161–170 of 255 posts
Comments in this thread are quite cringeworthy. People calling WhatsApp a simple application seem to fail to understand the cost of simplicity under such scale.
Isn't the fact that they've actually done it with so few people fairly concrete evidence that it's not incredibly complex?
They could be using really good tools. Or each of those 50 programmers are 10x more productive than regular programmer (I don't believe in this imo).
"WhatsApp doesn’t talk much about its engineering work" - Wrong as hell. They first talked about this in erlang conf about 3 yrs ago, in 2012. [Youtube Link]( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDk6l3tPBuw ). I hate how tech blogs take a thing thats quite well known and old and spins into a "did you know?" post like it was just unraveled (Oh, maybe your staff just heard about it, doesnt mean no one knows shit.)
Reading through comments, I think there is an undercurrent of slight envy or resentment (perhaps unconscious) both towards WhatsApp and Erlang. We are rational people so we'll never admit to that, so it comes out in other objections "It is a simple system", "I could do the backend in a weekend"... There are a lot of startup people here, who work at a startup, bet their time, money, life? on one, and talking about a s…
1. No web interface, I'm forced to use a tiny mobile keyboard
2. Identity tied to my phone number which changes every month
3. Ugly (subjective)
4. My friends are already on Facebook, why have another service that does the same thing but worse.
5. No chat bubbles.
6. No meme search
I could go on and on. They just got lucky and hit the lotto with foreigners who couldn't afford decent phones and are now locked in to their platform.
Edit: formatting
I'll never understand why so many people prefered WhatsApp over anything that already existed previously and even worked better.
To elaborate, there are many reasons 1. They have a no ads policy which is a really godsend thing when other messengers had stickers, games and just plain annoying ads. 2. The ones that did not, for ex Google etc were not really made for phones. They understood the importance of using your contacts as social graph really really well. 3. They almost never experienced outages. 4. Had sensible defaults. 5. Their apps ar…
I'll never understand why so many people prefered WhatsApp over anything that already existed previously and even worked better.
Because you can reach your friends and loved ones with WA. It is quite simple. You can make a better IM with fewer people, when you don't have bloat like stickers market and celebrity chats. And don't try to push people to buy those stickers in every possible menu. (Hi Viber).
Here's part of what I don't get - there are so many government organizations, state and federal, jumping over themselves to provide funding, incubation and support to IT product/app companies across the country claiming it creates jobs when, as this shows, it is entirely possible to operate at incredible scale nowadays with a mere skeleton staff. So why do so many government-run and government-funded programs fawn ov…
I guess they hope for startups that eventually will be tech giants like Apple and IBM, that actually do create jobs. It's only a fairly recent development that it's becoming evident that technology allows for a tremendous centralization and automation. Algorithms are invented by one person, implemented by ten and used by billions. Eventually, only a tiny elite will need to work, and at that point we will need some so…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think anyone commenting along these lines on HN is that ignorant. Everyone on here understands that anything executed at the WhatsApp/FB/Instagram sort of scale is going to present all sorts of tough problems and require software engineering know-how in spades. However of all the various applications you could conceivably scale to hundreds of millions of users this is one of the simplest. I do not think ackno…
>However of all the various applications you could conceivably scale to hundreds of millions of users this is one of the simplest. I do not think acknowledging that is cringeworthy at all. What other apps besides social networking and communication apps even get to hundreds of millions of user?
Here's part of what I don't get - there are so many government organizations, state and federal, jumping over themselves to provide funding, incubation and support to IT product/app companies across the country claiming it creates jobs when, as this shows, it is entirely possible to operate at incredible scale nowadays with a mere skeleton staff. So why do so many government-run and government-funded programs fawn ov…
There are many funded startups and publicly traded companies that are doing the same thing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reading through comments, I think there is an undercurrent of slight envy or resentment (perhaps unconscious) both towards WhatsApp and Erlang. We are rational people so we'll never admit to that, so it comes out in other objections "It is a simple system", "I could do the backend in a weekend"... There are a lot of startup people here, who work at a startup, bet their time, money, life? on one, and talking about a s…
I resent them because Whatsapp is terrible, terrible software compared to Facebook Messenger yet somehow made $19B. 1. No web interface, I'm forced to use a tiny mobile keyboard 2. Identity tied to my phone number which changes every month 3. Ugly (subjective) 4. My friends are already on Facebook, why have another service that does the same thing but worse. 5. No chat bubbles. 6. No meme search I could go on and on.…
> Why WhatsApp Only Needs 50 Engineers for Its 900M Users Answer: because sending short messages from A to B is basically a solved problem. There is even a programming language (Erlang) that was made with this application in mind. The prototypical "Hello World" example for Erlang is a messaging application.
The only thing simpler would be sending messages to a centralized queue for people to fetch. Yet Twitter needs 4100 employees for that (though not all engineers I hope).