skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Discussed yesterday:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33485026

(8 points, 10 comments)
It definitely is. You just need to look at some Mastodon conversations from non-tech Twitter.

People are confused about:

* there are so many servers - which do I join?

* how will I be able to tell people are who they say they are without the 'blue tick'?

* if anyone can verify how do I know who is important/celebrity/official?

* what do I do when the instance I want to join isn't open to registrations (and why on earth isn't it open to registrations?)

* how do I discover/follow people on other instances?
none of the big social media companies would have gotten big if the users had to pay.

See something awful where you had to pay a tenner to post.
I've had pretty much no issues, but the (10k user) instance I've been on has been closed to new user registration except by invite (from any existing user) the whole time this twitter thing has been happening.

Generally I'd assume that any big open instance is going to have scaling pains right now, but not all instances.
He says that himself:

> But when you show them PeerTube and Plume, Pixelfed and Misskey, it becomes more apparent that they’re not just betting on Mastodon, that it’s really this big, future-proof endeavour that anyone can contribute to.
It works financially but not ethically. Tracking users to maximize ad revenue is something advertisers demand and it's frowned on more and more. In the EU it's now illegal to do so without the user's consent. So.think it's smart to look at subscription business models and much more ethical too. At least you can give the user a choice now.
Broadly (and of course there are a lot of nuances), studies do not show substantial effect[0], which is a failure of the software considering the promise and the resources invested in this transition. Tens of billions of dollars invested in the transition, which could be used for other interventions.

The broad economy is different from pure-software companies. Software can eventually only manage information - but many businesses eventually operate on physical things, where people matter much more than software.

0. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33441368/
I never mentioned Elon or the implications of buying twitter, you went off on that tangent.

> You are implying that is pointless me to have a person website because I will not succeed to be more popular the FB or Twitter. The joke is on you I have a personal website and I run a blog and some static pages. EU is not attempting to defeat Twitter

Again never said that.

Backup communication methods don't work if no ones uses them do they?

> 1 Twitter or FB because they might block you and your then need to fight with AI bots to unblock your stuff

Normally when you have a controlling stake in a company you can have an input in how it operates.

> 2 there might be users that do not use Twitter or FB

There's also people who don't use the internet? what's your point?

>3 Twitter and FB might not respect user privacy so it is imporal to publish only on those

EU agencies already post on Facebook and Twitter, what's your point ?
I assume you're referring to the fact that liberal arts colleges are usually private and more expensive, which is true, but I paid for it with loans, so to the extent that one would be advised to go massively in debt for college, it's possible.

My parents had only saved enough for me to go to a state school, which got me through one semester at a private college, and the rest were student loans, and working often multiple part-time jobs (and full-time in the summer).
> Too much friction.

Is there some way to reduce the friction, now that Mastodon has so much interest? Something like a "twitter importer" e.g.?
Oh yes I’m 100% in support of better bike infrastructure! I still love how fast the bike is, because it means I can go long distance trips quickly, so even when I don’t have an afternoon for a ride I can go somewhere 10 miles / 16 kilometers away and back in a relativity short amount of time, even with big hills!

Powered assistance has a lot of value, and using electric power on a bicycle is orders of magnitude more energy efficient than anything in a car. I think there’s a lot more people interested in cycling now that e-bikes are more popular, and this means more support for that improved bike infrastructure and more people willing to travel by ultra low emissions means.

So yes, better safety is absolutely important. But I still think e-bikes and in particular 1500 watt e-bikes have a lot of value.
Kara Swisher said some advertisers had told her, after a meeting with Musk last week in NY, that either he came to the meeting totally unprepared or he actually had no plan. He could not articulate a sensible plan to them.
It's not just about the USA. Twitter has to follow the law wherever it operates. The way the company went about announcing redundancies in the Dublin office could well fall foul of Irish employment law (IANAL etc), and people have legitimate cause for annoyance if Musk feels he's rich and powerful enough to get away with doing it anyway.
Precisely, I get the sentiment/frustration expressed in the parent comment, but this is a curation, discoverability issue.
Get bike insurance, for this exact reason! Your renter's insurance might also cover bike theft.
Is this the moment to snarkily bring up "corporations are people, my friend"? :D
Tried to find your albums, but there’s nothing on your profile or comments. Do you have anything online we could listen to? I’m curious about the type of music you’re doing.. All the best!
Are you using the same software than 3Blue1Brown?
.
That’s a super weird take. Google and Meta absolutely dominate on users also.
I think it looks untuned rather than somehow broken.

