skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Outside of HN the impression I've had is that Twitter is an unprofitable company which is overstaffed. There's also an image of idle employees pursuing political crusades unrelated to the bottom line.

Elon is cutting the workforce. The short email doesn't seem out of place.

On HN Elon is some kind of villain. Except he's also incompetent, so he's not a super villain. More of bumbling idiot destroying higher SV ideals which are beyond his comprehension. How gauche of him.

In the RW media he is ocassionally portrayed as a savior, who is going to stick it to the libs, right where they deserve it the most. In their social media oligarchy!

Elsewhere in the media he is an un-PC problematic figure who foretells the rise of fascism, just you wait, this time it is really going to get bad! Did you know he lived in apartheid ZA?

Overall this just seems absurd. I cannot understand the fascination with him. Elon has become more interesting than all of the shit-posting on Twitter itself. I don't believe he's a villain, an incompetent, a savior or the catalyst for totalitarianism.

He's just an above average troll with extraordinary money. He bought Twitter, a messaging and microblogging site. He's trying to clean house, maybe even turn a profit?

Why is the Internet obsessed? Are partisans so emotionally invested in the outcome that they cannot turn away? Will his success or failure validate their tribal identity?
It's all about economics of demand for what Twitter is offering: advertising. Elon's changes have massively harmed the value of an ad on Twitter.

Moderation teams are massively cut, meaning advertisers have to worry about their products beside hate speech or worse. At the same time, Elon is explicitly un-banning people who were banned for hate speech, promising that no ads will show beside their future hate speech- it will just show to their many many followers who come to the site to see that exact thing. I'm not certain advertisers will be encouraged by this.

Engineering is massively reduced, meaning the operational excellence of the system is in question- what good is paying for ads if the site is down so often that users don't come back?

And there's all of the potential issues with the SEC and other legal problems that aren't being addressed because Elon fired the teams that handled those things. No sane advertising agency is signing a long-term contract with Twitter. There's just too much uncertainty.

Elon Musk is not cut out to be the CEO of a software company. The problem is that he is the only person that isn't aware of that at this point.
> They’re not anti-trans by primary motivation - it’s that the logical consequence of what they believe about the nature of sex and gender leads them to believe that “Trans-X aren’t X”.

This reasoning is suspect: most people don't wake up and decide to be "Anti-X" as a "primary" motivation; they're "Anti-X" because it adheres to all kinds of other positions they have, and humans are pattern-matching beings.

In other words: most people exhibit prejudice not for its own sake, but for some other sake. This doesn't meaningfully change the fact that it would be correct to label them as prejudiced.
Anybody competent in IT wouldn't be asking for screenshots of code. They'd know how to access the repos touched by a given user.
Agreed that the projection is cartoonish, but looking at the actual actions at Twitter speak for themselves.

And discounting the scale of Twitter is also quite cartoonish projection.
Historically all governments suck.
If he doesn't visit for a few weeks, nothing gets done.

Wow, if his leadership results in such a bad situation at SpaceX I can only image how poor the result will be at Twitter with whatever is left.
Why google does not rank freenom domains by Mayank Vikash.

This article covers all the possible reasons for free domains not getting ranked on google
No, as explained in the thread following that tweet: "Note, this applies just to the individual tweet, not the whole account"

Shadowbanning applies to accounts.

Also, nowhere in that thread does it say that the user won't be told the Tweet was demonetized, which is the dictionary definition of shadowbanning.
Use a custom domain to send emails with Gmail using Cloudflare email routing
At home:

- a FreeNAS with a bunch of Samba file shares and a Plex. I tried Jellyfin, because I got annoyed with Plex trying to force me to create an account on their cloud stuff, when I just want to use it locally. But the Playstation wouldn't play videos from Jellyfin, so I stuck with Plex.

