skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
IMHO, Bluesky is nothing more than Dorsey's attempt to clone what Matrix was set out to do. And truthfully, Matrix already has already achieved a great deal; namely passing the 60 million user mark back in June of 2022, 70 million by October. Some major names have adopted it as well, including Mozilla, KDE and several organizations in the German and French governments, including a large German Healthcare org.

Matrix's code is independently audited, and they just completed the 2nd of those earlier this year. They did have some Cryptographic issue several months ago, but it was fixed quickly, and was on an old code base. The replacement is apparently close to completion, at which point that system will be submitted for an independent cryptographic audit.

I will admit that BlueSky does seem to incorporate the recently announced decentralized identifier (DID) spec from the W3C. The DID Method specs are still a hot mess, and there's no guarantee that the W3C is even capable of navigating that corporate 'I was here first' minefield. But I still have to tip my hat to BlueSky for doing it though. Given identity is so fundamental to these types of things, I suspect it'll be a damn mess incorporating it into existing protocols.
It's funny how historically a lot of "kings" were more like dictatorial mayors of small cities to largish collections of huts and many great battles were actually more like cattle raids.

The only reason Musk is getting away with any of this is that we've got the pending recession going on and others doing layoffs to jumping jobs isn't as easy for those who remain. I certainly would never go through that dance to prove my worth.
Objectively not true. What the common idiom "There's no such thing as bad publicity" actually is intended to mean is that "sometimes bad publicity can actually be good", which is true.
If by Web3 you mean decentralized networks, then I'm not sure it has much of a future. I'm not sure why we thought there was. We've had decentralization since the dawn of the internet, and it never took off.

My view is that decentralization is not the panacea it's being claimed to be. Humanity is not inherently trustless and we naturally want to hold something or someone accountable when things go wrong, and if we think this is solvable by complex technical transparency, we've missed the whole field of UX and why Apple is so successful. Do you really think the average person cares about a decentralized version of Instagram? Even in networks that seem decentralized, a lot of times scalability issues can only be solved through centralization.

Beyond that decentralization is naturally against the establishment, and the establishment won't go down with a fight. The only future decentralization has is if the establishment keeps getting weaker.

If you mean anything else by Web3, I'm not 100% sure. I have no idea what the term means tbh. It's being used to peddle a whole host of things.

I also think Web3 assumes that we've finished being in "Web2" whatever that even means. I guess Web2 is really the emergence of cloud computing, SaaS and mobile computing networks. I'm not sure that's quite over. I'm not really sure we need to evolve this. Or does Web2 mean big web companies who sell ads? If that's what it means, we can deem these companies (e.g. Google) as necessary infrastructure and regulate the crap out of them. The problem with these terms is they're just meaningless mumbo jumbo mostly created by people who have no depth.
It's not going to stumble into a new sale or bankruptcy anytime soon (next several years).

He'll slash the costs dramatically to adjust for the loss of revenue. He just sold another $4 billion in Tesla stock the other day to most likely cover the expected losses over the next few years. Slash deep enough and you can easily run Twitter on a few hundred million dollar loss per year. He probably thinks he can get it to break-even following this approach over the next few years and go from there.

Facebook was profitable at under $1b in sales with a larger userbase size 12 years ago. Why can't Twitter get there today? Twitter was unprofitable with $5.2b in sales, it was an exceptionally bloated corporation.
That's an interesting take I hadn't considered, thank you.
What Blind shows is that for a portion of the population TC is just a game. Sure they have "skills" but a lot of those skills are grinding leetcode, creating referral networks, and otherwise becoming skilled at getting hired and surviving in a large FAANG.

In my experience leetcode has surprisingly low correlation with programming ability and most definitely software engineering.

It's not just Blind either. I've been surprised how many young people aspire to "work at a FAANG" as a goal, and software is just a convenient way to get there.
Elon is a genius - seriously. Having worked at similar companies myself, I have a pretty good sense for how this went down (mostly speculation of course):

• On day 1, Elon probably talked privately with some of the head engineers at Twitter. He told them he wanted to trim the fat, and asked them how much could be cut while basically keeping the lights on and the website up (accepting some risk of temporary outages).

• I'd bet money that some of them told him something like 80-90% of the staff could be cut. I think that's true of a lot of large companies.

• Then Elon had the balls to actually move in that direction. Rather than make arbitrary cuts, he's letting people self-select. Obviously the company will lose some really good engineers as collateral damage, but for the most part, the dead weight will reveal themselves through silly shenanigans like this. Elon knows it's silly, but there's no graceful way to make such drastic moves.

He's painting with broad strokes to clear the canvas and re-imagine Twitter as a startup. And I think it's brilliant.

