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It's because they're just serving a big site, not running the world's most sophisticated surveillance and ad serving machine. Serving giant websites isn't all t

It's because they're just serving a big site, not running the world's most sophisticated surveillance and ad serving machine. Serving giant websites isn't all that hard if you're just spewing out SQL queries into html templates. It all scales in all directions with a properly thought through architecture.

braythwayt 7y ago
Please be careful of logical tautologies: "It all scales in all directions with a properly thought through architecture" sounds dangerously like, "Programming isn't that hard if you just do it right."
- chillydawg 7y ago
  I appreciate what you're saying, but I don't think it quite applied. What I meant was that it's easy to create an architecture for an application that doesn't scale well at all. Eg - poorly sharded data, lots of cross dependencies etc. However, if you properly think through your data model and data flows and use cases, it's generally possible to create a system that is extremely scalable in all directions. This is certainly not easy, but it's a hell of a lot easier than creating some huge ai driven data slurping ad empire.
  - braythwayt 7y ago
    I totally agree that you make an excellent point about the relative ease/difficulty of various approaches.
- inimino 7y ago
  > Programming isn't that hard if you just do it right. That's not a tautology. In fact, it's actually worth pointing out, especially to junior engineers who get frustrated by how hard everything is, that it actually doesn't need to be that hard if you, well, do it right. Obviously that's not productive feedback without actually helping them be better, but it's far from a tautology. For anyone wondering, a tautology is a statement that is logically true by construction, rather than contingently true because of the way the world is. For example, "Programming isn't that hard if it's easy" would be a tautology. Constructing a counterexample by changing programming to something else shows that this was not a tautology to begin with: "Sending a man to the moon isn't that hard if you just do it right," which is obviously false, because even if you do it right that's objectively difficult. Programming is hard, but we make it much harder than it has to be by doing it spectacularly wrong in many ways, both individually and collectively.
  - braythwayt 7y ago
    I think that you are speaking of a logical tautology, while I am speaking of a linguistic tautology. If I am correct about this, we are both right. A logical tautology is, "A statement that is true by necessity or by virtue of its logical form." A linguistic tautology is, "A phrase or expression in which the same thing is said twice in different words." In formal debating, for example, you can call someone out for either type of tautology.
    - inimino 7y ago
      Because we express logical statements in English, these two kinds of tautologies overlap. (If we were using a formal language we could express tautologies like !(A && !A) without using English.) If you say "All bachelors are unmarried", this is true both because of the meaning of the words, and because of the logical structure implied by the words. In either case, if you state a tautology, you state something which is true in all possible worlds, given the definitions of the words, at least. Someone can then call you out for stating a tautology, which is to state something that is vacuously true, that is, you've made a statement about the nature of reasoning itself, in any possible world, but you haven't said anything at all about the world we're actually in. So you're wasting your breath even though what you say is unassailably true. (Note that in mathematics, the tautologies are precisely the theorems with their premises or axioms! So this is by no means always useless.) The problem with calling out tautologies in common life, however, is that the danger of identifying a false tautology is very high. When someone says "Either X happened, or it didn't." you may be tempted to say "tautology!" but in fact they are probably making some kind of oblique point or highlighting a flaw in someone else's argument, etc. In other words, tautologies may be vacuous as statements about the world within a logical framework, but as speech acts in the real world, they always come with a motivation and that can usually be expressed in a non-tautologous way. For example, "A or not A" can be expanded charitably to "A or not A, and this is relevant to the topic at hand", which is not a tautology anymore. In this case, if you do something right, it's not extra hard, which is kind of a tautology. But there's a point in saying it, which is that it doesn't have to be that hard... if you do it right. And that's not true of everything or in every possible world, hence not a vacuous statement.
  - deleted 7y ago
- WhitneyLand 7y ago
  >>"Programming isn't that hard if you just do it right." Is this like saying, programming isn't hard if you choose easy enough problems to solve? Or should we ask for a link to see a demo of an AGI implementation? I guess math is not hard either if you're "doing is right", as long as it's all arithmetic... >>That's not a tautology. I would agree tautology is not the best description, probably fallacy would do fine.
  - inimino 7y ago
    > Is this like saying, programming isn't hard if you choose easy enough problems to solve? No, this is saying that things don't have to be as hard as we make them. You don't need more than a hundred people to run a top-ten website, and that shouldn't be surprising. It is surprising only because we are so good at making things overcomplicated.
benologist 7y ago
But also perhaps it’s because they didn’t allow a team to endlessly iterate on tech minutiae until they required many teams to keep it running and iterate on tech minutiae.
blauditore 7y ago
> Serving giant websites isn't all that hard if you're just spewing out SQL queries into html templates. It all scales in all directions with a properly thought through architecture. No. 1. Your comment makes it sound like Wikipedia is just, or mostly, serving read-only content, which is far from true. Yes, static read-only content is significantly easier to serve than dynamic, editable one, but Wikipedia is the latter. 2. Claiming it's easy to build something at this scale is "isn't all that hard" just makes me think you've never done anything similar. It reminds me of devs saying they could re-build MS Office over a weekend. It's just ignorant of the software's actual complexity. I'm not associated with Wikimedia in any way, but have worked on large-scale software projects before, and things are quite different from, say, websites only serving 100k monthly active users.
- abraae 7y ago
  I've never heard anyone in my life say they could rebuild MS office in a weekend. What, in your opinion, would be the work needed to go from a 100k monthly active user site to a wikipedia scale site - that would be comparable to rebuilding MS office?
  - ivan_gammel 7y ago
    That seems indeed comparable given the scope and functionality of Wikimedia products.
  - z3t4 7y ago
    The core parts of Office could be done on a weekend, but in order to get the same complexity and incompatibility it would take several "codemonkeys" several years to achieve.
    - journalctl 7y ago
      Silly Microsoft wasted hundreds of people and decades of time. Why didn’t you tell them?
      - 7y ago

braythwayt 7y ago

Please be careful of logical tautologies: "It all scales in all directions with a properly thought through architecture" sounds dangerously like, "Programming isn't that hard if you just do it right."

