George Hotz: Resigned from Twitter Today | Hacker News Reader

George Hotz: Resigned from Twitter Today

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74 pointsalexrustic51 comments

This man should cure you of your impostor syndrome: Guy who founded an AI startup interned at Twitter, shipped nothing, had to ask for help for basic FE fixes, and couldn't figure out GraphQL, then quit because he didn't see enough green on his GitHub activity card.

On the other hand, maybe it shows that one reason why people start startups is that they are bad at judging how difficult problems are to solve.

I'm sure he's a smart guy, but I never got why his exploits-finding made him a kid genius. Isn't the white hat community full of whiz kids? What makes geohot more of a genius than comex? Adrian Lamo didn't even know how to code!

> What makes geohot more of a genius [in the public eye] than comex?

His confidence, probably.

He's photogenic and good with media. Look at his twitter profile - he obviously spent a lot of time and thought on that picture, and it makes him look like a kid from the movie Hackers - that's not accidental.

I’m not really surprised by this news after his Twitter post [1] soliciting the public for code, tbh.

Anyone who knows anything about search knows that it’s not an easy problem to solve, especially at Twitter scale and especially given only 12 weeks to do it. The mythos of the lone genius coder really needs to just die already.

[1] https://twitter.com/realGeorgeHotz/status/159527086740295680...

"Let all the people who don’t desire greatness leave." - George Hotz Nov 16th 2022

That right there

I find it a little alarming how common these cult-of-personality posts show up on HN.

I’m not sure who is surprised by this but not me. When the news of his offer was posted a few weeks back it seemed 100% certain he would walk away accomplishing little or nothing lasting in that time.

I think it would be far more interesting to see posts on actual accomplishments, small or large, than posts focusing on the personalities involved.

> Appreciate the opportunity, but didn’t think there was any real impact I could make there.

You need to be really naive to think that you can jump in and be productive immediately, it takes people months to ramp up on codebases of Twitter's scale.

Naive, arrogant, or both.

Have to give him some credit for coming to terms with his Dunning-Kruger regarding modern web development, that graveyard of geniuses.

Or offering a polite fig leaf after saying "wait no f'ing way".

Or it was this: https://twitter.com/realGeorgeHotz/status/160459985556060569...

> Btw follow me on Instagram in case I get banned here, you know how to find me

> If saying that is banned, this isn’t somewhere I want to be anymore. That’s so far from free speech.

He went against his boss' approach to public opinion and public opinion, truly a maverick

https://twitter.com/realGeorgeHotz/status/160494553522742067...

He tried to get gain some meme cred but lost some actual credibility instead. Ouch.

People should atleast apologize for not keeping their word along with providing the reason they couldn’t keep their word. Maybe he got fired. But not keeping your word to abide by a poll, without even an attempt at an explanation is just losing credibility for no reason.

Unbelievable. George appears to have deluded himself into thinking he was an order of magnitude smarter than all his predecessors at Twitter. It's incredible what social media popularity can do to a person's ego.

I'll bet Musk wishes he didn't haphazardly fire so much of Twitter's talent. He could use the help right now.

Why? Twitter is running like normal.

It definitely isn't. There's a noted problem with replies failing and disappearing. The number of replies versus the number of replies is often inconsistent, and it changes with new replies being added (so it's not some spam-detection gone amok).

This is why you don't fire most (all?) of the chefs immediately before requiring everyone to spend 80 hours a week working in the office. Grubhubbing all your meals every day in an office isn't great for productivity.

Penny-wise, programmer-foolish.

But Paul said Musk was smart.

How is ordering Grubhub a drain on productivity?? Most tech companies don't have free food (e.g. Apple), so I doubt that's an important aspect here.

Apple has onsite kitchens with subsidized prices, IIRC? At they did before Covid and switching to work from home.

Analogously it would like if Apple upped in office time to 80 hours or whatever, and then closed those cafeterias.

And FWIW George has good food at his own company because he personally values it.

Yes, it’s subsidized.

It's not heavily subsidized. It still costs like $10 for a meal.

Also, my point in using Apple as a reference was that they do have a crunch culture (occasional 80-hour workweeks), and those cafeterias aren't open all day (unlike the Twitter ones).

Assuming it's good food $10 a meal on an apple salary seems pretty reasonable.

Tesla and SpaceX don't have free food

He lasted a hair under three Mooches, for the people keeping score at home.

That’s two thirds Truss, in european units.

