Birbla

Discussion summary

A discussion about a 'Moby Dick Workout' in 2022, where Jesse Grosjean created a test for Bike 2.0 using the book. Participants shared their own test data, including Anna Karenina, War and Peace, and Crime & Punishment.

What the discussion says

  • Jesse Grosjean wrote the test for Bike 2.0.
  • Participants used classic books for testing.
  • Some discussed performance issues and data sizes.
“I used 'War and Peace' for this.”
— miiiiiike
“I called it the 'Anna test' for Anna Karenina.”
— jessegrosjean

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  • Hacker News
  • You had me at "dick workout".
    by hnbad
  • And to Moby music! What's not to love?
    by muvlon
  • (2022)
    by gnabgib
  • did jesse write this? i presume so but maybe hog bay has an anonymous forum
    by 0gs
  • I did! And I'm still using it to test Bike 2.0. Will will be release about 2 years ago. :\ Well soon anyway!
    by jessegrosjean
  • A bit amusing. I took Anna Karenina off Gutenberg and used that as test data for some of my flashing algorithms. I called it the "Anna test". I could have used random data, but where's the fun in that? Besides, during dev, structured text showed the kind of error I got much better than random data would have.
    by RealityVoid
  • This made me test my own app with the book. And even though it had no issues loading it, it still left me thinking I can get much better performance on scrolling.

    small video I made for demonstration purpose: https://youtu.be/fiJ0vJLhcN8

    I am overall pretty happy with iced-rs

    by t_mahmood
  • I use "War and Peace" for this.
    by miiiiiike
  • Good idea, I might use Crime & Punishment!
    by N_Lens
  • I used war and peace to explain to a CEO how wasteful a mobile API was; twelve distinct items of data to display but we sent JSON larger than war and peace.
    by timclark
  • not to pile on the particular software but the example just stuck in my memory, two years ago or so I tried out Logseq for note taking, and I still remember that it put a five page file (not even Moby Dick) into 'read only' mode because apparently at about 1k characters or a few hundred lines of text the app couldn't handle the performance impact, stumbling across discussions like this[1]

    With the quasi supercomputers we have, that somehow apps that exist to edit and display text crap themselves on ordinary <1mb files is just weird. There should be no trade-offs.

    [1] https://discuss.logseq.com/t/logseq-unusable-for-long-form-p...

    by Barrin92
  • Oh that’s a great test case. I’ve been annoyed by the speed issue too. For a while I had json and Md files bound to Zed because it was faster with highlighting than anything else.

    But even that takes seconds to start on my M1 Max from cold. So then I just wrote (avec Claude) a viewer app and it turns out computers are so fast you can not only open multi GB JSON files instantly you can even pretty print them so fast the user won’t lose attention.

    But I just generated those. Moby Dick is a great real-world test case.

    by arjie
  • This is why you use Emacs in Daemon mode for instant starts. Does zed perhaps offer something similar?
    by zipy124
  • This reminds me of ‘The Jules Test’. Popularised (hyper locally) by my friend Jules.

    When renting a flat, simply head straight to the bathroom and flush the toilet. If the toilet flush is good, the flat is fine.

    by jonplackett
  • Turn on the sink before you flush so a sizeable drop in header pressure becomes obvious.
    by black6
  • You can use "20,000 leagues under the sea" instead of Moby Dick.

    Both were written at the same time, both deal with ocean adventures, and both (IMHO) are much longer than they need to be.

    Then you can have multiple Jules tests, depending on occasion!

    by sam_goody
  • That reminded me of how fast/instant Winamp loads the huge directory (recursively), while other players struggle. Scrolling reveals that files are being loaded lazily (obviously), but the most interesting part is that Quick search and Jump to file works immediately.
    by zerr
  • And here I thought this was going to be, “do a push up every time you have to look up a word in the dictionary while reading Moby Dick.”
    by keiferski
  • Here I was, thinking it would be a very, very odd workout set to Moby's music.
    by nixosbestos
  • No, that would be doing curls with a printed copy of the book.

    Alternatively, I'm sure recreating the drum solo from the Zeppelin song of the same name would get you sweaty. For advanced athletes, do the live version.

    by mikestew
  • Or how to stay fit like an 1800s whaler. Where am I going to find a hook and a 200 pound chunk of whale blubber though?
    by Cthulhu_