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Comment by ComputerGuru | Hacker News Reader

I read the title and thought that I was going to see some really stupid design decisions. To the contrary, it's vary clean and smart.

It's not that strings over 24 are slow, it's that strings below length 24 have extra optimizations.

It's a great article, but I really, really despise the linkbait title.

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I work with Pat and kicked around some title ideas with him yesterday. It's interesting to see a title that he created out of a sense of fun and excitement being perceived as linkbait. I can see why that perception would arise, but I hope people think of him as a good writer trying to have fun rather than some dude writing linkbait titles trying to get attention.

Some other title ideas:

* 23 characters ought to be enough for anybody

* 23: How Twitter could have solved their ruby scaling problem

No better. It is becoming a real problem if factual accurate titles don't go through. Imagine, I'm on a phone in China, most articles never load, I have to rely on title and comments to now what we are talking about.

Heh. I would have gone with "Ruby Optimizations: Why short strings are an order of magnitude faster" or something.

> It's a great article, but I really, really despise the linkbait title.

Generally I feel the same. Although, I think exceptions can be made for articles with real content.

I enjoyed the article too but the title is incongruous to the conclusion of the article, which openly states that it's ridiculous to suggest using strings < 24 chars in ruby applications, but just be aware what's going on under the hood

s/vary/very/

Sorry! Can't edit it now, either. :$

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