Barring that, turning off server side throttling or atleast making it less aggressive to slow the retry storm seems the most reasonable.

Their default of “just go ham on that API” feels like the same footgun of “by default this Humongous Database is wide open.”

The easiest path will always be the default for the majority of devs, with a simple "timer" type solution being the easiest to implement in pretty much all cases except where otherwise it's literally forced on them.

There's nasty form of this where the site is offline for a bit and then all the clients rush their requests in when it comes back online. The client requests are all coordinated on the site recovery time and end up overloading the site with their coordinated retries.

If you introduce a bit of randomness into the retry timing (say, multiply by 1.8~2.2 instead of a straight doubling), that thundering herd will spread itself out and be much easier to recover from.

(thanks RFC 2119)

Even more so when that person later loudly proclaims that they never made such a request, even when provided with written proof.

I can of course not say whether the people currently working at Twitter did warn that the recent measures could have such major side effects, but I would not be surprised in the slightest, considering their leadership's mode of operation.

Even as someone who very much detests what Twitter has become over the last few months and in fact did not like Twitter before the acquisition, partly due to short format making nuance impossible, but mostly for the effect Tweets easy embeddability had on reporting (3 Tweets from random people should not serve as the main basis for an article in my opinion), I must say, I feel very sorry for the people forced to work at that company under that management.

I'm about 2 for 8 but you gotta try sometimes.

Being the bearer of bad “stoves are hot to the touch” news makes you a downer.

Not enough of you believed and now this balloon is adrift and will never make it to Imaginationland.

You should have warned me about this more convincingly!

This is why I find if you don't already have good relations with management and trust each others judgement, it really doesn't matter.

They will do as they wish, and throw you under the bus as needed.

This is protection in adversarial scenarios, but is also just a great habit In general. Verbal discussion is really good for getting people on the same page, but without notes it's very easy for details and decisions to get lost.

If you are in the kind of adversarial management relationship where this is necessary, you have already lost.

Do you think this kind of guy, when you point to "hey remember the conversation, here's the follow-up mail with the meeting notes" he's gonna be like "oh yeah, I was wrong, you are right." ?

It's good to have meeting agendas and follow up minutes, I just rarely find that they are going to help you litigate anything. More to remind you how a decision came to be.

That way, it's unavoidably in front of everyone's face, and you get the perk of ironclad timestamps in the document-editing history.

You are wrong because you were right but unable to persuade me. Not "hmm, maybe I should be more receptive to my reports feedback".

All. the. time...

Pervasive cognitive glitch: inability to distinguish between _problems_ and _people_.

Identifying the problem ==> causing the problem.

He then asked me to do weekly RAG status for stakeholders. So I did and it all slowly turned red with no easy remediation.

He did two things that made me realize it was time to go:

First, when I suggested that "if I report red status all year and then it doesn't complete on time, but I kept everyone well informed - am I going to be rewarded end of year".. to which I got nervous laughter response.

Second, he started talking about "what if we change the definition of done", such that we just start marking things amber/green because like.. well some of it is running in QA or hey its like 70% done, so why not mark it done?

Just seemed like he handed me the keys to a sinking boat as he stepped off in the last life boat.

If you ever have a beverage with me or drop me an email I'm happy to discuss without naming names, but public is unwise, sadly.

One of these years I'm going to retire and start a youtube channel. If you like similar stories, ThePrimagen[1] definitely has a similar flavor. He talks about some situations at Netflix that are eerily familiar, even though I've never worked for them.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/c/theprimeagen

did you get copmensation for the 2 times it worked out

Heck, I've hired people to teach me things, told them they were wrong, and learned the hard way, many times.

Not those who just punish anyone who dares. Then they're just not told anything but "yes, sir" until disaster strikes.

Wait, what? That's a ridiculous assertion, even taken as hyperbole. A huge percentage of people in power surround themselves with "yes-men", and are allergic to (even constructive) criticism, let alone direct disagreement.

Let's say there are a 100 people who actually interact with him in a professional context. Those are the ones that are yes men.

and they'll throw you under the bus

That usually gets them to sit up and reconsider.

Occasionally they sign the damned thing, and then it’s popcorn “I told you so” time.

In the case of Twitter, the new owner has thoroughly broken the advertising business and is trying to aggressively pursue a new version of the data business Twitter once had-- E.g. Google's Caffeine, which Twitter also eventually lost https://searchengineland.com/google-search-algorithm-change-... ... The statements about "too many scrapers" are almost certainly as illegitimate as the previous pre-acquisition statements about "too many bots."

The nature of business is that there's no judiciary or referee... the purpose of a business is to make money. Tech businesses just happen to hire lots of academically-oriented engineers who developed their skills in a different environment. It's possible to build a culture of "fairness" in a business, but at the end of the day even Google dropped "don't be evil."

Я, Unless your visa is sponsored by your employer.

And it's a tough market where 5% of IT engineers across the board have recently been let go.

Even non visa holders at Twitter have had to wait it out, sometimes months, until a suitable job was found.

The OP is fundamentally wrestling with an issue of justice, but the bottom line is that in business there is no punishment for stupid. There is only reward for profit.

Detaching myself emotionally from my employer was one of the best things I've ever done for my mental health. When I was young I got upset when "the company" made bad decisions. Now I feel no negative emotion about it, sometimes I laugh at them.

My recommendation is to recognize the stock options, bonuses, etc. as the emotional manipulations they are. Either perform the tasks or don't, but try to avoid getting emotionally bogged down in it. Instead, lift your head up and look around at the broader economy and make your decision based on that. Most of the time the fastest path to a promotion, higher income, etc. is to leave.

The better place to seek emotional fulfillment and validation is at home with your family.

They don't get paid after the company dies.

"State capitalism" and "monopoly capitalism" (the bad kind according to socialists) are about as different as Coke and Pepsi.

Ultimately the "owners" in practice are people you never heard of that work for (government) pension funds and index funds. The billionaires, founders, and celebrities are mostly a sideshow. That's not a denial of wealth inequality, just as officially socialist countries have.

But nearly all big companies have no owner in a top hat running the show, just faceless committees, responsible for buying everything - that company and all its competitors. Bureaucrats, apparatchiks, public or private, it's much the same.

If the C-suite and directors of huge companies are generally parasites, it's because robber barons and corporate raiders are the exception today. People whose job is to invest trillions of dollars by simply buying everything for sale have the least control imaginable over company managers. The current situation reflects classic criticisms of socialism, but it won anyway.

Nearly every source of information on public company stocks in the US has a figure for "institutional ownership". If a company is of any size, and is a real business, this is usually a high % - this is a reality check if what I'm writing sounds outlandish because nobody talks about anything but Twitter around here.

(The full link is https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.14318/hau4...., recommend reading the whole thing):

"As radical theorists like Michael Albert were already pointing out in the 1970s, this is the key flaw of traditional socialism: actual members of the working classes have no immediate hatred for capitalists because they never meet them; in most circumstances, the immediate face of oppression comes in the form of managers, supervisors, bureaucrats, and educated professionals of one sort or another—that is, precisely the people to whom a state socialist regime would give more power, rather than less (Albert and Hahnel 1979; Albert 2003). The decisive victory of capitalism in the 1980s and 1990s, ironically, has had precisely the same effect. It has led to both a continual inflation of what are often purely make-work managerial and administrative positions—“bullshit jobs”—and an endless bureaucratization of daily life, driven, in large part, by the Internet."

People think they know what a job is, without having done it.

You cannot imagine even, say, stocking shelves at a retail store, without doing it.

If, for the sake of argument, most jobs are bullshit, the only way that can be maintained is if people are ignorant of what other people do.

But if you're so ignorant, you should consider that you can't imagine jobs you don't do, let alone do them.

One job I had I suppose was bullshit, was sweeping a fairly spotless warehouse, because, I was told, a division boss was coming to inspect, and so they hired a temp to look busy.

But a job is not bullshit, just because you have a flight of fancy that involves massive restructuring of an organization or society. "Writing this CRUD application should be unnecessary because everybody should've used the same database in the beginning". So...make a time machine, or get everyone using one of them to switch. Should be roughly comparable difficulty.

