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Comment by VeejayRampay | Hacker News Reader

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

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Critizising 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.

>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.

And 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.

>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.

Exactly. 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.

Well, it's not meant for people not into Ruby.

Well, maybe read the original title again: "Ruby Outperforms C: Breaking the Catch-22"

Still not meant for people not interested into Ruby.

Got it. The title of an article is a detail and this title in particular doesn't draw any attention from people interested in C or the claims made by performance comparisons between different types of programming languages in general.

That's probably also the reason why the title was changed on HN after this criticism was made and the submission disappeared from the front page a short while after that.

I get your point, but it's a blog post by a Ruby & Rails core member, published on a Ruby-oriented blog named "Rails at Scale", with a particular audience in mind, and is written as a response to an ongoing discussion in the Ruby community. In context, I think the title is fine. But, for those without the context the title may be misleading. At no point is the goal to convince people to throw away C and switch to Ruby for everything.

This title in particular encourages sharing the article out of context, because it is a bit sensational.

That's why the title is so important.

If an article is aimed at a particular audience only and could be misunderstood otherwise, that's a good indication that the title should reflect that fact. (As the revised one does.)

As a sidenote: This submission has been tried multiple times on HN and it would very likely not have been successful here without the sensational title. [0]

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

The fastest parser in the post works at 35MB/s which is ~100x slower than necessary, improved from a baseline of ~1000x slower than necessary.

The 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/b635a66e957e4dd3fed83ef1d7...

Yes, 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.

The 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

That 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.

If 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

> 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.

Clickbait titles gets criticism because some people won't read beyond the title

Clickbait 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.

Talking 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)

If 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.

I 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.

> 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?

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