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Cold Showers

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Re: Cold Showers

#271

Post by siboehm »

CapmCrackaWaka wrote: post #12

> Benchmarking cutting-edge graph-processing algorithms running on 128-core clusters against a single-threaded 2014 Macbook Pro. The laptop consistently wins, sometimes by an order of magnitude. LOL, this hits close to home. My company had a modeling specific VM set up to run our predictive modeling pipelines. Typical pipeline is about 50,000 to 5 million rows of training data. At best, using an expensive VM, we mana…

I built this decision tree (LightGBM) compiler last summer: https://github.com/siboehm/lleaves

It get's you ~10x speedups for batch predictions, more if your model is big. It's not complicated, it ended up being <1K lines of Python code. I heard a couple of stories like yours, where people had multi-node spark clusters running LightGBM, and it always amused me because by if you compiled the trees instead you could get rid of the whole cluster.

Re: Cold Showers

#272

Post by zigzag312 »

> Hype: "Static Typing reduces bugs."

> Shower: A review of all the available literature (up to 2014), showing that the solid research is inconclusive, while the conclusive research had methodological issues.

Which research is supposedly solid?

Skimming through the article it seems to me that proper controlled study would be prohibitively expensive and that no controlled study comes close to real world conditions of multiple people developing and maintaining a larger codebase. Conditions, where supposedly (according to anecdotal evidence) static typing would make a notable difference.

Re: Cold Showers

#273

Post by Konohamaru »

blindmute wrote: post #225

Hype: Your friend says, "Good morning!" Shower: Unfortunately, there is no conclusive peer-reviewed evidence that it is, in fact, a good morning. A randomized trial found that many mornings are bad. Caveats: Only applies to mornings. No rigorous paper exists for evenings, so this remains an unknown.

Refutation: Any morning you're on this side of the grass is a good morning.

Re: Cold Showers

#274

Post by tene »

jacobsenscott wrote: post #235
semiquaver wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you search your exception tracker for NoMethodError in production, do any results come up?

Yes - in every case it is calling a method on a null reference. And no commonly used statically typed language helps here because they all allow null references. And languages that disallow nulls, if you are one of the 10 programmers on earth working in one of those languages, don't help you because you are dealing with real world data where inputs to your system can be null or not so you end up using some type syste…

> no commonly used statically typed language helps here because they all allow null references

This is false.

TypeScript, Swift, and Rust are commonly used and support non-nullable references.

> those languages, don't help you because you are dealing with real world data where inputs to your system can be null or not so you end up using some type system escape hatch anyway.

You don't need escape hatches to deal with "real world data" that may be missing some values. This blog post is my favorite detailed comparison of handling "real world data" in static vs dynamic languages: https://lexi-lambda.github.io/blog/2020/01/19/no-dynamic-typ...

Rust's serde_json docs on "Operating on untyped JSON values" are also a pretty good description of working with "real world data" where you want to examine an arbitrary document: https://docs.serde.rs/serde_json/#operating-on-untyped-json-...

The only requirement for working with "real world data" in a static non-nullable language is to choose whatever kind of behaviour you want when working with the data. Everything you can do with null references, you can do better with option types; there is nothing that null references uniquely permit.

Re: Cold Showers

#275

Post by wiether »

Toine wrote: post #40
number6 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most Times I can't bring myself to get into a cold shower. If I start warm I can cool down from there. Is there a way to start cold and go even colder?

Anecdotal, but for some reason, when I tell myself "It's just cold water", my fight or flight response instantly goes away.

"fight or flight" is how you nicknamed your balls? Because when I take a cold shower they do instantly go away!

Re: Cold Showers

#276

Post by enasterosophes »

WalterBright wrote: post #149
laserlight wrote: post #128

> Hype: "Identifiers should be self-documenting! Use full names, not abbreviations." > Shower: Researchers had programmers fix bugs in a codebase, either with all of the identifiers were abbreviated, or where all of the identifiers were full-words. They found no difference in time taken or quality of debugging. That's a very weird take on the statement. The downside of using abbreviations is probably dominated by the…

People nearly always gravitate towards abbreviations in natural language. The more a word is used, the more likely it gets shortened. LA for Los Angeles, Frisco for San Francisco, Vicki for Victoria, Jay for Jason, Dub for George W Bush, Doozy for Duesenberg, and on and on. Why should programming be different?

When I worked as an analyst in DoD, it was widely understood that acronyms would appear everywhere in everything we did, but also that it can confound a reader who bumps into an unfamiliar acronym if it appears out of nowhere in a report. The caution and best practice was to always give the full name the first time it is used, together with its acronym in parentheses. Then after that you are free to use the acronym as much as you want.

I doubt it would be controversial if programmers adopted a similar convention.

Re: Cold Showers

#277

Post by midasuni »

oogali wrote: post #239
nemothekid wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What if my company is pretty much all engineers? I don't know how that changes the equation. No one is undervaluing your skills; it's would you rather spend your time driving to a colo center to replace a RAID array or working on $product. With AWS you are outsourcing an IT team, not just processors and how you approach pricing should reflect that.

I hear this bad argument often (“replacing hard drives”) and I don’t understand why. It’s as if we’re mentally stuck in a bad hacking movie from 1999. If you’re doing colocation to save money, you’ve also figured out that going to the datacenter sucks and it’s a terrible place to do work. You’re not building your own servers from scratch, you’re generally purchasing them from a vendor who offers a warranty and option…

We do very occasionally go into our telehouse data centres, maybe one person once every year.

Our in house data centres we visit more often, usually to add new equipment, doesn’t take long to walk down stairs.

I can’t think of the last time a hard drive failed

Re: Cold Showers

#278

Post by roeles »

I am particularly surprised by the agile statements. I wonder if this flies in the face of the "state of DevOps" reports some people wave around.

Re: Cold Showers

#279

Post by selcuka »

jamal-kumar wrote: post #260
m_kos wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that cloud compute is usually (too) expensive, but it is sometimes useful and cost-effective. Not long ago, I need to very quickly run a one-off analysis, which required over 200 GB of RAM. It was much cheaper and faster to spin up one VM on GCP for a day than having to order parts, etc.

What was the price?

No idea about GCP but a 32-CPU Digital Ocean droplet with 256GB of RAM costs $1,280/month, which is less than $43/day.

Re: Cold Showers

#280

Post by southerntofu »

tlamponi wrote: post #269
KSteffensen wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people above you suck. That's a terrible attitude. Signalling that saving money or just generally improving systems doesn't matter will not build a culture of technical excellence and ambition. Also, it's not peanuts. How many extra developers are $28400 per month?

no idea of $ but say they'd get 5000€ a month (quite OK for most places europe), the company would need to pay out a bit more here (for some tax/social benefit things), 7000€ would be pretty realistic, so 4 developers could be hired. This then means that while op wouldn't immediately add 1M ARR, the original dev and the new devs could soon add 5M ARR (stupid extrapolation, it won't be as much in practice, at least no…

Please note that in many places 5k€/month is a huge sum of money for a salary. Even in western Europe, and in France more specifically, many devs i know are payed 1-2x minimum wage (i don't know a single IT person earning 5k€/month although i'm aware they exist). In France, minimum wage is about 1500€/month (before taxes), to which you add about as much professional taxes and contributions from the employer.

According to my napkin calculus, you could get about 4.5-9 developers (for 1-2x minimum wage) onboard here in France for 28k€/month. I'm betting in other countries with low salaries and a vast talent pool, 28k€/month would get you even more employees.

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