Hacker News Reader

Comment by forgottenpass | Hacker News Reader

>If electron apps' claimed memory causes your computer to go slow due to swapping, you should complain. But most complaints I see on this topic stem from a discomfort over the reported figure by the operating system.

I tried that once. But I'm sick of having to fight that my usecase is valid, that my laptop isn't too old, and that it isn't broken/misconfigured in some other way. It's 4 years old, and I can't run 2 electron applications and firefox at the same time without swapping so hard I can't get anything done. Fuck me for asking so much from a computer, right?

View on HN

No idea why you're getting downvotes. I think this actually is a problem in the dev world. They often have overpowered systems compared to the average user and as a result might not realize or simply don't care how their software performs on lower end systems.

One example that's driving me mad is shotwell (photo managing software). For some reason whenever you start it, it is crawling your entire collection of photos again. There are countless rejected tickets from people asking to add an option to disable it. I personally manage my photos on an older laptop with a spinning 2tb drive, for when I travel... So I'm somewhere without a power outlet in reach, battery sitting at 12%, and would like to quickly show some photos to a friend, but opening up shotwell will make sure that remaining battery will be drained in an instant. But the neckbeards developing that software sitting in their basements with 4 SSDs running in raid 0 just fail to understand what my problem is. Sadly I haven't found a good replacement so far, feature wise.

Edit: Also forgetting your password sucks ;-)

I very specifically cited someone like you as being a person who has a valid complaint. I'm calling out people who get upset at the idea of a computer doing "wasteful" work, when that wasteful work has no meaningful impact on latency, responsiveness, power draw, etc. This is common and is a form of "visibility bias". For example, computers do not report their CPU cache miss rates in a highly visible place. I'd imagine if they did, you'd have countless people agonizing over them, despite the fact that in most cases a higher cache miss rate would not result in perceptible difference when using the computer.

> I'm calling out people who get upset at the idea of a computer doing "wasteful" work, when that wasteful work has no meaningful impact on latency, responsiveness, power draw, etc.

But who gets to make that call?

For every person out there who complaints that using voice chat in Discord on a MacBook Pro on battery causes the chassis to heat up, fans to kick into turbo boost, and the battery to dwindle — but only when using the .app, not when using the website through Firefox, there's another person who says "oh, but my computer doesn't do that".

So then everybody who has a similar complaint as the first person is branded a liar and whiner.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com