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Rachel's posts would be so much more useful if she would just say what she meant, instead of twisting everything into knots to find a way to say it backwards so
by MoronInAHurry 7y ago
Rachel's posts would be so much more useful if she would just say what she meant, instead of twisting everything into knots to find a way to say it backwards so she can be sarcastic and condescending while doing it.
I'm sure there's some useful information in here, but it's not worth digging through the patronization to find it.
- gorgoiler 7y agoIt’s an interesting post to read. Have another go if you can, but I very much agree with you on the tone issue. Imagine if these were ones own notes that had to be read through the next time something like this happened. A more succinct operational — dare I say: positive! — way of writing would really be welcome.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- yobert 7y agoI would counter-argue that dry, positive, informational writing is great for Wikipedia but can also be very boring. This blog has a lot of snark and that's what makes digesting the great information so much fun!
- _frkl 7y agoTotally agree, I also enjoy her posts quite a bit!
- spectramax 7y agoSo much fun and so little substance. Fun should be sprinkled here and there with a healthy 95% dose of substance. Everything Rachel writes is a convoluted mess that’s impossible to follow.
- spectramax 7y agoFor the downvoters - I also do not like Paul Graham and Sam Altman - they're the same as Rachel in every way. Little substance, lots of unsubstantiated filler material. To extend this further, I also don't like NewYorker for this reason alone - I don't have time for convoluted novel-like stories that has the important bit buried somewhere in the middle of 6 pages. If I want to read beautiful and creative prose, I need to be in that mindset. Not when discussing Python innards.
- cgriswald 7y agoSarcasm isn’t difficult, interesting, or particularly creative. I found this particular post very off-putting and not-at-all considerate of my time.
- pdpi 7y agoThere's a middle term, and you can avoid dryness with tones other than condescension. While I always read Rachel's posts whenever they come up because they're jam packed with wisdom, I always find them a bit off-putting.
- notyourday 7y agoWisdom is always off-putting at the first glance. That's what makes it wisdom
- mrmonkeyman 7y agoThat's not even wrong.
- chillingeffect 7y agoif i could put a point on it, it would be the implied entitlement and absence of gratitude. Sure, this architecture is not 100% efficient. But step back for a moment, take a breath and consider the number of human-hours spent to get it where it is today. Consider how many people are busting their humps, many volunteers, to keep improving it. We arw not _owed_ any of this. Just the miracle of elastic server config and multicore processors... Buying into the pessimistic viewpoint is dangerous: When these issues get improved, will we feel grateful and adequate? or will we find new flaws and get snarky about them? Anyway, what i do really like abt this post is it shows the chain of technical details across the call chain. it connects together info on dozens of man pages, etc. I also appreciate how it points out the inefficiency is quite convenient for service providers.
- eropple 7y ago> Consider how many people are busting their humps, many volunteers, to keep improving it. I think criticism about gratitude is strange when the author is pretty clearly coming from the standpoint that it was a bad idea to use this in the first place (and, to be fair and with regards to Python specifically, I tend towards that standpoint myself) that labor begins to look like it's being set on fire. No Purple Hearts for self-inflicted wounds and all that.
- ljm 7y agoI think she does The Daily WTF better than The Daily WTF sometimes.
- DevKoala 7y agoThere is a lot of literature on the subject if you want more pragmatic notes. You read Rachel’s blog not only for the tech experience, but for her storytelling skills. I particularly enjoy her blog.
- CameronNemo 7y agoShe linked none of that literature, and neither did you.
- kragen 7y agoShe mentioned a hell of a lot of googlable terms: epoll_wait, Apache thundering herd, EPOLLONESHOT, EAGAIN, idempotent requests, userspace threads, copy-on-write, queue depth determination, selective LIFO, strongly typed RPC, ...
- bshanks 7y agoBy the way, what is "selective LIFO"? I googled it and couldn't find it. Also, I couldn't find anything on queue depth determination.
- kragen 7y agoIt's a new term to me, but I think “selective LIFO” means switching to LIFO scheduling under overload conditions as a load-shedding measure: https://landing.google.com/sre/sre-book/chapters/addressing-cascading-failures/ https://landing.google.com/sre/sre-book/chapters/addressing-... Presumably “queue depth determination”, another new term for me, means determining how big the queue of pending requests for a service is allowed to get before further requests are refused (another load shedding measure) rather than being enqueued.
- DevKoala 7y agoThis might help you, but honestly, if you want literature that will help you arrive at the same conclusions, you should read docs. https://medium.com/@genchilu/brief-introduction-about-the-types-of-worker-in-gunicorn-and-respective-suitable-scenario-67b0c0e7bd62 https://medium.com/@genchilu/brief-introduction-about-the-ty... The problem is that a solution for I/O bound workloads has become generalized as the solution for all concurrency needs when in reality, that’s just half the picture.
- malux85 7y agoI agree there's been so many posts recently I've written a filter to remove them all from hacker news. Ugh.
- tomrod 7y agoAs an outsider to this space I'm loving it! I wish she would put a review at the end of sources / main concepts so I can learn more.
- saber6 7y agoShe's a meme. And an annoying one at that.
