The people at Twitter who understood the system and could predict the side effects were all fired or left. My guess is Elon said "the site's too slow!" Engineers noticed that the home feed request was slow. They didn't understand how it worked, had no tools to profile it, and were given an unrealistic deadline to fix it. So about the only thing they could do was issue multiple, parallel requests and hope that at least one of them was fast.
I worked in the games industry for a while, and came to understand how they could spend so much money and so much time, and yet release a game where even basic functionality was broken. It's exactly this sort of extreme schedule pressure that, ironically, makes a huge morass where changing one thing breaks 10 other things, so progress grinds to a halt.
>The people at Twitter who understood the system and could predict the side effects were all fired or left
Not necessarily. I’ve predicted bad outcomes for decisions in a few cases and been ignored but stuck around regardless. Mostly because I like my job and the goals of my organization even if it makes bad decisions.
Of course to remain productive and improve my influence in future decision making it is absolutely critical that when predictions come true, I do not go anywhere near an “I told you so mentality.”
Instead I do what I can to clean up the mess with a “how can I help?” attitude. And increasingly over time people take my opinions and analysis much much more seriously.
I wouldn’t say that’s the path everyone should take, especially because some work environments are just too toxic for any progress at all (I ran away, fast, from two jobs like that). And some people cherish having an entirely new type of challenge every few years instead of shepherding something through longer periods of time. All valid paths.
People didn’t leave because of the bad decisions. They left because Musk said he wanted “hardcore” people who’d work 80 hour weeks. Turns out masochism isn’t correlated with great engineering.
I think there may be a disconnect between what Musk says and the reality on the ground. Enough so that I, given such a situation, would wait around a little bit to see how things played out before jumping ship. But as I said in my original comment, I’ve sprinted away from toxicity before, and will do so again if it becomes obvious.
If it was only that Elon had said it, I might agree. But he also had multiple rounds of layoffs (after lying every time and saying "this was the last!"). He had multiple horrible mandatory meetings forcing people to drop everything and fly over the country. He forced people to print out their code so he could review their work.
If you really want I can qualify my earlier statement, I thought it was obvious:
GP wrote:
> Enough so that I, given such a situation, would wait around a little bit to see how things played out before jumping ship.
That means "nobody" is talking about the group of people who have the option of "waiting around a little bit to see how things played out before jumping ship". H1B visa holders aren't included in that earlier group, so I didn't think a further qualification is necessary.
> I think there may be a disconnect between what Musk says and the reality on the ground.
Which runs against every good piece of advice that has ever been uttered about leadership. Musk far overpaid for twitter because he wanted to be the center of attention and what better way to do that than to buy the network which gets the most attention from "important" people?
He then took the Michael Jordan trope of "I never asked anyone to do anything I was unwilling to do" and tried to turn that into reality by sleeping in his office every once in a while. The problem with this sentiment is that the only employees who are going to stick around long-term in such a ridiculous working arrangement are those who either can't find jobs elsewhere or are terrified that they won't be able to find jobs elsewhere.
So now you've got a highly toxic work environment full of people who are unconfident in their own abilities to get the work done, and Elon constantly pretend like he's some sort of business genius from the movies who just walks into a meeting, throws a bunch of turds on top of the agenda without having a firm grasp of anything, and storms off to light the next fire.
> Enough so that I, given such a situation, would wait around a little bit to see how things played out before jumping ship.
The twitter engineers were presented with an opportunity to jump ship and also get 3 months of severance. I think the rational ones, who had a choice took it, leaving employees who didn't consider it rationally, as well as employees on H1Bs who didn't have the luxury to quit without something else lined up
Individually yes. It's less clear what happens if Twitter is shedding hundreds of engineers at the same time many other companies are freezing hiring or letting people go.
The parent is technically correct, you're not deported for losing your job on a H1-B. Your permission to remain in the US ends, and presuming that you leave by the deadline, you are not deported.
Deportation is a different legal event. It's a forceful expulsion which occurs because you did something seriously negative like break the law. Deportations are a big deal and a bad thing to have on your record in any country when it comes to your future prospects with that country.
To use a super rough analogy it's kind of like an honorable vs dishonorable discharge from the military.
> Mostly because I like my job and the goals of my organization even if it makes bad decisions.
Keep in mind that Musk intentionally turned Twitter completely upside down. Anything that people there liked about it before Musk is likely gone—coworkers, WFH, perks.
Tell me you're in your 4th year at a BigCo without telling me you're in your 4th year at a BigCo.
The goals of the organization are mostly a facade. The people running the organization, and their actions, are what the goals of the organization actually are.
No, I’m not at BigCo, at least not in anything at all close to the scale of of FAANG.
But I do work in an industry where even the C-level people usually (not always) have at least a little interest in truly pursuing mission <X>
I know this for a fact because even though I am not at all C-level or even the manager of a large team, I often have a seat of the table in the meetings where such people come together. Those meeting can be ugly, they can reveal how the sausage is made, to borrow that analogy. And I’ve seen how many (not all) truly are trying to get <X> done but doing so may require a bit of ugly sausage making to get there.
And I’m not a wide eyed 4th year either. I’m a grizzled and usually cynical veteran in my field. My job is often to put out fires, or produce analytical tools or output of strategic importance, and also to sometimes to plug a major gap in operational capabilities. I’m not really a manger but I’ve earned a seat at the table when the highest people get together as well as when they interface with counterparts at other organizations.
Don’t take that that to mean too much though: I may have a voice, but it is by far, very far, the smallest voice in the room.
> The people running the organization, and their actions, are what the goals of the organization actually are.
Obviously. Are you suggesting that one can’t appreciate those? Or that this is some secret? Maybe the communication in the orgs you’ve been with has been poor?
The organization’s stated mission, inherent not just to it but to all places of its sort, is <X>, even though, unfortunately, we often end up chasing <Y> instead.
It’s a difficult balance: <Y> is in fact necessary to continually achieve <X> but there are times where decisions focus exclusively, or at least too much, on <Y>. But we live in the real world, and sometimes that’s necessary. (<Y> is not money though it has an impact on our financials) And also sometime people with a broader view see further than I do and those choices that seem wrong come around a few years later and it turns out <X> is actually better off for it. It keeps me humble, skeptical of my own certainty even when it seems faultless.
But I’m also at a point now where people who pop up and start shouting <r>! or <f>! or something completely random like “Well how about <~€€€~>?” I can easily deal with: I go back, do a bit of the work I do, show it to the right people, and those shouts -disappear. Sometimes one gets through and it’s annoying, but whatever, nothing is perfects.