On a dedicated server with public IP addresses:

- mail (opensmtpd + rspamd + dovecot)

- blog (made with Hugo, a static site generator)

- git (gogs)

- Nextcloud

- XMPP (ejabberd)

- VPN (tinc)

Each of those services is in a separate jail and the jail with the blog has an nginx that serves as a reverse proxy for all http-speaking services.

I'm considering replacing XMPP with Matrix (looking at conduit) and tinc with Wireguard. With the latter I might wait until FreeBSD 14 with in-kernel Wireguard is out.
While weird, that is probably the time and place where employees will get some equity or cash to stay on.
I'm excited to see what the new policy will be tomorrow.
I think he's heading towards making people pay for reach to try to get more subscription revenue. In my opinion paying for reach is what started Facebook's decline, when people realize that "your" followers are not actually theirs they lose interest.
Nope. It's not reasonable to expect all (or even most) employees to understand how effective communications works. Some people happen to be good at it, but those are a minority. For the rest, it's a skill one has to learn, and most employees will not learn it. And even if they do, it takes years of practice to become really good at it.

I mean, you could mandate everyone take courses on it, but the reality is that most senior leadership have poor communication skills and don't want to spend time on it.

Edit: To clarify: What I mean is you'll get further understanding and acknowledging that most communications is poor, and adapt to that than to expect people to communicate well. You may have spent years honing your technical skills, but most employees have spent approximately no time honing their communications skills.
It's meant as a rule of thumb. That level of precision is unnecessary.

Generally speaking, industrially-processed foods are going to be overall less healthy than less-processed alternatives. There are a multitude of reasons this may be so, and between them there's enormous variance in both the size of and our confidence in those effects, not to mention between specific products.

Being overly specific just invites pointless quibbling over those details. Of course, not being specific just started this pointless quibble, so damned if you do damned if you don't.
NotNil is fine, but as a library author you need to implement every comparison operator for every type. You also have to implement each assertion twice; once for t.Error and once for t.Fatal. We have a homegrown assertion library in our codebase at work, and every time I write a test I have to settle for an inaccurate assertion, or add two more methods to the library. I grew up on Go at Google where I would not have been allowed to check in assertion helpers, and I think they made the right call there.

I've seen a lot of gore in code that uses assertion libraries like assert.Equals(t, int64(math.Round(got)), int64(42)). Consider the error message in that case when got is NaN or Inf.

It is so easy to write your own assertions. I can type them in my sleep and in seconds:

if got, want := f(), 42; got != want {
t.Errorf("f:\n got: %v\n want: %v", got, want)
}

if got, want := g(), 42.123; math.Abs(got - want) > 0.0001 {
t.Fatalf("g:\n got: %v\n want: %v", got, want)
}

Why implement a NotEquals function when != is built into the language?

(The most popular assertion library also inverts the order of got and want, breaking the stylistic convention. It's so bad. Beware of libraries from people that wrote them as their first Go project after switching to Go from Java. There are a lot of them out there, and they are popular, and they are bad.)

Finally, cmp.Diff is the way to go for complex comparisons. Most use of assertion libraries can be replaced by cmp.Diff. I wouldn't use it for simple primitive type equality, but for complex data structures, it's great. And very configurable, so you never have to "settle" for too much strictness or looseness.
Right, the reason frost-proof faucets work is because there's no water in them when not in use. The valve is at the far end, 12+ inches into the house (the water on the other side of the valve is never cold enough to freeze). And the pipe is angled ever so slightly downward, so gravity ensures that any water left after closing the valve flows out. That's why you can't leave a hose connected - it leaves open the possibility of preventing water from draining out before it freezes.
Musk is the guy who couldn't figure out how to run a python script not so long ago so it's doubtful.

Also it's really not something a CEO in a company of such size should be doing...
It seems like a lot of replies to this are reading it as "Lots of staff devs do nothing; they just coordinate and plan technology".

Another way to read this is as saying coordination and planning are the job. They "do nothing but", as in "only do".
Oh, sure, to be fair, I only just started with Brex.

