skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Twitter acquired Vine before Vine launched.

Okay, a citation: I didn’t realize this either, but there are many articles about it from 2012, such as:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-twitter-bought-vine-befor...

“Why Twitter Bought Vine Before Launch”

Or https://thenextweb.com/news/twitter-acqui-hires-pre-launch-v...

“Twitter acquires pre-launch video sharing startup Vine”
> Twitter is absolutely a startup. They are trying to a) find product market fit with a new vision b) Have negative cash-flow, so everyone has to workhard to reduce burn rate. c) Will have new fresh equity issued them with high upside rewards. d) Will have a liquidity event in a couple of years (IPO)

That sounds like a very idiosyncratic definition of a "startup" that would match all kinds of poorly performing companies no one would label a "startup." I think being new, small, and chasing orders-of-magnitude upside from that small start are pretty key to the conventional definition, neither of which apply to Twitter anymore.
He comes across as average to slightly above average IQ so he's not stupid. Definitely not a genius though. Just a really, really great self promoter who likes to take credit for other people's work.
Watch Musks interview with Ron Baron instead of reading second hand quality hack articles if you want to understand the scale of his plans for twitter.
I actually have no strong opinions about whether remote work must be allowed or not... but presumably this is going to result in more people leaving, right? Presumably he knows this, right? (Maybe he's even counting on it?).

I guess this is an interesting experiment in how much staff turnover you can have at a tech company like Twitter and still do fine.

I personally would not expect it to go well. Losing everyone who knows how things work and starting over from scratch with all new employees in as short a time period as possible, or even doing your best to approach that asymptote... that can't be a good idea, can it?
> destroy a toxic business

Twitter is more toxic under musk..
It's part of the whole BLS report, here:

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm

You may also be interested in what is referred to as "sticky CPI" which is reported by the Atlanta Fed: https://www.atlantafed.org/research/inflationproject/stickyp...

The name is fairly descriptive of what it is: the slowest re-acting elements of the CPI calculation. This is contrasted with the "flexible" CPI, which are the elements that react the fastest. In the last report, Sticky CPI was constant (no change), whereas all the decrease in CPI came in the flexible side of things.
Is it true that $13bn came in the form of loans and that those loans are secured by Twitter, not Musk or any entity he'd personally be responsible for?

If so, how does that work?
This is an incredible link...

>Day zero
2022-04-15 17:22:12 ( CDT )

>Sharpen your blades boys
2022-04-15 17:22:59 ( CDT )

>2 day a week Office requirement = 20 % voluntary departures

---

These people really don't understand the branding of Apple vs Twitter:

>Back of the envelope ... Twitter revenue per employee : $ 5B rev / 8k employees = $ 625K rev per employee in 2021 Google revenue per employee : $ 257B rev / 135K employee = $ 1.9M per employee in 2021 Apple revenue per employee : $ 365B rev / 154k employees = $ 2.37M per employee in fiscal 2021
2022-04-15 17:08:07 ( CDT )

>Twitter revenue per employee if 3k instead of 8k : $ 5B rev / 3k employees = $ 1.66m rev per employee in 2021 ( more industry standard )

---

hard to tell if this is sarcasm?!

>I will be universally beloved , since it is so easy to please everyone on twitter
2022-04-23 21:04:30 ( CDT )

>It feels like everyone wants the same exact thing , and they will be patient and understanding of any changes ... Twitter Stans are a reasonable , good faith bunch
2022-04-23 21:06:51 ( CDT )

>These dipshits spent a years on twitter blue to give people exactly .... Nothing they want !

