skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If it's like most companies with huge employee numbers, most of that staff is sales. Self-serve advertising is a neat concept, but actually making money at the scale of Twitter requires someone to go out and land deals to match.
Once you install "guardrails" (ie: limits to acceptable speech), they then immediately become the lever of power that the extremes vie to control.

"Unacceptable views" could include: Covid came from a wet market, the Iraq war was about WMD, etc. Pick your controlversial topic, there's going to be a battle over even the limits of rational debate - ones you agree with and ones you definitely don't.

You may be happy with the censorship flavour of the month now, but wait until a government comes into power that you dislike. Imagine what G.W. Bush would have done with the censorship powers available now?

You're opening the floodgates to massive governmental and corporate control. I want no part of that, and I don't want my democracy to be destroyed by the broader effects that would have. If you're consciously advocating for that, then I disagree with you in the strongest terms. Yes, there's an ocean of trolls out there. And the effects of strong censorship are far worse.
Ways to improve Twitter:

- Delete it
I'm not sure why anyone would trust corporate leadership in crisis times, and Twitter's board was completely divorced from any negative outcomes to twitter in terms of their holdings. They never had skin in the game except as a platform for improving their resumes or social networking.
It's not disabled for me. If you note, it updates a hash as you swipe, it probably is just that you used it for a minute and the list of hashes was deeper than your patience. Just a bad interaction the author didn't prioritize
Of course. I'm just n=1. Everyone can do what they want.

But I will not contribute 1 cent/penny/vote in advertising revenue towards a platform that hosts that horsesh!t.
Billionaires tweet, wannabe billionaire bootlickers retweet. It's a pretty straightforward concept.
No, they really don’t care. The difference is that if they did care, they’d care about where the money came from. They do not.

That does mean that it’s biased to what advertisers think is OK, but it’s always going to be biased. It’s just not really a bias based on a deep agenda or underlying conspiracy. I actually believe that. There may be some controversy but nobody has really demonstrated much consistent bias, less anything more sinister.
So why isn't TWTR trading at $54.20? There must be a significant chance this won't go through. Indeed, the deal is "Subject to the approval of Twitter stockholders".

Stockholders are holding it because they believe it's worth more than its current price. And Elon's offer is only slightly more than the current price. The board members do not hold much stock at all. It seems this might fail at shareholder vote.
The Age of Fire is nearly over
> Musk was part of the "not that bad", COVID19 is like the flu, etc. etc. conspiracy theorists.

How is that a conspiracy theory? That's an opinion. Everyone has them. Why would you label him a conspiracy theorist for having an opinion you disagree with?

edit: why also is conspiracy theorist considered a pejorative? Conspiracy turns out to be the stuff of history.
>that's depressing to read

congratulations! Depressing reading is second year of college level!
Personally I trust Mullvad a million times more than Apple. Mullvad is one of the few vendors which have earned my trust. Meanwhile, Apple caved into pressure from the FBI to keep iCloud message backups unencrypted.
And yet Linux is a terrible choice for the vast majority of users, no amount of "user choice" will change this. Most users don't need choice, they need structure and guide rails.

Apple is arguably engineering computers and OS UX "correctly," e.g. better for most people.
what?

in the history of England, the United Kingdom and the whole Commonwealth there has not been a single instance of a king or queen being anything other than - here comes the dreaded word - white.

what's the point of making them black?

coming from Eastern Europe, it's like you made John Paul II black - or any of the patriarchs of Eastern Christian Churches. you can do it, but it's so far offbeat it isn't even funny.

in the US, I guess you could make Lincoln, Washington and Reagan black. they just weren't.
Obviously, but verification already exists. For your answer to make sense, one needs to assume that there's a non-trivial problem of verified bot accounts.

Is that assumption correct? It seems incredibly wrong to me, but I may be misinformed.
I’m a human who can create a bot to tweet on my account. Are you suggesting that Twitter would require a captcha on every tweet?
I love the arrogance of Elon and all these people who think it's so easy to make Twitter better.

If it where so easy why hasn't Facebook, Reddit, YouTube or any one else figured it out?

I have seen this over and over again. Once you reach mass global adaption it becomes practically impossible to operate a "fair" and clean platform.

This idea that one platform works for the whole world is like believing in one world government. It doesn't work. It doesn't even work within the United States. People are just too different.

IMO, if anything will ever work it's a federated platform that is self governed by its regions. Reddit is somewhat that but there is a single US centric company in control and they ultimately decide which subreddit get deleted.
In my observations, macOS has a very different behavior with nice than my Linux machines. On my Linux laptop, I can run processor-heavy tasks with `nice -n 19` and browse the web as if the machine was doing nothing else. On my (x86) Mac, if I do that, the machine crawls to a halt, as if the OS were ignoring the nice setting. Maybe there is some connection to this and this elaborate scheduling model - on Linux I'd expect processes with lower nice levels get assigned beefier cores and bump out nicer ones to smaller cores and that would take care of everything.
I think that highlighting would have accomplished that better without sarcastically presenting them as "bad views".