Fine tuning result relevance is a pretty long and tedious process, and small problems with this can make results look very bad.
Twitter has lost money nearly every year since it’s been public, and was losing $4 million a day when Elon took over. If jobs don’t generate money they can’t exist in the free market, and the real shock is that the previous board of directors didn’t initiate layoffs sooner.
I think your response is based
on assuming what I would advocate for regarding moderation

Just like with alcohol its not a role of the government to say “thats too much, get help”. We can absolutely shame people into moderation, just like we shame people into limiting drinking till after 5pm, with limited discretionary exceptions. People are worried about breaking those social conventions at work functions, they’re worried breaking them socially, they’re worried about doing it by themselves knowing the cautionary tales of those who normalize the behavior.

We can maintain that peer based moderation with regard to weed consumption, and right now we don't have those conventions at all. Its all or nothing at the moment, where most people can read the room and use discretion, other people are getting high the same as people would take multiple daily coffee breaks, alongside coffee in the morning, and other intervals. A mental security blanket they think helps them with X, Y, Z while the rest of us see a degraded stupid human that is missing stimuli for a good chunk of time, and then making silly decisions after.
The months you’re referring to was spent trying to get out of the deal. It was not spent preparing for it to close.
> There have always been people resisting the majority decision

if you resist within the law and generous existing freedoms to do that, that's fine. if you feel it requires anything beyond that, you are essentially invoking a call to revolution. so if you'd tear down what we have, imperfect or not, over your single issue, that's exactly what I mean by "more dangerous". consider the substantial risk that we'd end up in an much more inequitable and un-ecologically sound system.

> That you'd write off recognition of an existential threat to humankind's existence as a "tantrum" is telling

I appreciate you mean "telling" as a complement. it also demonstrates nicely what I mean by "tantrum": if I don't agree with you, then I must not have studied the data enough because it's so obvious that your position is right.

> if you're already willing to prioritize billionaire luxuries

I'm willing to prioritize everyone's right to exist and function withing the framework of society. Including billionaires, if they are people too.

> The ones we need to convince are the ones with the actual power

are they? I doubt those in the actual power are going to be convinced by you sitting in front of their private jets or really anything else.

who you need to convince is super-majority of the rest of society. this kind of behavior and dismissiveness is spectacularly inept at convincing, which is why it hasn't worked to your satisfaction. back to the original problem, making thousands of people wait in traffic, while killing someone in the process is extremely unconvincing.
I tried to get an hour of "yard time" in every day, but it didn't help much.
Maybe he had access to internals. But do you really believe it's comparable to the SJ situation? He was the CEO and could talk to all the people in person. He spent most of his time understanding. It's seems very different now.
Mastodon is great but it isn't a replacement for Twitter. Too much friction. Too hard for the average journalist. Not enough reach.

You seem to think Twitter is for journalists. It isn't. It's for anyone who wants to use it, including people who have the time and energy to figure it out and no need for "reach". And that's more than enough.

What people fail to understand about Fediverse apps is that they aren't trying to be big. They're trying to stay small but be part of a big, connected universe. Mastodon won't ever be Twitter but it could still be incredibly useful.

Also note though that this doesn't mean Twitter is safe. Twitter's main rival is 'nothing' - eg users realising they don't want to use or read a microblogging service. People quitting Twitter because they don't like it any more is a far greater threat to Twitter than any fediverse service could ever be. Elon can happily ignore Mastodon. He can't ignore breaking Twitter (if he is, which isn't certain at all.)
There is always this "helps with extensibility, readability, maintainability, and more". These things are nothing burgers. Software can and does exist in different states with different goals. You cannot have all these attributes at the same time. Its why we keep going around in circles creating evermore complex patterns that are separate from the software that actually exists.
This project looks awesome and as someone who’s used vim/neovim my whole career, I’m very excited for a modern modal editor. If it had an easy motion/sneak/leap/hop sort of thing (there’s an open PR), I’d switch right away. I keep checking on it every few weeks. Can’t wait for that and the plug-in functionality.
I used vim as my daily driver probably for the same amount of time as you and couldn't make the switch . The lack of tabs and folding destroyed my workflow.

I like to set my splits up a certain way when I'm working on something specific and then make a new tab when I change context. Then I just change tabs to context-switch quickly.

I also immediately fold all when I open a file to get an "overview" and then slowly dig in deeper.

Both currently impossible in helix (at least last time I checked).

A lot of my muscle memory also doesn't work, specifically with shift+v and selecting/moving sections around quickly.

I got used to the different order of things fairly quickly, but I'm not convinced it's actually more efficient.

I also found the random pop-ups with hints really annoying and distracting. I'm guessing there's probably a config to disable them but I haven't looked into it.
China's weapons acquisition cycle 5-6x faster than the United States
I assume they mean "installation of service lines made of Lead"
let me guess it's proposed by someone from Brno
Not sure why this is downvoted, it's a pretty obvious assessment.
Mastodon and federated systems like it will not succeed beyond a tiny niche, will not replace twitter, and don't even solve most of the problems they try to solve.