And I am comparing their website to consumer-facing Chase—was just superficially impressed how much nicer Brex’s UI looks, and also feels more performant.
Wow, do you have a recipe for this? I would love to try it!
or that the theatre is only on when its only audience member is seated?
I doubt they eat as much of her wealth with their fees as they do ours. We probably hate them less now since transferring tickets to friends is easier than it was. She hasn't missed shows because bots grabbed all the tickets.
From my perspective, something seemed to happen with Musk roughly around 2015 or so. It seems like prior to that time, Musk was really indeed investing in some visionary tech that actually injected a kick in the pants to some industries (electric cars, space). Nothing wrong IMHO with Tesla and SpaceX. I think the super-detractors miss just what an out-of-nowhere big deal the Roadster was.

Since then, though, Musk has focused on a lot of misses that have spectacularly over-promised and/or undelivered. Neuralink seems to be based on over the top futurism and a lot of questionable promises considering current technology state (particularly considering the current overpromise of AI, with self-driving cars still way far out). Same with his Hyperloop concept. The Boring Company has so far been quite unimpressive, cars in a small one lane tunnel is not very innovative and does not seem to bring anything that existing AGT systems cover already. Then there's Twitter, where it seems there was no vision at all, and you half get the impression that he only bought it because he was miffed at the content moderation.

Tesla in particular seems to be a missed opportunity with New Musk at the helm. It seems to me that to get to the next level, Tesla could use some care to iron out the QC issues... they are not known as super reliable cars at this point on certain aspects, but it does not seem like it is insurmountable to bring quality standards up to the top brands. Were I a Tesla investor, my concern would be that Musk's constant distractions with things like Twitter are truly going to hamper the efforts of his primary companies... and looking at the post-Twitter stock price of Tesla, it seems I'm not the only one with such a concern.
Maybe they could? I’d love to see it, I love the engineering friendly culture, But we do seem to be a in a lull.
archive.org also offers a way to save a snapshot of a page. [1] I just do not use it frequently because it takes more effort to navigate to it.

[1] https://web.archive.org/save
run a git blame on any file and you're likely to see a dozen or more people touching it. You would need a large chunk of freshly-written code unmolested by your coworkers. And what's that even going to prove? You're not inventing any novel algorithm. You're going to write whatever code your PM wanted written to support whatever stupid features or A/B test they wanted done. And Elon's going to sit there and judge the worth of that? Based on what metric?
> It's not a blaming game. Code written in C has issues because C has issues, but are you then saying that Rust has no issues? Will never have any issues? What's the bar here?

For a given value of "issues," that's an accurate portrayal. Statically verified memory safety at the language level is a central part of Rust's mission statement. This is an essential difference from C in how it approaches that problem space. Rust might "have issues" in the sense that compiler bugs are exposed by particular edge cases, or that dealing with certain problems is needlessly difficult or verbose, but reducing everything to "issues" to portray it as equivalent to C is absurd. You might as well say they both have "syntax" and conclude that all code written in Rust is still written in C.
I don't think anyone is wondering why people left - I'm more curious why some people chose to stay.
It must be amazing to have such good will that even batshit crazy behavior is rationalized as somehow reasonable. Elon's going off the deep end.

The primary role of leadership is to feed tasks and guidance to skilled people who your organization has selected based on known temperament and skillset.

If you run a software company and don't know you employ who can code you are at titanic slipping beneath the waves status still calling on skilled ship designers.

It's done he burned 44B by being a bad leader.
It's a sad comment on the corporate world that so many are terrified of those they work for.
Most systems rely on network time from a canonical time source. Wouldn't it be enough to do the leap second smearing/adjustment there to free the end systems from dealing with that?
And that argument is wrong.

A “sandwich” doesn’t have an explicit general meaning, but almost nobody would classify a pizza as an open face sandwich.