All the sarcasm accomplished was an indirect criticism of the prior poster who asserted without evidence tech figureheads were tweeting "overtly racist and otherwise hateful political Tweets". It's pretty uncharitable to assume they were referring to stuff on that list (many of which aren't just in the realm of sensible debate, but are actually majority views-- e.g. #1 we can look to the results of the ballot measure).

I don't think anyone seriously doubts that with enough searching we could find a couple examples that would make their claim technically true, at the very least... without delving into comments within the realm of sensible debate.

We shouldn't need to be so cynical, but if we must we don't need to do it at the expense of other participants here!

Twitter encourages hot-takes. Because of that all sorts of ill considered crap shows up there-- and that includes both inappropriately tarring views as racist as well as racist views that most people would agree are racist.
And, that blog post was overwhelmingly more informative than the announcement.
It was making a lot of revenue and even got a (for the time) huge buyout offer. Lowtax being a mangosteen addict with a deeply troubled personal life who couldn't be bothered to take advantage of any of these opportunities/organise an effective was the main issue.
Ask HN: Why aren’t asocial people a protected class?
In particular, only hiring people who work well with others should be against the law for jobs where collaboration is not essential.
Hence instead should just be url, like /latest. Bookmark it, occasionally check mainline when bored.
Wow! I don’t know how I missed this (not a front end dev).
I think this reasoning is flawed. Joining Google does not mean you get to solve interesting problems because you will most likely contribute incrementally to a vast body of work. You want to build the next-gen database? You have to come up with something way better than BigTable and Spanner. You want to build a queue service? You've got to come up with something way better than Google's PubSub, which optimizes itself all the way down to the level of GBP protocols. You want to build a machine learning framework? Have you checked out TensorFlow and JAX in particular their ecosystem? You want to build a file system? Are you sure you can overcome all the organizational inertia that Google has built on Colossus over the years? You want to build a 10X more productive framework for data processing? Are you sure you can beat DataFlow or Flume4J-ecosystem in Google?

The point is, Google is a mature company. Mortals like most of us don't get to break ground in a technically advanced but mature company like Google. Instead, we find fast growing new problems to solve, to hone our skill, and to get to scale.

P.S., I personally know a number of prominent professors used to work on the Borg projects just to optimize for a few percent of gains. It's deep and interesting work, but nonetheless hard for mortals like me to get much out of.

That is, it's a more sure bet to work for a baby Google than to work for a middle-aged Google.
There's a middle ground here, but the argument you're making is essentially the same for the rule of elites as arbiters on what constitutes good faith and rationality on a society. These are emergent properties that come from free speech, and it's frustrating to me that free speech advocates aren't making this argument. I'm cognizant of Twitter occupying this mindshare as a "public forum" while being private, but even then, "canceling" is an emergent seizure of power, and while damaging, all the arguments decrying it seem off the mark to me.
So why didnt California end up in that state, concidering it has nearly the same conditions?
Different memo but worth checking out as well:

Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—things like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Surely all those blue checks can just go and make their own social platform?
It sounds like there would be a private investor pool- so options would convert?
Thanks. So its loaded and ready to go by the time you click the google doc link.
> Elon threatening to bring free speech back (hopefully addressing the toxic witch hunts, cancelling)

how is he supposed to address these without restricting speech?
Can you use a WebP file as an Open Graph Protocol image?
True, but the usual action is to hand the decision to the human, who can look out, figure out which (if any) sensor is right, and take appropriate action (737 Max feelings).
Works for me. So far rock climbing and fly fishing require 100% of my concentration and voice chatter disappears completely. For me they are my meditation.
it's the definition of speech and arguments of what is protected vs dangerous.

specifically Trump's access to the platform is de facto supporting or implicitly allowing Trump's right to lie, attack our Republic, spread violence. (if don't agree crosses into violent words, at least should agree definition something like: suggestively, dog whistle, saying it without saying)
Show HN: Deploy any Web App to Lambda in 60 seconds
The danger is already there. Banning a former US president is dangerous.
https://aipaygrad.es/
The legislators were the only ones incompetent - otherwise, sadly, no. This is their current system working as intended.

