Hacker News Reader

Comment by TigeriusKirk | Hacker News Reader

From reading his timeline, it seems he felt major refactoring was the way to go, and it didn't seem like Musk was going to go for that.

Wouldn't surprise me if he was right, but MuskTwitter doesn't have time to waste on refactoring.

View on HN

That's basically a classic "problem" whenever a new software engineer joins a new company.

"Everyone else code is shit except me. I don't want to waste my time reading the code." kind of scenario.

Yup, this is a symptom of having too high expectations for yourself.

The skill needed to contribute on a mature codebase within the first year is being able to tune out anything that doesn't directly interface with small changes you are making, and trust that someone more experienced will notice during reviews if it accidentally does break something outside of that scope. And do that again and again. Ambition is a bad thing when starting on a mature codebase, do new stuff on the side if that isn't satisfying.

No, most code is really just shit. The fact that code only gets more obscure instead of more obvious is anti-intellectual. This is the complete opposite of mathematical progress. It is due to the arrogance of programmers to think that their current codebase is the best TRADEOFF anyone could have achieved. Take the newcomers' words as monition. Be completely honest about how hard it is to think straight, and adopt formal methods like Coq as done by CompCert and Sel4. There is a reason why mathematicians DEMAND proofs. It's too easy to fool yourself. Recall how "newcomers" like Hilbert in the early 20th century revamped and closed "wide gaps" in Euclid's Element which had been considered the epitome of rigor for 2200 years. Of course, people will argue that proofs take too much time, etc. Wrong! Things move so much faster when there is absolute confidence that everything is correct. As proofs are required, one is also forced to constantly simplify things. This is what refactoring is all about: simplification.

Looks like you're right. He kept pushing for a dedicated refactoring effort throughout his live Q&A with Musk here, pointing out several services:

https://twitter.com/realGeorgeHotz/status/160542468694643097...

He also talks about how some changes he made, such as removing the annoying login/signup popup when viewing twitter posts, were reverted

Is there a recording of this? Never used spaces, couldn't find a replay button.

Unless geohot ticked the record option during his twitter space, it wont have the replay button. Quite a shame, it was the most candid tech talk I've seen Musk was in, and Hotz was challenging him his points about twitter engineering and policies.

I saw someone posted a screenrecord on youtube[0], but the whole space lasted 2 hours, with Elon being there for an hour.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVDUIyzeJn8

Alex Xu, author of the System Design Interview, breaks down the Space chat:

https://twitter.com/alexxubyte/status/1605607748283949056

A spicy clip involving igb (Ian Brown), former Twitter engineer

https://twitter.com/pwnsdx/status/1605442608603463680

https://twitter.com/pwnsdx/status/1605471948359843841

To be fair, there's a very real business reason for keeping login and sign-up prompts. I'm surprised he didn't recognize that as a founder. I imagine some PM panicking and running around after learning about the change.

One of the major learnings I had during my live is that major refactors rarely pay off. The true trick that worked was to learn how to pick features apart and migrate to new systems without taking what was working from production. You can deliver often and keep the sponsors in and iterate on learnings earlier, lots of knowledge is hidden on what was created and what problems were solved without being documented.

Didn’t Musk want to do a whole rewrite of Twitter? And Hotz questioned him on that? Seems like Hotz bailed because he realized Musk has no idea what he’s doing. Source: https://youtu.be/DkxRB_YW3s0

Reply on news.ycombinator.com