skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Elon didn't agree to "deal contingent on everything checking out", he agreed to deal. Normally, this would have been vetted in due diligence, but Musk waived that period -- this is why the turnaround from "I might buy Twitter" to "I'm buying Twitter" was much, much faster than your typical acquisition talk. Matt Levine covered this better than I did, so I'll just quote his relevant section below:

“Temporarily on hold” is not a thing. Elon Musk has signed a binding contract requiring him to buy Twitter. Legions of bankers and lawyers and Twitter employees and special-purpose-vehicle promoters are working to fulfill his legal obligation to get the deal closed. “The parties hereto will use their respective reasonable best efforts to consummate and make effective the transactions contemplated by this Agreement,” says the merger agreement. (Section 6.3(a).) He can’t just put that “on hold.”
That contract does not allow Musk to walk away if it turns out that “spam/fake accounts” represent more than 5% of Twitter users. We discussed this last month, when Twitter admitted in a securities filing that it had (slightly) overestimated its daily active users for years. The merger agreement contains a provision that allows Musk to walk away if Twitter’s securities filings are wrong — and this 5% number is in its securities filings — but only if the inaccuracy would have a “Material Adverse Effect” on the company. (See Sections 4.6(a) and 7.2(b).) That is an incredibly high standard: Delaware courts have almost never found an MAE. An MAE has to be something that would “substantially threaten the overall earnings potential of the target in a durationally-significant manner,” the courts have said; there is a rule of thumb that an MAE requires a 40% decrease in long-term profitability. If it turned out that 6% or 20% or 50% of Twitter accounts are bots, that will be embarrassing and might even reduce Twitter’s future advertising revenue, but will it be an MAE? No.
“Pending details supporting calculation” is not how this works. This disclosure — that “the average of false or spam accounts ... represented fewer than 5% of” Twitter’s monetizable daily active users — has been in Twitter’s securities filings for many years, always with a caveat that “in making this determination, we applied significant judgment, so our estimation of false or spam accounts may not accurately represent the actual number of such accounts, and the actual number of false or spam accounts could be higher than we have estimated.” Musk had the opportunity to read these filings before offering to buy Twitter, and he had the opportunity to do due diligence on these numbers before signing the deal. (He declined.) He can’t now go to Twitter and say “actually now you need to prove that your user numbers are right.” If he wants to walk, he has to prove that they’re wrong, and also that they’re wrong in a way that has a material adverse effect on the business. Which he obviously can’t do.
> Please assume good faith...

In Musk's case? Half of what he does is openly trolling.

"Assume good faith" means "assume good faith until reason to do otherwise", not "assume good faith no matter what".
And just like Wikipedia the content is full of errors.
The target should be the initial risk.

One day, we can dilute it; for now, it seems fair to store it in case it comes in handy later.
I've decided voicemail is a dead and obsolete technology and haven't had it set up in over a decade, but I do agree that hearing the voice of a loved one is nice, especially one that is no longer with us
We do nothing and wait for the disaster that will force a tanked economy and life altering changes?
This is incorrect. Putting a finite bound on n does not reduce n to 1. n is always meant to be a finite arbitrarily large value. n=INT_MAX qualifies as arbitrarily large, especially on a 64-bit system.
>"any political theory favoring immoderate uncompromising policies"

>I think that "I have this right because I say so" qualifies

I (and pretty sure a sizeable portion of HN) want precisely zero on-device CSAM scanning and encryption backdoors. I'm not willing to compromise on this (eg. "okay we'll backdoor encryption but only for terrorists"). Does that make me an extremist? Based on your definition it certainly sounds like it.
Cloud Native Programming Languages
MAU has to be done sort-of retroactively: you could say "given the accounts we now know to be bots and have removed, what percentage of January 2022's MAU were inauthentic".

Sometimes bot accounts will do organic-looking behaviour for at least a month to evade automatic detection, before doing explicit bot-like things (following particular accounts en-masse).
You do realize that HN is not just one person? The trendy opinion online amongst left leaning millenials is that Elon = BAD. But not everyone feels the same as you.
Yeah he is the master boss of debt and capitalism and you are on a venture capital forum aka "how to raise ultra risk debt super fast".
So Elon must be doing something right, the same way that YC is doing the right thing.
LOTR was already a mainstream novel when they wrote about it. Sure it wasn’t on TV but people that read novels surely knew about it and had read it by then.
One thing I'm pretty confident about is that Twitter really, really does not want to go to court to argue about how many bots they have.

