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Tell HN: Twitter switched temporarily to rate limited mode

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Tell HN: Twitter switched temporarily to rate limited mode

#711

Post by DropInIn »

dspillett wrote: post #465
the42thdoctor wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he was trying to say that the Frontend of the Twitter timeline is not aware of the new request limit, and when that limit is reached it just retries the request, as it would in a normal network error, and keeps in retrying resulting on DDOS. But I don't believe on that because Twitter is a billion dollar company and that kind of mistake is dumb. So idk.

> But I don't believe on that because Twitter is a billion dollar company and that kind of mistake is dumb. This sort of mistake is very common especially when a product is going through a period of change, so it seems very believable to me that recent rate limiting features (or older features that have not been used in a long time or maybe ever) on the backend hadn't been adequately tested to make sure there are no…

Very common for start ups with inexperienced devs, not for long standing tech companies with the best and most experienced employees...

Isn't Elon supposed to know this shit himself?

I guess we learned alot about the state of the company as well as elons own coding skills with this event, didn't we?

Re: Tell HN: Twitter switched temporarily to rate limited mode

#712

Post by l33tc0de »

user_named wrote: post #293

Reminder that Elon didn't even intend to buy Twitter He wanted to sell ~$2.5 Billion Tesla stock at all-time highs without causing the stock price to significantly deflate, so he used the Twitter purchase suggestion as a cover. He did similar pump and dump schemes with crypto - like Dogecoin - but because Elon is fundamentally a dumb guy, he did the extraordinarily stupid thing of signing a purchase agreement with Tw…

"but because Elon is fundamentally a dumb guy" - Oh genius, let us know who you are

Re: Tell HN: Twitter switched temporarily to rate limited mode

#713

Post by l33tc0de »

minimaxir wrote: post #322

Update from Elon: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1675214274627530754 > Rate limits increasing soon to 8000 for verified, 800 for unverified & 400 for new unverified lolwut. Quoting a post from Mastodon: https://mstdn.social/@maxkennerly/110640373859329500 > LOL this is not how you deal with "data scraping," this is how you deal with a catastrophic loss of system capacity. > You limit data scraping by blocking th…

Alphabet people talking about Twitter on Mastodon

Re: Tell HN: Twitter switched temporarily to rate limited mode

#714

Post by brohee »

somenameforme wrote: post #184
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s notable that it’s Elon, not Yaccarino, making this announcement (and likely decision).

It sounds like they are facing a novel denial of service attack that was near to the point of being able to imperil their service. This is an obviously temporary remediation to keep the systems up, not a new policy for the site. And all of that falls right under the purview of the CTO.

Entities cutting service because they are not getting paid is technically denial of service I guess...

Re: Tell HN: Twitter switched temporarily to rate limited mode

#715

Post by seanhunter »

somenameforme wrote: post #184
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s notable that it’s Elon, not Yaccarino, making this announcement (and likely decision).

It sounds like they are facing a novel denial of service attack that was near to the point of being able to imperil their service. This is an obviously temporary remediation to keep the systems up, not a new policy for the site. And all of that falls right under the purview of the CTO.

No it was "management by stochastic gradient descent" as per Elon's usual modus operandi.

Re: Tell HN: Twitter switched temporarily to rate limited mode

#716

Post by phpisthebest »

tyrust wrote: post #623
phpisthebest wrote: post #608

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TIL that June 1st is "today" July 1st... In reality that was a month ago, and on June 30th they increased the value https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/30/fidelity-deepens-valuation...

> The financial giant also readjusted the value of its holding in Twitter to $6.86 million, up from $6.55 million from a month prior, but still down 65% since the original investment. Still significantly down.

[flagged]

Re: Tell HN: Twitter switched temporarily to rate limited mode

#718

Post by willis936 »

ProjectArcturis wrote: post #536
tiedieconderoga wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd think they would at least throw in an exponential backoff. Here, I'll help. to = 2; while (!request(timeout=to)) { to *= 2; } I'm available for a 6-week contract. $1M plus a ride in a Dragon capsule, cash up front.

We'll give you $2M and a free OceanGate tour of the Titanic; $2M paid after the tour.

That's better than my current life insurance policy.

Re: Tell HN: Twitter switched temporarily to rate limited mode

#719

Post by KnobbleMcKnees »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #485
slawton3 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's even funnier when Elon confirmed that scrolling through a tweet counts as a read.

Isn't that obvious though? What else would count as a read?

It's impossible to know for real if someone has read a tweet -especially on Twitter where several tweets appear on the screen at once - however "dwell time" is a common measurement that is usually enough to appease marketers.

In this case it doesn't matter though because the aim is to mitigate cost, so equating an impression with engagement is fine.

Re: Tell HN: Twitter switched temporarily to rate limited mode

#720

Post by gmerc »

petesergeant wrote: post #457
zimpenfish wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I find the scraping explanation plausible. How do you explain it suddenly being a problem today and not, say, during the recent World Cup when not only the AI scraping would have been happening but el Morko himself was crowing about how much extra traffic they were handling?

Someone with deep pockets flipped the ON switch?

The much simpler explanation is that elon lied again.
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