They don't fix the upstream issues that lead to centralization. Incentives mean most users end up centralized on a handful of servers with a worse experience. It's the worst of both worlds. As designed the UX is bad and cannot be fixed because of these issues.

Twitter has been a terribly mismanaged company for a long time and there's general consensus on this. Jack knew this, but was powerless to actually make the changes necessary to fix it. Elon may not succeed, but I hope he does and what he's doing is a necessary prerequisite. People dismiss his obvious success elsewhere in other insanely hard domains, they can largely be ignored.

I want a world where people have actual ownership over their computing, but federated system designs like Mastodon will not get us that and we have thirty years of failure to prove it. The press pretending otherwise because they hate Elon and see tech companies as a threat are just embarrassing themselves.

To solve this problem for real is a lot harder, but I'm optimistic it's not impossible. https://zalberico.com/essay/2022/09/28/tlon-urbit-computing-...
Right taxing negative externalities more would be a good thing, but I think that's kind of independent of whether the land is owned by a foreigner or a local?
> Never understood why people are so concerned about him cutting jobs?

There can be many different perspectives on it.

A possible perspective is someone who uses twitter. If Elon cut jobs too hastily that might risk the stability, safety, or moderation of the platform. That is a valid concern for users.

If you are an advertiser for a big brand you are concerned about what content your advertisement appears next to. Brands don’t want to see their names plastered next to things which are too controversial, or frowned uppon. This is called “brand safety”. They might worry that a deep cut in twitter’s headcount will mean that twitter can’t quarantee that they can maintain the required level of moderation for this.

There is then the perspective of a regular everyday person who is not a twitter user in any way. They are interested in a safe society. If the changes at twitter lead to an under moderated free-for-all that can give power to all kind of dangerous individuals. Radicalisation is a real thing. Free rethoric against groups of people can lead to more radical rethoric. And more radical speech can lead to violence.

> It’s his right to restructure it and try to make it generate profit as he’d wish.

Of course! That is without dispute. One can be concerned about how something is managed even if the owners of said something has every right to manage the think the way they want it.
Taiwan claims that China belongs to them. Why do you not require them to declare anything?
> hes lucky corporate brands and advertisers havent figured out they could start their own Mastodon instance for almost nothing

I think competitors would all start their own instances (Nike instance vs Adidas instance?), so you'd end up with a myriad of them eventually.
Shortening Mastodon to Masto is even worse

"Here are some #MastoTips" https://mathstodon.xyz/tags/mastotips

T-t-thanks
Looks potentially interesting to us at Sourcegraph. We built pricing, metering, and license keys into our product ourselves a few years ago because (1) nothing like this existed at the time and (2) a large portion of our customer base was (and still is) self-hosted, so we couldn't depend on some cloud service. Our code is all public, in case you want to poke around and see if it'd be a good solution for us.
The advertisers began pulling ads after ad agency execs met with him and failed to get satisfactory answers[0] and after he posted that conspiracy theory about Paul Pelosi. It didn't help that he ignored and then blocked the head of MMA Global just after the layoffs started.[1] If he wanted to keep advertisers on board this is an odd way to go about it.

The Ethical AI team wasn't 'silly', it was working on ways to make the algorithms used at Twitter more transparent to users, avoid bias, and potentially allow for multiple algorithm choices.

Subscription funding for Twitter is never going to work as Twitter Blue showed quite clearly. At best it'll result in marginal profit on a substantially smaller and less interesting site, dominated by a few voices and with many of its members leaving to other places. Nor will it block scammers, who'll be able to use stolen cards and other payment methods to pay for access the same way they currently pay for hacked accounts. It'll just be even cheaper for them.

Nor is $8/mo 'nothing' for large groups of people, especially in the developing world, and would result in them being excluded from the platform. Musk made one vague statement about the price being adjusted for different regions but nothing further has emerged on that.

[0]https://www.adweek.com/media/elon-musk-fails-to-answer-brand...

[1]https://twitter.com/LouPas/status/1588599808587345921?s=20&t...
Isn't the idea that you publish on one but you subscribe to many?
ShadeMap – Simulate sun shadows for any time and place on Earth
Always happy to answer questions! The code is mostly Node.js, with a lot of shell scripts to glue things together. The “background worker” is mostly me running things in tmux, though I do (ab)use GitLab CI for some scheduled tasks. The main full-text index is currently ElasticSearch (as I mention elsewhere in this thread, I’m not a fan of it); various other data in the ingestion process is stored a combination of JSON-Lines files, SQLite, and bespoke binary formats as needed. Because I’m squeezing this into the hardware I have, the details are generally dictated by performance constraints for the particular problem at hand.

