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Immunotherapy drug eliminates aggressive cancers in clinical trial

https://www.rockefeller.edu/news/38120-immunotherapy-drug-eliminates-aggressive-cancers-in-clinic...
194•marc__1•2h ago•33 comments

All vibe coding tools are selling a get rich quick scheme

https://varunraghu.com/all-vibe-coding-tools-are-selling-a-get-rich-quick-scheme/
65•Varun08•1h ago•39 comments

iPhone Air

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/09/introducing-iphone-air-a-powerful-new-iphone-with-a-breakt...
390•excerionsforte•5h ago•944 comments

Anthropic judge rejects $1.5B AI copyright settlement

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/ip-law/anthropic-judge-blasts-copyright-pact-as-nowhere-close-to-done
130•nobody9999•14h ago•150 comments

Memory Integrity Enforcement

https://security.apple.com/blog/memory-integrity-enforcement/
270•circuit•5h ago•112 comments

E-paper display reaches the realm of LCD screens

https://spectrum.ieee.org/e-paper-display-modos
151•rbanffy•5h ago•67 comments

Claude can now create and edit files

https://www.anthropic.com/news/create-files
373•meetpateltech•9h ago•225 comments

Axial Twist Theory

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axial_twist_theory
32•lordnacho•2d ago•0 comments

I don't want AI agents controlling my laptop

https://sophiebits.com/2025/09/09/ai-agents-security
40•Bogdanp•2h ago•16 comments

The Dying Dream of a Decentralized Web

https://spectrum.ieee.org/web3-hardware-security
119•warrenm•4h ago•128 comments

We all dodged a bullet

https://xeiaso.net/notes/2025/we-dodged-a-bullet/
507•WhyNotHugo•8h ago•308 comments

Anthropic is endorsing SB 53

https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-is-endorsing-sb-53
25•antfarm•2h ago•23 comments

Ask HN: Why is there no native SSH hook to run a local command before connecting

6•tetris11•2d ago•2 comments

Tomorrow's emoji today: Unicode 17.0

https://jenniferdaniel.substack.com/p/tomorrows-emoji-today-unicode-170
73•ChrisArchitect•5h ago•111 comments

A new experimental Go API for JSON

https://go.dev/blog/jsonv2-exp
165•darccio•8h ago•53 comments

US HS students lose ground in math and reading, continuing yearslong decline

https://apnews.com/article/naep-reading-math-scores-12th-grade-c18d6e3fbc125f12948cc70cb85a520a
160•bikenaga•8h ago•214 comments

Show HN: Bottlefire – Build single-executable microVMs from Docker images

https://bottlefire.dev/
26•losfair•2d ago•7 comments

Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-send-employees-back-to-office-rto-remote-work-2025-9
182•alloyed•6h ago•325 comments

Weave (YC W25) is hiring a founding AI engineer

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/weave-3/jobs/SqFnIFE-founding-ai-engineer
1•adchurch•6h ago

DuckDB NPM packages 1.3.3 and 1.29.2 compromised with malware

https://github.com/duckdb/duckdb-node/security/advisories/GHSA-w62p-hx95-gf2c
280•tosh•13h ago•215 comments

Building a DOOM-like multiplayer shooter in pure SQL

https://cedardb.com/blog/doomql/
124•lvogel•8h ago•28 comments

YouTube is a mysterious monopoly

https://anderegg.ca/2025/09/08/youtube-is-a-mysterious-monopoly
94•geerlingguy•18h ago•158 comments

An attacker’s blunder gave us a look into their operations

https://www.huntress.com/blog/rare-look-inside-attacker-operation
112•mellosouls•7h ago•75 comments

Inflation Erased U.S. Income Gains Last Year

https://www.wsj.com/economy/consumers/census-income-insurance-poverty-2024-31d82ad0
121•JumpCrisscross•3h ago•31 comments

Dropbox Paper mobile App Discontinuation

https://help.dropbox.com/installs/paper-mobile-discontinuation
113•mercenario•5h ago•94 comments

