skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Maybe the way by which the subscription software becomes better is different: perhaps because the SaaS model provides higher recurring revenues, these businesses and products draw more investment, which allows them to develop more quickly and leapfrog the competition.
I think your point about non-SaaS being a Ponzi scheme is valid. However, I think it conflates several separate phenomenon, at least in my mind.
I’ll use Fitbit as an example, since I have one. I purchased a piece of hardware that has certain capabilities, and links to the Fitbit app, which ought to provide me access to those capabilities. I can only use the app to access those capabilities (at least without some hacking; not sure if anyone has done this). I’d much rather use an open source app and self host the data - Google hosting the data and providing me an app to interface with it isn’t valuable to me except to the extent I cannot access it any other way. The fact that they paywall certain components behind a monthly subscription, when the device I purchased is fully capable of interacting with the app in the same way without me having a subscription, is exploitative, in my opinion. And I would be more than happy to pay money for new software versions if they provided me anything useful. Instead, Fitbit has become more SaaS-y, and I have gotten nothing of value from that.
Sorry if that’s not a very cohesive set of thoughts; I think there are a lot of viable reasons for subscription services (I have no issue with Spotify, for instance). At the same time, I do not think worthless software upgrades, holding users’ data captive, and bug fixes are worth a dime, morally nor economically.
What happened? Isn't that just a body weight exercise routine?
Lex is a strange human. Seemingly smart, but also supportive of a lot of weird shit. Also he says he's neutral - but don't criticize Joe Rogan!! lol
What it looks like Elon is trying to do is:

- Level the playing field between the "blue-checks" and everyone else. I think the intent of that is to encourage the 90% of people who passively consume content to engage more, and encourage lurkers without accounts to sign up.

- Reduce the dependency on advertisers by pivoting to a model that is partly user-funded. Reddit seems to have had some success with this, for example.

- Signal that Twitter is going to be less politically partisan going forward, probably in an attempt to rope back in users who moved to right-wing Twitter clones.

I don't think those are objectively terrible ideas, but the implementation so far has been remarkably bad.
Wealth, power, ... could be a blend of several.
Browsers and messaging apps also rely on OS security to a degree, it's part of why they don't support old operating system versions.
Yes, and what's the other side?
I just wish personal integrity mattered at any scale, anymore. I wish that people actually came to their opinions via some sort of logical process that could be easily later self-evaluated and reflected upon. There's this tendency to double-down, when "admitting a mistake" is really as simple as reflecting, realizing what assumptions were made wrong, going back to base principles and re-assessing. If you have integrity and good base values, then it's admirable to be able to see a mistake, acknowledge it and grow.

But what's frustrating is that this "double-down-at-all-costs" has worked for some at the top recently, and it seems to just be spreading, and spreading to those that don't have the money to escape the embarrassment/cost of repeating doubling down.
I want to vote "keep Musk as CEO" just to give him more rope
Fortunately my opaque non profit files a different 990
Well, congratulations, anyway. They made it exciting.
As something of a free speech absolutist myself, I'd say this Twitter policy goes directly against the principles of free speech. No twisting required, Elon is simply being hypocritical here.
First, ban everyone who votes "Yes" because obvious bots are obvious and then re-issue the poll. So many birds killed with the same stone.
Blake Masters.
When I was at 7th grade I only knew BASIC. Then someone told me about Pascal and it blew my mind, because it didn't have the GOTO statement.
> I don't think Musk deserves an easy exit.

Probably not, but the health of twitter matters to me a ton more than that. And I don't even like twitter.
From speaking to a few people in the industry, I believe there is also a significant problem with the delayed return on investment for establishing orchards with appropriate apples. Part of why AO tastes like candy is because it's made from apples which have been selected for decades, well, to taste like candy, to sell to consumers as eating apples. Their all-granny smith cider comes to mind as a shocking example. Supposedly AO has an intentional business model of selling these subpar products to finance establishing orchards for real cider but idk how that is working out.
You made me go on Twitter for the second time this weekend. Great idea, sir!
> But he still owns it, so who will he put in his place?

Lex Fridman just volunteered

https://twitter.com/lexfridman/status/1604627087385661440
> If you halved today's average lifespan, you'd see a dramatic reduction in cancer.

Not sure where the comment I’m replying to, and onwards, ever mentions cancer.

Lol
It's hard to surface stuff there, got any good devs to follow?
Video without transcript.
An eternity to be concious is a long time. Over an infinite amount of time it can go wrong in an infinite number of ways.

Seeing your loved ones is great. Exhausting the total combination of <1hr long conversations with them over an infinite amount of time, not so much. What do you even do after that? You've spoken with them about everything you can express with english words.

