Would you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to HN? We ban accounts that do that as much as you've been.
In case it helps: I don't give a fig about being a schoolmarm, nor does anyone else who works on HN. What we care about is having a web forum that isn't quite at the bottom of the barrel. The downward pressure thither is so overwhelming that unless we do specific things to counteract it, and maintain them constantly, that's where we all end up. That's bad, not because Miss Manners doesn't approve, but because it's boring.
I’ve adapted my tone to the forum in question, but it’s true that I need to work on making my manner more robotic and increasing overall passive aggression, thanks!
A better place to start would be dropping the unsubstantive comments. HN's rules aren't the way they are to try to neuter your brilliant genius. We're just trying to avoid sucking quite so badly. Since you use this site heavily you should contribute to making it better, not worse.
There's always the option to simply not invest. For those platforms still in a pre-IPO state, you probably can't invest, even if you want to. For Twitter, it's easy enough to not buy the stock, and, indeed, if you bought in Jan 2014, you probably wish you hadn't. But if you bought yesterday, you're probably happy enough right now.
There are ways for investing in companies Pre-IPO such as EquityZen (https://equityzen.com). Often, shareholders want to get liquidity before IPO and sell their shares via the secondary market.
Don't VCs constantly fund things (social media or otherwise) that never reach profitability? Isn't that the whole gamble of "venture" funding in the first place?
The monetization aspect is supposedly solved. If I suspect you can garner audience, I posit that said audience can be translated into ad dollars at some point in the future. Only the first part is speculative. And speculation is what venture funding is all about.
> Don't VCs constantly fund things (social media or otherwise) that never reach profitability?
The expectation isn’t perpetual. Evert company must become profitable, be acquired by someone who believes it will make them (more) profitable (or attractive to another party with that belief), or go bust.
> More and more these social media platforms feel like scheme's. Round after round of funding without ever reaching profitablity
Nowhere did I say we're looking at perpetual return on investment. Like any investment, you're looking to go in at a certain point and get out at a certain point. This is no more a "scheme" than buying a house and hoping it increases in value or buying a lottery ticket. The underlying value is audience. Some companies get that, others don't.
The next big scheme is allready in the making - virtual customers:
You order a shoebox appartment, create a home-maker NN that can fake basic human occupancy, register it online as a new citizen and put it on basic income, and set it up to order stuff from company A. Now those NN trade among one another, sending the stuff in a circle until its scrap or they are broke and its impounded.
Finally, the limiting part for eternal growth can be removed.
What most investors fund is something that creates value, and then convert that value to cash later. Creating value is the hard part.
It's not always about a company's profitability either. Startups focus on exponentially growing their assets rather than cash flow then selling it all to someone else. Like Facebook can make more wealth from WhatsApp than they could do by themselves.
Of course, profitability is often close to the actual value something creates. Twitter is a really odd case in that it's a big part of many people's lives, but they won't pay for it.
They would be profitable in an instant if they'd get rid of half their employees? Im not sure why they need SO many people for Twitter. I believe they have over 4000, they could easily get by with 1000
Sales Departments have way too many people. I like that they employ people, but that’s a separate conversation. On a team of 8 sales people, typically 2 people together sell enough for the team to break even. The other 6, usually because of poor sales territory luck, sell maybe half their salary worth of services, but since growth is everything, an employee who makes 100k but only sells 50k is considered valuable.
Probably just anecdotal numbers from experience. I've seen similar things as well. The division of prospects/accounts is kind of a big deal, and usually defaults to geographical area or industry as the primary dimension, with size/revenue of prospect as the secondary.
Given that, if you're selling something like Github or container management services, you can imagine that the person who's selling in the Pacific West Coast region might be having an easier time of things than the guy who has the mid-west. This isn't universally true for all products, but sales people will complain about leads being bad in any industry (see: Glengarry Glen Ross).
All of that is to say is that empirically, usually there are a few outperformers on any sales team that are crushing quota, and a bunch of others who are skating by at fractions of quota until they get canned. As some evidence, there's a lot of churn in sales teams and for the average sales person, which is partially because of the above, and also because good sales people will kill it as a company is getting a lot of adoption, and then jump ship when a better opportunity arises.
So maybe there's been a study on this stuff, but you could talk to any number of people who work in sales orgs and hear similar stories without the study.
Oh, and yes, when companies get 'serious' about sales, you'll see sales quickly expand to encompass a third or half the total company size. I won't make any guesses as to whether that actually makes sense and how many people are being productive, but large sales orgs are common in my understanding.
I see, thank you for the reply. I guess someone might want to make similar claims about an engineering team, but eng teams probably don't have hard numbers to judge with.
Yes, but it makes sense for things that like to occur because when you think about it, firms care about the total contract value - meaning it might be a 50k contract per year for 2-3 years. Companies are looking at the longer term. At least that's how it is at my company. Clients generally sign a 2 year contract at $X per year. So if a sales person only sells 50k in a given year but every contract averages 2 years that's really 100k.
Right. As you said, companies aren't optimizing just for this year's sales; they're going to be balancing acquiring customers this year, the cost of each sale, and the retention of those customers year over year. So if a sales guy gets a huge commission and salary for the first year for his acquired customers, but the company's retention rate is high, then that sales person's salary could be paying multiples in revenue over several years.
Twitter was massively overstaffed before they began to meaningfully grow sales. It goes back to the days of their faster user growth when they were anticipating competing with Facebook and having over a billion users. They built the company ahead of time for that outcome rather than restraining employee growth and focusing on profitability.
They could have probably done both, given what Facebook managed to accomplish financially. FB was profitable at $500-$600 million in sales and around 200 million monthly active users. At that same size Twitter was losing an immense amount of money. At the $2.5 billion sales level that Twitter hit in fiscal 2016, Facebook had around $750-$900 million in net income.
> each of whom presumably brings in more than their salary in revenue to remain employed
Good sales people bring in enough revenue for a company to be profitable. But I have no idea how many sales people Twitter has, I think even if they had 100 it'd be plenty.
Remember that Twitter works in multiple countries and in different languages. Then there is a lot of face to face meetings required, so add offices and service staff as well.
1-1,5K would sound reasonable for global sales and customer services.
I would blame management/top more, than sales. Sales can work only with products they were given. AFAIK Twitter was pretty aggressively hiring 2-3 years ago sales reps across the globe and they were stealing top employees from FB and co.
I would assume that it is the lack of products/top commitment that causes poor sales.
I agree again, I think there is a lot of blame to go around in Twitter, also another reason why I think they could have a healthy purge and move forward with some fresh vigor.
For a while stories popped up describing Devs lounging around or playing table tennis, waiting for their stock to vest. I've no idea the truth in these anecdotes and they're annoyingly hard to find due to google finding lots of tweets instead of articles about twitter.
You can add -site:twitter.com to remove all tweets from your search results when you're trying to find something about twitter instead of something on twitter.
Instagram’s CEO has said one of the most valuable parts of being acquired by FB is they could just hook into their vast revenue org (probably thousands of employees, and battle tested ad targeting tech and expertise). Twitter has to build its own, and I’m sure that accounts for most of their headcount.
They can easily get by with 1000? Are you sure about that? What does the timeframe look like for reducing 75% of your workforce and what kind of costs would there be in such an initiative? What lay-off laws are tripped when you do this sort of mass firing?
In 2016, they spent $957M on marketing (which is the area I often hear people saying they should reduce), most of which was personnel expense, according to their 10K filing. I suppose it's easy to look at it and just say "cut it in half" (which would nearly make up the $457M profit deficit from 2016), but is that truly realistic? What affect would that have on top line revenue?
Oh boy, another Hacker News commenter with zero experience running a large corporation telling experienced folks how they should run a large corporation. Better yet, with no explanation for why. The sheer arrogance.
But Im not wrong. Twitter was in dire straits a year ago. Saved by a reality show presidential candidate and might have their first profitable moment after 10 years of existence.