If you think he's out of his mind (as many commenters appear to think), show me your billions of dollars and multiple successful companies as proof that you know more about success than he does.
I know. Even by the same people that like to repeat their mistakes.
They've been shut down in Illinois twice and they're still in legal hot water. Blame interest rates and inventory yadda yadda but they've been moving fast and breaking things too long. Their VP is facing 50+ criminal charges in this state alone.

https://jalopnik.com/carvanas-legal-counsel-ordered-to-appea...
I can't actually imagine watching NFL without using Twitter during commercials (or after something crazy happens). It's actually quite spectacular

World Cup is definitely going to surge traffic
An addicted twitter toll with 100m followers starts talking shit about the place you work, purchases a lot of shares, decides to join the board, decides to not join the board, talks more shit, decides to just buy the company, changes his mind and backs out of the deal, talks more shit, changes his mind and buys the company, introduces new features without much thought, releases new features without much thought, turns off new features almost immediately, fires half the staff, complains about advertisers, complains about needing advertising dollars, has an idea to introduce payments and banking, continues to talk shit about his own company, fires people for speaking up, threatens everyone with an ultimatum, and then...

Edit: I don't use twitter but this is what I've been able to parse from HN articles being posted.
What is "processed foods"? Isn't bread a heavily processed food? Is somehow making it at home magically healthier than it being made in a factory? What about whole wheat bread from a factory vs white bread at home? Which one is healthier?

Or are you trying to say that bread is somehow unhealthy? Even though it is staple eaten by literally everyone across the world in someway, shape or form.

Terms like this destroy the credibility of "food research" and I find it hard to trust any dietary guidance. Specially after the whole fat & sugar debacle
For any budding Douglas Couplands out there, I think there's going to be at least a few chapters, if not a whole novel's worth of stories in being at Twitter the next six months to a year. (To say nothing of the last month!)
A Brief Interview with Pascal and Oberon Creator Dr. Niklaus Wirth
10 years ago I was at a place where a new CEO came in and fired 80% of the tech team. It was a hard scramble for the surviving engineers, including me, and we had some episodes of being down, but we pulled through it and the site survived.

I think a balanced view of Twitter right now is that Elon Musk has made some mistakes, but in the end, Twitter will be fine, and in 6 months it might be more profitable than ever before.

The pros and cons work out something like this:

con:

Musk fired people recklessly, treating a global workforce as if it could all be treated under California fire-at-will laws. As such, Musk might face lawsuits and might have to pay out some damages. This is not a big deal. He has the money. He can pay.

Musk probably violated the consent decree that Twitter had with the FTC. Again, Musk will probably face a lawsuit and he will probably have to pay. Again, not a big deal, he has the money.

Musk fired or offered resignations to key team members. As such, in a crisis, Twitter may face some downtime. With key people missing, the ability to bounce back from a crisis will be slower than otherwise. But all this means is that Twitter will become unreliable again, as it was during the first 10 years of its existence. Not a big deal: it was popular even back when it was unreliable.

Musk fired or offered resignations to key team members. As such, the roll out of new features will be slower than it might otherwise have been. In particular, his roll out of subscription features will be slower than he wanted.

Musk could have made dramatic changes over 6 months and no one would have noticed except for industry insiders (including the type of people who read Hacker News). Instead, he wanted to reinvent Twitter in less than 6 weeks. This was a mistake, plain and simple. His actions came across as erratic, he made advertisers nervous, and as he has complained "Twitter has taken a huge revenue hit." But this will probably be temporary. In 6 months all of the advertisers will have returned.

pro:

It's likely that in 6 months advertising with be back to pre-Musk levels, but the staffing will be down at least 80%, so profits will be much higher than ever before.
In this hypothetical, did the staff engineer do anything besides attend meetings in the last 12 months? Did they write any code, or design docs, or actually contribute anything?

Elon’s a jerk, but this thread seems to be full of people saying “I deliver value even though I can’t actually demonstrate any evidence of it.”
We'll get yet another new study that slams studies that red meat is still bad and contributing to climate change. Some things will never grow old.
Free as in capital, not beer.
true but there would be a massive resource imbalance. A small team of paid professionals whose job was solely wikipedia edits would quickly overwhelm the efforts of well meaning amateurs.

Additionally, there is a market size problem. For example, a highly literate, politically mobilised population would out-edit a less literate, politically apathetic competitor.
Can we stop upvoting these clumsily disguised adguard marketing posts? It’s annoying: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=adguard.com
Making time less accurate just for the sake of testing in production doesn't seem great.
I wonder how many Musk fanboys at Twitter got the axe in the first round of arbitrary, poorly-conceived layoffs.

I wonder how many of them are still fanboys.
At this risk of sounding like a "BUT BOTH SIDES" argument - both sides of the major two parties have elements of undesirability. I register as an independent. I vote for representatives that I feel best convey my hope, dreams, and views into the halls of power. Often, those candidates self-identify as liberals. Sometimes, they identify as Republican. Either way, the faster we can get away from having politics be a team sport and have people think for themselves, the better off we'll all be.

