skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I did my PhD under possibly the most narcissistic, ruthless, and petty professors anyone around me had ever heard of, so I might be able to comment on this.

I and the few people who managed to actually graduate with our sanity intact (out of like 50) learned to play this game you suggested where we have to play to their egos, and try and salvage their shitty, shitty ideas into workable projects that will end with us publishing. Every week they will suggest experiments that are nonsensical, and we will huddle and discuss how to do some preliminary work and present it in a way such that they will think it’s their idea to change it in a more productive direction.

When smart people are forced to work with egotistical pricks like this, I think it’s inevitable such a system comes in place.

The interesting thing is my professor kinda knew we do this, he just acknowledged it as part of the dance of their system. For Better or worse this shitty lab actually put out a drug that helps patients (I constantly think about how and why that happened). Could this lab have been more productive? Absolutely. Would this lab have existed without these people though? Probably not though.

The question here is whether Elon is aware this is why spacex and Tesla succeeded or he’s too deranged now to remember it. Looks like it’s the latter and that just sucks. My professors too have gotten unhinged (they’ve been literally pushed out of two universities and an entire country, though they always find another sucker, which at this point is the wellcome institute lol). When you’ve been doing this shitty shtick for too long I suppose it gets to you.
Musk has completely lost the plot.
Banned for posting a link to his personal website (which has links to his other social media profiles)

Ridiculous.
"Villain" isn't the word I'd use, but he has been increasingly indulging in gleeful cruelty and childish nonsense, both of which are very off putting.

I also admire his car and rocket businesses, but he seems to have gotten sucked deeply into the very online culture war grievance trap in the past few years, to the point that it now seems to be taking up essentially all of his time now. It's really a shame to see.
This guy helped me find my love for computers and all things tech back in the late 90s. Call for Help and The Screen Savers sent my life in a very particular direction, and I regret none of it.

So yeah, the bs headline gave me a mini panic and quite frankly pissed me off. Sad to see the current state of what gets posted on HN.
PG’s account is now suspended by Twitter.

The ironic thing is that one of his latest posts was about dumb people and identity politics.

The whole group of tech luminaries turned political whiners just goes to show that it’s time for a new generation and they should not bend the knee for the last one but forge their own way.
>Standalone software keeps working more or less forever regardless of the company.

That may be true for Windows, but it isn't true for Mac (unless you never upgrade your computer).

I have been writing and supporting the same piece of commercial software since 2005 on Windws and Mac. v1 of my software probably still works on Windows 11. Not a chance on Mac (it has gone PowerPc -> Intel -> Arm in that time!).
Leaving aside the hypocrisy angle of mastodon et Al. This is opinion dressed in the language of facts. Loads of places have contracts like "if you leave early you have to pay us back". Running your society like that is a political choice. The Chinese government would probably say the society that poaches doctors from poor communities is the bad one.
Yup, it's exactly that deference that gives people like Musk a permission structure to thrive as sociopaths. pg is part of the problem.

Leaders need to have enough integrity and humility to admit when they're wrong. Giving them a pass for being "eccentric" denies them opportunity for self-correction.
Yes it is barely accessibly from a location in Europe. Httping gives me 1-2 seconds. Other sites hosted in the US are fine (for me).
Yeah, maybe an unintentional DDOS from Twittee/Elon
Japan has historically had a culture of waffling between being extremely open to the outside world and being extremely insular. The period is measured in decades, probably up to 100 years. Wonder if this is correlated with a cultural shift that peaked in the 1980s?
He didn't even post the link directly, just said that it was on his site.
Fuck slack. Treat it like email.

Batch it on an a regular schedule. Set boundaries publicly with its use.
Possibly malicious enforcement by Twitter staff in light of https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604593057676300288

“Casually sharing occasional links is fine, but no more relentless advertising of competitors for free, which is absurd in the extreme”
As a parallel, there are plenty of people that speak Latin.
Definitely not just you, I see the same thing.
This is insane. Elon Musk himself [replied to @paulg](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604258004706201602) not even 24 hours ago. I bet this will be reversed (quite possibly along with the new anti-competitive, anti-free speech policy) but if not, this feels like an unprecedented death knell.
> Edit: I guess Paul won't be going back to Twitter because his account just got suspended...