ICE is using fake cell towers to spy on people's phones

https://www.forbes.com/sites/the-wiretap/2025/09/09/how-ice-is-using-fake-cell-towers-to-spy-on-p...
430•coloneltcb•7h ago•182 comments

A clickable visual guide to the Rust type system

https://rustcurious.com/elements/
233•stmw•4d ago•39 comments

Go for Bash Programmers – Part II: CLI Tools

https://github.com/go-monk/from-bash-to-go-part-ii
75•reisinge•1d ago•3 comments

You too can run malware from NPM (I mean without consequences)

https://github.com/naugtur/running-qix-malware
172•naugtur•13h ago•96 comments

Cities obey the laws of living things

https://nautil.us/cities-obey-the-laws-of-living-things-1236057/
28•dnetesn•2d ago•8 comments
Open in hackernews

Source code for the X recommendation algorithm

https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm
222•mxstbr•8h ago

Comments

mxstbr•8h ago
https://x.com/XEng/status/1965226798460887127
numpad0•7h ago
Interesting. So the numbers/fractions of "for you feed isn't working" complaints, and specifically that complaint, is above some threshold?
davidw•8h ago
Does it include the bit about white South Africans?
kennyadam•7h ago
That was Grok, not the X algorithm.
cubefox•7h ago
And the Grok prompts are also open source: https://github.com/xai-org/grok-prompts
jsheard•7h ago
Well, some version of them are open source, which may or may not be what is actually running in prod. AFAIK the patch which made it obsessively bring up white South Africans was never published, and this algorithm repo went over two years between updates so it obviously wasn't tracking prod.
cubefox•5h ago
> which may or may not be what is actually running in prod.

This is the case for every open source software ever.

> AFAIK the patch which made it obsessively bring up white South Africans was never published

Or there never was a specific patch for that purpose, contrary to what you are assuming.

> this algorithm repo went over two years between updates so it obviously wasn't tracking prod.

You are mixing up something. The Grok prompt repo is a different repo from the recommendation algorithm, and the former has been updated regularly.

cma•7h ago
Did they ever open source in there the stuff that was making Grok search for Musk's opinion before giving an opinion on world news?
luma•6h ago
Nope, nor did that repo have the system prompts that brought is MechaHitler, nor the time earlier this year where it started injecting Trump into every completion.

The Grok repo is a smokescreen for deniability (just not particularly plausible).

cubefox•5h ago
> Nope, nor did that repo have the system prompts that brought is MechaHitler

False, you made that up.

https://decrypt.co/329365/bye-bye-mechahitler-elon-musk-xai-...

> The Grok repo is a smokescreen for deniability (just not particularly plausible).

Completely unfounded conspiracy theory.

cma•2h ago
I would be surprised if that line in the prompt caused it without the other thing they did just before mecha Hitler: Elon created a Twitter thread asking users to submit divisive politically incorrect facts for grok training. It was full of Holocaust denial and white supremecy stuff.

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1936493967320953090

Most likely they rolled back finetuning on that thread at the same time they adjusted the prompt.

openquery•8h ago
I've always wondered - how can I as a non X engineer be sure that the code on GH is actually deployed on their servers?
h1fra•7h ago
you can't, and it's 100% sure it's not this code running in prod
jjordan•7h ago
100% huh? That's a bold statement with no supporting evidence.
Pxtl•7h ago
Sounds like the right tone when discussing a Musk project.
viraptor•7h ago
Already posted above: https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/blob/c54bec0d4e029f...

It's redacted.

jibal•5h ago
Claiming that there's no supporting evidence is a bold (and obviously false) claim when the code is 2 years old and heavily redacted.
random3•7h ago
I don’t think that’s the point of open sourcing things, in general
openquery•7h ago
I agree in general it isn't. But in this case Musk claimed that was the point of open-sourcing the algorithm. Transparency on what they are or are not suppressing.
cma•7h ago
When Tesla "open sourced" their patents, they required companies taking them up on it to, not reciprocally, not copy their "designs". So you get access to their patents in exchange for vague restrictions broader than the patent or copyright system.
random3•7h ago
Oh, I see. Well, purely on his claim:bs ratio, I'd too take than with a grain of salt :)
gchamonlive•7h ago
How can you be sure that the machine code that was generated from your C source files actually match the behaviour encoded in them?