Twitter is easily overstaffed by looking at what they have produced over the years. Even if you shaved the bottom 25% of employees they could still be operational and extremely profitable. They are a public company, growth is stagnant, and expenses are extraordinary. It's not rocket science even for someone with sheer arrogance and zero experience running a large corporation.
According to my Wikipedia research, they had ~2.5 billion in revenue last year and ~450 million in net losses
If they shaved the bottom 25%, to reach ramen profitability they'd need a savings of $450,000 per employee cut, and do that without having any negative impact on the productivity of the org as a whole (be it through hours worked or employee morale or additional churn)
Corporations are giant container ships moving in one direction, you can't just snap your fingers and turn 90 degrees
"Let's force ourselves to be profitable right now, regardless of the fact that it will destroy our future profitability"
Soundcloud just had a similar shock happen, and after all the people they had to fire, I would not be surprised if that will kill the company in the mid-term, even with their new investment. If you have no ability to innovate due to missing staff, there is a good chance that your competitors will eat you alive.
I think SoundCloud's downfall would be it's huge investment into record label deals, it's paywalling to support said deals and then the lack of adoption for it's subscription service for access to those label's music.
Essentially, SC tried to pivot to Spotify, pissed off free users, and let it's actual paying user base stagnate for 2 years.
Then all that capital investment had no return and they're stuck in big contracts with hefty guaranteed payouts.
Although few have any experience operating at that scale, one can make comparisons.
I do find it curious that WhatsApp was operating at a much larger scale in terms of users and messages processed when they were sold to Facebook. And they had 55 employees.
So obviously you don't need 4,000 employees for the technology at this scale. I'm not sure what in the world the other 3,945 employees are doing though.
You don't see how person to person and small group messaging is a more difficult engineering challenge than personalized feed multicast? It's also simpler to sell subscriptions than to sell targeted ads - there's at least one whole other product we don't see, which Twitter's advertisers use, and it's probably a few different ones for different sizes and kinds of advertisers. Clearly, there's also a whole group working on the firehose product discussed elsewhere in this thread.
I don't know anything about Twitter's business, but just in general, I agree with your parent commenter that this entire thread of conversation (which happens every single time) is embarrassingly arrogant.
But as with many engineering challenges, throwing more people at the problem doesn't solve it faster and often makes things worse. A harder problem to solve might just need and other person or two or more time but thousands of people? It does seem excessive, right?
Honestly, it's impossible for me to say whether it seems excessive, because I have no idea what it takes to run their business. But I don't think you have any inside information either, do you?
Let me put it this way: I think it's arrogant that management consulting companies think they can send in a couple recent ivy league grads to learn about a company for a few weeks and then suggest a bunch of changes. This is like that, but without even bothering to go in and learn about the company at all.
No, I don't know anything more that you. But I can contrast the scale of Twitter with other comparable, realtime, multi user sites like reddit and stackoverflow. Both of those sites have 230 and ~330 (I didn't count all the SO employees), respectively. And Stackoverflow is actually selling a product. Is Twitter so different from these sites?
Yes, I see some differences and added complexity. I don't see a nearly 100x difference. Sure, it's arrogant to question them with little inside knowledge. But I have been in business long enough to know that big, public companies do really, really stupid things sometimes.
I'm guessing you would have called people arrogant for questioning Equifax's security practices. After all, it's an enormous company with thousands of skilled employees (interestingly, only about 2x as many employees as Twitter and an arguably much more complex tech stack) and security experts checking and consulting. How could they possibly be wrong!?!
I don't think anyone should assume security practices at companies either are or aren't sufficient, without any knowledge one way or the other. Same thing with company size. Without actual knowledge, it doesn't make sense to assume it's too many, too few, or exactly the right amount.
> I do find it curious that WhatsApp was operating at a much larger scale in terms of users and messages processed when they were sold to Facebook
I recommend you search around HN before you make sweeping generalizations, there are numerous threads that explain how or why WhatsApp were capable of doing what they were. From a technical perspective, as a "core product", Twitter's business has more abstractions
It's a little arrogant, but the commenter is probably more or less correct.
Twitter is bloated.
Their headcount has expanded quite a lot over the last few years - and for what? Their service has remained the same and 'scale' beyond a certain point does not matter.
What is 'labour intensive' - sales? Sure. Maybe some support staff? I doubt they're full time, more likely in Phillipenes off the books.
I don't doubt for a second that they didn't need all those staff members - I've worked enough 'fast growth' places to see how 'hiring for the sake of hiring' happens, it's a political orientation, not really an economic one.
And you came up with that number, how? Do you have in-depth knowledge of what their staff makeup looks like? If you don't, how do you even begin to think about making such an absurd statement. You are saying that Twitter can continue to do what they do if they fired 3 out of 4 employees. You know what, you should propose this to their leadership, I'm sure they haven't thought of this great idea.
i think their past issue was having to hire more sales people to scale revenue in a manual fashion talking to companies rather than having a robust programmatic platform they can rely on to bring in revenue with fewer headcount. not sure if this is still a problem for them or not.
It's because they need the headcount to speculatively try to achieve the growth numbers needed to support their valuation.
Suppose they cut back to just keeping the lights on in engineering, along with obviously-profitable sales staff to sell advertisements and make business deals. Twitter is instantly profitable, but the net present value of those cash flows is something like a third to a tenth of their current valuation.
This is what happens when you over-fund a business at too high of a valuation. They do what they can to try to "grow into" the valuation, because otherwise management's junior equity positions and stock options are worthless.
It's not mentioned in the article, but I really think President Trump has been a savior for Twitter.
Without those controversial tweets, Twitter would rarely be in much of the public's mind, and the company would have continued its slow slide into irrelevance. As it is, barely a day goes by without "Twitter" being mentioned in national news.
Someone did a linguistic analysis and demonstrated that there are two writers of Trump's tweets. Trump's were all the crazy ones, his handler's were all of the moderate ones and the ones that walked back what was said previously.
I only know in the context of celebrities. Normally a handler is a person, manager, agent, personal assistant, who helps a celebrity deal with public appearances.
I can't find the article but an economist was estimating Trump's worth to Twitter at almost $2 billion. So I can't say I'm surprised; he is the single best thing that has happened for their company in YEARS.
I gave twitter another show about ~6 months ago. I enjoyed some feeds, most just felt like "fadspam" where people echoed popular opinion - particularly in tech. I really hated that as a new user I was immediately recommended to follow Trump. I get that algorithmically he's probably seen as a great person to follow, but I really, really, really, had no interest in doing so.
But Twitter derives business value from recommending people follow Trump on their platform, so they'll keep doing that. Strikes me as selling out - would've preferred they not recommend any political leaders.
Twitter is ALL ABOUT who you follow. I hated it for years, until a popular post here on HN a couple months ago.
A user compiled an absolute SUPER LIST of the best people to follow, and now my feed is full of really interesting information, diverse viewpoints, and stuff I wouldn't find anywhere else.
This one account was kind of the tipping point for me, finding GOOD TWITTER
If I hit 60 it's one in one out and I have to think about which one to drop, that way I keep a feed that updates relatively slowly, is useful and full of content I actually am interested in.
If you follow too many you loose far too much wheat in the chaff.
Fully agree. Also, a good time for Jack to step fully into Twitter boat. Square is doing quite well, he can easily find somebody to run it. If he takes the fulltime role at twitter, expect the stock to go up another 20-30 %
Honest question: why should Dorsey not be seen as an exaggerated media story (by the media and himself) and what has he done which justifies the stock jumping that high?
He's run both companies for awhile now, Twitter has basically been stagnant. Doesn't he supposedly work like 80 hours a week anyway? It's already a full time job. Examples from 2011 and 2016:
Here is he 5 years apart, marketing himself. So if he's actually working 80 hours a week, where are the results? What has Twitter done over the last seven years? He wants to have his cake and eat it, too, yeah?
