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I've talked/pitched (full disclosure: got a "no") some of the bigger names behind the product at Twitter. I was a little disappointed because they seem to be pr

I've talked/pitched (full disclosure: got a "no") some of the bigger names behind the product at Twitter. I was a little disappointed because they seem to be proud of their at least $15M+/month server costs which is partly driving their company into the ground (the user facing product hasn't improved despite "re-engineering" of their backend, at non-substantial price differences, and lack of innovation for consumers have made them lose everyone to Snapchat or anti-censorship sites). Of tweets alone (about 200bytes per tweet), over the last decade, they probably have about 3 petabytes. Unknown to them (because of the aforementioned pride) they have 1.5 petabytes a month of free storage/caching they aren't even touching. If they switched to a P2P model like IPFS or (full disclosure: I work here) http://gunDB.io/ http://gunDB.io/ , but Twitter seems determined to stay as a centralized monolith. Which is too bad, because that has now become their own death - the regime change is happening and decentralized services will win instead. Edit: Compare against 100M+ messages (1000bytes each) for $10 a day. 2 min screencast here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_WqBuEA7s8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_WqBuEA7s8 . Even if you multiplied the feature set by 10K times, you would still be saving $12M+ a month. At this rate the Discord guys (pushing 120M+ messages a day) are doing way better - there post is on top of HN right now too, see my comment there as well. And they only have 4 backend engineers.

jhoechtl 10y ago
Why the downvote? The post contains valuable architectural links worth a discussion
- rapsey 10y ago
  1. Because it's a .js database. 2. Because the website does a poor job explaining what problem it solves.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - eduren 10y ago
    Agreed, their website definitely turned me off. Quick tip for them: Having a section for showing that a bunch of people are using and "Trusting" the product is good, but your's seems to mostly (4/7 from what I can see) be the investors behind your product. Edit: Looked at the names more, and it seems 7/7 are individual investors or VCs https://angel.co/gun https://angel.co/gun Which is all well and good, but maybe the wording should be "Investors and Backers" rather than "Trusted By".
    - marknadal 10y ago
      Sorry the website turned you off :( what recommendation do you make for balancing both enterprise and developers? Currently we have two website, the other for developers: http://gun.js.org/ http://gun.js.org/ Better links: (again) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_WqBuEA7s8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_WqBuEA7s8 100M+ msg a day for $10. Doing distributed machine learning: http://myrighttocode.org/blog/artificial%20intelligence/particle%20swarm/genetic%20algorithm/collective%20knowledge/machine%20learning/gun-db-artificial-knowledge-sharing http://myrighttocode.org/blog/artificial%20intelligence/part... 30M+ ops/sec performance testing: https://github.com/amark/gun/wiki/100000-ops-sec-in-IE6-on-2GB-Atom-CPU https://github.com/amark/gun/wiki/100000-ops-sec-in-IE6-on-2... 1 minute demo of seamless multi-server failover during a live chat app: https://youtu.be/-FN_J3etdvY https://youtu.be/-FN_J3etdvY 1 minute demo of recovering from a complete server meltdown: https://youtu.be/-i-11T5ZI9o https://youtu.be/-i-11T5ZI9o You are right - trust should be proven by demonstration, not the blind faith of others. We're also deploying out to customers with 1.5M users in production and customers with a product being shipped to 1.5K homes. And we're nearing our production-ready v1.0 stable release. Feedback like yours is helpful, so please hit me up with any other critiques or ideas on how we can explain ourselves better. Thanks for jumping in on the convo :)
      - rapsey 10y ago
        After reading the topmost info I still don't know if this only runs in the browser, on the server or both. I don't know how data is stored, how nodes sync, what protocol it uses, what storage engine it uses, etc. The main page has paragraphs of text that tell me nothing.
  - sciurus 10y ago
    Previous discussion of the Gun database: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9076558 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9076558
- snowwrestler 10y ago
  Because it reads like "I tried to sell Twitter something, and now I think they're dumb because they didn't buy it." Also because it claims that decentralized services are winning when the exact opposite is true.
  - marknadal 10y ago
    No matter how biased I am, Twitter's collapse over the last half year is evidence of their demise. Decentralized tooling (even if it runs on a centralized service) is winning, the stark contrast against Discord's engineering post ( here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13439725 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13439725 ) is proof. I love being proved wrong though, shoot me some links backing up your claim?

jhoechtl 10y ago

Why the downvote? The post contains valuable architectural links worth a discussion

rapsey 10y ago
1. Because it's a .js database. 2. Because the website does a poor job explaining what problem it solves.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- eduren 10y ago
  Agreed, their website definitely turned me off. Quick tip for them: Having a section for showing that a bunch of people are using and "Trusting" the product is good, but your's seems to mostly (4/7 from what I can see) be the investors behind your product. Edit: Looked at the names more, and it seems 7/7 are individual investors or VCs https://angel.co/gun https://angel.co/gun Which is all well and good, but maybe the wording should be "Investors and Backers" rather than "Trusted By".
  - marknadal 10y ago
    Sorry the website turned you off :( what recommendation do you make for balancing both enterprise and developers? Currently we have two website, the other for developers: http://gun.js.org/ http://gun.js.org/ Better links: (again) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_WqBuEA7s8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_WqBuEA7s8 100M+ msg a day for $10. Doing distributed machine learning: http://myrighttocode.org/blog/artificial%20intelligence/particle%20swarm/genetic%20algorithm/collective%20knowledge/machine%20learning/gun-db-artificial-knowledge-sharing http://myrighttocode.org/blog/artificial%20intelligence/part... 30M+ ops/sec performance testing: https://github.com/amark/gun/wiki/100000-ops-sec-in-IE6-on-2GB-Atom-CPU https://github.com/amark/gun/wiki/100000-ops-sec-in-IE6-on-2... 1 minute demo of seamless multi-server failover during a live chat app: https://youtu.be/-FN_J3etdvY https://youtu.be/-FN_J3etdvY 1 minute demo of recovering from a complete server meltdown: https://youtu.be/-i-11T5ZI9o https://youtu.be/-i-11T5ZI9o You are right - trust should be proven by demonstration, not the blind faith of others. We're also deploying out to customers with 1.5M users in production and customers with a product being shipped to 1.5K homes. And we're nearing our production-ready v1.0 stable release. Feedback like yours is helpful, so please hit me up with any other critiques or ideas on how we can explain ourselves better. Thanks for jumping in on the convo :)
    - rapsey 10y ago
      After reading the topmost info I still don't know if this only runs in the browser, on the server or both. I don't know how data is stored, how nodes sync, what protocol it uses, what storage engine it uses, etc. The main page has paragraphs of text that tell me nothing.
- sciurus 10y ago
  Previous discussion of the Gun database: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9076558 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9076558
snowwrestler 10y ago
Because it reads like "I tried to sell Twitter something, and now I think they're dumb because they didn't buy it." Also because it claims that decentralized services are winning when the exact opposite is true.
- marknadal 10y ago
  No matter how biased I am, Twitter's collapse over the last half year is evidence of their demise. Decentralized tooling (even if it runs on a centralized service) is winning, the stark contrast against Discord's engineering post ( here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13439725 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13439725 ) is proof. I love being proved wrong though, shoot me some links backing up your claim?