Musk wants to do a “total rewrite” of Twitter | Hacker News Reader

Musk wants to do a “total rewrite” of Twitter

thedailybeast.com

23 pointssutro21 comments

I think the title fails to what happened. He was completely unable to provide a single technical answer, in public, after being minimally challenged.

Perhaps he doesn’t know about the technical side. Remember he was fired from PayPal for insisting on using Windows for the servers.

Maybe this is what he means by a “total rewrite”.

Right, but the whole reason he gave to do a whole rewrite was that Twitter’s tech stack was horrible… but then couldn’t even answer what is that tech stack and what makes it so horrible

Yeah, you guys are sooooo much smarter than Elon. Carryon.

Smarter? Maybe, maybe not. Able to articulate a basic reason to rewrite or not? Most of us here probably are, yet Musk chose the least compelling route, ad hominem attacks.

I mean, yes, I would assume a lot of people here are smarter than Elon Musk, and certainly far more familiar with software engineering.

I don't think it takes a genius software engineer to be able to give a high level description of the stack they are in charge of.

  Musk: "I think we won't get to the refactor if we don't make these changes"

  "why?"

  Musk: "because we're going to be bankrupt"

  "what's the runway?"

  Musk: *silence*

  "Elon you're you're our philosopher um you know Plato would be very proud of you. You're extremely technically competent and I think really understand how to how to drive things in a in a good direction. You know I I really love how you're also leaning into the voice of the people and letting you know them have a say as well *but*..."

That last bit there is exactly the kind of kindergarten that had to be erected around Musk at SpaceX, described here in [1] as "Managing Elon was part of the company culture", which gives credence to that piece.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/comments/z2ofwk/i_wa...

That last bit, it’s very hard to believe it was _serious_.

Mr. Musk, your campaign seems to have the momentum of a runaway freight train. Why are you so popular ?

Ooh, a tough question, but a fair one.

I don't think the person who said it was serious, but I think they understood that Musk needed to hear it.

"Musk, who also likened Twitter to a plane crash..." Musk is the pilot of that $44 billion plane. This is the same company that he convinced himself and a bunch of investors was worth all that money. He should have figured out what a disaster it was before signing that contract. This is what happens when you make investment decisions while on the can and poop tweet about them.

Aka "the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make": https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

It's my first instinct when I look at someone else's code. Or even my code I wrote yesterday.

This is why experienced engineers don't just act out on first instinct.

Jesus, Musk sounded absolutely clueless there. "Please explain the stack at a high level" isn't normally a gotcha question for an engineering leader who is talking about needing to totally rewrite a major software product.

To be fair the way Brown tried to call out Musk, was horrible and a direct attack. You don't talk to anybody like that, no friend, partner, intern or whoever unless you want to provoke them into a reaction. (Referring to his questions about the stack, ending in "buddy") It's really low and Musk was 100% right identifying that as acting like a jackass. Should he have taken it more calmly? Probably. But there is really no point in even talking to bullies like Brown.

Apparently there had been an architecture diagram by Holz that people are aware of and I can only imagine it to be a mammoth.

The laughing heard when Musk mentioned the diagram came from Holz's direction mostly I think at a) the aggressive provocative tone of Brown and b) his hilarious "questions" directly trying to put Musk on the spot about this mammoth tech stack. Everybody knows that just naming things in this 1000+ items diagram won't help anybody but Brown's ego.

Lol. Wasn’t built here huh? Has he ever worked with legacy software ever before? It’s possible he has not. Wild.

Do it! And GPL the stack you leave for dead please, Elon.

He paid $44 billion not so start from scratch, and now he wants to start from scratch.

Not that this isn't dumb, but what he paid for was the customer base and the domain name, not the software. The software is cheap; acquiring the customers is not.

Rewriting software from scratch isn't cheap, either, especially if you're doing it at the same time as trying to keep the existing code base running. It's practically never a good idea.

But even if it were worth rewriting the software, it's still not what he paid for. He paid $44B because the software is so famous that we're talking about it here, and that would last even through a rewrite. (Assuming the rewrite was done correctly, which it usually isn't.)

Priceless comment. Well, what's priceless, give or take 44 billion, but still.

If you want to start Twitter from scratch, but don't pay $44B to kill Twitter first, you will likely not go anywhere.

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