chillydawg 7y ago
I appreciate what you're saying, but I don't think it quite applied. What I meant was that it's easy to create an architecture for an application that doesn't scale well at all. Eg - poorly sharded data, lots of cross dependencies etc. However, if you properly think through your data model and data flows and use cases, it's generally possible to create a system that is extremely scalable in all directions. This is certainly not easy, but it's a hell of a lot easier than creating some huge ai driven data slurping ad empire.
- braythwayt 7y ago
  I totally agree that you make an excellent point about the relative ease/difficulty of various approaches.
inimino 7y ago
> Programming isn't that hard if you just do it right. That's not a tautology. In fact, it's actually worth pointing out, especially to junior engineers who get frustrated by how hard everything is, that it actually doesn't need to be that hard if you, well, do it right. Obviously that's not productive feedback without actually helping them be better, but it's far from a tautology. For anyone wondering, a tautology is a statement that is logically true by construction, rather than contingently true because of the way the world is. For example, "Programming isn't that hard if it's easy" would be a tautology. Constructing a counterexample by changing programming to something else shows that this was not a tautology to begin with: "Sending a man to the moon isn't that hard if you just do it right," which is obviously false, because even if you do it right that's objectively difficult. Programming is hard, but we make it much harder than it has to be by doing it spectacularly wrong in many ways, both individually and collectively.
- braythwayt 7y ago
  I think that you are speaking of a logical tautology, while I am speaking of a linguistic tautology. If I am correct about this, we are both right. A logical tautology is, "A statement that is true by necessity or by virtue of its logical form." A linguistic tautology is, "A phrase or expression in which the same thing is said twice in different words." In formal debating, for example, you can call someone out for either type of tautology.
  - inimino 7y ago
    Because we express logical statements in English, these two kinds of tautologies overlap. (If we were using a formal language we could express tautologies like !(A && !A) without using English.) If you say "All bachelors are unmarried", this is true both because of the meaning of the words, and because of the logical structure implied by the words. In either case, if you state a tautology, you state something which is true in all possible worlds, given the definitions of the words, at least. Someone can then call you out for stating a tautology, which is to state something that is vacuously true, that is, you've made a statement about the nature of reasoning itself, in any possible world, but you haven't said anything at all about the world we're actually in. So you're wasting your breath even though what you say is unassailably true. (Note that in mathematics, the tautologies are precisely the theorems with their premises or axioms! So this is by no means always useless.) The problem with calling out tautologies in common life, however, is that the danger of identifying a false tautology is very high. When someone says "Either X happened, or it didn't." you may be tempted to say "tautology!" but in fact they are probably making some kind of oblique point or highlighting a flaw in someone else's argument, etc. In other words, tautologies may be vacuous as statements about the world within a logical framework, but as speech acts in the real world, they always come with a motivation and that can usually be expressed in a non-tautologous way. For example, "A or not A" can be expanded charitably to "A or not A, and this is relevant to the topic at hand", which is not a tautology anymore. In this case, if you do something right, it's not extra hard, which is kind of a tautology. But there's a point in saying it, which is that it doesn't have to be that hard... if you do it right. And that's not true of everything or in every possible world, hence not a vacuous statement.
- deleted 7y ago
WhitneyLand 7y ago
>>"Programming isn't that hard if you just do it right." Is this like saying, programming isn't hard if you choose easy enough problems to solve? Or should we ask for a link to see a demo of an AGI implementation? I guess math is not hard either if you're "doing is right", as long as it's all arithmetic... >>That's not a tautology. I would agree tautology is not the best description, probably fallacy would do fine.
- inimino 7y ago
  > Is this like saying, programming isn't hard if you choose easy enough problems to solve? No, this is saying that things don't have to be as hard as we make them. You don't need more than a hundred people to run a top-ten website, and that shouldn't be surprising. It is surprising only because we are so good at making things overcomplicated.

benologist 7y ago

But also perhaps it’s because they didn’t allow a team to endlessly iterate on tech minutiae until they required many teams to keep it running and iterate on tech minutiae.

blauditore 7y ago

> Serving giant websites isn't all that hard if you're just spewing out SQL queries into html templates. It all scales in all directions with a properly thought through architecture. No. 1. Your comment makes it sound like Wikipedia is just, or mostly, serving read-only content, which is far from true. Yes, static read-only content is significantly easier to serve than dynamic, editable one, but Wikipedia is the latter. 2. Claiming it's easy to build something at this scale is "isn't all that hard" just makes me think you've never done anything similar. It reminds me of devs saying they could re-build MS Office over a weekend. It's just ignorant of the software's actual complexity. I'm not associated with Wikimedia in any way, but have worked on large-scale software projects before, and things are quite different from, say, websites only serving 100k monthly active users.

abraae 7y ago
I've never heard anyone in my life say they could rebuild MS office in a weekend. What, in your opinion, would be the work needed to go from a 100k monthly active user site to a wikipedia scale site - that would be comparable to rebuilding MS office?
- ivan_gammel 7y ago
  That seems indeed comparable given the scope and functionality of Wikimedia products.
- z3t4 7y ago
  The core parts of Office could be done on a weekend, but in order to get the same complexity and incompatibility it would take several "codemonkeys" several years to achieve.
  - journalctl 7y ago
    Silly Microsoft wasted hundreds of people and decades of time. Why didn’t you tell them?
    - 7y ago