Twitter scrubbing Elon, Republican, Democrat code references on GitHub | Hacker News Reader

Twitter scrubbing Elon, Republican, Democrat code references on GitHub

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25 pointsdonohoe16 comments

How do you infer that is what is happening?

This comment would seem to contradict

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

Well at the top it says that the commit is not part of any branch. So presumably this commit was removed from master and its history rewritten to exclude it from the commit tree.

Edit: see reply from verdverm

It says that about every file in the repo

It seems more like source available than Twitter developing as open source

Force push : not just for Jedi.

Looking at that I am still wondering how it got there. That isn't something that just happens, someone wrote that code and that means someone put some thought into it. I am not saying it can't possibly be irrelevant but it isn't nothing either.

That comment seems to be authored by a PR firm and approved by legal.

This is a peak Silicon Valley moment. Mike Judge should come back and do a sequel where Gavin Belson buys a social media company.

Idiocracy prequel!

This code was used for analytics. Not for filtering or presentation. I don’t see why it matters

Doesn’t GitHub implementation details allows anyone to view commits to a repo’s fork as though they are part of the original repo? I can’t find a reference to this but I remember some pranks using it before.

Anyone know what the DarkRequest thing is all about?

Dark launching is the term for releasing new features to specific users or groups for testing feedback (performance, csat, usability, etc) - back in the day of shipped software it was just called "feature flags."

It's a standard part of zero planned downtime product development.

See LaunchDarkly for a commercial provider of dark launching services.

Thanks :)

(We still call them feature flags at my place).

Great find. What was this code replaced with?

Good god, streisand effect much!

But this will probably work with Trump getting changed, that will suck the oxygen out of everything sadly for the next few weeks.

Assuming you had no software engineering skills or background, what prompt could you use for GPT-4 to scrub this code out?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com