Do you continue to make up new concepts forever to keep yourself entertained?
"unbiased moderation" is fundamentally impossible for an international service like Twitter with millions of users. Each country has its own rules about which content you are allowed to post and it has its own regulatory agencies that may demand you behave in a certain way. Your moderators will all apply their own cultural norms to their own behavior as well.

I agree that it's not "righteous" somehow but the idea that Twitter could be moderated evenly in an "unbiased" way is incredibly naive and it seems to be one of the illusions Elon was under before he took over.
Ideally, the features needed for writing bigger codes should be optional. For instance, a beginner can write a Python script within a single screen that does something like graph some data. Encapsulation can be treated as an add-on, as can be the type system.

That's assuming you want scalability. If a language is absolutely never going to be used for scripting by beginners, it doesn't need to be used that way.
> This is dishonest competition (all other major companies do the same but not as blunt: Facebook, Google, Amazon for example). Twitter could be an exception. But it won't.

During the #deletefacebook movement, Facebook didn't ban links to or discussion of competitors.
Did JFK dislike it as much as Diem did?
Not really “has to”, he just is doing it because he’s got nothing better to do. Much like how he didn’t have to fire the previous head of moderation and spend the last week calling him a gay pedophile and releasing his work emails.
>Corsair keyboards unequivocally do not log user input in any way and do not have the ability to log individual keystrokes," Corsair's rep told Ars Technica.

I understand wanting to deny the keylogging for keylogging sake claim, but given that, bug or not, the keyboard is clearly storing user keystrokes, that's simply a bold-faced lie.
The EU will grant €1.13B to tech startups in 2023
"We don't have room in our garage for the truck".

It's apparently too much trouble for this guy to clean up his garage. In the community he bought into, that's where you park your truck. If he didn't like it, he could have bought elsewhere.
> I find it amazing people can look at that and say he's just a rich idiot.

I look at the last three months and I wonder how they can't.

But you're just as entitled to your opinion as I am to mine.
I am even more cynical and I think he wants an out without loosing (more) face. He hopes he will get a vote telling him to leave and then he can say people have spoken.
It really surprises me how much attention twitter is getting on HN.

I must be living in some bubble, because not only I have never had an account there, I also do not know anyone who would be using it.

From my perspective I'd judge the popularity of Twitter to be similar to e.g. Soundcloud - people know what it is, but very few people use it.
What's the problem, money is just another form of free speech isn't it?
Bored Ape Yacht Club Conquered NFTs. Can It Master the Metaverse Next?
> - The vast majority of Hispanic people don't like "Latinx"

It's worse than that. The majority of Hispanic people (around 75%) haven't even heard of it [1]. Only about 3% use it. Even among the demographic that it has the most recognition in (ages 18-29) only 42% of heard of it, and only 7% use it.

Many also find it offensive [2].

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/11/about-one-in...

[2] https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/many-latinos-say-latin...
We don't know everything for sure. And we'll never know everything. But, we know enough up and down the physical stack through biology, chemistry and physics that there isn't some non-physical other going on in there.

Here's where the idea of life after death really breaks down for me: If you have a degenerative disease when do you get to this afterlife? Some people have effectively died long before they die, in terms of mind. If you see this as a process that is entirely physical it makes sense, it's sad but it makes sense. If you think there's something non-physical there then it poses some really hard questions: did they die already? why do personality changes happen if who a person is is contained in some non-physical thing? when they do die does the degenerated form go to the afterlife or the whole, and if its the whole then what happened to the person that was degenerative? Now throw in non-human life where we have a continuum of brain complexity down to nothing and ask similar questions - it just makes no sense. Unless you hold humans above other animals, which I find really distasteful and short sighted. Really though, if you try to explain all this you're just explaining away needless complexity to justify wishing for something that seems very unlikely.

A christian chap I used to live with told me that after we die our soul goes to heaven but its just our consciousness and not our personality, and we spend the rest of all time praising god. Well, not me, I was going to hell for not believing. Honestly, of the things he described, not sure which sounded better, but a materialistic death definitely trumps either of those options.
What they do is no different than MSM. There are plenty of news agencies paid by billionaires for good PR or to push a certain agenda.

For some reason people think Kurzgesagt is some magical independent team of experts so they get stung when these things come out.
Perl, in my opinion, will never be dead enough.
By the numbers, I'm now receiving ~2.2 spam/DAY via DMs, up from ~2.4 spam/WEEK via DMs averaged over Jan-Oct.
As a user, software companies are usually not producing good enough software to justify paying for the price of incremental updates ;).

In many ways, I feel much software needs to transition to "be maintained," very quickly.

So much engineering time and energy is spent releasing not very useful, incremental features.

Engineers... ironically, need to give up sooner in many cases.