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_Ref...

ml-anon•7h ago
It’s not. The last “algorithm” release was a random grab bag of code which existed in some of the Twitter repo that might have been tangentially related to recommendations/feed.

Source: worked at Twitter in ML/recsys.

anonym29•7h ago
False, this is definitely production code.

Source: I work at Twitter.

jsheard•7h ago
Even if this is the actual production code at this very second, it won't match prod for long if they continue this pattern of only dropping an update every two years or so.
GuinansEyebrows•7h ago
> Source: I work at Twitter.

Please stop

anonym29•6h ago
edit: disregard, misinterpreted
wtfwhateven•5h ago
because the person you replied to said they worked (past tense) at twitter, unlike you who says they [currently] work (present tense) at twitter

why would they tell someone not working at twitter anymore to stop working at twitter? and how does that amount to "biased, hypocritical, one-way persecution"

majewsky•7h ago
This does not contradict what GP said.
close04•6h ago
Honest question. Would you even dare to say you work at Twitter and then spill the beans on some very public lie or misdirection? It’s trivial to match your writing style between your HN comments and your work emails to identify you. Musk is famously a very petty, bitter, and vindictive person with an easy to bruise ego.

I don’t have any knowledge of the reality inside Twitter but I also have no reason to believe the company would be transparent given the many past controversies, or that any one employee would be able to look at this code which has obvious redactions and say “everything else is definitely 100% prod” and not exactly what GP suggested.

jibal•5h ago
"..." all over the place in 2 year old code is production code?

And people who work at X don't say they work at Twitter.

kklisura•3h ago
~65k lines added, ~3k removed in span of more than 2 years. Do you guys do anything there?
3np•2h ago
This is not believable. It's not syntactically valid Python.

https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/blob/c54bec0d4e029f...

0xDEAFBEAD•1h ago
True, but on the other hand, it's not exactly surprising if they're redacting details related to spam detection, algorithmic manipulation, foreign interference, and other such adversarial phenomena.

(I'm not necessarily saying that's what's going on. But I do seem to recall that when reddit open-sourced, they deliberately chose to redact info related to vote manipulation/spam detection/etc.)

3np•33m ago
Do you also believe it plausible that aside from redacted parts, this module has not been changed in any way on production servers for over 2 years (last commit is spring 2023)?
0xDEAFBEAD•12m ago
That's a fair point, it looks like they aren't making much effort to keep this up to date.
TheAceOfHearts•5h ago
Anon, when I was looking through this source dump I saw a huge range of timeouts used in various services, do you know if there's any writeup or explanation as to how the engineering team settled on those values?
jsheard•7h ago
RIP author_is_elon, we hardly knew ye.

https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/issues/236

echelon•7h ago
Republican, Democrat, and Elon.

Wow.

ivape•7h ago
Is this real? We accept that the algorithm may link you abstractly with other people, but I didn’t think they were literally labeling on this level. If you just say “we look for what’s similar and leave it at that”, then there’s much less liability.

This is political targeting. This guy was one of the biggest political donors, how can this fly?

frabcus•7h ago
Looks pretty real:

https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/blob/7f90d0ca342b92...

When this started it really put me off X - I'd have tolerated, and almost liked the idea, of a freedom of speeech place. But a place that boosts its owners posts... Nope.

I'm out - it's such a big personal diss of me, I'm not interested any more.

burnte•7h ago
Yes, he really had twitter change their code to push his tweets more.
jsheard•7h ago
They seem to have dialed the overt Elon boosting down now but it's still conspicuously aligned with his priorities. I just made a fresh burner account to see what the algorithm is primed to push by default nowadays, and about 80% of the feed is anti-immigration ragebait.
mrguyorama•6h ago
I think that's just an accurate and mostly genuine indicator of who is left on twitter nowadays.

The people left on twitter earnestly believe that it is better now that you can shout racial slurs at people, buy your way to the top of any chain, get literally paid for ragebait, and genuinely think this repo is meaningful.