---

The sycophantism is over 9k:

> Morgan Stanley and Jared think you are using our friendship not in a good way
2022-05-12 19:31:12 ( CDT )

>This makes it seem like I'm desperate .
2022-05-12 19:31:17 ( CDT )

>Please stop
2022-05-12 19:31:48 ( CDT )

>Only ever want to support you .
2022-05-12 19:37:49 ( CDT )

>Clearly you're not desperate - you have the worlds greatest investors voting in support of a deal you already have covered . you're overfunded . will quietly cancel it ... And to be clear , I'm not out actively soliciting folks . These are our exiting LPs not rondos . Sorry for any trouble
2022-05-12 19:55:14 ( CDT )

>Morgan Stanley and Jared are very upset
2022-05-12 19:55:55 ( CDT )

>Ugh
2022-05-12 19:58:44 ( CDT )

>SPVs are how everyone is doing there deals now ... Luke loved to SPVS etc
2022-05-12 19:59:13 ( CDT )

>Just trying to support you ... obviously . I reached out to Jared and sort it out .
2022-05-12 20:00:53 ( CDT )

>* moved
2022-05-12 20:01:54 ( CDT )

>Yes , I had to ask him to stop .
2022-05-12 20:06:45 ( CDT )

>Liked " Just trying to support you ... obviously . I reached out to Jared and sort it out . "
2022-05-12 22:49:00 ( CDT )

>Cleaned it up with Jared
2022-05-12 22:49:12 ( CDT )

>Liked " Cleaned it up with Jared "
2022-05-12 22:49:58 ( CDT )

>I get where he is coming from .... Candidly , This deal has just captures the worlds imagination in an unimaginable way . It's bonkers ....
2022-05-12 22:51:42 ( CDT )

>And you know I'm ride or die brother - I'd jump on a grande for you
2022-05-12 22:51:49 ( CDT )

>Loved " And you know I'm ride or die brother - I'd jump on a grande for you "
How many years could Sam Bankman-Fried get in jail?

It is also interesting to read on his Wikipedia profile [1] about "Bankman-Fried is a supporter of effective altruism and claims to pursue earning to give as an altruistic career. He is a member of Giving What We Can and has claimed that he plans to donate the great majority of his wealth to effective charities over the course of his life.". Having direct access to a lot of money changes a some people ethics.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Bankman-Fried
iPhone 8 on iOS 13 here. That does not work but holding lock and volume does.
The end of cold/flu season.
The problem with your proposal is that Elons Twitter followers do not equal a profitable market. He needs Twitter’s brand and established user base to bootstrap whatever X is (something payment related probably). If it were just a bunch of his fans it wouldn’t have the penetration needed to loop more people in.
He was, for the first few years of the war. His wikipedia article has the details of his wartime career. You're probably thinking of "A Piece of Cake", which was his first published story and based on a plane crash he'd been in in 1940.
I think for an insane comp and equity in a new company led by Elon, lots of people would consider leaving. Network affects are real and is probably a top 10 world individual as far as the power of his network is concerned. Having a ton of YC press is way different than being Elon.

Even still he could pay people to use his application. Pay businesses $20 a month for a verified business account. Pay individual users $10-100 a month based on activity and engagement. Does it scale? Absolutely not but I still think it'd end up cheaper than $44 billion.
Yes, with Roth, Wheeler, Fogarty, and and the CISO Kissner departing, Twitter's prior leadership is now 100% dismantled.
Congratulations, you just lost all your invested capital on Truth Social 2.0.
Since November 2019 I feel like the flu is taking longer to pass, has been more annoying. And I more easily get sore throat bacterial infection, which I never had before
>Yea, the Navy has basically fostered a shit culture that turned the leadership into MBA-style bullshit artists today. Leadership isn't taken seriously, just promotions and personal gain. Only those who kiss ass can make it in today's Navy.

This is a disease of all peacetime militaries. The Army suffers the same problem. They spend an entire career LARPing in camouflage, and think that somehow means they know anything at all about warfare or leadership.
> I'm sure even those good type-1 captains you mention would still get rid of malingerers

No, they'd try and figure out the motivation of the malignerer, or lack thereof, first. We had one guy who was a great tech, but then for a few months he showed up drunk to watch and was lazy. Found out his wife left him with the kids, to another state. The officer's mess arranged with some of the enlisted senior crew to invite the guy to family events every week, dinner and stuff, and helped him get back that family feeling with the ship, so he had something to work for.