62 centitrusses by my calculation.

Lettuce for the win again

Well that was quick. Can't even last for 12 weeks.

2022-11-21 "Musk antagonist George Hotz hired to fix Twitter search – he’s got 12 weeks" (several HN discussions back then https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33723257) That was 26 days ago. Not sure when he started, so maybe 3 weeks? I scrolled his Twitter timeline and can't see him posting anything substancial what his work was like, his obsticals, photos from the office or such.

This whole saga didn't last long... our bright mind motivation individual dropping like flies because dynamic social engineering is less fun than general purpose problem solving.

Or more difficult than he thought. The whole thing was very reminiscent of when a random HN poster says "I could implement Facebook in a week" or similar.

From reading his timeline, it seems he felt major refactoring was the way to go, and it didn't seem like Musk was going to go for that.

Wouldn't surprise me if he was right, but MuskTwitter doesn't have time to waste on refactoring.

That's basically a classic "problem" whenever a new software engineer joins a new company.

"Everyone else code is shit except me. I don't want to waste my time reading the code." kind of scenario.

Yup, this is a symptom of having too high expectations for yourself.

The skill needed to contribute on a mature codebase within the first year is being able to tune out anything that doesn't directly interface with small changes you are making, and trust that someone more experienced will notice during reviews if it accidentally does break something outside of that scope. And do that again and again. Ambition is a bad thing when starting on a mature codebase, do new stuff on the side if that isn't satisfying.

No, most code is really just shit. The fact that code only gets more obscure instead of more obvious is anti-intellectual. This is the complete opposite of mathematical progress. It is due to the arrogance of programmers to think that their current codebase is the best TRADEOFF anyone could have achieved. Take the newcomers' words as monition. Be completely honest about how hard it is to think straight, and adopt formal methods like Coq as done by CompCert and Sel4. There is a reason why mathematicians DEMAND proofs. It's too easy to fool yourself. Recall how "newcomers" like Hilbert in the early 20th century revamped and closed "wide gaps" in Euclid's Element which had been considered the epitome of rigor for 2200 years. Of course, people will argue that proofs take too much time, etc. Wrong! Things move so much faster when there is absolute confidence that everything is correct. As proofs are required, one is also forced to constantly simplify things. This is what refactoring is all about: simplification.

Looks like you're right. He kept pushing for a dedicated refactoring effort throughout his live Q&A with Musk here, pointing out several services:

https://twitter.com/realGeorgeHotz/status/160542468694643097...

He also talks about how some changes he made, such as removing the annoying login/signup popup when viewing twitter posts, were reverted

Is there a recording of this? Never used spaces, couldn't find a replay button.

Unless geohot ticked the record option during his twitter space, it wont have the replay button. Quite a shame, it was the most candid tech talk I've seen Musk was in, and Hotz was challenging him his points about twitter engineering and policies.

I saw someone posted a screenrecord on youtube[0], but the whole space lasted 2 hours, with Elon being there for an hour.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVDUIyzeJn8

Alex Xu, author of the System Design Interview, breaks down the Space chat:

https://twitter.com/alexxubyte/status/1605607748283949056

A spicy clip involving igb (Ian Brown), former Twitter engineer

https://twitter.com/pwnsdx/status/1605442608603463680

https://twitter.com/pwnsdx/status/1605471948359843841

To be fair, there's a very real business reason for keeping login and sign-up prompts. I'm surprised he didn't recognize that as a founder. I imagine some PM panicking and running around after learning about the change.

One of the major learnings I had during my live is that major refactors rarely pay off. The true trick that worked was to learn how to pick features apart and migrate to new systems without taking what was working from production. You can deliver often and keep the sponsors in and iterate on learnings earlier, lots of knowledge is hidden on what was created and what problems were solved without being documented.

Didn’t Musk want to do a whole rewrite of Twitter? And Hotz questioned him on that? Seems like Hotz bailed because he realized Musk has no idea what he’s doing. Source: https://youtu.be/DkxRB_YW3s0

The number of high profile tech people that have had their eyebrows singed on account of Elon Musk's actions is increasing rapidly.

Who is this? Why is this notable?

Try Google first.

He's an idiot and isn't notable, and he just owned himself by running his stupid mouth and writing cheques he couldn't cash.

On the other hand, perfect company for Elon.

Ironically, despite the snide reply and the down-votes, the other replies here led me to conclude something similar to what you wrote. Thanks!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com