skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> more profitable than ever before.

Not if all the big advertisers leave...

> In 6 months all of the advertisers will have returned

Why? If the economy declines ad spending will fall and the industry is more competitive than ever, it's a buyers market. Also most seem to have left because they didn't want to be associated with Musk rather than due to technical/policy issues with Twitter itself.

> his roll out of subscription features will be slower than he wanted

Which is probably a good thing for Twitter, would move it to the pros parts.
Man, people are so assumptive and negative about one of the world's greatest innovators today. Hasn't he earned any respect? I know layoffs are really tough but does anyone really believe there was no reason for them at Twitter? He's got a tough task in front of him and getting to the barebones team of mission driven people seems like a plausible first step towards a better tomorrow. The assumption that only the worst employees will stay seems odd to me, I would bet that there's some population of employees that believe in their new ceo and believe what he is doing is necessary for a chance at a thriving company.
Will we have a negative leap second? [pdf]
Vladimir Shukhov
They are locking a distinct ethnic minority in internment camps and sterilizing their women.

That is a genocide. They are attempting to remove the Uyghur people.
> at the current rate it'll be ~9000ad before we hit an hour offset

And the leap year problems of the Julian calendar weren't a problem… until they were. And then good luck coördinating things:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorian_calendar#Adoption_by...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adoption_of_the_Gregorian_cale...
>I'm no Elon fan, but why does essentially everyone in these threads automatically assume he is wrong?

Have you seen any move these past weeks that can potentially be constructed as a good idea, without invoking a brilliant master plan that nobody else understands?

Occam’s razor, etc.
Attempting murder is still illegal and carries a heavy sentence.

I don't want him free personally, I just want him freed on the drug charges and tried separately for the murder charges
lol, what do the downvotes even mean in this context? Is this a stupid question?
That depends on whether there's a critical mass of Googlers dedicated to the product who want to see it through to success, not only initially, but in 10-20 years. You'd think that Reader wouldn't take much effort to keep going, but no one was interested.
Then please define “raw” and “processing” in such a way that “raw” =/= “not processed”.
True! How would it detect sarcasm.
For eg. I love what he is doing to Twitter
And nearly every decision he's made has driven away Twitter's best developers, who could probably be useful in reducing the headcount in an efficient and non-shambolic fashion.
> What if there is no clean, efficient way to discover who should be fired and so Elon's fallback plan is to test for who really wants to continue working for the company vs. who is apathetic?

That's presumably what he thinks he's selecting for, but is it really? In my experience on sinking ships the least useful people are the ones who often stick around longer, simply because they're worried they can't easily find another job.

That aside, I'm not sure that willingness to submit to the whims of Musk (and be really hardcore or whatever) correlates in any way with actual capability to contribute. Even if it does, the trait is unlikely to be distributed evenly across the myriad departments in Twitter, so in the best case it's going to impact certain parts of the business disproportionately.

But realistically, my gut check is that selecting for sycophants and masochists is more likely to leave you with a bunch of dysfunctional psychopaths than it is to leave you with highly competent contributors.
What is their last successful consumer product? Pixel? Chrome?
People’s problem with Twitter was always that they would arbitrarily decide what is or isn’t acceptable speech, and Elon’s new solution does…exactly the same thing. The only thing that will change now is that liberal politicians and views will start being targeted rather than conservative/alt-right ones. Is anyone here really naïve enough to believe that this whole saga has been about “free speech”? It is simply a shift of power from the left to the right, financed by a handful of billionaires, Wall Street banks and Saudi/Qatari Princes.
Just like with using C and C++ on such scenarios, the standard library doesn't come for the party.
From code to Kubernetes in one CLI command
"negative/hate" will be defined by the advertisers.
For some people the most impactful thing they have done in life is create something that makes obscene amounts of money. I designed and built nanoshelters.com to help homeless people secure uninterrupted sleep. I should be worth more than most of you 'money is god' programmers but we live in a world that values how you much money you make rather than how you treat other humans.
Some lucky person will get my gold fillings. Those are my only implants.
The cholesterol discussion is highly nuanced. There are alternative theories of the function of lipoproteins in the blood. If you're interested check out Dave Feldman's work around his theory, the Lipid Energy Model. https://cholesterolcode.com/model/
> we do hour offsets twice a year, so if an hour off is okay why is 1 second off not?

