Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by its_a_random_ac 1044 days ago
Kinda of crazy, my first computer had a million times less ram than this.
2 comments
TacticalCoder 1044 days ago
> Kinda of crazy, my first computer had a million times less ram than this.

My first computer had a billion times less RAM than this: not even 32 KB (16 KB actually). My everyday computer has 2 million times the RAM of my first computer (16 KB vs 32 GB).

And now we're waiting for the real dinosaurs here to comment!

link
diarrhea 1044 days ago
My first computer had RAM.
link
retrac 1044 days ago
What gets me is how it has made all my intuitions about how to program incorrect with time. And I'm no dinosaur. I started with an old obsolete machine with 128 KB. I remember getting a hand-me-down PC with a 486 (virtual memory at last!) and 16 megabytes of RAM and I couldn't imagine how I could ever use that much memory, besides for multimedia. Still hard to imagine, sometimes. How long to sort a vector of 1 million simple elements? Intuition says about a minute, but it's milliseconds. How big a working set before cache thrashing? My intuition is attuned to single-digit kilobytes, but it's multi-digit megabytes now.
link
imtringued 1044 days ago
Why would intuition say that sorting 4MB of data is slow?

Assuming the worst case with 4 billion elements:

log_2(4 billion) = 32

So 128 billion operations or 500GB of memory read and writes if everything is touched only once. Anything below that is peanuts.

You need unimaginably large numbers to make sorting slow. How am I going to find that much data?

link