I had hopes Elon would be good for Twitter, but this is just comedic
pg's twitter was amazing archive of insightful content. How do I get the backup of his tweets? I always thought it will be there all the time. Does he has backup that he can share? I am all but stunned right now. Need time to process this.
Elon is literally trying to deny the severance packages he promised to give. How is this amazing?

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/12/musk-brings-spac...
They had lots of FTT too.
Can confirm, had to reload new page twice to look for this exact thread.
Ask HN: Best way to read HN threads on e-ink device?
I noticed I bookmark a lot of interesting HN threads, because there are often 200+ comments and I don't have time to read them all. As the collection of bookmarks is now quite big, I wanted to read one thread every night before bed on my kindle device.

Can someone suggest what would be the best way to achieve this? I would like to download all the comments at once and have the same functionality of "collapsing" comments on the kindle if possible.
This is beyond ridiculous. Twitter has given me so much over the years and it’s dismantled in days
Wow. PG did not even post any links, he pretty much just said "I have a Mastodon account." And just like that, banned.

Looks like now you're not allowed to so much as mention that you use other websites on the internet besides Twitter.
HN is minimalism with less than 65kB resources to download. This is a deliberate decision, it works very well and it is usually very fast (not right now though).

Mastodon on the other hand downloads 2.6MB resources to display what exactly? Some tiny images, three posts and an ad. That does not look like a winner.
I’m guessing you haven’t been keeping up with the news. 2FA not working for some, countries missing from account recovery process, axes Twitter Spaces after being criticized by a journalist, and last bit not least…he seems to have decided he will not pay severance.
He also predicted no COVID cases by April 2020 when a rock knew that yes it will take a long time.
The written policy contradicts his statement.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanessa_Williams
Then there would be at least two people misremembering. He wanted to navigate the tight system of a water filled cave with a submarine and felt insulted that his idea was non-sense. The rescue operation involved divers holding their oxygen tanks in front of them to squeeze through holes.
The situation with Twitter has gotten so ridiculous that it's pretty much impossible to comment substantively on this topic at this point.

So: lol
Free speech!
This was posted on here two weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33864660
>Watergate.

Fair point, my bad -- I'm a millennial, that's before my time, I'm giving my thoughts as someone who became old enough to stop violating COPPA around "Indecision 2000".

>Also my impression has been that NYTimes definitely does geopolitics - Earth laughably and famously turned "flat" in NYTimes editorial pages

My impression was WaPo is run by the CIA, and NYT is run by like, at least nine eyes[1]. (With the usual France vs USA bullshit continuing on from the cold war playing out in the opinions pages)

>Wall Street Journal represents the establishment's (petite) capitalist class -- this is why things like Theranos get pounded on by WSJ: the petite capitalist class depends on the fairness of the system.

I can't comment either way on WSJ because heir paywall works too well LOL -- I haven't read it in years.

Forbes was good tho -- that's how I discovered one of my favorite journalists before they moved on to the Times. And I'm not exactly uh... petite... nor particularly capitalist myself. I'm a fan of democracy. Representative or otherwise, take your... pick... but capitalism is an economic system, not a political system, and conflating the two is the path to totalitarianism IMHO :-)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_of_Providence
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UKUSA_Agreement#9_Eyes,_14_Eye...
Why Mastadon rather than nostr or farcaster?
snap keeps the last three revisions, doesn't it?
I think this is a link to the mIRC issue:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33864660

(Whatever perf issue HN is happening makes it hard to figure out right now)
For me it takes almost 10 seconds to load from Sweden/Stockholm. So it may indeed be some sort of service issue.
paulg has now been banned from twitter (presumably for noting that he was making a mastadon account)
https://twitter.com/paulg
Same here, at times. Login page took good 3 sec to show, login submit about the same. This page itself though, arrived promptly. Parts of hn are struggling with something.
> banning of links to Mastodon

I’d like to point out that this is what everyone says is happening, but actually that’s not what’s happening.

