[HN Gopher] Saving Lives
___________________________________________________________________
Saving Lives
Author : compiler-guy
Score : 246 points
Date : 2023-08-21 15:51 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.folklore.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.folklore.org)
| seeknotfind wrote:
| If you have to wait on a computer, it's not fast enough.
|
| Steve's argument here is widely used in the industry. It's almost
| emotional blackmail (fail and be a killer) but classic
| nonetheless.
| dijit wrote:
| > It's almost emotional blackmail (fail and be a killer) but
| classic nonetheless.
|
| I read it much more as inspiring people to consider that they
| have an impact on peoples lives.
|
| It's strikingly easy to blame the user for slow software, or
| blame the PM or Org for pushing features and speed of
| development over speed of the product.
|
| Steves mantra here is that software performance has a material
| impact on daily lives. Pointing something out is not emotional
| blackmail.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > Pointing something out is not emotional blackmail.
|
| True, but disingenuously implying that something like slow
| boot times costs lives is.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| What is a life if not time well spent?
| dijit wrote:
| Not costing _lives_. But saving _lifetimes_ across a
| population.
| icepat wrote:
| I can easily imagine a situation where life support
| hardware needs to reboot, and taking too long to do so
| would be life threatening.
| JohnFen wrote:
| "So if you make it boot ten seconds faster, you've saved
| a dozen lives."
|
| That's emotional blackmail. The implication is failing to
| do that will _cost_ a dozen lives. It 's also incorrect.
| Making it boot ten seconds faster saves zero lives.
| JJMcJ wrote:
| Wasting people's time. That's a good enough reason.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Sure, I agree. I just take issue with the framing. It's
| highly manipulative.
| xsmasher wrote:
| This dovetails with another Jobs story -
|
| > After the iPad launch, Jobs supposedly walked into a meeting
| with the Mac team, carrying an iPad. He woke up the iPad, which
| happened instantaneously. Then he woke up a Mac, which took a
| while to come out of sleep. Then he asked something like, "Why
| doesn't this do that?
|
| Without the iPad there to show it was possible there would have
| been arguments about memory speed and disk speed etc. And
| faster Mac sleep/wake put pressure on Windows to up their game.
| neurocline wrote:
| I must have heard this story and forgot it, because I used this
| argument on my team when I ran the group at Blizzard that did
| installing and downloading and patching. "We have 10 million
| people downloading and installing this patch, so every minute
| extra we take is another fraction of a human life we're
| spending". Sure, overly dramatic, and corny, but helped drive
| improvements.
|
| The other more important metric I pushed was "speed of light".
| When installing from a DVD (yeah, olden times), the "speed of
| light" there was the rotational speed of the disc and so we
| should install as close to that speed as possible. Keep improving
| speed of operations until you butt up against whatever physical
| limits exist. Time is precious, you don't get more of it.
| hobs wrote:
| That last part is important. I have worked with many engineers
| who I would even classify as hard working, but spent little to
| no time understanding the hardware they were running on and the
| possibilities that it provided them.
|
| I have heard "that's slow" or "that's good" too many times in
| performance talks that have completely ignored the underlying
| machine and what was _possible_.
| TillE wrote:
| Learning about how the CPU cache works is probably the most
| useful thing you can do if you write anything that's not I/O
| limited. There are definitely a ton of experienced
| programmers who don't quite understand how often the CPU is
| just waiting around for data from RAM.
| mcculley wrote:
| It is a shame that there are not better monitoring tools
| that surface this. When I use Activity Monitor on macOS, it
| would be useful to see how much of "% CPU" is just waiting
| on memory. I know I can drill down with various profilers,
| but having it more accessible is way overdue.
| arrowsmith wrote:
| Okay, you've made me want to learn about it. Where do I
| start? What concepts do I need to understand? Any reading
| recommendations?
| Mockapapella wrote:
| Haven't read through it, but I suspect this would be a
| good place to start: https://cpu.land/
|
| HN Discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36823605
| breakingrules wrote:
| [dead]
| tazjin wrote:
| Back in the day I was hacking on WoW-related stuff like server
| emulators, and it was always very noticeable how much care
| Blizzard put into this kind of stuff. The (iirc) torrent-based
| patch distribution for WoW etc. was really well done. Kudos,
| especially in such a high-pressure industry!
| opportune wrote:
| I wish more engineers thought this way. As someone who works in
| infrastructure it's the story I tell myself to
| justify/rationalize my place in the world. When I ship big
| infrastructure performance improvements it's not about the
| speed or money saved per se, it's less CO2 in the atmosphere
| and more human life (amortized over millions of people) spent
| on something other than waiting for a computer to respond.
|
| We aren't doctors saving individuals' lives but what we can do
| is give people fractions of their lives back. Some software is
| used by hundreds of millions or billions of people, so small
| changes there can save many "lives" worth of time.
| llimos wrote:
| > Time is precious, you don't get more of it.
|
| In this particular example, the time saved on the download will
| go towards the noble cause of ... playing video games? Is that
| _so much_ better use of time than the wait for it to download?
| niels_bom wrote:
| That's assuming people play more when the download is faster.
|
| And to answer your question: for everybody involved it's
| better yes.
| firebirdn99 wrote:
| I didn't know this before, but it's cool that originally back
| then Apple's directory explorer was still called 'Finder and it's
| not changed since.
| FBT wrote:
| There are about half a million minutes in a year, so 50 million
| seconds is a year and two thirds. At the rate of saving 50
| million seconds a day, in a year you'll have saved around 608
| years--which is only a dozen lifetimes if a lifetime is around 50
| years. Still, that's a pretty close approximation for an off-the-
| cuff guess.
| msephton wrote:
| I'm sure he'd have planned or thought about this before hand.
|
| Steve's famous "computers are a bicycle for the mind" was
| refined over a long period of time and countless interviews. We
| only hear about the one time where he perfected it, where it
| made an impression. Many other instances are on YouTube, in one
| you can see him trying out different alternative lines.
| jjkaczor wrote:
| Well... I remember some press and discussion about "InterBase"
| (now FireBase) - and it's storage/self-healing recovery model
| being critical for some scenarios "back in the day", some quotes:
|
| "AFATDS includes 935,000 lines of Ada code, running on an HP RISC
| Workstation and the Army's Light Weight Computer Units,"
| according to John Williams, spokesman for Magnavox Electronic
| Systems Company, the prime contractor on the project. "We needed
| to work with a single database that could scale and operate
| across Unix and PC platforms. The product also had to install
| quickly and provide high availability without monopolizing our
| systems resources."
|
| "Decision support of this nature requires a modular and flexible
| architecture that would support both distributed processing and
| distributed databases. That's why we chose InterBase. It out
| performed the competition and convinced us that it would be
| reliable in life and death situations."
|
| The exact nature of the discussion was that in some situations,
| the firing of the main weapon in certain tanks would generate an
| internal EMP event, so systems would reboot - they had to have
| extremely fast reboots and recovery-times... so they could fire
| again...
| alex_suzuki wrote:
| I remember my MacBook booting up lightning fast in 2013 (Leopard?
| Earlier? Dunno). Those days are gone.
| msephton wrote:
| My M1 MBP on Monterey boots in a few seconds.
| zython wrote:
| I never understood why people calculate time savings like this.
| Similar for a developer 1 times 5 hours yields not the same
| producitiy/results as 5 times 1 hours, due to "context switching
| overhead" for example.
|
| Claiming you saved a couple of lifetimes when all you can gain is
| a couple of seconds is so misleading.
| [deleted]
| bhauer wrote:
| Programmers and engineers have to apply this thinking
| holistically. The totality of waiting for slow software is
| enormous. Performance needs to be given a higher priority by more
| development teams.
|
| I don't tend to consciously sum all of the time I spend waiting
| on slow software and slow services. But waiting on slow software
| impacts my subconscious in the moment, making me feel
| uncomfortable and frustrated with the system, as if it is
| antagonistic. If I do spend any time consciously thinking about
| it, I feel disdain for the engineers and project leaders who
| believed that what they had produced was good enough to ship.
|
| With the processing capacity of modern computers, waiting for
| hundreds of milliseconds for trivial requests, or much longer for
| only modestly-complex requests is evidence of gross negligence on
| the part of the programmers.
| khaledh wrote:
| Yep. Computers should wait for people, not the other way around
| (unless it's a long running batch job).
| karol wrote:
| Nostalgia this and that... in 1983 I had a calculator and flew to
| Venus...
| overgard wrote:
| I think about this a lot whenever I'm waiting on a long compile.
| How many lives has complicated template metaprogramming in C++
| taken?
| yellow_lead wrote:
| I was reading this while compiling
| teo_zero wrote:
| Nicely played on the double meaning of "save". Couldn't be done
| in every language.
