Hacker News: chrfrasco

New comment by chrfrasco in "The Jeff Dean Facts"

chrfrasco — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 22:14:51 +0000

It was Jeff Dean and Noam Shazeer: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/jeff-dean-and-noam-shazeer

New comment by chrfrasco in "Proof you can do hard things"

chrfrasco — Wed, 12 Jul 2023 07:14:58 +0000

I believe Nat is referring to a full stop rather than menstruation in the sentence about crying into tiktok.

New comment by chrfrasco in "Why F# evangelism isn't working (2015)"

chrfrasco — Wed, 31 May 2023 02:56:35 +0000

> This is how a new product gets across the chasm. Find a pragmatist in pain. Do whatever-it-takes to make them happy with your product. Then go back and do it again.

Good advice, I think the useful idea is: An excellent product in competition with a very good incumbent is a bad idea. A mediocre product in competition with an absent or terrible incumbent is a great idea

New comment by chrfrasco in "GitHub.Dev is now available on any GitHub repo"

chrfrasco — Fri, 13 Aug 2021 01:35:48 +0000

mind expanding on this? you've piqued my interest but I can't quite see the connection

New comment by chrfrasco in "Senior Google exec opposes remote work, moves to New Zealand to work remotely"

chrfrasco — Thu, 08 Jul 2021 23:19:29 +0000

The limiting factor is managed isolation. You can return if there are flights from where you are currently, but you need to secure a spot in managed isolation first (2 weeks in a hotel). https://www.miq.govt.nz/travel-to-new-zealand/secure-your-pl...

New comment by chrfrasco in "Mugo, a toy compiler for a subset of Go that can compile itself"

chrfrasco — Mon, 12 Apr 2021 11:23:03 +0000

> I wonder if we could reduce binary size with a dead-simple scheduler and GC

For many CLIs I think even a brain-dead bump allocator would work

New comment by chrfrasco in "Mugo, a toy compiler for a subset of Go that can compile itself"

chrfrasco — Mon, 12 Apr 2021 11:17:18 +0000

This is so cool. I especially loved the Makefile, it's nice to see "bootstrapping" laid out so plainly. I remember finding the concept quite hard to wrap my head around when I was introduced to it. Seeing this would have made it a lot easier to understand!

New comment by chrfrasco in "Pydis – Redis clone in 250 lines of Python, for performance comparison"

chrfrasco — Tue, 17 Nov 2020 02:54:52 +0000

I hope you didn't take too many of these comments to heart. You unfortunately got the standard HN comment section treatment – a delightful mix of nitpicking, assuming bad intent, and completely missing the point. I also hope you continue to share things on the internet – it's far easier to criticise than it is to create.

New comment by chrfrasco in "Single Page Applications using Rust"

chrfrasco — Wed, 12 Aug 2020 01:30:56 +0000

Sum types and exhaustiveness checking are doable with typescript! Though it's not especially ergonomic

https://www.typescriptlang.org/play?#code/C4TwDgpgBAygrgWygX...

New comment by chrfrasco in "Notion for everyone"

chrfrasco — Wed, 20 May 2020 04:21:56 +0000

One more suggestion for you – dropbox paper (https://paper.dropbox.com/) has latex support + syntax highlighting. It's quite simple but it works well as a google docs replacement. As others have mentioned Notion is also fantastic.

What Color Is Your Function? (2015)

chrfrasco — Mon, 18 May 2020 05:43:47 +0000

Article URL: http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2015/02/01/what-color-is-your-function//

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23218782

Points: 106

# Comments: 85

What’s the difference between a Rust char and a Go rune?

chrfrasco — Sun, 10 May 2020 15:23:19 +0000

Article URL: https://www.christianfscott.com/rust-chars-vs-go-runes/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23133320

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by chrfrasco in "Making Rust as Fast as Go"

chrfrasco — Sun, 03 May 2020 16:11:56 +0000

Yeah, I can definitely see how that would be a more performant approach.

I suppose I wasn't so interested in figuring out how to make this algorithm as fast as possible as much I was interested in diving into why this particular implementation was slower.

I'm not totally convinced that this difference is down to the string being parsed over and over, though

> doing the UTF-8 decoding up-front is exacerbating the performance difference in the allocator

This seems to suggest that allocation might be dominating here. WDYT? Either way, I've added a disclaimer to the post.

New comment by chrfrasco in "Making Rust as Fast as Go"

chrfrasco — Sun, 03 May 2020 15:39:18 +0000

Hey all, as some keen-eyed commenters have pointed out, it looks like the rust program is not actually equivalent to the go program. The go program parses the string once, while the rust program parses it repeatedly inside every loop. It's quite late in Sydney as I write this so I'm not up for a fix right now, but this post is probably Fake News. The perf gains from jemalloc are real, but it's probably not the allocators fault. I've updated the post with this message as well.

The one-two combo of 1) better performance on linux & 2) jemalloc seeming to fix the issue lured me into believing that the allocator was to blame. I’m not sure what the lesson here is – perhaps more proof of Cunningham’s law? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Cunningham#Cunningham's_L...

New comment by chrfrasco in "Making Rust as Fast as Go"

chrfrasco — Sun, 03 May 2020 15:29:02 +0000

> The second problem is that at least the Rust code is decoding UTF-8 every iteration of the inner loop instead of decoding once and saving the result, or even better interning the characters and having versions of the inner loop for 32-bit chars and 8-bit and 16-bit interned indexes.

I tried this. Pulling the .chars() call out of the loop & collecting into a Vec made the performance even worse – the following balloons the runtime from ~2.7s to ~5s:

    let target_chars: Vec = target.chars().collect();
    for (i, source_char) in source.chars().enumerate() {
        let mut next_dist = i + 1;

        for (j, target_char) in target_chars.iter().enumerate()  {

> written mindlessly > incompetence of the person

No challenge there :P I am operating under the assumption that I don't need to understand how compilers work to get good performance from rust (where good is "similar enough to an equivalent go program")

New comment by chrfrasco in "Making Rust as Fast as Go"

chrfrasco — Sun, 03 May 2020 14:45:30 +0000

run.js is not doing the benchmarking. If you look at the source for each of the programs being benchmarked, you'll see that the programs themselves are responsible for benchmarking

New comment by chrfrasco in "Making Rust as Fast as Go"

chrfrasco — Sun, 03 May 2020 14:02:28 +0000

Nice catch, thanks for pointing this out. I've updated the cache initialization to use `len(targetChars)` rather than `len(target)`:

    cache := make([]int, len(targetChars)+1)
    for i := 0; i < len(targetChars)+1; i++ {
        cache[i] = i
    }

AFAIK this makes them equivalent (fingers crossed). It seems to not have made much of a difference (-0.03s)

Making Rust as Fast as Go

chrfrasco — Sun, 03 May 2020 10:32:11 +0000

Article URL: https://www.christianfscott.com/making-rust-as-fast-as-go/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23058147

Points: 304

# Comments: 200

Is Mobx Magic?

chrfrasco — Sat, 02 May 2020 16:23:24 +0000

Article URL: https://www.christianfscott.com/is-mobx-magic/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23052715

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Show HN: A utility for printing paths from stdin as a tree

chrfrasco — Thu, 02 Apr 2020 13:13:06 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/christianscott/print-paths-as-tree

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22758523

Points: 3

# Comments: 0