Twitter allows linking to other social networks as long as that’s not the only thing you do. Twitter is suspending accounts which were made sorely for linking to another network. (The mastodon account was only used for promoting mastodon’s alternative social network).

Here is a thread by twitter which explains the policy: https://twitter.com/twittersupport/status/160453126541959168...

This FUD is almost on crypto twitter levels, and this is very behavior is very unusual for HN.

(I don’t mean you specifically, a lot of people and even major news outlets got this wrong)
lol. Twitter is a joke now. How sad.
Account suspended.

Guess you are.
He mentioned the M word and got suspended for it.
It's just "enforcement", there's nothing malicious about it. Elon Musk is the CEO and policymaker of Twitter now, he's responsible for the actions his company takes.
This is getting too comical.
Well Oiled Engineering Teams
Ted Cruz (Republican senator from Texas) comes up for re-election in 2024. Couple of remarks about Cancun every time the weather gets a bit chilly, update some of the fun memes from the 2016 presidential primary... and maybe Cruz himself is considering another go at the White House.

Or perhaps that was the situation at the beginning of this year, and one of Musk's motivations for moving to Texas, beyond his previously-stated ones.
There is an 'in Soviet Russia' joke in there somewhere but I'm not going to get burned like that ;)
Firefox on the release channel downloads updates automatically. And it applies the updates when you next restart the browser. This does not interrupt your browsing in any way. Which I think is fair decision for a browser with a large attack surface.

Most other software should only update when specifically instructed to.
When it's our side o propaganda getting promoted and the other side censored it's "start your own platform, private companies don't owe you anything". When it's our side of propaganda getting censored it's "death of free speech".
> and in some cases legally required, work

Are we talking EMI compliance or surveillance backdoors? :)
Don't say anything that could be seen as positive about Elon Musk unless you are the founder of this website.
> according to Statistics Norway, in 2021 almost 6,000 million kilometres driven by passenger cars were powered by electricity. The total number of kilometres driven by passenger cars was 35,000 million, so EVs still account for less than 20%.

(I just stuck your comment into Google.)
Lolllllllllllllll. I'm sorry, but in all seriousness, that really is all there is to say about this. I guess he is leaving Twitter after all!
I feel terrible for Paul — imagine having a decade of work wiped out overnight. Hopefully it’s not permanent.
But buying twitter for billions more than it's worth and driving it into the ground _might_ mean that you aren't smart
Perfect. It’s not like the gov to pass the buck to a corpo.
absolutely. colbert-eating-popcorn.gif
I went through this with my then 94-year-old grandfather a couple of years ago.

I ultimately came away from the situation realizing that things only got done when you actively threaten people and force them take action.

Doctor doesn't want to properly follow up on a stage-iv foot ulcer and home wound care misses scheduled appointments? Ok, we're going to the ER and telling them that the doctor doesn't respond to his service and home care didn't show up. Had to do that several times but eventually doctors and home care got tired of getting yelled at (by me and by whomever at the hospital system they reported too, because, ER staff was unhappy) that home care and doctors visits were much more regular.

Sadly 94 with a foot ulcer only ends one way and in the hospital post-amputation doctors were deflecting responsibility for his ongoing care and basically leaving him on a post-op ward with minimal PT/OT and extremely limited interaction due to COVID restrictions. A JACO complaint resulted in a meeting at the hospital with about 16 doctors in attendance. I started the conversation by telling them "Your inaction is killing my grandfather and before we leave here today we will find a solution because I will not allow you to murder him". My aunt (who was there) described me as "a bit much" but within 24 hours he was moved home with appropriate support, multiple PT/OT daily, 24-hour home care, nursing visits, etc.