Of course the above vastly oversimplifies things. There are many, many more variables to juggle along the way. But I hope it gives a reasonable sense of things.
And I’m sure the “<X>” style notation of things in my explanation makes it harder understand what I mean, but I value my privacy, hence the abstractions of the factors involved.
I guess the way you abstracted will probably reduce your privacy (a tiny bit). At least I have not seen anybody write "<X>" instead of just X in this usecase.
So either this is very specific to you, or is very common in your circles so you do it too. Both of which reduce the number of potential candidate if somebody tries to doxx you.
Additional you (or your editor) uses “” over " which also reduces the number of candidates.
(Not trying to attack you here, just thought it was notable)
<*> was my own ad hoc convention in the moment. My
“.” style is the default for the mobile phone I’m on, which is the US, and I don’t mind sharing that since I’ve mentioned it in plenty of prior posts. But I do honesty appreciate the analysis, those aren’t things I’d specifically considered when posting now or in the past, and it’s always useful to know what subtle signals can be picked up in that sort of detail. Heck someone observant could probably infer broad geo region (time zone) just from the fact that I am making these comments at this time.
Then you'll probably appreciate the following info. You have commented excessively on HN over the years. If you have done any publicly accessible writing with your real name attached, then it is quite easy to find out who you are by correlating writing styles. (If you don't have done so publicly then at least your employer will be able to do that using all internal writing on one hand and all your HN contributions on the other.)
Sounds far fetched, but it's really not that hard. Quite recently somebody hacked this for correlating HN accounts with each other and found alt accounts of people with high accuracy. Which people confirmed. And that wasn't even a serious attempt, just a little hack on a sunday night.
In a sense, it's all too late now since all your writing is already out there. But could be good to know for the future.
All true, but that’s a level personal detail I’m prepared to live with having it out in the world. There’s a limit to how much mental energy I’m prepared to put into worrying about doxing, and it doesn’t go this far. But it is a remarkable aspect of just how much we can be fingerprinted by so many different things we do in life.
One option is to change HN accounts often. Every few posts you need to make a new one. Successfully correlating writing styles needs some data and if there are only a few sentences to go off then that's not enough.
I know that the site guidelines discourage that, but what can you do.
I guess you can try to develop two very distinct writing styles.
Or, as I do, consider everything posted to HN to be linked to me. My handle is actually an abbreviation of my full name. I consider HN to be "professional" correspondence.
Writing style is also a lot more individual than people recognize.
Iirc word histograms almost uniquely identify authors. Of course this is on larger amounts of text, but I guess you could identify users over seperate platforms this way.
E.g. Intend to use ellipsis (...) to separate thoughts in online conversation a lot. But I try to not do that in reddit, where I try to stay somewhat anonymous.
Still, I assume that it would be possible to correlate my reddit and HN account just by comparing the word histograms (ie which words I use and how often).
Yes, some of my academic work in comp-ling (massively outdated by today’s advances) explored things like the perplexity scores of different Shakespeare plays to explore the controversial claim that some the work attributed to him was actually done by Marlowe.
(As a complete aside, that program of study also included Forensic Linguistics which truly fascinating. And of course the work of Claude Shannon and information theory, though not in any great depth)
I can share a post-mortem in a non-confrontational way and have a discussion about it. Even if it often results in an “Oh well, I guess it won’t work”, sometimes it’s a highly productive conversation on how things could have been done better, and the person or team goes off to execute some new variation to great success. And sometimes the variation fails as well, but such is life. I try to engage with people in a way where even if failure is highly likely, we go in eyes open knowing the risk is worth it. Sometime we’re wrong (or I’m wrong, it’s my fault) but such is life. Not all shiny ideas keep their shine once they’re unpacked into an attempted implementation.
Avoiding the mentality isn't the same as referring to the past. With most people, It's perfectly fine to bring up the past in a matter of fact and dispassionate way, so long as it's constructive and not meant to shove "see I was right" in their faces.
You might be right; the person you're replying to might have zero idea.
Now me... I know someone personally who was a senior exec for Twitter's software team, who left after Elon's purge.
He left because all the people who understood the system and could predict the side effects were fired or left. He'd been with companies going through death spirals before, and had no interest in being involved with another one.
So, while the person you're replying to might not know, my friend DOES know.
About 80% of Twitter was laid off or quit. I think it's a reasonable supposition that a good number of those were critical personnel who felt they could get a better deal somewhere else.
This rhetoric is well past its peak. When the firings happened, people said twitter would crash in a week. It's been a long time since then, and twitter, for my very generic uses and purposes, has just gotten better.
Demonizing past hard decisions at every unrelated point of difficulty has to be the worst kind of toxicity there is.
There were some people who predicted that in the heat of the moment, but the rational people at the time were predicting that Twitter would limp along, gradually start to show cracks, and eventually become a husk of what it was as the systems slowly degraded. I'd say we're well on track for that prediction.
This isn't an unrelated difficulty—this kind of bug is the direct result of losing (or ignoring) the people who knew better. Institutional knowledge is a tech company's lifeblood, and Musk gleefully discarded most of Twitter's when he came in.
It's a big holiday weekend in America, and having an outage seems like a minimal inconvenience, especially for those of us without an account.
There are entire communities of people who relied on the ability to simply read Twitter without an account, took the time to write code of their own, and now are reacting with much more maturity than HN seems to be. The petty personal attacks are simply astonishing.
I really don't expect this to be permanent. For this very second though, I do get your point, there are quite a few services I only visit occasionally through links and even after making an account I was a lurker for the longest time on Twitter.
However talking in a way that takes the current critical temporary state as the default forever isn't very fair
It really depends I suppose. If you consider the accused to to be in an unearned place of power, it might feel like an acceptable thing to do (albeit still quite icky and pedesterian). But if the situation is very different and/or you are not sure if your PoV is fully justified, this can absolutely be the most toxic low-effort thing one can do when thrown at someone who's already fighting an uphill battle. Without going to specifics this is something I've experienced myself, and have also seen happen close to me in a very toxic calculated way. So these kinds of comments are IMHO overally very unconstructive.
On the community side, it now better reflects its mission as the public market square, where before it was so unbalanced to the left (also making what was to the right way more polarized) that it just wasn't very much fun or developing to stay on for long. Before I was only a lurker but now I sometimes chime in to tech threads without fearing someone will try to cancel me over a way I name a fruit or something.
