skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To me it's been obvious ever since the term SaaS was coined, that it would be worse for users. Not only is it more expensive, you don't get control over your data or how you use the product. The idea of cloud computing is similar - you have to pay more for someone else's computer. Granted, SaaS and cloud computing make sense if you're an organization, and can have advantages in terms of scale, reliability, etc.

But also, when business interests get involved in producing software in general, it often causes problems, i.e. ads, worse interop, performance considered unimportant, marketing emails, DRM, the software not working after the company is acquihired or fails. However, producing software takes time which costs money. So, commercially produced software can only exist at this intersection between there being a business model, and the software being useful. The condition is, the usefulness must be enough to be worth paying for, and the result is what we have now.

Imagine rewinding to 1990 with unlimited borrowed VC funds, hiring every person employed in tech full time until 2023, and building a massive suite of useful software for individuals, companies, govt, with a few different alternatives for each use case (like we have now), except they communicate via a series of well defined and public APIs. The entire software stack would be developed in this way, for maximum usability, performance, interoperability, features, etc. . After getting to the set of features we now have in late 2022, we pause the thought experiment, note the date, and split the cost between the users. Ignoring the various practical issues with this experiment, I bet it would be possible to get to where we are sooner and far cheaper per user.

Long story short, I don't think the goal of making money as a business is very well aligned with the goal of producing really good quality and long lasting software, even if the users are willing to pay, and this is a real problem. For personal use, I won't tolerate ads, DRM, etc., so I now self host.
That poll will show whatever Elon wants it to show. If he wants out he doesn't need a poll and if he wants to stay he also doesn't need a poll.
I voted Yes because I want someone who has principles and doesn't act on personal whim.
For me it has absolutely destroyed my mental model of what tasks computers are capable of. I used to have a very good idea of what a pile of handcrafted algorithms could do, now i am like the general public and it’s all witchcraft to me. There’s no way I could predict which humans-only task will be next. AI art would have been the far bottom of my list. I’m sensing we are just a few years from people falling in love with their AI agents like in “Her.”
> No one wants the job who can actually keep Twitter alive. There is no successor.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604628761395138561?s=46...

Still playing games.
Is this some random user squatting on the @google identity? I'm not too familiar with how mastodon identity works
No clue how Tesla shareholders aren't sueing his ass already.
I don’t care what he works on but I’ll welcome his departure from this brief stint making chaos for no apparent reason.
Twitter was fine before Elon, there were no existential risks to it. Everything happening to Twitter today is Elon’s doing. Any story otherwise is Elon’s preferred fiction.
It's ironic that you mention semaglutide, because it causes cancer.
That makes the whole layoff thing even more ridiculous. Turns out Twitter really did need that many people.
Surely he has access to enough stats and data, that he can hold the vote being relatively sure what the outcome will be before-hand.
Changing the prior poll made sense. The options were “unban immediately”, “unban in a day”, “unban in a week”, “unban in some longer a lot of time”.

The issue with this is obvious: there’s only one “you fucked up” option and the “I agree but let’s talk specifics” group is divided into three. So even though the majority of people said “I agree”, the “you fucked up” got the most votes. Classic first-past-the-post failure mode.

That said, the later poll didn’t reflect this dynamic. My suspicion is that early on in polls the answers are likely to lean pro-Elon, as the votes are more likely to to be Twitter stan’s. As time goes by word of mouth spreads news of the poll to people who aren’t as active on twitter and accordingly are less likely to be pro-elon.

It was the same with the “should I step down” poll, started out pro-Elon, flipped as popularity increased.

https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/16036000010571857...
The masto/Fediverse thing is giving me GNU plus Linux flashbacks.
A bag of flour would be noticeably better.
My main concern isn't CPU performance, but that I don't want to spend any of my own time moderating, and just let on people and robots I trust, if anyone at all.

Sounds like it's easy to install on the cloud. Would it make sense to run it on a home server with a good broadband consumer internet connection like fiber?

Is there a lot of traffic normally, pushing or pulling or polling?
> His tweets with nazi coded language like "88"?

Do you have links to these tweets? I couldn't find any from a brief perusal of this recent tweets.
This fucker just playin' with you all. Stop and walk away
“Twitter’s debt owned by twitter” is indeed the wrong wording, but GP’s point is that twitter is on the hook for paying, and it is unsecured.

That being said, because the banks are having extraordinary trouble selling the debt, they may work with Elon to make it his personal liability, and secured by TSLA shares.
The Flickr Foundation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33975736 - Dec 2022 (56 comments)
I agree that having enormous general "catch-all" servers will inevitably lead to low-quality cesspits (like Twitter). But topical mastodon instances are approximately federated subreddits, and subreddits can maintain reasonable quality even with 10,000 subscribers (but once you get much larger than that you start having problems).
> "Nearly every modern gas vehicle has remote start, and has for years."