Sadly 94 with an amputation only ends one way and within 6 months he reached a point where we knew the end was near. We enrolled in a home hospice program but the end came quickly. Hospice, despite promising 24/7 coverage and promising quick response times, failed in the end and despite repeated calls over his final day nobody showed up. Eventually, only threatening to call 911 (because we were desperate) and saying we would tell 911 that hospice care was non-responsive resulted in a nursing dispatch, but, it was too late.

The American health care system seems to require one to stand up and scream sometimes to get help. Doctors, nurses, etc are individually great people but they all have their own myopic opinions of the situation which my grandfather was not the center of. Getting things done requires reorienting them and making them realize you will not settle and that medical opinion is both only an opinion but also only one part of a large equation. (Yes, perhaps, PT/OT techs in Dr X's experience are better in sub-acute rehab facility X, definitely they will do 3x daily instead of 2x daily, but being completely isolated (no family visits due to COVID) is a completely dominating concern and not even a medical one.)

Every regret I have from that year is from not pushing people harder, everything I'm proud of is from when I did.
I’ve had the exact same though about George Lucas. Having constraints often forces us to listen to other people, take on advice we don’t want to hear, and tamp down our worst excesses.

When all external constraints are taken away, it’s probably much more of a challenge to stay grounded.

Incidentally, this latest action immediately brought to my mind a Star Wars quote:

“The more you tighten your grip, Elon, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.”
Re your PPS, maybe it’s not the platform but the users of the platform. Maybe Elon’s long game is to get the toxic users off the platform. It has a lot more value with diverse views (meaning ideas you disagree with) than the current echo chamber.
Same. It's sad how quickly this is getting absurd.
This is just vindictive behavior. Wouldn't be surprised if Musk authorized it personally
Paul Graham was suspended from twitter now.
I'm less concerned about the occasional unintentional f'up, and much more concerned about the targeted and politically motivated intentional leaking of information.
Mostly this because you can easily tell when the switch occurs on your mpg gauge, but also increased friction from higher viscosity of lubricants, denser air and subsequent drag increase, increased tire rolling resistance etc
Analogy of tyrant in other thread is very apt. Reminds me of Caesar who won impossible wars, gained huge respect and then took over the senate while still claiming that Rome was a republic. Interestingly he became dictator only because all other nobles thought he must be doing something right if he won all he impossible wars.
Can be found at @paulg@mas.to
I've self-hosted email and error reporting for decades.
There are less interesting ways to set $40B on fire I suppose.
They acquired a competitor, doubling their headcount. Two weeks later, I was being let go.
This.

Continuing to give him the benefit of the doubt just reeks of

> I can be tricked by anyone who looks like Mark Zuckerberg.

And yes, I know that was a joke but obviously the unconscious bias is quite strong, stronger than a lot of these investors want to admit.
This doesn't really do it justice, but keep A Pattern Language in your bathroom. There are 253 patterns in the book and they generally are around 4 pages or less. Consuming it a few minutes at a time is wonderful, giving you time afterwards to mull over each pattern and their interaction with other patterns.

And you don't need to read it front to back, jumping to a random point is fine too.
It’s getting really hard for Musk supporters to justify him.
How FIFA Silenced a World Cup Armband Campaign
You've had the US President tweeting a lot. I'm sure the US government could replace Twitter with a bespoke version of Twitter if they didn't want to use Mastodon. Similarly there are news publications like the NYT which could operate their own bespoke Twitter. Reuters and the Associated Press basically already manage some services which could be described as a bespoke Mastodon instance. Who are the Twitter users who matter who can't afford to operate their own Mastodon server?

I'm not suggesting any individual do so, but this is not rocket science. I feel like maintaining a physical building is probably harder, so any organization with a physical building that has ~100+ members should be able to do this - and enough organizations doing this could replace Twitter.
Show HN: I made a feature rich alternative to OneTab. Supatabs
I'm not obsessed with Carmack, so I honestly don't know what has been said about him one way or the other. But really this is just a coat rack to hang a point about the epistemology of the argument.