It's a massive self selection bias.

archagon•4h ago
Musk is actively pushing white nationalism these days, so maybe he adjusted the algorithm in line with his political priorities: https://bsky.app/profile/harikunzru.bsky.social/post/3lxrqzm...
bongodongobob•5h ago
You do realize people officially register as party members right? I have no idea why this upsets you. It's just categorization. I fucking hope my feeds do this, I do not want to see maga trash.
0points•5h ago
> This guy was one of the biggest political donors, how can this fly?

The system is rigged. Haven't you noticed yet?

SXX•7h ago
South Park: The Game level of irony.
hereme888•5h ago
Rep, Dem, and "America Party".
uyzstvqs•6h ago
The file in question is now here: https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/blob/main/home-mixe...

author_is_elon, author_is_democrat, and author_is_republican are in fact gone. Now there is grok_politics_neutral, grok_politics_left, and grok_politics_right. This is in addition to a whole group of other categories, such as grok_category_sports and grok_category_music. All are based on annotations by Grok.

Importantly, this file is not used for recommendations. Everything in this file is only used for "metrics tracking purposes to measure how often we serve posts with various attributes." This would also have applied to author_is_elon.

0points•5h ago
Oh my god lolollol

author_is_elon

author_is_power_user

author_is_democrat

author_is_republican

Scene_Cast2•7h ago
Just like with their last release, they only released the architecture and not the weights. It may be useful for analyzing the system if you're a competitor (but from my last dive into it, it seemed like a strict subset of fancier, industry-leading rec systems), or perhaps getting into rec / retrieval systems as a newcomer.

However, this gives roughly zero insight into how Twitter's feed behaves.

amelius•7h ago
There might be some value if someone can show that the feed mis-behaves for some selection of weights.
Scene_Cast2•7h ago
Nope. Every single system like that will misbehave if given a bad set of weights, or even a random set of weights. I'd go as far as saying that even with "good" weights, it's likely to have some sigma of misbehavior.
gyanchawdhary•7h ago
For all its flaws .. it’s still a step up from how Parag and co used to run twitter
snapcaster•7h ago
Why? I've never been a twitter user
gyanchawdhary•6h ago
Post Musk Twitter is amazing. It lets you see how stories, opinions that you support or don’t are attacked from all sides and Community noted / @grok fact checked … a lot of UX changes too .. pre Musk, the moderation / banning was biased and arbitrary (who is watching the watchers?) .. my personal fav was to see the special tick removed from journalists ..
jezzamon•6h ago
I think that's the first time I've seen someone positive about that change. My experience has been by showing blue tick users above others, the experience has become a lot more biased because it's only a certain type of person that pays for Twitter
moralestapia•6h ago
Then make that two times.

I also think Twitter under Musk is much better, way much more functionality in it.

gyanchawdhary•6h ago
Isn’t that a good thing that you have already created a mental filter about people who pay for it as being of a “certain type” .. the problem with ticks being bestowed upon some journalists is that they become the brokers/influencers by the virtue of simply working for a newspaper .. that power is vaporised now .. tbh the real question is why didn’t twitter pre musk implement community notes .. I mean it’s not such a bleeding edge / hard to execute idea ..
kej•6h ago
>tbh the real question is why didn’t twitter pre musk implement community notes

They did. Community notes are just the rebranded "Birdwatch" program that predates Musk.

TheAceOfHearts•6h ago
Community Notes was literally built by pre-Elon Twitter: Birdwatch was first announced on August 2020, and it was initially launched on January 2021. On November 2022, Elon rebranded it to Community Notes and made it widely available.
lawlessone•5h ago
>that power is vaporised now

and replaced with something worse.

mac-attack•5h ago
In the same way that someone speaking on behalf of the White House is held to a standard whenever they speak, the same applies to journalists that are representing a newspaper.

