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Cold Showers

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Re: Cold Showers

#291

Post by zasdffaa »

zimbu668 wrote: post #254
VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haha! Back in ~2014 or so my company was spending nearly $30,000/month on an EC2 "compute-optimized" cluster to transcode live video streams to multiple renditions. One of our engineers said hey, why don't we try to colo some real hardware? We did a test with a single bare-metal 8-core Xeon server and it completely destroyed the performance of the EC2 "compute-optimized" cluster! After that we colo'd 4 big Xeon serve…

So you saved, $28,400 a month. Did that make a material difference to the company? I often tell people above me I could save us $10k a month at AWS and generally the response is, "Yeaaaaaaah that's great, could you do XYZ instead to help us land an additional $1M in ARR?"

$340,800/year. If that doesn't make a material difference to your company or department you've never worked where cash is tight. More bluntly: you've been spoilt with excess resources. That's a lot of cash to waste.

Re: Cold Showers

#292

Post by tgv »

aranchelk wrote: post #78

> Hype: "Static Typing reduces bugs." It’s only hype because it’s imprecisely stated. Static type systems make entire classes of bugs impossible at runtime. The stronger (read less permissive) the type system, the more classes of bugs cannot occur.

The articles from the review (as far as I've scanned them) seem to take a common view of static typing, but the studies themselves are obviously weak. There's almost no way to test such statements, because how are you going to generalize that? Some studies use restricted tasks, which would provides some indication of the usefulness of static typing for e.g. beginners, but then the reviewer starts mixing up all kinds of problems and concepts. E.g., who cares that there's more variation between programmers than between languages?

To use that review as an authoritative statement is ingenuous, to say the least.

Re: Cold Showers

#293

Post by PartiallyTyped »

moffkalast wrote: post #102
aranchelk wrote: post #78

> Hype: "Static Typing reduces bugs." It’s only hype because it’s imprecisely stated. Static type systems make entire classes of bugs impossible at runtime. The stronger (read less permissive) the type system, the more classes of bugs cannot occur.

On the other hand it increases development time and makes modifications and new features much harder to implement. If you took it to the extreme, you could also mathematically prove your code is correct for every input variable. Everything's a trade-off, the question is which approach is best for your application. Your average website doesn't warrant as much rigor as a Mars rover.

> On the other hand it increases development time and makes modifications and new features much harder to implement

I am not sure that that is correct. Type inference significantly decreases development time imho, and access to compiler errors means significantly less testing time because a certain class of errors is avoided.

Personally, I find that my productivity w/ Haskell was significantly higher than with python exactly because of the type system even though I have 3x the experience in years w/ Python.

I have inherited (hah) a project at work and had to introduce all sorts sanity checks (mypy, pylint, etc) as pre-commit hooks to make my life easier wrt bug hunting.

Re: Cold Showers

#294

Post by hsn915 »

ReactiveJelly wrote: post #184
hsn915 wrote: post #166

IMO a lot of truths in programming are not amenable to "scientific studies". Static typing is objectively better than dynamic typing for the vast majority of cases, but you can't capture this in a scientific experiment or study. The only thing you can do is find people who are similarly experienced, break them up into groups (n=1 is also ok) and ask them to complete a specific project, and see how much time it takes.…

I present "The emotional argument for static typing". Static typing is good because dynamic typing measurably makes me sad. Therefore I want the company to use static typing.

This but unironically.

Your feelings are often a good heuristic. If something makes you feel depressed, it's because your mind has gathered enough information from past experience to know the situation is hopeless. It's your mind discouraging you from wasting your energy on a pointless activity.

Re: Cold Showers

#295

Post by bjourne »

kdtsh wrote: post #217
bjourne wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is an item in the second declaration? That it has type "Item" doesn't help you unless you have contextual information. And if you have contextual information you can probably figure out what an item is in the first declaration too.

An item is an IItem, as it says in the definition. You can always ‘figure out what an item is’ in a dynamic typing system, that’s not the problem. There’s an incredible amount of mental overhead in any non-trivial project which employs dynamic typing. Engineers who can work around this have my respect, but I find static typing to be the easiest solution to this problem by far.

That fact is useless without any context. An "item" could have been an "Ifdkjsj" and you'd be none the wiser. "incredible amount of mental overhead" needs a citation and, as shown in TFA, no citation exists.

Re: Cold Showers

#296

Post by kdtsh »

bjourne wrote: post #295
kdtsh wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An item is an IItem, as it says in the definition. You can always ‘figure out what an item is’ in a dynamic typing system, that’s not the problem. There’s an incredible amount of mental overhead in any non-trivial project which employs dynamic typing. Engineers who can work around this have my respect, but I find static typing to be the easiest solution to this problem by far.

That fact is useless without any context. An "item" could have been an "Ifdkjsj" and you'd be none the wiser. "incredible amount of mental overhead" needs a citation and, as shown in TFA, no citation exists.

Maybe I’m not understanding where you’re coming from because as far as I can tell a ‘lfdkjsj’ and a ‘skfjwb’ which are both an IItem, or both a IWhcjwp, is easier to work with than the dynamic alternative. Regardless of how poorly named a variable is, in a static ruling system what you see is what you get, where as in a dynamic typing system what you see could be anything at runtime.

The only citation I have is the tenuous grip I have on my own sanity - I could have more correctly talked about the incredible amount of mental overhead this has _for me_, but read the rest of the thread and you’ll see that this isn’t an uncommon experience. As I said, if you can work around this then you have my respect.

Re: Cold Showers

#297

Post by Fnoord »

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…

Seems to me KVMs also save travels. I don't know, one can make productive travels. There's more tools available for that nowadays.

Re: Cold Showers

#298

Post by 112233 »

redredrobot wrote: post #218
jamal-kumar wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't use AWS for a damn thing because of exorbitant costs. I just don't get why people think that it's necessary other than that they're the types to get drawn into marketing hype. There's just so many better things for your company to be spending the money on.

The argument is - engineers are expensive so why pay for the expertise to setup and run machines? There's just so many better things for your company to be spending the money on.

Never understood that argument. How exactly an expertise of setting up and running (your cloud provider) instances is cheaper than expertise of setting up a physical machine?

Re: Cold Showers

#299

Post by bayindirh »

thom wrote: post #75
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…

There appear to be slightly weird commercial reasons behind this, because gaming GPUs have great CUDA performance but NVIDIA won’t let you put them in a datacentre. So buying your data scientists gaming laptops (RGB and all) generally works out faster for any reasonable price point. That said, a dedicated server with a decent Xeon and MKL set up correctly generally outperforms CPU-bound stuff.

When the models get sufficiently big, even a 40GB A100 is not sufficient. Unless you can feed the core quick enough, your performance drops considerably.

GPUs are like heavy flywheels. Getting them up to speed takes some time (copy data, compile and copy the kernels, kickstart everything, etc.), so you need to start them once to get the performance benefits. Otherwise CPU is much more nimble since they're closer to RAM and made to juggle things around.

Re: Cold Showers

#300

Post by kangda123 »

falcolas wrote: post #167
kangda123 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is just a fair bit harder to figure out the types as program grows.

Not in my experience. Language engines are good enough to help most of the time, And typed or untyped, you’re only ever reasoning about the types in the context you’re working in, not the entire program.

Can you actually determine things like that with an engine?

A Python function can be called from within or from outside of your codebase with different callsites passing different types.

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