Hacker News Reader

Comment by robenkleene | Hacker News Reader

> the remaining 1% is stuff that you should migrate away from

I'm not following. Compiling and media editing depend on a fast platform, are you really suggesting people should avoid doing those tasks?

View on HN

Photoshop (i.e. "image editing") and video editing software have existed for a long time. They have not become better, just heavier. There are still alternatives for those applications that run just as well on slower hardware, though obviously your movie edits might have to render overnight instead of in three hours. Nobody will die if that happens.

Edit: You mentioned compiling, which is not an incredibly salient point. If you're not doing linux kernel development (and even then...) you do not need a fast machine for this. Even the linux kernel compiles within a few minutes (maybe 5? It has been a few months since I tried this) on a raspberry pi 3b. For more contained projects (e.g. something you might write in lisp, rust or go) it'll take somewhere between one to twenty seconds.

what on earth are you talking about? time is made up of seconds, minutes, hours... etc. reducing wait time increases productivity. The larger and more complex a project becomes, the more these delays compound. A sub $1k laptop with the the computational power of a workstation that costs many times that, and isn't portable is an absolute game changer in many areas. If I worked for National Geographic or the New York times as a photographer and needed to preprocess several thousand images or 4/8k footage from the field so I could make print deadlines, 3 hours vs overnight means everthing.And more importantly, the amount of power consumed by the cycles is far from trivial. An x86 mobile workstation can't even complete certain render tasks on a single charge that the macbook air can do on less than a quarter of a battery charge.

As for compile times, believe it or not, lots of projects are written in something other than highly optimized C code and compile time is a real pain point. You don't always have a choice of what language or dependencies you work with.

Just because there is an alternative way to do something, or a way that takes longer doesn't mean its viable. Performance improvements matter, a lot. Power consumption improvements matter, a lot.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com