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Comment by justinkramp | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

Please don't just post the most obvious snarky comment about a given topic. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Sorta amazes me how people in various levels of power will not say the obvious thing or actively discourage saying the obvious thing because it might offend Elon.

Recently all the big bank CEOs involved with the SpaceX IPO - a lot of money in that for them - but a company trading at 100x sales is clearly crazy.

Yeah I don’t get it. These are legitimate questions to ask considering what happened recently.

Being nice, maybe Tomhow is just unaware?

People post critical things about the most powerful people and companies all the time here and we have zero problem with it.

What I'm asking for is for people to not post the most obvious, snarky comment, regardless of the topic/target, not because of who it may “offend” (as if the most powerful people in the world would have any awareness or care about a comment like that on HN), but because it makes HN seem repetitive, miserable and lame.

Critique away, just make discussions thoughtful and substantive, which is what HN is for.

For what it's worth, this doesn't read as "snark" to me. There _are_ many direct critiques in this thread about X being caught uploading users home directories, and some are clearly snark. I understand that you read this as a rhetorical question meant as a critique.

But it's really not clear to me why this should be read as a snarky, critical, rhetorical question. Someone who eagerly wants to use Grok Build would ask this exact same question.

"Does this [Grok Build] also just directly suck all your code up and make a copy of it on their servers?" is a question that is (1) salient and (2) answerable and (3) could be thoroughly devastating for someone to find out on their own by using it.

The answer is not present in the README, and XAi has blocked Issues and Discussions, so there's none of the usual avenues on GitHub to ask these questions. It seems perfectly typical and expected for someone to ask this question here.

I understand reading it as benign and sincere if you're sympathetic to the sentiment. As someone whose job it is to read the comments all day every day, and whose objective is to keep discussions here as intellectually gratifying as possible, it just comes across as unsubstantive at best, and jeering at worst.

The project is open source; if the commenter was sincerely curious about what the software does with a user's code, they could have checked themselves or phrased the question in a way that made it clear they were genuinely interested in finding out.

My reply wasn’t hostile or threatening; just a polite reminder to use HN in a way that’s consistent with its intended spirit.

Ah, that's fair. I think I saw the [dead] and [flagged] and assumed you might have personally pulled a lever behind-the-scenes for that, but that was not a fair assumption of mine.

I hope I don't come off as argumentative, but I did try checking the source code myself. It clocks in at 1.3 million lines of Rust around version `b189869`, so I can't hold that against anyone. Most of that is under `crates/` (which contains a number of xai crates).

(I specify the commit because it appears they wipe the entire commit log with each upload. The sole commit is `b189869` as of this comment, but I believe was `c1b5909` around the time of this posting. I have only cloned `b189869`, personally.)

Thanks for understanding. I had un-killed the original comment but it was re-killed by later flags. I've made it un-killable now.

The rest of your comment all sounds like great material for a curious conversation about how/whether you could check what the software is doing with the code :)

Good push, thank you. Others have commented more salient criticism.

Thanks for understanding! Appreciate the reply.

Honestly a great question. I mean if it’s open source someone will check (I don’t use xAI but believe me I would be checking first if I did).

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