Twitter was always making money. That was not their problem. Their big problem was spending 2 billion dollars. Cut spending and you will see net profit go up. He is atleast doing that while slowly starting to experiment with the product.
It's funny, but the 'Trump effect' is why myself and many I know use Twitter less, or at least only use it to interact on a micro level with friends/followers. Every trending topic is infested with so many Trump bots its just pointless to even engage.
...and you are likely on the front line of new things, and as such less important for Twitter's long term strategy, even as you were likely a reason for their initial growth.
That's the issue for SM sites like Twitter et al: going from early adopters to mass appeal. As much as some people hate Trump, his tweets likely got a lot of the 300 million non-SF, LA, NYC users involved.
I might be off on user uptake, but the mainstreaming of Twitter is vital for their ad-based model, so anything that appeals beyond the liberal elites is going to be solid for their bottom line.
By bots I'm not talking about Trump fans who have Twitter accounts. I'm talking about actual bots. Huge networks of fake accounts with predictable combos of words for names based around Trump that solely post/retweet about Trump that only follow and are followed by 10s of thousands of similar accounts and use a specific schedule for hundreds and thousands of these tweets/retweets/likes. The kind of bots that take an innocuous trending topic like #WhatsUpWednesday and push 5 different anti-Hillary memes to the top of it. A full year after the election. And the 5 memes are the exact same ones they pushed to the top of a similar trending topic a month prior. It doesn't turn off 'liberal elites', it turns off anyone with a brain.
Except that these don't appeal to anyone, really, whether you're a Democrat or Republican or independent. They're designed to shut conversation down. And to make it appear like a specific point of view has many times more support than it does. And they're working.
And thus why he will never have violated the ToS. He could openly threaten to murder someone and Twitter would not suspend him. (Though in fairness they rarely suspend anyone else either.)
I'm sure it has happened but it's also funny to see as an observer how both American political sides feel victimized the same way. Basically, both sides blame same things.
I'm not bothered about big Silicon Valley companies, but it can't be easy to satisfy both sides and keep making more money.
> Though in fairness they rarely suspend anyone else either.
Twitter suspends or shadowbans quite a few people, at least if what a fair few people online are saying is true. Not sure their logic behind who exactly they suspend though. Conservatives say they get accounts suspended more, liberals say it's them etc.
No. Historically, modern presidents have made their holdings public and put their assets into a blind trust while they've been in office. However, this is not required of the President, and Trump has chosen to do neither so far.
Yeah, all Twitter needed was a pack of neo-Nazis, some Russian bots, and a genocidal conman in the White House. Not worth it. The health of Twitter's balance sheet is a counterindication of the health of the world. When their stock goes up, the market should dive.
That is what passes for entertainment these days. Who do you thinking is following the feeds? Who is watching the cnn warrooms? The general public is rooting for or against whatever they believe.
>He said his father had protected Jewish boys wearing yellow stars on the way to school as a child. When Communists took power, he supplied information to MI6 before being arrested, tortured and imprisoned (possibly betrayed by Kim Philby). He arrived in the UK after escaping during the 1956 uprising.
How exactly is that "self-proclaimed" when he is denying it.
On one hand he says that he isn’t a part of the order, on the other hand he wore their insignia to the inaugural ball. Maybe he was using neo nazi symbolism ironically?
>Leslie Waters, prof of European History at Randolph-Macon College, said: “It definitely is a symbol that a lot of Hungarians would associate with racist ideology and anti-Semitism but plenty of Hungarians also associate it with some sort of generic patriotism and anti-communism.”
Or he wore it to reflect his family history and as an anti-communist symbol....
His family history as nazis? Also, thank god he’s trying to draw attention to the anti-communist movements in the world, seeing as communism is really a key global issue in the world today.
I agree with you in your comment that point that these disguised insults against trump are inappropriate here (saying this more directly could have better effect imo). But please, you seems to be a good guy, do not fall into the Tribal trap, whether it is "i must defend m own even if i'm wrong" or "He has opinions from the opposite side, he must be wrong on everything else". The people this man hang out with AND this symbol he wore are enough evidences that he support, even if it is a little, Nazi ideology.
Since nowaday, nazi ideology has several sides, xenophobic, antisemitic, racist ant anti-feminist (i might forgot some), he might agree on at least one, and if you're dead set on defending him you can say he is only xenophobic or something, and the other part of neonazism, he doesn't support, but are you really believing that he wore this to say "i'm anti-communist"? If he did, he must have been seriously misinformed (and anyone this out of touch, honestly, deserve to be kicked of of any job that require you to understand history).
Genocidal doesn't necessarily mean he's committed genocide; it means that he's prone to (and to some extent, fascinated by) mass acts of killing. The tweets about promising fire and fury on an entire nation of people (North Korea), telling Fox that we need to kill the terrorist families as well, etc. He gets off feeling like he's the most powerful man in the world.
He's a strongman, whose solutions often involve labeling entire categories of people as bad/evil (Muslims, Mexicans, the media). If you haven't noticed this you're either not paying attention or willfully ignorant.
Genocidal means a proclivity to commit genocide. I believe you have do it once before you can be called that, in all fairness.
Generally, threatening war (and generally even going to war) is not considered genocide.
>and to some extent, fascinated by
We don't call people murderers just because they like watching CSI Miami.
In fact, the person Trump was threatening with his "fire and fury" remarks legitimately IS genocidal and has ACTIVE CONCENTRATION CAMPS in his country. Yet you think it's more important to criticize Trump for entering into a war of words, rather than the dictator himself?
You're identifying things which make him an authoritarian, a strongman, and an idiot, but that still doesn't make him genocidal. That has a very specific meaning.
Threatening a country that is threatening us isn't exactly genocidal. Killing families of terrorists is deeply immoral and murderous - but it's also in keeping with current U.S. policy (see Anwar al-Awlaki - both Trump and Obama administrations have killed Awlaki's children). Terrorists aren't a race though, so wanting to kill them and their families isn't genocide.
Don't confuse yourself. It's not the millions of people El Cheeto would kill in a nuclear strike on DPRK that are threatening the US, it is effectively one trump-like individual in charge of DPRK that is threatening the US.
Government has consequences. That's why democracy is so important. This is especially true with regards to foreign policy. If a country threatens another such that the threatened country's only viable defense is to attack the civilians of the aggressor, that would be a totally legitimate tactic of war.
Taking out North Korea's nuclear capability while preventing a counter attack on South Korea will probably involve the deaths of many innocent North Koreans, since North Korean artillery is spread widely throughout the southern part of the country. That is tragic, and no small part of why we've allowed this madness to go on for so long. But at some point a people must protect their security, and do what must be done.
> Taking out North Korea's nuclear capability while preventing a counter attack on South Korea will probably involve the deaths of many innocent North Koreans,
How about we concentrate on their leadership, instead of 'spraying and praying'?
That's not so easy. Decapitating the regime, even if we could reliably kill all the key officials, does not necessarily prevent a lengthy barrage of artillery on South Korea.
I'm not confused on this point. The people of North Korea have devastatingly unfortunate circumstances, and the thought that, in addition to living such grim lives, they may have to die to ensure our safety - it's unfair beyond the power of words to describe.
And yet, if I had to choose between a million North Koreans, hundreds of thousands of South Koreans, and tens of thousands of American soldiers, dying in a pre-emptive war - versus all that plus a few million more Americans and North Koreans dying in a nuclear exchange... Well, it's an obvious choice.
North Korea is approaching the point of being able to achieve mutually assured destruction. They could build a cobalt bomb, or spend a decade building ICBMS, but relatively soon the problem will be intractable and we will play nuclear chicken with an unstable murderous dictatorial regime.
Well, "Make America great again" seems essentially like a nazi expression, based on the fact that Hitler and his crowd used the same for Germany. I don't know what it needs to make somebody a nazi -- not a single phrase certainly, but I reckon that brings them closer at least.