On the tech side, it has retained everything that made it good (didn't implode!), and the tweet length / "show more" logic fits my style of writing perfectly. Spaces are also a kind of thing that I didn't use before but became immediately accessible as it was added right to twitter itself (and things like the 24h wagner coup space with 6M visitors isn't something I have seen in the past). And other simple things, like long videos sometimes fit a need, even while most of the time a youtube link also works.
Some things like crypto spam also seem to be in a bit better state, though can't obviously ever be completely removed
It's interesting to me how deeply politics gets into everything. You like Twitter more because "it was unbalanced to the left" and now reflects your political views better. My experience is that the first 100 replies to every semi-political post are now right-leaning blue checkmark holders and conspiracy theorists, and now I find it "not very much fun".
Honestly, I don't think the "public market square" has ever worked all that well, not even in a physical market square. You get 2 groups with sufficiently different views and before long it's devolved into shouting, if not a brawl.
I actually don't like politics being so prevalent in the space but it's quite unavoidable to give free speech any chance in the current environment. I really hope it evens out.
It's just the sad state of the world that the most aggressive, but voice-defining leftists would like to live in a situation where politics is talked about less but take a speech-impeding dictatorial rule as the precondition to allow for something like that to happen. Meaning, as long as every person in the thread or platform has somehow been "vetted" to not be conservative or even moderate, they'll act "normal". (and that ignores purity spiraling in such echo chambers making even that a stretch)
Maybe in one of the futures of this planet people can go back to not being as polarized and twitchy about talking with people with even the opposite viewpoints. Increased amount of mutual respect in a conversation plus all sides having more mental robustness reduces escalation, reducing the speech and experience of having the kind of speech you probably are talking about to a very manageable level and is absolutely best for everyone.
I've learnt to personally take a lot of pains to maintain communication lines with even some quite extreme leftists and actually managed to retain a level of mutual respect with people some of my peers don't even dare to talk to. The end result makes otherwise impossible things greater than individuals could achieve, possible. But it's not very fair feeling like the human in the "pigeon vs human" chess match at times.
Regardless of everything, as long as we're not in some kind of shittyfuture war scenario, I will not stop believing in the concept of a "public market square" of free speech. I don't believe there is any other value that can keep an intellectually diverse human society together.
No matter how good your documentation or comments are, that doesn't mean whoever is left holding the bag will understand it. Or at least not in the amount of time it would take to keep it from exploding
I understand the abstracted theory of how a nuclear power plant works (uranium heats water -> makes steam -> drives turbines etc) but if you sat me down at the control console and asked me to restart a reactor? Yeah I'd have no idea where to even begin. Even if I had a manual as thick as a fridge to (slowly) flick through
I have the impression that the comment you are replying to was sarcastic. Of course you're right that experience can't be replaced with documentation. The role of documentation IMHO is making it easier for people to gain experience by smoothing out the process -> it aids the process of gaining experience, does not replace it
Seriously ? How did you end up in that line of work?
HN has a tendancy to find something like "nominative determinism" - "comment determinism" where a comment about a job produces a (contradictory) reply from someone doing that job.
Can’t speak for them, but being poor, intelligent, and in need of steady income when you graduate High School is a very good way to end up in the Navy’s nuclear program.
Source: Was kicked out, poor, and intelligent. Ended up a submarine reactor operator.
The person I know who is a reactor operator was really good at math, joined the Navy and got trained to operate a nuclear sub. Then in the private sector I am sure that skillset is somewhat rare, so it was easy to get a job there.
This is such a disingenuous take. Twitter isn’t just a web page that displays the last thing saved to a database. It curates a different version of that for the millions of users reading it. That’s before you think about Spaces, the whole advertising platform that supports it, the abuse systems, and the infrastructure required to do all of that at a scale far beyond some bootcamp clone.
Just to give one example, I (and many others) have tens of thousands of blocked accounts. How do you implement that efficiently, at scale? Are you gonna do an extra database check for every single tweet that comes my way? Hopefully not.
And if you think about how Twitter works for five seconds, just consider everything that has to happen when an account with 100M followers posts a tweet. It's an absolute nightmare.
A bit off topic, but any book/article recommendations for building things at Twitter/IG scale? I know for example IG switched to a "fan-out" approach early on to handle accounts with a lot of users. Would love to learn more about this.
In some previous HN thread, I dialed in on a recommendation for "Designing Data-Intensive Applications" by Martin Kleppmann, which I honestly still haven't gotten around to reading so....YMMV. Maybe if you search HN for that book title, it might lead you to other useful discussions?
Out of curiosity, what do you mean by tens of thousands of blocked accounts? Are those your bot accounts that get blocked or it is you blocking people from your feed?
back when I was doing personal projects or working at small early-stage startups I used to think the same, but then I've worked at later stage scaleups and even large publicly traded companies and realised that once a project becomes large enough, that prototyping phase that you just described is like 1% or 2% of the total workload. There is so much more to the SDLC that is not just writing code (some examples: liaising with stakeholders, requirements gathering, clients acceptance testing, QA, integration testing, certifications, regulatory frameworks etc. etc. etc. -> all things that take much of your time and involve nearly 0 lines of code written).
Some of that sounds like bloat to me. The fact that Twitter is still here and building features faster with 20% of the workforce may indicate that a lot of what was thought needed really wasn't. You might point to the current outage or other bugs but you have to ask yourself, how serious is it really and is it worth 400% more employees to mitigate them?
Long form video, Twitter blue at the very least, which seems like more than Twitter managed to do per year before then with 4x the manpower.
Many of those things you listed are what people who have been in the institutionalized employees find important, essentially process for its own sake.
Before the layoffs Twitter had about 7500 employees, while SpaceX at 12000 builds frickin' rockets, have rocket launches every week, designing and building the next level launch platform that will revolutionize space travel, all the while revolutionizing satellite internet. Musk knows a thing or two about what smart, focused people are capable of.
So you're saying that at SpaceX or Tesla people don't work on any of those things (requirements gathering, clients acceptance testing, QA, integration testing, certifications, regulatory frameworks) and they just happily code away?
> thousands of people in bootcamps are making twitter clones
Heh Heh Heh
Those twitter clones will tend to be of the "looks pretty on the front end, but a fucking nightmare on the backend" type. ;)
Likely with part of the backend nightmare being security issues as well. From what I've seen of bootcamp output, they seem to rarely explain much about security to the people doing the learning. :(
That's not even the problem. The Stack Overflow guy wrote a very informative response to people claiming they could clone SO in a weekend (I can't find it now)
The core of the problem is not even the quality of the code but rather the thousands of things the site does besides letting you post a tweet and displaying it to other people.
