9 ms·

Decimation of Twitter Eng

53 points by marvindanig 4y ago

chatman 4y ago
Given that all of this tech is already being used inside Twitter, I feel it is unethical to discuss any non-public info (like discussions with cloud vendors on cost etc.) in public. The engineers have been kicked out, the tech still belongs to Twitter. This is not "decimation" of the engineering, just of engineers' egos. Someone else will do the job, the show will go on.
- jacurtis 4y ago
  Saying that the cloud provider was “shocked” or didn’t believe how low costs were is not revealing anything proprietary. Almost everything on the list that was specific to a technology or accomplishment had a public url attached to it.
- 29athrowaway 4y ago
  Many of the projects mentioned there are open source and have been known publicly for a while, and talks about them have been presented over the years in many conferences.
sidibe 4y ago
I trust the Tesla engineers who thoroughly review the code for a few hours more than this guy who worked at Twitter for years. After spending time reading Elons first responders on Twitter, I have learned that in the hierarchy of human competence, rocket scientist or FSD engineer > engineer supporting a website. This means naturally they are better at everything even when they stoop to doing a lesser job and would quickly recognize the coding deficiencies at Twitter.
- slantedview 4y ago
  This is a joke post, right?
  - mynameisvlad 4y ago
    As someone that has the FSD beta, I certainly hope so.
shrubble 4y ago
It's very interesting that Dan discusses the issues of cloud latency vs on-prem with on-prem being faster; something that some on HN have pooh-poohed as not being something that mattered. And that bandwidth costs they were paying suprised GCP , when it's been pointed out that bandwidth costs can be quite low vs the cloud providers. Granted Twitter is operating at a very large scale...
- wmf 4y ago
  SLOs for most SaaS are really loose (if they exist at all). Almost the whole industry is leaving 10x-100x performance on the table because I guess very few people even notice.
jmeister 4y ago
This post is more than ten days old. Twitter has only gotten better. Why can't people exercise some discipline while running their mouths? If only to embarrass themselves less.
- tadfisher 4y ago
  > Twitter has only gotten better. Good to know. I stopped contributing to their metrics because I am sick and tired of seeing EM everywhere.
  - jmeister 4y ago
    You could block his account or the keywords 'Elon' and 'Musk'. That's the idea anyway, to provide moderation tools to the end user. You should check back when that idea is put into practice more comprehensively by Twitter engineers.
- mynameisvlad 4y ago
  > Twitter has only gotten better. Says who?
  - the_doctah 4y ago
    Less censorship is better.
    - mynameisvlad 4y ago
      > Less censorship Says who?
      - the_doctah 4y ago
        The Commonwealth
        mynameisvlad 4y ago
the_doctah 4y ago
Maybe its because they seemed to have their own home-baked version of damn near everything?
- draw_down 4y ago
aaron695 4y ago
renewiltord 4y ago
I follow Dan Luu and he often writes very well, but my perspective as a user is that search is rubbish. I know they're solving a complex problem and indexing is x seconds but I genuinely just use Google with Twitter added as a keyword. For my own tweets and those of my closest friends, I have them all posted to a group Slack we have and I just use Slack search. It's absurd but instantaneous results. Ultimately, I'm sure they did lots of kernel hacking and ingestion and ETL stuff but Slack search of Twitter mirror is better than Twitter search for my follow list.

53 points by marvindanig 4y ago

Given that all of this tech is already being used inside Twitter, I feel it is unethical to discuss any non-public info (like discussions with cloud vendors on cost etc.) in public. The engineers have been kicked out, the tech still belongs to Twitter. This is not "decimation" of the engineering, just of engineers' egos. Someone else will do the job, the show will go on.

jacurtis 4y ago
Saying that the cloud provider was “shocked” or didn’t believe how low costs were is not revealing anything proprietary. Almost everything on the list that was specific to a technology or accomplishment had a public url attached to it.
29athrowaway 4y ago
Many of the projects mentioned there are open source and have been known publicly for a while, and talks about them have been presented over the years in many conferences.

sidibe 4y ago

I trust the Tesla engineers who thoroughly review the code for a few hours more than this guy who worked at Twitter for years. After spending time reading Elons first responders on Twitter, I have learned that in the hierarchy of human competence, rocket scientist or FSD engineer > engineer supporting a website. This means naturally they are better at everything even when they stoop to doing a lesser job and would quickly recognize the coding deficiencies at Twitter.

slantedview 4y ago
This is a joke post, right?
- mynameisvlad 4y ago
  As someone that has the FSD beta, I certainly hope so.

shrubble 4y ago

It's very interesting that Dan discusses the issues of cloud latency vs on-prem with on-prem being faster; something that some on HN have pooh-poohed as not being something that mattered. And that bandwidth costs they were paying suprised GCP , when it's been pointed out that bandwidth costs can be quite low vs the cloud providers. Granted Twitter is operating at a very large scale...

wmf 4y ago
SLOs for most SaaS are really loose (if they exist at all). Almost the whole industry is leaving 10x-100x performance on the table because I guess very few people even notice.

jmeister 4y ago

This post is more than ten days old. Twitter has only gotten better. Why can't people exercise some discipline while running their mouths? If only to embarrass themselves less.

tadfisher 4y ago
> Twitter has only gotten better. Good to know. I stopped contributing to their metrics because I am sick and tired of seeing EM everywhere.
- jmeister 4y ago
  You could block his account or the keywords 'Elon' and 'Musk'. That's the idea anyway, to provide moderation tools to the end user. You should check back when that idea is put into practice more comprehensively by Twitter engineers.
mynameisvlad 4y ago
> Twitter has only gotten better. Says who?
- the_doctah 4y ago
  Less censorship is better.
  - mynameisvlad 4y ago
    > Less censorship Says who?
    - the_doctah 4y ago
      The Commonwealth
      - mynameisvlad 4y ago

the_doctah 4y ago

Maybe its because they seemed to have their own home-baked version of damn near everything?

draw_down 4y ago

aaron695 4y ago

renewiltord 4y ago

I follow Dan Luu and he often writes very well, but my perspective as a user is that search is rubbish. I know they're solving a complex problem and indexing is x seconds but I genuinely just use Google with Twitter added as a keyword. For my own tweets and those of my closest friends, I have them all posted to a group Slack we have and I just use Slack search. It's absurd but instantaneous results. Ultimately, I'm sure they did lots of kernel hacking and ingestion and ETL stuff but Slack search of Twitter mirror is better than Twitter search for my follow list.