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nauseating mix of hubris and ignorance

I'm afraid it's a nauseating mix of having operated real pub-sub systems such as TIBCO Rendezvous on major stock exchanges.

What Twitter does is not difficult and they do it badly.



I haven't been in the industry since 2005 or so. Even so:

And how many stock symbols are there? 5500 on NYSE, 4500 on NASDAQ.

Updates per second? CSCO had a few hundred thousand updates per day.

How is the data persisted? It is typically only logged, and not retrieved in realtime.

Unfortunately, Twitter doesn't match this problem particularly well.

Delicious, which I did write, had many similar structural issues. Tags, /network, etc.


So now you bait and switch?

You started out with a condescending post which implied that anyone who'd stayed awake in CS 101 would find Twitter trivially easy to scale.

Then you switched course to claiming that you know how to do this because of experience working a gigantic installation.

Or are you asserting that the average CS 101 project consists of running the production messaging systems for major stock exchanges?


That wasn't a bait and switch. He suggested the engineering problem isn't as hard as is being made out, and then when you claimed otherwise, he explained that he was in a strong position to know otherwise. In the real world, this is known as a "good argument".

He didn't claim his experience proved HE could do it. He didn't imply that you NEEDED his experience to do it. He was calling you out on your claim by showing that he had done it, and so knew from experience that it wasn't hard. You're the one moving the goal posts.

Note: I actually don't have an opinion on whether that experience is relevant to twitter's situation, but it certainly wasn't a bait and switch.


I didn't claim otherwise; you'll note that that was my first comment in that little thread.

The fact that he went from "CS 101" to "major stock exchange" as the barometer seemed a little fishy to me, ya know?


Evidently the concept of studying theory in school then applying that theory in the practical world of industry is too complicated to fit into 140 chars.


How much did Twitter cost to develop vs TIBCO Rendezvous? How much of the "easy" part did you come up with yourself vs working at a polished product that already? What are the actual volumes that Rendezvous handles and how do the details of the network topography compare? How do the details of the functionality compare? How much scalability analysis to they teach in CS (answer: only theory)? Is anyone who doesn't have your particular experience an idiot? Is working on a product for a small collection of the filthy rich better work than creating something that millions of people directly identify with?

Finally, how much do you know about Twitter's architecture and do you know the definition of hubris?


How much did Twitter cost to develop vs TIBCO Rendezvous?

The real question is how much VC has Twitter wasted reinventing the wheel (and making it square) when they could have just bought an R/V license?

"Not invented here" is the definition of hubris.




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