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Hacker News is going to nitpick at the bold claim of the title instead of focusing on the fact that it's a well written technical article that underlines some n
by VeejayRampay 3y ago
Hacker News is going to nitpick at the bold claim of the title instead of focusing on the fact that it's a well written technical article that underlines some neat tricks that allow a rather slow, highly dynamic language such as ruby to provide great performance under some circumstances, which is all that engineers should care about
- thepostman0 3y agoClickbait titles gets criticism because some people won't read beyond the title
- starbugs 3y agoClickbait title gets criticism, because it makes bold claims drawing the attention of people who when reading the article find that their time was unfairly wasted, because said claims are a pile of ... Excuse my French.
- anonymoushn 3y agoThe fastest parser in the post works at 35MB/s which is ~100x slower than necessary, improved from a baseline of ~1000x slower than necessary.
- starbugs 3y agoCritizising the title is not exactly nitpicking. The title is important. And it’s misleading. I disagree that this article is well written. It is hard to identify what is compared exactly, at least as someone not deeply familiar with the ruby ecosystem. The article doesn’t do a great job of explaining the caveats and limitations of the comparison either.
- coldtea 3y ago>Critizising the title is not exactly nitpicking. The title is important. Only if one doesn't bother to read the article. Else the title is just an insignificant detail, or, at worse, a redundant piece of promotional material attached to the article.
- starbugs 3y agoAnd how do you decide if you're going to read the article? Ah yes, the title. I guess we will always find someone who tries to word-wrangle their way out of an obvious fact. The title is the first thing you see. It's printed in a bigger font than the rest. Most people won't even read anything else. In short: It's important. It's not a detail. Hence it's not nitpicking when I criticize it.
- coldtea 3y ago>And how do you decide if you're going to read the article? Ah yes, the title. Nope: the subject. This is about Ruby and execution speed, for example. Then you open it and give it a quick cursory glance. Most articles have non-descriptive titles to begin with, or clickbait titles. The title could say any kind of non descriptive BS like "Ruby's new JIT rocks!" or "Ruby smoking C in benchmarks". That's even the case for "serious" media, like NYT. If you go by the title you're in for a bad experience.
- starbugs 3y agoExactly. This is why without the original title nobody who's not into Ruby would even consider reading it. And only a fraction of those people who are into Ruby and upvoted it would consider upvoting it. Thanks for confirming it.
- bakugo 3y agoIf the writer of the article wanted people to actually read the article and judge it by its overall quality, they wouldn't have used such a blatantly clickbait-y title.
- 59nadir 3y agoI agree; the title is doing a lot of work in terms of getting people to read the article and I'm sure the author is aware. This is a trade-off and when the article doesn't quite sell on the promise of the title you are bound to get a little backlash.
- rewmie 3y ago> Hacker News is going to nitpick at the bold claim of the title instead of focusing on the fact that (...) ...that the claims are somewhere between false and cherry-picked?
- wodenokoto 3y agoIf we are keeping the nitpickings to this thread, I think adding a “when” to the beginning would keep it just as interesting a title and be good enough in terms of correctness
- dig1 3y agoThe title is misleading, just like other commenters mentioned. Just check how much indirection "rb_iv_get()" has to make (at the end, it will call [1], which isn't "a light" call). Now, check generated JIT code (in a blog post) for the same action where JIT knows how to shave off unnecessary indirection. We are comparing apples and oranges here. [1] https://github.com/ruby/ruby/blob/b635a66e957e4dd3fed83ef1d72ce8c9b57e0430/variable.c#L1218 https://github.com/ruby/ruby/blob/b635a66e957e4dd3fed83ef1d7...
- vidarh 3y agoYes, it may well be misleading, yet you're making the point of the commenter you replied to while pointing out why the article is interesting. If you're a position where you're using Ruby and considering whether writing a C extension will speed things up, it has valuable advice on what other things to also try. That is a lot more interesting to me than the title.
- xxs 3y agoThe article findings apply to any managed language. Don't call extern libs often as the call overhead is non-trivial and it cannot be inlined. There's nothing new about
- vidarh 3y agoThat one part is nothing new. That does not mean the specific mechanisms of what to do to take advantage of this for Ruby isn't of interest to Ruby developers, who are the main audience for this given it's posted on the blog for Shopify's Ruby/Rails team.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- xxs 3y agoTalking about technically well written: When showing microbenchmarks - show the exact hardware used, make sure the CPU does run at fixed frequency (no boost, most laptops can't control the freq. esp Macs)
- lelanthran 3y ago> Hacker News is going to nitpick at the bold claim of the title instead of focusing on the fact that it's a well written technical article t I think that's an unfair characterisation of HN readers. They aren't criticising the article after all, they're criticising a clickbait and misleading title.