Admiral Grace Hopper Explains the Nanosecond

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Strong rec dmoreno · 2023-01 · on “Ask HN: What's your favorite illustration in Computer Science?”

My favorite is more a small presentation than an image: Admiral Grace Hoper Explains a Nanosecond. [this video] For me it changed my mind on wasting time on less efficient algorithms.

Recommends dougmwne · 2020-01 · on “A low-mass planet candidate orbiting Proxima Centauri”

Yes it is and no it isn't. Learn from Admiral Grace Hopper: [this video] The speed of light in fiber optic cable is about 2/3 the speed of light, which is why SpaceX's Starlink will have a potential latency advantage over oceanic fiber optics. It also gives good perspective on what's being thrown away when you add a single ms of latency through a router or a display. 186 miles at the speed of light. Many on HN don't get this, but this is why cloud gaming is perfectly feasible if we're running with low latency displays and inputs, low distance to the edge compute, and few routing hops.

Recommends lozf · 2020-04 · on “Captain Grace M. Hopper: The Mother of COBOL (1981)”

> The nanosecond wire alone should be a compelling argument. For those that haven't seen it: [this video] (Of course, I expect that most here have, but xkcd 10,000 and all that.)

Recommends klyrs · 2021-06 · on “Your CPU may have slowed down on Wednesday”

Speaking as somebody who never stopped optimizing like its the 90s: there's definitely a learning curve, but when microbenchmarking becomes a reflex, you learn your language in depth and the burden drops quickly. It only seems esoteric to you because the industry has collectively decided that Grace Hopper is an old codger who doesn't need to be listened to. [this video]

Recommends throw0101a · 2021-12 · on “I bought 1000 meters of wire to settle a physics debate [video]”

> Light is slow, not exactly 1 foot per nanosecond but it's a reasonable mnemonic. "Admiral Grace Hopper Explains the Nanosecond" is a good illustration of this (segment is only 2m): * [this video] * [LINK] Full lecture: * [LINK]

Cites cogman10 · 2021-06 · on “Your CPU may have slowed down on Wednesday”

Pretty reminiscent of Grace Hopper's nanosecond lecture [1] Certainly there are reasons why a feature might slow down a system beyond the branching (for example, if it requires you to load other resources)... but really, the issue is that as pointed out in the youtube video. Software companies very frequently do not care about performance. [1] [this video]

Cites BenoitEssiambre · 2022-03 · on “How our free plan stays free”

I would add that software infrastructure can run incredibly fast and scale incredibly well on modern hardware if you're a bit careful about resource usage. Traditional relational DBs like Postgresql are very scalable on modern hardware. If you take the time to craft a normalized schema with low redundancy being careful about keeping data small, you can achieve performance and resource efficiency and cache efficiency hundreds of time better than bloated distributed document nosql based systems. You can also get better transactional integrity, reduce reliance on queues (use load balancers instead) and get more instant and more atomic error propagation and edge case resolution. You can really b

Cites BenoitEssiambre · 2022-08 · on “Use one big server”

I'm glad this is becoming conventional wisdom. I used to argue this in these pages a few years ago and would get downvoted below the posts telling people to split everything into microservices separated by queues (although I suppose it's making me lose my competitive advantage when everyone else is building lean and mean infrastructure too). In my mind, reasons involve keeping transactional integrity, ACID compliance, better error propagation, avoiding the hundreds of impossible to solve roadblocks of distributed systems ( [LINK] ). But also it is about pushing the limits of what is physically possible in computing. As Admiral Grace Hopper would point out ( [this video] ) doing distance over netw