
 TechCrunch on Twitter: Translation - nickb
http://progprog.com/articles/2008/5/23/techcrunch-on-twitter-fixed-that-for-you
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randy
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.

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nreece
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...](http://www.hueniverse.com/hueniverse/2008/03/on-scaling-a-mi.html)

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tdavis
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.

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michaelneale
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.

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

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

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antirez
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.

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bkovitz
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>

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tlrobinson
Craigslist too (as of 2006):

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

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axod
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...

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tlrobinson
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.

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

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tlrobinson
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.

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

