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Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

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Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#552
post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's definitely a strong element of people here rooting for Twitter to fail because they dislike Elon's politics.

It is -- and I cannot stress this enough -- entirely OK to root for the failure of a company that is owned, directed and dominated by an odious person with abhorrent politics. 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 r…

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Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#553
post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's definitely a strong element of people here rooting for Twitter to fail because they dislike Elon's politics.

It is -- and I cannot stress this enough -- entirely OK to root for the failure of a company that is owned, directed and dominated by an odious person with abhorrent politics. 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 r…

[flagged]

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The people at Twitter who understood the system and could predict the side effects were all fired or left. 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…

to be fair i would guess that a lot of the engineers there are also stuck because of visa issues. plenty of sychophants too i’m sure.

That’s what they meant about H1B.

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

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except, progress grinding to a halt pretty much described Twitter before Elon Musk too. The story that anyone who knew anything was let go is just that, a story, as the number of employees by year shows Twitter, and other tech companies in the same period, overhired and then went back to pre-2020 levels. The only difference between then and now is that there is a big personality at the top who now personifies everyth…

> The story that anyone who knew anything was let go is just that, a story, as the number of employees by year shows Twitter, and other tech companies in the same period, overhired and then went back to pre-2020 levels. 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 ev…

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Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#556
post #499
post #7

This is interesting. Judging from the screenshot, a huge amount of GET /TweetDetail is generated which triggers some rate limiting, as shown by the 429. If this is indeed due to the recent decision to enforce authentication for all API calls, it means the curlprit may actually be the API gateway or something similar downstream. Also, this behavior seem to never stop, which isn't what one would expect from an exponent…

While exponential backoff is theoretically optimal, I doubt it's actually used that often in practice. I've seen too many cases where someone decides serving user requests with low latency is so important that they'd rather have a constant randomized backoff than exponential backoff. I've been in many design meetings and seen enough documents where the decision not to use exponential backoff is explicitly made, under…

I wouldn’t be surprised if this has no back off or limit at all. 10 RPS is fast enough that it may simply be sequential.

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#557
post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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

I agree about healthcare. Employees in the United States over-perform because we can't risk losing health insurance and ending up in financial ruin.

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?

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A union vote is the only way to save that platform. Either unionize or let the company die.

Unions are for the people, not the company

For the people who work at the company and want to continue.

They don't get paid after the company dies.

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ll play the devils advocate here but frontend devs need to smarten up. This is basic error handling that should have been in place for years. Blocking tweets with 403 or whatever they chose shouldn’t trigger endless retries on short intervals.. ever!

..and using exponential back-off, if not limiting the number of retries. 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).

Devil's advocate here: did we consider that any such exponential back off goes out the window when users, faced with a non-working site, will just refresh the page therefor reseting the whole process?

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#560
post #557

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.

I agree about healthcare. Employees in the United States over-perform because we can't risk losing health insurance and ending up in financial ruin. 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…

The issue is that they, for their own mix of reasons, decided they most preferred to work in the US on an H1B, and are now losing that.
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