Spam protection and protection from people falsely claiming spam on posts they don't like is already enough for me to laugh off the "clone in a weekend" camp.
Apparently you do, given that we're posting in a thread where Twitter is self-imploding due to amateurish technical decisions foisted down by a God King.
The current state of Twitter seems to indicate there's a significant problem with the code, which implies the people who would have either spotted that before it was deployed or fixed it quickly afterwards, are unable to do so. Given the number of layoffs and resignations Occam's Razor would suggest the reason is because those people aren't available to do that work.
We don't kmow it's true but it is a likely explanation.
But these are "significant problems with the code" which evidently can't be fixed by simply reverting relevant changes. In that case, it seems more likely to me that these are due to long-standing issues which would have caught up to the company sooner or later.
which evidently can't be fixed by simply reverting relevant changes
Rumors suggest that part of the change is moving from GCP to something else. Something like can't be reverted without signing a new contract with Google (and paying the bill..).
Ah - I hadn't heard that and it does make some sense. But I'm not sure that the alternative version of events (where the engineers who were fired or left were still around) would look much better in that case - perhaps delay/better planning might have helped (though of course we don't know how much planning was done) but it's also entirely credible that this was essentially inevitable with such a move.
I think most experts were fascinated by the whole experiment as it is essentially gathering data on a subject we had theories on but no experiments.
I used to work at a company where both the main data center and the main dev office were in the flight path of a major airport. We joked that if the data center had a plane hit it we’d go down quickly but recover but if the office building got hit we be fine for a while but long term in trouble.
> The people at Twitter who understood the system and could predict the side effects were all fired or left.
This is like a case study in what happens when you fire everyone except the sycophants and yes-men.
I only feel sorry for remaining non-yes-men twitter employees who might still be there because for whatever personal reasons they're in a precarious economic situation where they can't quit (H1B?) or are tied to the company for healthcare coverage (Thanks, America, for being the greatest country in the world) because they can't afford any other health insurance option.
I don't see how that would be any better than what we have now. If employer provided healthcare was removed, that would leave us with a bunch of private healthcare companies. These private companies would drive up the cost even more.
If an affordable or free healthcare option was offered on top of making employer provided healthcare illegal, then I completely am behind your idea.
Well let me enlighten you, as someone who doesn't live in america. I pay a bit less than 150 euros a months in health insurance in the Netherlands. It is not tied to my employer in any way. If I was poor I could ask for those payments to be subsidized by the state.
If I am sick I can just get an appointment with my GP within the day and not pay a thing, they can refer me to specialists or blood tests if needed, which are also fast and free. The remaining healthcare costs for medications or dentistry are so low I don't even notice them.
Hope this will shed some light to you about what's happening in other countries.
The problem with the above account is that the 150 euros you claim to pay per month for health "insurance" is transparently a fantasy number, and in reality you probably pay closer to an order of magnitude more into the Dutch health system.
Nope. Look at how much the Netherlands actually spends on Healthcare, it's about 11.2% of GDP in 2021 [1]. Per capita GDP in 2021 was ~53k€.
((53k€*11.2%)/12) ≈ 495€
Only problem is, like most developed countries, close to a majority of people are net recipients (around 40%). Someone will have to pay their share too. Chances are, if you're posting on HN, that's you, as you'll be somewhere in the top 5% income bracket. I think if the OP does the math based on their actual numbers, they'd be more likely to find themselves in the ~1000€/month ballpark than the 150€/month they seem to think they are paying.
> But even then, counting all payers and not just the residents' sticker price, the USA is the high-priced outlier.
The Netherlands (11% of GDP) is not quite as extreme as the US (17%), but it's certainly nothing to write home about, especially as I don't get the impression that either health care expenditure as percentage of GDP or demographics are moving in a favorable direction.
My second link is pretty much the same as the numbers you're giving.
What's the difference between my first and my second? I don't know. If you force me to guess, post-retirement and/or terminal care, possibly?
> like most developed countries, close to a majority of people are net recipients (around 40%)
Yes, and? Isn't much the same also true for private insurance?
You've got the potential for arguing about what "fair" looks like; I'm fine with it being funded like a progressive tax, based on income rather than risk factors, but that's not hugely important.
> I think if the OP does the math based on their actual numbers, they'd be more likely to find themselves in the ~1000€/month ballpark than the 150€/month they seem to think they are paying.
I would assume that zer0tonin pays whatever they say they pay. They're likely to have better insight into their own finances than random internet strangers like thee and me.
> The Netherlands (11% of GDP) is not quite as extreme as the US (17%), but it's certainly nothing to write home about, especially as I don't get the impression that either health care expenditure as percentage of GDP or demographics are moving in a favorable direction.
The direction of movement may or may not be favourable (given the pandemic I assume "not"), but the USA is kinda the outlier in developed nations for spending a lot without delivering particularly good outcomes:
I'm not trying to make any statements about fairness or the superiority of the US healthcare system, I'm saying that for the purposes of comparing the cost impacts of different putative health policies in the US (which was the context of the thread zer0tonin was replying to) the €150 you and zer0tonin think zer0tonin is paying a month is nonsense, because it very obviously is not an accurate reflection of zer0tonin's actual monetary contribution to the Dutch health care system.
That's less than half of what the typical UK taxpayer pays for healthcare. Surely the Dutch health system is also partially funded by government revenue?
The Swiss healthcare system is privatized to a higher degree than the US one (no Medicare/aid equivalents) yet it seems to be doing mostly fine because of sensible regulation?
While generally true it needs to be noted that health insurance is very expensive in Switzerland.
I'm not complaining since, first, this is a political decision and second, the level of service is outstanding.
For example: psychotherapy is paid for or, if your doc orders an MRI you get an appointment after tomorrow.
There's also no such shit as in network health providers (exceptions apply for some insurance models) or pre-existing conditions for the basic health plan (which is still pretty good and comprehensive).
While I do think that it's an overall good system it is expensive (and subsidized for people who can't afford it).