| stevenfoster wrote:
| If only he knew how many millions of lives would be lost
| indefinitely scrolling on a small sheet of glass.
| titaniumtown wrote:
| It's very fascinating how small amounts of time people take to
| do/wait for something add up over a huge population.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Back when most everybody ran Connectix RAM Doubler and Connectix
| Speed Doubler on their Macs (which actually worked!), I was
| praying for Connectix to release Boot Doubler, that made every
| other boot instant!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connectix
|
| https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/RAM_Doubler
|
| https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/Speed_Doubler
|
| https://68kmla.org/bb/index.php?threads/connectix-speed-doub...
|
| https://www.betaarchive.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=31852
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21768641
| devnullbrain wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8Mc-38C88g
|
| A similar (fictional) sentiment from Margin Call
| csharpminor wrote:
| I think about this every time I see a cookie banner. It's a 1-2
| second delay that plays out millions if not billions of times per
| day. How many lifetimes have been wasted since those were forced
| into existence by GDPR?
| hosteur wrote:
| GDPR does not force those (In fact most of them are illegal
| according to GDPR). Every site could avoid those banners by
| just not tracking visitors.
| ShinzonRemus wrote:
| Cookie banners were present well before GDPR, and they are not
| mandated by law.
|
| You can avoid the cookie banner in two ways: 1. Do not use
| tracking cookies (or other tracking tools); or 2. Ask the
| consensus in a non-intrusive way, e.g., directly in the page
| itself.
|
| We know that no company wants to remove tracking cookies
| because they need to "improve the service". However, there is
| no reason for not using solution 2. The only reason is annoying
| the user: a dark pattern to force users to accept cookies.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Most of them were not forced into existence by the GDPR.
| [deleted]
| mbork_pl wrote:
| Sort of related: https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/performance-
| matters/. Well, not really - that one is about saving lives with
| performant software, but _more literally_.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| I wish someone at microsoft would do this for o365. Losing 2-5
| seconds any time I click a link is painful.
| jonahhorowitz wrote:
| A story an old engineer at Apple told me:
|
| When working on MacOS 8.x (not sure which point release), they
| surveyed users, and their number one complaint was boot time. It
| took long for the system to boot (around 45s on average at the
| time). They looked into it but also asked the question, why do
| people care about boot times at all? At this point, the systems
| were capable of sleeping, so reboots should be rare.
|
| They found that people were rebooting because of instability, not
| just once a day or once a week. While they did improve the boot
| times, they put more effort into making the OS more stable. When
| the new release shipped, people stopped complaining about boot
| time, but not because it was vastly improved, instead because
| they were doing it less often.
|
| The moral of the story is to make sure you understand both what
| your customers are asking for and why your customers are asking
| for it.
| Someone wrote:
| > When working on MacOS 8.x (not sure which point release),
| they surveyed users [...] They found that people were rebooting
| because of instability, not just once a day or once a week.
|
| That didn't require a survey. The OS didn't have memory
| protection and typically got patched at startup by ten or so
| different extensions from both Apple and numerous third
| parties.
|
| The rules for patching were unclear, to say the least (1), so
| an extension might, for example, have a code path where it
| allocated memory inside a patch to a system call that might be
| moving memory around (a no-no, as the memory manager wasn't
| reentrant)
|
| And that had to run code that typically was compiled with a C
| compiler of the time, with very, very limited tools to prevent
| out of bounds memory writes.
| jeffbee wrote:
| That certainly sounds about right. I definitely lost more time
| to the fact that a Quadra would freeze with high probability
| during a scan than I ever lost to intentional reboots.
| pvg wrote:
| Apple's customers had been screaming for better stability for
| years and Apple repeatedly tried and failed to deliver a
| meaningful solution. Even MacOS 8 introduced very limited
| memory protection that didn't help much in most practical
| cases. In context, it's really a story about an organization's
| capacity and will to rationalize - this very nearly killed
| Apple as a business.
| ninkendo wrote:
| It's an immutable law of the universe that consumer computers
| will always take at least 30-45 seconds to boot. If yours is
| faster, wait a few years... the developers will allow enough
| regressions to slip in that it'll go back up again.
| tmpz22 wrote:
| > The moral of the story is to make sure you understand both
| what your customers are asking for and why your customers are
| asking for it.
|
| One reason engineers enjoy questioning the premise of a
| difficult feature is to avoid the work entirely. The problem
| with this is not that engineers are lazy its that the success
| metrics after the goal posts are moved can be futzed in a way
| that ultimately is detrimental to users.
|
| Did Apple really improve boot times and OS instabilities to a
| complete resolution or did an aspiring PM or Lead achieve the
| bare minimum of the goal to claim victory internally?
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Mac OS X took time to shut down though.
|
| When a friend first showed my wife Mac OS X and went to shut it
| down she frowned, "That's something I liked about the Mac, it
| would shut down instantly."
|
| "You'll have to find something else to like about Mac OS," he
| said.
| haswell wrote:
| This reminds me of the "XY Problem" framing [0], a concept that
| has been very helpful over the years when communicating with
| customers about feature requests.
|
| Many people can imagine how they'd solve an immediate problem,
| but never pause to examine whether or not this solution is
| ideal, or generalizes beyond a specific situation.
|
| Another phrase that comes to mind is "fall in love with the
| problem, not the solution". If you understand the problem space
| deeply, either many solutions can emerge, or one solution
| emerges as clearly the best place to focus.
|
| In my years as a product manager, it surprised me how many PMs
| don't think this way, and just tack on feature after feature,
| convinced this is the best thing for the customer, when often
| the thing they need is not something they know how to ask for.
|
| - [0] http://xyproblem.info/
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| > This reminds me of the "XY Problem" framing [0], a concept
| that has been very helpful over the years when communicating
| with customers about feature requests.
|
| It also ruined stackoverflow, since replies which ignore the
| question and assume that the OP really meant something else
| end up being so much easier to write/vote on than an actual
| answer.
| jameshart wrote:
| Also when, for example, someone suggests a strategy that is
| useful in scenario X, but because it can be problematic in
| scenario Y, they get a bunch of replies warning them about
| that - even though they had no intention of advocating
| applying it in scenario Y. That's also a kind of XYing -
| "oh don't do that, it's bad if you re trying to Y..." when
| we're not, we are trying to X.
|
| For example, when someone says they think the XY problem
| model is a useful framing when evaluating customer feature
| requests in product design, they are talking about using it
| in scenario X.
|
| But inevitably they will attract a bunch of replies telling
| them how bad it is to apply the XY problem approach when
| answering questions in a technical Q&A forum. That would be
| scenario Y.
| yowzadave wrote:
| Even if you know that the strategy is problematic in
| scenario Y, other viewers of the reply may not; you are
| only one of the many potential consumers of the response.
| Isn't it useful to flag the potential gotchas of a given
| approach for a naive reader?
|
| I feel like many of the complaints Stack Overflow users
| come down to this: in many users' minds, the site is a
| Q&A forum, while the SO team wants it to be an
| authoritative repository of technical knowledge.
| pierat wrote:
| "You keep mentioning XY problem, but you really meant the
| AB problem, and that answer is ......"
|
| That's it in a nutshell. And concur with this de-framing
| non-answer as one of the leading causes of bad
| StackOverflow solutions.
| jameshart wrote:
| Apparently I was too subtle so let me put a lampshade on
| it.
|
| The replies to the post which said that the XY problem
| approach is useful in product development, which are
| talking about XY reframing being a problem on
| stackoverflow _are XY reframing the parent post_.
|
| They are doing exactly what they decry.
|
| The smell of irony is apparently not as thick in the air
| as I thought it was.
| haswell wrote:
| For what it's worth, I saw what you did there and
| appreciated/enjoyed it.
| asveikau wrote:
| Stack overflow started out with a lot of Microsoft
| ecosystem people, eg. Joel Spolsky. I worked at Microsoft
| in 2008 and this kind of de-framing was a bit of a
| corporate cultural obsession there at that time. You'd
| report a bug internally and PMs would ask you what you
| were _really_ trying to do ... It was frustrating when
| you wanted people to just fix their shit. Instead people
| would universally treat you like you didn 't know what
| you were doing and really meant to ask something else. I
| saw this trait a lot on SO around the same time.
| [deleted]
| haswell wrote:
| Like anything, it needs to be applied appropriately, and I
| agree that blindly redirecting every request to this
| framing is not helpful.
|
| But the number of times that it _is_ helpful has been
| pretty high for me over the years. This probably depends a
| lot on the customer's own ability to comprehend the true
| nature of the problem. I worked in the enterprise /B2B
| space, where a significant number of requests came from
| people not technical enough to fully know what to ask
| without some deeper exploration.
| hooverd wrote:
| Agreed. But sometimes, especially if you know about your
| problem domain, it feels like asking "how do a I keep
| water out of my basement" and all the answers are "simply
| rebuild your house at the top of the hill."
