Ah crap, did it come across as snarky? I'm not very good at conveying tone through comments, it was supposed to be mildly poking fun while making a minor nitpick.

It did, at least the way I read it. That might say more about me than it does about you though :)

Being wrong is fantastic, because it means I have learnt something. In fact I recently had to optimize a troublesome loop and got acceptable results (15 minutes down to 2 minutes thanks to branch mispredicts). Given what I saw today I can go back and see if splitting it up will result in any performance gain.

Agreed, well done for replying with good humor. I think HN is getting more and more of these types of exchanges, which is great.