Scotland is a small place so can't find much for you other than this one local explaining it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvmF1peteGE

You can now meme yourself to jail now. No need to even go so far as the head of state, any random individual can feign offense at you to land you in legal trouble.
EFF pays attention to when screaming into the void isn't helpful.
There’s plenty of right-wing content on Twitter. Trump wasn’t even banned until his coup attempt. AFAIK, you can lie on Twitter until it causes real world danger.
I wonder what will happen with Twitter now. Is this the first time that a major social network is owned by one person?
The problem is that a cheaper house in the country no longer has jobs. Americans don't earn enough in average to afford to support local businesses, so every dollar made gets basically exported from the town to walmart or amazon.

That $150k house in the boonies, even if it was built yesterday, has less value, because the community it is in is in the process of dying and has no opportunity. That same house in the same town sold for $60k in 1989, while that very town was much more functional, alive, and happy than it is now.
Replacing White people in medieval England with black people is no different than portraying an African tribe as led by White members — the exact same racism that “woke” people pretend to care about.

“Woke” racists are the usual source of such race-swapping, because they’re obsessed with race and can’t simply tell a story as it makes sense.
Taking a salary implies you're forgoing a salary. There's nothing special about equity in this respect. In a conversation about equity specifically, holding everything else constant, it does not have a negative EV by itself.
I believe zstd does parallel compression/decompression and has some of the best efficiency ratios.[1] I’ve been replacing gzip with zstd as a general purpose compression format.

[1]: Benchmarks available at http://facebook.github.io/zstd/#benchmarks
True, but :: is probably more readable than # or \
Design a language, and you'll understand that there's always trade-offs.
You quoted one small part of the bill, and not the part people are concerned about.

Care to address any of my other examples, or the people actually arrested due to right wing laws?

> Diluting mathematics education, claims it promotes white supremacy.

And Florida recently rejected math textbooks claiming they push critical race theory.

> I wouldn't want my kids to be schooled in a place where gender/race takes precedence over math/science.

But that wasn't happening. Do you have any evidence these things resulted a worse mathematics education?
Why Pessimism Sounds Smart
No, it really wouldn't, since Twitter has a social/psychological problem, not a technological problem.
One thing that's probably safe to conclude is that Putin doesn't actually care about what nato does or who joins it because that's a very predictable outcome of invading another non-nato country. Sure he'll say stuff about nato, but he's habitually lying like about invading ukraine. If anything it seems he wants other countries to join for his own reasons.
Maybe use your one-on-one to discuss those things.
I think that still eats the itab penalty so as long as the structures wind up with the same gcshape? But now I wonder.
Isn't that supporting their point? If things change then surely differing views should be allowed, if not encouraged.
There is a gap between languages at the moment imo. Ruby is just ruthlessly productive.

Compare https://github.com/benhoyt/countwords/blob/master/simple.rb with https://github.com/benhoyt/countwords/blob/master/simple.go

Hoping new age compiled languages like Crystal & Nim fill the gap of performance, types & productivity. But compile speeds need to be factored in.
Trump already said he won’t rejoin Twitter even if Elon reinstantiates his account. Of course, one shouldn’t be surprised if he changes his mind at some point.
Does local = national? what about conflicts legally - or ethically as a US corp. China access using CCP rules. Russia too.
Ha, well. I just spent a fair bit of time writing an interpreter in assembly and hand-optimized the regalloc to the limit. But I was surprised by my competitors written in C and how well gcc, in particular, could regalloc hairy interpreter loops. Compilers are very good at register allocation at the right granularity; they just generally don't do it across procedures.
Recruitment in the military is becoming more difficult. Here in the UK, you get BBC's TopGear doing "cool things" with different parts of the military.

Both USUK have various motor sport racing teams to make things seem cool, but its also an attempt to boost recruitment and the bleeding obvious is criminals can now sign up and join the forces, so the bar has been lowered, but I'm sure it can be spun another way!

I know there are a lot of less fortunate who took advantage of educational programs and sponsorship, like prisoners get, to further their educational qualifications, and its a cheap way to see parts of the world if you want to travel.

Saving that, you do meet some odd people in the military and PTSD is a big problem.

Thing is Govt's make sure the Military PR is always the best so you never hear about those who have been mentally destroyed by the military, either directly or by being related to military personnel.

Everything you hear Putin or China being accused of, goes on in your country as well, the so called free press are not that free!
Personally, I think the value of Twitter will be much higher under Elon Musk than under old management. I don't know if it was undervalued or overvalued, so I don't know if he's going to make money on it, but from the outside, it felt mismanaged.

I do think employees will scream "bloody murder," but it will be the wrong employees screaming the hardest. Twitter should be neutral, and support diversity. Twitter employees can't tolerate red states, let alone the diversity of the broader world. Muslims constitute over a billion people. Chinese are over a billion. Toss in Latin America, Slavic countries, and so on, and you have a broad swath of cultures which views out-of-line with woke Twitter employees.

