from Hacker News

Decimation of Twitter Eng

by marvindanig on 11/27/22, 4:19 AM with 20 comments

  • by shrubble on 11/27/22, 5:10 AM

    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...

  • by renewiltord on 11/27/22, 8:31 AM

    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.

  • by the_doctah on 11/27/22, 6:33 AM

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

  • by jmeister on 11/27/22, 5:54 AM

    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.

  • by chatman on 11/27/22, 4:36 AM

    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.

  • by sidibe on 11/27/22, 4:42 AM

    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.