12 ms·

My opinion of geohot definitely dropped after he started tweeting how easy it would be to fix Twitter, and then he started soliciting free work. He obviously un

My opinion of geohot definitely dropped after he started tweeting how easy it would be to fix Twitter, and then he started soliciting free work. He obviously underestimated the difficulty of shipping a feature across web and mobile. Hacking a prototype is trivial. Making it work well for all platforms, fully accessible, and across all supported languages is a bigger hurdle. It just gave me the impression that he thought frontend development was trivial and he'd just be able to hack it out in a day.

anonymoushn 3y ago
Twitter doesn't work well and isn't accessible so we needn't burden every product change with these additional concerns.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
godelski 3y ago
For me it was when he said that the cardinality of integers is the same as real numbers. Then I saw his twitter and all the politics and crazy stuff about QM.
- krick 3y ago
  > the cardinality of integers is the same as real numbers That's definitely more outrageous than saying that frontend is trivial. Whatever, I never took him seriously anyway.
  - GauntletWizard 3y ago
    Isn't that just a trivial misunderstanding of Hilbert's Hotel? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert%27s_paradox_of_the_Grand_Hotel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert%27s_paradox_of_the_Gra...
    - godelski 3y ago
      Either he's: Trying to be edgy for edgy's sake or he bragging about how he's smarter than the experts in the field while demonstrating a lack of understanding (thinking he doesn't have to prove it to others, they should just trust him). Neither give me that great of an opinion of him. If you don't understand something don't tell everyone that studies the thing that they're wrong. If the experts are wrong, show them, embarrass them, get a fields metal, another million dollars, and a shit ton of fame. Essentially, pony up or shut up.
    - lordnacho 3y ago
      This got me thinking, is there a scenario where the number of new guests is uncountable? Seems to me that every kind of ferries/buses/guests story is just going to be countable, since a finite number of countables is still countable. Maybe something that pretends to be the real numbers, like a matrioshka doll of infinite containers inside containers.
      - luplex 3y ago
        The easiest analogy I can come up with is an infinite pipe that's completely full with water. When a new amount of water arrives, say 1 Liter, all the water just flows along the pipe a bit further to make space for the new water.
      - godelski 3y ago
        In the hotel fashion, might be difficult. Think of it this way, if we make the Hilbert Hotel infinitely tall and each floor has infinitely many rooms such that they correspond to each rational number, we can fill any number of people from any source on the first floor alone. I think we could only do this with an even more absurd scenario like if each room was filled with pregnant women who are giving birth, and the children rapidly age, and also give birth at an infinite rate? That would create an infinite nesting doll like situation for each guest
- ly3xqhl8g9 3y ago
  Some light, coffee reading "Cardinality of the continuum" [1]: in short, the cardinality of real numbers (ℝ) is often called the cardinality of the continuum, and denoted by 𝔠 or 2^ℵ_0 or ℶ_1 (beth-one [2); whereas, interestingly [3], the cardinality of the integers (ℤ) is the same as the cardinality of the natural numbers (ℕ) and is ℵ_0 (aleph-null) [perhaps what was meant initially?]