Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article and then copy it into the threads to complain about it. The most provocative thing is nearly always something shallow and barely (if at all) related. This leads to shallow/indignant discussions, which are the opposite of what we're going for here.

It would be much better to find the most interesting/surprising/meaty thing and start a thread with that.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

(Also, re formatting - see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: "Please don't complain about website formatting, back-button breakage, and similar annoyances. They're too common to be interesting. Exception: when the author is present. Then friendly feedback might be helpful."

p.s. Your comments are usually excellent—thank you!

What's wrong with the formatting? Plain text has a lot going for it. (I remember when most/all GameFAQs guides were text files just like this -- not to mention the Super Metroid guide [0] that manually justified every paragraph via word choice.)

[0] https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/snes/588741-super-metroid/faqs...

On mobile it looks terrible. The lines will wrap and then a few words later there’s a forced line break.

That's a reasonable criticism. It works better in Reader View (because you can scale the font down, at least in Firefox), but I have to rotate to landscape as well.

Yeah. GameFAQs guides had perfect usability. Now they're multipage HTML documents and searching is impossible. Sometimes the "guide" consists of nothing but YouTube links.

> What's wrong with the formatting?

It messes up Firefox reader mode.

I myself have gotten complaints from other people when using linebreaks in Github comments because their device renders them.

I kept reading but I did have a "hey, that's kind of unfair" reaction at that line. It's not their fault that the speed of light is a hard limit, eh?

There's a chicken and egg problem with compilers and languages on the one side and machines architectures and instruction sets on the other, it's not easy breaking the mold. (GPUs are a counter-example perhaps?)

CPU designers can't all be Ivan Godard ( https://hackaday.com/2013/08/02/the-mill-cpu-architecture/ https://millcomputing.com/ ) or Chuck Moore ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_H._Moore#Hardware_desi... http://www.greenarraychips.com/ ) eh?

> It's not their fault that the speed of light is a hard limit, eh?

If you're at Intel, you not likely to see this as a calm period bereft of ideas, while Apple silicon has made such strides. New ideas, or simply a rebalancing of familiar ideas, can make significant progress against the same physics.

Seems like a pretty innocent, tongue-in-cheek comment?

actually its a pretty substantive and spot-on comment. the cpu people have been trying _really_ hard to make existing workloads run faster.

but the software people have known for 50 years that concurrency was going to be necessary to go further..but it was never really a good time.

maybe we can finally start looking at other programming models instead of wasting so much time and getting such crappy reliability and performance out of thread-and-lock?