It's very pathetic to me how desperate people are to label Trump a Nazi, simply because he criticizes Islam and wants to scale back immigration (which the public never even voted to approve in the first place.)
Ronald Reagan used the same campaign slogan in the 80s get a fucking grip. It is a short memorable slogan and it is simply good marketing.
Hitler was a vegetarian and liked dogs. According to your logic that makes you a nazi.
Also you probably don't remember, but everyone called George W Bush a nazi when he was elected. It is complete fucking bullshit and tbh I think it is pretty disgusting to demean the real meaning of things like racism, fascism etc when you clearly don't understand what that really means or the implications.
Growing up as a kid in the late 80s and 90s the whole message from society was "Racism and Sexism is bad, treat everyone equally". Now the message is "If you are a white person you should accept being treated like a second class citizen".
This is the thing that has led to a growing white supremacy movement, even Jared Taylor (a prominent white supremacist in the US) has said so "They are driving them [white men] into our arms".
Ridiculous comments like yours saying that Trump is dog whistling to the alt-right when he said there "was violence on both" sides is again bullshit (there has been clashes between the far right and the far left in the US months before that statement) as what he said was more or less accurate.
Also why would he subtly dog whistle? White supremacy movements in the USA are tiny (in the few thousands), there aren't any votes in it. It simply doesn't make any sense from a campaign standpoint.
> Now the message is "If you are a white person you should accept being treated like a second class citizen"
> Ridiculous comments like yours
I like the irony.
Frankly, from outsiders perspective, both sides seem ridiculous and hypersensitive. Except one side keeps pushing tax cuts for the rich and the other tries to implement some of things we in Europe consider standard.
But neither side is good at convincing anyone. Or even good at seeming at least a little reasonable in these discussions.
This is one example but I been seeing this shit turn up on social media for the last 2 years. It could be cognitive bias, or I am noticing it more. But it is definitely there.
> Except one side keeps pushing tax cuts for the rich and the other tries to implement some of things we in Europe consider standard.
Except as someone that lives in Europe (I lived in Spain, the UK and Germany) most of the things that are standard in Europe don't work. The NHS has botch the treatment of my right shoulder and while I am not disabled, I now have a permanent weakness in my right side of my body.
In Spain there is massive unemployment and the country economy is permanently crashed (I lived in La Linea and the unemployment rate was 48%). Regular utilities like rubbish disposal stopped for 2 or 3 months because there was no money to pay the bin men (Garbage man for those in the US).
"Tax cuts for the rich". LOL. You know if you tax the rich too highly they basically leave the country or they find a loophole round it. That is why there is are measures like an affective tax rate.
In the UK where they keep on tightening up tax laws most of the large companies are in Ireland or off shore in one of the crown dependencies such as Isle of Man, Jersey, Guernsey, Gibraltar etc. I paid more tax than Starbucks last year and I run a small hosting company. So I get fucked by tax rate increases for businesses and individuals because I just about fit into that bracket of the so called rich.
Also a lot of these tax the rich laws never take into account where you live. I used to live in Manchester in the UK and I was earning £30,000 and I lived very comfortably. If I lived in London I would barely be able to afford the rent.
He’s not subtle at all. It’s pretty obvious he doesn’t like non-whites. Or at least prefers to judge them if you want to wear kid gloves.
He tried to skate by not criticizing the Charlottesville nazis/“protectors” of southern heritage/whatever they want to call themselves when he’s pretty quick to criticize any nonwhite race that commits violence or a crime.
Sources: the passage of time cross referenced with the garbage that tumbles out of his mouth and/or thumbs.
Sorry you are talking bullshit. Why would someone that didn't likes black people would be seen being photographed with Jessie Jackson and James Brown .... Doesn't make any sense.
You've been violating the Hacker News guidelines by using the site primarily for political battle. We ban accounts that do that, so please stop doing that.
You've also crossed into incivility, and we ban accounts that do that too. Would you mind reading https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and following them when posting here? We'd appreciate it.
You don't have to commit genocide to be "genocidal." It's an adjective that means either "involving or relating to" to the act.
Similarly we say someone is "suicidal" but that doesn't mean they have committed suicide.
Having or displaying an attitude or a policy that could kill lots of people(presumably the OP is referring to North Korea" can be correctly labeled genocidal.
It is no surprise that Trump won when his name can't be mentioned without an absolutely asinine, incorrect comment following it. Addressing dishonesty with hyperbole is not helping anyone.
You're being completely and totally intellectually dishonest. North Korea is a nuclear threat with an extremely vulnerable neighbor. Trump's interest in a first strike has nothing to do with eradicating the North Korean people.
Again, trying to justify your strong feelings about Trump by fabricating these insane narratives does nothing but hurt you and your political causes.
"trying to justify your strong feelings about Trump by fabricating these insane narratives"
This is the first time we've ever interacted and you're projecting my feelings? Great, we're off to a good start here.
From there, I'm "fabricating a narrative" because I implied that casually threatening to kill millions of people on twitter might be what someone else was referring to as "genocidal"?
You know what is WAY more disingenuous than calling killing millions of people "genocide"? Implying that a first strike which would kill millions of people has nothing to do with killing millions of people. Now THAT would be disingenuous.
And, just to throw a cherry on the top of those other weird behaviors, you tell me I'm doing nothing but hurting my political causes, when you don't know what they are.
Couldn't you at least have the self awareness to realize that just because you get cranky when someone calls threatening to kill millions of people "genocide" does not actually mean that all points that person makes somehow lose credibility with all other human beings on earth...because you said so...?
I questioned the (incorrect) usage of the word "genocidal". There are no ifs, ands, or buts; not every mass killing/death is a genocide. A nuclear first strike against the DPRK in the current political climate would have nothing to do with a deliberate eradication of a certain ethnicity/nationality and everything to do with the DPRK being a nuclear threat in a nuclear world.
You responded to my questioning by trying to qualify the argument with his Twitter antics. Since you're supporting the argument (or at least trying to justify the sentiment of labeling something that wouldn't be a genocide a genocide), I think we can reasonably assume that you're not a fan of Trump's idea of a first strike. The tone of your writing heavily implies that, so if you're actually in support of (or not directly opposed to) a first strike, but simultaneously argue that people could reasonably mistake a first strike for a deliberate, focused genocide, a small disclaimer that you're arguing in support of two dissonant ideas really helps people understand what you're trying to say. Similarly, unless your political alignment and actual viewpoints on the subject are highly dissonant, your politics are pretty easy to extrapolate.
To my knowledge (and I could be wrong), there is no indication that Trump has any intention to eradicate the North Korean people. To argue that Trump's intention with a first strike would be to eradicate the North Korean people would require you to fabricate reasoning behind such an action. To argue that someone is justified in the genocide argument is to admit that they're fabricating that reasoning or narrative.
Not even once did I try to minimize the casualties a first strike would have.
I never said that the original argument was necessarily wrong. I did say that the general populace will make arguments to logic, and making individual points that are blatantly wrong except in the most liberal interpretation of the wording just enables the general populace to do so.
Ha, this reminds me of a story from economics class that Hamburger Helper was one of a set of products whose profits correlated negatively with the overall economy's health.
Agreed. I wonder how much of that money is from strawman purchases that can't be traced directly to russia yet. When the dust finally settles on all this we'll see that twitter received millions from russian surrogates.
There's already a news report from RT today claiming that Twitter actively courted them (RT) for advertising during the elections, and have published a Keynote slide deck from a presentation they claim Twitter presented to them:
They claim that in return for $1.5m upfront spend during the elections, Twitter would promote Russia Today's tweets and provide them with an inhouse team to curate content and provide strategy. For $500K extra, Twitter would promote RT's moments to 60 Million users. There was an offer for a $3.3m total ad spend.
