If that's the case, that's their own fault. Seriously. As an engineer, you can hardcode your assumptions or make them parametric. I get that 140 chars has been

If that's the case, that's their own fault. Seriously. As an engineer, you can hardcode your assumptions or make them parametric. I get that 140 chars has been a core part of the Twitter identity, and maybe there are some infrastructural aspects that have to be hardcoded to optimize for that. But if they've got `140`s sprinkled all over their code base because that was the assumption of the day, god help them.