Giving you more characters • Hacker News Board

Re: Giving you more characters

#241

Post by Pxtl » Wed, Sep 27, 2017, 2:22 AM UTC

continuational wrote: post #164

okr wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can think of many reasons, why a limit is somehow hardcoded/assumed throughout the entire system including the history and probably a lot of optimizations around it. You can not think of any? In databases you also have limits, like character limits, like 16k for a varchar or something. Or memcaches with bucket sizes and so on. It is not just changing a number, i can imagine.

There are databases with arbitrary limits on strings? That strikes me as really poor design.

Almost every SQL database has arbitrary limits on text. Personally I find it ludicrously anachronistic.

Re: Giving you more characters

#242

Post by Pxtl » Wed, Sep 27, 2017, 2:25 AM UTC

Latin-derived languages are getting longer, but Asian ones aren't? It sounds like they're switching to utf-8.

I know that's not really what's happening, but that's what it sounds like.

Re: Giving you more characters

#243

Post by snuxoll » Wed, Sep 27, 2017, 2:30 AM UTC

Pxtl wrote: post #241

continuational wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are databases with arbitrary limits on strings? That strikes me as really poor design.

Almost every SQL database has arbitrary limits on text. Personally I find it ludicrously anachronistic.

I mean, there’s good reasons to limit the size of fields in database tuples - relational databases are made for storing small to medium amounts of normalized data, you can abuse them (and I have, storing a couple million 60-200K PDF’s in a Postgres database at work) but you can shoot yourself in the foot by creating tons of 60% full pages and the stupid amount of extra IOPS those wide columns create.

Still, not allowing unrestricted text and binary columns is still silly, so I agree for the most part - but you still need to know what you’re getting yourself into when you start making wide tables.

Re: Giving you more characters

#244

Post by geofft » Wed, Sep 27, 2017, 2:31 AM UTC

Overtonwindow wrote: post #181

robtaylor wrote: post #50

@Jack said "Proud of how thoughtful the team has been in solving a real problem people have when trying to tweet. And at the same time maintaining our brevity, speed, and essence!" https://twitter.com/jack/status/912784057863245824 How many people did it take to come up with double a char limit, and how is that 'thoughtful' or 'solving' anything? Total guff. The start of the end of twitter hashtag hottake.

Someone needs to make an Apple-style video of a Twitter employee talking about this latest breakthrough in human communication. Oh, and they have to use the word "courage"

Twitter is saving its courage for enabling nuclear war. https://twitter.com/biz/status/912526977361264640

Re: Giving you more characters

#245

Post by m3kw9 » Wed, Sep 27, 2017, 2:31 AM UTC

Having known many Japanese, I feel they like to be concise and simple in their expression, they do like infer a lot and not be direct, hence no need to spell everything out all the time

Re: Giving you more characters

#246

Post by perseusprime11 » Wed, Sep 27, 2017, 2:34 AM UTC

robtaylor wrote: post #50

@Jack said "Proud of how thoughtful the team has been in solving a real problem people have when trying to tweet. And at the same time maintaining our brevity, speed, and essence!" https://twitter.com/jack/status/912784057863245824 How many people did it take to come up with double a char limit, and how is that 'thoughtful' or 'solving' anything? Total guff. The start of the end of twitter hashtag hottake.

And all they had to do was to remove URL from character count. Now we will be staring at Twitter trying to become Tumblr.

Re: Giving you more characters

#247

Post by aaron-lebo » Wed, Sep 27, 2017, 2:35 AM UTC

geofft wrote: post #244

Overtonwindow wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone needs to make an Apple-style video of a Twitter employee talking about this latest breakthrough in human communication. Oh, and they have to use the word "courage"

Twitter is saving its courage for enabling nuclear war. https://twitter.com/biz/status/912526977361264640

Don't understand the criticism. If the world goes to nuclear war, it won't be because of a Tweet, it'll be because of a conflict going back to the 1950s, a lunatic dictator, and an elected maybe unstable authoritarian. You don't think those guys have lots of other ways of talking trash?

Is the suggestion that banning Trump from Twitter will prevent nuclear war? That sounds like armchair virtue signaling of the highest order. Or is there more to it; am I misunderstanding?

edit, so after searching, this is based on this:

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/09/25/553475174/...

North Korea's foreign minister says President Trump's tweets about the Korean nation amount to a declaration of war and that under international law, his country can legally shoot down U.S. military planes — even if they're not in North Korea's airspace.

We pretending that the North Korean government hasn't justified a lot of crazy stuff? They probably have a good justification for the invasion of South Korea, too.

Re: Giving you more characters

#248

Post by nobodynobodee » Wed, Sep 27, 2017, 2:35 AM UTC

A 4 person startup can double its character count in an afternoon.

A 1,000 person startup needs a team of 8 and two quarterly OKR periods.

Re: Giving you more characters

#249

Post by ufo » Wed, Sep 27, 2017, 2:37 AM UTC

mintplant wrote: post #44

Mastodon [0] has a default character limit of 500, which individual instances can turn up or down as they see fit (Mastodon is a federated network). Hundreds of thousands of people use it and the social dynamics work just fine, or even better, with the additional breathing room for expression. To me Twitter's attachment to such a low cap feels like an anachronism. [0] https://joinmastodon.org

Do you need to have an account to lurk around a mastodon instance?

Re: Giving you more characters

#250

Post by KekDemaga » Wed, Sep 27, 2017, 2:39 AM UTC

continuational wrote: post #164

okr wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can think of many reasons, why a limit is somehow hardcoded/assumed throughout the entire system including the history and probably a lot of optimizations around it. You can not think of any? In databases you also have limits, like character limits, like 16k for a varchar or something. Or memcaches with bucket sizes and so on. It is not just changing a number, i can imagine.

There are databases with arbitrary limits on strings? That strikes me as really poor design.

Why you are being down voted: As far as I know in most databases TEXT and BLOB types have no "arbitrary" length parameters but are stored at the end of the database file making access slower especially on spinning rust, VARCHAR(x) can only be x characters long but is stored inline with the table so it's much faster. If you know the length of a string won't exceed a relatively small number of characters VARCHAR is the right tool for the job.