| hunter2_ wrote:
| It's a matter of vastly different costs, in that case:
| the solution to the modified problem costs much more to
| solve than the originally stated problem. The trick is
| avoiding such a large gap, hopefully with a breakeven
| that comes in the foreseeable future, if not immediately.
|
| For example: how do I repair water damage on my ceiling
| in a way that's quick enough to do it after every storm?
| You mean how do I repair my roof so I only have to repair
| the ceiling one more time? It's more upfront cost to do
| both now, but the breakeven is only a small handful of
| storms away, which is palatable enough to get serious
| consideration. If the breakeven was (for some reason,
| hypothetically) 20 years away, actually figuring out how
| to make quick work of repeated ceiling repairs might be
| more desirable.
| bombolo wrote:
| Most people ask how to make some absurd hack when there is
| an easy and proper way to solve their problem.
| lolinder wrote:
| Sometimes what you think is an absurd hack is still what
| I want to do _after having thoroughly considered all
| other options_. It 's infuriating in those cases to end
| up on a Stack Overflow question where someone wanted to
| do _exactly_ what I want to do, and the only answers are
| redirecting them to other solutions that I 've already
| considered and ruled out.
| adamc wrote:
| Many, many things are wrong with stackoverflow. Insisting
| that every discussion be factual and opinion-free pushes
| you deep into the McNamara fallacy of believing that things
| that cannot easily be quantified don't matter.
|
| It's a site I sometimes use but dislike intensely.
| spencerchubb wrote:
| I don't see that as a bad thing. Stack Overflow only
| wants to focus on questions that have a verifiable
| answer. Other types of questions still matter, they just
| don't matter on Stack Overflow.
| bee_rider wrote:
| This is the most techie social media site I use, and I
| see constant complaints about the other techie social
| media site, StackOverflow. Why doesn't someone test the
| theory and come up with some competition?
|
| I think this is normally an unreasonable ask (when we're
| complaining about, like, cars, clearly that's not in this
| site's aggregate wheelhouse). But I mean this is a
| website about start-ups, full of techie web-devs
| complaining about a website that they all use.
| seedboot wrote:
| > Why doesn't someone test the theory and come up with
| some competition?
|
| ChatGPT Has entered the chat.
| sanderjd wrote:
| I think the absolute hardest thing to get information on
| is "I have XYZ problem, I am aware of solutions A, B, and
| C. What is the best solution among these, what are the
| trade-offs between them, and what solutions am I not
| aware of?". Now, this is just a truly difficult question,
| but Stack Overflow solves that problem by forbidding such
| questions, which is understandable, but I think also a
| shame. At one point in time, I thought maybe Quora would
| try to fill this gap, but they went off in some other
| direction that I never understood. Most other "social"
| things (reddit, etc.) are discussion rather than Q&A. Or
| they are blog posts, where the focus is usually on
| solution A, with solutions B and C presented only for
| contrast, because solution A is what motivated the author
| to write the post.
|
| I kind of want Wirecutter, but for technologies.
| adamc wrote:
| Yes, that would actually be much more useful to me than
| what stackoverflow is. A vast number of the questions
| found that can be easily answered by RTFM and/or doing
| some direct experimentation. The harder ones would be
| more useful.
| sanderjd wrote:
| Yeah. I think it's also why chatgpt (and copilot, etc.)
| actually did turn out to be a strong SO competitor,
| because it actually can do a pretty good job on these
| factual questions.
|
| But unfortunately it's pretty bad at this other kind of
| judgment-based compare-and-contrast question. It's
| especially bad at the "what other solutions am I not
| aware of?" part, because it isn't kept up to date.
| hunter2_ wrote:
| Isn't Bard kept up to date?
| nonameiguess wrote:
| You seem to be trying to replace a basic peer-review of
| an engineering design that typically involves a paid team
| with advice from poorly-known, pseudonymous strangers
| with reputation crowd-sourced from a web site's user-
| rating system.
|
| Frankly, I think that's asking a bit much. If you want a
| high-quality peer review of design proposals to bounce
| ideas off of others and discuss tradeoffs, you need a
| team. Maybe something like a meetup group or mailing list
| for a specific technology, programming language, or
| industry sector. But it goes beyond one-off Q&A, and I
| can also understand why Stack Overflow, with a goal of
| becoming a repository of perpetually useful knowledge
| that is general enough to be useful for anyone into the
| indefinite future, does not want to host such project-
| specific discussions.
|
| Why not just develop in the open and collaborate
| explicitly with other parties also working on the same
| project? What you're asking for sounds close to something
| like the various special interest groups and public
| discussion of improvement proposals you see in things
| like the Python programming language or Kubernetes, or
| discussion on LWN about specific challenges the Linux
| kernel team faces.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| I don't think that's asking a bit much.
|
| If it were, then there'd be no reason to prohibit such
| questions... people wouldn't ask them, because they would
| never be answered. The only reason to prohibit them is
| because they would get attention/answers where none was
| desired.
|
| The trouble with StackOverflow, is that what the users
| want and need does not match what the owners want. The
| owners want something monetizable, something that can
| look elegant and beautiful (hence the PR release a couple
| of years ago where they were positioning it as some
| "encyclopedia of computer science" or whatever). They
| figured out that the users could be denied what they
| want, while still (slowly) creating what the owners
| themselves wanted.
|
| > and I can also understand why Stack Overflow, with a
| goal of becoming a repository of perpetually useful
| knowledge that is general enough to be useful for anyone
| into the indefinite future, does not want to host such
| project-specific discussions.
|
| I'm not sure I'd characterize them as wanting that, but
| if they did... how would that be at all useful to anyone
| except CS undergrads trying to get someone to do their
| homework for them? Literally nothing of what people ask
| there day to day will be generally useful into the
| indefinite future. What do you want to ask, that will be
| useful 40 years from now? Neither anything language
| specific, nor anything domain specific will be relevant
| to anyone not a historian. Even the cutting edge stuff
| today will have long since been wrapped up into some
| blackbox library that everyone will use without
| unerstanding it.
|
| If you were correct, SO could never be anything more than
| some useless little dumpster where the same 5 people
| whine n about the quickest sort algorithm.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| All true, to which I'd add:
|
| It's like giving a big sales force a financial incentive:
| you have to be careful because they'll just game it,
| relentlessly, all day long. They won't care about your
| corporate priorities -- just getting that incentive
| money.
|
| On SO, people get "reputation points." Those "same 5
| people" game that system like salespeople winning that
| prize. You answered a question? They don't want you as a
| competitor, so they downvote you. You don't like _their_
| answer? Too bad, you don 't have enough reputation points
| to downvote them.
|
| To pick another analogy: they're like high school
| cheerleaders voting on who can become one of them.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Unfortunately the XY problem is now mostly used by know-it-
| alls trying to show off. At least in my experience.
|
| If you ever find a question that you _think_ is an XY
| problem, answer X first and _then_ say "did you want Y?".
|
| The _worst_ possible answer is "you should be asking Y".
| haswell wrote:
| While I agree that it's not useful if people are using this
| to show off, I'd prefer to deal with a few know-it-alls if
| it means that better product decisions are being made, and
| dev teams are spending less time building things that
| customers can't use or didn't even want.
|
| The way I see it, there are failure modes with both
| extremes. I'd prefer the failure mode that involves some
| occasional annoyance over the failure mode that results in
| significant amounts of wasted code/effort, and a return to
| the XY framing anyway when things go wrong.
|
| Ideally, people who are using this find a balance, and can
| recognize the difference between an obviously straight-
| forward request and something that needs deeper
| exploration.
|
| It's not perfect, but I think it's a better default.
| shawnz wrote:
| > answer X first and then say "did you want Y?".
|
| That's a surefire way to cause your suggestion of Y to get
| ignored and proliferate the bad practice of X.
|
| It's not anyone's responsibility to explain how to do
| things in a way that they believe is wrong.
| lolinder wrote:
| If they don't want to explain how to do things in a way
| they disagree with, then the appropriate response is to
| not say anything at all.
|
| The current culture on SO is to flood questions with
| "don't do X, do Y", then upvote those answers. The result
| is that questions _look_ answered but actually aren 't,
| so the questions stay unanswered. When I come along
| months or years later having already considered all
| options, I don't want to have my time wasted by a
| question that perfectly matches my goal but was never
| answered because it got drowned in alternative approaches
| that I already ruled out.
| shawnz wrote:
| Isn't it the question author who gets to choose when an
| answer is satisfactory or not on SO? If a question is
| full of answers that aren't marked as satisfactory, then
| there's still an opportunity for someone to come in and
| get the points by providing a different one. What more
| can they do, ban people from trying to provide
| alternative solutions? Surely that is going to create
| much more harm than good.
