Hacker News Reader

Comment by eeks | Hacker News Reader

A 20s turnover is not even that slow. Debugging undecidable timing issues in an FPGA may have turnover counted in hours given how slow HW synthesizers are.

If the need of better tooling is clear, the OP does not mention one important point: faster machines have created some sort of fast food approach to programming, where programs are built on the go with the help of the appropriate tools (some sort of computer-aided programming).

Back in the 60s, when programs where being shipped by snail mail to some data center somewhere in the country to be entered by a random assistant and scheduled in a long pool of jobs, turnover was counted in days. Yet, we walked on the moon.

So beyond better tooling, maybe a key to maintaining that attention span is check is to simply spend more time on the design board.

View on HN

Possibly. All this talk about getting antsy if things take time to build seems to fit a worry i have about our current web focused world.

Observe Google and their management of Android.

Again and again they have pushed out some half-baked X.0 version with the unstated intent that it will be sorted in a near future update. A clear example of that was the introduction of the Storage Access Framework.

This is the web mentality seeping into the development of firmware and physical products, and it is leading to a massive culture clash and crap products.

Basically you can't just code, push, run, repeat on devices in peoples pockets and bags like you can a web site.

Seriously, the reason I can't rely on my phone is mostly Google Play Services. I never know when it will update behind my back, and suddenly I'll feel a warm spot on my leg, and less than halfway into my day my phone's battery is at 5% because of Google Play Services running infinite loops.

Or how at least every two days, the phone's wifi and LTE connections just stop working, for no apparent reason. But if I Force Stop on Google Play Services, they suddenly work again. This has been going on for several months now.

Of course, these issues didn't used to happen with older versions of Play Services. And if I downgrade the Play Services app to the version installed with my ROM, I never have these problems--but then I can't use any current Google apps, like Gmail, Maps, etc.

The AOSP software is mostly fine. But the Play Services side of Google simply cannot be trusted. Their CADT/web-style of development is almost enough to push me back to iOS.

I want a phone that just runs Debian. :(

I would say that it is a balance of consequences. When the consequence of a mistyped variable is two days, you better believe I'm going to triple check everything. When it is the ten seconds for the compiler to run, I tend not to worry as much.

Reducing the turnaround is a good thing, because that time that would have gone into triple-checking variable names can now go into triple-checking the algorithm on a whiteboard.

I wouldn't say FPGA synthesizers are slow. They take a long time, but that's not the same thing.

A design board is just another tool, a workaround for not being able to run the program quickly enough (compare e.g. "presentation compilers" in languages that take a long time to fully compile).

This is one reason why I'm so happy about the Raspberry Pi. It is not that the Pi as such added anything to the world that wasn't there before. But it is small enough to do the little things I always wanted while still running a normal OS, and it is attractive and widespread enough that SBCL was ported to it. I can now have the whole stack of SBCL with SLIME and all the other Lisp toys on the Pi.

I don't think it's hard to give credence to the thought that there perhaps is a natural boundary for responsiveness that, when crossed, results in vastly increased productivity. That's the idea here. This works for people with short or long attention span. The paucity of short term memory is perhaps made worse by attention span issues, but that's not the core issue.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com