The actual Unix time does not change when the clocks are switched between daylight saving time and standard time. Only the time zone changes.

When a leap second occurs, the actual Unix time changes, which can lead to bugs, e.g. when a positive time difference comes back as negative. To prevent such issues, a monotonic clock can be used to measure time intervals.
Habit is not the problem. Once you get tenure, a good part of your job is to ensure that the younger generation in your lab/uni publishes well, i.e encourage them to pursue the next low-hanging fruit... So no, you do not in fact have more freedom.
Seems needless to say 5D when that's the status quo -- just 6HWD - Six Hour Work Days

6HWD vs 4DWW - FIGHT ;)
It's far more likely that Elon consulted Twitter when they were having issues and just didn't take the credit. The distributed work of SpaceX and Tesla is far more important and hardened than what Twitter has achieved.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is the sort of damage control id expect to see from someone only peripherally aware of or involved in their businesses accountability or strategic operations. This concern from advertisers has existed far too long for an executive action to have any meaning. the marketing conference call on november 3rd was your red flag where advertisers voiced their displeasure with firing large swaths of the content moderation team. The checkmark fiasco that wiped billions off corporate ledgers on a friday of active trading left a pretty sore spot with them as well that you never seemed to completely address. To corporations looking at this release today youre just some guy dragging a plumbing fixture through the lobby of your new office demanding hardcore work and cutting staff and --lets be honest-- at least Chainsaw Al Dunlap made stockholders rich in the process of scorching earth. So far youve just made the entire platform look like the bombing of dresden.

by the 14th most reasonable advertisers had paused their spend if not backed out entirely.

but after the bombshell office lockout and mass exodus today? to think a ToS change with a skeleton crew of H1B's and lifers that arent even allowed at their desks is going to reverse the course of decline is farcical. This is the kind of massive failure that triggers disaster recovery plans. This ship is sinking, and whatever life thats valued on it will either jump ship to a competing platform or Mastodon. You took a 44bn USD risk and managed to absolutely destroy any credibility in your leadership in under a month. At this point its best to hope markets dont start reconsidering your other companies as risky business.
The vast contribution to greenhouse gases is well established though, so a preference to white meat is meaningful
I can show you my results and deliverables all you want, but they're definitely not going to be measured in the number lines on code in a screenshot. Come on, you know this
He's trying to build a culture of engineer abuse.

I'm sure he'll succeed in building it. The game industry manages it, for example. You can abuse and burn out engineers if that's what you really want.

That said, I wouldn't say abused engineers are particularly more productive. He can work them 9/9/6 while he's at it, I don't think that'll help Twitter succeed.
exactly the point
When has Elon not shared a plan? He tends to announce everything before they've even started working on.
Apparently many C users aren't aware that lint exists since 1979.
Based on leaked texts and his answers to personalities like catturd, he is in a right wing filter bubble and truly believes there was a censorship problem with Twitter. In a leaked text he was outright asked whether he could buy Twitter after Babylon Bee was suspended. https://twitter.com/MattBinder/status/1591813699840495616 He made an offer for Twitter at a nonsensical price and only went through with the sale because of the looming court case. Chances are extremely low there is a plan hiding in this mess.
> It's also completely asinine to assume that poorly written Rust will have fewer flaws than expertly written C that has been vetted for literally decades.

No one is advocating for writing the kernel in “poorly-written Rust”. This whole post is one giant, obvious straw man.
So free speech absolutist is starting to adapt rules which are roughly similar to Twitter's current rules. And those rules are existing for a reason, rules don't popup from a thin air. What a surprise...

