TechCrunch on Twitter: Translation | Hacker News Reader

TechCrunch on Twitter: Translation

progprog.com

27 pointsnickb14 comments

I've been sitting here trying to think of an insightful comment I can add to this post, but I've come to the conclusion that you can't improve on perfection. It's unfortunate that this post won't be read by nearly as many people as it needs to be.

Great post. The original TechCrunch article is another instance of talking about how things fail (miserably), rather than talking about how things can be improved to not fail. Poor journalism.

The real issues about Twitters scalability are best covered in a blog post @ http://www.hueniverse.com/hueniverse/2008/03/on-scaling-a-mi...

Whenever I see these type of analyses I always get to thinking how awesome it would be to make all these "translations" in my head as I read.

They also make me consider how easy it would be for one to come to a conclusion about the "twitter problem" by reading an article like the one on TC even though it goes out of its way to not come to any real conclusions. As in, "I read on TC that twitter's problem is..." and actually believe it.

In essence, he could have written "Twitter went down again two days ago," simply leaving it at that, and it would have essentially provided the same amount of meaningful content.

Worth a chuckle. Although most "translations" in this style I have read seem to have at one point: "I am high as a kite" - shame they didn't continue that meme.

Yup. Given the omission it's not a proper Fisking. Well done otherwise.

This is so spot on and hilarious. Funniest thing I've read in a while.

Great article, we need people unmasking from time to time articles without any clue that may sound reasonable just because the blog publishing them has N*million users/month.

Wikipedia: one of the top 10 web sites by traffic, and run by 15 people, most of them not even technical.

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Current_staff

Craigslist too (as of 2006):

http://www.craigslist.org/about/pages.and.peeps.html

Rails does not seem the best language to write essentially a messaging architecture in though. Surely the core of twitter has little to do with the web, and more to do with efficiently passing messages around - something that c or java could do like a walk in the park.

I don't know though, sounds like lots of it isn't in ror already which makes the point a bit moot.

Maybe twitter intentionaly break their system every once in a while now to get some coverage on blogs etc. Much like 'celebrities' release a dirty video or go into rehab.

Oh I'm just kidding :) although...

Besides referring to Rails as a language rather than a framework, it's a valid point.

Twitter doesn't seem like it's the kind of thing that fits cleanly into Rails way of doing things.

Offtopic, but what's the difference between framework and library?

I would say that all frameworks are libraries but not all libraries are frameworks. A library could be a small chunk of code that helps accomplish one little task, or it could be a huge framework. A framework is basically a large library or collection of libraries for building applications on.

Can we add the keyword "Twitter" to the Hacker News blacklist? This is getting ridiculous.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com