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Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

Looks like it's gonna be time for another round of "no, you can't write Facebook/Twitter in a week" again.

Yes, both are quite easy, as long as you ignore all the parts that make it hard. Like scaling. Lots of things are easy if they don't have to scale.

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> Looks like it's gonna be time for another round of "no, you can't write Facebook/Twitter in a week" again.

Certainly not today's Facebook or Twitter, no. But the initial versions were very simple things. Anyone can make a Facebook or Twitter. Not anyone can grow it to a userbase of hundreds of millions of users. That was what was special, not something technical. Scaling wasn't an issue; once you have investment and users, you just throw money at the problem.

> Not anyone can grow it to a userbase of hundreds of millions of users.

Yep.

> Scaling wasn't an issue; once you have investment and users, you just throw money at the problem.

Yeah not really. The CAP theorem is going to bite you if you just buy more servers. Twitter suffered huge growing pains as it tried to scale after becoming mainstream--remember the "fail whale?" Facebook completely re-engineered PHP to address performance and scale issues.

Hmm, maybe using 'throwing money at the problem' was a poor choice, it's not quite what I meant. But yeah, Facebook had enough money they could hire people to work full-time on writing a PHP-to-C++ compiler. It's the sort of hack that typifies Facebook.

The hard part of a service like Facebook or Twitter is actually getting the users. Scaling is a problem that has been solved ages ago. It is something that will come naturally as you throw money/people on a service that is growing organically.

You don't work in "cloud", do you?

Scaling is solvable, but it is not solved. If you have to throw money/people at the problem, well, that means it is a problem, right?

Getting from any place in a western country to a different place in a western country (possibly a different one) is solved. It costs money and time, an estimate for both is often available using ITA Matrix or Kayak or Orbitz or Expedia. There's effort involved, yes, but it is not generally considered a problem in the circles I frequent.

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