skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Related ongoing thread:

Twitter Suspends PG's Account - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34044047

I'm moving the current thread (the earlier one) off the front page, partly because these are more or less the same story, but mostly because the traffic on this is boiling our poor server and I need to resort to tricks. Sorry all!

In case you're not aware: you need to click on the "more comments" links at the bottom of the pages to get to the rest of the thread; also, you can make HN faster by logging out when it's keeling over. Also, genuine performance improvements shouldn't be too far off now.
> The acid test for any two competing socioeconomic systems is which side needs to build a wall to keep people from escaping? — ERM
> Banned for posting a link to his personal website (which has links to his other social media profiles)

How many levels deep does their new policy go? It sounds like they violated it not Paul...

Paul and I disagree on a lot (I've struggled to remember to not post like a Redditor here) but dear lord -- last I looked at HN, it said the guy was leaving Twitter, and Paul doesn't seem like the type to troll on his way out like I am.

This is absurd.

For context: I'm an amateur comedian in addition to being a hacker. Every set I've done IRL I've asked folks not to record or quote, and had that honored. I specialize in observational comedy -- often rude, insulting observations that approach the limits of American style free expression that I won't repeat here. I've encountered folks who can't take a joke before, but dear lord, the levels of petty coming from Elon Musk are off the charts.

Or as I'd say if it was open mic night in an undisclosed location in Appalachia:

"Big 'You're not breaking up with me I'm breaking up with you' energy on the bird site tonight ladies and gentlemen."
That's a fairly recent addition, after a very long time without any notifications and abysmal handling of a running application. These issues were handled slow and dismissively, the current solution is still half-baked. It's yet another good example how bad Snap is.
Lionel Messi doesn’t need the ball to hurt you
i always thought this was obvious about his character, why are people just now realizing this?
National teams play several times a year.
I'm really not trying to say anything positive about him. I'm guessing there are things I don't know and I would like to understand them.
He had two kinds of supporters. The people like me who respected him because of the things he accomplished, and the ones that love him because he pisses liberals off. He's lost the former but the latter love him even more now.
And so this is how twitter ends. Not with a twang, but a simper.
He’s on the cap table, right? I bet they got several hundred of you to click Twitter links just from hacker news alone.
Note that Twitter's TOS are only one of the three components of the Twitter User Agreement. There are also the Twitter Rules and Policies. This is what Twitter's Rules and Policies page says:

> At both the Tweet level and the account level, we will remove any free promotion of prohibited 3rd-party social media platforms, such as linking out (i.e. using URLs) to any of the below platforms on Twitter, or providing your handle without a URL:
Everyone I've met at accenture actually was paid below market, and usually billed at 5x their cost, or more.
Capricious enforcement sucks

See also Andor episode 8 (spoilers so I won't post exact details) ;)
How many malicious employees do you think would be left at this point? There have been massive layoffs, and anyone who didn't like Musk or the "extreme hardcore" could have taken the severance.
I worked on the Engineering side of compliance at my last job managing Compliance and Security. As part of going public, part of my job was keeping some executives away from the Auditors. This was not because the Auditors wanted information from them that we didn’t want to share, but because the auditors actually had zero interest in what they had to say. I.e. they did not care about Joe Techbro and his Git front end and how it would allow us to avoid having an Internal Audit team (news flash: it didn’t).

All these pointless conversations would slow the process down and the auditors would bill (aggressively) for these pointless interjections.

My job for a while was listening for signs they would do this, create a meeting, take notes, email the notes to our Eng team, and then fein concern. This worked as the audit team were able to do what they needed to do and we went public. Eventually half the people I was playing interference against were asked to leave the company or were otherwise fired for unrelated reasons that I’d roughly group into being unprofessional or poorly prepared for their role.

In my subsequent job (years later and at a multinational) I’ve seen more of this. I’ve learned that at any sufficiently large company there will be at least one person paid to keep one person from messing things up with their presence.