And I'm pretty sure that "the key flaw of traditional socialism" is not that they recognized reality. I think it was Lenin who declared that there would have to be a temporary phase of socialism. It's a sick mind that thinks the "key flaw" of existent socialism was employing educated administrators and not, say, dekulakization.

Edit: Maybe the clusterf*ck was Rumsfeld's idea.

"all public sector employees affiliated with the Ba'ath Party were to be removed from their positions and be banned from any future employment in the public sector... When the CPA turned over enforcement of de-Ba'athification to Iraqi politicians, however, these rules were broadly expanded and used to punish political opponents, including nearly 11,000 teachers who were dismissed from the party and removed from government"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Bremer

But since you've begun a knee-jerk reaction against this, I think there are some flaws with your criticisms (assuming you have read the book):

> People think they know what a job is, without having done it. > But if you're so ignorant, you should consider that you can't imagine jobs you don't do, let alone do them.

What Graeber has done in the book is to actually do numerous interviews with the people who have actually claimed to have done these jobs, and then categorize them into some noticable patterns to arrive at a conclusion. If you can't experience every job in the universe, the closest you can get is to talk with the people who have done them - and this is what he's precisely did. There are claims that the sample size wasn't enough or it was biased - which I think is totally apt. But it's incredibly dismissive of you to describe this attempt as "ignorant": how are we supposed to do any anthropological / sociological work in a large scale when you claim "no scholar can even try to analyze various types of work without actually doing everything in-person beforehand?"

> But a job is not bullshit, just because you have a flight of fancy that involves massive restructuring of an organization or society. "Writing this CRUD application should be unnecessary because everybody should've used the same database in the beginning". So...make a time machine, or get everyone using one of them to switch. Should be roughly comparable difficulty.

I think the "duck-tapers" Graeber describes in his book are a bit different from what you understand currently. He's mostly talking about the people who are doing tedious cleanup work because of reasons that can obviously and trivially be fixed but the higher-ups in the organization are not doing it for various reasons (mostly politics).

No, no different - this sounds like every bit the same phenomenon I thought I was addressing.

It's a fake distinction because every job can be framed in a way that puts it on either side of the divide.

And lack of understanding of other peoples' jobs is clearly at the core of the issue.

The "higher ups being stupid because of politics" can never be really definitely false, but it never, ever, is an explanation that shows understanding or justifies calling something trivial.

That's no more likely to be true. In order to correctly understand the context of our jobs, we would have to understand other jobs we don't and never will do.

It's called "alienation" - do you even Marx, bro?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation

Somebody needs to submit this with (1843) appended.

I haven't witnessed what happens if the members were determined to anyway, or read up on the circumstances of past wildcat strikes.

Also, the last time I saw something about my local hospital nurses' union in the news, they were alleging that the recruiting and employment of foreign nurses violated human trafficking laws. Basically, they signed people up from another country with a huge penalty if they quit early as "compensation" for the cost of importation.

To me, that strongly suggested the union was not playing a strong hand, when it comes to "unsafe policies".

Although yes. I don’t think Twitter unionizing will save the site.

Unions are the reason we have a minimum wage, limited work week, paid holidays, equal pay for equal work, unemployment benefits, workers' comp, the family medical leave act, and many more things. If not for unions we would all still be doing sixty hour weeks getting paid in company scrip.

"Socialism" brought us Social Security, Medicare, child labor laws and agriculture subsidies, health insurance, food assistance, housing subsidies, energy and utilities subsidies, and education and childcare assistance. And it brings the rest of the modern world free education and healthcare.

It is absolutely true that for some people, they don’t have a choice in just quitting because of healthcare or H1B stuff. That’s absolutely true. But we're now at the 8 month mark of Elon buying Twitter. If you truly feel like it is a toxic and untenable place to work, you have had opportunities to explore other options. That doesn’t mean I judge or fault people who have chosen to stay, but this wasn’t January when there were tons of layoffs and uncertainty. Things have calmed down and while job offers aren’t falling off trees like they were in 2021, it isn’t the complete end of the world either.

People do have some agency eight months in. Again, I won’t judge anyone for staying for whatever the reason is, but let’s not pretend as if every person remaining (H1B or not) is void of all agency.

Sure, if you are unskilled worker that's struggling from paycheck to paycheck, then you might not be able to easily change work.

But in our line of work, and ESPECIALLY if you are good enough to work at something like twitter, pretending we are force to work where we are is a cope.

Sure, maybe there are some extreme instances when it is the case, there are always exceptions. But on average, it's cringe when people who earn literally twice what the average population does talk about "job insecurity" and pretend they are in the same boat as trully struggling lower class worker.

Listened to some of that twitter spaces the other day about the Russian coup and discovered that there are grown adults using that word to label just about anything that doesn't fit with their stance.

It's a little embarrassing and very online.

That falls quite a bit short of being forced to to work there.

There's a whole host of behaviors that are legally unacceptable in the workplace because telling people to just get another job isn't really a solution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_labour

If you can show congruence with that and Musk's behaviors, I'll cede the point.

The point is not to say that Twitter or Musk are benefitting from forced labor. The point is to say that we shouldn't think everyone working at Twitter is is endorsing Twitter's decisions or enjoying the workplace as is.

Amazing that someone can still hold that opinion, when all the evidence overwhelmingly contradicts that little nugget of pyrite.

Sure, you don't need to quit on the spot, but looking for options, absolutely

How small of a minority was it for Twitter after Elon fired a supermajority of the regular FTEs?

There’s some paperwork, but it’s not a major hurdle. Maybe a few grand in legal fees and a few hours of work on the employer side.

Also a lot of employers who had layoffs aren't sponsoring new Green cards because u know...

It is no fun being on H1B...

But still, that's no way near comperable to working class who, if they loose their current job, won't have just the inconvenience of flying back home, but will actually loose their (already below standard) day-to-day nessecities

Or are you talking about green cards, which is a completely different thing?

Because the Hedonic treadmill exists, expenses are also higher for high-earning people than the average population's: why would you expect well-paid folk not to worry about being unable to afford paying for their car note, mortgage, child-care and other obligations. Your position would be reasonable if all costs were uniform, and people who earn double put all their money in savings and investments.

It does make me wonder how much the ratio of forced labor H1B situations has gone up at Twitter as US citizens all bail from the fire.

I cannot imagine why anyone would work there if they had a choice at this point.

There are about 550 full-time engineers at Twitter. [1]

There are about 625-670 H1-B holders working at Twitter.[2]

This isn't quite the full story since of course H1-B holders might be doing other jobs than engineering; many of those 550 engineers are not US-based; there are other visas for foreign workers in the USA than the H1-B; and Musk has reassigned some workers from his other companies to work at Twitter.

But it sure looks like the answer is: a lot!

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/20/twitter-is-down-to-fewer-tha...

[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2022/11/04/twitt...

After getting rid of 80% of employees, that number has surely dropped.

H1-B, now, as much as I am sympathetic to that (an immigrant coming from extreme poverty myself), I don't understand why HN treats losing a work visa as a death sentence.

The tragedy here is what exactly? That you get to go home to your family and a country with a safety net and free healthcare, as bad as it might be? Before you apply for a new job? Is that really worse than some narcissistic rich douche shaving the years off your life by working you into the ground like this?

The second reason is H1B.

If you’re a software engineer anywhere in the US (with exception of H1B/TN/etc), where you work is 100% your choice. There isn’t a shortage of open engineering roles in this country. Nearly 100% of full time positions include fully paid healthcare.

Do you have a problem with lowering your standards, at least temporarily? Non-SWE positions? Or are you like "I'm overqualified, I won't apply for that..."

I’d say employment is less a choice in the us than any other oced country

This might be kind of true for a software engineer, but not for most people. Especially since if you quit or get fired, and can't find another job, you have no health insurance.

In fact, I'd recommend you do some job hunting right now and get an offer to prove your point.

It is always amazing that some people can be so out of touch and speak to people in this tone.

The second instance, I feel I can comment on, though allow me to leave out details to spare the people involved public embarrassment.

There, the changes, whilst annoying and born out of a complete misunderstanding of a core part of their alleged competency (Imagine a Botanist telling you leaves are always blue because that is the color of the sky), were not going to break anything, just look silly and create unnecessary, but compensated, work.