I'll just hold my breath for that moment.

<dies>
> That'd test all the software paths.

The daylight savings time bugs I've run into at pretty much every company I've ever worked at would beg to differ.
> His ego is immense and he lacks the emotional maturity to not lash out at people when he is wrong.

> To put it bluntly, because he is an asshole.

A few years ago some data/articles made the rounds showing that most billionaires and high-powered executives are "psychopaths" according to the criteria for "psychopathy".

It isn't necessarily Elon specific but his public outbursts certainly put him in the spotlight, others lay low.
> "Elon is a great engineer"

Even his "physics degree" is apparently BS
Neat to learn. I'm almost certainly using a knockoff
By what metric is it climbing? DAU's? Signups? People exporting all their data?

Musk has no incentive to be truthful here anyway. He's in the middle of what could end up being one of the most embarrassing failures the last 50 years. Destroying a 44 billion dollar business in 3 weeks through sheer, unadulterated hubris and incompetence. There's nothing people love more than watching people fall from grace so I have a feeling that folks will remember this.
His ability to attract top tier talent and work them hard is second to none. And frankly, many great engineers want to work hard and want to work with other great engineers who want to work hard on something that matters for society. That rules out most Silicon Valley startups.

Electric cars and SpaceX are intrinsically cool to work on, but it remains to be seen whether working on "Twitter 2.0" will be interesting enough for Elon to attract enough talent.
Nobody is going to pay you before you do the work, but “Time value of money means it’s better to be paid money today than in 5 years”

Thus, 10M in RSU that vest in 5 years > 10M in cash today (not a real option) > 10M in cash in 5 years.

However, this also helps explain 5%,15%, 40%, 40% vesting schedules they are somewhat better than 25%,25%,25%,25% for the company because it better incentivizes staying and for the employee due to tax advantages.
Might have all resigned because they knew the days of them riding the gravy train were over. It's hard to put any meaning to that without knowing more detail.
We have laws that define this.

What changed was that a small group of technocrats took it upon themselves that any questioning of their ideology was “hate speech.”
But will the remaining eng be what he wants?

I assume he already laid off most h1bs, who would say and do anything to not get deported but might not be the best engineers.

Still, the people that claim to work 'hardcore' might just say that. They might survive for 3 months, which is how much severance they are forfeiting.
Nobody really knows for certain what things do to the body even in isolation. For one example, see Yellow #5 [1]. It's associated with all sorts of nasty stuff, but actually proving a causal relationship is not really possible. So some countries ban it, some require special scary labeling for products with it, and in other countries it's A-OK.

And processed foods aren't in isolation. You're mixing up all sorts of stuff which can viably result in chemical and other changes which will vary by product, producer, and even time. Trying to pin all of that down is not really possible.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tartrazine#Potential_health_ef...
This is a weird take.

No, alot SW devs (the type that work at FAANG-like companies) are actually spoiled, relative to most other industries of the world. Perhaps, they have gotten so used to is that they don't recognize it. You can absolutely make an argument that the rest of the world's workforce is being abused, but that is speaking from place of privilege and its easy to be a "champion for the worker" from your ivory tower.

> Elon is spoiled though, in thinking he can treat folks as fungible.

That is because they are fungible, though. Twitter is not some paragon of technical excellence and innovation. Its a website.
Yes absolutely. All developers, junior and senior, go through a 4 month training program working on a completely independent project from scratch that teaches them everything they need to work in their domain. There are exceptions now and then, but for the most part it's pretty consistent.

When a developer wants to switch from one area to another, they go through an accelerated program (takes only about a month).
That would make more sense if 1) he had a coherent plan 2) he could motivate the good 20% to stick around 3) he had some way to differentiate high vs low performers.

Instead, he now gets an effectively random layoff, with potentially whole/important teams vanishing, and biased so that the best people (who can easily find jobs) are most incentivized to leave.
You're not a current or former smoker to say that. Nicotine is incredibly powerful.
It's the other way around, The smaller the org the more lines per code you would expected per engineer. Scaling codebases is hard.

> Feels like everyone wants to be the exception

Right. You can easily write 10x the number of lines than an average engineer and create negative value for the product.
I heard that by looking farther away we should see older less formed galaxy but that it isn’t the case.

Do someone know something about it?
> The CGPM — which also oversees the international system of units (SI) — has proposed that no leap second should be added for at least a century, allowing UT1 and UTC to slide out of sync by about 1 minute.

So, in one century, we'll get 1 minute's worth of drift.

Recall that we all share the same clock within timezones, and 1 minute of drift between atomic & solar clocks is the equivalent of traveling 1/60th of your timezone's width to the east or west ... something many people do every day as part of their commute. _Everyone's_ clock deviates from their local solar noon, and _nobody cares_.

