George Hotz becomes a Twitter intern to fix search

It's sort of like modern art. Maybe you could have done it, but you didn't.

I've done this many times and it comes back shortly afterwards. I'm not saying they should optimize for my use case and I have enormous sympathy for the Twitter engineers. However on a personal level this removes a huge annoyance when I need to read tweets. Now if I could just get Reddit to stop redirecting me to their app :)

> Good lord. I can't imagine bragging, taking a job, then immediately asking other people how to do it.

This. What a public announcement of incompetence.

It happens a lot in software, especially in the last half decade or so.

You can't imagine being a manager?

The reason so many coders think coding bootcamps are viable and a CS degree is not a good fit or not useful for a dev is because they are all javascript plumbers and haven't seen good code in their life.

If plumbing was done with the same skill level, talent, and rigor as most websites, your average bathroom would look like the pipes screensaver.

Maybe hacking and front-end dev are very different skillsets, and being gifted at one does not automatically make you even competent at the other.

this

I don't really see how this would make sense or even be possible purely from the frontend, I think you'd need to modify the typeahead service unless I am misunderstanding the requirements.

At first I thought him trying to engage the community as a whole for technical contributions was good and upbeat. But it also makes me question- then what is he bringing to the table then? His celebrity, to engage those people? Is his internship to be a technical manager? Is he actually going to credit these contributors, let alone ask Musk to give them internships? It's not managing if these people are just random volunteers he's using ad hoc.

Passionate hackers love to solve technical challenges, sure, but it does feel weird that he posted this open-ended call to action. I'm not saying they must be paid, as per the free work detractors, but even in FOSS you get credited and on Stack Overflow you receive karma.

> did anybody expect Hotz to sit down and write search from scratch in complete isolation?

Based on his reputation, people sure act like he is some sort of supercoder polymath who is able to pick up on any stack.

> Looks to me like he might recognize the scope of the problem (...)

I find it very unlikely that search, of all features, has problems where UI development is remotely relevant, let alone the solution. UI-wise, search consists of firing dumb requests to the backend and just update the UI with the results.

Hotz is an intern not a manager. Interns are generally expected to take on these sort of "heads down" coding tasks, not hire other interns.

In this case he seems to be either unwilling or unable to (it becomes more clear in one of the tweets further down the thread) to even implement Does the query begin with "from:"

Do you have the backstory?

George was kinda fanboying over Musk's "work harder" memo. Someone kinda mocked him. He said fine I'll intern myself to prove my point.

So, Musk hires him apparently specifically to fix search.

Then George makes a post asking how to fix search, under the guise of hiring them(as an intern) to do it.

What is he bringing to the table at that point?

But what is the point of this entire exercise? Was he actually asking for React help? Is he actually hiring an intern team? Did he just want to engage the community by presenting a technical challenge? Is he signaling that Twitter is going to open itself up and invite greater developer interaction? It's all very strange.

> All this is going to do is discourage him and others from being transparent and building in public.

He's a celebrity hacker, he's used to it. He is not fragile, judging by his public persona.

> Everyone trying to tear George down for this comes off as completely miserable. It's fucking sad.

Still less sad and miserable than billionaire bootlickers calling other people sad and miserable

He got hired to do a job. Rather than doing the job he was hired to do, he tried to farm out the job to someone else publicly, on Twitter.

This is the kind of incompetence you've said that Twitter is filled with. Why is it okay when it's George Hotz then?

> about to learn yet another lesson

Bold of you to assume they're capable of learning at this point.

Dunning-Kruger. It affects smart people too (for certain definitions of smart).

Dude he said robo-taxies by 2020 as a hard deadline in 2018. Why is our memory so short?

I think it's admirable they're pushing forward with these hard tasks, and I do see there's progress, and I do support them in continuing.

But he definitely had promised like a dozen times now throughout the years that it'll "be done in a year". Elon's promises mean absolutely nothing at this point.

EDIT: I... like totally didn't read the username I'm replying to.