Oddbean

@ed709062 Adding caching should have a very high threshold. Almost none of the caches at Stack Overflow ended up being worth it (I did the analysis and we yanked them out). Adding caching is behind like all the other answers if the problem is one badly behaving bot.

@25b1da2f As I said, if someone wants to have a 100k times lower threshold for what's ok, that's fine by me. My core question is how does one reconcile that with the opinion that engineers who produce 75% of humanly achievable performance "brutally bad", "terrible at their jobs", and deserve to lose their jobs? It's a bit incongruous for leadership to trash people so harshly for getting moderately close to cutting edge perf when their own product is many orders of magnitude away from that.

@ed709062 I also wouldn't add the caching if bing were hitting me incorrectly at a rate 100,000X higher than stated. And the core answer is I don't get hung up on obvious hyperbole. Jeff's run his mouth about things on the internet for decades. He pokes the bears he wants. Sometimes (somehow) it makes things better for people on the internet. Many other times it misses (and it has missed me).

@25b1da2f I think the absolute rate matters here. The two numbers that have been stated as too much / attack-level numbers are 0.006 QPS and 0.5 QPS. I wouldn't add a cache for that level of traffic either. I'm just saying it's trivial to serve that much traffic and I'd expect a site that could be static, like a forum, would serve crawlers out of a CDN and not even notice the traffic even at 10k x that level. For the other part, I have multiple Discourse folks and the CTO in my mentions,

@25b1da2f complaining this is "unfair", "nonsense", etc., when Jeff and Sam both put out stuff that's more hostile and, IMO, much more unfair as well. In the original threads on the Bing they, they're just having tantrums. IMO, if they don't want people pointing out this out, maybe consider they shouldn't have their co-founders go around the internet, trashing things they don't like a super hostile fashion, especially when they bill themselves as a company that creates "civilized discourse"?

@25b1da2f In general, I'm not a fan of the missing stair / "that's just Bob" defense. I don't think Jeff making a lot of statements that are equivalent to his statements that Qualcomm engineers are "terrible at their jobs" makes this better or should make Discourse more immune to criticism. It's Jeff's prerogative to use his huge platform to shit on people doing work he doesn't like, but it shouldn't surprise employees that his company is going to get splashed with some shit as a result.

@25b1da2f And if a founder goes around loudly calling engineers terrible an publicly hoping they lose their jobs for not hitting absolute cutting edge perf while their company produces a product that famously has worst-in-class performance, I don't think it should come as a surprise when people pick on the performance. The same thing would happen if Casey Muratori or Jonathan Blow made a forum with searching-hijacking javascript that's too slow to use even on a massive dev workstation.

@25b1da2f Jeff seems unusually good at handling criticism in a lot of circumstances and I have a lot of respect for that, but if someone is going to spend years (coming up on a decade now) hostilely trashing engineers at a company for not quite achieving the best performance in the world, it seems quite funny to me when they then produce world leadingly slow software.

@ed709062 I agree with you that the irony is odious and unbecoming. And I hope my friend hears you. And, on the Qualcomm issue, they did eventually back up their trash and rewrote their javascript to please that processor. https://eviltrout.com/2016/02/25/fixing-android-performance.html The server side performance was a tragedy we all saw coming the day we heard what the stack was. At SO we turned a well performing language into greased lightning. Couldn’t be done on ruby.

@25b1da2f Fair enough. With respect to the Qualcomm trash talk, given that he's trashing engineers for being terrible for not hitting Apple-like perf, I would consider the trash talk to be backed up if Discourse had an implementation that was within a factor of two of what an all-time-great performance team could do, which isn't even close to the case. I've tried using forums that use Discourse after that 2016 blog post and still find search to be unusably slow with annoyingly slow loading.

@ed709062 5X improvement near the top of the stack doesn’t feel like something to sneeze at outright, and your line is fair given the gauntlet thrown, and I don’t envy any of the engineers who had to actually cash the checks.

@25b1da2f As someone who's worked for Twitter, I'm familiar with having a leader who writes checks the company can't cash. I'm not exactly a fan of that, but one thing that I liked about Twitter was that it had a culture where people felt comfortable publicly calling Jack out on bad comments, e.g., if Jack made a comment like the ones from Jeff or Sam that I've quoted, I'd expect @85f21341 and others to publicly call him out on that and for Jack to take it well (at least while he was still CEO).