Musk is probably using their aversion to a legal deep dive on the topic to renegotiate the price. Which would be good, if brutal, business.
Nice piece of history.
Needs [2001] in the title
Pinterest acquired fashion startup The Yes
Yandex Board of Directors’ Statement on Arkady Volozh Designation
the dude was always a toxic bullshitter. it's amazing how people were blinded to this. telsa cars are poor quality garbage, and reflect elon's personality to a T. flashy, but under the surface it's all lies and decay.
Fair enough :) At least the macro is only evaluated once, not twice.
Good! They say the wealthy have a better chance at success (especially when it comes establishing businesses) due to their huge financial safety nets.

It would be nice to see this table turn for once; the 1% shouldn't always be able to have their cake and eat it too. Hopefully this bankrupts Musk in a stark turn of sweet, sweet karma deliverance.
The best ones are where you can fly at will, and then you realize you are in a dream. You may still have a few seconds where you are semi-conscious and can "fly".
The Tesla dip coincided with the Twitter takeover attempt, so Musk more or less caused it.
> more species are likely getting filtered further down the chain

My personal hunch is the filter is around multicellular life. We'll find lots of planets with single-celled goop. Many fewer with animals.

The unions that created photosynthesis and mitochondria look to have happened only once (successfully) in Earth's history [1], and sound more like voodoo than science the more one thinks about it. (Cell ate another cell then changed its mind and adopted it for 1.45 billion years.)

[1] https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/the-origin-of-mito...
I Rented an Electric Car for 4 Days and Spent More Time Charging Than Sleeping
What would you consider sufficient evidence?

Not that I can't come up with a lot, but if it's trivial to prove I have less work to do.
There is nothing new or original about management trying to con workers.

Musk is one part entrepreneur, one part con man.
If you have seen posts on HN all the time, why was your account only created 30 minutes ago? Want to have a go at people but don't want to lose precious karma?
After many years, need more screen brightness to see monitor. Is it normal?
My eyes used to get irritated if I used high brightness levels (on monitor and laptop). But these days even with the max brightness, I feel like the screen is not fully bright. I can still see things well, but I don't get that high sensation in my eyes with high brightness anymore. IS this normal after many years of looking at a screen for several hours a day?
I still use a custom self-designed startpage. Too bad FF killed support for them and the addon is miserable.
I think Source Forge used to have that sort of a graph.
It was a little earlier than that… IIRC I was using it in 2001 but it certainly was not called Ajax yet. But then IE just stagnated.
There are a few roundabouts near my house in the Chicago Suburbs. There are stop signs at all the entrances.
I'm talking about calls, not sms. Like if I order a pizza without using an app so the restaurant doesn't have to give a huge cut away to an app.
> When are linked lists actually good?

When the use case requires insertion/removal from the middle of the list. An LRU cache is about the most common use case I've run across. (The "LRU" part requires it to often bump an item to the end of the list, so LL's excel here, as we can shift the element's position in the list in O(1) time. An LRU structure would normally pair the LL with a HashMap, which maps the cached item to its LL entry, so that we've also got a O(1) search into the LL, and don't hit the problem in the article.)

> yet I see them employed in various places all the time, by competent engineers who are definitely aware of their limitations.

I see them employed very, very rarely. Vectors¹ are by far more common in every codebase I've ever worked on. (And should be one's default, IMO, if all you need is a container of stuff that you're going to iterate over, which is the usual case, for the reasons in the article.)

¹ignoring cases where a hash(map|set) is required; then our codebase uses that, b/c that's what's needed.
Does your comment on "annoying behavior" relate to him not voting for candidates of your political party any more?

The only annoying behavior I've seen of late are the frothing at the mouth vitriol that's being incessantly flung at him for the last weeks/months before and after the news about buying Twitter.

That's "annoying behavior". What he's been doing has not been that.
> It would certainly benefit the families left behind financially, but it would not be pretty.

You are very optimistic. Medics will sell expensive snake oil treatment to desperate families. For example, from the bottom of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breast_cancer#History

> In the 1980s and 1990s, thousands of women who had successfully completed standard treatment then demanded and received high-dose bone marrow transplants, thinking this would lead to better long-term survival. However, it proved completely ineffective, and 15–20% of women died because of the brutal treatment.
The current practice is pretty likely to be "we feed it into the ML model", isn't it?
Just like the Ballmer peak, i think there is an optimal peak for a CEO to be visible, Elon is way beyond that peak and full into "drunk" territory.
It's important to understand what amino acids are, if you want to know why this is more "interesting, but only somewhat so, science" than "groundbreaking news that changes our view of life in the universe": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amino_acid#General_structure

Those may seem complicated, but you have to also remember an "amino acid" is the entire family, and carbon tends towards "a bit complicated" naturally because it has so many bonds it needs to fill in. Fill an environment with carbon and the right other elements and it isn't "surprising" that amino acids form, it's inevitable. Like, literally unavoidable, you couldn't stop it if you tried. "The right environment for amino acids" would also be full of many other larger structures. It's a thing carbon does no matter where it is, not an exception. They would just be, if you'll pardon the convenient anthropomorphization, pointlessly larger structures, not doing anything in particular or having any particularly interesting properties beyond size. You get similarly large carbon structures in the soot of a fire, for instance.

