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Comment by anonym29 | Hacker News Reader

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This is not believable. It's not syntactically valid Python.

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

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.)

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)?

That's a fair point, it looks like they aren't making much effort to keep this up to date.

i.e., it's not production code and the guy who said it is and claimed to work at Twitter was lying, as previously pointed out. If only some people would read for comprehension before commenting ...

It could be old production code.

That's obviously not what "production code" means here. You just said that "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)?" was a good point, so you know what is meant. And further up in the thread there's "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?". I just made the point about ignoring the context and then you do it again. That is indistinguishable from trolling. Feh. No more responses from me.

Seems like a semantic argument over the definition of the term "production code". It's OK for you to use that term differently from anonym29 does. Cheers mate.

"..." 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.

This does not contradict what GP said.

~65k lines added, ~3k removed in span of more than 2 years. Do you guys do anything there?

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.

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.

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