skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Musk is clearly an incredibly brittle narcissist even by billionaire standards, he is probably the least suited person to owning a platform like Twitter because he seems to misunderstand the trade-offs inherent in the social media business. I find the cult of sycophants that idolise Musk as the real life Tony Stark nauseating. The hero worship of people claiming he's saving free speech by making the platform more restrictive than it's ever been has been hilarious to watch.

However, there was no viable EV market prior to Musk. The US wasn't launching rockets into space before SpaceX. Those are two things that many people thought weren't possible. Pretending that life is just a series of coin flips we can't influence and that all the people who've achieved more than us are merely more fortuitous rather than more deserving is just a coping mechanism. Almost nobody would have made the investments he made given the same opportunities.
> Him owning Twitter, the way he's currently operating, will force a critical eye toward a lot of bad behaviors that we all experience but nobody really talks about on every network.

Are you talking as a communist meaning "The society has been too lenient on the class of billionaires, but now that one of them is exposed as a destructive idiot, people will be forced to ask whether the rest of them deserve their power over us"?

Because that's the only logically consistent interpretation of your statement I can find.
I want my car to receive updates and support in the future and keep some resell value, so I voted "Yes" ...
Elon might be playing a very simple game.

Does this action cause outrage? Shock? Yes? Send it.

Is it a coincidence that this is an avenue for revenue for Twitter? Maybe.
Funnily enough, he has a poll up half an hour ago for whether he should step away as head of Twitter. Yes has a strong lead, so I guess we'll see if he abides by it!
Possibly of interest: : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34045737
I find myself in the unusual position of not having an opinion on this question (and thus I have not voted). I'm neither an Elon hater nor an Elon lover. I think he's done some good things since taking over twitter and some dubious things. I do think he's been unwise to involve himself so directly in 'moderation'.
From my laymen's perspective it seems most people lose out during a recession, across the socioeconomic spectrum. I think those who do manage to profit, despite what some of them may tell you, simply got lucky.

For what it's worth, I don't think this repeated boom/bust cycle is a good way to run the economy, but I am not convinced it's intentionally malicious. Nor am I convinced that concentrated wealth at rest really has much of an impact on anything at all (what really matters is the flow of cash, and this is where recessions can retard the arc of progress).

For all of its faults the economic system we find ourselves in actually has delivered on its promise of "growing the pie" which I suspect is why we continue to choose it. Even while living in a car I was able to obtain extremely cheap access to warm showers and a refrigerator--amenities that would be far out of reach of the homeless just 100 years ago.

It makes sense that Arnault has eclipsed Musk, luxury goods have a ridiculous profit margin and Elon has been wasting his wealth as of late.

There have always been powerful elites, but anyone who believes the elites possess more power over the proletariat now than in the past has not studied much history.

Furthermore the pool of elites, themselves, are more diversified and more likely to change from generation to generation than at any other time recorded.

So is it true that some with concentrated wealth may find it easier to weather a downturn than others without? Absolutely. Is it true that redistributing this wealth arbitrarily would systemically improve our society? Perhaps, but of this I am less sure.

We are still just scratching the surface of the potential global coordination modern communications technology can allow, I hope with time we can escape this local optimum we find ourselves in. Until then I see no point breathlessly railing against a system that while flawed is not without some merits and is assuredly keeping us at least pointed in the correct direction.
It's eye opening. Really makes me think HN is not a healthy place and I spend too much time here.

Maybe we need a new site. Well adjusted no public meltdown hacker news.
That's not a bad way to think about it, although I don't see any need to invoke community. Asimov: "There is nothing frightening about an eternal dreamless sleep. Surely it is better than eternal torment in Hell and eternal boredom in Heaven."
I keep a Keepass compatible password database file in my iCloud folder so I can access it from my computer and my phone with appropriate apps.
Look at what Jetbrains does. When you complete a 1 year subscription, you get a permanent license to a version of the software you're subscribed to, that is 1 year older than the latest.

It is at the same time a subscription to the latest updates, and a one time purchase of an older version that will still be able to open your files, if you drop the subscription. Or the company disappears.

I think that is the best option for a subscription. If you go the one off purchase route though, consider also adding a "grace period" where users get free upgrades to the next version or at least a good discount. For example, if I buy your $50 dollars software, and the next week you show up with a new version with really cool features for the same $50 dollars, I would feel scammed, especially if you hadn't made any announcements that the new version was about to come out. Try to either have a release schedule where you announce a month or two before they're out, or to offer a month or two or free upgrades if you someone buys a version right before a new one comes out.
I don't think it's a mere opinion. I think with enough documentation and research you can show that the costs will likely outweigh the benefits, but of course it's how you define what's a benefit.

