> Hacker News handles a huge amount of traffic to dynamic pages Traffic is not the primary driver of staffing. For a simple app, it is relatively straightforwa

> Hacker News handles a huge amount of traffic to dynamic pages Traffic is not the primary driver of staffing. For a simple app, it is relatively straightforward to use commodity cloud offerings to scale to large volumes of traffic. Even something as simple as Heroku + a CDN can take a small team a long way. But the NYT is not a simple app. I'm not even willing to accept that their CMS needs could be handled with an off-the-shelf CMS without modification. Without having worked there, I can see: - CMSs for text/images, audio, video content - syndication for audio content - custom? subscription system - some kind of interface to the printing system - bespoke game studio - Web dataviz studio plus all the stuff needed to run a company as big as the NYT, which will include lots of integrations between things like payroll, accounting, 3P ad networks, reporting, HR software, etc. I haven't even included the people who might make use of the copious data generated by the business. These things add up fast. > Twitter (though not doing well as a business) That's a heck of a caveat! Most businesses aim to do well as businesses, so current Twitter is not a great model.