But it should be pointed out that would not feed into this quarter's revenues, as it was for late 2016. And the story all depends on whether you believe the slide deck from RT is genuine or not.
> As it is, barely a day goes by without "Twitter" being mentioned in national news.
What are you talking about? Before Trump was a thing, Twitter was routinely mentioned in the news. It was the lazy source of react quotes: "Today, X tragedy happened in town Y. 'UnrelatedPerson' on twitter said 'what a tragedy'".
The name is more prominent now, sure, but it already was routinely reported in the news.
"ramping up deals to sell its data to other companies, which could help to break its reliance on advertising for revenue." i.e. "we don't know how to profit from this user data ourselves, so we'll sell it to people who know how."
More like, “we’ve analyzed our data to death and know it’s not worth beans, but we don’t have to tell anyone else that, and there’s a sucker born every minute who thinks they can beat the stock market by squinting at this-or-that data firehose just right, so we’re happy to charge them for the attempt.”
Things I can think of: Broadcast a tv spot, then measure how much hashtag mentions it generates. Find regions where people are more receptive to your product based on Twitter sentiment. Filter for stock mentions and use it for your trading bot.
They used to sell the “firehose,” which I believe was a real-time feed of every single tweet (something not available from the normal API). I don’t know if that still exists.
Twitter's partners build audiences around shopping decisions, lifestyle, and other online and offline behaviors.
Tailored audiences
Tailored audiences are often built from email lists or browsing behaviors. They help advertisers reach prospective customers or people who have already expressed interest in their business."
I wonder if FBI/Secret Service swoop in to prevent the President's data from being sold in these cases. Or if they restrict its use/sale by other platforms as well.
Like any other media platform there's advantages and disadvantages. Twitter is fantastic if you're trying to reach media professionals or developers in my experience.
When they bought GNIP they ended their partnership with DataSift. It was a major blow to DataSift. It was a shrewd move on Twitter's part. My company switched over to using GNIP and our DataSift sales rep told us tons of other customers switched too and that he was leaving because of it.
Yep, that’s correct. The recent lawsuit against LinkedIn about crawling [1] is interesting, though. It sets the precedent that third parties cannot be blocked from crawling, which technically means anyone could do this with Twitter as well.
I would assume they are selling data without personally identifiable information so it isn't your data. You are a set of data points that is aggregated with the millions of other users.
>San Francisco-based Twitter also disclosed that it had discovered an error in how it had measured its user base since 2014 and revised its estimates downward
How is this possible? They can't just do like fetch_all_users, filtered by "not banned?"
And users activates, users logged on last X months, users not deleted, no duplicates caused by some obscure event synchronization issue etc etc. Bugs are easy.
Do you mean it’s not easy to define? It shouldn’t be difficult to calculate any particular metric going forward, but it’s inportant to define what it means to be “active.”
But the user database should already have backups, importing those backups into an analysis server should be easy, and running queries like that on an analysis server should be easy.
Counting messages, or users with X messages, etc. is also largely a function of whether your backup/restore system works. But this time you do it in chunks.
I helped build Twitter's data platform, 2010-2016.
There isn't an "analysis server" and analyzing user activity is not done on a "user database backup" at Twitter's scale, though indeed that's a common way that would be done for smaller businesses.
By the way, if by user db you literally mean the db with user accounts, that's not the right data source -- you want the user _activity_ db to count active users, and for high-scale applications, those are different things. Presumably user activity updates are orders of magnitude more frequent than user object updates. You don't want to thrash your user db by constantly updating some "last seen at" field. Put that stuff somewhere else.
That said, it's true that counting is simple, it's just a Hadoop / Spark / distributed computing platform of choice job. Filter, distinct, count. It's not even hard in real-time if you have enough ram or are ok with approximate counts with bounded error, thanks to Storm, Heron, Flink, etc.
Defining what exactly constitutes an active user and catching edge cases such as this Digits thing is where things get tricky; the number of weird scenarios that cause under/overcount for what seem like reasonable and straightforward definitions would surprise you.
Thanks. Note that I wasn't trying to guess at what twitter does, just to provide a workflow that should be viable almost anywhere, in the absence of easier options. It's good to hear that the underlying idea of "calculating the metric isn't the hard part" is true.
"These third-party applications used Digits, a software development kit of our now-divested Fabric platform, that allowed third-party applications to send authentication messages via SMS through our systems, which did not relate to activity on the Twitter platform," the company explained in its earnings report.
Really seems like something they should have caught earlier.
I bet an engineer noticed and told a manager that the numbers were technically lower, the upper management finds out and decides to release that info when they already have massive mindshare and it won't hurt them as much.
I believe they attributed this to MAU/DAU of Digits[0] who are not otherwise MAU/DAU of Twitter. Ostensibly, users who use Digits to sign into 3rd-party apps ride in the same DB as bona fide Twitter users, and they just didn't discount them.
Twitter just posted that it has inflated its user values for the past 3 years and lied to constituents, and now there stock price has risen. Why aren't more investors fleeing from these companies? It seems endemic that social media platforms are not just lacking in transparency, but completely trying to obfuscate it for profit.
I know it's the huge growth story that wallstreet seeks but it's an invaluable resource, Twitter is. It should be bought by one of the big 5 tech firms if just to keep it alive in the public interest.
Can I also say one more thing without getting downvoted? A good reason why their stock is rallying today is also because of their ban on Russian Ad dollars going forward. Something that Mark could not do at Facebook.
By now, couldn't they just automate everything and lay off 90% of the staff? I bet that would make it profitable. I'd like to see their cost structure.
> and ramping up deals to sell its data to other companies
Which companies are buying this data? Considering its estimated that a third (1/3) of twitter activity is from bots retweeting, liking, and following. Not sure how much real value there actually is in this data. Twitter may turn a profit, but there are bigger issues with their model
Twitter, like FaceBook, should be an open, distributed platform. They are too valuable to remain under the control of a person or small group of people. They are communities and their value slides, and danger to society increases, when they are under centralized control.
I don't have any figures, let's just 5 servers running containerized environments, with a couple of decent uplinks, it is feasible to handle bandwidth of a million users for a few thousand a month.
With a million users, it's feasible to support the site with donations... no funding or IPO's needed...
In addition, there are numberous open-source frameworks ( like gnu-social etc. ) that enable a single person to deploy the code onto the servers.
So far Mastodon seems to be doing okay on a mix of "I wanna run a server for me and a few friends" and "I'm running a server, here's the Patreon to help pay for it".
Twitter is subverting the USA, and Trump is as well, by normalizing Twitter use. The punishment for subversion is summary execution because a subverter is assumed to be a traitor. Trump is a traitor, he should be shot immediately for subversion, and the heroes who shot him should be celebrated and enjoy a great triumph of liberating the people of America from Twitter. Liberation means death to those who tolerate the degradation and mental contagion that is Twitter, a disgusting pit of hatred and barbaric behavior. Trump is not just a stupid jerk, he is a stupid jerk who needs to be shot for subverting the USA, stat. Letting these monsters live is stupid. You want to be stupid? You want to tolerate a security force that protects a stupid traitor? That’s what Trump is: a stupid traitor. He wants to pretend it is OK to be a stupid jerk and tell the American people he is an incompetent moron every day. No, it is subversive behavior and it earns you the title of TRAITOR.
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Regardless of my thoughts on Twitter as a product, I'm glad they're profitable and might be around for a while.
They've released a lot of good open source software - their Scala stuff is great, and it seems like the company allows and even encourages their engineers to not only open up their code, but also gives them the time to document and help the community.
Maybe they finally fix their crappiest android app. Or open api for third-party developers, because obviously Twitter doesn't know shit about designing apps.
251 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 222 ms ] threadIn case it helps: I don't give a fig about being a schoolmarm, nor does anyone else who works on HN. What we care about is having a web forum that isn't quite at the bottom of the barrel. The downward pressure thither is so overwhelming that unless we do specific things to counteract it, and maintain them constantly, that's where we all end up. That's bad, not because Miss Manners doesn't approve, but because it's boring.
