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Comment by eyelidlessness | Hacker News Reader

The post suggests a race condition as the underlying cause of the behavior shown in screen captures. It’s perfectly possible the race condition does exist, and being a race condition you just didn’t happen to trigger it. It’s also perfectly possible to discover such a defect with or without any personal bias towards Musk or Twitter.

Reporting it publicly this way can also be a favor to both, as it gives them a fairly malleable narrative for reversing course, or directing responsibility, or both. Even if it’s simultaneously embarrassing to have it out there. And it’s not like either Musk or Twitter is a stranger to embarrassment, or particularly shy about courting it.

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Clearly there is something wrong with the site. So I don't doubt there is a bug. But the OP gives no helpful information that could be used to reproduce the issue and fails to describe it in any helpful detail really. They seem content to just effectively say "Twitter is dumb." Which, again, is fine but not all that technical and interesting.

There’s information in the post that very probably points at the underlying cause. The scrollbar jumping is a dead giveaway: Twitter loads more content based on scroll position. If your viewport is sized such that displaying the error message triggers another load event by its corresponding change in scroll position, it will try again indefinitely absent some additional logic to bail out.

Edit: this of course depends on some other implementation details, like the rendering flow and browser behavior. If showing the error is memoized, it shouldn’t trigger the loop unless they’re also rendering some intermediate loading state asynchronously.

>There’s information in the post that very probably points at the underlying cause. The scrollbar jumping is a dead giveaway

Maybe that theory is correct. But I feel like pretending this post is getting to the top of HN because it's a technically interesting diagnostic analysis is sort of silly.

It made its way to HN because people here find it interesting enough to discuss. It’s not some anti-Musk conspiracy. And it’s not anyone else’s fault you didn’t recognize the technical implications from the information available.

And after a while out with my pup enjoying sunshine and play, I think I should be a little more friendly than this.

It can take a lot of time and effort to develop instincts like “scrollbar jumping and network calls are related”. They’re so obvious to me that I didn’t even bother inspecting anything, I just “debugged” on my phone by connecting familiar dots and describing the familiarity. But if it’s not immediately obvious to you and if you have an inclination to be more familiar, I’d strongly recommend spending more time manually fuzzing rando sites with dev tools open. You’ll probably get a lot more out of that than dissecting personal motivations on any thread on any site. And you’ll have a much better calibrated bullshit detector too.

yeh, i tried to mention this, but it got flagged quick. it's unbelievable that my median salary for the past decade is $3,000 after several years of "Startup" followed by "How to Start a Reboot of My Life"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36561808

it's a 429 error, so the developer who posted this is an idiot. they're not even wrong. the 429 doesn't even touch twitter's infrastructure

https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastruc...

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