- It is mandatory to have health insurance, if you don't chose one the state will chose one for you
- On the whole it's very expensive, although this is somewhat offset by the high standard of living
- The insurance companies are legally forced to provide a lowest tier plan
As someone born in the UK, grew up in Australia and now in the US, who knows of paying a seven thousand dollar copay after my “platinum” insurance for “elective” surgery to remove a kidney stone that was too big to pass, versus a nine day stay for gout in Australia that resulted in a $38 out of pocket because I wanted premium TV channels in my room.
> that would leave us with a bunch of private healthcare companies.
It's already a bunch of private companies.
> These private companies would drive up the cost even more.
Other way around - by having to actually directly compete for customers, instead of just having to convince a few large corporation prices would go down, not up.
Although we really should not ignore that insurance companies are not the drivers of higher costs, it's health care providers that do that.
It's enjoyable to blame insurance companies, but the reality is their profits are capped by law - they are not the problem. Dr.'s will have to take a pay cut, and there will have to be mass layoffs, there's no other way to reduce costs.
> It's enjoyable to blame insurance companies, but the reality is their profits are capped by law - they are not the problem.
Health insurance profits are capped only as a percentage of premiums collected, not a fixed dollar amount cap. The rule is you must pay out 80% of premiums collected, everything else is OH&P.
Turns out, if healthcare costs go up, then premiums go up. If premiums go up, then insurer profits go up.
Healthcare providers and health insurers have an aligned perverse incentive to have healthcare cost as much as possible, since that is what increases their profits.
This isn’t a hard relationship to uncover if you are familiar with the insurer profit cap portion of the ACA and also how money gets made.
So if increasing healthcare expenses allow them to earn more profits, then why do you think having capped profits means that insurance companies are 'not the problem'?
Insurance companies are incentivised, under law, to have the highest healthcare expenses possible.
> Insurance companies are incentivised, under law, to have the highest healthcare expenses possible.
Yes, that is true. But it doesn't change the fact that prices will have to change at the healthcare providers. Dr.s will earn less, people will be fired as positions are eliminated. There's no other way to reduce prices.
Where do you think all that "incentivized" money is going? It's going to people in healthcare will either take a pay-cut or will lose their jobs.
perhaps we should sidestep the problem of profitability in healthcare entirely and create a non-profit healthcare system? which even the most free-market loving enthusiast should be in agreement with -- inelastic demand and all
The gigantic UPMC is a non profit. Actually a TON of hospitals are non profits - every religious founded hospital is a non profit (Maimonides Medical Center, or every Mercy Hospital (Wikipedia counts 33 of them)).
Non-profit insurance companies also exist. It still helps nothing.
Are you hoping for non-profit drug and equipment makers as well? How far do you need this "non-profit" thing to go before you acknowledge it doesn't help at all?
The NHS is non-profit. That's a healthcare system, not just a hospital or insurance company. I repeat that he said "system" and you continue to talk about things that are not a healthcare system.
I can acknowledge that it not just helps but that it is far more functional than the US system I've had to suffer through for many years. In addition to years of experience with the US and NHS, I also have many years of experience with Italian national healthcare which is also non-profit and better than the US system.
The US system is better for some diseases but only if you are rich. And an absolute failure if you aren't employed. Even if you can manage to stay employed with a serious illness you better have a healthy family member with a lot of energy who can fight the insurance company that really doesn't want the cost and burden of you and will make that clear in every action.
How far do you need this "for profit" thing to go before you acknowledge its very serious flaws and inadequacies?
NHS is not a combo of "hospitals, doctors, and insurance". It does not involve insurance at all. It is a comprehensive and integrated healthcare system that runs as a whole.
I'm writing this from the UK where I use the NHS. I've also used the US system extensively and the Italian healthcare system extensively.
You need to get basic facts right if you want to be a part of the debate.
If this is aimed at free-market living enthusiasts, I believe the response from them would be that the market is currently not stopping anyone from opening non-profit healthcare providers today.
> Other way around - by having to actually directly compete for customers, instead of just having to convince a few large corporation prices would go down, not up.
This is backwards logic. Those few large corporations have the bargaining power to negotiate lower premiums. Individual consumers have zero bargaining power.
You wish it was backwards logic. In reality the insurance company just needs to convince a single person in a company to pick them. And they are very good at doing that.
On the other hand individual consumers have ALL the bargaining power - they can simply pick a different insurance company, and insurance companies have to work very very very hard to get customers. They would compete on price because that's by far the most important thing to a consumer.
A company on the other hand cares about other stuff, how integrated in the system, how easy can we import members, manage members, how much marketing material do they give? Do we have to educate our employees, or will the insurance company do that for us?
Just tons of other stuff that isn't price. Individuals: It's 99% price.
So, you spend every single day of your existence in the US being absolutely fucked by the private medical sector, and you think that for some reason having no collective bargaining ability will make you better off?
Plus, health care spending is like >10% of GDP. You don't rewrite the rules like that with upsetting a great deal of corporate interests. An appreciable number of people benefit from all the inefficiency in delivering health care.
> An appreciable number of people benefit from all the inefficiency in delivering health care.
Not anything close the the number of people who suffer from the all the inefficiency in delivering health care, but guess which has more money to bribe lawmakers with
Meanwhile, France made mutuelle (half of the healthcare) mandatorily paid by employers. When you leave, you can keep it for a time, but it’s essentially paid by the employer…
> This is like a case study in what happens when you fire everyone except the sycophants and yes-men.
The initial and biggest waves of layoffs last year were of people who hadn’t yet had a chance to demonstrate whether they were or were not sycophants. They were essentially random.
I don’t think that’s true at all. Elon allowed any employee who wanted to quit with three months’ severance. Anyone who wasn’t a true believer and had options could have quit.
It is very possible that they did not predict this specific down stream effect, for one of many reasons. I do not want to discount that, though, as I am not at Twitter and am not on a first name basis with anyone there. Maybe there are some who did see this.
What I maintain though is that most anyone still working on code at Twitter, regardless of their experience or overview of the code base, would strongly argue for testing and staging, which appear to go against current leadership's mode of operation, likely because of the time pressure you mentioned.
Not pushing such changes straight to production is a concept I feel anyone working at Twitter would subscribe to, yet has to painfully go against, lest they be led go.
Except, progress grinding to a halt pretty much described Twitter before Elon Musk too. The story that anyone who knew anything was let go is just that, a story, as the number of employees by year shows Twitter, and other tech companies in the same period, overhired and then went back to pre-2020 levels.
The only difference between then and now is that there is a big personality at the top who now personifies everything Twitter does, especially if things go wrong, whereas before it was mainly just a faceless bureaucracy whose Trust and Safety lead at times had more visibility than the CEO.