Making everyone 'equal' is a political heuristic that IMO presupposes that journalists can't be trusted and are as useful as a random person paying $20/mo.

thevillagechief•4h ago
I'm going to go ahead and say that the last 5 years did in fact show that journalists cannot be trusted. I will agree that random persons paying $20 obliterates what was already an embarrassingly low bar. Really, opening it up just expanded the pool of what was already just influencers/activists. And why did celebrities have the bluecheck? It's probably more useful as a verification mechanism.
bookofjoe•6h ago
Yes, people like me who CAN’T STAND TO SEE THEIR TYPOS etc. up there on display forever.
next_xibalba•5h ago
Twitter/X user here. I agree with GP, it’s better than it was pre-Elon. The For You feed definitely seems less biased, more interesting, and fewer flame wars. I also think the exodus of Bluesky-ers has helped that (for which Elon gets partial credit). Yes, they do seem to have been backfilled by their right-side mirror images, but those people don’t seem to get amplified to the degree their predecessors were.
sanktanglia•4h ago
You are really going to try and say right wingers aren't amplified on twitter? I literally have an account that just follows gaming accounts and I was having to block people throwing out slurs daily
wisty•3h ago
Maybe you're just biased against normal people? According to the last election, most Americans support Trump. You'd expect a certain percent of the general population to be somewhat right-wing and maybe even rudely so - it's not the early 1990s when only people access to the university mainframe that could get online. Since mobile browsers became popular (around 2010?) being able to type with two thumbs is the only real requirement to comment online.

Hearing gamers swear profusely on a daily basis is the experience of anyone who plays a game with chat.

overfeed•3h ago
> You are really going to try and say right wingers aren't amplified on twitter?

FWIW, they see it - but interpret it as "Twitter being less biased" now, because from their POV, Twitter had a pro-liberal bias before Musk, and is now trending towards what they consider neutral.

simianwords•6h ago
I’m a big fan of grok fact checks.
tonymet•6h ago
it has potential but they need to improve the @grok UI. Twitter is just cluttered with "@grok is this true?" spam and I had to mute it.
samyar•5h ago
I agree i was banned pre Musk i think now its more free and less bans
archagon•4h ago
“Fact checks,” sure. Grok is finely tuned to its master’s demands and politics: https://archive.ph/G0Y4i
IncRnd•4h ago
The very first question that the article writer said they posed to Grok 3 and Grok 4, "What is currently the biggest threat to Western civilization and how would you mitigate it?", didn't return anything like the simplistic answers in that article. Apparently, the article was politically driven.

When I asked Grok 4, two pages worth of answers were returned, including a table with columns for Threat, Reasoning, and Severity. The article is just plain wrong and fails the very fact-checking that it purported to do.

archagon•3h ago
I’m not sure what point you think you’re making. The article points to several examples of Grok giving a politically unfavorable answer to a user, Musk throwing a fit about that answer, and then Grok returning a politically tuned answer several days later. It’s observation, not some sort of gotcha by the author. Whatever you’re doing with Grok right now is irrelevant in this context.
yyyk•2h ago
Grok is a lickspittle, don't ask it about facts. But the clever thing is that Grok can do meta queries for you ('give me the last 30 users from X who posted about Y using the word...').
jordanscales•3h ago
Unfortunately, this [0] cancels out everything ten-fold. The owner of the website is boosting the content of himself and the people he supports. This did not happen in the old twitter - not even close.

[0] https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/issues/236

paulpauper•7h ago
the criteria for deciding which posts in comments or feed are spam or should be otherwise be suppressed are unsurprisingly also hidden . It's known that blue checkmark accounts rank above non-verified ones for comments, but I dunno about feed visibiblity.
barbazoo•7h ago
Not only no weights. Not sure what people's expectations are but a lot of the time this isn't even valid code with all the redaction they did [1]. I'm confused as to who this is for, this surely isn't the repo they're working on, is it?

[1] https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/blob/main/trust_and...

Raed667•6h ago
This is 100% for headlines and Musk to be able to say "we're open" during interviews. Its actual usefulness is not the point
pbasista•6h ago
The reporters should be getting down to the point and asking Elon Musk about the practical usefulness of such a heavily redacted public release.
morkalork•5h ago
I can think of like 3 institutions that have reporters who would ask that kind of question (The Register, Ars Technica and 404media) and I don't think Musk is going to be sitting across the table from any of them, ever.
simultsop•3h ago
I believe these are the last kicks of a dying horse/bird...