Overall, I find the stories about keeping Elon placated completely believable.
Are you deliberately trolling?
Tried that some years back. Or the simpler version where it is just Control. Didn’t work I found out because I was using my pinky to activate a very common modifier key. It was uncomfortable. I ended up remapping caps lock to Ctrl-C.

I just use the good old control keys now. Either by using my palm or (more commonly for the left one) the last knuckle of my pinky finger.
Yes. This is the result of vast olygopolization. Market shares cannot grow and natural growth of revenues are not enough for boards of directors. Thus, they want you to pay many times over your lifetime what you’d have paid once for a product.
This is why I stay on LTS versions. I'm about to install 22.04 on a new SSD. I'll dual boot 20.04 to work until I'm confident that I can setup 22.04 with all the GNOME extensions I need to have a sane desktop, plus all the software I need to do my job. Actually maybe I'll give a try to Debian 11, no snaps there.
Username checks out there Elno, but we see through it.
That would be contrary to the GDPR export rules in the EU.
You mean this is a quick way to get rid of mostly unused Twitter accounts? I'm in.. I've got a few to knock their total account #s down.. After that make a gdpr request and have fun.
>If Qatar wants they can build a better team than the UEFA ones

They definitely could not

>Hint: look at Barça.

What do you mean
> dotted-list-p doesn't have anything to do with the "serialized form" (printed representation) of the list

It does: the details of the serialization are the reason that the concept of "dotted list" even exists. At the risk of belaboring the obvious, dotted lists are called "dotted lists" because there is a syntactically-significant dot in their serialization.

> There are many symbols in Common Lisp that you cannot DEFUN. See section 11.1.2.1.2 in the hyperspec.

It is not that you cannot defun them, it is that this is undefined behavior. At least one implementation (CCL) lets you defun just about everything except NIL:

? (defun &body () t)
&BODY
? (&body)
T
? (defun t () nil)
T
? (t)
NIL

But, as noted earlier...

? (defun nil () t)
> Error: Using NIL as a function name is silly.

> Since NIL names a constant variable but not a standardized function, macro, or special operator, you can bind it to a function lexically using FLET or LABELS.

NIL's lack of weirdness in this one regard actually seems pretty weird to me. IMHO it would actually makes sense to prohibit defining a function whose name is the same object that designates an empty list, just as it makes sense to prohibit defining functions whose names are (say) numbers.

> That operators treat a symbol specially does not make a symbol weird.

That all turns on how you define "weird". One dictionary definition of "weird" is "strikingly odd or unusual, especially in an unsettling way; strange". The fact that the CAR and CDR of NIL are both NIL seems weird to me. The fact that NIL is the canonical boolean false is NIL rather than F seems weird to me. (Actually, the canonical booleans, if they were going to be symbols at all, should have been :T and :F or :TRUE and :FALSE. But that's a different discussion.)

> Are you saying the symbol &BODY is not an ordinary symbol because it is a lambda list keyword?

Yes. Lambda-list keywords are weird. They behave differently from X and Y and Z and BAZ and BAR and BING and BIFF and BOFF and ORDINARY-SYMBOL and even WEIRD-SYMBOL. The same is true for symbols interned in the keyword package. All of these things are weird.
The breadcrumb links are hilarious:

> Help Center > Safety and cybercrime > Promotion of alternative social platforms policy
My thoughts too. If Twitter is going to start behaving like the App Store I want no part of it.
Yes I believe so. HN is loading too slow to find it, but a sister comment that stated the policy only applies to accounts whose primary purpose is to share other social media links. This is now further evidenced by PG’s account being suspended.
You shouldn't be disabling unattended-upgrades unless you're very diligent with security updates yourself.
Oh, you shouldn’t really be comparing unreadability of BASIC to even Unix shell scripts. Python is the pinnacle of readability and structure in comparison.

Let’s see…

Numbered lines as labels, GOTO everywhere. You got GOSUB if you were lucky.

All state propagated mostly via global variables. Subroutine parameters were present in dialects few and far between.

Now, variables. Maximum length of an identifier was what, 1? Or 2?