Now he will figure out that the bloat of microservices and employees was there also for a reason.
> I know someone that works at Tesla and they say that when Elon comes around there's an aura of terror.

Neighbor works for SpaceX and says the same thing.
Kubernetes isn't a product.
I give him a lot of leeway, but it's not what he's doing so much as how he's doing it. The sloppiness of it gives people an excuse to pile on.
Even in California? (Series question I’m too lazy to Google)
I agree, that was an interesting read.

Definitely send more studies if you find them. This one seems to suggest the main problem with ultraprocessed foods is they are easier to over eat (they taste better? Are less filling?) but it doesn't really show that they are necessarily bad.

Seems to jive with how food works for me. I've been counting calories as of late and it's definitely easy to down a bag of doritos or drink a bottle of soda
Where did they get their ideas from?
I had not encountered dice baseball before reading the article, probably because I was brought up in the UK, where the equivalent dice game was Owzthat [1] - for cricket. All of my contemporaries, when we were aged seven to 12, played - and most of us carried a tin in a pocket.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owzthat
Soy español. No he leído un periódico argentino en mi vida, pero hablo valenciano/catalán además de español y conozco mi país bien. Tengo amigos vascos, he estado allí, conozco el entorno, la historia, los mitos. Lo he comprobado por mí mismo. Es un tema altamente politizado el de las lenguas.

Pero no me informo por canales políticos exclusivamente. Sé de lo que hablo, créeme.
You read the news that he cancelled working from home and then locked everybody out of office? Does that look like a plan to you? Does anything that happend in the last weeks look like a plan to you? The blue checkmark disaster for example?
If you know of any Native Americans currently being genocided, please do call someone about it.

Unless you are suggesting that because of some previous genocide we should ignore an ongoing one?
I’ve never had a corporate card in my entire career, including Twitter. I’ve been able to book via a company provided travel agency, but I’ve never had the card in my hands.
Oh great, more unaccountable black-box "algorithms" that invisibly classify your tweets. Machines can't detect satire, they don't understand nuance or context, they don't understand tone. This will affect platform speech in strange ways as people naturally attempt to evade the algorithm.

Twitter needs a dislike button. Every social media platform needs a mechanism for explicit negative feedback. Yes, people will use it to downvote ideas they don't like. Yes, it will come with its own challenges. That's how real life works. It doesn't make that speech disappear, it just deprioritizes it.

Given that he already wants to do this, it's better to let humans have input than to pretend as if algorithms know what's best for us.
I'd just realised that "The Tempest" is where the phrase "sea-change" must come from.

Wikipedia confirms: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_change_(idiom)>
I’ve been hearing this a lot and while GS is a huge part of SpaceX success this says nothing about Tesla and the way Elon has grown the company.
You know this is all about the advertisers. He does not want to make Twitter better for people, he wants to make it better for corporate advertisers.

This is the YouTube "Dislike" button for Twitter.
That would be Modula-2 in 1978.
I didn't read this as expecting simple answers to questions, but as the question being simple and instead of the person being asked giving a direct answer to that question, instead they give an answer to a tangential question.

I've worked with people who do this consistently. Know this I would try to formulate as simple and direct a question as I could, but always the answer would be to a tangential, often more basic question.

At first I thought maybe the person was being condescending, answering basic questions that weren't asked, that anyone in my position should know. Maybe he was, I still don't know, but I refused to "believe" that. It's tricky suspecting something but forcing yourself not to believe that thing, but it was very helpful in that I was prepared to get past the initial phase of him not answering the actual question without it being contentious at all.

