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Comment by fer | Hacker News Reader

Unrelated to the content itself, am I the only one wondering if he has his t-shirt mirrored or if he's really skilled at writing right-to-left?

Content wise: his examples show such increases because they're extremely tight and CPU-bound loops. Not exactly surprising.

While there will be gains in in larger/more complex software by throwing away some maintainability practices (I don't like the term "clean code"), they will be dwarfed by the time actually spent on the operations themselves.

Just toss a 0.01ms I/O operation in those loops; it will throw the numbers off by a large margin, then one would just rather pick sanity over the speed gains without blinking.

That said, if a code path is hot and won't change anytime soon, by all means optimize away.

Edit: the upload seems to have been deleted.

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He created the t-shirts specially for StarCode Galaxy[1] which is a longer form class for C++ programming in the same veign as the current video, but with a much wider scope. (As far as I know SCG is not released yet).

As a small, amusing, s(n)ide note, Casey's rants about the slowness of the Windows terminal[2] that ended up in Microsoft releasing an improved version[3], were based him wanting to implement a TUI game as an exercise in SCG and the terminal being too slow.

[1] https://starcodegalaxy.com/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31284419 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31372606

>Just toss a 0.01ms I/O operation in those loops; it will throw the numbers off by a large margin, then one would just rather pick sanity over the speed gains without blinking.

I mean, yes, if you do something completely fucking idiotic like put an IO operation inside a tight calculation loop, then all your speed gains will vanish. But I don't see how that refutes anything.

I said I/O, but it could be memory access. All he does fits in registers and maybe cache. Also, 0.01ms was the normal RAM latency when I started using computers...

Do you remember the last time you had to do a tight calculation loop, and not only that, but one that significantly impacted the total runtime? Personally I do, it was roughly 15 years ago writing a raytracer.

I can imagine that happening in game/3D dev, DSP, emulators, ML, and maybe some other types of software, but even in those cases one already has dedicated libraries and hardware to extract the performance from where it can be extracted.

I mean, Python is slow as an old dog, yet it gets most of the ML fun.

> All he does fits in registers and maybe cache.

Well yes, that's.. actually the point. Indirectly, anyway anyway.

> I mean, Python is slow as an old dog, yet it gets most of the ML fun.

Python driving some UI and logic, with a ton of optimized Fortran and C driving everything hot.

its custom made mirrored tshirt, he is writing on one of those lightboards and then mirroring.

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