Hacker News Reader

Comment by polygamous_bat | Hacker News Reader

Wasn’t the tweet recommendation system “open sourced” as well? Does this guy know the difference between open source and “open source”?

View on HN

> Wasn’t the tweet recommendation system “open sourced” as well? Does this guy know the difference between open source and “open source”?

What do you mean? There exists only one binding definition of open source

> https://opensource.org/osd

and either some product does satisfy it, or it doesn't. As far as I am aware

> https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm

does satisfy the open source definition, so your sarcasm looks demagogical to me, but I am very willing to learn something new.

I think people expected him to "open" the algorithm so that you could tell how the recommendations are determined, and instead what people got was an Underpants Gnomes' Plan with a neural network step in the middle and no weights.

So it is not open source, thank you for the info.

While I agree there is a common understanding of what open source is, there most definitely does not exist any "binding definition"! It is not trademarked, copyrighted (and it never could have been, two common words that it is), or in any country's legally protected terms, or anything else. It is really grating to see such nonsense repeated way to often.

> There exists only one binding definition of open source

>> https://opensource.org/osd

Insert Obama awarding himself meme. Who said that this is the "only binding definition"?

Yes, and it's here: https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm

If e.g. Amazon open sources some part of its software infrastructure should they also open source the data it uses or their configuration files?

AGPL https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm

If I recall correctly this repo is missing data so it's functionally impossible to verify or replicate the behaviour they're using on live.

Not only that, it's not been updated in 8 months. It's extremely unlikely that Twitter hasn't updated anything about the home feed since then. They effectively dumped part of the code on GitHub for some headlines, but never intended to keep developing it in the open.

> but never intended to keep developing it in the open

Did Elon Musk promise this?

Not explicitly. But since they gave it an AGPL licence, you can request the updated source from them, so the intention was definitely there. (Then again, as owners they can relicense any time they want, so it's not really binding for them)

They also invited to contribute to that repo... but none of the serious PRs got ever merged as far as I can tell. Basically, they were never serious about doing this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com