Why you take this so serious? The world is moving on. Nobody will trust anyone with their freedom of speech, ever. Is this so hard to see?

Any centralized solution qucikly implements censoring, starts banning users.

Aurornis•3h ago
When they "open sourced" the Tesla Roadster the website only had a couple of mostly useless files. Discussion at the time https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38383099

Despite not containing more than a few random files, there were headlines everywhere about the "Open Source Tesla Roadster". There were countless comments, Tweets, and posts about how amazing it was that the Roadster was now open source.

None of the people reporting on it or praising it actually looked at the files and realized you couldn't actually build anything other than the HVAC control board for the car.

nativeit•6h ago
I know when I think “open source”, I am always thinking “heavily redacted”.

/s

nextaccountic•4h ago
Are you talking about this?

    wandb_key = ...
    wandb.login(...)
It's rather weird that they would add keys to the source code like this, rather than reading from the environment or some secrets service. Rather than redacting the source, they should refactor to remove the keys from the source
barbazoo•4h ago
One example, that's right. Another one:

    train_query = f"""
    SELECT 
      {{feature_names}},
      {",".join(labels)},
    ...
    """
and right at the top:

    cat_names = [
    ...
    ]
mvdtnz•3h ago
There's no way you got to this bit without skipping over multiple actual redactions, like SQL queries with all of the details replaced with ellipsis. Why are you cherry-picking one innocent instance when you know exactly what the parent comment is talking about?
Levitating•4h ago
what is your footnote referring to exactly?
Kaethar•6h ago
Not an ML expert, but is it feasible to train the weights using the actual Twitter feed as an oracle?
MiguelHudnandez•6h ago
It would cost a fortune in API calls, so it's not practical for anyone except internally at corporate.
bpavuk•1h ago
well, Bluesky and Mastodon posts would suffice, but it's still useless because of how redacted the release is
minimaxir•5h ago
No, even if you somehow were able to download the corpus of all public X posts. There are many hidden signals that are feature engineered in good recsys, and the stripped-down algo won't be able to replicate them.
Gabrys1•6h ago
It'd assume that weights are changing constantly so they'd need to open source a service tweaking the weights in real time rather than the weights themselves...
dotancohen•5h ago
They could publish a snapshot of any point in time. This is hosted on GitHub, literally the hub for actively-developed software and related assets.
cubefox•7h ago
This is laudable. But the great thing about Twitter is that you don't have to use the algorithmic "For You" feed at all. You can just use the "Following" feed, which is purely chronological, and doesn't contain any recommended content. This isn't possible on Facebook, which makes it unusable for me.
Pxtl•7h ago
That ignores the way Twitter sorts replies, which always use an algorithmic weight-based listing.
833•7h ago
Not if you sort by recency or likes.
thomasm6m6•7h ago
On iOS at least, there is a “Sort replies > latest” option which is strictly chronological
bprew•7h ago
Facebook has a "friends only" feed (Friends button, next to Home), but it's not chronological.
SilverElfin•6h ago
I don’t use it - does it remember the setting? My recollection is that Facebook would make you switch to that chronological feed manually each time you load the page.
cubefox•3h ago
As I said, Facebook doesn't have a chronological feed. Twitter remembers the feed setting.
jandrese•3h ago
The "following" feed helps, but replies to almost any topic still attract outright white supremacists on X. They have seemingly endless time to fill the site up with their talking points.
barrenko•7h ago
Just ping Nikita, he'll tell you the current algo.
qiine•7h ago
hope it doesn't involve goat again
anonym29•7h ago
It's so disappointing to see that Twitter has only released the source code of their algorithm while all of their competitors have released both algorithms and weights.
vips7L•7h ago
Always good to see some Scala in the wild. :)
halfmatthalfcat•6h ago
There are dozens of us!
OG_BME•7h ago
I tried going through the latest diff, but there is so much boilerplate that I was nt able to find any real insights through skimming.

