The funny thing is that with all the talk of "dreamers" and "aiming high" on HN, there's a horrible horrible groupthink that goes on here.
An obsession with the latest fad, to the complete disregard of substance. Buzzwords over basic utility, lists over productivity,
I would argue that demosceners (like little Johnny) are the dreamers
while much of HN consists of internet hucksters. Back when
I was writing demoscene code I bent my computer over my knee and
made it beg (Wrote a flat real mode extension for borland pascal).
Phong shading on a 486? Check. realtime raytracing on that same
486, in the same demo? Check. (10fps btw).
These days people struggle to handle a few thousand users of a text
based website on a quad core system with gigabytes of ram.
PS: Sorry this was a little off topic. Follow your dreams, don't
let the man get you down!
N.B. Although the S/N here is often quite poor, it is at least
an order of magnitude better than other places I know about. At
least once a day I read an article that is very much worth my time.
> there's a horrible horrible groupthink that goes on here. An obsession with the latest fad... ...Buzzwords over basic utility...
As far as I can see, HN is populated by desperate prisoners (of the 9-to-5 cube farm variety) driven mad by fantasies of escape (through earning "fuck-you money".) In that light, I find it somewhat easier to forgive the universal obsession with get-rich-quick nonsense.
> Back when I was writing demoscene code
If we can bring the Age of Cruft to an end, these days could come back.
> These days people struggle to handle a few thousand users of a text based website on a quad core system with gigabytes of ram.
> Although the S/N here is often quite poor, it is at least an order of magnitude better than other places I know about
I'm still looking for the secret pure thinking-people haven which surely lurks somewhere on the net. I might eventually take a crack at building it myself.
In the web hucksters' defense (not that I am one, mind you), fitting a few thousand users onto a quad core system (as opposed to a few million) improves maintainability, reliability, recoverability, and a multitude of other things that simply aren't major concerns in the demo scene.
The guys building big rigs care about performance - but never to the same tune as the guys designing F-1 racing cars. Different goals demand different approaches.
If you want to design jet fighters, go do that - and push the hardware to the absolute limits of human ability, but there is a glory in designing commuter jets too, you know.
That was part of my point. I don't see why we can't have a fast and good in the same piece of software. I've written software like that before, it's not difficult at all. Just keep your CS knowledge in the back of your mind and be a little pragmatic.
This is something that bothers me a lot. We've made huge, massive, spectacular progress in hardware. We know what the characteristics of our problems
are (usually they're quite simple like CRM), yet software seems
to ge slower, and more complex. With more layers of added complexity.
I simply do not see why continue to produce such bad software as
a society. We continue to build on quicksand when a few hundred
yards to the side is solid bedrock (lisps, ada, smalltalk, erlang, etc).
Back in the 50's we had teahouses in england [1] that fully automated their accounting/payroll system. On 50's hardware. Yet today we still need quad xeons to do even a fraction of that. It makes me very very
angry to throw more hardware at a problem that has already been solved
with orders of magnitude less.
These days people struggle to handle a few thousand (ed. concurrent?) users of a text based website on a quad core system with gigabytes of ram.
Which is subject to completely different requirements and restrictions. I think just flatly comparing that to 'writing demoscene code' constitutes a 'disregard of substance'.
BTW, reminiscing about writing demoscene code or actually returning to it may very well be the latest fad.
I would argue that demosceners (like little Johnny) are the dreamers while much of HN consists of internet hucksters. Back when I was writing demoscene code I bent my computer over my knee and made it beg (Wrote a flat real mode extension for borland pascal). Phong shading on a 486? Check. realtime raytracing on that same 486, in the same demo? Check. (10fps btw).
These days people struggle to handle a few thousand users of a text based website on a quad core system with gigabytes of ram.
PS: Sorry this was a little off topic. Follow your dreams, don't let the man get you down!
N.B. Although the S/N here is often quite poor, it is at least an order of magnitude better than other places I know about. At least once a day I read an article that is very much worth my time.