Put another way: (at most) one north-south line in your timezone will have solar noon & clock noon line up. Over time the relative location of that line will move. Fine. Let's not screw with our clocks in an effort to keep the location of that line fixed.
theres a bunch of interesting strings too. Things about being a super follower and users being paid for that. Uploading 1080p video

""Support your favourite people on Twitter for bonus content and extra perks.""
Hah, how’s that for an endorsement of structurally typed interfaces.
Where does far-right conservative propaganda come from?
I have never understood why people make so much work and waste around dead carcasses. When it is time for me to die and I am able, I want to get myself onto one of the hills around here. I want the condors, coyotes, and other creatures to have a good meal. Threatened animals are fed and my family has zero bills to pay. I know it is illegal, but go ahead and arrest my dead body.
If market makers are getting liquidated with any consistency frequent enough to require exceptions, they are in deep trouble.

Market makers almost universally remain delta-neutral (that is, their goal is to be hedged against almost any market movement). Sure they sometimes get off balance and lose some money, but the margins for makers are typically so thin that liquidation is basically equivalent to total failure.
The main reason I dislike the assert libraries is that you lose the ability to format things nicely; being able to see what's going on quickly is pretty nice when tests fail. Sometimes you want %s, sometimes %q, sometimes maybe a diff or formatted as something else. Testify "solves" this by just dumping a lot of stuff to your terminal, which is a crude brute-force solution. Plus with table-driven test you're saving what, 2 or 3 lines of code?

For example for a simple string comparison it's 12 lines:

--- FAIL: TestA (0.00s)
--- FAIL: TestA/some_message (0.00s)
main_test.go:11:
Error Trace: /tmp/go/main_test.go:11
Error: Not equal:
expected: "as\"d"
actual : "a\"sf"

Diff:
--- Expected
+++ Actual
@@ -1 +1 @@
-as"d
+a"sf
Test: TestA/some_message

vs. 2 lines with a "normal" test:

--- FAIL: TestA (0.00s)
--- FAIL: TestA/some_message (0.00s)
main_test.go:11:
have: "as\"d"
want: "a\"sf"

With your NotNil() example it's 4 lines, which seems about 3 lines more than needed.

This kind of stuff really adds up if you have maybe 3 or 4 test failures.
No, and this is a core misunderstanding of the profession.

The job of software engineers is to design and implement solutions to business problems with technology. The job of a software engineer is not merely "write code." Writing code will almost certainly be the smallest percentage of a skilled engineer's time. They need to be spending their time thinking and designing.

We're talking about solving extreme scaling problems at extreme scales here, not churning out crud apps at a local freelance studio.
The tiny keyboard combined with my oversized hands made it really hard for me to justify as a note taking tool haha. But yeah, I definitely can see them being used for this purpose. Especially since the laptops of that era weren't particularly lightweight either.
Weird. I often describe Ruby as "the best parts of Perl" to people who aren't familiar with Ruby.
I've been in one of these jobs before, and it's certainly exhausting. I'm not necessarily convinced it's useful though. It always seemed like a lot of planning and replanning of work that prevented anything from actually getting done.
That the people who quit or got fired apparently created a very resilient system with easy to understand code.
im not supporting the move, but i do think this is why its important to have a personal portfolio; of things you do yourself, have done for other jobs, and that you have kludged together independently for the benefit of the company, but were not yet received.

use the opportunity to prove how undervalued you were, and how essential you will be to restructuring.
> For a long time tech was eating the world and the more engineers you had the more likely you were to accidentally walk into a massive piece of the pie (the google model). Now things are more mature and there’s probably just less opportunity to do that.

Might be true, just easily might not be. Seems too uncertain to draw conclusions. Like, why didn't this happen ten years ago? Twenty? OK, take those explanations. Why can't they happen again?
Ok, so that’s one person that just needs to explain his role to the new boss. But the same excuse can’t apply to everyone on the team.
The systems still must exist somewhere in physical space, connected to a public IP network.

They require maintainers to continue operating.

Bills must be paid.

At some point, one or more of these individual SPOF requirements will fail, at which point the service will have failed.

There may be other degrading failures prior to this if the system is complex:

<https://how.complexsystems.fail/>

I'm ... disappointed that it seems necessary to point this out explicitly.
The security guards were fired for taking over user accounts. And this "help form" gave them sufficient "access to user accounts" to do it.
The earth sped up slightly the last couple years after only slowing down for a long time.

The great leap-minute crisis of 2147 will be interesting.
FSD ... ?
I'm not following you. What can I say that prevents you from saying something?

That would seem to violate causality.
Without a source on that "apparently" I'm going to take that as the output of Musk's usual legend-building apparatus.

The guy has so much capacity to build his own legend (and have others believe it) that people refer to him as the founder of Tesla without even blinking.