>Yeah well, you're anonymous...Carmack has proven enough times in the past that he's able to deliver, that he can push technology

In a follow up agreeing with him

>The person’s whole story was entirely based around their anonymous word

And later still

>A word with a name behind it.

So what's being implicitly said here is "I judge what's true based on the authority of the source". The premise is John Carmack is an asshole, and the attempt to refute it is "I have it on good authority he isn't", and when you dig into that claim the authority is either Carmack himself or a tech news org article. Well, when you stop and think about it, tech news has no interest in learning or publicizing if he's an asshole.

Unless you worked with him, everything you know about Carmack is just something you read somewhere. But there is no root of the reputation tree. Reputation comes from nowhere. Its all just bits of text being trusted because they looks like other bits of text you previously trusted. Nothing ever grounds the Carmack story in something else you can observe. We have no way to test if we are in a PR manicured version of the truth or not. Claims about him are both unfalsifiable and inconsequential and reduce to insisting a preferred source of narrative is more reputable than the others.

As far as I know, he only exists as a concept which is written about in websites I frequent. I'm a John Carmack Truther. There is no John Carmack. The CIA made him up as part of MK Ultra II. I read it on a very reputable online forum.
Elon Musk is going the way of Will Smith in terms of public goodwill and adoration!

There's no turning back!
He said in that second thread that he is not actually leaving Twitter.
If the same techniques would have been applied to Tesla and SpaceX the result would be different. I guess there must be quite a few people much smarter than Musk behind the success of those companies.

Calling abusive and intolerant behaviour "eccentric" is really weak.
Wait also the date is literally right there on the diploma so idk where the no date statement comes from - that frankly calls the credibility of that "reporting" into question when it literally says anno salutis mcmxvii right on the image they've annotated with the claim that the diploma doesn't contain the date
Not quite. This was his ultimate tweet:

>This is my last straw. I give up. You can find a link to my new Mastodon profile on my site.

The tweet itself did not contain a link to http://www.paulgraham.com/, which contains a link to his Mastodon profile. Apparently that was enough to be suspended.
I was there four months in total. They acquired a competitor two weeks before I was let go. I can connect the dots.
This is hilarious.

I’ve been thinking that pg was probably invited to invest (earlier in 2022). Would be cool to hear his reasoning for turning it down at the time.
this is so bad. at this rate it's over for twitter - the tech liberetraian folks are getting disenfranchised, when usually, they're the supporters of Elon antics. Wild

Curious to see how other platforms react. Beginning to see a huge opportunity manifest
well, guess again!
That moment may be much closer than we think.
Where interpretation of "casually" and "occasional" is left to the Emperor.
No, Twitter left him.
I have no inside info of Twitter besides being an interested bystander, but it seems like he's flat out ignored advice (and later fired the advice givers) at multiple points since taking over. I'm sure anyone left is only still around by being a yesman.
Same for me and I was surprised how many people I know were already there. I didn't do the statistics for a while but for the people I follow on Twitter it was 10% on 22-11-06 and 23% on 22-11-29.
It is indeed a cheap script boy for me as well

It does mundane work exceptionally well
> They supposedly have an entire handbook on "managing Elon" for deflecting his weird requests and framing things in a way that doesn't provoke his ire.

I heard that too. Is it just a rumour or do we know this is true?

And if it's true at SpaceX, is it also true at Tesla?
Doesn't Accenture offshore a lot of its work to India and other third-world countries?

So the Accenture engineer probably gets paid a lot less than you.

Edit: According to Wikipedia, yes:

> In 2015, the company had about 150,000 employees in India,[31] 48,000 in the US,[32] and 50,000 in the Philippines.[33]

Edit2: s/outsource/offshore, thanks. What I intended was: companies hire Accenture to outsource their development work to third-world countries.