Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?

Re:Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ev... by flukus on Wednesday November 14, 2018 @12:52AM (#18447818)

> Presumably, down the road, you'll either be a defunct company or doing well enough to afford 10 times the manpower to fix things.

Only in startup land which is still a small fraction of our industry.

Most places will never have 10 times the manpower to fix things and are hurting themselves by not doing them properly in the first place.

> Facebook was a spaghetti code mess in the beginning. I'm sure it caused them some growing pains, but moving too slowly early on would have likely been more costly.

Survivor-ship bias, for every facebook how many potentially viable companies never got off the ground because users couldn't tolerate using their steaming pile?

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Re:Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ev... by SatvikBeri on Wednesday November 14, 2018 @01:27AM (#18447951)

Notably, MySpace is often cited as a company that failed because their codebase was terrible, which prevented them from adding features as quickly as Facebook could (despite having many more engineers at the time.)

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Re:Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ev... by thepp1983 on Wednesday November 14, 2018 @07:47AM (#18449420)

I don't believe that for one second considering the hacks that Facebook has had to do around the limitations of PHP.

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