I guess you like the idea of all menial tasks being eliminated. I submit that some menial tasks are necessary to have a fulfilling life, and that a limited set of resources is actually better for society. Most people begin to feel boredom and useless if they have nothing essential to do with their lives.

Moreover, an era of abundance is simply impossible without us crushing the natural world...at this point we are just throwing mud and not using actual data, but I think if we did, we would find that your Star Trek utopia is exceptionally unlikely given the way we are going.
Is that true though? The Chinese market is huge, and even if most phones are running Android, they aren’t including google apps. But if we exclude Chinese android phones, I would guess that Google doesn’t hit that 70% mark.
Not to mention the interest payments on the debt that will be due in Q1.
Sounds like that second last full stop was a typo.
I’m aware.
I mean, I'm not sure why a physics degree would be evidence of being good at engineering.
> the oil tray (bad english, but you get it... under the engine)

It's almost perfect English -- it's called an oil pan ;-)
i'm so tired of musk related shit, it's exhasusing to read -- i had to delete my twitter account because his stuff was constnatly surfaced to the top of my feed no matter how much i marked it as `not interested`

i do not care if he owns twitter, i'm just tired of hearing about it
even in the US accenture's IT is not known for high wages. The only reason people stay there is being enslaved by US work visa like L-1, which allows Accenture to pay below market wage and keep employees on a short leash.

You won't be able to find a single american software engineer in Accenture, because of work conditions and wages, all engineers are foreigners on visas. The only americans there are salesmen and admin staff.
> Real shame, but these are fixable problems.

Debian.
David Sacks?
“Everything” wouldn’t break; the most popular address is the one that gets the name. It means businesses and admins would need to put in the work to have a good product instead of getting lucky / having a ton of money to grab a name. Most likely, once a popular name is defaulted it will never change since this system has a “snowball” effect, but if a ground-breaking innovation occurs, then it would have a chance of taking the name.

Anyone that manually sets a name to an address is unaffected by the default setting. Only people that haven’t overridden the default are impacted. Most people would likely not even participate in this mechanism of “voting”, so it would be a smaller group that I assume is more involved that directs defaults.

Nothing is perfect but I think this would have significantly better results for humanity as a whole once it is matured than the current system.

Additional note: For anything programmatic / apis / etc, the address hash can just be utilized to connect systems. The address hash is not an IP address. It is a record set that can only be modified using signed messages, where the latest signed message determines what is in the record — this is where a record for, say, another IP can exist. Or a record to another address hash, etc. This record set could operate basically the same as current records for domains.
> prevent consumers from linking up to businesses outside their platforms

This seems quite commonsensical. Isn't there already some other (less explicit) existing law that has the same effect?
If you got them from dockerhub or similar… that's not a default ubuntu install.
Surely that's Elon's problem and has absolutely nothing to do with you and I. The people who signed up are all grown ups, they made their choices.
> If you want to buy a $1,000,000 Ferrari and thrash it into oblivion in 1 week that is totally your choice, have fun with that. It wouldn't be a free country if people could stop you doing so.

OK, but if you do that, people will consider you reckless, and people will question whether they can trust you with other endeavors.

Hence TSLA sinking like lead.
I like Mastodon but agree about the bubble. I think the best case scenario is something like a return to the glory days of RSS.
same, I've been longing for the collapse of Twitter for years.

the federated social web will outlive this.
Let’s up this a little bit to Eric Weinstein.
Elon has been so hands-on and vindictive that it's hard to rule out him personally deciding to ban pg and then going back on it, but that's not the only possibility. If you looked at the replies to pg's initial "I'm leaving" post, there were hundreds or thousands of Elon's reply guys mocking him or deriding the decision. Twitter has become much more of a toxic hellhole than it was before.

What I've noticed is that accounts tend to receive bans when a large number of users report them simultaneously (whether they are actually rule breaking has relatively little impact). It strikes me as possible that a bunch of Elon's fans reported the "I have a Mastodon account" post, and some moderator pulled the plug on the account on the assumption that that's what Elon would want.