In that case, I also viewed the specific project finally launching as vitally important to our user base and wanted the results to go public for their benefit, so the decision was made to document and execute on their requests, so we could go live.

Of course, two weeks before our go live date, they changed their requests again ("leaves are not blue, they are violet because of the wave length of light") and had a hard time understanding that changes can have a knock on effect and some things are a bit more complex than Find and Replace. If I had been forced to make those changes at that point, I'd have packed my bags.

Simply said, when my work has the potential to benefit users and I know that arguing, even though I am correct, will lead to massive delays, I'd rather just put that silly request in writing and deal with these things after the users have received what has been worked on. Try to explain when someone is wrong, but if that doesn't work, finish the project, argue later.

Of course, if after the fact responsibility isn't taken, that finished project gets mentioned in my CV for the next employer.

As an industry we need to stop perpetuating this idea that everyone is fully mobile and software engineers are some mythical creature that isn't also shackled to the same constraints the rest of the labor force is. It's a job and a lot of people are dependent on a steady income stream. Part of that is putting up with the least worst of the options they have reasonably available to them, or sometimes taking up worse options just because it balances other aspects out. Ultimately during certain times you may have more or less leverage to put up with or reject crap practices. SWEs tend to have a lot more leeway than say a retail worker of course so we can be a bit more demanding but we can't just say crud off, I don't deal with any BS, even in the best of times. Higher salaries give you some negotiation room as well as you can lower your TC expectations in terms of negotiating better working environments (i.e. taking lower rates but demanding things like less pressured schedules, make autonomy, etc.) and as the extreme sof the markets are high enough, even taking TC hits can still let you live comfortably (this is to contrast many other professions who don't have this flexibility).

Unless you've lived modestly and invested significantly or started some side venture to become financially independent of labor based income, you're ultimately giving up some degree of agency to employers. We like to pretend this isn't the case but it is the case for most people, even highly paid labor.

In this case the horrible idea is being forced to push changes to production at a moments notice

Isn't that one of the DORA metrics?

As said, I don't want to speculate whether someone raised their voice on this being a likely outcome specifically, as not having testing prior to release is the much more obvious and significant issue here, driven by leadership.

I worked in the games industry for a while, and came to understand how they could spend so much money and so much time, and yet release a game where even basic functionality was broken. It's exactly this sort of extreme schedule pressure that, ironically, makes a huge morass where changing one thing breaks 10 other things, so progress grinds to a halt.

> The people that were fired from Twitter were fired for good reason

Ooh, you're talk like you're privy to inside information. I hope you brought enough for the rest of the class.

> if you think you’d do a better job than Elon with Twitter, you wouldnt.

You'd have to try rather hard to do worse.

It seemingly needs to be rate-limited for not just registered users, but registered paying premium users as well. And the rate limits for them are enough to be passed in less than an hour of average idle use!

> if you think you’d do a better job than Elon with Twitter, you wouldnt.

Doing nothing and not saddling twitter with unnecessary extra debt would have already been doing better than Elon.

The only difference between then and now is that there is a big personality at the top who now personifies everything Twitter does, especially if things go wrong, whereas before it was mainly just a faceless bureaucracy whose Trust and Safety lead at times had more visibility than the CEO.

The subtext is that Twitter changing hands also involved trimming a lot of the dead weight, particularly hitting the softer managerial/diversity/HR side. Now a lot of people are rooting for the site to fail because it has gotten too "bro-ey", as the era of trust-and-safety and $15k backchannel bluecheck deals has made way for free-speech and monthly subscriptions.

What I claim is that: - OPs story that Twitter was a healthy and productive tech company pre-Elon is complete non-sense. How many years did people pine for an edit button? - Twitter returned to pre-2020 staffing levels, which is true - Twitter struggled to push out new features (like an edit button) for years, which is true, wheras post-Elon they pushed out edit buttons, longer tweets, subscriptions, etc.

Claiming that nothing is different other than Elon's presence implies that Twitter was just as much of a technical dumpster fire as it is now. That is not _at all_ what you're now claiming you said, which is, effectively, "Twitter made slow progress on product priorities". No one disputes that, but it's not what we're discussing here, which is the rapid degradation of service since Musk took over. Maybe those "diversity hires", as you call them, actually contributed to keeping the site running.

Here’s just a few of the people (in these cases journalists) that Elon has banned. It’s not hard to find other examples of censorship either. That’s his right, he owns all of it, but he lied about ideals of free speech. If it’s speech he doesn’t like, he kills it:

Ryan Mac

Drew Harwell

Micah Lee

Matt Binder

Aaron Rupar

Donie O’Sullivan

Tony Webster

EDIT: these bans were related to reporting on the elonjet tracking account that was banned. He didn’t just ban the account he didn’t like, he banned the accounts of journalists who talked about that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ElonJet

- Daniel Ellsberg - Julian Assange - Glenn Greenwald - Seymour Hirsch - Chelsea Manning

There is no doubt that, after firing Vijaya Gadde (sp?), the corporate focus has shifted away from censoring every single tweet, and more towards letting people say what they want. This does not mean every single tweet is left up, or that annoying Elon isn't a catastrophically stupid thing for journalists to do.

Do you dispute this?

It is absolutely unbelievable that anyone could say this when every Tweet is currently censored to non-members.

I've traditionally considered the Dorsey administration to be the worse steward, but this is an insane take to steelman considering how self-conscious the past few months of banning has gotten.

I don't care if you "like my graphics work" or not. You seem to be implying I owe you something, which is crazy. I have been publishing stuff online for decades and I can tell you, judgy and entitled people such as yourself have _never_ done anything useful in return.

What's amazing is you chastizing me for a "bad post", even as you dispute something you could've googled in 5 seconds.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1616706530841333761?s=46...

Your statement is gross.

The data is in now!

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2023/01/20/twitter-is-down-to-fewer...

Citation needed. Show me the 2020 Twitter headcount. Show me the 2023 Twitter headcount.

> The only difference between then and now is that there is a big personality at the top who now personifies everything Twitter does, especially if things go wrong, whereas before it was mainly just a faceless bureaucracy whose Trust and Safety lead at times had more visibility than the CEO.

That is not the 'only difference'. There is also the matter of all the hate speech. Which I guess you don't really notice, as you're not one of the targets, but I sure am. This is like Trump going 'boo hoo everyone hates me because I'm Donald Trump,' when in fact there is this small matter of an armed insurrection. You are writing off the valid political concerns of your opponents as being rooted in personality, rather than in odious politics.

> The subtext is that Twitter changing hands also involved trimming a lot of the dead weight, particularly hitting the softer managerial/diversity/HR side.

This is the most reality-defying way of recalling that the entire company basically quit on him overnight, but ok, bro

> Now a lot of people are rooting for the site to fail because it has gotten too "bro-ey", as the era of trust-and-safety and $15k backchannel bluecheck deals has made way for free-speech and monthly subscriptions.

That is not the reason we are anticipating its failure. We are anticipating its failure because we understand how people, platforms, and software interact. 'Hope' has nothing to do with it; we just read it off the verniers.

And if he didn't make his politics part of how he runs stuff, I probably wouldn't even care about his politics. But you know how celebrities get crap for inserting politics into things, when they know very little about that topic? Elon is going to get the same.

Compare:

- hoping Ballmer-era Microsoft would fail in their attempts to snuff out Linux

- hoping that USSR would fail in their attempts to snuff out large numbers of their own citizens

- hoping that the Confederates would fail at snuffing out resistance to literal slavery

- (in fiction,) hoping that the Death Star would fail at snuffing out various planets, etc

and so forth.

There is not some weird list of permissible root-reasons. You have no gotcha; you are just gotten.

> The problem with this asinine debate over debating is that everyone is trying to come up with a content-neutral principle.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36556393

>trevioustrouble 1 hour ago [flagged] [dead] | parent | context | prev | next [–] | on: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

>It’s just a feed, and needs to be rate-limited for unregistered users. No need to pull out your philosophy-degree. The people that were fired from Twitter were fired for good reason and if you think you’d do a better job than Elon with Twitter, you wouldnt.

