Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

sfba.social

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

651–660 of 1001 posts

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#651

Post by doomleika »

8organicbits wrote: post #377
oblio wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean?

Jitter is a little randomness in how long clients wait between retries. It ensures that you don't have a "thundering herd" all retrying at the same time. Imagine if your API used exponential backoff of [1s, 2s, 4s, 8s, ...] and a large group of requests gets a retryable error at t=0. They will all retry at exactly t=1, t=2, etc. If the group is large enough that repeated surge of requests can knock you offline. There…

Ah, so it’s like CDMA in WLAN, TIL

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#652

Post by cto_of_antifa »

jayd16 wrote: post #635
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…

> The people at Twitter who understood the system But this is Scaling-101 stuff. It's not some super complex or unique system going wrong. At least according to the article, it's a classic case of bad retry logic leading to a death spiral. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thundering_herd_problem

[dead]

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#653

Post by ars »

Travis_Pastrami wrote: post #617
mensetmanusman wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I wish Obama care had simply been: 'employer provided healthcare is illegal in 2024'

I don't see how that would be any better than what we have now. If employer provided healthcare was removed, that would leave us with a bunch of private healthcare companies. These private companies would drive up the cost even more. If an affordable or free healthcare option was offered on top of making employer provided healthcare illegal, then I completely am behind your idea.

> that would leave us with a bunch of private healthcare companies.

It's already a bunch of private companies.

> These private companies would drive up the cost even more.

Other way around - by having to actually directly compete for customers, instead of just having to convince a few large corporation prices would go down, not up.

Although we really should not ignore that insurance companies are not the drivers of higher costs, it's health care providers that do that.

It's enjoyable to blame insurance companies, but the reality is their profits are capped by law - they are not the problem. Dr.'s will have to take a pay cut, and there will have to be mass layoffs, there's no other way to reduce costs.

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#654

Post by berkle4455 »

pschuegr wrote: post #598
evan_ wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think it’s necessarily saying the self-inflicted DDoS has caused a technical issue that’s forced them to shut down access. I think it’s possible that shutting down anonymous access caused the DDoS, which led to giant spikes in some metric , which led them (Elon) to conclude that there was an uptick in scraping, so they imposed the 600/tweet/day limit to punish scrapers. Seems like either my quota reset or the…

This. I'd bet substantial amounts of money that the evil scraper idea is the result of a) another issue + b) paranoia + c) Musk thinking he understands better than anybody else.

This is a really ignorant take to dismiss scrapers. LLMs operate by having petabytes of conversational training data. Scraping is how OpenAI trained GPT. It’s how all their copycats are trying to do the same.

Elon can be a monumental asshat, and he can be self-DDOS’ing, and can be accurate about scraping at the same time. It’s why every single social media platform is heading toward becoming a walled garden.

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#655

Post by andsoitis »

spamizbad wrote: post #632
andsoitis wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The people at Twitter who understood the system and could predict the side effects were all fired or left. Are you saying the engineers who are now at Twitter don’t have the right skills?

They lack knowledge not skills. To my knowledge there is no "intuitively understand how my changes will impact a complex system without studying it" skill (unless that system is under a robust test suite, which Twitter is not)

> knowledge there is no "intuitively understand how my changes will impact a complex system without studying it" skill (unless that system is under a robust test suite, which Twitter is not

then how do they have confidence that anything works before they subject hundreds of millions of people around the world to system updates? that seems disrespectful to the user, if you asked me.

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#656

Post by andbberger »

jaggederest wrote: post #358
Waterluvian wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If executives are throwing you under a bus, make an exit. There’s no coming back from a clown show like that.

I have a general rule that I make proactive, diligent efforts to inform and correct, and I do it 3 times to 3 different groups in leadership, and if that doesn't work, I'm out. I'm about 2 for 8 but you gotta try sometimes.

not my circus

did you get copmensation for the 2 times it worked out

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#657

Post by sleepybrett »

cj wrote: post #392
baby wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Employment is not the choice in the USA because health care is tied to it. The second reason is H1B.

> Employment is not the choice If you’re a software engineer anywhere in the US (with exception of H1B/TN/etc), where you work is 100% your choice. There isn’t a shortage of open engineering roles in this country. Nearly 100% of full time positions include fully paid healthcare.

Based solely on my linkedin inbox, that's not currently true. A year ago I would get ~10-12 recruiters pitching me jobs a month. For the last three months that's down to exactly 1 each month.

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#658

Post by FranksTV »

lolinder wrote: post #627
sigzero wrote: post #622

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The people at Twitter who understood the system and could predict the side effects were all fired or left. You have zero idea if that is true or not.

About 80% of Twitter was laid off or quit. I think it's a reasonable supposition that a good number of those were critical personnel who felt they could get a better deal somewhere else.

"But the code is self-documenting!"

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#659

Post by FranksTV »

tomcam wrote: post #636
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…

How do you force someone to work at Twitter?

If they quit their H1-B gets revoked.

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#660

Post by AbraKdabra »

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 feel very sorry for the people forced to work at that company under that management.

Forced? You know slavery was abolished a long time ago no?

Post reply on HN