| lolinder wrote:
| > Isn't it the question author who gets to choose when an
| answer is satisfactory or not on SO?
|
| This would be a fine policy if SO didn't _also_ make a
| huge stink about duplicate questions. As is, there 's one
| canonical copy of each similarly-phrased question, and a
| re-ask that says "but for real, I actually want to do it
| this way" is going to get shut down as a duplicate.
|
| > If a question is full of answers that aren't marked as
| satisfactory, then there's still an opportunity for
| someone to come in and get the points by providing a
| different one.
|
| The system rewards being one of the first responders, not
| the one who actually answers the question. This is
| especially true now that they've updated the system to
| place the highest-voted answer first rather than the
| accepted answer.
|
| > What more can they do, ban people from trying to
| provide alternative solutions? Surely that is going to
| create much more harm than good.
|
| I don't know that there's anything the company _can_ do,
| since it 's pretty clear that they've lost control of
| most aspects of the culture.
| shawnz wrote:
| Fair enough, I totally agree that SO moderators are way
| too overbearing when it comes to duplicates.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > The current culture on SO is to flood questions with
| "don't do X, do Y", then upvote those answers. The result
| is that questions look answered but actually aren't, so
| the questions stay unanswered.
|
| I think this is the #1 reason why SO isn't a great
| resource for me.
| IshKebab wrote:
| It's not anyone's responsibility to answer at all.
| shawnz wrote:
| Agreed! Which is why I think it's especially
| disrespectful to criticize people making honest efforts
| to help as being "know-it-alls trying to show off" in
| cases where their idea of the ideal kind of help is
| different than what the original poster had in mind.
| IshKebab wrote:
| It's frequently NOT an honest effort to help. It's just
| "well that's a stupid question, let me show you how I
| know more..."
|
| When you really _are_ trying to help and you think it 's
| an XY you can answer politely by actually answering their
| question and _then_ saying "but you may want to do this
| instead". Try it.
| petsfed wrote:
| Indeed, a good answer to X will make clear why Y is the
| better option _in most cases_. But its a thin line to
| tread between subtly implying that X is bad, and saying
| "only idiots do X, anyway here's how an idiot would do
| X".
| shawnz wrote:
| You suggested that in your previous comment, and I
| explained already why I don't think that's a good idea:
| it's liable to cause your alternative suggestion to get
| ignored and proliferate bad practices.
|
| If someone has a genuine desire to help, then they also
| inherently have an interest in making sure people don't
| continue down paths which are likely to lead to more
| problems in the end. Otherwise, you might end up spending
| more time supporting the follow-on issues created due to
| the misapplications of your own advice than you spent
| providing the support in the first place, which would not
| be an efficient way of helping.
| jldugger wrote:
| Okay, but I've been in plenty of conversations where I
| ask "I read in a book that we should be doing X, how are
| people doing X?"[1], and the answers I got, _from a
| community that included the book author_, were "first,
| make sure you're doing A, B and C."[2] When in fact I am
| doing that already. Do I have to really preface every
| question with "i promise i'm not the idiot you assume I
| am?"
|
| 1: "This book says to monitor ML systems for distribution
| shifts; what tools are people using to store that data
| and monitor for changes?" 2: "Make sure you're monitoring
| normal SRE statistics like request failure rate"
| shawnz wrote:
| > Do I have to really preface every question with "i
| promise i'm not the idiot you assume I am?"
|
| Yes, first of all I do think it's up to the person
| looking for help to fully elaborate their situation in
| such a way that makes it clear why the X/Y problem
| doesn't apply to them, since other people with similar
| issues who stumble upon your thread might not realize
| that you have that additional context, and the answer is
| just as much for them as it is for you (if not moreso,
| since you're just one person).
|
| Secondly, even if you did fully elaborate your situation,
| it may be that there are people interested in trying to
| help who don't know the answer to X but do know the
| answer to Y, and by answering Y they are still providing
| more value than not answering at all. There's nothing
| about answering Y that prevents X from being answered by
| someone else.
| dpkirchner wrote:
| "Here's the answer to what I wish you asked..."
| PlunderBunny wrote:
| Politicians do it all the time: "Answer the question you
| wish you were asked, not the question you were actually
| asked." And reporters are pretty bad at taking this on.
| lolinder wrote:
| > reporters are pretty bad at taking this on.
|
| The format of a typical press conference is designed to
| make it hard for a reporter to follow up when the
| politician dodges their question, because the politician
| usually moves on to the next reporter. If they ever get a
| chance to ask a follow-up, it's after the original
| context is long gone from anyone's working memory.
| teddyh wrote:
| If reporters really wanted an answer to the question, the
| next reporter to be called on could just press for an
| answer to the previous question. But they don't; in a
| press conference situation, the goal of reporters is to
| be _seen_ , so their fame goes up, and to avoid
| antagonizing the host, since if they do, they won't be
| invited to the next press conference.
| lolinder wrote:
| Eh, that's part of it, but it's also that the next
| reporter already knew which question they wanted to ask.
| They probably didn't pay that much attention to the
| answer to the previous question because they were busy
| formulating their own question.
| teddyh wrote:
| > _And reporters are pretty bad at taking this on._
|
| If they do, they won't get the interview next time.
| albertzeyer wrote:
| The XY problem:
|
| > This leads to enormous amounts of wasted time and energy,
| both on the part of people asking for help, and on the part
| of those providing help.
|
| This is not really true though.
|
| The time spent to answer is not wasted. There are people
| searching for it via Google, e.g. how to get the last N
| characters from a variable, and they will find the correct
| answer.
|
| The time spent by the asker is never wasted. I sometimes know
| that this is not directly the thing I want to solve, or how I
| stumbled upon this question. Still, it's a question I have
| because I'm curious and I just want to know. So, in any case,
| the person asking for help will learn something.
|
| And all other people on the Internet who stumble upon the
| question are likely searching for exactly the answer to this
| exact question, so they get some good value out of it. Or
| even if not, it likely will have references to what they are
| interested in. Those other people are ignored here.
| sopooneo wrote:
| For all it is rightfully derided, it is this aspect of "user
| story phrasing" I find valuable. If you can politely ask
| stakeholders to state their problem in the form "As a _____ I
| want to _____ so that I can ______", then you can find out
| that why as filled in on the last blank. And then you can use
| that why to figure out the best actions to take, being
| careful that you still scratch the itch the that middle blank
| in that story brought up.
| dgb23 wrote:
| There's more general concept of perception here that is worth
| thinking about.
|
| Users can get awfully confused by generic, misleading or
| overly technical error messages. So they call/write you and
| confuse you even more.
|
| "There is something wrong about X." Where X is some
| misinterpreted partial of a message. This only gets cleared
| up if you let them walk you through what happened step by
| step and/or examine logs etc.
|
| Error messages are an important part of a UI. No matter if
| they're user errors or internal errors.
|
| There are always errors that you don't foresee and just need
| to display generic messages for. But even then there should
| be a very clear, short(!) description and a unmistakable call
| to action.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Ugh, not 15 minutes before this I was testing a new yet to
| be released version of my companies software. And while
| testing I get an error message like
|
| "Cannot do X with upload"
|
| Number one this is a behavior change and should not have
| been changed in the first place.
|
| But number two, all the error had to say was "Cannot do X
| with upload because application is set to Y"
|
| The first one generates a support ticket, the second one
| gives a legitimate reason on why the failure occurred and
| what they can do about it.
| otikik wrote:
| Trust people when they report there's a problem, but don't
| trust them with the solution.
|
| Otherwise we would get faster horses instead of cars.
| munificent wrote:
| If I remember right, in "The Inmates are Running the Asylum",
| Alan Cooper says there are two golden rules:
|
| * The user is always right.
|
| * The user is not always right.
|
| And then the explains the first point is that the user should
| be treated as the authority on what their problem is. You
| can't just tell them they're "doing it wrong" or rationalize
| away their pain.
|
| The second point is that users are not designers and
| shouldn't have to be. They'll often come up with ideas for
| solutions, but you shouldn't take those as what needs to be
| done.
| Pannoniae wrote:
| The first point is really common in programming. If you ask
| a "stupid" question, you don't get an answer like "here's
| how to do it, but by the way, you could also do this
| instead" but just flame you with "you shouldn't have been
| doing X".
|
| Good example is FTP. Obviously, for anything requiring any
| kind of security, use SFTP. But I kid you not, almost all
| FTP-related questions on the internet have answers like
| "are you still using that INSECURE protocol in 2020??"
| without being constructive at all. Even if it's just some
| random hobby project. Or a legacy system they can't change.
| Doesn't matter, it's more important to score points from
| virtue-signaling than actually helping the poster.
| biogene wrote:
| That's a nice way to put it!
| amatecha wrote:
| Ah, funny, I just shared this link in a comment a couple weeks
| ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37053941
|
| It's applicable in conversation so frequently around
| software/computers as it reflects a really empathic mindset that
| I feel is becoming more and more rare...