To be clear, I'm not saying any of this would exonerate Elon. He put this stupid policy in place to begin with. If anything, the sheer scale of the pro-Elon toxicity I've seen in every Twitter link I've clicked today is a symptom of a much bigger problem that is slowly building on the platform.
When I read a puff piece on him a few years ago, they brought up that he would play League during meetings as a funny founder quirk. My only thought was I would not want to work at a place where my boss played league openly during meetings.
I voted yes. I'd much rather he get back to working on electric cars and space travel and leave the tribal warfare to others.
I had a similar experience to yours. I used to do MMA and got fairly good. I’ve trained with people who fought locally in the ring and did ok with them in sparring matches. They were clearly better but I did ok against them. One day I ended up sparring with someone who eventually went on to become a semi finalist in the Ultimate Fighter. It was like I was 5 years old fighting a college student. I could do nothing against him. He completely destroyed me. He didn’t have a successful UFC career. I can’t imagine what it would be like to fight a top tier pro.
> I'd be shocked if @paulg isn't reinstated within 48 hours

The only reasonable comment in this thread. He was reinstated a few minutes ago.
Did LoL have any brand respect to begin with? Aren't they basically just known as "e-sports for people who suck at video games"?
I think he will do it.

But he will still own Twitter and he will still take action, whenever he feels like it, so not sure if that would change anything. Either way, the whole drama is both hilarious and sad at the same time.
“Should I resign” is just more attention getting.

“Please tell me you want me.”

I’d advise everyone to just leave Twitter. He can still be “Head” there will just be nothing underneath him.
It doesn't really matter does it? Because if idiot policies can be made, implemented and executed to a degree that people like Paul get banned and then be rescued by the CEO of the company you have to wonder how many people without that kind of stature are going to be treated the same way.

This is simply no way to run a social media website. You need care and delibration, not spur-of-the-moment changes with massive impact on the site and its users, including some of your most steadfast supporters, which Paul clearly was up to that point.
You would need an extra referee per extra ball.
And it shows Paul is followed by 2857 people, following none.
All this random minor chaos is a little saddening.
Eggs have to be broken to make omelette. This looks like sloppy cooking.
I mean… having recently read “Everyone Poops” to my youngest I feel the analogy isn’t terribly far off.

Guess the question is what direction the sewage is flowing.
Elon Musk. He could step down and ascend.
Content moderation is a hard, stressful, thankless job. Having built several moderation tools for large sites (large for back in the day), I for one am enjoying the debacle that is Elon and a cadre of Yes Men thinking they would waltz in with no experience and shake it all up with no consequences.
I voted Yes because too many people’s time is being wasted with all that drama.
What's IDA?
https://archive.vn/3KMTB
Because Musk got angry about pg's tweet and lashed out, then pretended it was about policy instead of his lack of emotional regulation. He's not really making deeply reasoned choices.
He's realised it's not in his best interests to be there, but can't mentally tolerate the idea of supporters thinking he's quitting or there against his will. Which is why I think he frames these decisions as a vote. If the vote doesn't go the way he wants, he'll try it again later, come up with another reason or whatever. It's easier to ascribe blame for something that goes wrong if it was a popular vote rather than a personal decision.

I suspect his personality means that he gets a lot of satisfaction from fawning fans, but at some point the reality hits of the Twitter saga's impact on Tesla and more. Like he's trying to kick some sort of addiction.
Twitter is a bit of a gatekeeper is it not? So many companies ran their customer service through there, it became one of the dominant customer service platforms (alongside Facebook). On top of this, many news platforms also relied heavily on Twitter to break and share news, same with journalists who used Twitter as their only form of communication effectively.

Twitter was positioning itself as a major gatekeeper of information, and so I do think the EU should be looking into this carefully in hopes of preventing it from happening again.
Here are a few among many:

https://mastodon.social/@b0rk

https://abyssdomain.expert/@filippo

https://ioc.exchange/@matthew_d_green

https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza
This is true. Source: work in IT at a library. We don't want your musty old books, but politically we cannot say no.
wait till you know about MyPillow
Strongly disagree with the linked article.

Individual customers, and corporate customers, are wildly different.

The "buy it for life" business model works very well if you're trying to launch a mass market product to individuals.

In your first year of a product, those users who'll pay upfront 3 years of subscriptions for a "lifetime pass" are an awe-inspiringly useful customer segment to identify.

They're your way to run experiments to find "what am I doing well and how can I do more of it."

Plus, they're effectively loaning your business money against future revenues. During the first 2 years of your product, that's an amazing deal all round.

Just... never, ever, let corporations "buy it for life." Corporations will exploit by it for life dramatically.
That would work. It's hard to think of a better choice.
> It's even very hard to find details on the robosigning scandals from 2008, which were huge and recent.

That could be due to changes to Google's search algorithm, which has made it harder to find anything, especially older content.
Pixel 2.

