6 ms·

Does it take a genius to figure out how to build twitch? It’s a modern crud app with video streaming.

decebalus1 5y ago
This reminds me of the Albertsons guy on Blind who inadvertently created a meme when he said that Facebook could be rewritten with a small cluster of Oracle dbs. The meme is that Albertsons people are so elite, they work and think in a higher level of existence, way above the scalability bs us commoners are accustomed to.
lwansbrough 5y ago
Just stream the video, it’s easy!
- kinghajj 5y ago
  Netflix & Youtube in shambles.
  - lapetitejort 5y ago
    I found out how to destroy reddit. Just fork their repos! https://github.com/reddit https://github.com/reddit
    - duskwuff 5y ago
      Sadly, Reddit stopped updating the public repo for their main application in 2017: https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit
      - BitwiseFool 5y ago
        It's for the best. New reddit is awful.
      - asddubs 5y ago
        so it won't even have new reddit, even better!
Zababa 5y ago
You don't need a genius. You need a few good people, and a lot of hands. I think the best way to look at things like Twitch is to compare them to cathedrals, bridges, things like that. You might be able to have the idea and sketch the plans by yourself, but it's physically impossible to build it yourself.
NelsonMinar 5y ago
I mean doing Youtube is even easier; it's just a wrapper around HTML5 video.
ashtonkem 5y ago
Everything is easy to build until a small nation state’s worth of people want to use it at once.
- ThePadawan 5y ago
  I work in a small nation state. That doesn't stop CV-hungry engineers from finding ways to overcomplicate it. (I do agree with you on this topic in general)
  - ashtonkem 5y ago
    You completely misread me.
    - ThePadawan 5y ago
      Oh I'm sorry, here's what I read: "Building apps is easy as long as you don't have millions of users. For that you have to actually think about bottlenecks, the larger architecture etc." (I agree with that) What I wanted to express is that lots of engineers I personally know instead say "Building apps involves thinking about every bottleneck in advance and optimizing for every possible user scenario and a global user base, regardless if the number of users is only ~100."
      - oceanplexian 5y ago
        "Building apps involves thinking about every bottleneck in advance and optimizing for every possible user scenario and a global user base, regardless if the number of users is only ~100." I would advocate the exact opposite. If you need to scale to X users focus on making a great platform for X users, even if it’s only 100. If you try to over-engineer instead you’ll prematurely optimize and will make poor decisions that’ll come back to bite you when you actually DO need the scale and the requirements change.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
namrog84 5y ago
A lot of the secret sauce of such things are not that secret but just take a lot of work. Building and maintaining infrastructure simply takes a lot of people, time, relationships and whatnot. They get good at it over time which I guess could consider some secret sauce but there isn't like some secret code that makes the whole thing way better that now you'll see tons of competitors.
SonicScrub 5y ago
[flagged]
lm28469 5y ago
Everything is just a crud app with a few extra steps.... yet you're not Zuckerberg or Dorsey
- runawaybottle 5y ago
