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Comment by tonsky | Hacker News Reader

> You can format an SSD, download a multi-gig image and install it in under 6 minutes?

5 minutes to download 4 Gb at 100 Mbit/s, 0,5 min to write 4 Gb at 1Gbps

> I'm failing to see the problem with that dialog. It's hardly new.

It’s always been a problem. Trouble is, you want work from both versions combined, not to select one and destroy another

> Everyone thinks that a problem.

Yet new languages (e.g. Rust) are still developed with terribly slow compilers

> It can kill processes (configurable). But AFAIK it doesn't do it randomly.

Well, I meant randomly in a sense that you can hardly predict or control what will happen. Of course it’s a determenistic algorithm, but engineers treat it as a black box.

> Anymore? Really? I reboot my Windows computer one-tenth as often as twenty years ago.

Why do you need to reboot at all?

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> 0,5 min to write 4 Gb at 1Gbps

By "install it", I thought you meant install Windows, which takes for longer than 30 seconds. It's not a straight byte copy. For one, part of the install process compiles code for your variation of CPU architecture.

> It’s always been a problem.

In fact, it's less of a problem now than it was 15 years ago. Google Docs, Office 365.

> Yet new languages (e.g. Rust) are still developed with terribly slow compilers

Slow compilers (Rust, TypeScript, Scala, Haskell) almost universally have complex type inference.

Languages with limited type inference (Go, Java) have fast compilers.

It's really a matter of choice of language design, rather than compiler implementation.

> Well, I meant randomly in a sense that you can hardly predict or control what will happen.

This is like complaining search engine results are random because they are complex. Does it really matter?

> Why do you need to reboot at all?

Usually my battery dies.

> By "install it", I thought you meant install Windows, which takes for longer than 30 seconds. It's not a straight byte copy. For one, part of the install process compiles code for your variation of CPU architecture.

That was my point. It does something very slow but unnecessary. If you could install it by straight copy, it would be way faster. And there’re no reasons why it can’t be straight copy (or really fast unzip & compile).

> Google Docs, Office 365

Google Docs disables offline mode by defaults. It only works as long as everyone are almost on the same page. It’s a step forward, yes. I wish using those algorithms was as easy as writing LAMP apps

> Usually my battery dies.

Doesn’t mean it has to reboot. It’s just an implementation design of current OSes. See Phantom OS

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