Get out while you can enjoy a profit.
For example, EquityZen is a platform that lets people to invest in private markets: https://equityzen.com/?utm_source=hackernews&utm_medium=comm...
Disclosure: I am an engineer at EquityZen
The monetization aspect is supposedly solved. If I suspect you can garner audience, I posit that said audience can be translated into ad dollars at some point in the future. Only the first part is speculative. And speculation is what venture funding is all about.
The expectation isn’t perpetual. Evert company must become profitable, be acquired by someone who believes it will make them (more) profitable (or attractive to another party with that belief), or go bust.
> More and more these social media platforms feel like scheme's. Round after round of funding without ever reaching profitablity
Nowhere did I say we're looking at perpetual return on investment. Like any investment, you're looking to go in at a certain point and get out at a certain point. This is no more a "scheme" than buying a house and hoping it increases in value or buying a lottery ticket. The underlying value is audience. Some companies get that, others don't.
You order a shoebox appartment, create a home-maker NN that can fake basic human occupancy, register it online as a new citizen and put it on basic income, and set it up to order stuff from company A. Now those NN trade among one another, sending the stuff in a circle until its scrap or they are broke and its impounded.
Finally, the limiting part for eternal growth can be removed.
It's not always about a company's profitability either. Startups focus on exponentially growing their assets rather than cash flow then selling it all to someone else. Like Facebook can make more wealth from WhatsApp than they could do by themselves.
Of course, profitability is often close to the actual value something creates. Twitter is a really odd case in that it's a big part of many people's lives, but they won't pay for it.
Given that, if you're selling something like Github or container management services, you can imagine that the person who's selling in the Pacific West Coast region might be having an easier time of things than the guy who has the mid-west. This isn't universally true for all products, but sales people will complain about leads being bad in any industry (see: Glengarry Glen Ross).
All of that is to say is that empirically, usually there are a few outperformers on any sales team that are crushing quota, and a bunch of others who are skating by at fractions of quota until they get canned. As some evidence, there's a lot of churn in sales teams and for the average sales person, which is partially because of the above, and also because good sales people will kill it as a company is getting a lot of adoption, and then jump ship when a better opportunity arises.
So maybe there's been a study on this stuff, but you could talk to any number of people who work in sales orgs and hear similar stories without the study.
Oh, and yes, when companies get 'serious' about sales, you'll see sales quickly expand to encompass a third or half the total company size. I won't make any guesses as to whether that actually makes sense and how many people are being productive, but large sales orgs are common in my understanding.
Likely this is true for engineering as well. 25% of the team pulling the weight of the department.
They could have probably done both, given what Facebook managed to accomplish financially. FB was profitable at $500-$600 million in sales and around 200 million monthly active users. At that same size Twitter was losing an immense amount of money. At the $2.5 billion sales level that Twitter hit in fiscal 2016, Facebook had around $750-$900 million in net income.
Good sales people bring in enough revenue for a company to be profitable. But I have no idea how many sales people Twitter has, I think even if they had 100 it'd be plenty.
Remember that Twitter works in multiple countries and in different languages. Then there is a lot of face to face meetings required, so add offices and service staff as well.
1-1,5K would sound reasonable for global sales and customer services.
I would assume that it is the lack of products/top commitment that causes poor sales.
I've often wondered how Twitter ended up with so many people as well. I'd love to see a breakdown of what they are all doing.
In 2016, they spent $957M on marketing (which is the area I often hear people saying they should reduce), most of which was personnel expense, according to their 10K filing. I suppose it's easy to look at it and just say "cut it in half" (which would nearly make up the $457M profit deficit from 2016), but is that truly realistic? What affect would that have on top line revenue?
Twitter is easily overstaffed by looking at what they have produced over the years. Even if you shaved the bottom 25% of employees they could still be operational and extremely profitable. They are a public company, growth is stagnant, and expenses are extraordinary. It's not rocket science even for someone with sheer arrogance and zero experience running a large corporation.
According to my Wikipedia research, they had ~2.5 billion in revenue last year and ~450 million in net losses
If they shaved the bottom 25%, to reach ramen profitability they'd need a savings of $450,000 per employee cut, and do that without having any negative impact on the productivity of the org as a whole (be it through hours worked or employee morale or additional churn)
Corporations are giant container ships moving in one direction, you can't just snap your fingers and turn 90 degrees
Soundcloud just had a similar shock happen, and after all the people they had to fire, I would not be surprised if that will kill the company in the mid-term, even with their new investment. If you have no ability to innovate due to missing staff, there is a good chance that your competitors will eat you alive.
Essentially, SC tried to pivot to Spotify, pissed off free users, and let it's actual paying user base stagnate for 2 years.
Then all that capital investment had no return and they're stuck in big contracts with hefty guaranteed payouts.
I do find it curious that WhatsApp was operating at a much larger scale in terms of users and messages processed when they were sold to Facebook. And they had 55 employees.
So obviously you don't need 4,000 employees for the technology at this scale. I'm not sure what in the world the other 3,945 employees are doing though.
I don't know anything about Twitter's business, but just in general, I agree with your parent commenter that this entire thread of conversation (which happens every single time) is embarrassingly arrogant.
Let me put it this way: I think it's arrogant that management consulting companies think they can send in a couple recent ivy league grads to learn about a company for a few weeks and then suggest a bunch of changes. This is like that, but without even bothering to go in and learn about the company at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddit https://stackoverflow.com/company/team
I'm guessing you would have called people arrogant for questioning Equifax's security practices. After all, it's an enormous company with thousands of skilled employees (interestingly, only about 2x as many employees as Twitter and an arguably much more complex tech stack) and security experts checking and consulting. How could they possibly be wrong!?!
I recommend you search around HN before you make sweeping generalizations, there are numerous threads that explain how or why WhatsApp were capable of doing what they were. From a technical perspective, as a "core product", Twitter's business has more abstractions
To get you started[0]
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10225096
Anybody who has done better than that should feel free to give tips, in my view.
Idea: redirect Twitter.com to a Geocities page with ads for fidget spinners and fire everyone. I predict record profits.
Twitter is bloated.
Their headcount has expanded quite a lot over the last few years - and for what? Their service has remained the same and 'scale' beyond a certain point does not matter.
What is 'labour intensive' - sales? Sure. Maybe some support staff? I doubt they're full time, more likely in Phillipenes off the books.
I don't doubt for a second that they didn't need all those staff members - I've worked enough 'fast growth' places to see how 'hiring for the sake of hiring' happens, it's a political orientation, not really an economic one.
Suppose they cut back to just keeping the lights on in engineering, along with obviously-profitable sales staff to sell advertisements and make business deals. Twitter is instantly profitable, but the net present value of those cash flows is something like a third to a tenth of their current valuation.
This is what happens when you over-fund a business at too high of a valuation. They do what they can to try to "grow into" the valuation, because otherwise management's junior equity positions and stock options are worthless.
Without those controversial tweets, Twitter would rarely be in much of the public's mind, and the company would have continued its slow slide into irrelevance. As it is, barely a day goes by without "Twitter" being mentioned in national news.
a handler is somebody who makes the blue check feel comfortable on the platform, e.g. banning people who disagree with them
http://www.businessinsider.com/realdonaldtrump-data-suggests...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2017/10...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-17/what-is-t...
But Twitter derives business value from recommending people follow Trump on their platform, so they'll keep doing that. Strikes me as selling out - would've preferred they not recommend any political leaders.
A user compiled an absolute SUPER LIST of the best people to follow, and now my feed is full of really interesting information, diverse viewpoints, and stuff I wouldn't find anywhere else.
This one account was kind of the tipping point for me, finding GOOD TWITTER
https://twitter.com/humanprogress
Another great one from that list is @FermatsLibrary
If I hit 60 it's one in one out and I have to think about which one to drop, that way I keep a feed that updates relatively slowly, is useful and full of content I actually am interested in.
