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Refterm Lecture Part 1 - Philosophies of Optimization

Casey Muratori's first refterm lecture lays out philosophies of optimization, distinguishing optimization from non-pessimization, which means avoiding needless work. It uses his fast terminal renderer project to show how fast computers really are.

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Why HN readers recommended it

HN returns to it constantly in software performance debates as the primer on non-pessimization and why modern software is slow.

This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.

Video & recommendation details

Creator / channel
Molly Rocket
Topic
software performance
Format
lecture
Level
intermediate
HN recommenders in dataset
10
HN mentions in dataset
20
Recommendation years in dataset
2021–2026

These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.

From the original HN conversations

Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.

  • Casey Muratori's refterm video series is a great example of how to do application design. It focuses on writing a terminal emulator for Windows, but almost all the concepts apply to nixes as well -- even down to the level of OS primitives like memory …

    dundarious on Hacker News · 2021-11
    In Anatomy of a Terminal Emulator

  • > The overwhelming majority of slow code isn't slow because it's failed to do this kind of microoptimization, it's slow because it used the wrong algorithm. I disagree. I believe the majority of code is slow because it's written without any consideration at all to …

    grayrest on Hacker News · 2021-10
    In 55 GiB/s FizzBuzz

  • The fallacy of premature optimization rears its ugly head again. When Knuth wrote that quote, he meant something very specific with the word optimization: low level micro optimizations. Spending a lot of time trying to get every little ounce of performance from every little CPU …

    hsn915 on Hacker News · 2021-11
    In Selecting a programming language can be a form of premature optimization

Summaries, classifications and recommendation records are from the HackerTube source dataset. Read about this library and its limitations.

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