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

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

lethain.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–358 of 358 posts

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

#351

Post by mistermann »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #242
mistermann wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Just asking questions" is the biggest red flag of ill intent I consider the playing of the accusation of the JAQ wildcard (an immediate victory in the minds of some subsets of observers) to be a much more dangerous (often literally unrealizeable) cultural norm, it is a go to staple technique in any delusional internet rhetorician's toolkit.

Ill intent to do what? What exactly would they accomplish if not banned, and were allowed to continue to "ask questions"? Why should anyone be afraid of them achieving that accomplishment?

I think it comes down to this:

"Do people have ideas, or do ideas have people?"

Carl Jung

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

#352

Post by jboy55 »

jasonfarnon wrote: post #249
mynameisvlad wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning It is a well known tactic for ill intent. For a reason. People do it all the time and should be called out for doing so.

asking questions is also a well-known tactic for getting information. how do you figure out there's ill intent?

When its an excuse for bad behavior. If someone is being told, "You are being disruptive to this forum" and the response is, "I'm just asking questions". Then you know its a red flag.

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

#353

Post by jboy55 »

raxxorraxor wrote: post #305
mistermann wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Just asking questions" is the biggest red flag of ill intent I consider the playing of the accusation of the JAQ wildcard (an immediate victory in the minds of some subsets of observers) to be a much more dangerous (often literally unrealizeable) cultural norm, it is a go to staple technique in any delusional internet rhetorician's toolkit.

Indeed. Just very practical if you really don't have an answer.

Well, when someone says you are being disruptive and not productive to the discussion, and your retort is, "I'm just asking questions". Then you have stepped over a line.

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

#354

Post by [deleted] »

unsupp0rted wrote: post #191
jboy55 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Just asking questions" is the biggest red flag of ill intent, its not doubt I would ban someone for resorting to that. Especially if we look at the facts given in the comment. " saying at the time we didn't yet know how many doses and on what schedule of the vaccine would be needed." "I messaged the mods to explain that I was triple-vaxxed " So we can infer from this post that this happened sometime after Aug 2021.…

It would be doubly damning if GP hadn't made up the "just asking questions" quote as if I had said or implied it. Or if you hadn't made up the "how we shouldn't have a mandate?" quote as if I had commented in either direction on that.

[deleted]

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

#355

Post by andromeduck »

philovivero wrote: post #221
Andrex wrote: post #134

Coincidentally, I've been going through Digg's history including v4 and their early history, because it's nostalgic for me. What people don't realize is Digg actually had four founders, depending on how you count them. Owen Byrne[0] has as his bio "The person who built digg for $1000 @ $10/hour, lol". Going by that, I don't think he shared in any equity. The whole site was bootstrapped for apparently $6000 total. Peo…

I wasn't a Digg founder, but I worked with them from the earliest days on Digg until its downfall. The real story is probably way more interesting than anyone really would guess. I'll summarise it as so: What made Digg work really was one guy who was a machine. He would vet all the stories, infiltrate all the SEO networks, and basically keep subverting them to keep the Digg front-page usable. Digg had an algorithm, b…

Sounds a bit like reddit and u/maxwellhill aka Ghislaine Maxwell and potentially others.

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

#356

Post by runlevel1 »

HaZeust wrote: post #293
runlevel1 wrote: post #218

Fun fact: Digg sold SendGrid its hardware after Digg v4 flopped. This made up a good chunk of our first data center. IIRC, it was a bunch of Penguin Computing boxes in an Equinix DC in San Jose. I think we probably retired the last of them in early 2015.

Were they auctioning it, or was it direct buy?

Direct buy, I think, but I could be wrong.

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

#357

Post by philovivero »

philovivero wrote: post #221
Andrex wrote: post #134

Coincidentally, I've been going through Digg's history including v4 and their early history, because it's nostalgic for me. What people don't realize is Digg actually had four founders, depending on how you count them. Owen Byrne[0] has as his bio "The person who built digg for $1000 @ $10/hour, lol". Going by that, I don't think he shared in any equity. The whole site was bootstrapped for apparently $6000 total. Peo…

I wasn't a Digg founder, but I worked with them from the earliest days on Digg until its downfall. The real story is probably way more interesting than anyone really would guess. I'll summarise it as so: What made Digg work really was one guy who was a machine. He would vet all the stories, infiltrate all the SEO networks, and basically keep subverting them to keep the Digg front-page usable. Digg had an algorithm, b…

Replying to self to answer thread questioners. No. Owen was the engineering powerhouse. Kevin was the PR front-man (the pretty face). Ron (Gorodetzsky) was the DevOps mastermind.

Who I am referring to was named Amar (his name is common enough I don't think I'm outing him). He was the SEO whisperer and "algorithm." He was literally like a spy. He would infiltrate the awful groups trying to game the front page and trick them into giving him enough info that he could identify their campaigns early, and kill them. All the while pretending to be an SEO loser like them.

There were a few other amazing people behind the scenes. I'm actually leaving out myself and my group because who wants some dude to blow his own horn? But many of us did amazing things.

There were also literally dozens of guys super high-up that were useless. Not because they were dumb, but they were too full of hubris and thought they had expertise where they didn't. Like Kevin Rose should have realised being a nice guy was his strength, and stay out of engineering, because he started dabbling in it, promoting the wrong people and ideas for the wrong reasons, and the next thing you know... BOOM. Implosion.

I even catch myself calling some of the people who were in K.Rose's event horizon "idiots" or "stupid" but when I really think about it honestly, they were reasonably bright but just given poor incentives. Hey, this NoSQL thing is awesome! Let's replace the entire (functional) MySQL portion with Cassandra. Yeah! After seven beers and two joints, this sounds like an amazing idea. Let's do it!

No.

If you find yourself, or your company founder, doing things like this, sell your equity position for whatever it's worth at that moment. Do not HODL. SELL and SHORT.

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

#358

Post by dronf23 »

WJW wrote: post #46
belter wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely disagree with the aproach humans are not perfect. This was not a one opportunity only event. Every test case they did not run, every load simulation they did not perform, every chaos test they decided to overlook was an example of humans failing repeatedly. Massive websites were running since the early nineties...And robust software practices are a thing of the sixties.

Agreed, but this was not a solid company in the first place. Rather, Digg was (according to TFA) a failing startup losing money hand over fist that was launching v4 as a hail mary. They were so hard up that no hardware was available for hosting the new environment, so they started reusing v3 servers for v4 while the migration was ongoing . They bet it all on this v4 thing, and lost.

Funny you should mention that there was no hardware available. Digg had a second cage full of servers in VA as part of a failed attempt to go multi-DC. If that project had ever worked out there would have been 50% more capacity. Those servers and network gear just sat there unused until they finally got liquidated for pennies on the dollar.
Post reply on HN