Likewise, the vast majority of people would consider a carrot (peeled or otherwise) “unprocessed food” and would consider cheetos “processed food”.
he had a coherent plan

So if he doesn't share his actual plan with you, the media, and his competitors, he doesn't have a plan?
I think people miss the point with the "tell me what code you've written in the last 6 months" task. The idea is hopefully not to qualitatively quantify anyones work - the idea is to find folks who have nothing whatsoever to show, and yet have titles like "staff software engineer". Anyone who has worked at a large enough company knows there is a solid 10-15% of folks doing nothing. The new leadership probably asked the infrastructure team if they could keep the site online if all development stopped, and they probably said "easily". I don't think twitter is in any risk of disappearing - the real question is if velocity can be regained or not.
Usually extremist think tanks funded by wealthy capital owners
I've purchased 2 vehicles through Carvana, and honestly the process was fantastic. I feel I got a fair deal on both vehicles, the quality was good, and everything as advertised. I did all the paperwork online and when I showed up to pick the car up was in and out in just a few minutes.

The only problem I had was that the delivery tower didn't work when I dropped the coin in both times. First time the car was for me and I didn't really care. The second time it was for my son I would have really liked their gimmick to work.
He literally says if you can't, you're excused from needing to. It's important to not lie.
The worst aspect of twitter is the anti-fans who follow people just to disrupt any conversations that they're having, and the organized trolling groups. You could interpret this is saying that those people are going to be pushed out of threads, but you could interpret it in any way. He's really not saying anything.

The organized groups and the anti-fans would be easy to automate discovery of. Just flag people who reply in a similar manner no matter what they're replying to, and cross them with voting rings. Declaring war on negativity and hate is pretty silly, though.
The people who oppose free speech always try to redefine it this way.

Freedom of speech is freedom from censorship or moderation. Not freedom from discomfort
Sounds about right. From what I've heard, Meta is laser-focused on metrics compared to other tech companies and FAANGs, and entire promotion cycles are based around how much you "moved the needle" so to speak along some metrics. This "increase revenue through in-call ads" seems like low-hanging fruit for any PM or engineer who wanted to get promoted quickly.
NASA declines to rename JWST
Ok let future generations take the hit. Got ya. Selfish ...
France allowed particular demographics to come to the country until they reached a critical mass and became dangerous. That shouldn't have happened.
Is There a Pagan Thanksgiving?
Sounds like an interesting blogpost in and of itself. Have a blog somewhere?
My understanding is that it is the absorption which is the problem.

The example I was given was eating raw sweetcorn. Infamously, you can be sure a certain amount will pass through you undigested.

If you grind it up first and make bread out of the flour you will absorb far more.

Secondly breaking things down robs them of flavour and texture.

To compensate manufacturers add a load of now easily absorbed salt, sugar and fat.

None of that is good depending on what your goals are.
For one, there's more thoughtful ways of joining a company and remaking the culture that aren't a shitshow.

Instead of starting with 50% layoffs, you could have started with the ultimatum to stay for 'hardcore twitter' or not. Then you have a loyal set of employees AND reduced headcount.
Nobody really cares about clocks being celestially "off" by a minute either.

So this isn't a once-a-century thing, it's adding-a-leap-15-minutes-once-a-millenia issue.
Yes. But some senior devs actually do very little, for a number of reasons.
He didn't throw it away, he's working on donating it to improving global public discourse by eliminating Twitter.
Reminds me of the time (in 1990) that I hacked my 386 BIOS so I could add an IDE drive. That motherboard did not allow manually specifying C/H/S (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cylinder-head-sector) and the drive was much larger than any of the presets. Initially I tried just patching the table of preset values, but my first attempt failed because the checksum had changed and the BIOS failed POST. I ended up modifying two other unused table entries to force a checksum collision.
I'm certainly not a fan of how Musk has handled the Twitter takeover, but this sentiment, "New Twitter policy is freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach", seems highly reasonable to me, no?