> or enemy sympathizers.

I doubt anyone in the Navy I met was a spy for an enemy. I also doubt someone at Twitter is rooting for TikTok and working against Twitter in that direction.
> He is jeopardizing the continued viability of a $44b investment to save maybe a few hundred million max.

Both he and the market know that he paid too much for Twitter. It isn't worth $44B, but he needs to make it lean enough to start throwing off enough cash to pay back the loans he took to buy it at that price.

Since it is very hard to increase revenue (especially when he is allowing more advertiser-repellent content), he is trying to dramatically cut costs while trying to increase non advertising revenue.

He can't go back to the banks and the Saudi sovereign wealth fund and explain to them that he needs a deferment so he can invest in more efficient SRE and content moderation. He has to sleep in the bed he made, which means show his creditors the money.
> Or maybe he's just a guy that believes in free speech…

Lol, that’s some good comedy. He’s already gone on a ban run of people mocking him. He didn’t even make a month before showing his true colors on this talking point.
Spending $44B to prevent the endless terrible hot takes of the Twitterati from polarizing the world to the point where the rest of his stash becomes worthless. I like it.
You can always count on HNers to point out that a neutral network designed to run realtime on devices that have a 1 watt-hour battery definitely "isn't going to be used primarily in smartwatches". The US gov't can't possibly afford to do offline pose estimation on a real GPU, am I right?
> He also wants to recreate the place per his own vision, so it makes sense to get rid of as many people carrying the previous culture as you can and then start hiring as necessary with the kind of people you want.

Twitter isn't going to have the same "pull" as organizations like Tesla or SpaceX where you can attract top-shelf talent by virtue of working on some of the most interesting problems. Twitter is... Twitter. It's Adtech + SaaS. I'm not saying this is boring or easy - it's not, it has tons of challenging problems... but how is Twitter under Musk more appealing to engineers than Twitter under any of its previous CEOs?
This of course is nonsense. It takes some effort to host your own, but you can do it, and there are hundreds of email providers out there. And there is the middle ground of getting your own domain and “hosting” your own for $6/month with Microsoft 365 for example…
> I keep thinking it'd be much cheaper for Elon to have paid to build an entirely new Twitter that has the features he's looking for.

It'd be even cheaper if he had the sense to not play chicken with Twitter's board only to get called on his bluff. Nothing about how he's handled Twitter thus far suggests that he ever took his offer to buy them seriously. He was showboating from the beginning and screwed up, and thousands of people are paying the price.

We'll probably never know, but I'd love to hear the story of how exactly he thought it would be a good idea to blindly sign the binding paperwork for the purchase without doing any serious due diligence. Either his lawyers were begging him not to or they're as dumb as he is.
I'd argue his followers are his greatest chance at profit. Many people despise him and have been closing their twitter accounts. So despite it still being twitter brand and established users, they don't like Elon so they don't want to support the platform.
ENS doesn't hit those points. It doesn't fulfill any need that isn't served by DNS, and it still depends on other centralized services for it to actually be useful: https://web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=ethlink-service-about-to-go...
While he has so much money that he can lose billions and I don't see it actually affecting his quality of life... it will presumably affect his ability to raise billions like this again in investments or loans, which seems to be something he really enjoys doing and his ability to do it seems to be part his self-regard. It doesn't seem likely to me that he intends to destroy twitter and lose all the invested money.

However... he does seem to be really really bad at running a company, which does seem a bit inexplicable when he's run several companies succesfully before.
Can't animals be vaccinated?
Well he's in the bahamas, not the US.
The problem is companies are so big and consolidated now that competitors can't as easily come in and existing competitors were bought out.
He doesn’t want to build a better twitter.

He wants to _own this twitter_.
Illegal immigrants are by definition knowingly breaking a law, a rather uncivilized act. Kayakers or border hoppers, regardless of country of origin, are not behaving in a civilized way.