The subtext is that Twitter changing hands also involved trimming a lot of the dead weight, particularly hitting the softer managerial/diversity/HR side. Now a lot of people are rooting for the site to fail because it has gotten too "bro-ey", as the era of trust-and-safety and $15k backchannel bluecheck deals has made way for free-speech and monthly subscriptions.
You claim with a straight face that, had Musk not taken over Twitter, it would have had the same rate of outages and level of degradation as it does now? It's completely obvious to anyone familiar with the stability of Twitter pre and post Musk that his takeover was an inflection point. You're ignoring reality in order to support a claim that fired non-coders and "diversity hires" contributed nothing.
What I claim is that:
- OPs story that Twitter was a healthy and productive tech company pre-Elon is complete non-sense. How many years did people pine for an edit button?
- Twitter returned to pre-2020 staffing levels, which is true
- Twitter struggled to push out new features (like an edit button) for years, which is true, wheras post-Elon they pushed out edit buttons, longer tweets, subscriptions, etc.
Nope! From your original post: "The only difference between then and now is that there is a big personality at the top"
Claiming that nothing is different other than Elon's presence implies that Twitter was just as much of a technical dumpster fire as it is now. That is not _at all_ what you're now claiming you said, which is, effectively, "Twitter made slow progress on product priorities". No one disputes that, but it's not what we're discussing here, which is the rapid degradation of service since Musk took over. Maybe those "diversity hires", as you call them, actually contributed to keeping the site running.
Here’s just a few of the people (in these cases journalists) that Elon has banned. It’s not hard to find other examples of censorship either. That’s his right, he owns all of it, but he lied about ideals of free speech. If it’s speech he doesn’t like, he kills it:
Ryan Mac
Drew Harwell
Micah Lee
Matt Binder
Aaron Rupar
Donie O’Sullivan
Tony Webster
EDIT: these bans were related to reporting on the elonjet tracking account that was banned. He didn’t just ban the account he didn’t like, he banned the accounts of journalists who talked about that.
For posterity, those journalists were banned (unbanned a few months later) for just reporting on ElonJet, who used publicly available FAA data to track Elon's jet. Elon called it doxxing. And also temporarily banned links to Mastodon just to prevent people from accessing ElonJet that way.
Good point, they were all related as bans resulting from reporting or tweeting about the elonjet ban. I edited my comment accordingly since it’s important context to know the ones I mentioned were all related to a single event (though he’s silenced others as well for different reasons too)
Elonjet was bait by people with an axe to grind and a chip on their shoulder, and if this isn't blindingly obvious, I have a bridge to sell you.
There is no doubt that, after firing Vijaya Gadde (sp?), the corporate focus has shifted away from censoring every single tweet, and more towards letting people say what they want. This does not mean every single tweet is left up, or that annoying Elon isn't a catastrophically stupid thing for journalists to do.
> There is no doubt that [...] the corporate focus has shifted away from censoring every single tweet
It is absolutely unbelievable that anyone could say this when every Tweet is currently censored to non-members.
I've traditionally considered the Dorsey administration to be the worse steward, but this is an insane take to steelman considering how self-conscious the past few months of banning has gotten.
Unless you have some information I don’t, Twitter is way below its pre-pandemic staffing levels. Obviously hard to tell exactly how low they went as they’re not public anymore, but this is quite different from Meta and such that really did just go back to pre-pandemic level. CNBC say Twitter is at 1300 people, a drop of 80%. It’s mind boggling.
Your statement is an admission that you prefer to judge messages for their implied moral valence instead of their truth content. Personally I find that pathetic.
What a fantastically bad take supported by no facts whatsoever. I like your graphics work but you should really think before you type this kind of a thing up.
Twitter went from a 4.9k headcount in Dec 2019, to 7.5k in Dec 2021. Fact.
I don't care if you "like my graphics work" or not. You seem to be implying I owe you something, which is crazy. I have been publishing stuff online for decades and I can tell you, judgy and entitled people such as yourself have _never_ done anything useful in return.
What's amazing is you chastizing me for a "bad post", even as you dispute something you could've googled in 5 seconds.
It is -- and I cannot stress this enough -- entirely OK to root for the failure of a company that is owned, directed and dominated by an odious person with abhorrent politics.
Compare:
- hoping Ballmer-era Microsoft would fail in their attempts to snuff out Linux
- hoping that USSR would fail in their attempts to snuff out large numbers of their own citizens
- hoping that the Confederates would fail at snuffing out resistance to literal slavery
- (in fiction,) hoping that the Death Star would fail at snuffing out various planets, etc
and so forth.
There is not some weird list of permissible root-reasons. You have no gotcha; you are just gotten.
And speaking of having no gotcha but just being gotten, if you have showdead=true you can see one of Musk's biggest stans trevioustrouble rolling out their very best most deep and thoughtful arguments in support of Musk:
>trevioustrouble 1 hour ago [flagged] [dead] | parent | context | prev | next [–] | on: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself
>It’s just a feed, and needs to be rate-limited for unregistered users. No need to pull out your philosophy-degree. The people that were fired from Twitter were fired for good reason and if you think you’d do a better job than Elon with Twitter, you wouldnt.
>* PS: Dislike my comment fags
And then they sum up their politics and best arguments and what the Twitter they're fighting so hard for and what Musk they worship so much is all about, in just one word:
>trevioustrouble 1 hour ago [flagged] [dead] | parent | context | flag | vouch | favorite | on: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself
>fag
And that's the best they've got.
It really makes Musk's apologists so angry and frustrated to see everyone laughing their asses off at Musk explosively and bloodily sharting himself in public like that, because now they have to follow behind the elephant and wipe up all the mess.
Disclaimer: I'm not American and have only the foggiest notion of who RFK is, but the urge to identify boundary conditions for 'permissible wants' does feel especially America-y to me. I speculate that it has something to do with the veneration given to markets --- the underlying anxiety being that having feelings about an intensely cultural use of forty billion dollars is somehow antithetical to the conduct befitting an ideal rational agent.
None of your examples actually align with the general sentiment here. In your examples, you cite specific goals that should fail, which may be part of a broader approach which includes more noble goals.
For example, you say that Microsoft should fail in attempting to snuff out Linux, not that Microsoft should fail generally.
You say that the USSR should fail to kill their own people, not that the USSR should fail to thrive as a people or a nation.
In this case the equivalent would be to call for Twitter to fail at... what exactly? Free speech?