  I’m so misread, Twitch is a lot of luck, so is all of these companies. Show me the the source code for luck. I don’t give a fuck if you leaked a video streaming crud app code lol.
  - lm28469 5y ago
    It's a very polished, state of the art crud app serving millions of people, it's always interesting to see how it's made. I personally don't give a single fuck but I can see the appeal for some people. It's a bit like the great pyramids, it's just a big pile of rocks but we'd be really interested in knowing exactly how the made these big piles
  - holler 5y ago
    You're missing the _hard work_ part. Sure there's always an element of "luck" in any story of success, but that mostly has to do with timing, and is much less weighted than the perseverance and hard work of the people building it. Twitch is a full-featured, very mature application with many moving parts outside of just the video streaming, and building all those parts took an incredible amount of time and effort.
    - runawaybottle 5y ago
      It’s just luck. I mean, if I was a storyteller, what story would I have to tell if there was no story. They hit. It’s sort of like we all hold Golden dice, so we marveled, by our own eyes, at the gold. Dealer: You rolling those? Us: no, it’s gold. They fucking risked it. It’s not a engineering feat, we’re all a bunch of pussies. Twitch is easiest site to build, you might as well show me a todo app (which will be sieged and dismantled), scale is solved, we will eat your applications, the barbarians. Rome falls.
kabdib 5y ago
I figure you could "build a Steam" in a couple of years, with the right engineers hitting the main features. There's very little magic at the technology level, and you can make life simpler and forget about minor things like the hardware survey or the pretty graphs. I'm not saying this is trivial, but it's definitely doable. This is a far different statement than "You can build something and compete with Steam in a couple of years". Most of the really hard problems are not technical. Success ain't gonna happen without a bunch of pain, sweat, and strategic stumbles on the part of the competition.
- runawaybottle 5y ago
  Sir (Madame?), I ask you one simple question: Was Twitch built in 10 years, or over just a few? Steam was built since I was in FUCKING high school. Im old now, well over 30. Apples, and blueberries. Bluebarry, Drewbarry, tomato, ToMaHtoH. Fuck their stupid ass streaming code, it’s a giant crud app, only their devops team can take credit for scaling, everyone else is not worth a shit, sorry, thats life, I gotta Leetcode too, and ur code isn’t worth me reading it, leaked or not).
  - dijit 5y ago
    Based on what I read of the ops code… don’t give them too much credit. The thing I learned most from this leak is that the technology side plays very little part in the business being successful or not.
mdoms 5y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
o10449366 5y ago
This is such a Hacker News comment. It's just a crud app - why do they need more than 10 employees?
- runawaybottle 5y ago
  inefficiency.
throw_m239339 5y ago
Like all things web, the problem is scaling the platform and moderation/security. It wouldn't be hard to build a toy Twitch clone no. But it takes tons of people and money to scale it / secure it. And even with all the security, they still got hacked...
bradjohnson 5y ago
Right, just like a plane is a car with wings.