- signed, a legal immigrant
Elon Musk tells Twitter staff that bankruptcy isn’t out of the question: report
It seems like it's pretty clearly going to be the EU? The Digital Markets Act takes effect in 2023.
Must be in office. Must work at least 40 hours per week. Eliminated days of rest. As if twitter's problems are caused by "employees not working enough".
The only people he needs to not fire are ones running infrastructure. Rest can be replaced easily.
Depends on your expected remaining lifetime of the human race? (since from that you might compute the expected cancer deaths over that time and then you can do a simple comparison)
Does not use <blink> tag... Worst. website. ever. ;-)

There used to be a famous site in the 90's documenting such things ...

found it!
http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/begin.htm
>Musk expects subscriptions to make up to 50% of revenue

I've seen a lot of people calculating how many subscriptions would be required to hit this number as of today, but they're all forgetting to factor in Apple's and/or Google's cut.
Hiring is expensive, and people can take months to get up to speed on a new role. If too many people quit, he'll have simply wasted money and time.

I've joined two teams where everyone previously on the team quit (plenty of openings). There was indeed a benefit to fresh eyes on things, but those projects took months to get back up to speed.
The plane turns while banking which results in a force vector mostly straight down towards the floor. If the plane did not turn while banking what you wrote is true.

The ground is whatever you accelerate towards.
There is a surprising amount of luck and happenstance in people reaching their current positions. Even great discoveries made by smart people often originate because someone was in the right place at the right time. Most societies rewards these events, for both the individual and through inheritance their children.

Musk may be cleverer than average, but he's also come to own twitter by virtue of being successful at building paypal, followed by being able to successfully deploy capital at impactful problems at SpaceX and Tesla. While impressive achievements, these achievements do not imply that Musk will be successful at Twitter. He's known for demanding people to do their best and hardest work by pointing them at seamingly impossible but impactful problems.

Will rescuing a failing social network motivate people in the same way? I don't think so. I'd probably be willing to work 60+ hours a week for average pay to solve global warming (TSLA) or colonize Mars (SpaceX) - I wouldn't be willing to make that sacrifice for Twitter.
Yeah but things are about to change for germany. At best it will stagnate.
Unpopular opinion: I wish this law extended to startups using VC cash to offer products at artificially low prices. When done at sufficient scale (ex. Uber), it massively distorts markets and is very much anticompetitive, even if consumers benefit for some time.
Better in theory than IRL. You think the Don was able to get top dev talent lol?
US typically uses pretty strong adjectives. Like my kid keeps on "hating" everything, and there are no shades of gray. Maybe that's how you are using "stupid"? Haha.
CRISPR cancer trial success paves the way for personalized treatments
Sorry I cannot remember it.
I mean even for humans consciousness has been a mystery. I throw, therefore I am.
Based on the content, the headline might as well be "you are currently drinking, and will drink much more snake oil"

Especially if Zimmerman's Law is valid.
Why would they care? Whether an app is 100mb or 500mb has zero financial repercussions for them. (In a consumer-friendly world they would care, and we want them to care, but as is, they have no reason to care)
I think his ego is too massive for that. The man bristles at the slightest criticism. Destroying Twitter, even intentionally, will provide enough fodder to his critics that I don't think he'd be able to actually suck it up and follow through.
It's funny how people will argue "never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence" ...

... but here people are bending over backwards to justify Musk's behaviour ...

My issue with arguments like these is that these are collective opinions held by different segments of people, not some nebulous singular person whose opinion can be safely discarded because of contradictory statements.
> This is not different than Epic charging X% for use of the Unreal Engine's APIs to build a game.

It is completely different. You are distributing the Unreal Engine with every game you make. You aren't distributing any proprietary code with your iOS app, it only calls up APIs that are already paid for by the user and for which the user already has a copy.

A good analogy would be me making a new control panel for a mechanical machine, where the panel has metal arms and rods that connect to the machine's original mechanisms to bring about a certain result that the machine itself would be incapable of bringing on its own.