I think you've been gotten. You don't perceive these examples as equivocations when they are, and it is blinded by dislike for a figure you disagree with rather than a specific bad goal.
One may compare circumstances of the same kind without asserting that they are of the same degree. This is generally referred to as an 'intuition pump' -- it's not the most reliable move, philosophically speaking, but it does have a pretty long history, IIRC Plato's _Republic_ mentions looking at big things from far away in order to understand things that would remain obscure if (as he put it) written small.
And if he didn't make his politics part of how he runs stuff, I probably wouldn't even care about his politics. But you know how celebrities get crap for inserting politics into things, when they know very little about that topic? Elon is going to get the same.
Is it..? All the replies to this thread just mention how he has abhorrent politics but there's no specifics. I'm not sure anyone really knows why they dislike him, and thought critically about it. A lot of it seems assumption-based, fed mostly by the media who is Twitter's biggest competitor. And on Hacker News, of all places. I'd think it the most likely place to find people who understand the rift between tech and trad media, and that character assassination is the biggest tool used by one particular side in this war. Instead the middling tech armchair specialists who partake in and promote the culture that birthed Elon and his multitude of companies have bought the other side's narrative to hate on their own.
I think its like, totally reasonable? to want the Gates Foundation to like implode and everybody who works for it to be unemployed? and all those poor African kids to go unvaccinated?
Because I kinda think Bill Gates has bad politics?
It’s not his politics, it’s him personally. Many find him an arrogant, loathesome baffoon and an asshole, even outside of the political realm. Obviously many people are rooting for him to fail.
Prior to Twitter's acquisition by Musk, they worked quite closely with the State and even hired the former top FBI lawyer as their chief legal counsel.
And now that he's opened his big fat mouth and revealed just what kind of a person he really is, I'm also rooting for unconed to fail because of his politics.
> The story that anyone who knew anything was let go is just that, a story, as the number of employees by year shows Twitter, and other tech companies in the same period, overhired and then went back to pre-2020 levels.
Citation needed. Show me the 2020 Twitter headcount. Show me the 2023 Twitter headcount.
> The only difference between then and now is that there is a big personality at the top who now personifies everything Twitter does, especially if things go wrong, whereas before it was mainly just a faceless bureaucracy whose Trust and Safety lead at times had more visibility than the CEO.
That is not the 'only difference'. There is also the matter of all the hate speech. Which I guess you don't really notice, as you're not one of the targets, but I sure am. This is like Trump going 'boo hoo everyone hates me because I'm Donald Trump,' when in fact there is this small matter of an armed insurrection. You are writing off the valid political concerns of your opponents as being rooted in personality, rather than in odious politics.
> The subtext is that Twitter changing hands also involved trimming a lot of the dead weight, particularly hitting the softer managerial/diversity/HR side.
This is the most reality-defying way of recalling that the entire company basically quit on him overnight, but ok, bro
> Now a lot of people are rooting for the site to fail because it has gotten too "bro-ey", as the era of trust-and-safety and $15k backchannel bluecheck deals has made way for free-speech and monthly subscriptions.
That is not the reason we are anticipating its failure. We are anticipating its failure because we understand how people, platforms, and software interact. 'Hope' has nothing to do with it; we just read it off the verniers.
> So about the only thing they could do was issue multiple, parallel requests and hope that at least one of them was fast.
lol nobody would do this to solve this problem because it doesn't even remotely solve it or give the appearance of solving it, if anything it's guaranteed to make things go slower
Google did this a long time ago. It’s more nuanced than you think. Two requests would be issued and the first acknowledged one cause the second to be cancelled. There was a public paper on this from Dean iirc and the method is a decade old.
I think the fundamental difference is that Google was using request hedging within their own network, sending the same request to two different internal servers in case one was slow, while Twitter appears to be sending the same request to the same server over the public Internet.
That's the first thing that came to mind. It's a pay-to-play move, which is not at all surprising. People seem to forget that fully-featured social media-centric corporations are run for profit, and if they can't get enough advertising to balance the books, then what's left but subscriptions?
Sometimes people buy media corporations because they're interesting in using them to promote their other more lucrative operations (think Jeff Bezos and the Washington Post) so they don't really care about profitability, but I don't think Twitter fits that model, but who knows?
The WeChat model is the obvious answer to that rhetorical question. Build paid services on top of your hellsite with millions of addicts using it daily. For example, Twitter could have easily been the gateway to OnlyFans, or to Patreon. Apple is another example of this kind of value-added ecosystem that leverages a foothold to sell other crap to people.
Or there's the TikTok model: gobble up all the data, sell data to governments, give MBS or Putin admin access to Twitter, build AI on top of the dataset.
Even a private equity chop-shop like Bain could do a better job of extracting value from Twitter than this mess.
This isn't a profit-seeking venture for Musk. This is about politics, about power, and primarily about revenge. Musk is giving Notch stiff competition for the title of most pathetic billionaire.
>This isn't a profit-seeking venture for Musk. This is about politics, about power, and primarily about revenge.
I strongly disagree; this is about Musk buying Twitter accidentally, and then running it as best he could without losing face as "real world iron man". He's fucking up left, right and center because he was completely unprepared to actually run it, and suddenly needs $40B to pay off his debtors.
It's also about politics, power and revenge, but it's primarily about Musk being a fucking idiot and constantly digging himself deeper.
That's a non-sequitir. You can be at the top of your field and not completely understand a complex system. Also, the right people may not have even been involved in the implementation of this "feature".
Bingo. You can know a specific technology inside and out, but easily get lost in a large system built in that technology if you haven't worked with it before.
It's very easy to get caught in assumptions like, "Nobody would ever do things THIS way, so they must have built it THAT way," only to find out that, once upon a time, THIS way was the right way to do things, only for it to over time become less and less optimal, but the costs of changing things were too high to fix it. Once your system is old enough and large enough, you'll have several thousand things just like that.
For sure. I'd add that even super-geniuses get overwhelmed when asked to do too many things at once. Kudos to whoever's still left at Twitter; the current erratic decay is better than I would have expected after this long. But when maintenance and improvement are deferred long enough, eventually you reach the point where on average solving 1 problem creates >1.0 problems.
> You can be at the top of your field and not completely understand a complex system.
The tweet reads: "Twitter is firing off about 10 requests a second to itself to try and fetch content that never arrives because Elon's latest genius innovation is to block people from being able to read Twitter without logging in."