My belief is the 2nd version of any tech is the best. They've fixed the initial bugs from version one and are still trying to impress you, but they haven't started abusing and controlling you/your data with version 3 and on.
FWIW: This got me to look into Mastodon. I saw it was too complicated to setup and gave up. Lost opportunity IMO.
Elon suggests no new successor if he steps down
Having programmed in both, the most similarity is in the name. PL/I is a vastly complicated language that needs a specialized grammar to describe and PL/M works on microprocessors. Oh, and another flaw with the article is that PL/M was not invented by Gary Kildall, not Intel.
For some reason his replies aren't at the top, you have to expand past the first few replies.
It's more like 1D chess. The trouble with your explanation is that Musk was well-established in an escalating cycle of acting out to get attention before he announced his plan to buy it. That situation naturally kept him in the news as it developed but he's going to have to try increasingly drastic actions to prevent people from losing interest.
Regarding the reasons for this, I'll repost:

Being deaf is an inherently negative aspect. You either have the ability to hear, or you do not. If you do not, it is a dis-ability. No one wants to lose an ability to do something.

Someone who lives an extensive period of time without an ability may have learned how to live without this ability. They learn to cope and affirm their life with its faults in their current state. Offering the ability they lost and have learned to live without may be declined because of the affirmation of their life as it is. It could be declined because the transition is uncomfortable as well. Either way, being deaf is still negative, they've just psychologically coped well.

If you had the choice, would you choose that your child be deaf or not? That you be deaf or not? If one isn't deaf, would they choose to become deaf or not? This entire argument results from academic nonsense that anyone outside that context can see through.

Regarding culture, culture is defined as "the customs, arts, social institutions, and achievements of a particular nation, people, or other social group.". A social group of veterans (injured or not) absolutely can be considered equivalent as your usage. Preventing war is a cultural genocide if you consider it that way. You're saying that a culture which arises from suffering, injury, evil and so on deserves preservation by refusing to prevent the evil that causes them. Alcoholics Anonymous has a culture, Gamblers Anonymous, etc.

Yes, it is academic nonsense based on semantics. It doesn't matter if they don't feel they're missing anything - what you've never had you cannot miss. What you've had, lost and coped with you've learned not to miss. No one buys into this pedantry but academics with too much time on their hands.

EDIT: I apologize for "proselytizing" and "trashing" that view. My sister is an ASL teacher and she's made the same points you have to me, so I'm aware of the debate, and so have strong views on the matter. I have heard and considered everything you've said beforehand. I believe this sentiment comes from empathy and affirmation of deaf people as taught by those who are close with that community. Yet, I also believe this view is nonsense that someone outside that context can clearly see.
It's been a good year for machine learning overall, and that includes autonomous vehicles. There's more optimism this year, the survivors are seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.
Yep. He said just now that Twitter is "in the fast lane to bankruptcy":

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604626103326253056
> ... probably in an attempt to rope back in users who moved to right-wing Twitter clones.

The problem with Twitter isn't free speech, but objective reality. There's only room for one reality on Twitter -- not two, or three, or four.

Truth Social and the right wing platforms don't challenge people's view that the 2020 election was a fraud, that pizza gate really happened, so they will probably continue now as they are.
I don't really get the need people have for a causal explanation. The internet is _full_ of arseholes saying stupid things; we don't in general assume they're all on drugs or anything.
That is definitely true. I actually try and make my videos as short as possible but I noticed that over time the longer ones are definitely prioritized by the algorithm, yet I get lots of comments saying how people appreciate my very short videos.
> unbiased moderation" is fundamentally impossible for an international service like Twitter with millions of users.

Especially given that the pool of California tech people from which Twitter might draw moderators are to the left of 99% of that international community of users.
He wasn't forced to buy Twitter. He bought Twitter and then was indirectly forced to follow through with the purchase contract that he already made.
A note taking app or password manager in the modern sense is not a product, it's a service. Your content is stored and this costs money. Not only is it a recurring cost, it's also a growing cost as content keeps getting added and rarely removed. It's not illogical that a recurring fee is asked.

It's very much possible that a large company subsidizes these costs or runs ads, thereby making it "free". But the costs are still there.

You do have a point about office and image editing programs. A local desktop app in itself has no recurring costs for the company that built it, at least not directly. Still, after market and customer saturation it would mean the companies go bankrupt, as little new revenue comes in.
So it's still SaaS, except you're using it for storage and sync and doing the password stuff yourself.
Related ongoing thread:

Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34045423