. Related: the Schröder–Bernstein theorem [4], "if there exist injective functions f : A → B and g : B → A between the sets A and B, then there exists a bijective function h : A → B.". Not related, but great: Max Cooper (sound) and Martin Krzywinski (visuals) did a splendid job visualising "ℵ_2" [5]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinality_of_the_continuum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinality_of_the_continuum [2] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E2%84%B6 https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E2%84%B6 [3] "Cardinalities and Bijections - Showing the Natural Numbers and the Integers are the same size", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuJwmvW96Zs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuJwmvW96Zs [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6der%E2%80%93Bernstein_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6der%E2%80%93Bernstei... [5] "Max Cooper - Aleph 2 (Official Video by Martin Krzywinski)", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNYfqklRehM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNYfqklRehM
  - orra 3y ago
    Quite. Then there is the question, is the cardinality of the continuum the first cardinality bigger than the cardinality of the naturals? It turns out the 'continuum hypothesis' can be true or it can be false. Neither contradicts standard ZFC set theory: the hypothesis is 'independent'.
    - ly3xqhl8g9 3y ago
      One way to think about it would be to replace or with and: the continuum hypothesis can be true and false: it is a 'polycomputational object' [1]. [1] Using the concept of polycomputing from There’s Plenty of Room Right Here: Biological Systems as Evolved, Overloaded, Multi-Scale Machines: "Form and function are tightly entwined in nature, and in some cases, in robotics as well. Thus, efforts to re-shape living systems for biomedical or bioengineering purposes require prediction and control of their function at multiple scales. This is challenging for many reasons, one of which is that living systems perform multiple functions in the same place at the same time. We refer to this as 'polycomputing'—the ability of the same substrate to simultaneously compute different things, and make those computational results available to different observers.", https://www.mdpi.com/2313-7673/8/1/110 https://www.mdpi.com/2313-7673/8/1/110
- mach1ne 3y ago
  To be fair, infinity is not a concept that is in any way well understood or defined.
  - varjag 3y ago
    It is quite thoroughly studied in mathematics, and that particular issue has a definitive answer.
    - mach1ne 3y ago
      It does not. Logical outcomes that use infinity as an intermediary are inherently not reliable. An example of this is the Ramanujan summation where 1+2+3+... results in -1/12, an outcome which is disputed among mathematicians due to the fact that we have not defined the concept of infinity properly.
      - varjag 3y ago
        What does it have to do with cardinality of continuum, with several proofs since Cantor?
      - godelski 3y ago
        > Ramanujan summation That's not a sum in the traditional sense so don't think about it this way. Infinities are used quite often in mathematics for rather mundane things. Calculus doesn't work without it. It is also quite important to the foundation of many other areas but this is often hidden unless you get into advanced works (in this sentence we're not considering a typical undergraduate Multivariate Calculus, PDEs, or Linear Algebra as "advanced")
        FreakLegion 3y ago
        Calculus works fine without infinity. Finitism is basically a philosophical position without practical consequences. Plenty of serious people have planted their flag there. I don't find it particularly surprising that someone who works with computers, especially at a low level, would be drawn to it.
baby 3y ago
I don’t remember that he said it was easy, I read some of his tweets and listened (twice) to the twitter space he did with elon and the big take away for me was that he was convinced twitter wouldn’t be able to move much without a heavy refactor. I can believe that. Elon who disagreed with him at the time seemed to have changed his mind now.
pavlov 3y ago
