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Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

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Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#401

Post by bbreier »

trevioustrouble wrote: post #397
martincmartin wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people at Twitter who understood the system and could predict the side effects were all fired or left. My guess is Elon said "the site's too slow!" Engineers noticed that the home feed request was slow. They didn't understand how it worked, had no tools to profile it, and were given an unrealistic deadline to fix it. So about the only thing they could do was issue multiple, parallel requests and hope that at leas…

[flagged]

I have no experience managing a company at that scale so I won't challenge the assertion that Elon is doing a better job than I would but... the feed has not been rate limited for unregistered users for the history of the site as far as I know, and its been pretty damn stable and snappy!

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#402

Post by pkulak »

trevioustrouble wrote: post #397
martincmartin wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people at Twitter who understood the system and could predict the side effects were all fired or left. My guess is Elon said "the site's too slow!" Engineers noticed that the home feed request was slow. They didn't understand how it worked, had no tools to profile it, and were given an unrealistic deadline to fix it. So about the only thing they could do was issue multiple, parallel requests and hope that at leas…

[flagged]

I can see your perspective, up to the last bit. Elon is objectively incompetent.

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#403

Post by trevioustrouble »

Topfi wrote: post #126

Speaking from very painful, personal experience, few things are more agitating than being forced to execute on something you fully know is a horrible idea, especially when you tried and failed to communicate this fact to the individual pushing you to go against your best judgement. 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…

[flagged]

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#404

Post by nicolas_17 »

sanderjd wrote: post #342
Topfi wrote: post #126

Speaking from very painful, personal experience, few things are more agitating than being forced to execute on something you fully know is a horrible idea, especially when you tried and failed to communicate this fact to the individual pushing you to go against your best judgement. 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…

I'm curious about this: When you were experiencing this, why didn't you quit? I truly feel bummed for the people remaining at Twitter who are miserable but for whatever reason feel they can't just quit.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7z5px/twitter-employees-on-...

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#405

Post by EdwardDiego »

trevioustrouble wrote: post #397
martincmartin wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people at Twitter who understood the system and could predict the side effects were all fired or left. My guess is Elon said "the site's too slow!" Engineers noticed that the home feed request was slow. They didn't understand how it worked, had no tools to profile it, and were given an unrealistic deadline to fix it. So about the only thing they could do was issue multiple, parallel requests and hope that at leas…

[flagged]

I didn't see them mention a degree in philosophy at all.

> 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.

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#406

Post by eyelidlessness »

TheBlight wrote: post #389

I don't see any unusual behavior when looking at the debugger in Chrome. People have a political issue with Elon. Which is fine. People are entitled to it.

The post suggests a race condition as the underlying cause of the behavior shown in screen captures. It’s perfectly possible the race condition does exist, and being a race condition you just didn’t happen to trigger it. It’s also perfectly possible to discover such a defect with or without any personal bias towards Musk or Twitter.

Reporting it publicly this way can also be a favor to both, as it gives them a fairly malleable narrative for reversing course, or directing responsibility, or both. Even if it’s simultaneously embarrassing to have it out there. And it’s not like either Musk or Twitter is a stranger to embarrassment, or particularly shy about courting it.

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#407

Post by curtisblaine »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #274
choppaface wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well "forced to execute" is somewhat subjective. If you are convinced leadership is doing the "wrong thing," then best to either leave or accept that you're just collecting your paycheck. 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 lo…

> Well "forced to execute" is somewhat subjective. If you are convinced leadership is doing the "wrong thing," then best to either leave or accept that you're just collecting your paycheck. Я, Unless your visa is sponsored by your employer.

If your visa is sponsored, you should be especially prepared to execute even if the leadership is doing the wrong thing, at least until you have an alternative. Being hired on visa means having less contractual power, and there's no way around it.

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#408

Post by 14u2c »

Xeamek wrote: post #369
roughly wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That will be the case once H1-Bs are reformed and universal healthcare becomes real. Until then, this is an unrealistic and cruel position.

Nah, that's bs. 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 cring…

H1-Bs are not an "extreme instance", to they are incredibly common. At my previous company I knew a excellent engineer who was treated poorly and paid way less than he deserved. He had no choice though because loosing the job means he's kicked out of the country. Obviously he was grateful for the opportunity, but there's a flip side to it as well.

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#409

Post by TheBlight »

eyelidlessness wrote: post #406
TheBlight wrote: post #389

I don't see any unusual behavior when looking at the debugger in Chrome. People have a political issue with Elon. Which is fine. People are entitled to it.

The post suggests a race condition as the underlying cause of the behavior shown in screen captures. It’s perfectly possible the race condition does exist, and being a race condition you just didn’t happen to trigger it. It’s also perfectly possible to discover such a defect with or without any personal bias towards Musk or Twitter. Reporting it publicly this way can also be a favor to both, as it gives them a fairly…

Clearly there is something wrong with the site. So I don't doubt there is a bug. But the OP gives no helpful information that could be used to reproduce the issue and fails to describe it in any helpful detail really. They seem content to just effectively say "Twitter is dumb." Which, again, is fine but not all that technical and interesting.

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#410

Post by EdwardDiego »

epistasis wrote: post #286
aeyes wrote: post #272

This bug is very unlikely to be the reason. The rate limiter on the server side is cheap and the frontend bug only gets triggered with the rate limit active. I have seen similar bugs in the systems I oversee because network libraries love to retry requests without sane limitations by default. But I never saw them make our rate limiters sweat. It's slightly more annoying when they hit an API which actually does some e…

One thing about having leadership that is known to lie about anything or everything, for any sort of imagined personal gain, is that the very concept of truth is destroyed. I agree that this is probably not the bug at the root of it all. But I also don't believe the story that Musk is selling for why he's in effect shutting down the site. But both could be true and I'm still thinking about other potential reasons, a…

I feel like that book title is paraphrased from the maxim of the leader of the Assassins in that Alamut novel.

"Nothing is an absolute reality, all is permitted"

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