If you follow too many you loose far too much wheat in the chaff.
He's run both companies for awhile now, Twitter has basically been stagnant. Doesn't he supposedly work like 80 hours a week anyway? It's already a full time job. Examples from 2011 and 2016:
http://money.cnn.com/2011/11/13/technology/dorsey_techonomy/...
http://www.businessinsider.com/jack-dorsey-explains-his-18-h...
Here is he 5 years apart, marketing himself. So if he's actually working 80 hours a week, where are the results? What has Twitter done over the last seven years? He wants to have his cake and eat it, too, yeah?
And here I am, trying to find just one job in tech that's only 40 hours a week.
That's the issue for SM sites like Twitter et al: going from early adopters to mass appeal. As much as some people hate Trump, his tweets likely got a lot of the 300 million non-SF, LA, NYC users involved.
I might be off on user uptake, but the mainstreaming of Twitter is vital for their ad-based model, so anything that appeals beyond the liberal elites is going to be solid for their bottom line.
Exactly. So it has mass appeal :)
That's the sad reality. The Kardasians aren't popular because of people with a brain. Mass appeal matters.
They probably suspend a lot of people every single day, but we don’t notice it.
It'd be funny if it weren't so sad.
I'm not bothered about big Silicon Valley companies, but it can't be easy to satisfy both sides and keep making more money.
Twitter suspends or shadowbans quite a few people, at least if what a fair few people online are saying is true. Not sure their logic behind who exactly they suspend though. Conservatives say they get accounts suspended more, liberals say it's them etc.
Edit:
- For the uninformed: https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11297050/tay-microsoft-ch...
- Archives: https://www.reddit.com/r/Tay_Tweets/top/?sort=top&t=all
Seb Gorka
>Mr Gorka denied any anti-Semitism in his family.
>He said his father had protected Jewish boys wearing yellow stars on the way to school as a child. When Communists took power, he supplied information to MI6 before being arrested, tortured and imprisoned (possibly betrayed by Kim Philby). He arrived in the UK after escaping during the 1956 uprising.
How exactly is that "self-proclaimed" when he is denying it.
Or he wore it to reflect his family history and as an anti-communist symbol....
Since nowaday, nazi ideology has several sides, xenophobic, antisemitic, racist ant anti-feminist (i might forgot some), he might agree on at least one, and if you're dead set on defending him you can say he is only xenophobic or something, and the other part of neonazism, he doesn't support, but are you really believing that he wore this to say "i'm anti-communist"? If he did, he must have been seriously misinformed (and anyone this out of touch, honestly, deserve to be kicked of of any job that require you to understand history).
Please do not go tribal on Hn.
Genocidal doesn't necessarily mean he's committed genocide; it means that he's prone to (and to some extent, fascinated by) mass acts of killing. The tweets about promising fire and fury on an entire nation of people (North Korea), telling Fox that we need to kill the terrorist families as well, etc. He gets off feeling like he's the most powerful man in the world.
He's a strongman, whose solutions often involve labeling entire categories of people as bad/evil (Muslims, Mexicans, the media). If you haven't noticed this you're either not paying attention or willfully ignorant.
Generally, threatening war (and generally even going to war) is not considered genocide.
>and to some extent, fascinated by
We don't call people murderers just because they like watching CSI Miami.
In fact, the person Trump was threatening with his "fire and fury" remarks legitimately IS genocidal and has ACTIVE CONCENTRATION CAMPS in his country. Yet you think it's more important to criticize Trump for entering into a war of words, rather than the dictator himself?
Taking out North Korea's nuclear capability while preventing a counter attack on South Korea will probably involve the deaths of many innocent North Koreans, since North Korean artillery is spread widely throughout the southern part of the country. That is tragic, and no small part of why we've allowed this madness to go on for so long. But at some point a people must protect their security, and do what must be done.
Too bad there is not a true democracy in the US.
> Taking out North Korea's nuclear capability while preventing a counter attack on South Korea will probably involve the deaths of many innocent North Koreans,
How about we concentrate on their leadership, instead of 'spraying and praying'?
If you're curious, I am on the left.
And yet, if I had to choose between a million North Koreans, hundreds of thousands of South Koreans, and tens of thousands of American soldiers, dying in a pre-emptive war - versus all that plus a few million more Americans and North Koreans dying in a nuclear exchange... Well, it's an obvious choice.
North Korea is approaching the point of being able to achieve mutually assured destruction. They could build a cobalt bomb, or spend a decade building ICBMS, but relatively soon the problem will be intractable and we will play nuclear chicken with an unstable murderous dictatorial regime.
Towards your main point: https://us-east-1.tchyn.io/snopes-production/uploads/2016/03... -- Most politicians talk about making their countries great or better, obviously.
Do you think it's a good thing that your political opinions are so profoundly influenced by shitposting you see online?
https://c4.legalinsurrection.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/...
Hitler was a vegetarian and liked dogs. According to your logic that makes you a nazi.
Also you probably don't remember, but everyone called George W Bush a nazi when he was elected. It is complete fucking bullshit and tbh I think it is pretty disgusting to demean the real meaning of things like racism, fascism etc when you clearly don't understand what that really means or the implications.
I think the difference is the subtle embrace of white supremacy via the inability to dismiss or criticize those “good people” on both sides.
This is the thing that has led to a growing white supremacy movement, even Jared Taylor (a prominent white supremacist in the US) has said so "They are driving them [white men] into our arms".
Ridiculous comments like yours saying that Trump is dog whistling to the alt-right when he said there "was violence on both" sides is again bullshit (there has been clashes between the far right and the far left in the US months before that statement) as what he said was more or less accurate.
Also why would he subtly dog whistle? White supremacy movements in the USA are tiny (in the few thousands), there aren't any votes in it. It simply doesn't make any sense from a campaign standpoint.
> Ridiculous comments like yours
I like the irony.
Frankly, from outsiders perspective, both sides seem ridiculous and hypersensitive. Except one side keeps pushing tax cuts for the rich and the other tries to implement some of things we in Europe consider standard.
But neither side is good at convincing anyone. Or even good at seeming at least a little reasonable in these discussions.
In my home country in the BBC there was a woman pretty much saying that White British people are racist.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-41148872/sacked-model-all-wh...
This is one example but I been seeing this shit turn up on social media for the last 2 years. It could be cognitive bias, or I am noticing it more. But it is definitely there.
> Except one side keeps pushing tax cuts for the rich and the other tries to implement some of things we in Europe consider standard.
Except as someone that lives in Europe (I lived in Spain, the UK and Germany) most of the things that are standard in Europe don't work. The NHS has botch the treatment of my right shoulder and while I am not disabled, I now have a permanent weakness in my right side of my body.
In Spain there is massive unemployment and the country economy is permanently crashed (I lived in La Linea and the unemployment rate was 48%). Regular utilities like rubbish disposal stopped for 2 or 3 months because there was no money to pay the bin men (Garbage man for those in the US).
"Tax cuts for the rich". LOL. You know if you tax the rich too highly they basically leave the country or they find a loophole round it. That is why there is are measures like an affective tax rate. In the UK where they keep on tightening up tax laws most of the large companies are in Ireland or off shore in one of the crown dependencies such as Isle of Man, Jersey, Guernsey, Gibraltar etc. I paid more tax than Starbucks last year and I run a small hosting company. So I get fucked by tax rate increases for businesses and individuals because I just about fit into that bracket of the so called rich.
Also a lot of these tax the rich laws never take into account where you live. I used to live in Manchester in the UK and I was earning £30,000 and I lived very comfortably. If I lived in London I would barely be able to afford the rent.
He tried to skate by not criticizing the Charlottesville nazis/“protectors” of southern heritage/whatever they want to call themselves when he’s pretty quick to criticize any nonwhite race that commits violence or a crime.