Why is Twitter such a Waterloo for all these obviously accomplished people? It seems like they've been assuming Twitter is the way it is because it was staffed by technically incompetent leftists, and if only they could apply their own get-things-done attitude and "neutral" politics, then the problem would be trivially fixable. Where does this fallacy come from? Is it because of the illusory simplicity of the tweet format? Something like: "We just need to come up with the right algorithm and do an embarrassingly parallel run over these tiny 280-character chunks of text. How hard can that be. In my own Very Serious Day Job, I deal with oompabytes of very complex data. This tweet processing stuff should be child's play in comparison."
- lordnacho 3y ago
  It's because of scale. Very complicated algorithms and mathematical proofs can still be understood by a single person, and be explored by a small number of people who all know each other. Brain surgery is done by a small team of people. These are typical "smart people" occupations. Something as simple as Twitter still needs machinery that spans across technical skills, needs 24 hour monitoring, and needs lawyer and accountant support, so nobody can actually to it. People think they can do it, because it's easy to spin up a demo that sends messages to a few thousand people and then shut it down again. They don't think about how to scan for CSAM, or how to respond to foreign government censorship requests.
- gettodachoppa 3y ago
  Well, when Elon Musk took over and gutted half the staff, I distinctly remember HN full out of outrage and predicting (in hindsight, "impotently wishing" would be more accurate) doom and how Twitter will go down any day now. Then nothing happened. At least, nothing that I personally observed as a casual Twitter reader. The goalposts were moved to "it will go down with the New Year's Eve spike", and once again nothing happened. Then the narrative became "the cracks will only be noticeable in a few months", and here we are and yet again, nothing. So Musk and Geohot came out as the saner voices of that whole debacle. Of course Geohot said exaggerated things like "you only need 40 engineers to run Twitter", but if it turns out it takes 300 engineers, then I would consider this as Geohot being proven mostly right.
MangoCoffee 3y ago
agree. he was talking about how he can do this and that to fix Twitter then just fizzled, blame the Twitter's code and said Twitter need to rewrite from the ground up.
spaceman_2020 3y ago
People completely forget how complex things can get when you have to serve millions of users across platforms, devices, countries, and accessibility settings, and all of it needs to work because you've got hundreds of millions of advertising dollars paying for views and engagement.
- ilyt 3y ago
  The first part is also probably far easier than the second, and lawyer work to comply with various laws so you can actually get paid. ...that doesn't change a fact there are some failures where developers really should know better and design it less shit
blitzar 3y ago
> how easy it would be to fix ... obviously underestimated the difficulty of ... If I had a dollar for every job that I didnt get where I estimated the correct degree of difficulty, and they laughed, went with the person who said it would be easy and they could bang it out in a day of sleeping - I would be rich. The loud optimist wins the 5.1 mil every time.
- consp 3y ago
  That's because there is no penalty for being late in many projects. As soon as there is, this doesn't happen anymore but in software there hardly ever is any real penalty. As soon as there is a dead serious one, I've noticed everyone get serious and starts ignoring the rainbows and unicorns people. If it's a slap on the write the rainbows still win.
ilyt 3y ago
To be entirely fair many things would be easy to fix if you can throw away everything and make clean implementation. It's the existing codebase and data that makes that difficult. Of course, he should know better than to throw claims like that.
ncr100 3y ago
His attitude towards society appears not to be one of being serious, and legally correct, at all times. It's likely there was some humor and bravado, as is the culture of his east coast origins. The truth of his engagement with Twitter was, Just based on my watching him and his live streams during that time, that he was looking for a thing to do while he ceded control over comma AI, to a new executive leadership group.

