A former Apple engineer discusses Google product culture:
> My director wore an Apple Watch and had an iPhone ... my VP too. Nobody was expected to eat the dog food and so few did. This was crazy to me coming from Apple ....
Long-time Microsoft employees explain changes in Windows:
news.ycombinator.com/item?id=300193…
Designers were handed full control over UX. Engineers who fought for usability over a slick-looking interface burned out and left after repeatedly being overruled.
"Hardcore" engineering at Twitter 2.0: "To address extreme level of data scraping & system manipulation", Twitter added rate limiting on the backend which seems to have created a retry storm from the client that DDoS'd Twitter for at least eight hours.
State of the art anti-cheat techniques:
Roblox detects if you have the string "x86dbg" in a window title (or window?), so kids are changing their display names and discord server names to x86dbg to get people kicked from Roblox.
I've find U.S. immigration policy baffling.
Back when I was in college, the majority of the top EE students at my university where from China, Korea, or India.
Almost all of them wanted to stay in the U.S., but most couldn't, so they went home and worked as engineers at home.
One thing it took me quite a while to understand is how few bits of information it's possible to reliably convey to a large number of people.
When I was at MS, I remember initially being surprised at how unnuanced their communication was, but it really makes sense in hindsight.
One of the things that I think is sad about the decimation of Twitter eng is that Twitter was doing a lot of interesting (and high ROI) engineering work that, at younger companies, is mostly outsourced to "the cloud" or open source projects
A few examples off the top of my head:
![mattnewton 1 hour ago | parent | next [–]
When I worked at Google I got re-orged into the same division as pixel / android.
My director wore an Apple Watch and had an iPhone for personal use, and I am pretty sure I saw an Apple Watch on my VP too. Nobody was expected to eat the dog food and so few did. This was crazy to me coming from Apple- I remember several internal sites would ask you to file a radar (bug report) on why you switched to chrome from safari if you opened them in chrome. So many crazy issues I saw and reported didn’t actually matter to many high ranking members of the pixel team because they didn’t use the devices after 5pm.
There is a lot of incredible talent in that team but I think Google needs a minor culture shift to compete with Apple here.](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GU5KozmXsAAHZ8u?format=webp&name=medium)
![Sundar is not a psychopath. You're making a common error, ascribing humanity to Sundar. Sundar is a growth robot with no moral system. See Bryan Cantrill's description of Larry Ellison: "You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle."
The difference is that Sundar is a industrial scale trash compactor, not a lawnmower.
throwaway5211 1 hour ago | root | parent | next [–]
(throwaway for obvious reasons)
The comparison to Oracle is pretty good. Working for Sundar's Google feels like working for a company whose only product is quarterly earnings reports. I have no idea what the company's mission is anymore besides Number Go Up. The ol...](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GEGXFcta8AAMxJk?format=webp&name=small)
![Tell HN: Twitter switched temporarily to rate limited mode
246 points by 3cats-in-a-coat 1 hour ago | hide | past | favorite | 351 comments
Elon Musk:
"To address extreme level of data scraping & system manipulation, we've applied the following temporary limits:
- Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day
- Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day
- New unverified accounts to 300/day"
Source: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fz94eReWYAEhkHS?format=png&name=900x900
Source (backup): https://i.imgur.com/WvwtHez.png
user_named 40 minutes ago | prev | next [–]
This is hilarious. It appears that Twitter is DDOSing itself.
The Twitter home feed's been down for most of this morning. Even though nothing loads, the Twitter website never stops trying and trying.
In the first video, notice the error message that I'm being rate limited. Then notice the jiggling scrollbar on the right.
The second video shows why it's jiggling. Twitter is firing off about 10 requests a second to](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fz-Wr-2aMAAWdhr?format=webp&name=medium)