The hubris of "the thing I make is genuinely useful, surely" is the profession's Pandora's box.

Pride is most dangerous sin etc etc.
Kanye?
Or B but the person is noticeably better.
Show HN: Share Mastodon link in an untraditional way
A bunch of his saddest posts have been in the early hours of the morning, like 1-4am. He seems to have a pattern of getting really upset about something and then Posting Through It, and it reminds me in a really sad way of how some of my most troubled friends always feel worst after midnight.

It sucks to see people with near-limitless resources just sit and wallow in (self-inflicted) misery when they could probably do something about it.
Wow, since running the poll about whether Musk should step down (with a clear Yes in the lead) he decided to unban pg.
It was ultimately all of SW. Before the Valspar purchase, SW used SugarCRM, and my team there (TAMs) were with the account and regularly out in CLE. I really like the team there from SW. One of the best customers I ever dealt with overall.
no, dealing with thousands of users is that bad on an interpersonal level
Please don't post unsubstantive or flamebait comments. We're having enough trouble with discussion quality as it is.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34044189.
Most self-proclaimed "experts in social media" seem to be responsible for making it the disaster that it is for our societies.

The one thing that has definitely been refreshing about new Twitter is that the leader isn't yet another "social media expert" and just another social media user with similar complaints as millions of other users.

Personally I really hope they also get rid of the "UX experts" next, given how shit Twitter's UX is, especially on anything that isn't a phone.
Lex Fridman would do it for free

https://twitter.com/lexfridman/status/1604624131626090497
I am also running Akkoma on a free-tier OCI ARM instance. It runs great.

Akkoma also works with the official Mastodon mobile app.
Nightmare blunt rotation right there.
No, it's to encourage communities to form and admins to be able to have minimal relationships with their users.
A vote by who, the bots?
Couldn't agree more on this. The market forces governing new home construction are completely broken and nothing short of government is going to change that. It is genuinely a travesty how bad in virtually every aspect new construction it and the lack of investment in minimizing long-term tcoo is going to bite us down the line. I almost cant even blame the builders, you literally can't source quality materials at prices affordable by a family. The bit about humans evolving polyamory in response to housing prices is feeling less and less like a joke every day. Inflation plus a generation of wage stagnation has made it so that house prices are still outpacing the savings from cheaper construction which is an everyone looses situation.
pg is Silicon Valley royalty. jack is SV royalty. So is sama. They all seem to be getting a little distaste for space karen.
I think we can stop thinking he’s running Twitter for revenue. This is clearly politically motivated and he’s even quite open it.
If Elon is the Gatekeeper, who is the Keymaster? He kinda seems like a cultist trying to summon Zuul or NYNEX or something.
who do you think he'll chose as his successor?

And how long before he has another poll on whether or not to fire them?

It's his thought process that is the problem. I feel Twitter would have died Elon, or no Elon. But this sort of spectacular flameout ending is really what Elon brings to the table because his leadership style does not lend itself to stability.
Sure it's associated to you, and yes it's permanent in the lifetime that this particular record is remembered and/or useful. It is also not farfetched for Twitter or really any website similar to it like FB, Reddit, etc. to punish people who only upvote or like comments/posts, no other engagement otherwise.

I don't really see a problem here that was not already a problem before.

I am also not going to lie, I think social media as a whole is really not that big of a deal. I know many people have built businesses through social media and benefit from it, but businesses live and die naturally everyday, don't put your eggs into one basket. I know some people that had some level of popularity on LiveJournal, they all survived it's death. You will too.
I blame it on automated advertising. When you had to work to get someone to pay you you made good content. Now anyone can get paid as long as they're digestible. It's created the interesting situation where the average quality of demonetized content is far high than monetized content.
mc hammer
All I can really say here is that I hope we can elevate beyond "left" vs "right". Elon is doing the same thing every other wannabe-populist does. Take the beacon light off of him, his riches, his flailing ego, and... sow division. Every single thing he's done for the past 4-8 weeks has been about doubling down on distractions, as he sells more TSLA, lol.

Why is the supposed "liberal tech guy" bumping fking shoulders with Ian Miles Chong on a regular basis? I mean, come on. Please, see it for what it is. Ego and populism, through and through and through. Exactly what I told my ex I was freaked out about when he floated this in March. At least Bezos had the sense to keep his hands off the Post.

We need class solidarity (, we desperately need ranked choice voting), and seeing Elon for who he is, would be a great place for us all to start.
I can’t for the life of me understand how people can still defend this guy.

The only possible explanation is that they hate people that Musk claims to oppose even more and that causes them a blindspot on Musk himself.

Namely Biden, Dems, Unions, Pelosi etc.

That might be, but we just came off an historic World Cup Final.