Has anyone found anything useful? Interesting needle-in-a-haystack problem for LLMs to try as well.

thewisenerd•7h ago
sidenote: when do you think they're going to coax GitHub to transfer the `x` username?

https://github.com/x/

mrtksn•7h ago
I want a social media where I can ssh into the servers with limited privileges, enough to see what's going on but not cause harm.
nativeit•6h ago
I want a social media where all of that is true of its owners.
swaptr•6h ago
Not sure if this is the right place to ask, but why does Bluesky feel so much faster to load and interact with compared to X? On the surface, both have similar interfaces and equally rich content, yet Bluesky consistently feels snappier and more responsive, even though it’s the newer platform.
palmfacehn•6h ago
Could be from lower usage.
pavel_lishin•5h ago
No idea, but Twitter is functionally un-usable if you're not logged in.
recursivecaveat•4h ago
Newer is generally faster, hasn't had time to accumulate cludges and dead ends from years of evolution. The bigger factor though I would imagine is not having 100 tons of analytics tracking everything.
cropcirclbureau•2h ago
Iiirc, Twitter uses some mongrel version of React Native on the web. That's why you get the 3 seconds long loading thingie whenever you open a new tab.
HelloUsername•6h ago
Previous discussions:

25-apr-2022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31160546 380 comments

31-mar-2023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35391433 1185 comments

TheAceOfHearts•6h ago
I browsed through it a bit and these are some details that raised questions or which I found interesting:

There's multiple mentions of slop, for example: SlopsAuthorScoreFeature in HomeTweetTypePredicates. That means everyone gets a slop score between 0 and 1, which makes me wish that it was openly visible and that people with a high slop score would get a little piggy emoji next to their name.

There's a CLIENT_TWEET_TAKE_SCREENSHOT action, which is likely used to keep track of when a (mobile, presumably) client takes a screenshot. I hadn't considered this before, but for a social media app where posts are often shared externally through screenshots, keeping track of this can give you another engagement metric.

They have two types of NSFW filters: isNsfw and isSoftNsfw, but I couldn't figure out the distinction. Other metadata types include: isGore, isViolent, isSpam, isLowQuality, isOcr.

In ContentFeatureAdapter there's a getTweetLengthType function which shows the range for each tweet type. This is used to set TWEET_LENGTH_TYPE elsewhere. I wonder if it would help your virality to switch up your tweet lengths to regularly put out tweets which hit every length category, or if it doesn't significantly affect your potential reach.

There's a hardcoded list of top-level Grok topics [0]. Just mildly interesting to see what they consider to be top-level categories. Anime has achieved a significant cultural victory by getting separated into its own major category.

The timeout values for different service request types varied a lot across the application, which makes me curious about how they settled on those numbers. This is a question I've pondered in the past but haven't gotten around to researching deeply.

[0] https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/blob/c54bec0d4e029f...

saagarjha•2h ago
I assume soft NSFW is non-hardcore content
lambdaone•6h ago
This is essentially useless without the training set or the weights. It's open-source theatre.
keepamovin•6h ago
I think Elon said he would release the weights. In a video somewhere. That's what he meant - when the next major version lands, they release the previous one?

People's choices can change, maybe the economic/geopolitical reality of AI race has been impressed upon him, but I think that's what he said.

TheAceOfHearts•5h ago
This post is about the Twitter algorithm. He originally said it would be open source, but he just did a source dump 2 years ago. Now they did a new source dump with updated but heavily redacted code for the For You feed.

As for his claims about opening up Grok: Elon said that they would publish the n-1 weights for Grok. However, he dragged his feet and only recently released the weights for Grok 2. So now we're up to Grok 4 but he has yet to release the weights for Grok 3 despite his claims.

I think the problem with Elon is that he doesn't fully hold himself accountable for his words. If he decided that it was no longer economically viable to share Grok's weights then he should post an update about that. You cannot expect to win the goodwill of claiming to support open source and then continuously drag your feet while refusing to communicate your intentions clearly.

guluarte•5h ago
so basically pay to play