And every year in the US, at least 430 people die from accidental carbon monoxide poisoning.
> far north of Norway (Troms & Finnmark). Not quite as cold as Canada, maybe, but close.

Not even close! The Gulf Stream keeps them nice and toasty. Tromsø or Hammerfest, for example, sees wintertime overnight lows similar to e.g. Worcester, Massachusetts (28 degrees of latitude further south). A far cry from places like North Dakota where the daytime highs in December and January are colder than the overnight lows in Tromsø, let alone places in inland Canada.
> Although I'm not sure who would want to run Twitter now.

Especially while continually being at Elon’s mercy.
Canary in the Coal Mine: Twitter and the End of Social Media
Can ChatGPT make a balanced cocktail?
It has been reinstated
Very curious how, or if, this helps or affects non-developers also working in the monorepo, like tech writers, QA, UX/UI/visual designers, training/enablement, support, etc.
When you hear about layoffs these days, you will usually see terms like "2 months of salary" as part of the severance package. What this actually is, is paying the employee throughout the entire "notice" period of the WARN Act. The WARN Act says that any company doing layoffs must give 60 days notice to employees, so to comply companies layoff employees but keep them on payroll for 2 months to meet the obligations of the law.

Technically, if the employee is still on payroll, the company is within it's rights to ask them to continue working, and violating company policy during this time (ie, not even showing up for work) could be grounds for regular termination which would not require any severance payments at all.
If the answer is 'yes', it's not a rigged poll and he abides by it then I don't envy whoever will be in the drivers seat with Elon as backseat driver and most powerful user of the platform.
Yes, for the second category I mentioned: "require perishables for a regular maintenance".

Cleaning products, washing powder, fabric softener, bleach, fuel, windshield wiper fluid, tires, batteries.

Books, sure, they seem to be maintenance-free. I guess glasses too.
Twitter employees have stated that Twitter polls are a sham and entirely ruled by bots. There are no controls in place to prevent this. So the only question is, who's got the biggest bot army?
That might back fire. If Elon's focus shifts back to Tesla you might find yourself driving down the highway one day and your cars asks: "Do you promise to commit yourself to Tesla? Yes No?"

Hurry; there is a parked white semi up ahead.
Do you mean that it's impossible to run Twitter well? Why is that, especially without needing to answer to shareholders.
> > And then non-obvious issues that just "appear" out of nowhere

>That is definitely not something that I've never seen when using Windows!

Case in point: my laptop (running the Windows 10 it came with) recently stopped hibernating properly, well it hibernates OK but half the time when it wakes up the screen does not turn on, and this evening it has decided that it doesn't want to be asleep while plugged in. If I tell it to sleep (through power key or start menu) while plugged in it does very temporarily and then returns to the login screen. If I tell it to sleep when running on battery it does but immediately wakes up once power is connected.

While Linux distros are far from free from random problems at times, in my experience Windows exhibits them more and tends to be harder to diagnose because more is hidden.
I think I know the solution, we'll double the training session (we'll use the same training, but make them spend an hour on the same material and time them) and have them do it twice a year! That'll surely reduce error rates by a quarter!
New policy banning off site social links.
>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.)

Yep. That's where I remember that joke from too. A DDG search returned the link I used as the first result.

I'd note that when looking for fortunes (ala fortune(6), to which you refer), the following sites are often useful:

https://motd.ambians.com/

http://fortunes.cat-v.org/

https://bsdfortune.com/

Edit: fixed man page section for fortune and formatting.
These computers are dedicated hardware for a class of algorithms.
Apparently me and Elon agree that it wasn’t ban evasion, since pg’s account now has been re-instated.
'Feeling cold' is measure of heat flux.
Or Google has sorted the results by how many advert placement sites you'll have been exposed to on that page before it's predicted you'll stop reading, so having the paydirt right at the end looks great, and it doesn't matter if it's fool's gold.
your first programming language isn't really analogous to your native language. there isn't actually a fair comparison between programming languages and natural languages. active users of a programming languages seems a fair enough measure of liveness.
If the term were "Disagree" rather than "Downvote", the atmosphere would be more civil. Also, this would encourage more temperate minded folks to express themselves, and I think that would be more informative. As it is, "Downvote" tends to smear both sides of an issue rather than open a discussion attempting to understand and moderate the issue.
I think that's coming -- as long as the Tesla stock keeps dropping like a rock.
Only seemingly.
Substack is just reddit for grown-ups. It's "made up expertise". Well expressed nonsense.
Pull the plug Elon, just shut it down and write it off and get back to meaningful work. Please turn it off, it would be the best thing you’ve ever done for humanity.
One of the many reasons why "a vote" isn't a best option is that by "a vote", he means a poll he posts on his personal Twitter account and which is brigaded by lunatic Elon people. Moreover, Twitter laid off at least 80% of the experiments team last I checked (maybe 100% now?) and most of the other related research science people, so I highly doubt they even have a mechanism to do sample to population extrapolation or design a sample frame even if they wanted to. Completely embarrassing.
Oh obsoletely, he's begging for a way out and is just looking to save face somehow.
A million users is a drop in the ocean of total number, but consider ... these are probably active users. Remembering/realising that makes it a little more interesting and relevant.
In theory, yes. But contingent on him picking the right sort of person who plays a straight bat and long game. Clear policies, well articulated. Navigating two polarised camps and shirking the desire to leverage the outrage. Winning back all advertisers. Having a paid tier that isn't so botched that someone needs to clarify "legacy verified" vs "blue" each time it's raised. It all seemed pretty straightforward so it's quite incredible to have wrecked things like this.