>* PS: Dislike my comment fags

And then they sum up their politics and best arguments and what the Twitter they're fighting so hard for and what Musk they worship so much is all about, in just one word:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36556423

>trevioustrouble 1 hour ago [flagged] [dead] | parent | context | flag | vouch | favorite | on: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

>fag

And that's the best they've got.

It really makes Musk's apologists so angry and frustrated to see everyone laughing their asses off at Musk explosively and bloodily sharting himself in public like that, because now they have to follow behind the elephant and wipe up all the mess.

This is also why I'm hoping for Florida to become a failed state and descend into a Cormac McCarthyan cannibal holocaust. Because Ron DeSantis is a meanie head.

One may compare circumstances of the same kind without asserting that they are of the same degree. This is generally referred to as an 'intuition pump' -- it's not the most reliable move, philosophically speaking, but it does have a pretty long history, IIRC Plato's _Republic_ mentions looking at big things from far away in order to understand things that would remain obscure if (as he put it) written small.

If you could read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuition_pump I'd be willing to have a conversation with you about the pros and cons of this approach.

Funny, that's exactly how I'd describe your insipid, over-dramatic tumblr-speak posting style that I was parodying.

For example, you say that Microsoft should fail in attempting to snuff out Linux, not that Microsoft should fail generally.

You say that the USSR should fail to kill their own people, not that the USSR should fail to thrive as a people or a nation.

In this case the equivalent would be to call for Twitter to fail at... what exactly? Free speech?

I think you've been gotten. You don't perceive these examples as equivocations when they are, and it is blinded by dislike for a figure you disagree with rather than a specific bad goal.

Because I kinda think Bill Gates has bad politics?

>7. Against individualism, the Fascist conception is for the State;

http://www.historyguide.org/europe/duce.html

Prior to Twitter's acquisition by Musk, they worked quite closely with the State and even hired the former top FBI lawyer as their chief legal counsel.

This is like a case study in what happens when you fire everyone except the sycophants and yes-men.

I only feel sorry for remaining non-yes-men twitter employees who might still be there because for whatever personal reasons they're in a precarious economic situation where they can't quit (H1B?) or are tied to the company for healthcare coverage (Thanks, America, for being the greatest country in the world) because they can't afford any other health insurance option.

If an affordable or free healthcare option was offered on top of making employer provided healthcare illegal, then I completely am behind your idea.

Look at how these systems work in other countries

If I am sick I can just get an appointment with my GP within the day and not pay a thing, they can refer me to specialists or blood tests if needed, which are also fast and free. The remaining healthcare costs for medications or dentistry are so low I don't even notice them.

Hope this will shed some light to you about what's happening in other countries.

> Funding for all short-term health care is 50% from employers, 45% from the insured person and 5% by the government.

…

> Premiums paid by the insured are, on average, €137 per month for basic health care

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_the_Netherlands

Only an order of magnitude if you're in base-2.

That said, this doesn't quite track with the numbers for

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_hea...

and

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_dollar

But even then, counting all payers and not just the residents' sticker price, the USA is the high-priced outlier.

Nope. Look at how much the Netherlands actually spends on Healthcare, it's about 11.2% of GDP in 2021 [1]. Per capita GDP in 2021 was ~53k€.

((53k€*11.2%)/12) ≈ 495€

Only problem is, like most developed countries, close to a majority of people are net recipients (around 40%). Someone will have to pay their share too. Chances are, if you're posting on HN, that's you, as you'll be somewhere in the top 5% income bracket. I think if the OP does the math based on their actual numbers, they'd be more likely to find themselves in the ~1000€/month ballpark than the 150€/month they seem to think they are paying.

> But even then, counting all payers and not just the residents' sticker price, the USA is the high-priced outlier.

The Netherlands (11% of GDP) is not quite as extreme as the US (17%), but it's certainly nothing to write home about, especially as I don't get the impression that either health care expenditure as percentage of GDP or demographics are moving in a favorable direction.

[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.CHEX.GD.ZS?end=2...

What's the difference between my first and my second? I don't know. If you force me to guess, post-retirement and/or terminal care, possibly?

> like most developed countries, close to a majority of people are net recipients (around 40%)

Yes, and? Isn't much the same also true for private insurance?

You've got the potential for arguing about what "fair" looks like; I'm fine with it being funded like a progressive tax, based on income rather than risk factors, but that's not hugely important.

> I think if the OP does the math based on their actual numbers, they'd be more likely to find themselves in the ~1000€/month ballpark than the 150€/month they seem to think they are paying.

I would assume that zer0tonin pays whatever they say they pay. They're likely to have better insight into their own finances than random internet strangers like thee and me.

> The Netherlands (11% of GDP) is not quite as extreme as the US (17%), but it's certainly nothing to write home about, especially as I don't get the impression that either health care expenditure as percentage of GDP or demographics are moving in a favorable direction.

The direction of movement may or may not be favourable (given the pandemic I assume "not"), but the USA is kinda the outlier in developed nations for spending a lot without delivering particularly good outcomes:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Life_expectancy_vs_h...

(Sourced from: https://ourworldindata.org/us-life-expectancy-low)

A typical family premium (two adults in their 40s and two children under 10) can vary from £700 to £1,800 a year.

The average price of a private healthcare policy in the UK is £1,032.84 per year (February 2022)

Google results ...

I did use the word "taxpayer". The UK's health service costs £2700 per head of population. Obviously what people contribute towards that varies.

Also my question remains unanswered. Is the Dutch health system topped up by government funding?

I'm not complaining since, first, this is a political decision and second, the level of service is outstanding.

For example: psychotherapy is paid for or, if your doc orders an MRI you get an appointment after tomorrow.

There's also no such shit as in network health providers (exceptions apply for some insurance models) or pre-existing conditions for the basic health plan (which is still pretty good and comprehensive).

While I do think that it's an overall good system it is expensive (and subsidized for people who can't afford it).

Also, health insurance is mandatory.

It's already a bunch of private companies.

> These private companies would drive up the cost even more.

Other way around - by having to actually directly compete for customers, instead of just having to convince a few large corporation prices would go down, not up.

Although we really should not ignore that insurance companies are not the drivers of higher costs, it's health care providers that do that.

It's enjoyable to blame insurance companies, but the reality is their profits are capped by law - they are not the problem. Dr.'s will have to take a pay cut, and there will have to be mass layoffs, there's no other way to reduce costs.

What a delightfully naive view.

Answer me two simple questions:

1) How are insurance companies profits capped?

2) How does increasing or decreasing costs affect thier allowable profits?

2: Costs change nothing. But increased health care expenses do allow them to earn more (the 20).

Insurance companies are incentivised, under law, to have the highest healthcare expenses possible.

Yes, that is true. But it doesn't change the fact that prices will have to change at the healthcare providers. Dr.s will earn less, people will be fired as positions are eliminated. There's no other way to reduce prices.

Where do you think all that "incentivized" money is going? It's going to people in healthcare will either take a pay-cut or will lose their jobs.

The gigantic UPMC is a non profit. Actually a TON of hospitals are non profits - every religious founded hospital is a non profit (Maimonides Medical Center, or every Mercy Hospital (Wikipedia counts 33 of them)).

60% of hospitals are non-profit.

Are you hoping for non-profit drug and equipment makers as well? How far do you need this "non-profit" thing to go before you acknowledge it doesn't help at all?

I can acknowledge that it not just helps but that it is far more functional than the US system I've had to suffer through for many years. In addition to years of experience with the US and NHS, I also have many years of experience with Italian national healthcare which is also non-profit and better than the US system.

The US system is better for some diseases but only if you are rich. And an absolute failure if you aren't employed. Even if you can manage to stay employed with a serious illness you better have a healthy family member with a lot of energy who can fight the insurance company that really doesn't want the cost and burden of you and will make that clear in every action.

How far do you need this "for profit" thing to go before you acknowledge its very serious flaws and inadequacies?

This combo (system as you like to call it, although that leaves out a ton of stuff) also exists in the US as a non-profit. I said this already.

It doesn't help

What will help is doctors taking a paycut and mass layoffs.

The problems in the US are not on the payment side, they are on the service side: it's simply too expensive.