I agree with OP, it does seem like a lot of people make no effort to communicate clearly.
Yeah but put that MIT guy at Boeing or LM, and you get the same disposable rockets they've been building for 100 years. You need a crazy guy at the top to allow for crazy things, otherwise you'll get the same results. If you put a bunch of Google engineers under Oracle or Cisco management, you get Oracle or Cisco in the end.
He keeps changing Twitter Blue, he tried to back out of the deal but then came back, he randomly changes his mind based on questionable troll account replies. For every good idea he has (I'm not convinced the engineering of Tesla or SpaceX was mainly his ideas), he has many other terrible ones (Hyperloop, Tesla Boring tunnels as transport, etc).

I believe he's just an attention-seeker and is becoming far more unhinged in the public sphere, whether it's drugs, manic-depression, or some combination. Given his recent behavior, I don't think the success of SpaceX or Tesla had _anything_ to do with his actual CEO or engineering skills, but rather his public image attracting the right people under him willing to work for smaller pay.
The base code and functionality of Twitter will keep working, because code is code. My HTTP server doesn't need me to check in on it pretty much ever.

Its changes to the world that require code changes. Ex: when the new spam-companies figure out the new anti-spam techniques Twitter implemented last month, then those spam-companies will shoot up to the top of Twitter. And there will be no one to stop them, analyze the new spam or figure out how to stop it.
Yeah, I read this as a stunt to sift out the people who are confident in their abilities and contributions from those who just kind of show up and do some minor edits.

I have no idea how many people get through the code interviews at Big Tech and then think they've proved their value and just phone it in, but I guarantee it's not zero.

If I have any particular concern it's that this sort of thing misses some real unsung heroes in any big technical project, i.e. the people who write good documentation and the people who chase down bugfixes. This is important work, but won't be captured by screenshots of code very well. "Here's a screenshot of where I fixed an off-by-one error, but it took two weeks of unraveling 137 microservices to find which RPC was guilty." Important, but not exactly impressive in the way one might think.
Strongly disagree.

Kubernetes is not a Google product. But it is "a" product, and it was successfully launched as a commoditize-your-complement / cannibalize-yourself kind of thing.

GKE meanwhile is a Google product, and is successful, and wouldn't exist if it wasn't for Kubernetes.
Successful consumer product? Probably not. Google's competitive advantage is their technical infrastructure and scaleability, which are helpful to have for but not really what makes/breaks a consumer product.
Well, I suspect at a minimum that the organic apples were turned over quicker, and possibly were picked recently.
Moral of the story is that sometimes social engineering is much cheaper and more effective than software engineering!
istwitterdown.com
That causal violation is the exact problem with free speech aboslutism.

"You are not allowed to criticize the CCP" is speech.

"I order you to kill/hang that vice president" is speech, and the dead don't speak.
If you think Elon's behavior towards Twitter employees since the takeover isn't abusive and demeaning then we absolutely have different definitions of the word!
No sane infrastructure team will answer „easily“ to that question. Things break, all of the time. And infra will need developer input to figure out some of the breakage, let alone fix it. And that‘s not even considering deliberate attacks, fixes for critical security/stability issues etc.
My worst job offer ever
Good community called Scraping Enthusiasts on this topic here: https://discord.gg/4fGEPZzs
Plus curated list of research papers here if you want to go deep on the subject matter: https://github.com/prescience-data/dark-knowledge
As a 30 year software veteran, I'd find it pretty demeaning to be called into a lineup where my CEO was going to judge me based on a verbal quiz about my past 6 months of code and 10 screenshots, and likely fire people based on that assessment.
This is true of everything excepting contagious prions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuru_(disease)

Luckily, scrapie doesn't seem to be infectious to humans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrapie
I understand wanting to give him the benefit of the doubt, but his decision making around twitter has basically been disastrous from the start.