Inconsistent delimiters and syntax in general. Take GW-BASIC and its hot mess of graphical commands. Here you can’t have parentheses, but there you must. Semicolons here, commas there.

All the stuff that makes programs readable — consistent syntax, named procedures, reasonably long variable names, named labels if you must — all appeared very late, in QBASIC I think. But the rest of the BASIC world still had to cater to the lowest common denominator if your program was to be even mildly portable.
He's now at https://mas.to/@paulg by the way. Twitter account suspended.
We have all the cultures, whether that means they all cancel out on average is up for debate;)
IMO the resposibility is entirely on IRS. They chose the contractor, they wrote the legal terms and conditions, they vetted them out and they presumably did the due diligence for security.
The one good thing that's come out of Musk's ownership of Twitter is that we now have extensive public evidence that Twitter staff bent over backwards to maintain objective moderation standards even in the face of unprecedented challenges. The "leftist cabal" theories are thoroughly disproven now. And we see now the kind of actions that an actual ideological cabal would take if they controlled Twitter.
I totally misunderstood the purpose of this extension. Now that you've pointed it out, it's clear that it's quite useful. I was previously manually entering all the users into the search box, which was a pain. I'm glad this extension exists to automate the process. It would be even better if Mastodon integrated something like this natively.
I think you’ve misread my “we need fossil fuels/fission isn’t a slam dunk” comment.
Every day I feel like more of an idiot for giving Elon the benefit of the doubt with this whole freedom of speech thing

At this point he's so completely tarnished his public image, I don't see Tesla surviving this long term unless he sells out and rides off into the sunset
This comment is so depressing. Is there no limit to what he can do? Is there no point at which you'll stop defending him?
>Any time the FBI “asks” a company to do something it’s immediately a form of coercion. Government law enforcement agencies shouldn’t be “asking” for anything unless it’s done under due process of law. Sorry but I 100% disagree.

By that logic, if there's a loud party in your apartment building, the police shouldn't be able to knock on the door where the party is going on to ask them to keep it down unless they already have an arrest warrant for disturbing the peace.

Does that sound about right? Because police should never be involved in anything unless there's a court order. Is that correct?
Those buerocrats weren’t able to construct either on their own, and already ran one space program into the ground. Why do you think they will do better this this time?

Also, what makes you think the buerocrats making up the buericracies are any less emotional when given vast resources? Government is known for wasteful and irrational spending on things such as roads to nowhere
> How do I get the backup of his tweets?

When the account appears again you run one of the many archiving tools that downloads tweets to a json file.

Preferably a tool that doesn’t require an API key.
I wonder if Jack Dorsey will get suspended as well, because he shares his Nostr account on his Twitter profile and Nostr is specifically mentioned among the prohibited social media sites.
Labor theory is an insufficient and poorly evidenced claim that does not align with reality.
Honestly it's hilarious to see the Elon worshippers turn against him. Paul Graham and Ryan Jones - check. Tim Urban, Andrej Karpathy, Sam Altman - no comment so far, but I suspect they're not on Elon team anymore. Lex Fridman - no chance, that guy would gladly follow him to grave.
This is capitalism. He'd be completely within his rights to buy Twitter for cash...then completely shut it down, pay off A/P & such, and liquidate all assets.
The best choice. Twitter was Twitter before Elon Musk and it could be Twitter again after Elon Tusk - although it is likely to tank unless he has the balls to move on before say 2024.

I wonder what's next...
The only accounts that I’ve felt really abuse “using Twitter to promote another site” are OnlyFans creators.
Time for a mass exodus. Seriously.

Anyone sticking around is hanging on to what they had in the old system.

That’s dead and gone. its time to move on.
Previous threads in this sequence:

Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34041985

Promotion of alternative social platforms policy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34040165

I moved 34041985 off the front page, partly because these are more or less the same story, but mostly because the traffic on this is boiling our poor server and I need to resort to tricks. Sorry all!