We need twice as many doctors, working half as many hours, for half as much pay.

That's what would fix the US.

I'm writing this from the UK where I use the NHS. I've also used the US system extensively and the Italian healthcare system extensively.

You need to get basic facts right if you want to be a part of the debate.

Health insurance profits are capped only as a percentage of premiums collected, not a fixed dollar amount cap. The rule is you must pay out 80% of premiums collected, everything else is OH&P.

Turns out, if healthcare costs go up, then premiums go up. If premiums go up, then insurer profits go up.

Healthcare providers and health insurers have an aligned perverse incentive to have healthcare cost as much as possible, since that is what increases their profits.

This isn’t a hard relationship to uncover if you are familiar with the insurer profit cap portion of the ACA and also how money gets made.

OK, I can agree with that - but it doesn't change my point that cost reductions need to start with providers, NOT with insurance companies.

I have a bridge to sell you.

This is backwards logic. Those few large corporations have the bargaining power to negotiate lower premiums. Individual consumers have zero bargaining power.

On the other hand individual consumers have ALL the bargaining power - they can simply pick a different insurance company, and insurance companies have to work very very very hard to get customers. They would compete on price because that's by far the most important thing to a consumer.

A company on the other hand cares about other stuff, how integrated in the system, how easy can we import members, manage members, how much marketing material do they give? Do we have to educate our employees, or will the insurance company do that for us?

Just tons of other stuff that isn't price. Individuals: It's 99% price.

Not anything close the the number of people who suffer from the all the inefficiency in delivering health care, but guess which has more money to bribe lawmakers with

https://www.google.com/search?q=h1b+visa

The initial and biggest waves of layoffs last year were of people who hadn’t yet had a chance to demonstrate whether they were or were not sycophants. They were essentially random.

I should also add that Musk's management methods are likely to turn any remaining people in to yes men. E.g., his "demon mode" routine: https://fortune.com/2023/06/29/elon-musk-demon-mode-rip-peop...

Are you saying the engineers who are now at Twitter don’t have the right skills?

The tweet reads: "Twitter is firing off about 10 requests a second to itself to try and fetch content that never arrives because Elon's latest genius innovation is to block people from being able to read Twitter without logging in."

Does that strike you as complex? I mean, surely they had the context (need to log in) because it was all over the news

Twitter serves their service to the entire world, with multiple layers of systems working in conjunction in order to make things work smoothly. A new engineer that has not been working on it for no more than a couple months would likely be unaware of how the different systems communicate and interact. A change like this will have have a lot of unintended consequences, and not having a senior engineer with lots of context leading the change will undoubtedly cause these kinds of issues.

Twitter could be packed with extremely skillful senior engineers who don't understand the product well enough to predict complex outcomes of planned changes.

They are potentially more vauable than the 100x engineer who has intimate knowledge of how googles shipping container datacentres work.

Having a senior engineer with a lot of context is worthless if the work environment does not promote open communication. You don't want to be the senior engineer or leader who shows "poor judgement" by opposing the mercurial owner "for no reason" if you're overridden and the feature launch succeeds without a glitch; no one gets fired for implementing a request that came straight from the top.

This is why non-rushed, scaled roll-outs are essential for large system: had they tried this on 1% / 5% / 10% of random traffic first, they could have caught this. Yet again, if the directive to roll it out to production came from the very top, you set that gate to 100% immediately.

[1]: https://www.wired.com/story/mudge-twitter-whistleblower-secu...

It's very easy to get caught in assumptions like, "Nobody would ever do things THIS way, so they must have built it THAT way," only to find out that, once upon a time, THIS way was the right way to do things, only for it to over time become less and less optimal, but the costs of changing things were too high to fix it. Once your system is old enough and large enough, you'll have several thousand things just like that.

then how do they have confidence that anything works before they subject hundreds of millions of people around the world to system updates? that seems disrespectful to the user, if you asked me.

And never created sufficient testing.

It's not just hypothetical either. There was a bug in a sorting algorithm a few years back that had been 'proved' correct. I think it was to do with numbers wrapping, and that hadn't been considered in the mathematical proof.

You have zero idea if that is true or not.

I understand the abstracted theory of how a nuclear power plant works (uranium heats water -> makes steam -> drives turbines etc) but if you sat me down at the control console and asked me to restart a reactor? Yeah I'd have no idea where to even begin. Even if I had a manual as thick as a fridge to (slowly) flick through

HN has a tendancy to find something like "nominative determinism" - "comment determinism" where a comment about a job produces a (contradictory) reply from someone doing that job.

Source: Was kicked out, poor, and intelligent. Ended up a submarine reactor operator.

Features are easy, scale is hard.

HN discourse should be above this.

And if you think about how Twitter works for five seconds, just consider everything that has to happen when an account with 100M followers posts a tweet. It's an absolute nightmare.

vomit inducing "Be better" post..

"I disagree with you so your comment shouldn't be allowed here"

Some of that sounds like bloat to me. The fact that Twitter is still here and building features faster with 20% of the workforce may indicate that a lot of what was thought needed really wasn't. You might point to the current outage or other bugs but you have to ask yourself, how serious is it really and is it worth 400% more employees to mitigate them?

Also, they aren't building features. The only features that rolled out are the ones that were already done. They haven't released anything.

Many of those things you listed are what people who have been in the institutionalized employees find important, essentially process for its own sake.

Before the layoffs Twitter had about 7500 employees, while SpaceX at 12000 builds frickin' rockets, have rocket launches every week, designing and building the next level launch platform that will revolutionize space travel, all the while revolutionizing satellite internet. Musk knows a thing or two about what smart, focused people are capable of.

I very much doubt that's the case.

Heh Heh Heh

Those twitter clones will tend to be of the "looks pretty on the front end, but a fucking nightmare on the backend" type. ;)

Likely with part of the backend nightmare being security issues as well. From what I've seen of bootcamp output, they seem to rarely explain much about security to the people doing the learning. :(

The core of the problem is not even the quality of the code but rather the thousands of things the site does besides letting you post a tweet and displaying it to other people.

Spam protection and protection from people falsely claiming spam on posts they don't like is already enough for me to laugh off the "clone in a weekend" camp.

If it's capital, just get an SBA and start working.

Demonizing past hard decisions at every unrelated point of difficulty has to be the worst kind of toxicity there is.

It's not great, but that's really a bizarre thing to say. There are many many things far more toxic than that.

On the tech side, it has retained everything that made it good (didn't implode!), and the tweet length / "show more" logic fits my style of writing perfectly. Spaces are also a kind of thing that I didn't use before but became immediately accessible as it was added right to twitter itself (and things like the 24h wagner coup space with 6M visitors isn't something I have seen in the past). And other simple things, like long videos sometimes fit a need, even while most of the time a youtube link also works.

Some things like crypto spam also seem to be in a bit better state, though can't obviously ever be completely removed

Honestly, I don't think the "public market square" has ever worked all that well, not even in a physical market square. You get 2 groups with sufficiently different views and before long it's devolved into shouting, if not a brawl.

It's just the sad state of the world that the most aggressive, but voice-defining leftists would like to live in a situation where politics is talked about less but take a speech-impeding dictatorial rule as the precondition to allow for something like that to happen. Meaning, as long as every person in the thread or platform has somehow been "vetted" to not be conservative or even moderate, they'll act "normal". (and that ignores purity spiraling in such echo chambers making even that a stretch)

Maybe in one of the futures of this planet people can go back to not being as polarized and twitchy about talking with people with even the opposite viewpoints. Increased amount of mutual respect in a conversation plus all sides having more mental robustness reduces escalation, reducing the speech and experience of having the kind of speech you probably are talking about to a very manageable level and is absolutely best for everyone.

I've learnt to personally take a lot of pains to maintain communication lines with even some quite extreme leftists and actually managed to retain a level of mutual respect with people some of my peers don't even dare to talk to. The end result makes otherwise impossible things greater than individuals could achieve, possible. But it's not very fair feeling like the human in the "pigeon vs human" chess match at times.

Regardless of everything, as long as we're not in some kind of shittyfuture war scenario, I will not stop believing in the concept of a "public market square" of free speech. I don't believe there is any other value that can keep an intellectually diverse human society together.

