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Smaller staff and smaller user base.

How much smaller user base? Looking at some recent data, which may not be accurate (but they're required to publish user numbers in the EU at least), it looks like the user base may be only 0-20% smaller compared to 2022.

https://www.similarweb.com/blog/insights/social-media-news/x...

https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/x-formerly-twitter-con...

https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/07/threads-is-nearing-xs-dail...

https://www.businessofapps.com/data/twitter-statistics/


Smaller ad customer base, too, and qualitatively less demanding.

if bots count as user base they're thriving

“The richest” !== “The best”.

Without you providing a countermeasure I'd say wealth is still best measure for creating value

Okay, to be explicit: The best engineering manager in terms of getting things done.

I have read that Musk was a complete cunt to the people working for him, long before he took over Twitter.


> The best engineering manager in terms of getting things done.

Beyond the joke truck thing, his car company hasn't released a new car in almost seven years. Twitter doesn't appear to have done much beyond release a few previously gated features (longer tweets, tweet editing, and the birdwatch/community notes thing were all things they were previously testing) since acquisition.

Like, I dunno, I'm not seeing it.


Erm, heard of Spacex ?

Twitter sacked a large %age of staff and kept going fine.

The Cybertruck failed because of marketing, not engineering, and I think we can assume Tesla will bring out some new products soon.


> Erm, heard of Spacex ?

Yes; they have yet to have a proper orbital launch with their new product; it's substantially behind schedule. The best engineering manager in terms of getting things done could surely do better.

> Twitter sacked a large %age of staff and kept going fine.

I mean, I'd hope "the best engineering manager in terms of getting things done" would add up to more than "the service hasn't substantially changed in three years, except in that it is rather more unreliable and that the spam prevention, never wonderful, seems to have broken down entirely". That seems extremely unambitious. Wasn't it meant to be "the everything app" by now?

> The Cybertruck failed because of marketing, not engineering

Fundamentally it failed because it was ill-conceived, but it also had fairly severe quality and design defects. No amount of _marketing_ would have saved it.

Again, I'm just not seeing anything that makes me think "bestest engineering manager ever". Actually, I see no reason to think that he has any recent experience as any sort of engineering manager _at all_; he appears to spend most of his time spouting nonsense on Twitter and failing at ill-conceived joint ventures with Donald Trump. Neither of these are generally considered to be part of the core skill set for engineering managers.


You're refuting a point he didn't make.

Programming was so much better 15 years ago, except for all the parts that sucked.

He's smart enough to know when he took it too far.

No, but the comment above and variations of it are mentioned in every thread about IBM, so it’s probably just a reflex at this point without much thought behind it.

This comment comes across as someone who is either trying to flog AWS to customers or someone who has to justify a job that depends on AWS.

Well, you're entitled to your opinion.

For what it's worth - my day job does involve running a bunch of infrastructure on AWS. I know it's not good value, but that's the direction the organisation went long before I joined them.

Previous companies I worked for had their infrastructure hosted with the likes of Rackspace, Softlayer, and others. Every now and then someone from management would come back from an AWS conference saying how they'd been offered $megabucks in AWS Credit if only we'd sign an agreement to move over. We'd re-run the numbers on what our infrastructure would cost on AWS and send it back - and that would stop the questions dead every time.

So, I'm not exactly tied to doing it one way or another.

I do still think though that if you're going to do a comparison on price and performance between two things, you should at least be somewhat experienced with them first, OR involve someone who is.

The author spun up an ECS cluster and then is talking about being unsure of how it works. It's still not clear whether they spun up Fargate nodes or EC2 instances. There's talk of performance variations between runs. All of these things raise questions about their testing methodology.

So, yeah, AWS is over-priced and under-performing by comparison with just spinning up a machine on Hetzner.

But at least get some basics right. I don't think that's too much to ask.


On the "value" question, it's worth considering why so many tech savvy firms with infra-as-code chops remain with GCP or AWS. It's unlikely, given how such firms work, they find no value in this.

FWIW, I firmly believe non "cloud native" platforms should be hosted using PXE-booted bare metal withing the physical network constructs that cloud provider software-defined-network abstractions are designed to emulate.


Maybe instead of "good value" I should be saying "the cheapest option" or "lowest $/unit of compute"

For value here in this thread I'm definitely meaning monetary value.


Bingo.

If we don't know how it got compromised, chances are this attack is still spreading?

Will the list of affected packages expand? How were these specific packages compromised in the first place?

These small models are very cheap for "good enough" translations. I just translated 6M comments on my platform with Gemma 32B and this model seems to be on par.

It's cheap enough that I'm currently doing a second pass where another model critiques and if needed, rewrites the original translation.


To English, I assume, for casual perusal? Before people unfamiliar with this topic start thinking small models are decent at translating between random language pairs. They're poor for translating "to" the overwhelming majority of languages and I wouldn't recommend using them for this purpose for anything user-facing.


Second run with same Gemma? Perhaps 12b would perform similarly or not?


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