| Justsignedup wrote:
| Errr my biggest shock and awe moment was Guild Wars 2. A bit
| after launch I was playing and an update came in. "Please restart
| the client now after patching"
|
| Okay... Let's click that button!!!!
|
| Game... shuts down... downloads an update... patches... starts
| up... loads me back into where I was.
|
| All this in... 1 minute flat! Baldur's Gate 3 can't do that on
| today's hardware with an SSD and a much faster processor, and 4x
| the ram, compared to a game 13 years ago on significantly
| crappier hardware.
|
| That's what solidified to me that the game was rock-freaken-
| solid.
| fjni wrote:
| What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| It's a pretty good point, ordinary computers could boot up from
| cold in under 30 seconds on 5400 rpm spinning rust, so why can't
| they boot up in under 1 second on the latest and greatest NVMe
| SSDs?
| biogene wrote:
| They do, on the same workload. But if you look at the virtual
| memory breakdown, the vast majority of pages are non-executable
| data pages. Just did a rough check with Firefox and the
| executable pages are ~200MiB compared to ~2GiB of
| Private+Shared Pages. So its not so much the code, its all the
| data - the graphics, dictionaries, icons, fonts, textures,
| cached data, etc, etc.
| the8472 wrote:
| Mostly a matter of software not being written to make use of
| the SSD capabilities. You need parallelism or prefetching to
| keep the IO queues non-empty. If you have a single-threaded
| workload which interleaves blocking IO with CPU work and the IO
| patterns are not amenable to readaheads the SSD will be mostly
| idle. Similarly anything calling fsync or performing other file
| system operations that trigger synchronous writes on the
| critical path will stall the entire boot process. Due to
| caching writes are fast no matter the medium as long as you
| don't demand instant durability.
| mewse-hn wrote:
| Recently, I was able to get a NVME SSD into an old dell
| (i5-4590) using a modified bios and a PCIE adapter card. It
| booted into fresh win 10 in seconds.
|
| I think it's the old problem where the more crap windows
| accumulates, the longer it takes to boot.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Most likely because that ordinary computer of that time wasn't
| trying to bring up any network devices.
|
| Simply put, strip down an OS to the same feature set of that
| ancient computer and the modern OS will be a lot faster. Some
| of the networkless VMs I mess with boot in a second or two, but
| you see we've abstracted most of the hardware away. So, mostly
| the problem is a hardware one.
| cocodill wrote:
| my fresh PC with 64GB DDR5 takes a minute til POST.
| water9 wrote:
| Check bios for fast boot setting perhaps?
| dist-epoch wrote:
| DDR5 memory has this thing where it needs to be "trained" to
| figure out the best settings for a particular
| memory/motherboard combination.
|
| Maybe your PC "trains" the memory every boot instead of just
| the first one.
|
| https://www.crucial.com/support/articles-faq-
| memory/ddr5-mem...
| fatnoah wrote:
| My Windows 11 PC boots in about 20 seconds. Over half of that
| time is the POST. Once that's done, I see the Windows login in
| about 5-10 seconds. It's fast enough that I don't really
| notice.
| rocky1138 wrote:
| Relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37212557
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| That is speedy, 2.2 seconds on a 9.54 MHz Tandy 1000RL!
|
| The ~4 seconds to boot up to a GUI desktop is actually even
| more impressive:
| https://youtu.be/JIEPqD4luG8?si=9gVtFCIxFYma1erC&t=556
|
| My top of the line i9-9880H Macbook Pro from 2019, with PCIe
| 4.0 NVMe speeds, needs over 20 seconds to boot up in
| comparison...
| toast0 wrote:
| I had a Tandy 1000 TL/2; it had a tandy specific MS-DOS 3.3
| with Deskmate setup in ROM, booted pretty darn fast; but
| you had to give that up if you wanted to boot a newer dos.
| A newer MS-DOS still booted quick, and there wasn't much to
| the BIOS before it hit the drives, but you couldn't run
| Deskmate on standard MS-DOS.
| b20000 wrote:
| because parts of code these days is written in languages like
| java, python, etc which means at least some software runs
| slower.
|
| add to that that people think that because machines are faster
| they don't need to optimize anything.
| beebmam wrote:
| My PC takes about 5 seconds to boot to be usable.
| jeffbee wrote:
| My NUC boots Ubuntu in 3 seconds flat, including POST.
| walteweiss wrote:
| How is this possible? Is it super new?
| jeffbee wrote:
| There were two things I had to do to shave the last few
| seconds, the most beneficial was disabling all the
| unnecessary peripherals in the BIOS. When I looked at the
| Ubuntu boot log it said it spend 1.7 seconds uploading
| firmware to the bluetooth controller, which at that point
| was like 95% of the post-POST boot time, and not needing
| that I just turned it off in the BIOS.
| [deleted]
| crazygringo wrote:
| Icons used to be 32x32 monochrome with a mask. Now they're
| 512x512 in 48-bit color. System fonts used to have ~200
| characters, now they have tens of thousands.
|
| Extrapolate to everything else and it becomes pretty clear.
| There's just so much more to load.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| The math indicates otherwise, as another user pointed out, a
| 9.54 MHz Tandy 1000RL could load to MS-DOS in 2.2 seconds
| with 512 KB of very very slow RAM and a very slow 20MB drive.
|
| Even factoring in 100x more resource usage for a 2023
| computer to deliver all the features expected, it definitely
| should be way under 2.2 seconds.
| crazygringo wrote:
| You've got to go way more than 100x. An 80x24 character
| screen used 2K of memory. Running two 4K monitors today
| uses 50MB of memory.
|
| That's 25,000x more usage of memory for the interface
| alone.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| 100x total system resource demands.
|
| Display memory usage made only a modest difference even
| for 1989 era computers as demonstrated by the 1000RLX vs
| 1000RL, which you would have known if you followed the
| link in the other comment and watched the video.
|
| You can verify this yourself by hooking up a VGA
| resolution display, the same as the 1989 1000RLX shown,
| to a modern computer with VGA out and it doesn't reduce
| boot times by any significant amount.
| amarshall wrote:
| Not every part of the boot process is bottlenecked by disk I/O.
| jdiff wrote:
| Every part it's bottlenecked is similarly exponentially
| improved from the olden days though.
| tempestn wrote:
| One of the slowest parts of boot-up is memory checking,
| where the speed has increased exponentially, but so has the
| size.
| jdiff wrote:
| Maybe it's the single slowest individual item, but it's
| very far from being a significant fraction of boot time.
| And the capacity really hasn't kept up the way speed has.
| My desktop has 24GB of DDR3 1600 and manages to post in
| under 2 seconds. And that's pretty old by today's
| standards. Mid level modern hardware runs at least a
| circle or two around this system in terms of speed, but
| in terms of capacity it's still right in line with a
| higher end system today. Maybe I'm atypical but my boot
| time is dominated by my OS spinning itself up, by a long
| shot.
| Syonyk wrote:
| Complexity. Size.
|
| Windows 95 was about 50MB installed with most features.
|
| Windows 2000 fit on a CD for the install.
|
| Current Windows 10 installers won't even fit on a single layer
| DVD anymore, and forget doing the install with a FAT32 USB
| stick (some older UEFIs won't handle exFAT yet).
|
| The fastest computer I've ever used, perceptually, was a dual
| Pentium 3 866, with Rambus, booting XP (probably SP1 or so) on
| 15k U320 SCSI disk. The thing was telepathic.
| morelisp wrote:
| The P3 era was really a golden age. Clock speeds were still
| rapidly doubling, you could get SMP but most people didn't so
| everything had to optimize single-threaded perf, and likewise
| "normal" memory spanned 32MB to 512MB so you could really
| keep multiple programs' full working sets ready at once.
| water9 wrote:
| I would've said P4 era with hyperthreading opening the door
| to multi-core programming paradigms. Clock speeds mostly
| capped around 5ghz since that era
| jorvi wrote:
| I'd rather call that the Athlon era. P4's ran like
| (literal) hot garbage, Athlon's absolutely crushed them.
| Affric wrote:
| Athlon was amazing.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Not my recollection, TBH. Yes, my VIC-20 or C64 turned on to
| immediate usability, but it had no spinning media or real
| operating system. My Atari ST took quite a few seconds to spin
| the floppy and dump to desktop. My next computer in the early
| 90s, a 486 50 running Linux I think would seem interminably
| slow to me now; Linux boot was faster than DOS/Win3.1 but still
| we're talking a big chunk of time.
|
| Honestly, things are much faster now than they used to be.
|
| Plus I can shut my laptop lid, use basically no power, and come
| back to my session as-is almost instantly. That's new and way
| better than the 80s and 90s. Then you either had to leave the
| machine on or suffer slow cold boots.