Interesting. My "generic uses and purposes" was to occasionally scroll around through tweets somebody linked me to.

That's entirely impossible now since I don't have an account (and don't plan to create one).

Roughly speak, it has become infinitely worse for me.

There are entire communities of people who relied on the ability to simply read Twitter without an account, took the time to write code of their own, and now are reacting with much more maturity than HN seems to be. The petty personal attacks are simply astonishing.

"RIP Nitter" https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/issues/919

However talking in a way that takes the current critical temporary state as the default forever isn't very fair

This isn't an unrelated difficulty—this kind of bug is the direct result of losing (or ignoring) the people who knew better. Institutional knowledge is a tech company's lifeblood, and Musk gleefully discarded most of Twitter's when he came in.

I used to work at a company where both the main data center and the main dev office were in the flight path of a major airport. We joked that if the data center had a plane hit it we’d go down quickly but recover but if the office building got hit we be fine for a while but long term in trouble.

Now me... I know someone personally who was a senior exec for Twitter's software team, who left after Elon's purge.

He left because all the people who understood the system and could predict the side effects were fired or left. He'd been with companies going through death spirals before, and had no interest in being involved with another one.

So, while the person you're replying to might not know, my friend DOES know.

"my uncle works at nintendo"

However, even with my limited experience in similar scenarios on smaller scale - it still feels accurate.

It’s a mistake to stay.

They were just summarily fired.

We don't kmow it's true but it is a likely explanation.

Rumors suggest that part of the change is moving from GCP to something else. Something like can't be reverted without signing a new contract with Google (and paying the bill..).

But this is Scaling-101 stuff. It's not some super complex or unique system going wrong. At least according to the article, it's a classic case of bad retry logic leading to a death spiral.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thundering_herd_problem

Ironic that someone saying it's scaling 101 follows up the comment with a completely wrong explanation.

In my mind, it is much closer to needlessly asking every server for the same information because the requests are most likely load balanced, but I guess it's true that I don't know the load balancing strategy. Even still, is it not more likely than not that those retries are hitting multiple servers?

This specific problem we're discussing, of concurrent client retries effectively launching a self-imposed DDOS attack, isn't exactly the thundering herd problem. It's clients and servers instead of threads, for one thing. But it's a good enough analogy to another type of cascading failure in concurrent computing, IMO.

lol nobody would do this to solve this problem because it doesn't even remotely solve it or give the appearance of solving it, if anything it's guaranteed to make things go slower

Seems more like a thinly disguised attempt to force people to purchase subscriptions. Blue checkmarks and all.

Sometimes people buy media corporations because they're interesting in using them to promote their other more lucrative operations (think Jeff Bezos and the Washington Post) so they don't really care about profitability, but I don't think Twitter fits that model, but who knows?

The WeChat model is the obvious answer to that rhetorical question. Build paid services on top of your hellsite with millions of addicts using it daily. For example, Twitter could have easily been the gateway to OnlyFans, or to Patreon. Apple is another example of this kind of value-added ecosystem that leverages a foothold to sell other crap to people.

Or there's the TikTok model: gobble up all the data, sell data to governments, give MBS or Putin admin access to Twitter, build AI on top of the dataset.

Even a private equity chop-shop like Bain could do a better job of extracting value from Twitter than this mess.

This isn't a profit-seeking venture for Musk. This is about politics, about power, and primarily about revenge. Musk is giving Notch stiff competition for the title of most pathetic billionaire.

I strongly disagree; this is about Musk buying Twitter accidentally, and then running it as best he could without losing face as "real world iron man". He's fucking up left, right and center because he was completely unprepared to actually run it, and suddenly needs $40B to pay off his debtors.

It's also about politics, power and revenge, but it's primarily about Musk being a fucking idiot and constantly digging himself deeper.

6k tweets a day even with the blue mark of shame makes something like tweetdeck functionally useless.

Obviously Elon and I have different uses for "The Worlds Town Square"

Not necessarily. I’ve predicted bad outcomes for decisions in a few cases and been ignored but stuck around regardless. Mostly because I like my job and the goals of my organization even if it makes bad decisions.

Of course to remain productive and improve my influence in future decision making it is absolutely critical that when predictions come true, I do not go anywhere near an “I told you so mentality.”

Instead I do what I can to clean up the mess with a “how can I help?” attitude. And increasingly over time people take my opinions and analysis much much more seriously.

I wouldn’t say that’s the path everyone should take, especially because some work environments are just too toxic for any progress at all (I ran away, fast, from two jobs like that). And some people cherish having an entirely new type of challenge every few years instead of shepherding something through longer periods of time. All valid paths.

Nobody good stays during ALL of this.

GP wrote:

> Enough so that I, given such a situation, would wait around a little bit to see how things played out before jumping ship.

That means "nobody" is talking about the group of people who have the option of "waiting around a little bit to see how things played out before jumping ship". H1B visa holders aren't included in that earlier group, so I didn't think a further qualification is necessary.

Which runs against every good piece of advice that has ever been uttered about leadership. Musk far overpaid for twitter because he wanted to be the center of attention and what better way to do that than to buy the network which gets the most attention from "important" people?

He then took the Michael Jordan trope of "I never asked anyone to do anything I was unwilling to do" and tried to turn that into reality by sleeping in his office every once in a while. The problem with this sentiment is that the only employees who are going to stick around long-term in such a ridiculous working arrangement are those who either can't find jobs elsewhere or are terrified that they won't be able to find jobs elsewhere.

So now you've got a highly toxic work environment full of people who are unconfident in their own abilities to get the work done, and Elon constantly pretend like he's some sort of business genius from the movies who just walks into a meeting, throws a bunch of turds on top of the agenda without having a firm grasp of anything, and storms off to light the next fire.

It's fucking insane.

The twitter engineers were presented with an opportunity to jump ship and also get 3 months of severance. I think the rational ones, who had a choice took it, leaving employees who didn't consider it rationally, as well as employees on H1Bs who didn't have the luxury to quit without something else lined up

In practice, the immigration authorities have enforcement priorities, and deporting overstating H1B is very far from being one.

As long as you don't cross a border, no one will come looking for you.

Source, my immigration lawyer when I was in danger of overstaying my H1B.

Deportation is a different legal event. It's a forceful expulsion which occurs because you did something seriously negative like break the law. Deportations are a big deal and a bad thing to have on your record in any country when it comes to your future prospects with that country.

To use a super rough analogy it's kind of like an honorable vs dishonorable discharge from the military.

Keep in mind that Musk intentionally turned Twitter completely upside down. Anything that people there liked about it before Musk is likely gone—coworkers, WFH, perks.

What do you think they are?

It’s a difficult balance: <Y> is in fact necessary to continually achieve <X> but there are times where decisions focus exclusively, or at least too much, on <Y>. But we live in the real world, and sometimes that’s necessary. (<Y> is not money though it has an impact on our financials) And also sometime people with a broader view see further than I do and those choices that seem wrong come around a few years later and it turns out <X> is actually better off for it. It keeps me humble, skeptical of my own certainty even when it seems faultless.

But I’m also at a point now where people who pop up and start shouting <r>! or <f>! or something completely random like “Well how about <~€€€~>?” I can easily deal with: I go back, do a bit of the work I do, show it to the right people, and those shouts -disappear. Sometimes one gets through and it’s annoying, but whatever, nothing is perfects.

Of course the above vastly oversimplifies things. There are many, many more variables to juggle along the way. But I hope it gives a reasonable sense of things.

And I’m sure the “<X>” style notation of things in my explanation makes it harder understand what I mean, but I value my privacy, hence the abstractions of the factors involved.

I guess the way you abstracted will probably reduce your privacy (a tiny bit). At least I have not seen anybody write "<X>" instead of just X in this usecase.

So either this is very specific to you, or is very common in your circles so you do it too. Both of which reduce the number of potential candidate if somebody tries to doxx you.

Additional you (or your editor) uses “” over " which also reduces the number of candidates.

(Not trying to attack you here, just thought it was notable)

Iirc word histograms almost uniquely identify authors. Of course this is on larger amounts of text, but I guess you could identify users over seperate platforms this way.

