Top all-time · #4408
kmod's blog
Personal blog · blog.kevmod.comeconomicsaiproductivity
kmod's blog is a personal blog at blog.kevmod.com about economics, ai and productivity. Since 2014, 17 different Hacker News readers have linked it 33 times, most often “Why is Python slow”. The last post was in 2022, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (10) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link kmod's blog for technical posts on why Python is slow, Python performance internals and benchmarking, written by a Pyston developer, plus the Mill CPU history.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 10 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Why is Python slow7 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2016-07-03
- Personal thoughts about Pyston's outcome3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-02-03
- It’s worth spending one CPU-hour to save one second of your time2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-10-28
- Is the Mill CPU real? (2014)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-03-14
- Python performance: it’s not just the interpreter2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-05-19
What Hacker News says?
Someone asked something similar a while ago: http://blog.kevmod.com/2014/07/the-mill-cpu/ Ivan responded to the post but didn't address the questions about his bio at all, but perhaps he doesn't feel the need to. For the curious, his name apparently was Mark Rain for some time in the 70s/80s [1] – there are a number of publications under that name. [1] http://newsgroups.derkeiler.com/Archive/Comp/comp.arch/2012-...
Comment linking /2014/07/the-mill-cpu/
on “Mill Computing in 2017”Submitted Amazon disallows pointing out paid reviews as a story · 1086 points
HN discussionThe finger-pointing at BGP is red herring: the problem is that the stratum protocol has zero authentication. If you can intercept those streams, you can trivially ask anyone to start mining for you instead. This could also have been done using DNS poisoning, ISP-side intercepts, or anything else in the standard bag of tricks. http://blog.kevmod.com/category/bitcoin/
Comment linking /category/bitcoin/
on “Hacker Redirects Traffic From 19 Internet Providers to Steal Bitcoins”Submitted Python performance: it’s not just the interpreter as a story · 318 points
HN discussionI believe this article [0] (previous discussion [1]) from one of pyston's authors gives a much better overview of why python is slow. [0] http://blog.kevmod.com/2016/07/why-is-python-slow/ [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12025309
Comment linking /2016/07/why-is-python-slow/
on “Why Python is Slow: Looking Under the Hood (2014)”Submitted Why is Python slow as a story · 279 points
HN discussionAccording to the Pyston developers, yes[1]. [1] http://blog.kevmod.com/2016/07/why-is-python-slow/
Comment linking /2016/07/why-is-python-slow/
on “Why Python Is Slow: Looking Under the Hood (2014)”Submitted Is the Mill CPU real? (2014) as a story · 104 points
HN discussionThere was someone a while ago in a group I was in making the claim that python was no inherently slower than other languages that were more static like Java. I might have to point them at this now. Great read! Reminds me of: http://blog.kevmod.com/2016/07/why-is-python-slow/ which was discussed a few days ago at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12025309
Comment linking /2016/07/why-is-python-slow/
on “Why Python Is Slow: Looking Under the Hood (2014)”Submitted Personal thoughts about Pyston's outcome as a story · 103 points
HN discussion> Can you give specific examples and prove that they cannot be overcome? It's hard to prove a theoretical negative, but perhaps by comparison with the run time performance of static AOT (SAOT) compiled languages I can show what I mean. Dynamic typing: - Python requires dynamic type checking before any program work is done. SAOT doesn't need to do any run time work. - Adding two numbers in Python requires handling ru…
Comment linking /2020/05/python-performance-its-not-just-the-interpreter/
on “Attempts to make Python fast”Submitted Evidence that no one cares about crypto-denominated wealth as a story · 84 points
HN discussionThe blog is fun introduction into JIT compiler, but the big thing that is missing and that makes Python a hard problem for JIT is supporting Objects. From http://blog.kevmod.com/2017/02/personal-thoughts-about-pysto... I'll try to just talk about what makes Python hard to run quickly (especially as compared to less-dynamic languages like JS or Lua). The thing I wish people understood about Python performance is that…
Comment linking /2017/02/personal-thoughts-about-pystons-outcome/
on “JIT compiling a subset of Python to x86-64”Submitted Do the Real Numbers Exist? as a story · 26 points
HN discussion51% attacks on most currencies are quite easy if you attack the mining pools. http://blog.kevmod.com/2019/01/pooljacking-easy-51-attacks-a...
Comment linking /2019/01/pooljacking-easy-51-attacks-against-bitcoin-and-ethereum/
on “Cost of a 51% attack for different cryptocurrencies?”Submitted It’s worth spending one CPU-hour to save one second of your time as a story · 4 points
HN discussion> using minimum values is almost never a good idea Care to explain why? I find the argument in http://blog.kevmod.com/2016/06/benchmarking-minimum-vs-avera... for using the minimum to be pretty compelling. Also, FWIW, Julia's automated performance tracking determines likely regressions based on the minimum. Their reasoning is explained in http://math.mit.edu/~edelman/publications/robust_benchmarkin... .
Comment linking /2016/06/benchmarking-minimum-vs-average/
on “How to get consistent results when benchmarking on Linux?”Submitted “Do AIs think” == “Do submarines swim” as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI'm not sure if it's an exact fit, but dropbox used to have pyston: https://github.com/dropbox/pyston The blog posts by Kevin Modzelewski went into the internals: https://blog.pyston.org/ Also by the same person, a good article on Python's performance: http://blog.kevmod.com/2016/07/why-is-python-slow/ As a side comment: On the subject of type inference, I really come to like python's type hints. I don't use mypy it…
Comment linking /2016/07/why-is-python-slow/
on “Wrestling Python into LLVM Intermediate Representation (2019) [video]”Submitted Halting Problem == Russell’s Paradox? as a story · 3 points
HN discussionYou are right, the difficulties are in Python's design. See the Pyston blog "Why is Python slow". http://blog.kevmod.com/2016/07/why-is-python-slow/ That said, the Pyston guys knew what the problems were (dynamism in C runtime) and were making progress. This was the future of fast Python - JIT experts optimizing the runtime and feeding code and ideas back to CPython. I think we will look back at this Pyston announce…
Comment linking /2016/07/why-is-python-slow/
on “Pyston 0.6.1 released, and future plans”Submitted A new age of AI centaurs as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI’m afraid I don’t know the details. However, this post seems relevant - someone who worked on the JIT at Dropbox describes how expensive function calls in CPython can be: https://blog.kevmod.com/2020/05/python-performance-its-not-j...
Comment linking /2020/05/python-performance-its-not-just-the-interpreter/
on “Inline Caching: Quickening”Submitted Blog migration and self-hosting retrospective as a story · 3 points
HN discussionIANAMathematician, but it's "true" in the sense that we primarily use a set of axioms (ZF/ZFC) which produce this result. But in a sense one of the axioms is that these things exist (powerset axiom), so this result is a bit less illuminating than one might hope. My understanding is that we can reason about these sorts of non-constructible sequences but we can't really know if they "really exist" because it's not cle…
Comment linking /2022/04/09/do-the-real-numbers-exist/
on “Math That Goes on Forever but Never Repeats”Submitted Personal thoughts about Pyston’s outcome as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted It’s worth spending one CPU-hour to save one second of your time as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Tether’s Actual Peg as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Efficiency, and a simple formula for being a 10x-er as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Why is Python slow (2016) as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