In case you're not aware: you need to click on the "more comments" links at the bottom of the pages to get to the rest of the thread; also, you can make HN faster by logging out when it's keeling over. (Make sure you know your password and/or have a usable email address in your profile before logging out!) Also, performance improvements shouldn't be too far off now... but not today.
That's not fair.
That and this is a huge deal, in today's times.

PG created this community, and elon musk is in charge of the other one. Who isn't coming to hacker news to see the comments?

Let the fun begin.
I wish, but it doesn't seem to be the case. Elsewhere in this thread:

> What do you all think would happen if you walked into Safeway parading around with a sign saying "Shop at Ralph's"?

It's honestly sad. It's like these people have nothing. Musk has taken advantage of that and given them meaning, but he is debasing and humiliating them in the process. And I assume he enjoys watching people still come to his defense despite nakedly lying to them and manipulating them.
Not ocdtrekkie and I hope you don't mind me adding my opinion: I'm on my own instance but I don't host it myself and that's what I'd recommend. Your home is your castle.

Just use any of the hosters, set up the DNS record and be done. It's pretty similar to hosted e-mail under your own domain and even cheaper than a Twitter Blue subscription.
It's amazing Mastodon is still so utterly disaster. Where are all the startups? Why is making Twitter clone so hard?
Maybe the bar for "good person" is set too low, if convicted tax frauds are considered good people.
Nah, nah man. The Zune theme is where it's at. Orange and black.
He is pretty clearly personally policing Twitter. The extent is unclear, but he is clearly doing at least some of it.
If this is true that that's inexclusable and shitty. Still legal(?), but not ethical. Looks like the they're being challenged in the court.

Whether firing was done ethically or not, I still think that Twitter was bloated af and needed trimming. The macroeconomic conditions led to a huge hiring spree for last 8 years of 0% interest rates. We fucked around in the silicon valley and we are about to find out.

Overall, on a national/GDP scale, we can use these employees for betterment of other things than wasting their time at FAANG/Twitter. I'd like to see 1000 lean and mean companies than 10 bloated FAANGs.
>Messi's captured the hearts of the casual World Cup fan unlike anyone else. I don't know a whole lot about soccer

How on earth do you reconcile these two sentences lol x)
Can someone with real knowledge on deployment and usage of these language tell where are they being used (beyond a dedicated hobbyist community)? Which industries? What systems? Volume of transactions?
Genuinely interested and will appreciate it.
Thank you in advance.
It's not obvious why you think this applies here.

If statistics showing Messi is a great player were just random we'd expect them to regress towards the mean. It's true that as he ages they have a little, but if we compare him to players who are also his age he remains a far outlier.

And even against the world's best, in the a tournament that matters (ie, this world cup) he ended up being the second highest goal scorer, second highest assist giver, highest chance creator and second highest dribble completer[1].

So yes, I'd like to understand how randomness applies here.

[1] https://www.foxsports.com/soccer/2022-fifa-world-cup/stats
Twitter is not an institution. It is not a utility. People can just leave and go to another website. It will take time for a new website or websites to figure things out at scale, both technologically and socially. But people were patient with twitter in the fail whale days and I assume they'll be patient with another service in the future.

This guy is running twitter like it's his personal website. Which, it is. But people prefer services offered by businesses instead of individuals, because businesses have stable incentive structures and fiduciary responsibilities. No one likes it when the rules change arbitrarily every week, so businesses don't do that.

This level of chaos just isn't sustainable. I would never have thought that twitter could lose a significant portion of its user base in a short period. But that could very well happen now, and it's crazy.
Don't give them any ideas. Could you imagine having to have separate subscriptions for O'Reilly, Shuster, and Penguin, etc.
>I think the software in general have problems with long/deeply nested comment chains

nah, look at twitter for example! i don't think that's the reason of HN being slow/not responding..
The question I was trying to ask is.

1. Are people in poverty or with mental illness more likely to choose MAID on their own.

or

2. Are there people actively trying to encourage vulnerable populations to choose MAID?
The TOS says any accounts that primarily focus on promotion of competitors will be banned, which, hm, but anyways. I think it’s obvious PG’s account was not primarily focused on links to other socials, so on to the next condition.