This reminds me of the Albertsons guy on Blind who inadvertently created a meme when he said that Facebook could be rewritten with a small cluster of Oracle dbs. The meme is that Albertsons people are so elite, they work and think in a higher level of existence, way above the scalability bs us commoners are accustomed to.

lwansbrough 5y ago

Just stream the video, it’s easy!

kinghajj 5y ago
Netflix & Youtube in shambles.
- lapetitejort 5y ago
  I found out how to destroy reddit. Just fork their repos! https://github.com/reddit https://github.com/reddit
  - duskwuff 5y ago
    Sadly, Reddit stopped updating the public repo for their main application in 2017: https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit
    - BitwiseFool 5y ago
      It's for the best. New reddit is awful.
    - asddubs 5y ago
      so it won't even have new reddit, even better!

Zababa 5y ago

You don't need a genius. You need a few good people, and a lot of hands. I think the best way to look at things like Twitch is to compare them to cathedrals, bridges, things like that. You might be able to have the idea and sketch the plans by yourself, but it's physically impossible to build it yourself.

NelsonMinar 5y ago

I mean doing Youtube is even easier; it's just a wrapper around HTML5 video.

ashtonkem 5y ago

Everything is easy to build until a small nation state’s worth of people want to use it at once.

ThePadawan 5y ago
I work in a small nation state. That doesn't stop CV-hungry engineers from finding ways to overcomplicate it. (I do agree with you on this topic in general)
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  You completely misread me.
  - ThePadawan 5y ago
    Oh I'm sorry, here's what I read: "Building apps is easy as long as you don't have millions of users. For that you have to actually think about bottlenecks, the larger architecture etc." (I agree with that) What I wanted to express is that lots of engineers I personally know instead say "Building apps involves thinking about every bottleneck in advance and optimizing for every possible user scenario and a global user base, regardless if the number of users is only ~100."
    - oceanplexian 5y ago
      "Building apps involves thinking about every bottleneck in advance and optimizing for every possible user scenario and a global user base, regardless if the number of users is only ~100." I would advocate the exact opposite. If you need to scale to X users focus on making a great platform for X users, even if it’s only 100. If you try to over-engineer instead you’ll prematurely optimize and will make poor decisions that’ll come back to bite you when you actually DO need the scale and the requirements change.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

namrog84 5y ago

A lot of the secret sauce of such things are not that secret but just take a lot of work. Building and maintaining infrastructure simply takes a lot of people, time, relationships and whatnot. They get good at it over time which I guess could consider some secret sauce but there isn't like some secret code that makes the whole thing way better that now you'll see tons of competitors.

SonicScrub 5y ago

[flagged]

lm28469 5y ago

Everything is just a crud app with a few extra steps.... yet you're not Zuckerberg or Dorsey

runawaybottle 5y ago
I’m so misread, Twitch is a lot of luck, so is all of these companies. Show me the the source code for luck. I don’t give a fuck if you leaked a video streaming crud app code lol.
- lm28469 5y ago
  It's a very polished, state of the art crud app serving millions of people, it's always interesting to see how it's made. I personally don't give a single fuck but I can see the appeal for some people. It's a bit like the great pyramids, it's just a big pile of rocks but we'd be really interested in knowing exactly how the made these big piles
- holler 5y ago
  You're missing the _hard work_ part. Sure there's always an element of "luck" in any story of success, but that mostly has to do with timing, and is much less weighted than the perseverance and hard work of the people building it. Twitch is a full-featured, very mature application with many moving parts outside of just the video streaming, and building all those parts took an incredible amount of time and effort.
  - runawaybottle 5y ago
    It’s just luck. I mean, if I was a storyteller, what story would I have to tell if there was no story. They hit. It’s sort of like we all hold Golden dice, so we marveled, by our own eyes, at the gold. Dealer: You rolling those? Us: no, it’s gold. They fucking risked it. It’s not a engineering feat, we’re all a bunch of pussies. Twitch is easiest site to build, you might as well show me a todo app (which will be sieged and dismantled), scale is solved, we will eat your applications, the barbarians. Rome falls.

kabdib 5y ago

I figure you could "build a Steam" in a couple of years, with the right engineers hitting the main features. There's very little magic at the technology level, and you can make life simpler and forget about minor things like the hardware survey or the pretty graphs. I'm not saying this is trivial, but it's definitely doable. This is a far different statement than "You can build something and compete with Steam in a couple of years". Most of the really hard problems are not technical. Success ain't gonna happen without a bunch of pain, sweat, and strategic stumbles on the part of the competition.

runawaybottle 5y ago
Sir (Madame?), I ask you one simple question: Was Twitch built in 10 years, or over just a few? Steam was built since I was in FUCKING high school. Im old now, well over 30. Apples, and blueberries. Bluebarry, Drewbarry, tomato, ToMaHtoH. Fuck their stupid ass streaming code, it’s a giant crud app, only their devops team can take credit for scaling, everyone else is not worth a shit, sorry, thats life, I gotta Leetcode too, and ur code isn’t worth me reading it, leaked or not).
- dijit 5y ago
  Based on what I read of the ops code… don’t give them too much credit. The thing I learned most from this leak is that the technology side plays very little part in the business being successful or not.

mdoms 5y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

o10449366 5y ago

This is such a Hacker News comment. It's just a crud app - why do they need more than 10 employees?

runawaybottle 5y ago
inefficiency.

throw_m239339 5y ago

Like all things web, the problem is scaling the platform and moderation/security. It wouldn't be hard to build a toy Twitch clone no. But it takes tons of people and money to scale it / secure it. And even with all the security, they still got hacked...

bradjohnson 5y ago

Right, just like a plane is a car with wings.