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The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority

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837 points turrini | 5 comments | 13 May 25 10:31 UTC | HN request time: 0.711s | source
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AndrewDucker ◴[13 May 25 11:51 UTC] No.43971864[source]▶
Well, yes. It's an economic problem (which is to say, it's a resource allocation problem). Do you have someone spend extra time optimising your software or do you have them produce more functionality. If the latter generates more cash then that's what you'll get them to do. If the former becomes important to your cashflow then you'll get them to do that.
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tgv ◴[13 May 25 12:04 UTC] No.43971960[source]▶
It's the kind of economics that shifts the financial debt to accumulating waste, and technical debt, which is paid for by someone else. It's basically stealing. There are --of course-- many cases in which thorough optimizing doesn't make much sense, but the idea of just adding servers instead of rewriting is a sad state of affairs.
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1. inetknght ◴[13 May 25 13:05 UTC] No.43972503[source]▶
> It's basically stealing.

This is exactly right. Why should the company pay an extra $250k in salary to "optimize" when they can just offload that salary to their customers' devices instead? The extra couple of seconds, extra megabytes of bandwidth, and shittery of the whole ecosystem has been externalized to customers in search of ill-gotten profits.

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2. 3036e4 ◴[13 May 25 14:11 UTC] No.43973191[source]▶
It's like ignoring backwards compatibility. That is really cheap since all the cost is pushed to end-users (that have to relearn the UI) or second/third-party developers (that have to rewrite their client code to work with a new API). But it's OK since everyone is doing it and also without all those pointless rewrites many of us would not have a job.
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3. franktankbank ◴[13 May 25 14:12 UTC] No.43973202[source]▶
Also offloaded to the miserable devs maintaining the system.
4. inetknght ◴[13 May 25 14:20 UTC] No.43973300[source]▶
> without all those pointless rewrites many of us would not have a job.

I hear arguments like this fairly often. I don't believe it's true.

Instead of having a job writing a pointless rewrite, you might have a job optimizing software. You might have a different career altogether. Having a job won't go away: what you do for your job will simply change.

5. gwern ◴[14 May 25 15:14 UTC] No.43985551[source]▶
> has been externalized to customers in search of ill-gotten profits.

'Externality' does not mean 'thing I dislike'. If it is the customers running the software or waiting the extra couple of seconds, that's not an externality. By definition. (WP: "In economics, an externality is an indirect cost (external cost) or benefit (external benefit) to an uninvolved third party that arises as an effect of another party's (or parties') activity.") That is just the customers picking their preferred point on the tradeoff curves.