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Digg's v4 launch: an optimism born of necessity (2018)

lethain.com

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Re: Digg's v4 launch: an optimism born of necessity (2018)

#21

Post by conradfr »

deergomoo wrote: post #18

Good read. Interesting that the author’s takeaway is that folks consider Digg v4 to be a catastrophic launch because of the myriad technical issues. I don’t even remember there being technical issues, I just remember logging in one day to find a website I enjoyed replaced with a bunch of crap I wasn’t interested in.

That's my recollection of it. Just one day the content was not interesting anymore and felt certainly more gamed than before, which they wanted to combat as per this blog post.

I'm surprised the conclusion is not that they learn to never do a full rewrite of a social product again.

Re: Digg's v4 launch: an optimism born of necessity (2018)

#22

Post by neom »

mr90210 wrote: post #15
neom wrote: post #9

Kevin Rose: We migrated from LAMP to Cassandra because LAMP doesn't scale and Cassandra does. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQNBcIPSROs

Hasn’t Facebook moved away from LAMP because of… scale? Given how many users they have I suppose they know a thing or two about scale.

Facebook made Cassandra specifically because of this.

https://www.cs.cornell.edu/projects/ladis2009/papers/lakshma...

Re: Digg's v4 launch: an optimism born of necessity (2018)

#23

Post by [deleted] »

biorach wrote: post #3

> Our API server was a Python Tornado service... and one of the most frequently accessed endpoint was used to retrieve user by their name or id. Because it supported retrieval by either name or id, it set default values for both parameters as empty lists. This is a super reasonable thing to do! However, Python only initializes default parameters when the function is first evaluated, which means that the same list is…

[deleted]

Re: Digg's v4 launch: an optimism born of necessity (2018)

#24

Post by quickthrower2 »

ohgodplsno wrote: post #19
biorach wrote: post #3

> Our API server was a Python Tornado service... and one of the most frequently accessed endpoint was used to retrieve user by their name or id. Because it supported retrieval by either name or id, it set default values for both parameters as empty lists. This is a super reasonable thing to do! However, Python only initializes default parameters when the function is first evaluated, which means that the same list is…

Forget about production, how did this make it into python? This is so unbelievably stupid it makes PHP look like a sensible language.

It is perfectly sensible… if your language is guaranteed immutable everywhere

Re: Digg's v4 launch: an optimism born of necessity (2018)

#25

Post by biorach »

Macha wrote: post #13
biorach wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still... did no one with even moderate Python experience even glance at this very important endpoint at any stage during those 4 weeks? Like I say, this is the kind of thing that jumps out of the screen for an experienced developer.

In 2010? You'd be surprised before widespread adoption of git at how many places the process was individual developers committing changes unsupervised. I'm not sure we even disagree that's the problem - you feel a second person should have looked at it, I feel the process should require that. A code review might be something that they'd sit down with a selected piece of code that they felt was risky on a biweekly bas…

Forget code review. This is one of their most important endpoints. They had severe issues for 4 weeks. Did no one not even glance over the code and spot this glaring screw-up?

Re: Digg's v4 launch: an optimism born of necessity (2018)

#26

Post by biorach »

nunobrito wrote: post #16

Albeit unpopular opinion, this kind of things is one of the reasons why I'll always push for Java instead of a jigsaw of different languages that sound cool. Stability, scalability and simplicity. Yes, you read correctly. Whomever complains that Java is bloated or complex, needs only to look on who is writing that "piece" of code. Expert developers will write proper code that anyone can maintain and keep simple. Too…

It's pretty clear from the article that the issues Digg had were not caused by choice of language.

Re: Digg's v4 launch: an optimism born of necessity (2018)

#27

Post by 0xAFFFF »

biorach wrote: post #11
Macha wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans aren't perfect. Open source projects have missed unescaped spaces in directory paths that caused the deletion of /usr (Bumblebee), video games have forgotten to check the cwd and deleted vital windows boot files (Eve Online) and operating systems have forgotten to check passwords (MacOS). Given this was 2010 I wouldn't be surprised if they had a less mature development process that doesn't use things people ta…

Still... did no one with even moderate Python experience even glance at this very important endpoint at any stage during those 4 weeks? Like I say, this is the kind of thing that jumps out of the screen for an experienced developer.

Considering the context, most people were probably overloaded with work and a lot of changes must have been made with little to no oversight.

Re: Digg's v4 launch: an optimism born of necessity (2018)

#28

Post by thisismyhna »

deergomoo wrote: post #18

Good read. Interesting that the author’s takeaway is that folks consider Digg v4 to be a catastrophic launch because of the myriad technical issues. I don’t even remember there being technical issues, I just remember logging in one day to find a website I enjoyed replaced with a bunch of crap I wasn’t interested in.

Yeap, this was definitely the point where many of us jumped over to Reddit. I remember hating Reddit's interface but it was the lesser evil.

Re: Digg's v4 launch: an optimism born of necessity (2018)

#30

Post by captainmuon »

tyingq wrote: post #29

A year or two prior to this, they were also putting linked sites into iframes, with the "digg bar" on top. So they had managed to alienate not just their users, but also the site owners that all the content linked to.

That can actually be quite useful, if implemented correctly. Even as a site owner I wouldn't mind, because it lets users upvote my content after reading it easily. But evolving browser standards killed it and most of the time it was implemented annoyingly.

Actually it would be nice if this was a browser feature. Click on a link on a site like HN or Reddit, browse to the new page as usual, but you have a little inconspicuous indicator in the toolbar that lets you vote or comment on the origin site easily.

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