- sjburt 7y agoShe recently posted about which of her posts were most referenced by others, which caused all of those posts to be resubmitted despite being years old. This one, at least, is new.
- scubbo 7y agoI'm really glad to see this as the top comment. I came back to comments after reading halfway to see if I was the only one struggling to extract any meaningful point from this.
- Misdicorl 7y agoHer posts are entertaining. They aren't intended to be technical resources even though the topics are technical. If you aren't entertained by her style, move on.
- stickfigure 7y agoThe sarcastic and condescending tone is what makes it entertaining to read. I'm pretty sure you can find plenty of information on performance-tuning Python in IBM whitepapers, if that's what floats your boat.
- ljm 7y agoI agree on one level, but I'm reading this as a war story, and in that case the embellishment is suitable. I wouldn't read this if it was a tutorial and not a story.
- dmurray 7y agoI'd read it if it was a tutorial, but I'd read it when I hit performance issues in my Python webservice and it was Google's top result for my problem - not when it hit top 10 on HN. Statistically speaking, maybe that's the same as me not reading it at all in 90% of universes.
- DoreenMichele 7y agoMy feeling is that if you really wanted the author to improve, you would try to connect personally, establish trust and then talk to them privately about ways you feel they could improve their writing. And maybe you aren't comfortable reaching out privately because it's a woman, so that could go sideways (assuming you are male, which I don't actually know). Let me assure you that if you have good intentions, publicly dogging someone because you aren't comfortable reaching out privately is not a good substitute. Seeing this comment at the top of the page on the highest ranked post on the HN front page for the only woman programmer that I am personally aware of who regularly makes the front page really feels like a kick in the gut and looks like sexist garbage. And I would like to think better of HN than that.
- Misdicorl 7y agoWholeheartedly agree with this. I expected to see the parent comment, but I'm really sad to see it at the top. Of course that's not the commenters fault per se; it's clearly a very common opinion people are happy/eager to communicate rather than be ashamed of (even if so mildly as to prefer not to have it in their upvote collection).
- losteric 7y agoI agree that the previous post was not constructive or effective, but there's nothing sexist about what they said. It's just someone broadcasting critical opinion.
- tqkxzugoaupvwqr 7y agoHow is this sexist? Treating the author differently based on sex is garbage. A male author would receive exactly the same public treatment.
- Misdicorl 7y agoPolicing tone is far more prevalent when the speaker is a woman. Perhaps (I'm doubtful) this feedback would be given to a very well known male speaker, but it would not have been the top comment here.
- jasonhansel 7y agoHonestly, I really like her writing style! The content would sound dry and technical otherwise; the sarcasm makes it more engaging.
- irrational 7y agoWow, I’m glad I’m not the only one that feels this way. The sheer amount of “everyone is stupid except for people like me” is astounding. I’d love to see an article on the same topic breaking down what is wrong (by showing the code) and then explaining the “right” way to do it, with code.
- zmj 7y agoPeople appreciate that persona when it's presented male (the BOFH). Holding people you don't like to a higher standard is a cheap tactic.
- Grimm1 7y agoI read this as a dev war story, and as a person venting. I would have the same condescending sarcastic attitude while doing it if I was venting too. I also know a lot of people who like my sarcasm when talking about topics like this, so yeah as a guy who very much gets's where the author is coming from I agree this seems like a double standard.
- irrational 7y agoWhat are you talking about? Male? Is the author female? I honestly have no idea who the author is. But I don’t care if the author is male or female. Condescending is condescending.
- jwlake 7y agoIt actually alot of background on why it doesn't work. The post could just be: tl;dr: gunicorn doesn't know how to multiplex listeners and green threads will ruin your request latency. The thing is, that post isn't very useful nor interesting. The point here is that the "simple" python architecture doesnt scale well at all so you might not want to use it if you're planning on scaling ever.
- dws 7y agoI enjoy the story. It's a chance to reconnect with past times when those same things happened to me or someone on my team.
- EamonnMR 7y agoWould you say the same thing about Linus's rants?
- walshemj 7y agoNot the same random swearing directly from someone in a leadership role is not the same. And jeez what do you make of the BOFH if Rachels style upsets you.
- EamonnMR 7y agoThis author's style is 10x less abrasive, I was pointing out that Linus's rants are generally appreciated. Other posters did it better though.
- walshemj 7y agoI didn't find it Patronising it maybe those with ESL English as a second language with more formal usage and more stratified might not be as comfortable with it
- dmurray 7y agoI would say it's a bad post because the conclusion is wrong. According to the post, "the thing" with Python/Gunicorn/Gevent is it's less performant than one would like in some circumstances, and a lazy developer might tell you you need to 'set your system to "elastically scale up" at some pitiful utilization level, like 25-30% of the entire machine'. That's probably true! But not that helpful if you don't say what those circumstances are. There are many circumstances where Python is appropriate for a web service, and many circumstances where green threads work just fine. Tell me when I need to consider using the more complicated solution, don't tell me the simpler solution is always useless and doomed from the start.
- kragen 7y agoOn the contrary, I've written web services in Python and I found her snark highly entertaining, as usual.