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

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837 points turrini | 2 comments | 13 May 25 10:31 UTC | HN request time: 0.002s | 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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esperent ◴[13 May 25 12:23 UTC] No.43972105[source]▶
> It's basically stealing

This feels like hyperbole to me. Who is being stolen from here? Not the end user, they're getting the tradeoff of more features for a low price in exchange for less optimized software.

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1. cosmic_cheese ◴[13 May 25 13:40 UTC] No.43972871{3}[source]▶
It’s only a tradeoff for the user if the user find the added features useful.

Increasingly, this is not the case. My favorite example here is the Adobe Creative Suite, which for many users useful new features became far and few between some time ~15 years ago. For those users, all they got was a rather absurd degree of added bloat and slowness for essentially the same thing they were using in 2010. These users would’ve almost certainly been happier had 80-90% of the feature work done in that time instead been bug fixes and optimization.

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2. ◴[13 May 25 14:20 UTC] No.43973291[source]▶