Update frequency depends on the data source, details here: https://search.feep.dev/about/datasources

No plans to open-source it at the moment; that implies a level of stewardship that I don’t have the energy for at the moment, and also some of the code is kind of tied to my specific server right now.
You mean, federated systems like the web or email won't succeed ?
I also do the same, and I'm happy there are people like us who gives objects a second life :-)

The only appliances I had to recycle can't be repaired in any way or it cost about the same of a new one, but I rarely have that situation. Living 15 minutes apart from a appliance scrapyard, where parts are a lot cheaper than new, also improves that.
counterpoint:

The US is free at any time to stop invading other countries, trying to overthrow other countries, and enter into conflicts thousands of miles from their borders. But really, it doesn't seem that they do.

The US has invaded or attacked over 120 countries since 1991[1]. Absolutely none of them were a threat to the United States. How many countries has China invaded in the same period? How many has it bombed? Imposed sanctions on? Occupied?

[1]https://sites.tufts.edu/css/mip-research/
I believe there have been studies where they've transplanted hair from and to different parts of the body and found that they largely continue to grow the way they did at their original site, implying that follicles from different parts of the body just respond to hormonal environment differently.

Also the current understanding is that it's specifically DHT (a second order type of testosterone) that causes head hair follicles, and hormone treatments that modulate conversion of T into DHT one way or the other have fairly predictable effects on hair loss patterns.

There probably isn't just one single cause here, but hormones are definitely a big part of it.
I've seen it claimed that the $4M/day figure is mostly because of the debt servicing cost that Musk's acquisition added to the company's books.

The new debts apparently add over $1 billion / year in interest payments alone. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/03/technology/elon-musk-twit...

(Being able to do this as part of a buyout sounds ridiculous, I know. And yet.)
True, sorry. I just looked at the site on my mobile. Also no luck on eBay for me...

If my memory serves me good, then a https://www.amazon.com/i-gotU-GT-120-Travel-Logger-Software/... should also do the trick.
Mastodon is enjoying a bit of the network effect right now. More and more people are posting that they're trying it out without leaving Twitter - and this in turn drives others to try it too. Whether it will be enough for them to stick around I don't know. But they got the ball rolling a little bit.
> Why can't it work for twitter?

Don't know. Perhaps the fired management can comment on why it didn't work for Twitter?

> Elon might be overestimating how much other ppl care about spam based on his own feed/replies/notifications.

Difference is one does not need to follow Elon if one thinks his content is spam. Disincentivizing ubiquitous spam created by bots out of the platform will reduce the noise overall so one can curate the list of those who they follow.
Not sure why this growth is relevant. Think back to people moving off of Github to alternatives.
I've made a website that does very rudimentary simulation of transmission electron microscopy diffraction patterns, as a tool for myself and other researchers. Was a big leap for me learning how to do so, but it's been fun (and frustrating) to learn about Flask, Docker, cloud instances, HTTPS etc. along the way!

https://tcpekin.com/dp_sim/
To add to that first point there's rumors they're asking people to come back. Maybe confirmed by now?
I never ran into petri net in jobs, I always thought they were still stuck at educational use. Do you get good results using them ?
> It's the worst of both worlds.

Yea, I've been saying the same for some time. I really want for decentralized solutions to proliferate, but federation is a terrible model.
You appear to be correct, though in my defense I didn't give a version and I have definitely been stuck on such a compiler long after 1999. (And I suspect they're still over-represented for 32 bit systems.)
Or, it'll lead to more micro-communities creating crosswords that are topical and relevant to them, for example:

https://www.private-eye.co.uk/crossword

Private eye crossword, with downloadable version for use in apps, which references british (and world) politics.
> These two entities would collaborate on something of titanic portions. Of course it'd end up sinking into obscurity.

Amazing sentence pairing.
Having just added a yubikey as a PayPal 2FA device it niw appears that PayPal only supports one key. Not great.
I would agree that a single person defending a fortification probably not benefit from more than, say, two or three guns. One gun that has a decent automatic magazine size, and fast reloading, plus lots and lots of ammo. You need backup equipment in the face of possible failure.
Correct - email is a failure as a federated system, people are centralized on a handful of providers and you can't even run your own server these days without getting blacklisted.

The promise of the decentralized web of the 90s is a failure. The majority of users are centralized on handful of megacorporation apps despite the ad business making this pretty awful.

We're trapped in a local maximum because of the underlying system designs. Spam, linux server admin being too hard, terrible devex are some of the forces that lead to this [0]. It's a hard problem to get out of without thinking from first principles.

[0]: http://moronlab.blogspot.com/2010/01/urbit-functional-progra...
> Why don't they buy a considerable stake in these American social media companies

One is cost - a peertube instance costs thousands of costs including employee costs, while a considerable stake in youtube would cost billions. Two Second is control - why pay lots to hopefully get some special rules that need to be maintained over time to (for example) prevent any ads affecting the content when you can host yourself and not have the issue in the first place.