The lesson is that the leader of a social group cannot be an emotional mess. You need somebody like Bellichick or Argentina’s penalty kickers.

Trump lost 2 popular votes out of 2 that Romeny would have won, if Musk was eligible he would lose too because he is essentially Trump 2.0

The leader cannot be as vitriolic as you are if you want to win, no matter how cool it is to identify with them.
You pay monthly, but the subscription is for a year - at least in the US.
"Everything app" seems like a great vision. Let's not get hung up on the details of, you know... everything.
Agreed, but centralized services will always be easier to use and people drift toward the easiest solution.

People value freedom a little less than convenience.
I've found this is much more efficient if I add a comment at the end of the command describing what it does, then my C-r search can find that description, rather than just, say, any command in invoking some particular executable.
Maybe, or maybe not, but the fact of the matter is that a poll in a private platform does not a vote make, and using it as such for varying degrees of impactful events is either irresponsible or willfully deceptive.
Mentioned above, but I’ve been running Akkoma on a OCI free tier ARM instance with no issues.
Ghostwire delivered on exactly one promise to me: simulating the experience of wondering around the depopulated back alleys of a big city late at night. I've only had that experience first-hand a few times in my life, as an American on a work visit to London, wondering around Covent Garden.

Apart from that very specific experience, the rest of the game is negligible.
I do not agree with your opinion on Elon Musk, but I admire how calm, rational and polite your response to this situation is. Most people (including me) would let our emotions take over. You, sir, are a class act.
> We get a couple of those days every year

I'm always curious about things like this.

Did you insulate your house for the -40 days? Did you buy your winter coat and gloves based on -40 days? Did you install a block heater, battery blanket and oil pan heater in your ICE car for those -40 days?

I'm betting you didn't, because you know they only happen a couple of times a year, and it's not worth spending all the money and effort for something that happens so rarely. What you have for the -20 and -30 days is good enough for the (very) occasional -40.

The same is true for your EV.

(FWIW: I lived just above 60 degrees north for 4 years. I rode my bike to work every day. For many months it was often colder than -30, and at least a month a year it was colder than -40.)
This is one of the joys of command line tools.

They almost never stop working on you, and are far easier to maintain cross platform.

Using the same thing on Mac at work and Linux at home is a joy.

Increasingly, I actively try to use the command line approach to all my software. Not because it's better (often it... isn't. FFmpeg is actually remarkably annoying for example), but it's bloody reliable.
I had heard only good things about masto.host but they had closed their subscriptions, so I signed up with both Ossrox and Weingärtner IT to give both a try.

I have not decided yet which one to keep because they were both flawless so far. I ordered from both at almost the same time and they both activated my accounts almost at the same time about a day later.

Main instance I use currently is the Ossrox one, but that is just coincidence.

I'm not in any way affiliated with any of those companies and don't know anyone working there personally.
Somewhat ironically, Chamath, Calacanis, and Sacks can spot a bad deal.
It does not seem that PG is seeking sympathy, and it wasn't what bothered him

The post indicated that what bothered PG, was the 'last straw', was the new policy against directly "advertising"/"promoting" other social media such as Mastadon, FB, and a few others.

PG indicated that his personal webpage had his new socmedia addresses, and apparently got banned for that. Not even directly posting them.

Pretty damn far from Free Speech Absolutism.

Hell, this is not even close to being a Sec230-protected "carrier", it is straight up editorial control, which means Musk/Twitter could be solely responsible for all posted content...
It is not really his private play-toy. There was a bunch of other investors that joined him and I bet they're giving him heat about the results already.
Perhaps that is his current plan https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604617643973124097?cxt=...
Oh goddamnit. I was starting to get hopeful that twitter would actually fucking die, if he isn't in charge it will probably be someone less absolutely insane
This could have been some content moderator doing a casual override to something soft flagged, might not have been intentionally targeting pg
A correct use of "gatekeeper" as it always has been.

You might be more used to the more informal social media use of the word meaning busybodies that involve themselves unasked to police people's behaviors to their own arbitrary standards; this is not it.
Jak was an editor just as Elon is now

all the crying about big bad elon is a joke
@paulg's Twitter followers seem to have been wiped clean so his follower count is much lower now. Not really sure if that's part of the punishment or if that's an engineering failure.
Whilst I've had a lot of fun arguing about him, Twitter etc, it is getting a bit stale now. Hopefully he quietens down a bit soon and we can move onto a big and important new topic like 2 spaces or tab!
Huh, I'm pretty sure I first encountered this California joke from some variant of fortune[1] back in the '80s. Haven't thought of it in ages. ("fortune -m fornication" comes up empty on my linux system now though.)

[1] https://linux.die.net/man/6/fortune