That is, what I find so awful about most social media (and places like YouTube) is how they focus on some of the most anger-inducing content for "engagement". That is, I think the problem is much more their algorithms than what people actually post.

That said, I think that, realistically, being at the bottom of the heap won't actually be much different from being banned - which I actually think is a good thing.
I'm really tired of the cargo culted idea that Rust is a silver bullet and C hasn't evolved since the 1970s. Neither of those things are true.

The vast majority of people spouting opinions on Rust don't even write systems software, and have never even compiled a kernel driver. Linux, systemd, grub are all written in C and continue to have fewer flaws than trivial userland applications that allow for privilege escelation. The kernel core is incredibly high quality C, and time would be better spent working on the actual kernel security model. Dennis Ritchie himself wrote a paper about the deficiencies of the Unix security model which was designed for a trusting and shared computing environment.

But of course updating the API surface isn't as sexy as writing in a new cool programming language.

Cargo culting this notion that Rust is good because it is a security silver bullet is both ignorant AND dangerous because it moves the focal point away from the areas that actually need work to make Linux more secure. 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.

Iterative improvement has ALWAYS been the answer over throw everything away and start fresh. C tooling has gotten better over the decades, the C standard has evolved, and people will continue to successfully write secure and performant applications in C.

Edit:

Also are you upset that people still use hammers in 2022? I guess if we aren't throwing away all of our tools instead of improving on their design we aren't really seeing any *Progress*
Just assume that "Noun()" gets the noun and it's effectively the same as "GetNoun()". Of course, nothing in the language prevents you from using "GetNoun()" if you strongly prefer that.

> The other day, I spent a whole day trying to figure out the "idiomatic" way to return a an object not found case from my db. Do you return a nil pointer (don't, passing pointers leads to bugs), or an empty struct (then how do you reliably "test" its emptiness?) or an error?

sql.ErrNoRows is often used for this.
I wonder if even color scheme in requested screenshot can influence review.
May I ask what the purpose of this thought experiment is? It seems pointless to me, given you could purchase a copy of the entire NYT of that day for about the same, it would seem rather onerous to charge that much for a single digital view.
I am pro capitalism and I don't think that the creation of value by billionaires is immoral.

The immoral part comes after that when they sit on their horde of money, far too much for anyone to spend in 10 lifetimes, while they should be giving it to people and causes that need it.

The only one of the "mainstream", household name billionaires that gets it seems to be MacKenzie Scott.
Fumbling forward, path still unclear. Who and how is negative determined?
Is opposing oppression considered to be negative? Sentiment analysis of the protest orientated tweets would probably deem them so
Any CEO who forces you to bend the knee in order to remain employed isn't a CEO that's worthy of your employment. If an executive wants my respect, they can earn it by doing things that are worthy of respect.
> Before doing so, please email me a bullet point summary of what your code commits have achieved in the past ~6 months, along with up to 10 screenshots of the most salient lines of code.
Effective communication is an undervalued skill in many companies and cultures. If you've never been encouraged or allowed to speak up, it can lead to the situations you described.

Growing up, I had a terrible middle school educational experience in the 80s but two of the things they did right were A) computer club/lab where we could learn about programming and computers and B) a requirement to have an "oral presentation" (aka "OP") in front of our English class.

For introverts like me this was so worrying the first time but they made it easy by letting us choose almost any topic that we liked (I think I did coin collecting one time, I remember other students doing something on the Soviet military or sports). Once I got up there and into my OP it wasn't that hard and actually I felt relieved that some of my audience was bored. I feel that I am a better communicator because of it, both as a speaker and a listener.

Some workplace tactics I've seen to handle the situation you described include "BLUF" declarations (https://www.lauramfoley.com/bluf-statement/) for presentations or meetings. I met one guy in the military who said they do this, and if the scope of what is to be discussed is not clear or there is disagreement on what should be covered the meeting gets cancelled.