The TOS also says any accounts which post a direct link to such sites will be found in violation.

It does not say anything about purely mentioning the fact you have another social media (especially without saying the username), nor linking to a personal website, nor does it say anything about referring to where to find such a thing
It's baffling to me that Elon seems to be taking the opposite of a first-principles view on Twitter.

He fails to realize _why_ Twitter uniquely has the reach that it does. It's because it's platform-agnostic in a lot of ways. It's the base-level social protocol that all other platforms are adjacent to.

By removing that connection, it completely nerfs that influence and Twitter becomes just another social network.

I also fail to see how users could think this is reasonable considering Twitter has no way to upload long-form video. So how could YouTube be a competitor?

And the policy doesn't talk about Tiktok whatsoever, which is arguably an actual threat to Twitter, since it replaced Vine.

Overall, something's fishy.
There is no reason to assume that people don’t know of it simply because they don’t use it.

For me: annoying to use a modifier for a common key + doesn’t work on my keyboard.
Boy the bar for the “to be fair” crowd sure has slipped. To be fair, pg was only temporarily banned for acknowledging the existence of competing social networks!
Yeah, I don't think excessive Twitter use is healthy. Or at least not for a certain type of person.
He was totally better at masking a decade ago, I'll agree with that.
Is it really the equivalent of holding a rally? I think it's closer to being walked out of Walmart for wearing a Target shirt.
> https://mas.to/@paulg seems to have been hugged to death already :)

You can watch the account in your own instance (if someone on your instance has already followed him, which is likely for larger instances). Just go to https://example.org/@paulg@mas.to (replace the domain with your favorite instance's domain).

(Edit: fixed typo)
True, because of how necessary OS updates / security fixes are, sooner or later you're forced to upgrade, even on a "buy once" model. But in that model, at least there was still a chance of an effective user boycott.

When Windows Vista and Windows 8 released, people got mad, and enough of them stuck to Windows XP and Windows 7 that Microsoft had to address it, for example by going back on the Windows 8 start menu. Now that they're switching to this permanent license, free upgrade, model, that is going away. Thankfully Windows 11 is very boring, but if they pulled off another 8 start menu, there'll be no real way for people to avoid it or have their voice heard now.
Anyone got a copy of that, gone now.
This only happened 30min ago, hopefully this was just a rogue employee.
I am like you. I would prefer to buy once and own it instead of subscribing.
That's definitely not what he argues there. It's quite possible for 95% of hate to be mostly unfounded while that person is still worthy of hate. It's just that the existence of haters does not necessarily mean that person is hate-worthy.

The different rates and ways that various types of information travels through media (both social and not) and gets distorted by it are fascinating and there's probably been some good books written on them...
Out of curiosity I notice a handful of Hn users seem pretty frustrated at pg to the point of sticking a jab in whenever his name is mentioned. Obviously you can only speak for yourself, but I’m curious if there’s a common thread I’m not aware of leading to this personal bitterness?
Calling this a "blatant attempt at ban evasion" is uncharitable. What he wrote was, at most, arguably against the spirit of the rule. This is not even to speak of whether the rule is reasonable, or even just consistent with Elon's stated values.
So sad to see Alpha die off, especially since I haven't noticed any architectures with anything like PALCode spring up since. The Alpha's firmware was essentially a hypervisor that only supported a single guest, and the OS kernel had to upcall to the firmware for any privileged operations.

In particular, it would be nice to have userspace programs be able to take advantage of new/larger registers without requiring the OS kernel to support the extra CPU state. If the firmware (which presumably is available as soon as the new CPU ships) handles the context switch, then the OS kernel doesn't need an update.
I wish things like lubuntu, kubuntu, kde neon would also adopt the same or rebase themselves on top of Debian.
Also, preventing links to competitors is probably going to cost Twitter in the EU.

https://twitter.com/juddlegum/status/1604564509884030977?s=4...