E.g. Intend to use ellipsis (...) to separate thoughts in online conversation a lot. But I try to not do that in reddit, where I try to stay somewhat anonymous.

Still, I assume that it would be possible to correlate my reddit and HN account just by comparing the word histograms (ie which words I use and how often).

(As a complete aside, that program of study also included Forensic Linguistics which truly fascinating. And of course the work of Claude Shannon and information theory, though not in any great depth)

Sounds far fetched, but it's really not that hard. Quite recently somebody hacked this for correlating HN accounts with each other and found alt accounts of people with high accuracy. Which people confirmed. And that wasn't even a serious attempt, just a little hack on a sunday night.

In a sense, it's all too late now since all your writing is already out there. But could be good to know for the future.

Or, as I do, consider everything posted to HN to be linked to me. My handle is actually an abbreviation of my full name. I consider HN to be "professional" correspondence.

I know that the site guidelines discourage that, but what can you do.

The goals of the organization are mostly a facade. The people running the organization, and their actions, are what the goals of the organization actually are.

Obviously. Are you suggesting that one can’t appreciate those? Or that this is some secret? Maybe the communication in the orgs you’ve been with has been poor?

But I do work in an industry where even the C-level people usually (not always) have at least a little interest in truly pursuing mission <X>

I know this for a fact because even though I am not at all C-level or even the manager of a large team, I often have a seat of the table in the meetings where such people come together. Those meeting can be ugly, they can reveal how the sausage is made, to borrow that analogy. And I’ve seen how many (not all) truly are trying to get <X> done but doing so may require a bit of ugly sausage making to get there.

And I’m not a wide eyed 4th year either. I’m a grizzled and usually cynical veteran in my field. My job is often to put out fires, or produce analytical tools or output of strategic importance, and also to sometimes to plug a major gap in operational capabilities. I’m not really a manger but I’ve earned a seat at the table when the highest people get together as well as when they interface with counterparts at other organizations.

Don’t take that that to mean too much though: I may have a voice, but it is by far, very far, the smallest voice in the room.

If you can’t refer to “last time this was disaster” (aka “I told you so”) how do you prevent it.

What I maintain though is that most anyone still working on code at Twitter, regardless of their experience or overview of the code base, would strongly argue for testing and staging, which appear to go against current leadership's mode of operation, likely because of the time pressure you mentioned.

Not pushing such changes straight to production is a concept I feel anyone working at Twitter would subscribe to, yet has to painfully go against, lest they be led go.

Nobody is forced to work at Twitter.

As for Visa issues, your complaint should be with the US government, not Twitter.

But where on earth does deportation not constitute force?

Consider if you employ a person to mow your lawn. If you no longer want his services, you can force him to leave your property.

If you're a guest in a country, any country, and do not comply with the terms of your visa, they'll deport you.

Twitter cannot deport anyone. Your beef is not with Twitter.

I don't know what your point is.

https://www.cobrainsurance.com/kb/can-i-get-cobra-if-i-quit/

"The length of the COBRA coverage period is typically 18 months, with the possibility of an additional 11 months for individuals with disabilities who meet the eligibility requirements."

https://www.cobrainsurance.com/what-is-cobra-insurance/

So paying COBRA might be 20% of your prior income, at the same time as losing all your income and still having to pay your rent and all other expenses.

To continue my family's health insurance cost $4000/month. Fifteen years ago.

When I was employed, my employer was paying more than half of that. It was part of my compensation that I took for granted.

With no income, limited savings, a mortgage and a family, I no longer took it for granted.

I was responsible for my poor financial decisions that made that transition even worse than it had to be.

But I can damn well believe there are Twitter employees who have made all the right moves, yet still hesitate to leave their jobs right now.

Yes. I used it for 18 months, then bought an insurance policy. That lasted until Obamacare forced that insurer to leave the state, and now I am on Obamacare.

> But I can damn well believe there are Twitter employees who have made all the right moves, yet still hesitate to leave their jobs right now.

I can believe it, too.

Long ago, the company I was working on encountered hard times, and did an across the board 10% pay cut. One of my coworkers was furiously grumbling about it, so I asked him why he didn't just quit (there are plenty of tech jobs around Seattle). He said his finances were so tight he couldn't afford to miss even one paycheck. He had a McMansion, his & hers new cars, expensive furniture, and expensive clothes.

He was in a cage he forged for himself, the company didn't do it to him.

Jobs in the private sector are not guaranteed. It's best to save a portion of each paycheck. I bought stock with my first job, and drove beaters for a long time (and still do). My last beater I drove for 30 years, until it finally expired.

I have a pretty good PPO & it cost $2400 for the 3 of us.

Also, it was a good plan but more than we could carry indefinitely. My health collapsed and we were in the second year of trying to figure out why. So we needed to carry it for a while, but were able to switch to a different arrangement when long-term medical leave came into effect some months later.

What you're saying is way, way short of force.

(The Rust community has its own very serious issues but no one would even try to say "boo hoo if they don't like it they can just uproot their lives and go back to a place they specifically got away from, nbd")

What I said was they were not forced to stay. I've read a number of history books, and what forced labor is is very clear. Besides, when one comes to the US on a Visa one chooses to accept the terms, and they do not include a guarantee of lifetime employment.

What I actually believe in is freedom and individual rights, and my posts are consistent with that. At least I hope so!

As for D, it is Boost licensed. It is the most free license I could find. You can do whatever you like with the code, as long as the copyright is included. (I would have made it public domain, but that isn't recognized in many countries.)

Each member of the D community has their own reasons for contributing, and many (myself included) do not receive any compensation. It's just our gift to you and everyone else.

It is your right to use it, or not, as you please.

P.S. The D Foundation also discourages politics of any sort in the discussion forums. I don't even know what the politics of the other contributors are. It's not relevant.

More generally your interpretation of "forced" seems to be extremely narrow. How would you interpret a statement like "today at work I was forced to attend two completely useless meetings", which IMO is perfectly common use of the word "forced", but certainly does not imply that security was standing in front of the door monitoring who goes in and out.

This was all in the context of a job, right?

Forced to stay (at the job) means being forced to do the work, presumably.

Which would be forced labor, no?

Or did I misread this entire thread?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_labour

I'm not being weird about it. Just calling out the idea that Musk is forcing people to work for him is hyperbolic. If you want to call Musk mean, arrogant, uncaring, bad, etc., that's all fine.

I'll stick with that.

If someone is making a decision primarily based on circumstances and/or coercion—and having to uproot your life absolutely is coercion—saying that "no actually, it's a choice" is unkind.

I hope you find the space to grow as a person some time.

Assuming your question is in good faith:

If you go AWOL from the military, they'll put you in the stockade or even execute you.

Working for a private company in the US is by free agreement between both parties, and can be terminated when either party withdraws consent. If the terms of the contract include a specific term of employment, and one party withdraws from that, the contract may stipulate redress for it. However, forced labor contracts are invalid under US law and unenforceable, unless it's the military.

I am not a lawyer, but that's my lay understanding of it.

So what? You are free to go AWOL. /s

While having the choice to quit, uproot the entire family and leave the country you’ve called home for many years is a choice technically, it’s not a choice most people are in a position to realistically make.

Unless the home feed being down is simply a side effect - the service that fetches tweets being DDOS'd by other views in the app making numerous non authenticated calls.

But I was also thinking about this earlier today. These days, everybody is so quick to say "the software is easy, it's the community that's hard" - I've even said it myself a few times in the past few weeks, but I think that might be overstated.

Building good software is hard. Keeping it good is even harder. What does the codebase look like for Twitter's front-end at this point?

How many frameworks has the base functionality been ported through? How many quick pivots from product adding features, adjusting things squashed down the ability to address technical debt or even have functioning unit and regression testing?

The fact that this 1. Made it to production and 2. Was not noticed and rolled back immediately (like, in under 30 minutes) is extremely concerning (and obviously very embarrassing.) If I had private data stored on Twitter of ANY kind (like DMs that I don't want getting out - a messaging system rich, famous, and powerful people have been using like email for over a decade), at this point I would be trying to get that data removed however I could, or accept that there's a strong possibility there's going to be a huge data breach and all of the data will be leaked.

that is definitely frontend error

If you’ve never had to handle authorization in a particular area, it might have been safe to assume that any 4xx error should have been retried when the code was originally written and someone didn’t write them all out

And even if you do retry, exponential backoff has been the standard for a long time (and is mentioned by the Twitter API documentation as a good solution to 429 responses)

Though it’s hard to know for sure what really went down. Could be a number of things. Including a lack of subject matter experts (Elon recently admitted to laying off some people they shouldn’t have).

