Hacker News: mapme

New comment by mapme in "Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs"

mapme — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 21:39:30 +0000

Who is more impactful, the startup engineer who singlehandedly ships a feature that increases a startup revenue by 25% off a base $5M/yr ($1M extra rev), or a Meta/Google team of 5 engineers who ship a .01% revenue improve off a base of 150B/yr (15M/5 = $3M/engineer).

As an engineer you are thinking about impact as 'scope' or 'features'. Leadership will be thinking marginally on what adding a net new engineer will provide to the business.

“Marginalism is the economic doctrine that we can best understand value by considering the question of how many units of a good or service an individual has, and using that starting point to ask how much an additional – or marginal – unit would be worth in terms of other goods and services.”

New comment by mapme in "A Programmer's Loss of Identity"

mapme — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 03:18:26 +0000

What field has interviews without silliness like this. Jobs for lawyers in 1950 when all that mattered was your father and your alma mater? Hard pass.

I would take a interview premised on a know, learnable challenge (even if silly) over one that exclusively relied on what college you went to.

New comment by mapme in "6 Weeks of Claude Code"

mapme — Sat, 02 Aug 2025 20:14:23 +0000

The native tool use is a game changer. When I ask it to debug something it can independently add debug logging to a method, run the tests, collect the output, and code based off that until the tests are fixed.

New comment by mapme in "Lyft to Cut at Least 1,200 Jobs in New Round of Layoffs to Reduce Costs"

mapme — Fri, 21 Apr 2023 19:09:39 +0000

Living off 20k a year in a Hcol, where these salaries primarily occur, is next to impossible. Rent alone anywhere in SF area, for example San Jose, is 2k at a bare minimum for a 1BR, or 3k for a 2BR split between a roommate at 1.5k each. That means rent is 18k-24k, not to mention other living expenses (car, utilities, food, travel to visit family, etc.)

New comment by mapme in "Microsoft want court to toss lawsuit accusing them of abusing open-source code"

mapme — Fri, 10 Feb 2023 18:55:31 +0000

Is there a OSS license that specifically precludes its use in LLMs or effectively does so?

New comment by mapme in "Production Twitter on one machine? 100Gbps NICs and NVMe are fast"

mapme — Sun, 08 Jan 2023 05:53:50 +0000

Twitters data cannot fit on one machine. In 2015 their Hadoop cluster was 30 PB per earlier comments/their blog. How do you fit that on one machine?

New comment by mapme in "Production Twitter on one machine? 100Gbps NICs and NVMe are fast"

mapme — Sat, 07 Jan 2023 22:58:13 +0000

They did not spend half their revenue on compute. It’s more like 20-25% for running data enters/staff for DCs. Check their earnings report.

Whats app is not an applicable comparison because messages and videos are stored on the client device. Better to look at Pinterest and snap, which spend a lot on infra as well.

The issue is storage, ads, and ML to name a few. For example, from 2015:

“ Our Hadoop filesystems host over 300PB of data on tens of thousands of servers. We scale HDFS by federating multiple namespaces.”

You can also see their hardware usage broken down by service as put in their blog.

https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastruc...

https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/a/2015/hadoop-fil....

New comment by mapme in "2 Years at Twitter"

mapme — Wed, 23 Nov 2022 23:19:05 +0000

Excluding a settlement from 2014 that was paid this year, Twitter would have made 500mil on 5B revenue in 2021. They were also GAAP profitable in 2019.

Additionally, the incentive from wall street is to spend all your money to grow users. Whether that is right or wrong it’s the path they chose which led to users and revenue roughly doubling over 5 years.

https://s22.q4cdn.com/826641620/files/doc_financials/2021/ar...

https://s22.q4cdn.com/826641620/files/doc_financials/2019/Fi...

New comment by mapme in "Why Twitter didn’t go down: From a real Twitter SRE"

mapme — Tue, 22 Nov 2022 17:11:19 +0000

SRE is a mix of both. The expectation is you are able to write and understand any code the team is responsible for.

New comment by mapme in "Why Twitter didn’t go down: From a real Twitter SRE"

mapme — Tue, 22 Nov 2022 17:08:42 +0000

Yes that is the normal case. The post was refuting the assertion that one engineer can run these services indefinitely as previously the OP had the help of SWEs oncall and also fixing bugs.

New comment by mapme in "Why Twitter didn’t go down: From a real Twitter SRE"

mapme — Tue, 22 Nov 2022 06:06:52 +0000

Source?

New comment by mapme in "Why Twitter didn’t go down: From a real Twitter SRE"

mapme — Tue, 22 Nov 2022 05:54:52 +0000

One SRE, many SWE. Also have fun asking someone to be permanently oncall with one person on the team.

The cache clusters size are also described here for anyone who wants a good technical read over speculation. https://www.usenix.org/system/files/osdi20-yang.pdf

New comment by mapme in "Twitter to start layoffs -internal email"

mapme — Fri, 04 Nov 2022 04:35:52 +0000

But Tesla and Spacex have notoriously low pay compared to their peers. Eg a Tesla swe makes 40% less than at Google

New comment by mapme in "Musk plans to eliminate half of Twitter jobs to cut costs"

mapme — Thu, 03 Nov 2022 02:42:31 +0000

Holy moly you should relax buster, I was joking!

New comment by mapme in "Musk plans to eliminate half of Twitter jobs to cut costs"

mapme — Thu, 03 Nov 2022 01:57:32 +0000

Nothing, because they don’t understand RecSys which is half of ML at social media companies. Probably could help with prediction for ads but the domains are very different.

New comment by mapme in "Musk plans to eliminate half of Twitter jobs to cut costs"

mapme — Thu, 03 Nov 2022 01:48:33 +0000

Printing code on paper definitely happened. Confirmed by multiple folks. The layoff 75% numbers and layoffs before Nov 1 were false though.

https://twitter.com/leahculver/status/1586145696163373056?s=...

New comment by mapme in "Musk’s inner circle worked through weekend to cement Twitter layoff plans"

mapme — Mon, 31 Oct 2022 20:36:57 +0000

This is false.

New comment by mapme in "Musk’s inner circle worked through weekend to cement Twitter layoff plans"

mapme — Mon, 31 Oct 2022 19:24:50 +0000

Employee salaries is only 1.5B of their 4.5B annual costs.

Edit: per Wapo but you can see the cost structure from 10ks mostly

New comment by mapme in "Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far"

mapme — Sat, 29 Oct 2022 04:18:40 +0000

IME for engineering at these companies is that the social or political side of things is mostly irrelevant for Eng. Some folks want to be involved in internal activism but it’s easy to ignore and basically never comes up in Eng work. Ppl just avoid politics like normies and talk about average stuff like “how’s your kid?” not “let’s go to that protest”. Lots of good smart technical peeps more likely to nerd out on cool tech stuff than be political.

New comment by mapme in "Elon Musk Owns Twitter; CEO and CFO have left"

mapme — Fri, 28 Oct 2022 03:13:04 +0000

This is assuming that political power comes from influencing all Americans rather than a small fraction who hold true power (politicians, donors, journalists, industry groups, etc.). If the small fraction is all on Twitter then viola the rhetoric is meaningful.