Rendered at 08:21:13 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Cloudflare Workers.
acb12 19 hours ago [-]
Maybe old software was also fast because the people building it were more likely to care about computers first and careers second. Not that they were better, just that fewer people were there because tech was the obvious high-paying path.
halJordan 14 hours ago [-]
I think that's more of a nostalgia trip than anything else.
Guvante 15 hours ago [-]
> Sometimes, hardware is cheaper than human coordination.
A t3.small on AWS costs $182.21 a year before any discounts and has 2 CPUs and 2 GB of RAM.
So the computer to run the example at the start costs 3 hours of Engineering time.
This has... Warping effects on how hardware performance is perceived to put it mildly.
If you spend 4 hours halving that cost it takes multiple years to reclaim that investment.
Not that performance doesn't matter of course, reducing your total spend by a percentage is worthwhile, but micro optimizations become difficult when hardware is cheap and performant.
tippa123 18 hours ago [-]
One of my favourite words in engineering is resourcefulness.
For simplification, you need to make a Spaghetti Bolognese for 4 people.
Person A gets $10, Person B gets $100.
Person A is forced to be resourceful, look around and do a lot of thinking. Person B can be wasteful and still be in budget.
Reality Nowadays: Person B would contract this out to Person C, who would subcontract to Person D and suddenly there is a huge scope creep and $100 is not enough.
GJR 10 hours ago [-]
And also because it was possible to achieve deterministic performance as there was no (zero) virtualization.
1vuio0pswjnm7 19 hours ago [-]
Old software _is_ fast
I use old software on new hardware
It's faster than new software on new hardware
mda_damico 19 hours ago [-]
Old software is fast because it's built for old hardware and usually it was developed by good-taught engineers.
robthebrew 19 hours ago [-]
I heard there was a programmer exfux from USSR to USA in the 90s (?) because they knew better how to optimise code. Is this true?
A t3.small on AWS costs $182.21 a year before any discounts and has 2 CPUs and 2 GB of RAM.
So the computer to run the example at the start costs 3 hours of Engineering time.
This has... Warping effects on how hardware performance is perceived to put it mildly.
If you spend 4 hours halving that cost it takes multiple years to reclaim that investment.
Not that performance doesn't matter of course, reducing your total spend by a percentage is worthwhile, but micro optimizations become difficult when hardware is cheap and performant.
For simplification, you need to make a Spaghetti Bolognese for 4 people.
Person A gets $10, Person B gets $100.
Person A is forced to be resourceful, look around and do a lot of thinking. Person B can be wasteful and still be in budget.
Reality Nowadays: Person B would contract this out to Person C, who would subcontract to Person D and suddenly there is a huge scope creep and $100 is not enough.
I use old software on new hardware
It's faster than new software on new hardware