Compare with hemoglobin, just to pick a popular protein of moderate size: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemoglobin#Structure_of_heme This is a specific combination of 574 amino acids, in the correct chirality. Some deviations are possible that will retain functionality, it isn't that exact 574 amino acids, but there's limited variation possible. "Things useful for life" are much more than just bare amino acids.

This isn't something that should be downplayed; it is legitimately interesting, but at the same time, it doesn't materially move our probabilities on any particular theory of life because it was always predictable that amino acids would exist elsewhere in the universe. At a bare minimum for excitement would be demonstrating some sort of significant chirality preference. That would turn some heads.
I've noticed a bunch of people have tried to update the basics of stats by using this argument. No.
"No Human Error" is a bad approach for most real world context. It could be useful in an academic or simulation approach.

As other commentors have pointed out, Sidney Dekker has written some very good books on this topic. I'll point out two approaches or mental tools that he teaches.

1: "Slip" vs "Mistake". A slip is an non-intentional error: hitting the wrong switch accidentally, forgetting to click a button, etc. In general you could help prevent these with simple UI tweaks. A mistake is an error in or with intention. You meant to do something, and you had in mind what you wanted to do, but you made a miscalculation or had a misunderstanding of the situation. Changing workflows and adding context can help with these. This is a gross oversimplification, listen to his talks online and buy the book if you're interested.

2: Understand hindsight bias and blame. Hindsight bias is absolutely pervasive in human thinking after an incident. After an incident you have much more time and information to process than the operators involved. If you really want to prevent future incidents you must understand the information, tools, and mental context of the operator at the time of the incident.

Blame is a box to hide complexity in. People are afraid of the tiger in the forest. Complexity is hard to talk about. After an incident you want to feel safe and OK. If you can put the blame somewhere, you have hunted down the tiger and you can feel safe. But, if you are simply blaming a person, then another person may make the exact same mistake. This is very hard to talk about because in many cases there are legal and moral implications. When you take a systemic approach to safety and preventing human error, leave your morals at the door, and do not mix legal and engineering discussions during the investigation. You can pick up your morals when you go home for the day and be disgusted on your own time. Having an overly legalistic and punitive system can delay system improvements. Again, this is super oversimplified, there is a universe of nuance in this subject.
It's not dead it just got effectively integrated into existing networks like Twitter. I love spaces! I think there will be more innovation in the future with social audio but clubhouse felt like a flash in the pan to be sure.
I find it interesting that just when SMRs are getting a bit, and just a bit in a grand scheme of things, of traction, the old nuclear waster argument is revived.

Weren't the real reasons why we can't use nuclear power the long time needed to finish a plant and unreasonable economics?
While we're speculating, allow me to throw my 2 cents in.

The biochemistry of life is likely to be common, the conditions for complex or even intelligent tool using life are likely to be rare.

To have an earth, you need to have a moon comparable in mass to the planet to avoid atmospheric stripping. A temperature regime stable enough to support long term life development between 0 and 100 C. A star that doesn't blasttge planet in radiation every few thousand years. Along with a reasonable balance of materials, and a stellar neighborhood which wont swing the balance too badly every few million years.

Lastly, although untested, To have tool use, you likely need a planet with gravity thats strong enough for the atmosphere to be stable, but weak enough for organic molecules to hold together complex life and enable the construction of material objects. A super earth covered in algae is interesting, but may not be capable of traditional human intelligence.
Perhaps you just need to take a step back and re-evaluate your news sources then. Nothing about this event makes him a "schmuck".
It’s not possible because we’ve not yet observed it. It’s possible to say it’s very possible, but the strong assertion isn’t valid without proof.
DevTube – the best tech talks for developers
Who pays for the reconstruction costs after these events - isn't there a frequency of events when things simply becomes unsustainable and people migrate (like the Okies and the Dust Bowl)?
Not necessarily. If a company doesn't engage in commerce then it can be based in one country and provide services in other countries regardless of their laws, so long as their home country is willing to resist attempts by other countries to prosecute them.
> Assuming that operations take a linear amount of time (i.e. multiplying three times takes three times as long as multiplying once) this won't affect the asymptotic behavior.

This assumption is demonstrably broken if the first multiplication is a cache miss but the other multiplications then aren't -- an easy example is when the other two multiplications have data on the same cache line as the first multiplication's data.
In last year's VC market (and some of this year), don't interpret funding as VC validation.

VC's have been throwing money almost indiscriminately, compared to years past.