Sources: the passage of time cross referenced with the garbage that tumbles out of his mouth and/or thumbs.
http://cdn.newsday.com/polopoly_fs/1.11610613.1458769415!/ht...
http://hiddenamericans.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/images...
Sorry you are talking bullshit. Why would someone that didn't likes black people would be seen being photographed with Jessie Jackson and James Brown .... Doesn't make any sense.
You've also crossed into incivility, and we ban accounts that do that too. Would you mind reading https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and following them when posting here? We'd appreciate it.
https://www.google.com/amp/amp.washingtontimes.com/news/2016...
Similarly we say someone is "suicidal" but that doesn't mean they have committed suicide.
Having or displaying an attitude or a policy that could kill lots of people(presumably the OP is referring to North Korea" can be correctly labeled genocidal.
What?
It is no surprise that Trump won when his name can't be mentioned without an absolutely asinine, incorrect comment following it. Addressing dishonesty with hyperbole is not helping anyone.
I doubt he's particularly against it, but it doesn't actually benefit him so he's probably not for it.
Again, trying to justify your strong feelings about Trump by fabricating these insane narratives does nothing but hurt you and your political causes.
This is the first time we've ever interacted and you're projecting my feelings? Great, we're off to a good start here.
From there, I'm "fabricating a narrative" because I implied that casually threatening to kill millions of people on twitter might be what someone else was referring to as "genocidal"?
You know what is WAY more disingenuous than calling killing millions of people "genocide"? Implying that a first strike which would kill millions of people has nothing to do with killing millions of people. Now THAT would be disingenuous.
And, just to throw a cherry on the top of those other weird behaviors, you tell me I'm doing nothing but hurting my political causes, when you don't know what they are.
Couldn't you at least have the self awareness to realize that just because you get cranky when someone calls threatening to kill millions of people "genocide" does not actually mean that all points that person makes somehow lose credibility with all other human beings on earth...because you said so...?
You responded to my questioning by trying to qualify the argument with his Twitter antics. Since you're supporting the argument (or at least trying to justify the sentiment of labeling something that wouldn't be a genocide a genocide), I think we can reasonably assume that you're not a fan of Trump's idea of a first strike. The tone of your writing heavily implies that, so if you're actually in support of (or not directly opposed to) a first strike, but simultaneously argue that people could reasonably mistake a first strike for a deliberate, focused genocide, a small disclaimer that you're arguing in support of two dissonant ideas really helps people understand what you're trying to say. Similarly, unless your political alignment and actual viewpoints on the subject are highly dissonant, your politics are pretty easy to extrapolate.
To my knowledge (and I could be wrong), there is no indication that Trump has any intention to eradicate the North Korean people. To argue that Trump's intention with a first strike would be to eradicate the North Korean people would require you to fabricate reasoning behind such an action. To argue that someone is justified in the genocide argument is to admit that they're fabricating that reasoning or narrative.
Not even once did I try to minimize the casualties a first strike would have.
I never said that the original argument was necessarily wrong. I did say that the general populace will make arguments to logic, and making individual points that are blatantly wrong except in the most liberal interpretation of the wording just enables the general populace to do so.
a) Not do that.
b) Ask them what their views are if you're actually curious.
Cheers.
> Trump's interest in a first strike has nothing to do with eradicating the North Korean people.
How was it again?
> Addressing dishonesty with hyperbole is not helping anyone.
Oh. Right.
I think both of you are failing to convince anyone.
So just like every other news outlet out there? If it bleeds it leads and all that.
You realize that even if he was Hitler himself, we have multiple branches of government to counteract his power.
The public in general, not so much.
https://www.rt.com/news/407919-twitter-multi-million-offer-r...
They claim that in return for $1.5m upfront spend during the elections, Twitter would promote Russia Today's tweets and provide them with an inhouse team to curate content and provide strategy. For $500K extra, Twitter would promote RT's moments to 60 Million users. There was an offer for a $3.3m total ad spend.
But it should be pointed out that would not feed into this quarter's revenues, as it was for late 2016. And the story all depends on whether you believe the slide deck from RT is genuine or not.
(There's a separate HN discussion about that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15566663 )
What are you talking about? Before Trump was a thing, Twitter was routinely mentioned in the news. It was the lazy source of react quotes: "Today, X tragedy happened in town Y. 'UnrelatedPerson' on twitter said 'what a tragedy'".
The name is more prominent now, sure, but it already was routinely reported in the news.
It's now "Today, Trump said X about Y on Twitter".
Cool, so any indication on who is buying all my data?
Private data would spark my interest as well. They can't be selling DMs, can't they?
https://twitter.com/settings/your_twitter_data
"Interests from partners
Twitter's partners build audiences around shopping decisions, lifestyle, and other online and offline behaviors.
Tailored audiences
Tailored audiences are often built from email lists or browsing behaviors. They help advertisers reach prospective customers or people who have already expressed interest in their business."
Their biggest competitor is Datasift, which has similar exclusive deals with Facebook and Linkedin.
There’s an incredibly big market here, with customers ranging from social media analytics companies to investment firms.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/15/16148250/microsoft-linked...
How is this possible? They can't just do like fetch_all_users, filtered by "not banned?"
But the user database should already have backups, importing those backups into an analysis server should be easy, and running queries like that on an analysis server should be easy.
Counting messages, or users with X messages, etc. is also largely a function of whether your backup/restore system works. But this time you do it in chunks.
There isn't an "analysis server" and analyzing user activity is not done on a "user database backup" at Twitter's scale, though indeed that's a common way that would be done for smaller businesses.
By the way, if by user db you literally mean the db with user accounts, that's not the right data source -- you want the user _activity_ db to count active users, and for high-scale applications, those are different things. Presumably user activity updates are orders of magnitude more frequent than user object updates. You don't want to thrash your user db by constantly updating some "last seen at" field. Put that stuff somewhere else.
That said, it's true that counting is simple, it's just a Hadoop / Spark / distributed computing platform of choice job. Filter, distinct, count. It's not even hard in real-time if you have enough ram or are ok with approximate counts with bounded error, thanks to Storm, Heron, Flink, etc.
Defining what exactly constitutes an active user and catching edge cases such as this Digits thing is where things get tricky; the number of weird scenarios that cause under/overcount for what seem like reasonable and straightforward definitions would surprise you.
@baddox nailed it.
"These third-party applications used Digits, a software development kit of our now-divested Fabric platform, that allowed third-party applications to send authentication messages via SMS through our systems, which did not relate to activity on the Twitter platform," the company explained in its earnings report.
Really seems like something they should have caught earlier.
[0]: https://techcrunch.com/2014/10/22/twitter-launches-digits-a-...
"Twitter is in funding crisis now making revenue as a remedy"
"The tables have turned, Twitter now making money, what's next?"
"Twitter demonstrated first profit, VC-s are in shock"
"Twitter in decline, first profit is below expected after 11 years"
"A profitable Twitter is considered harmful"
This one here was a token gesture, a rounding error.
Which companies are buying this data? Considering its estimated that a third (1/3) of twitter activity is from bots retweeting, liking, and following. Not sure how much real value there actually is in this data. Twitter may turn a profit, but there are bigger issues with their model
2.Twitter says could turn first-ever profit, shares jump (reuters.com)
3.Twitter Says It Overstated Monthly-User Figures for 3 Years (nytimes.com)
And remember, your proposal can't be a greater danger to society than the problem you're trying to fix, or that would defeat the purpose.
With a million users, it's feasible to support the site with donations... no funding or IPO's needed...
In addition, there are numberous open-source frameworks ( like gnu-social etc. ) that enable a single person to deploy the code onto the servers.
TRUMP IS A TRAITOR.
They've released a lot of good open source software - their Scala stuff is great, and it seems like the company allows and even encourages their engineers to not only open up their code, but also gives them the time to document and help the community.