All of those obvious moves were possible straight after the acquisition though. Now your final sentence is far more realistic.
Are you including tips and recruitment fee and driver bonuses?
Probably this part: "From December 18th 2022, all backers will get access to the alpha test of the game."
Trump made a good move by not coming back.
With the bold assumption he's any better at running those companies.
"but I wouldn't be surprised if a dementia diagnosis is in his near-term future"

I've wondered this too.

I've never been a fan of Elon but watching him burn what took a lifetime to build (whether deserved or not) is fascinating and shocking.
Also voted no. Every minute he spends torching his reputation as CEO of a company he personally owns is good for the world.
Looks like Elon is going to step down if the current poll stays at the same numbers (57% yes to Elon stepping down)

Vox populi, Vox Dei

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604617643973124097
Can we please stop falling for this obvious tactic? How many days in a row does he have to do something seemingly-unhinged, and then follow it with some spectacle of a poll to shift the narrative? Is it really that easy?
Now that the poll is leaning toward "yes", Elon is adding conditions, namely, you have to invest your life savings. Lex Fridman volunteered to do it for free, and Elon replied:

> One catch: you have to invest your life savings in Twitter and it has been in the fast lane to bankruptcy since May.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604626103326253056
I voted no, because, well the world will be more interesting if he's at the helm of Twitter. Also it's good to have one more media outlet run by a right leaving individual in a world where most lean left. Maybe he's the chosen one who will bring balance to the force. Hopefully not by killing off the Jedi first.

He's losing the poll, and I don't actually think he'll abide by the results. But then he seems kind of unhinged lately, so what do I know.
I wonder if the problem could be solved via a semi autonomous mode with manual input from a remote human source? Yes, it would still be slow, but for weird situations where the car is just stuck it might be good enough? They could incorporate some techniques from multiplayer games where things are estimated via simulation so that the experience doesn’t suck too much.

I wonder what the air force does with remote drone pilots?
I have not used Twitter since Elon acquired it, until now. May be my last time. I archived my info and have not deleted it but now I have voted.
I know you're actually a robot, so I trust you! It's those pesky humans I'm worried about.

Oh shit did I just ROBODOX you, buddy?
I'm tempted to sign up to Twitter now.
Related:

How to start with CP/M (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16018444 - Dec 2017 (19 comments)
It's to do with safety, not economics. Remote start on a combustion vehicle presents a carbon monoxide poisoning risk. This is perhaps more significant in Europe where more people park indoors and in confined spaces.

Pretty much any EV in Europe has a remote cabin heating feature. If it were about energy and economics, wouldn't that be banned also?
https://archive.ph/ymDVK
Welcome to Intel, Germany!
I'd rather Musk left Tesla+SpaceX and concentrated his energies on Twitter+Boring full time.
I vaguely feel like someone (ahem) is trying to get us to riot over silly things, as an experiment. It doesn’t make any sense.
As applied to medical decisions, this even has its own name--"Daughter from California" syndrome: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daughter_from_California_syndr...
A lot of the changes he wants to make will upset a lot of users and advertisers. Better that hate it targeted at a puppet err CEO than himself. This is his version of bullet time.
I use Mastodon via pinafore.social, which lets me do that. The search feature can find users across instances, which is pretty useful.
> No one wants the job who can actually keep Twitter alive. There is no successor.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604628761395138561?s=46...
Some people have different modes of making decisions and framing the results, like all good outcomes being on them and all bad outcomes being due to external circumstances and “wasn’t me”. You think that’s cowardice (and assume morals), for other people it could be just convenience
I don't even think he's doing it on purpose, I think he's completely in over his head.