On that note, the 10 requests/second in the post is also negligible for the same reason. Only requests that hit backend servers matter

Personally I'd just cache HTTP 429 responses for 1 minute, but you could also implement rate-limiting inside the load balancer with an in-memory KV store or bloom filter if you wanted to.

Perhaps the context you're missing is that all large sites use ECMP routing and consistent hashing to ensure that requests from the same IP hit the same load balancer. Twitter only has ~238 million daily active users. 10 requests/second on keepalive TCP+TLS connections can be handled by a couple of nginx servers. The linked "Full-stack Drupal developer" has no idea how any of this works and it's kinda sad how most people in this thread took his post at face value

That would give the server side more control over the retrying logic (when the header is properly interpreted). I'm surprised Elon hasn't implemented this himself.

If you use a listener, useEffect in react, to load data, it will start the request, track it is loading with a boolean, and then store the payload. That passes unit tests and QA.

If the listener doesn't check the error before starting the api request again, you have this infinite loop happen where the loading flag goes off and the payload is still null, so it just starts it again.

It's sloppy code, but its an unintentional side effect.

It’s actually exactly the type of problem declarative UI libraries like react were supposed to prevent, yet here we are 8 years later.

Doubt either care at this point.

Twitter had many issues as a company, but one of its strengths was a lot of independent thinking and honest speech among staff. That's surely gone, and once gone it's very hard to get back.

I'm absolutely going to keep enjoying Musk's comeuppance. In this, consider me a traditionalist. As the Greek tragedies show, people have been enjoying the just punishment of hubris for thousands of years.

And still be the wealthiest individual on the planet.

He could do it another 5 times and still be a billionaire.

Yes, I’m aware his net worth doesn’t mean liquid assets but the point remains.

Why rush things when you can fail 5 times and still try again?

No one can lose 40B and come out unscathed, not even Musk.

That said, his historical pattern is not to sell out so quickly, but rather to keep iterating until he and his team get it right.

Even Musk values it at $20 billion: https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/26/23657182/elon-musk-twitte...

And that was a few months ago. I'd argue that one of Twitter's most valuable assets, the blue checkmark, has been irrevocably destroyed. And if I were looking at buying it, I'd also be concerned that the technical infrastructure is a significantly impaired asset, possibly one of negative value.

But basically from the moment he tried to buy Twitter, he's been ruining that reputation. It started with the business press, who have more of an incentive to see through the BS, and who quickly pointed out that it was a clown show of a takeover even before the Delaware courts forced him to buy it. That alone put a major dent in Tesla's stock price.

Now everybody has gotten to see how bad he is at running Twitter. Most of us didn't know shit about launching satellites, but a lot more people understood Twitter. By objective measures, things have gone terribly, and there have been waves and waves of stories showing that Musk is not half the genius he was painted as. Which has caused a lot of questions being asked about all of his businesses.

So now we're entering an age of electric cars, with global intent to switch. But Tesla, the nominal leader, has a stock price down 40% from its peak, and with widespread questions about how well it can really do. And part of that is definitely brand damage from Musk; I recently saw a Tesla with a bumper sticker that said, "When we bought it, we didn't know he was an asshole." Surely that has something to do with weakening sales despite previously unheard-of discounts.

Maybe Musk will get it together, and mainly for the sake of others, I hope so. But if I had to bet, it would bet that his launching a bid for Twitter will be seen as a turning point where he began a long slide into irrelevance.

I agree that people enjoying suffering generally is pretty bad, and I avoid it. But I make an exception for people who cause suffering receiving the just consequences of their terrible actions. If Musk were just some guy who were living a quiet life and then got cancer or something, I'd feel for him. But he's not. He's someone who's been aggressively a jerk for more than a decade.

His deciding to take on being a CEO of yet another company, one he didn't really understand except as a user, was bad enough. But as a former Twitter user and employee, I've had to watch him destroy something that a lot of people, me included, worked very hard on. I've had to watch him harm thousands of people quite directly, and many more indirectly. And all for nothing more than his arrogance and some half-baked clout-chasing notions.

So I am absolutely going to enjoy the fuck out of his serial rake-stepping. Could this be bad for me? Well that's a question I will take seriously from somebody in saffron robes that spends 10 hours a day meditating. But it's not one I'll entertain from the Volunteer Musk Defense Brigade, and especially not from one of its members who was busy performing lack of empathy recently on this very site: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35824824

And in an irony of ironies, you crawl through my post history and take objection to me expressing my lack of empathy for those that make repeated bad financial decisions, but you're not only defending that very sentiment, but taking it a step further: enjoyment of the suffering. I hope you find peace, brother. I'm going to put my robes back on and get those last few meditation hours in now.

But you're only objecting to it when it's somebody you like. When it's poor people, you're fine with trumpeting your imagined moral superiority. But when it's a famous rich guy, you're out here doing free PR on his behalf. You did not "go build something" then, and you're unable to even reflect on your blatant double standard.

You have no standing to moralize at me. And just to be clear, what I feel for you is not spite, but contempt, because you're not only a hypocrite, but you're using what might be otherwise valid moral points to derail discussion of one of the world's biggest jerks. Motes and beams, buddy.

Advertisers, the one group Elon is desperately trying to accommodate, will care.

Forced? You know slavery was abolished a long time ago no?

But when a higher-up so clearly takes responsibility of something that is risky but deemed necessary, it provides for a lot better space to also respond to any potential problems that pop up, while not needing to suffer snarky comments in hindsight as a dev.

Of course something like this is easier to hate on ...

Will admit that seeing a billionaire go mental is funny. Petty I know.

The push to "make the content less user friendly" and push then to our app/logged in experience is similar to reddit's push and it doesn't really present an insurmountable challenge on the technical side.

These technical hurdles are temporary. Not the end of the world. The "only in our app/only logged in" requirements are bad on a philosophical level of user choice, not on the "this is terrible technically" side.

Attacking it on that note is just perpetuating the narrative where elonmuskmanbad (which is more political than consistent with the treatment others get) above more specific truths.

This is something I don't get. They say that Twitter is now blocking embeds and I've seen an author respond by... including a screenshot of a tweet in their piece.

Except that's obviously better than embedding a tweet in the first place. It's better in every possible way. It's easier to write your article with an included image that you provide than to hotlink content from some other website. And when the tweet vanishes into the mists of history, your captured image of it will still be around, illustrating your article the way you were hoping the embedded tweet would do. There are so many articles out there with dead embedded tweets illustrating... something.

So, all that said... what was the effect that embeddability had on reporting? Why hasn't it been screenshots the whole time? What did easy embeddability enable that wasn't just as easy anyway?

2. Make a change you don’t understand

3. (2) causes a DDoS

4. Interpret it as an attack, because of (1)

5. Make more changes you don’t understand

6. ?

7. Profit?

Two nines is atleast 99.0%.

Three nines is atleast 99.9%.

and so on.

So the result wasn't an outage, it was a radical reduction in functionality.

I think that still qualifies as a self-ddos.

Maybe not

> if twitter isn't going down

I disagree. Ddos is a type of attack, not the result of an attack. If they're hitting their services way too many times in a distributed fashion, it's a ddos regardless of how it was handled.

Similarly, would you say this[0] wasn't a ddos because it was mitigated? I think not.

[0] https://blog.cloudflare.com/26m-rps-ddos/

I agree. DoS is an attack, so without intent it is fuzzy. But I think it is pretty descriptive, so it's okay. I know exactly what self-ddos means instantly (flooding your own service, without malicious intent).

I think it's kind of a limitation with English or the term ddos. If it really is only used it for intent to attack, it becomes less useful of a word IMO.

You can’t debug and root cause if you do. So you end up adding hacky point fixes

The root cause is business & feature experimentation at scale with a tight runway & no executive oversight.