The best companies to work for during an economic downturn are ones that don't worry about VC or runway... because they're profitable (with real paying customers).
In the US, you've also got the problems of: not all votes count equally (Senate, electoral college) so some people's opinions (say, those in Wyoming) count a whole lot more than others; you need 60 Senate votes to do anything remotely controversial, and that's the same body subject to the first problem, so even 60% support for a position among the general population may not be enough to make something happen; our voting system forces people to compromise lots of things they care about, in favor of a few things they care about a whole lot, so you're never going to see someone who's, say, very pro-life but nonetheless cares about climate change, vote for action on climate change at the expense of their pro-life position.
The "dreaming in code" thing is just awful. The worst sleeps I've ever had were filled with a tormenting "problem" to "solve" which was just pure absurd abstract theorizing, attempting to fit bits and pieces together that had no tangible relation to a real world problem.

Like you, this has always happened to me when I have been stressed and overworked, usually if I've spent a whole day rushing to get something completed that is a little difficult and I haven't appropriately broken down a problem into manageable chunks.
Hey! The DevTube founder here. I spent the last two weeks rebuilding DevTube. Unlike the old version which contained 150K+ videos (and most of them were garbage), the new version contains ~350 tech talks from different sources – my personal favorites, GitHub lists, and YouTube most liked. The new DevTube is YouTube uncluttered + secret gems reuploaded from InfoQ, Vimeo, and private video archives.

- Discover hidden gems – Watch videos that are not publicly available on YouTube (e.g. Chad Fowler's "Tiny").

- Save time – Watch only the best talks, curated by the community, grouped by categories and speakers. Quality beats quantity.

- Create lists – Watch later, bookmark, and keep track of watched videos.

- Discuss – Read, write, and reply to comments directly from DevTube.

- Contribute – Get karma for video contributions. Your name will also be visible next to the video.

- Subscribe – Stay up-to-date with the latest videos via RSS. Too busy? Receive one tech talk per week.

- Fewer distractions – No annoying YouTube algorithms, irrelevant videos, ads, and tracking.

Enjoy!
He might just be trying to reprice the deal at a lower price he now thinks is commensurate to the value. Things were necessarily rushed in the initial agreement due to leaks etc. He and his team have now had time to develop an operating plan. Keep in mind that there are several savvy hedge funds also investing in this deal and this may be driven by their concerns.

There's also a possibility he'd just like to ensure the deal closes in a certain later time window. The composition of his personal wealth is complex and highly dependent on his equity holdings which have grown volatile recently.
> I'm not a Twitter investor so I have never looked deeply into their financials. Is this consistent with previous representations?

Yes, it very much is. And, actually, given their definitions, it's something I find highly plausible (essentially, they're saying that less than 5% of accounts that look like active daily users are bots).
A linked list is going to be more costly where objects are simple integers and a single array access can load multiple adjacent elements. In practice, list nodes are more often than not complex objects, where loading a single object will flood the cache anyways.

Furthermore, the author is masking the true cost of an array resize, which often happens in a running system where a finite array is completely full and needs to be resized to append an additional element. This is the scenario where linked lists are most useful.
Crypto consumes a lot but it really produces nothing. It is not capitalism and the stock market.

As the Luna example shows, just maintaining "stability" is a major achievement in the world of crypto.
> So how is your statement many Indians who come to the US care about caste due to reservation even make sense?

Your comment supports my observations. The newly-arrived Indians really don't like reservation and therefore care about caste. Second generation non-Brahmins in the US don't care about caste because it doesn't affect them.
How visible Elon is is a result of reporting and the clickbait (often with false information) headlines used in that reporting.
Not really. Sometimes you specifically want a water fountain where the water shoots upwards. Not a faucet.
how many businesses are having the problem you’re solving? is this number greater than 10?

aren’t you scared Fastly and Cloudflare will just clone your moat once they see some demand for a service like yours?
I get this. I often find myself thinking “why is this so dim?”. Try to turn up the brightness and it’s already at 100%.
Congrats and thanks for giving so much to the OS community
He doesn't own the company yet, and is making it pretty clear that he never intends to. As an outsider like you and me, he has nothing to do with improving upon Twitter spam. If he were to purchase the company, then as its owner he would have all the Twitter confidential information he wants. He doesn't get to have it now, especially after waiving due diligence on the no-longer-intended purchase.
That's an exceptionally naive analysis of the situation. Nobody makes an agreement to buy a multibillion dollar company and waives due diligence, then makes a stink afterwards. He's not some crusading knight in armor protecting the world from twitter's bots.

His behavior (across a wide range of things) is not fine. Which is a real shame because the core of his business activities right now is great, and his behavior constantly distracts from that.
Too much Elon hate here, your factual statements goes against the narrative.