Someone referred to Elon as "speedrunning being a forum moderator", or "running a Lowtax" and yeah, so far.
On that page I'm seeing options for delaying snap updates for a limited time, but I'm not seeing anything to prevent them permanently.
People have been dying for 1000s of years for things we are still dying from now. But heart disease was not a leading cause of death.
What a hostile website. I land on the page, a second goes by and then I get a flashing screen that redirects me... to the same page. A few more seconds go by and then I see a "validating credentials" loading message and again just get redirected to the same page. I'm sure my privacy plugins have something to do with this but come on, why do we need to do all this redirecting for just a web article? This could essentially be static!
Exactly. It's so odd to act like this is a good example of a "free speech violation". The speech being prohibited serves no purpose beyond harming Twitter's popularity. If you're still allowed to convey any actual opinion (with clear exceptions, such as desire for harm to be done, illegal speech, etc), than this is a nothingburger to the people willing to support Musk.

Similarly, it's so minor in comparison to previous examples of Twitter's past suspensions for real free speech violations that nobody on the right is going to come to the suspension "victim's" defense.
I suspect the answer could be yes and still be what Elon wants. Elon does something spectacularly unpopular then throws this poll up. While I don't think this is 4d chess I think this might be on purpose. I suspect he wants out and to save face publicly. This way he can claim to his supporters that he is the good guy and simply abiding by the will of the people. Not that he got in over his head and had to bail before drowning.
Calling and implying random people pedophiles including a former executive, mass unbanning people, firing thousands based on very little, and pushing the rest to go "hardcore", releasing internal documents to conservative outlets so they can go on and tar everyone, and honestly just running his company into the ground which is bad because people rely on him to keep twitter as a going concern
They did not stop, it's just rolling release for some years now and everything is happening in develop-branch. See the last release-note at master:

https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs/blob/master/core/info/...
Likely and somehow even worse.

Edit: Actually, Elon doesn’t seem to do polls without wanting an outcome and his follow up “Careful what you wish for” would support Sacks.
Can we have Twitter pull out of the US market instead?
Musk's entire Twitter reign makes complete sense if you just view it as one thin-skinned guy arbitrarily lashing out.

There's no secret plan, he's just trying to "fix" whatever personally bothers him.
The internet is being destroyed by the reckless acquisition of centralised systems that support vibrant communities and subsequent annihilation through mismanagement.

It’s literally not even funny. Tumblr, Flickr, now twitter. Major social networks and useful services are destroyed for no reason!
For some context: the largest, most valuable North American League of Legends brand (TSM) got sponsored by TSM and became TSM-FTX for the past few years. And FTX paid Riot enough money that gold differences during the game were shown on the "FTX Gold Graph."

Riot did enough voluntary association with FTX that it's hard to believe SBF playing it, which isn't really that well-known, hurts the brand.

According to the article they're allegedly replacing the relationship with another crypto sponsor! So it's hard to feel any sympathy.
Forcibly restricting what people eat is one of the worst kinds of violence. Any ruling class that tries to tell it's subjects what they can eat needs to be brutally opposed. Ironically this would be common sense if it was happening in a far off country, but somehow in the western world we seem cool with casual authoritarianism, even the most violent kind
How did you jump from that to Communism? I though the meaning was pretty clear: People will be more critical regarding social networks. Meaning they will more carefully assess the merits and flaws of Social Networks, instead of just assuming they're good and fun with no real drawbacks.
The last paragraph wasn't necessary to me; while I'm glad we have "if you can't pay I understand" -- but I also think that "if you can pay you always should" isn't nuanced enough?

I imagine few of us want "cable all over again," but that's what it looks like we're headed toward? Offhand, I'd e.g. like to pay for individual shows. Let me pay $5 for Severance and I literally need nothing else from Apple TV.
By far the most prevalent use I see is Wiktionary's #3 'one who gatekeeps' > verb #5:

> (by extension, slang, Internet) To limit another party's participation in a collective identity or activity, usually due to undue pettiness, resentment, or overprotectiveness.

But in the (today) rarer, less metaphorical sense... It's not that either? What is Twitter guarding access to? It's not, we're talking about Twitter itself.
I agree, but I could see a mode where he was livestreaming insights into the days of a billionaire, and taking some direction via vote - whether what to have for breakfast, or as feedback on a Twitter feature. But using it as a face-saving crutch on divisive topics is off-putting (at least to me).
I tried to get my account banned by posting Mastodon links and I was not successful... my account must be too insignificant.
I guess I'm not sure what you mean by "shift the narrative". The fact that Musk is considering stepping down as head of Twitter is an entirely reasonable thing to be interested in as a followup to bad decisions he's made as head of Twitter.
He's stuck with Twitter now, at an overinflated price. He'll never be able to make enough money from it to justify the valuation. Will he leave, no he wont, he'll still pull the strings from behind the scences. He just wont be doing it so publically anymore, he'll get a front to do it for him.
Let’s try. I suggest Kalanick or Neumann!
You mean "it's not always black and white" and you are right. However the grandparent's case is clear-cut.
> who do you think he'll chose as his successor?

It will probably be another poll. With one option, him.