| Symbiote wrote:
| RISC OS, the operating system that ran on the first few
| generations of ARM CPUs in the 1980s and early 1990s, was
| stored on ROM chips. It booted in a few seconds, to a real OS
| with a GUI etc.
|
| https://youtu.be/5M6OIOIND-0?t=1278 -- I think about 12
| seconds, or which 3-4 is waiting for two hard drives to spin
| up.
| bluGill wrote:
| Which is great and fast - until you want/need to upgrade
| the OS. Security hole, too bad, that is baked into ROM and
| can't be fixed...
| Symbiote wrote:
| RISC OS could selectively replace parts of the ROM (in
| RAM) with new code/data, for upgrades, new device drivers
| and so on.
|
| (I think some viruses loaded themselves with this
| mechanism. And virus checkers.)
|
| https://www.riscosopen.org/wiki/documentation/show/File%2
| 0fo...
| bluGill wrote:
| Sure, but everytime you need to do that boot time goes
| down and so what was the point?
| Symbiote wrote:
| In practise I don't remember this being a big deal. At
| some point I remember helping my dad upgrade us from RISC
| OS 3.something to 3.11, by replacing the ROM chips, but
| patches to the OS loaded into RAM were unusual.
|
| The OS in ROM was 2MiB, and looking at some module files
| intended for potential loading at boot time I have in an
| emulator, they are around 5-40kiB.
|
| The computers typically had 2 or 4MiB RAM, so there isn't
| space to replace a significant amount of the OS anyway.
| (1MiB or 8MiB was possible, but unusual.)
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Atari ST also booted from ROM. But it also expected a
| floppy disk to be in the drive, to check for auto boot
| programs, etc. So that slowed the boot. If there was no
| floppy, it would hang for a while waiting for one, even.
| Poor choice.
| Symbiote wrote:
| In RISC OS that was optional. There was a setting[1] in
| NVRAM which set whether or not to look for a boot device,
| and what that boot device was (floppy disc, hard disc,
| network).
|
| I don't remember what happened if you configured it to
| look for extra boot files on a floppy disc, but the drive
| was empty. I _think_ it would give up very quickly (1-2
| seconds), as it was a normal way to load a program on the
| earlier BBC computers -- insert the program disc, which
| would be bootable, and press the key combination
| (Shift+Break) to reset.
|
| "Podules" (expansion cards) could also map extra modules
| into the OS from their own ROM, usually the required
| device drivers for the card.
|
| [1] https://www.riscosopen.org/wiki/documentation/show/*C
| onfigur...
| jameshart wrote:
| On those old eight bits it wasn't immediate either. You had
| to wait for the memory to all get zeroed out and for the CRT
| capacitors to charge.
| huy77 wrote:
| It's not Steve. It's the engineers who care about saving lives. I
| have tried to pitch the idea of saving lives to different people.
| Many of them think it's nonsense to care about other people
| business.
| Krssst wrote:
| If this is valid, how about the countless animations everywhere
| in UIs today that waste time for no other reason than looking
| pretty the first hundred times? The application switcher on a
| phone I use has a switch time of 0.5s-1s with animations,
| practically instant without.
| jdiff wrote:
| There's real UX benefit to it is why. Things instantly changing
| to entirely different layouts takes time to process visually,
| if things lerp to their new positions then that processing time
| is cut down to the length of the animation, which are usually
| around a quarter of a second, not half or a whole. It might get
| in the way of speedrunners and power users, feel free to
| disable them, but you're not the target audience. It's the
| average user who doesn't have every UI nook and cranny burned
| into muscle memory.
| modeless wrote:
| It's a nice theory but it only works if the animations are
| smooth and designed to improve understandability. The vast
| majority of UI animations are pure visual flourishes that
| take twice as long as they should and don't make any kind of
| sense spatially or physically or improve the user's
| understanding of what's happening at all. There's a lot of
| cargo cult UI design out there.
|
| And what's worse is that most of the animations either don't
| start at the initial state of the UI or finish at the final
| state, or perform so badly that they hardly show any frames
| in between, so you have the worst of both worlds: abrupt
| jerky transitions _and_ wasted time.
|
| UI transitions that make spatial sense, are fast enough, are
| fluid, and don't slow down typical use of the UI are rare
| unicorns.
| jdiff wrote:
| I unfortunately 100% agree. While an amount of whimsy
| should be everywhere, animation shouldn't be used as just
| eye candy. Like every other aspect of UI design, it has to
| be used with purpose and care. And yeah, that's way rarer
| than it should be.
| yomlica8 wrote:
| Funny. I've had people hovering over my shoulder comment how
| my PC is so much faster than theirs when it was actually an
| RDP session to another PC, which seems to disable almost all
| window animations by default.
| lucky_cloud wrote:
| A lot of software also puts in some kind of input delay/rate
| limiting for no apparent reason.
|
| Video game console system UIs and some game menus seem to be
| really bad about this for some reason.
| Too wrote:
| Cheap phones have terrible frame rate so they have to make the
| animations long to appear smooth.
|
| Imagine short animation in 200ms at 25fps only gives you 5
| frames. It's going to look janky and tacky. Make it 1000ms and
| it looks smooth and nice, except hopeless to use.
|
| (Unpopular?) solution: get an iphone. Their app switcher works
| as fast as your finger moves, with no problem of delivering
| consistent 60fps.
| sedatk wrote:
| Not all animations are useless. Actually, any useless animation
| has no place in the UI.
|
| - Some animations can be overlapped with time-taking tasks to
| keep user engaged but waiting at the same time. I think iOS
| does that when switching to an app that was swapped out to the
| disk. Loading takes time, so the animation compensates for some
| of the delay while the app's resuming. If there was no
| animation, the user could think that they didn't perform the
| action correctly, and might be inclined to repeat it, causing
| frustration.
|
| - Some animations are necessary to orient the user in UI flow.
| For example, the minimization animation moves the window to the
| icon that user needs to click in order to restore the app. The
| animation also makes user differentiate between close and
| minimize operations.
|
| - Some animations are necessary to give user proper feedback
| while keeping the responsiveness. One example would be the
| spring animation you get at the end of a list when scrolling
| using a touch screen. If there was no spring animation there,
| user would have no way to know that if that was the end of the
| list, or the touch screen stopped working.
| yreg wrote:
| If you are on iPhone, you can switch
|
| Settings -> Accessibility -> Motion -> Reduce Motion
|
| The Android a11y menu probably has something similar. Try it
| out and see if you like it more.
| msephton wrote:
| You can do it in a per-app basis. I turn it off globally and
| then turn it back on for Home screen, Books, and a couple of
| other apps.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Windows 11 takes about 12 minutes to boot from an HDD. Imagine
| trying to boot it from an FDD.
|
| Installing Windows 11 and then waiting for all the updates to
| install on a HDD takes about 8 days.
| hosteur wrote:
| Wow. That is outrageous.
| jeffbee wrote:
| I only know this because I needed to use a utility from Asus
| to update the Intel ME, and it only runs under Windows. I
| naively assumed it would not be that much trouble to throw a
| hard disk that was laying around into that PC and install
| Windows thereupon.
| Knee_Pain wrote:
| [dead]
| gsich wrote:
| Also false.
| wsc981 wrote:
| I fucked up the partitions on my 2017 iMac with Fusion drive a
| short while ago trying to create a dual boot system and even
| since my Mac was slow.
|
| I think from beginning of start-up to a somewhat usable system
| was maybe 5 minutes? Quite long either way.
|
| But just last weekend got sick of the slowness and found
| there's a 'diskutil resetFusion' [0] command that restores the
| partitions to the default. So I ran this command, reinstalled
| the OS and now my iMac is pretty speedy again. Not great mind
| you, but way better then before.
|
| Lesson learned: dual boot on a Fusion drive is a bad idea.
|
| ---
|
| [0]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207584
| objektif wrote:
| This cannot be true.
| alephxyz wrote:
| I have a W10 install on a 7200rpm HDD and I believe it.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| Can confirm the boot time with Win10 on HDD. Can't argue
| about updates, took about a couple of hours, def. not days.
| toast0 wrote:
| I'm kind of surprised Windows 11 allows you to install to or
| run from something that isn't an SSD. Windows 7 ran just fine
| on spinners, but Windows 10 is pretty bad; I'm not surprised
| Windows 11 is worse, but they really should just disallow it.
| soupfordummies wrote:
| Maybe they shouldn't have such resource-creep that REQUIRES
| an SSD. Maybe they WOULDN'T if there weren't mountains of
| bloatware and telemetry bs.
| toast0 wrote:
| I mean, that would be great; but if nobody is holding the
| line on resource-creep, as is obviously the case, and
| nobody is testing if releases are acceptable on HDDs, as is
| obviously the case, they should just change the published
| requirements to reflect reality.
