[runawaybottle]

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

[kabdib]

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]

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).

[o10449366]

This is such a Hacker News comment.

It's just a crud app - why do they need more than 10 employees?

[runawaybottle]

inefficiency.

[namrog84]

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.

[ashtonkem]

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

[ThePadawan]

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)

[lwansbrough]

Just stream the video, it’s easy!

[kinghajj]

Netflix & Youtube in shambles.

[NelsonMinar]

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

[lm28469]

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

[nullifidian]

One shouldn't aspire to be a Zuckerberg/Dorsey.

[runawaybottle]

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.

[Zababa]

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.

[throw_m239339]

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...

[mdoms]

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

[decebalus1]

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.

[bradjohnson]

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