anonymoushn 3y ago

Twitter doesn't work well and isn't accessible so we needn't burden every product change with these additional concerns.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

godelski 3y ago

For me it was when he said that the cardinality of integers is the same as real numbers. Then I saw his twitter and all the politics and crazy stuff about QM.

krick 3y ago
> the cardinality of integers is the same as real numbers That's definitely more outrageous than saying that frontend is trivial. Whatever, I never took him seriously anyway.
- GauntletWizard 3y ago
  Isn't that just a trivial misunderstanding of Hilbert's Hotel? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert%27s_paradox_of_the_Grand_Hotel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert%27s_paradox_of_the_Gra...
  - godelski 3y ago
    Either he's: Trying to be edgy for edgy's sake or he bragging about how he's smarter than the experts in the field while demonstrating a lack of understanding (thinking he doesn't have to prove it to others, they should just trust him). Neither give me that great of an opinion of him. If you don't understand something don't tell everyone that studies the thing that they're wrong. If the experts are wrong, show them, embarrass them, get a fields metal, another million dollars, and a shit ton of fame. Essentially, pony up or shut up.
  - lordnacho 3y ago
    This got me thinking, is there a scenario where the number of new guests is uncountable? Seems to me that every kind of ferries/buses/guests story is just going to be countable, since a finite number of countables is still countable. Maybe something that pretends to be the real numbers, like a matrioshka doll of infinite containers inside containers.
    - luplex 3y ago
      The easiest analogy I can come up with is an infinite pipe that's completely full with water. When a new amount of water arrives, say 1 Liter, all the water just flows along the pipe a bit further to make space for the new water.
    - godelski 3y ago
      In the hotel fashion, might be difficult. Think of it this way, if we make the Hilbert Hotel infinitely tall and each floor has infinitely many rooms such that they correspond to each rational number, we can fill any number of people from any source on the first floor alone. I think we could only do this with an even more absurd scenario like if each room was filled with pregnant women who are giving birth, and the children rapidly age, and also give birth at an infinite rate? That would create an infinite nesting doll like situation for each guest
ly3xqhl8g9 3y ago
Some light, coffee reading "Cardinality of the continuum" [1]: in short, the cardinality of real numbers (ℝ) is often called the cardinality of the continuum, and denoted by 𝔠 or 2^ℵ_0 or ℶ_1 (beth-one [2); whereas, interestingly [3], the cardinality of the integers (ℤ) is the same as the cardinality of the natural numbers (ℕ) and is ℵ_0 (aleph-null) [perhaps what was meant initially?]. Related: the Schröder–Bernstein theorem [4], "if there exist injective functions f : A → B and g : B → A between the sets A and B, then there exists a bijective function h : A → B.". Not related, but great: Max Cooper (sound) and Martin Krzywinski (visuals) did a splendid job visualising "ℵ_2" [5]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinality_of_the_continuum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinality_of_the_continuum [2] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E2%84%B6 https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E2%84%B6 [3] "Cardinalities and Bijections - Showing the Natural Numbers and the Integers are the same size", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuJwmvW96Zs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuJwmvW96Zs [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6der%E2%80%93Bernstein_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6der%E2%80%93Bernstei... [5] "Max Cooper - Aleph 2 (Official Video by Martin Krzywinski)", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNYfqklRehM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNYfqklRehM
- orra 3y ago
  Quite. Then there is the question, is the cardinality of the continuum the first cardinality bigger than the cardinality of the naturals? It turns out the 'continuum hypothesis' can be true or it can be false. Neither contradicts standard ZFC set theory: the hypothesis is 'independent'.
  - ly3xqhl8g9 3y ago
    One way to think about it would be to replace or with and: the continuum hypothesis can be true and false: it is a 'polycomputational object' [1]. [1] Using the concept of polycomputing from There’s Plenty of Room Right Here: Biological Systems as Evolved, Overloaded, Multi-Scale Machines: "Form and function are tightly entwined in nature, and in some cases, in robotics as well. Thus, efforts to re-shape living systems for biomedical or bioengineering purposes require prediction and control of their function at multiple scales. This is challenging for many reasons, one of which is that living systems perform multiple functions in the same place at the same time. We refer to this as 'polycomputing'—the ability of the same substrate to simultaneously compute different things, and make those computational results available to different observers.", https://www.mdpi.com/2313-7673/8/1/110 https://www.mdpi.com/2313-7673/8/1/110
mach1ne 3y ago
To be fair, infinity is not a concept that is in any way well understood or defined.
- varjag 3y ago
  It is quite thoroughly studied in mathematics, and that particular issue has a definitive answer.
  - mach1ne 3y ago
    It does not. Logical outcomes that use infinity as an intermediary are inherently not reliable. An example of this is the Ramanujan summation where 1+2+3+... results in -1/12, an outcome which is disputed among mathematicians due to the fact that we have not defined the concept of infinity properly.
    - varjag 3y ago
      What does it have to do with cardinality of continuum, with several proofs since Cantor?
    - godelski 3y ago
      > Ramanujan summation That's not a sum in the traditional sense so don't think about it this way. Infinities are used quite often in mathematics for rather mundane things. Calculus doesn't work without it. It is also quite important to the foundation of many other areas but this is often hidden unless you get into advanced works (in this sentence we're not considering a typical undergraduate Multivariate Calculus, PDEs, or Linear Algebra as "advanced")
      - FreakLegion 3y ago
        Calculus works fine without infinity. Finitism is basically a philosophical position without practical consequences. Plenty of serious people have planted their flag there. I don't find it particularly surprising that someone who works with computers, especially at a low level, would be drawn to it.