If Elon can make Twitter less progressive, white, affluent, Western, blue state value aligned, that's a bigger, broader userbase.

On the other side, Twitter hasn't really improved since coming out. The number of employees has more than doubled since 2017, and it's not quite clear why. There's a lot of work to be done on either the cost side or the product improvement side. I don't feel like it has much beyond momentum.

A key question is whether Elon will be able to make a workplace environment competitive with FAANG. He's not known as a great guy to work for. He will need that calibre of talent (if not the current quantity).
Crazy to see this on HN today, I just integrated this into my desktop environment as a "Live Wallpaper" yesterday. I disabled the interaction and put the model flip on a 20 second timer though.

https://www.dustinbrett.com/
> Optional verification check marks for anyone who wants them. Throw out the Blue Check status symbol

Those are not mutually exclusive. I may be interested to know that @emmanuelmacron and @emmanuel_macron are both real persons but I’d also want to know that @emmanuelmacron is the famous one while the other is just an homonyme. Blue Check symbols are also a lot useful to distinguish real brand accounts from fake ones.

> Transparent and consistent moderation policies. Bans are inconsistently applied for reasons that are often hard to figure out.

See @yishan’s thread on moderation [1]. Moderation is a hard issue, "consistent moderation" is not achievable because the hardest decisions are made based on the personal feeling of the moderators (that’s also why FB has tons of humans moderators: you can’t just automate it beside obvious spam content). You can’t have rules for everything and you will ALWAYS have people whose behavior match the 'rules' but are still problematic. I guess that to have a good opinion about moderation you must work as a moderator for some time.

[1]: https://twitter.com/yishan/status/1514938507407421440
Acoup (acoup.blog) has a few really nice posts about this topic (in relation with current Ukraine conflict no less.)

Basic takeaway is this - yes, everyone wants to run their army using (googlable keyword) Auftragstaktik. But that's very similar to saying that everyone in software business wants to run their software company like Netflix, Apple or Google at it's best - with responsible senior engineers that own their mistakes, show initiative, are skilled and don't let performance or power spats influence their ability to achieve goals.

But the reality is, that shaping such an organization (or company!) is exceedingly hard and requires massive culture shifts within people of the organization (which bring their own baggage from outside) and incentives. It's easy to say you want to be Apple, but hammering a 3rd tier company filled with backstabbing juniors into a highly performing machine is going to be an impossible task.

That's what many nations are facing when shaping their armies into better performing units - command-oriented hiearchies can be more effective when your people are poorly skilled and not culturally prepared to work together. Even US had some famous massive fails in WW2 where generals let many Americans die due to their dumb branch power struggles and egos.
Yes, scientific consensus can change, which lends support to the idea that platforms shouldn’t be banning ideas that aren’t the current scientific consensus.
I am not 100% certain. It could definitely be sand being sprayed. The old trains don't have it, only the newer ones. I just hear compressed air being sprayed under the train when it's wet and the train is skipping on the track. Something is being sprayed onto the track.
Musk is radically pro-free speech. Free speech necessarily includes speech that might be unpopular, or popular only with the "wrong" kind of people.
- Let the main feed be the main feed and not some attempt to recommend 4 new persons/things to subscribe to after every 2 tweets.
both civilian jets and big civilian boats are required to broadcast their position when under power, sometimes also when stationary.

so yeah. you can't buy that kind of privacy unless you want a nation state air force on your six, or some kind of a patrol boat in case of a yacht.
Eclipse Theia is the next generation of Eclipse
Yes, this has also confused me. What is so different now than 10 days ago?
The NYT doesn't seem to know.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/16/business/elon-musk-politi...
Reich says:

>If consumers don’t like what Musk does with Twitter, they cannot simply switch to another Twitter-like platform. There aren’t any.

Lol! When they were encouraging the banning of users they disliked from Twitter, people said "hey, switch to another or go make your own platform" to those that objected. You have to appreciate the karmic nature of the turn of events.
Making the UX worse so it takes a longer time and more clicks to get what you want out of a site could look like improved engagement. What if I just want to quickly check-in, see what's new, then bounce?
Ask HN: How do Twitter employees feel about the potential Elon take over?
> What happened to us?
Got too focused on genitalia and skin tone, and how they're used or referred to. Even the ones that "don't care" got dragged in. And there's no escape.
Pretty, but does anyone know/understand what the underlying local rules are governing the global imagery? Seems like the author is randomly cycling through some variations of underlying parameters to make pretty dynamic pictures? Just curious. Personally, for things like this I like to be able to set the parameters myself and observe the results. It gives me more of a sense of exploring the unknown that can be repeated by using the same parameters.