| wtallis wrote:
| > they should just change the published requirements to
| reflect reality.
|
| Marketing won't let them so long as it would piss off PC
| OEMs that still ship crappy systems and want to use the
| Windows logo.
| toast0 wrote:
| Shouldn't be a hard sell for OEMs; official specs are 64
| GB is enough storage for windows 11, and I can get a 128
| GB SSD for $15 retail, whereas the lowest price hard
| drive I can find is $25 retail (500 GB, but 3.5"), so if
| you're a cheap PC OEM, putting in a crappy, tiny, SSD
| saves money. And the only systems without SSDs I saw on
| BestBuy were refurbished machines shipping with Windows
| 10.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Why shouldn't they? People don't buy operating systems to
| be slimmed down...
|
| If you got a computer and it didn't come with all the
| needed drivers and a web browser along with most of the
| functionality needed to print, you'd most likely wonder
| what decade it came from. All that stuff I listed, without
| the telemetry is still going to run like dog shit on a HDD.
|
| I honestly think users are forgetting just how badly
| fragmented hard drives of days yonder used to run, and
| those same spinning disks are not any faster these days.
| Cutting down the OS to barely do anything still took more
| time than the complete boot cycle of my current computer up
| to a browser on an SSD.
| toast0 wrote:
| Yeah, hard drives are never going to be great (although
| 15k rpm drives aren't too bad), but IMHO, the real thing
| that causes perf to be awful is that windows 10 (and I
| assume 11 has gotten worse) can't seem to ever stop
| writing to the disk. Those writes seem to interrupt reads
| enough that you never can get good sustained read speeds,
| so loading anything is painful.
|
| I'm not going to setup a system to test, because it's too
| painful, but I'm now idly wondering if you could set the
| checkbox on a hard drive for "Turn off Windows write-
| cache buffer flushing on the device", and if that would
| help. Doing a aggregated write of a couple MB once a
| minute would probably work better than doing a few KB
| every second. Of course, at great risk of data loss, but
| YOLO. (a smidge of research seems to indicate this is for
| asking the device to pretty-please flush its internal
| write cache, so that might help a bit, but probably not
| very much; maybe there's a knob somewhere to tune the
| system file cache)
| water9 wrote:
| They must have a lot of "Telemetry" to collect on you.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| I thought telemetry was supposed to improve the experience.
| Not make it worse?
| JohnClark1337 wrote:
| [dead]
| lowercased wrote:
| It improves "the" experience; not "your" experience. ;)
| biogene wrote:
| Not seeing those boot times, but I rarely reboot. I usually
| reboot my W10 box once every few months or so. Our IT
| department commissions our Windows PCs in about an hour.
| Something seems very very wrong here, but I'm not an IT expert.
| pixl97 wrote:
| If you're not rebooting your W10 box every month, then every
| time you do reboot you're doing windows updates.
| biogene wrote:
| True, but our IT only lets important/critical updates
| through, so its not really a big burden.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > Windows 11 takes about 12 minutes to boot from an HDD.
|
| Mine doesn't. It takes 3-4 minutes (which can easily feel like
| an hour).
| hospitalJail wrote:
| Try to remove Windows/Microsoft from your life, Microsoft no
| longer is decent.
|
| We need to migrate to Linux.
| 1023bytes wrote:
| Come on now, HDDs aren't that bad.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpNagBwWlNk
| jeffbee wrote:
| Well that is not at all what happens on my machine, which is
| a Core i9 13900K with 128GiB of memory. It just grinds and
| grinds and grinds for ages.
| omnibrain wrote:
| Why do you use a HDD? Of course, I ask in jest, but I'm
| also a bit curious.
| jeffbee wrote:
| I have a very excellent SSD which I removed from that
| system because I am certain that the Windows installer
| would fuck it up, and I did not want the hassle of trying
| to fix it. So I pulled it out of the box to keep it from
| harm, and the only media I had at hand at that moment was
| a WD SATA HDD. I thought it would be slow, not kill-me-
| now slow.
|
| I do not "use an HDD" of course. It was improvisational.
| deathanatos wrote:
| The same reason anyone has always used a HDD? ... they're
| dirt cheap, compared to SSDs.
|
| I'd consider hybrid being the best cost option, with a
| small SSD backing frequently used data, like the OS. But
| there's more complexity in that setup. I'm also a Linux
| user, and boot times don't bother me.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Dirt cheap in which measure?
|
| I was at Microcenter and some 1TB (rather questionable)
| NVMe drivers were $30 on special. Going to be difficult
| to get cheaper than that.
|
| Now, lets turn your equation around. What is the cost per
| IOPS of your HDD versus SSD? HDDs start to get expensive
| very fast in that measure.
| deathanatos wrote:
| In terms of $/B.
|
| Yes, HDDs are slower than SSDs. If that axis matters to
| you, you'd use an SSD, particularly NVMe. (Which is sort
| of implied by the hybrid setup I suggest.) If storage
| capacity matters, HDDs. You can see this reflected in
| market prices, though it does look like SSDs are
| surprisingly cheap these days, comparatively.
| Historically this has not been the case. (I wonder if
| economies of scale are now working against HDDs suddenly,
| or what? There's no reason for them to cost the same or
| more than an SSD -- the market would collapse. Although I
| swear market pricing for many components hasn't made a
| lot of sense, recently... i.e., RAM has seemed
| horrendously expensive.)
| toast0 wrote:
| There's some sort of big SSD price drop in the past 3
| months. I dunno what that's about, but I did upgrade a
| machine, so that's nice.
|
| There does definitely seem to be a pricing mechanic in
| that hard drives never really scaled down in minimum unit
| cost; the basic parts of a hard drive still cost real
| money, so if you can do 2TB per platter, and a top of the
| line drive has 10 platters, a single platter 2TB drive
| costs a lot more than 10% of the top of the line drive.
| OTOH, flash controllers aren't that expensive and/or the
| cost of the controller scales with the capacity, so SSD
| prices tend to be more linear with capacity.
|
| If you need a lot of space, $/B means a lot, but if you
| just need an ample amount of space, $/device is more
| important, and SSD drives have hit the point where an
| ample amount of space is available for less than any hard
| drive.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| > they're dirt cheap, compared to SSDs.
|
| If you need very large (4TB+ drives) maybe, but 1-2TB
| SSDs are so cheap nowadays. 2TB SSDs today are cheaper
| than 2TB HHDs from 10 years ago, and the price
| discrepancy is quite narrow unless you're looking at 4TB+
| drives.
|
| I don't even bother looking at HHDs for my own computers
| anymore unless I need bulk storage for videos or
| something.
| XTHK wrote:
| The most efficient cost option is to have one cheap SSD
| for booting and a handful of apps that need the speed and
| then using a HDD for storage. Been that way for 10+ years
| deathanatos wrote:
| ... that video really doesn't sell Windows very well. My
| Linux laptop boots ~40s faster.
| judge2020 wrote:
| The slowness you see with NVME isn't in boot anymore -
| instead it's in BIOS. As memory times get faster, it takes
| longer for the motherboard to train to hit those XMP targets,
| especially with memory still super far away from the CPU. For
| me, rebooting has ~20 seconds of staring at a blank screen
| with the Motherboard doing memory training/initialization on
| 6000 MHz ram.
| divbzero wrote:
| This is good bullshit because it's close to the truth. Not quite
| a dozen lives but order of magnitude right:
| (50,000,000 seconds saved per day) / (60 seconds / minute) /
| (525,600 minutes / year) [?] 1.6 years saved per day (1.6
| years saved per day) x (365 days / year) [?] 580 years saved per
| year
| gorpomon wrote:
| I like arguments like this because it's a reminder that details
| matter. I clearly see them as the manipulation they are, but I do
| like them nonetheless.
|
| I remember watching a story about asylum seekers who had to use
| Skype to dial in to get an appointment. At one point, one of them
| says to the camera "I often dream about the call music." I would
| be surprised if the call music isn't (at this point at least)
| configurable in some way, but it's still humbling to realize that
| a minor thing like a loader or sound file can represent the
| entire product to someone at a very stressful time in their life.
| leo150 wrote:
| I recommend reading "Revolution in the valley" by Andy Hertzfeld,
| who is also the author of this story. The book is a compilation
| of all stories from folklore.org including more interesting
| details about development of the Macintosh.
| npalli wrote:
| Steve Jobs would always make up stuff ("reality distortion
| field") to motivate and push people. One of his famous stories
| that I found very funny --
|
| _According to Mike Slade, he was working at Microsoft around
| 1990, and Jobs was trying to recruit him to NeXT. (Bear in mind
| that Microsoft was only a few years from launching its mega-hit
| Windows 95, while NeXT was struggling to sell computers.)
|
| During a conversation, Jobs told Slade he would find his talents
| wasted in Seattle. In contrast, Jobs called Silicon Valley a hub
| of excitement and activity where Slade could blossom.