Does that strike you as complex? I mean, surely they had the context (need to log in) because it was all over the news
I don't know what kind of systems you worked on in your career, but even simpler systems with smaller userbases than twitter are quite complex if you are new to it.
Twitter serves their service to the entire world, with multiple layers of systems working in conjunction in order to make things work smoothly. A new engineer that has not been working on it for no more than a couple months would likely be unaware of how the different systems communicate and interact. A change like this will have have a lot of unintended consequences, and not having a senior engineer with lots of context leading the change will undoubtedly cause these kinds of issues.
> A change like this will have have a lot of unintended consequences, and not having a senior engineer with lots of context leading the change will undoubtedly cause these kinds of issues.
Having a senior engineer with a lot of context is worthless if the work environment does not promote open communication. You don't want to be the senior engineer or leader who shows "poor judgement" by opposing the mercurial owner "for no reason" if you're overridden and the feature launch succeeds without a glitch; no one gets fired for implementing a request that came straight from the top.
This is why non-rushed, scaled roll-outs are essential for large system: had they tried this on 1% / 5% / 10% of random traffic first, they could have caught this. Yet again, if the directive to roll it out to production came from the very top, you set that gate to 100% immediately.
“Trying to make a pigtail out of these unbrushed hair may unscrew the ears”. Sorry, yep, twitter is big. But if preventing tens of doomed requests before a login requires a senior engineer with lots of context, then the program was screwed up long before the layoffs.
I don't disagree, but: Twitter was big and it worked. Then someone created incentives for many people who know the code to leave.
The one's left don't know all the code (how could they?), but were forced to change many things about the site at a "just do it" basis. This error didn't happen because someone was too stupid to remove the code, it did happen because the connection to another thing was removed and the failsafe on the landing page doesn't have exponential backdown built in, not something you can necessarily know or investigate before, when an executive breaths down your neck and wants you to just do it.
This is about the new managment, not about engineers.
Your argument is that it is a non sequitur to say that the right skilled people are not at twitter, using the argument that the right people with the available skills were not involved in this feature.
Twitter could be packed with extremely skillful senior engineers who don't understand the product well enough to predict complex outcomes of planned changes.
Likewise you can have a "poor quality" 1x employee who has knowledge of how everything within the stack is glued together; where there is chewingum and where there are steel beams.
They are potentially more vauable than the 100x engineer who has intimate knowledge of how googles shipping container datacentres work.
Seems Twitter has had a culture of rolling out changes straight into production without incremental testing, at least since well before Musk took over. Mudge was hired there in 2020 and what he found was a complete mess.
They lack knowledge not skills. To my knowledge there is no "intuitively understand how my changes will impact a complex system without studying it" skill (unless that system is under a robust test suite, which Twitter is not)
> knowledge there is no "intuitively understand how my changes will impact a complex system without studying it" skill (unless that system is under a robust test suite, which Twitter is not
then how do they have confidence that anything works before they subject hundreds of millions of people around the world to system updates? that seems disrespectful to the user, if you asked me.
Alternately, if they have the “right skills” why is this happening? Clearly they don’t have some of the needed skills to prevent this. And a self-DDOS might be a good indication of that.
> and needs to be rate-limited for unregistered users
It seemingly needs to be rate-limited for not just registered users, but registered paying premium users as well. And the rate limits for them are enough to be passed in less than an hour of average idle use!
> if you think you’d do a better job than Elon with Twitter, you wouldnt.
Doing nothing and not saddling twitter with unnecessary extra debt would have already been doing better than Elon.
I have no experience managing a company at that scale so I won't challenge the assertion that Elon is doing a better job than I would but... the feed has not been rate limited for unregistered users for the history of the site as far as I know, and its been pretty damn stable and snappy!
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
– Donald Knuth
It's not just hypothetical either. There was a bug in a sorting algorithm a few years back that had been 'proved' correct. I think it was to do with numbers wrapping, and that hadn't been considered in the mathematical proof.
WPA2 also had an exploit (KRACK) while the handshake algorithm itself was "proven to be secure". Formal verification is a powerful tool but it does not guarantee bug-free code: it merely guarantees that the particular bugs you checked for are not possible.
That's exactly why you write tests. You want to be sure future changes don't break present functionality, especially if the future changes are being done by someone who doesn't understand your part of the system.
You write tests for your code as it exists to make sure it functions. You cannot write tests for every conceivable change that someone else might make in the future that either mis-uses your code or adds new code inbetween that didn't previously exist. You need the people who add that new code to write new tests. Something that it seems the remaining engineers at Twitter do not have time for.
But this is Scaling-101 stuff. It's not some super complex or unique system going wrong. At least according to the article, it's a classic case of bad retry logic leading to a death spiral.
Explain why not, if you please. If unresponsiveness causes increased traffic, which causes further unresponsiveness, is that not referred to as a thundering herd problem? Is the stated mitigation of a backoff not fully relevant here?
It's the difference between one customer asking a hundred cooks for a waffle and a hundred customers asking one cook for a waffle. The former is the thundering herd (a bunch of processes trying to do something that only needs to be done once, causing resource contention) and this is akin to the latter (with the "customers" being parallel requests from the frontend).
The thundering herd problem is more like, there's a hundred cooks, one griddle, and only one of them can make an acceptable waffle for the customer.
This specific problem we're discussing, of concurrent client retries effectively launching a self-imposed DDOS attack, isn't exactly the thundering herd problem. It's clients and servers instead of threads, for one thing. But it's a good enough analogy to another type of cascading failure in concurrent computing, IMO.
Hmm, I was thinking it still applies in the sense that the many many duplicate retries are hitting many of Twitter's servers causing unnecessary duplicated load when a single successful response would satisfy the client and reduce the traffic.
In my mind, it is much closer to needlessly asking every server for the same information because the requests are most likely load balanced, but I guess it's true that I don't know the load balancing strategy. Even still, is it not more likely than not that those retries are hitting multiple servers?
Sure, maybe? We (or at least I) know little about the actual problem here, and metaphors only go so far. But to my mind, "too many things trying to handle a request" gets a cool name because it is a fairly narrow and unusual problem, whereas "too many requests" goes by many names (DoS, hammering, flood, etc) because it's depressingly common.
I worked in the games industry for a while, and came to understand how they could spend so much money and so much time, and yet release a game where even basic functionality was broken. It's exactly this sort of extreme schedule pressure that, ironically, makes a huge morass where changing one thing breaks 10 other things, so progress grinds to a halt.