baby 3y ago

I don’t remember that he said it was easy, I read some of his tweets and listened (twice) to the twitter space he did with elon and the big take away for me was that he was convinced twitter wouldn’t be able to move much without a heavy refactor. I can believe that. Elon who disagreed with him at the time seemed to have changed his mind now.

pavlov 3y ago

Why is Twitter such a Waterloo for all these obviously accomplished people? It seems like they've been assuming Twitter is the way it is because it was staffed by technically incompetent leftists, and if only they could apply their own get-things-done attitude and "neutral" politics, then the problem would be trivially fixable. Where does this fallacy come from? Is it because of the illusory simplicity of the tweet format? Something like: "We just need to come up with the right algorithm and do an embarrassingly parallel run over these tiny 280-character chunks of text. How hard can that be. In my own Very Serious Day Job, I deal with oompabytes of very complex data. This tweet processing stuff should be child's play in comparison."

lordnacho 3y ago
It's because of scale. Very complicated algorithms and mathematical proofs can still be understood by a single person, and be explored by a small number of people who all know each other. Brain surgery is done by a small team of people. These are typical "smart people" occupations. Something as simple as Twitter still needs machinery that spans across technical skills, needs 24 hour monitoring, and needs lawyer and accountant support, so nobody can actually to it. People think they can do it, because it's easy to spin up a demo that sends messages to a few thousand people and then shut it down again. They don't think about how to scan for CSAM, or how to respond to foreign government censorship requests.
gettodachoppa 3y ago
Well, when Elon Musk took over and gutted half the staff, I distinctly remember HN full out of outrage and predicting (in hindsight, "impotently wishing" would be more accurate) doom and how Twitter will go down any day now. Then nothing happened. At least, nothing that I personally observed as a casual Twitter reader. The goalposts were moved to "it will go down with the New Year's Eve spike", and once again nothing happened. Then the narrative became "the cracks will only be noticeable in a few months", and here we are and yet again, nothing. So Musk and Geohot came out as the saner voices of that whole debacle. Of course Geohot said exaggerated things like "you only need 40 engineers to run Twitter", but if it turns out it takes 300 engineers, then I would consider this as Geohot being proven mostly right.

MangoCoffee 3y ago

agree. he was talking about how he can do this and that to fix Twitter then just fizzled, blame the Twitter's code and said Twitter need to rewrite from the ground up.

spaceman_2020 3y ago

People completely forget how complex things can get when you have to serve millions of users across platforms, devices, countries, and accessibility settings, and all of it needs to work because you've got hundreds of millions of advertising dollars paying for views and engagement.

ilyt 3y ago
The first part is also probably far easier than the second, and lawyer work to comply with various laws so you can actually get paid. ...that doesn't change a fact there are some failures where developers really should know better and design it less shit

blitzar 3y ago

> how easy it would be to fix ... obviously underestimated the difficulty of ... If I had a dollar for every job that I didnt get where I estimated the correct degree of difficulty, and they laughed, went with the person who said it would be easy and they could bang it out in a day of sleeping - I would be rich. The loud optimist wins the 5.1 mil every time.

consp 3y ago
That's because there is no penalty for being late in many projects. As soon as there is, this doesn't happen anymore but in software there hardly ever is any real penalty. As soon as there is a dead serious one, I've noticed everyone get serious and starts ignoring the rainbows and unicorns people. If it's a slap on the write the rainbows still win.

ilyt 3y ago

To be entirely fair many things would be easy to fix if you can throw away everything and make clean implementation. It's the existing codebase and data that makes that difficult. Of course, he should know better than to throw claims like that.

ncr100 3y ago

His attitude towards society appears not to be one of being serious, and legally correct, at all times. It's likely there was some humor and bravado, as is the culture of his east coast origins. The truth of his engagement with Twitter was, Just based on my watching him and his live streams during that time, that he was looking for a thing to do while he ceded control over comma AI, to a new executive leadership group.