|
| Jobs then launched into a spontaneous, impassioned speech. He
| described Palo Alto, California, as a "special place" and likened
| it to Florence during the Italian Renaissance. There was so much
| talent in the area, Jobs said, that you could walk down the
| street and bump into a scholar one moment, an astronaut the next.
|
| Jobs' off-the-cuff description of the place bowled over Slade. It
| was a twist on Jobs' famous pitch to Pepsi CEO John Sculley.
| (Jobs asked whether Sculley wanted to sell sugar water his whole
| life or join Apple and change the world.)
|
| After the talk, Slade agreed to pack up his stuff and move to
| Palo Alto.
|
| Jump forward a year, and Slade and his wife were eating in Il
| Fornaio, an Italian chain restaurant with a location on
| University Avenue in Palo Alto.
|
| "We were sitting there, in early '91, and I'm reading the menu,"
| Slade recalled. "And on the back of the menu at Il Fornaio it
| says, 'Palo Alto is like Florence in the Renaissance...' And it
| goes through the whole spiel! The fucking guy sold me a line from
| the menu! From a chain restaurant!! Bad ad copy from Il Fornaio,
| which was his favorite restaurant, right? Such a shameless
| bullshitter!"_
|
| https://www.cultofmac.com/573753/how-jobs-poached-a-microsof...
| pokstad wrote:
| This is my new favorite Jobs story.
| racl101 wrote:
| He sounds like a sociopath. I could believe him gaslighting
| Wozniak out of the money he should've paid him for the Atari
| gig.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Seems kind of apocryphal. You mean to tell me a smart
| professional engineer working at one of the biggest and most
| prestigious (at the time) companies of the world is going to
| quit that job, uproot his life, and move to an entirely
| different state, just from a single "Trust me, Bro, it's
| awesome" endorsement from a potential employer? I'd have wanted
| to at least fly down there, look at a few apartments, visit the
| office, and so on, before making that kind of commitment. It
| makes a cool story, but there must have been more to it.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Eh, at least this short story did not say that. What it
| stated is the 'hook' line that got him was pulled from a
| menu. Not that this guy didn't at least to go Palo Alto first
| and make sure it wasn't a total shithole.
| adrianmonk wrote:
| Steve Jobs, whatever else you want to say about him, had
| charisma. It's a big part of why he was successful. So that's
| kind of the point. He had an ability to take a message like
| "trust me bro, it's awesome" and say it in a way that it
| would resonate, and that ability _was_ most of the secret
| sauce of being Steve Jobs.
| yongjik wrote:
| Man, Steve Jobs' Palo Alto must have been a truly special
| place. The only memorable thing I encountered in Palo Alto's
| street (while working there a few years ago) was the
| overwhelming stench of urine in the underpass beneath the
| Caltrain Station.
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| He Keyser Soze'd him
| DonHopkins wrote:
| I would have moved there just for Chef Cho's potstickers!
|
| https://www.paloaltoonline.com/blogs/p/2018/12/04/after-39-y...
|
| https://kellanskitchen.com/menu/chos-the-end-of-an-era/
|
| https://www.masterstech-home.com/the_kitchen/recipes/Interna...
| DoneWithAllThat wrote:
| It's a funny story, but... yeah, the early 90s was a special
| time in Silicon Valley. It was THE center of the computing
| world. And you really did just randomly bump into amazing
| people at Fry's or restaurants or bars or whatever. I don't
| think younger people understand how much around them today,
| when it comes to technology, can trace its roots to 90s South
| Bay and Peninsula.
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| I object to the idea that San Francisco, with its yuppie tech
| culture, was truly comparable to Florence in the Renaissance.
| The Renaissance produced works of culture and art in addition
| to the technological advances. In that regard, Seattle
| produced the best music of the decade and would be an equal
| contender to the title.
| pengaru wrote:
| > Bad ad copy from Il Fornaio, which was his favorite
| restaurant, right?
|
| Funny story, but I find it hard to believe Il Fornaio, with its
| mediocre Italian fare, was Jobs' favorite restaurant.
|
| This is the restaurant we'd go to when all other options were
| booked or it was too late to drive further.
| elwell wrote:
| Do they sell fruit?
| reidjs wrote:
| Just because he is great at business doesn't mean he has
| great taste in Italian restaurants
| pengaru wrote:
| I'd actually argue there's more evidence of Jobs having
| good taste in general than being good at business.
| thatfrenchguy wrote:
| It's really funny when you think about how underwhelming Palo
| Alto is too.
| [deleted]
| jonny_eh wrote:
| Oren's Hummus is pretty good -\\_(tsu)_/-
| wmf wrote:
| Radiohead even wrote a song about it.
| drivers99 wrote:
| I was hoping it would explain what they did to speed it up.
| tpmx wrote:
| I wonder what he would have said about the 20 minutes when you
| can't use the computer and the 1+ GB download it takes to update
| a state-of-the-art mac from macOS 13.5 to 13.5.1 that has one (1)
| bug fix ("macOS Ventura 13.5.1 fixes an issue in System Settings
| that prevents location permissions from appearing.")
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37206660
|
| I miss having Steve running Apple.
| throitallaway wrote:
| Coming from the patching experience on various Linux distros
| (and even Windows), I really want to know what Apple is doing
| under the hood with macOS updates. Their point updates are
| multiple gigabytes and often take 20-40 minutes to install. My
| Arch system updates itself in a couple minutes (even if I
| haven't updated for a month) and there's no "unusable" phase of
| the upgrade process, other than a normal reboot for kernel
| updates.
| [deleted]
| NobodyNada wrote:
| A few years ago, they moved the OS to a "sealed system
| volume" -- basically, the entire OS is stored on an immutable
| disk image, signed and verified with a Merkle-tree sort of
| structure. This has a few advantages: malware cannot modify
| the OS, you can't brick your system by accidentally deleting
| OS files, updates are far more robust (they don't have to
| change files on your root filesystem), and the OS can be
| stored unencrypted meaning you can boot the system without
| requiring the user's password first. (And of course, there's
| an opt-out if you really want to modify OS files.)
|
| The big downside is that installing an update means you have
| to rebuild and re-sign the entire OS image, which takes
| forever. When they first introduced this model, I was
| surprised at this: I expected they could generate the new OS
| image in the background, _while you're still using the
| computer_ , then just swap over to the new image with a
| single reboot, instead of requiring a ton of downtime. I
| think they might finally be doing this with macOS 14/iOS 16
| -- I've been running the betas for both and noticed
| restarting to install updates has become far, far faster --
| like maybe a minute or two.
| tpmx wrote:
| _I've been running the betas for both and noticed
| restarting to install updates has become far, far faster --
| like maybe a minute or two._
|
| Nice! (And thanks for the backgrounder. It's the first time
| I've seen this explanation on HN.)
| diskzero wrote:
| I assume he would say the same things I would hear him say in
| meetings where the installer team would show him the lastest
| versions of the application. A special memory comes from the
| time where the installer progress bar starting going in
| reverse. The installer and mail teams received a lot of abuse.
| It took a special person to stay motivated given all of the
| challenges they faced and the feedback they got from SJ.
| tpmx wrote:
| As a customer (my personal computer/display/phone/etc spend
| with Apple over the past 20 years or so: $25k+): I would
| prefer having someone in charge who can tell/understand/sense
| and say that something is clearly not good enough and then
| actually getting it solved. Tim Cook does not strike me as
| that kind of guy.
|
| The abuse isn't required though.
| tpmx wrote:
| (These extremely slow updates thing has been going on for
| many years now. So many lifetimes wasted.)
| didip wrote:
| Just load an addicting easy game during boot process. Then users
| won't even notice :)
| msephton wrote:
| Namco had the patent on that.
| sbuk wrote:
| Games on the Commodore 64 started doing that in the early 80s.
| Loading from the cassette could take ages, so the devs would
| put in something like space invaders or missile command to
| entertain while the user waits for the main event.
| sedatk wrote:
| When our website was down due to maintenance, we used to run
| JSTetris on the error page, so people would stay on the page,
| and they would get redirected to the web site as soon as the
| maintenance was over.
|
| Some people even complained that they shouldn't be redirected
| automatically because they'd lost their progress :)
| JJMcJ wrote:
| I certainly wish Windows would do something about these endless
| boot and even worse shutdown times.
|
| Even worse, I want to go home, not wait 30 minutes for updates to
| install.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| I suppose this makes TV advertisers worse than Hitler
| throitallaway wrote:
| Correct.
| huy77 wrote:
| Not if the ads targeting wrong person.
| varjag wrote:
| This is also a great argument for power saving. Shave a Watt or
| two of consumption from your mass market device or application,
| and suddenly you've saved hundreds of Megawatt-hours over the
| years.
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