1. Bought the company at an overinflated price and tried to back out, but was ultimately forced by the court to buy it

2. Half baked rollout of the twitter blue which caused brands to flee the platform after major reputation damage.

3. Laying off half the company, and then having an uncapped layoff of remaining individuals (probably violated labor law, by placing the voluntary layoff days after the top down layoff, he had 0 control over the effects, which by some reports has meant 88% of people no longer work at the firm)

5. Company was purchased with 12B in debt, meaning he has 1-2B/year in debt payments alone, meaning a path to profitability is challenging.

6. Has had to go back to critical workers to try and retain them.

outside of the leveraged buyout, I’m not grading him on assumptions, but rather the ways in which his actions don’t seem to align with his stated goals.

He wanted a reduction of 75%, may have gotten 88%
He wanted no WFH, he had to roll that back
He wanted to verify for money, he (effectively) had to roll that back.
He wanted to grow revenue, and it’s declined.
He didn’t want to buy the company and was then forced to do so.
Sublevel was a better name IMO. Subreply is really hard on the tongue.
That was a really touching story, thanks for sharing it
How many companies advertise on Tumblr or Digg? They continue to exist but are not seen as the next bastion of advertising. How will they target well when the platform is a cesspool? Sure they'll get impressions but not the clicks. Fewer celebrities will want to hang out on Twitter if anyone can easily impersonate them or if they don't have people at Twitter to give them white glove service.
> There has never been a negative leap second.

That doesn't stop the (e.g.) FreeBSD folks run tests to make sure things are fine:

* https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2020-Nove...

* https://docs.freebsd.org/en/articles/leap-seconds/

Of course there's a whole lot of other userland code besides ntpd.
> Elon “free speech” Musk.

Is your usage of quotations marks intended to adhere to one of these?

If so, which one, and how?

If not, what is the intent of them?

-------------------------------------------------

https://www.grammarbook.com/punctuation/quotes.asp

- Rule 1. Use double quotation marks to set off a direct (word-for-word) quotation.

Correct: “I hope you will be here,” he said.

Incorrect: He said that he “hoped I would be there.” (The quotation marks are incorrect because hoped I would be there does not state the speaker's exact words.)

- Rule 8a. Quotation marks are often used with technical terms, terms used in an unusual way, or other expressions that vary from standard usage.

Examples:

It's an oil-extraction method known as “fracking.”

He did some “experimenting” in his college days.

I had a visit from my “friend” the tax man.
Unless his plan is to destroy the value of Twitter (such as it is) then his actions do not suggest a coherent plan.
666k/yr, 4.20 years of experience
I make no wager on whether he can actually reach what he's trying to achieve. Rather, I'm merely proposing what I think he's doing / why he's doing it.

I don't think he can run Twitter very effectively out of San Francisco going forward, after his behavior. He'll try to run it out of Texas instead.
> preparation for "clawback", where transfers that occurred prior to the bankruptcy are undone

Will be very interesting to see how the $5bn sent to users before FTX collapsed will be handled. If I had any recent withdrawals from them, I'd keep the money segregated for now.
I work with accountants and have been successful at effectively being their voice to other people. I'd argue they are aware of their deficiencies and have chosen a profession accordingly. They largely have no interest in the training. Or, perhaps they just have no interest in implementing the lessons the training provides. Same results either way, they are poor communicators.
If there’s one thing I’ve learnt from this whole debacle, it’s that US employment law is fucked. I can’t believe worker protections are so poor in such a forward thinking, modern country. The things he’s getting away with sound like something out of a Victorian factory.
Yes, of course they did: design docs, RFCs, some PoCs to validate assumptions on small scale, etc. that's all part of a staff engineer job.

Now the question is: does Elon have enough technical expertise (or access to such) to be able to judge if a collection of assorted 10 screenshots without context of some GDoc pages, some shoddy PoC code and comments on RFCs is up to par with his bar of what a Staff Software Engineer title should produce? I highly doubt it.

It's not about showing evidence of work, it's that technical work can differ so much depending on context and constraints that it's impossible to demonstrate its value in such a reductive way, it's simple and clear stupidity to even ask to be demonstrated that way.