Ask HN: How do you use computers faster? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you use computers faster?

6 pointsPhileosopher5 comments

I noticed something weird today by websearching "world's fastest computer user". I had to search "fast computer use", "how to interface computers faster", and a few others.

There appears to be absolutely nothing mainstream about the slowest part of the computer experience: the users.

This leaves me with so many questions:

* why does everyone want computers to be faster when their sludgy brains are the weak point in the process? * how DO you get faster at computers? my theory is that the faster you are, the more you get done, so what does it take? * how come FAMGA isn't on this beyond brain interfacing? isn't there an easier way that uses present technology and just a teensy bit of education?

Not really sure where I'm going with this, but just wanted to throw that idea here.

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It's actually a good question because the average user won't really ever see where the speed and additional memory capacity gets used.

The faster the computer is, and the more memory it has at hand, the more technology can be abstracted away from the users and developers.

Ease of use is the Operating System's job. If you boot up a DOS with Windows 3.1 disk, you'll find it runs pretty fast. BUT it is also lacking a lot of the comfort features that make computing easier. As speed and memory constraints get dealt with in many ways (price, new tech, etc) more of those ease-of-use functions start to appear.

To a lot of regular "desktop" users, this may not be very visible. But for example, look at graphic apps. Try to duplicate what you can do on a modern graphic app on a Windows 3.1 computer. How about something as simple to use as Blender? If you can do it, it'll take you a very long time, because without the memory and speed, you can't abstract enough of the hard work away.

The only thing that trumps clock speed are features ("tricks" in some cases perhaps) like hyperthreading, super computing, multiple cores, etc.

We can't speed our brains up. We can make a gentler learning curve, and make all the functionality of the software faster, smoother, easier. And that requires memory, speed and multiple threads.

It's worth noting that early QNX and Amiga operating systems actually did extraordinarily well with very few resources. However, maintaining them as the hardware improved was very intensive and expensive.

> why does everyone want computers to be faster when their sludgy brains are the weak point in the process?

Because unless I program in PHP or Quarkus, half of the time my brain isn't the weak spot.

Also, waiting for my computer to finish of what it is doing is an insane distraction.

And stopping my brain from going on tangents while I'm waiting for Spring Boot or React or whatever, that is often an actual job (although I am good at it and have a lot of tricks).

That said, I don't look for faster computers, I'm on plenty fast hardware.

But I do get somewhat mad at Windows for making git (or even a plain - but well optimized - HelloWorld in C#) use several hundreds of milliseconds (!) to complete.

So I use WSL now, but often I just install Linux so I don't have to deal with this enourmous waste.

How everyone else lives happily with systems that routinely use hundreds of milliseconds extra many times an hour, that is something I can't really understand.

Maybe it is easier to tolerate it if one hasn't experienced anything else?

Edit: and don't get me started on modern web browsers and modern web applications, even modern web applications from what is supposedly the smartest people on this planet. It is amazing how a few of them can bog down my i7 - even if I haven't used them for a long time and even if they are all in background tabs.

> why does everyone want computers to be faster when their sludgy brains are the weak point in the process?

Maybe because you can buy faster computer today and save few second per compilation right now. Also you can learn some new skill and get +/- same result but... later, after accomplishing some learning.

upd:

> how DO you get faster at computers? my theory is that the faster you are, the more you get done, so what does it take?

learn touchtyping + vim to get faster typer and stop distruction into keyboard which may be slower than all compilation I have ever experienced (I did it and I promise it works).

learn some magic utils like: grep, regexp, sed, awk, etc for never searching that can be searched by machine (I am having this as future goal).

Brain interfacing reduces latency for sure, but until then the office-seat-parked-beside-a-workstation is the default, and hasn't changed. Phones reduce latency, but I've found they only really shine as consumption devices and I can't code or do anything super productive with them, apart from taking photos, typing tweets etc

VR headsets look promising and may reduce latency but will probably come with their own caveats too, so there is no golden solution to this apart from physically wiring a computer to your brain which will probably be our last good invention.

still a lot of calculation tasks for workday, so that I go to another computer to do not wait, than to another and another. breadth-first-search to find solutions reqires multiple computers to do fast

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