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Comment by dexen | Hacker News Reader

The author notes about himself:

> I work for Microsoft as a software engineer for Bing in Silicon Valley. My group specializes in building platform and experiences for consumers. ( http://www.salmanq.com/ )

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I just want to point out (as a Microsoft employee) that Microsoft is very actively using node.js internally. Many services are already using it and many more are starting projects with it.

I suspect the author did this as an evaluation to see which would work best for a future project, not a teardown piece on the platform. We really love node.js - seriously!

My friend works now for Skype/rosoft and they hired him particularly because of his knowledge of Node.js and JavaScript.

Unless you can point to something incorrect or unfairly biased in that article - why does this matter?

Because .NET is Microsoft's baby? How is this not a huge conflict of interest? At the very least, he should put a disclaimer of that conflict somewhere in the article.

Are you insinuating that there is deception being used here? or an inaccuracy? If the blog post was by a node contribute, would you cry foul for that as well? how about giving some counter points against the substance of the blog instead of just attacking the author's credibility based on where he is employed. I am guessing that since you cannot disagree with what was actually said and done by the author, you are grasping at the default fallacy of attacking his character and honesty.

Yes when the author writes in the closing paragraph like this:

And that is when you realize that you have such a powerful, flexible framework like .NET under you fingertips with amazing performance like we’ve shown today.

> Are you insinuating that there is deception being used here? or an inaccuracy?

I don't know what he's insinuating, but looking at the code and liking neither technology the bench does indeed look completely inaccurate (it's not even comparing apples and oranges, it's comparing bananas and clams) if not willingly deceptive: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5460267

>Are you insinuating that there is deception being used here? or an inaccuracy?

It could be both, and we should investigate both cases. Why should he get a clear pass?

>If the blog post was by a node contribute, would you cry foul for that as well?

If it was skewed towards node and/or he didn't mention it, then sure.

>how about giving some counter points against the substance of the blog instead of just attacking the author's credibility based on where he is employed.

The blog post has no substance to begin with. The comparison is bogus and the assumptions he makes do not stand. There are already about 20 comments in this thread as to why this is.

At minimum you should use or have an expert in Node.JS (etc) to make sure things are done efficiently or used in the manner that makes sense for the use case.

It's a benchmark of .Net's Array.Sort to NPM's third-party async.sortBy, not a benchmark of .Net to Node, and the test does not make sense: async.sortBy is used to sort an array on an asynchronous function, it does not perform an asynchronous sort (which is what the asynchronized Array.Sort does)

I agree with that and it's a fair comment. I'm just opposed to bias just because someone works for X.

And I agree, character assassination is no good.

On the other hand, when the author has a hand in one of the pots it very commonly results in a biased or incorrect comparison if only due to incorrect interpretation of the other tech, so defaulting to dismissal is not a bad heuristic either as first-order filtering to know whether there's a point in spending time in evaluating the post.

Especially when there's no clear up-front disclaimer of the conflict of interest, and here there is not (I went back to check, the post does not specify he works at Microsoft, you have to go and check his about page and/or blog history to realize that he's posting about MS tech all the time)

While others have pointed out the issues, it is a critical observation to make because it often goes with a very strong selection bias. When someone wants to write that A is better than B -- which would be the obvious motivation of a Microsoft employee -- they will iterate through the cases until they can find evidence that they think supports that conclusion, then publishing that alone. In this case a rather terrible benchmark that, as so many others have mentioned, is really a sort comparison (against an incorrectly done node js sort, making it even worse).

I love .NET. I also love nodejs. The truth is that node is best as a glue system between technologies, and it works perfectly there.

I know nothing about node but the last paragraph of the article reads like it came directly from Microsoft's marketing material. Shame, because it makes me doubt the rest of what was a very interesting comparison.

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