You wouldn't say I can't distribute that new panel I made because the original machine is patented, right?
Yep, americans aren't nearly as price conscious anymore in general, and there are just so many that are flush with cash now due to cheap money that they still don't care.
I think you got the math wrong, because I'm 100% sure not all 67million customers have $250,000 in their accounts. Being that 56% of Americans can't cover $1,000 expense[0], and most people with >$100k assuredly have their money in assets rather than cash, I think your math is way, way, way off.

[0]: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/19/56percent-of-americans-cant-...
Balanced out by the centripetal force of the plane turning!
Ask HN: Why there's such a big difference when it comes to payment methods
Why games try to support as many payment methods as possible meanwhile a lot of other services offer only card or paypal - e.g HBO's Streaming

In video games people without cards can pay with premium sms or even paysafe cards (they're really handy)

Shouldn't every service try to cover as many reasonable as payment methods? aren't they losing customers?

Is this because they want to force you to sub & forget as hard as they can?

I don't like that because I cannot purchase services "anonymously" and I don't trust some services to give them my card details
But this isn't counterparty risk, it's fraud risk, right? It sounds like "Atrium borrowed a bunch of houses from FX, but FX didn't own the houses." When you check the Recorder (the blockchain for houses), the deeds should all say "John Doe owns 123 Main St."

In the world with a Recorder of Deeds, Atrium is screwed, and FX might be screwed, but John Doe is easily confirmed as the owner of 123 Main.

It sounds like people here gave their coins to FX, so that the "deed" shows FX "owns" the coin. In effect, they destroyed the 'trustless' part of the equation. And then SBF violated the trust.

So, the next innovation seems to be a blockchain that shows an owner and an agent?
If police only gave speeding tickets to those with Trump bumper stickers, would that not be a misapplication of the law? I think most people would think that is wrong even if they all happened to be speeding.
I miss the old internet.

It's a dead horse, I know, but this site makes me feel reminiscent of better days.
This whole thing is SGI syndrome. The tight knit teams that were either let go or quit Twitter will go and found the next equivalent Nvidia or Adobe. Elon is making the classic Valley blunder of trying to make a company something it's not, in this case x.com. See also AOL, Yahoo!, and Tumber.

If Elon turns brings Vine back from the dead, I might have to eat my shoe however.
Despite what the article says, this can't be more complicated than producing 5 nm process chips. It's just less funded.
>This also applies to existing aircraft, but the amount you drop/rise is limited by the your distance from the axis of rotation, which is normally not very far.

When a plane is crabbing, as in coming in sideways towards the runway, when it touches down, and suddenly pivots to normal runway directions, even passengers in the rear of a normal plane, might be accelerated hard around the yaw axis.
Ah, gotcha. Yeah, there’s zero chance that you can make a pressurized pancake using rib-and-stringer architecture, probably even out of unobtanium. The best candidate I can think of is making it like a submarine, although that would definitely mess with the open concept floor plan and probably impose a huge weight penalty (although it might be helpful from a fatigue life standpoint). The only other remotely viable solution I can think of is drop stitching, but that has some fairly obvious drawbacks that would probably make it impracticable.
Oh yes they can force you to see a search through. I had a federal search warrant executed where a judge explicitly gave permission for medical personnel to "internally search" my body. They're unable to do that without your cooperation.
Putin's and Musk's massive ego and narcissism will be their downfall.

By invading Ukraine, Putin has achieved the exact opposite he wanted to achieve. The West is now more united than ever and more Russia border countries are going to join NATO. On top of that he has destroyed Russian economy. Tell me how that's not stupid?

I don't even have to go into Musk's actions. He massively overpaid for Twitter and to service the loan he has to pay $1bn a year. Even if he'd cut all his staff and millions would subscribe to Twitter blue - that wouldn't be enough to service the loan. Plus tons of advertisers left the platform because he's a loose canon spewing conspiracy theories. How is this not stupid?
That entirely depends on type of work. We do 1-2 days on site a week and it works well, we can get all of the management and coordination done then then just code away in peace without interruption. But that's programming, some jobs are less dependent on communication, some are more.