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Comment by dhh | Hacker News Reader

Now where's the TC retraction? (oh, forgot, there's no link-bait in boring stuff like accuracy)

Oh, there may yet be.

Melodramatic mea culpas can attract traffic too. Getting a story wrong can thus provide a two-fer: one batch of attention for the sloppy, inflammatory first piece, then another for the contrite (or alternatively, defiantly unapologetic) correction.

Ever see the movie 'The Corporation', which diagnosed the 'person' of a corporation as being psychopathic? Well, the DSM-IV diagnosis for an ad-supported blogging site will tend toward Histrionic Personality Disorder†. Clickonomics almost demands as much.

† http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histrionic_personality_disorder

unless it's a major mistake, most publications don't really publicize corrections (especially not with blogs being able to edit their content.) UPDATE

Indeed: the story (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/01/twitter-said-to-be-aban...) now has an update:

"Update: Regarding Evan Williams’ statement here [link to http://twitter.com/ev/statuses/801530348], all I can say is that multiple sources claim that Twitter is telling people they are planning on moving away from Ruby on Rails. This is not the first time a company has denied something that has turned out to be 100% true."

Looks like they chose the "defiantly unapologetic" correction. I wonder, have they done any studies on which type of correction gives them more traffic? Might be worth it.

retraction or correction? TC is only partially right/wrong... Ev's says:

"Lots of our code is not in RoR, already, though"

Sounds like an ongoing process rather than a new thing

Let me give you a scoop, then: Lots of 37signals code is not in Rails, either. We run Solr for search. We use a C-based poller for Campfire. We call out to ImageMagick for transformations of images.

Most successful LAMP sites use software from more than one bucket. That is not news.

Twitter has been mostly not Rails for a very long time. You can't build a service like Twitter on top of a traditional relational database stack, so much of their infrastructure is based around custom message queue stuff.

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