Leaving Twitter | Hacker News Reader

Leaving Twitter

nathanmarz.com

138 pointsananthrk22 comments

The new title, "Leaving Twitter", is much less descriptive than the previous one, "Nathan Marz is leaving Twitter". Could someone please change it back?

I don't understand why Hacker News allows us to submit titles with our links. If they are just going to be overridden, then the software should automatically fetch the title from the web page without user input.

I wouldn't mind so much if it were accountable. There's no mechanism to challenge a title change. Between that and the arbitrary banning of sites, I usually think twice about submitting good things.

Or to hovertext with "Submitted title: 'blah blah blah'"

I agree. I am the original poster and I expanded the title to make it more clear. But looks like the mods don't see it that way.

Funny, I see "Leaving Twitter (nathanmarz.com)". That's pretty descriptive.

I had no idea who Nathan Marz was. When I saw the title, I assumed "Leaving Twitter" was implying discontinuing usage of Twitter from an outsider's perspective, not an employee parting ways with the company. The original title is completely unambiguous.

AFAIK all of the mods are YC insiders, so they'd know Marz by name.

If it is as you imply, that's a pretty serious Theory of Mind failure on their part.

Agreed, and more importantly, thank you for introducing me to the term "theory of mind." It seems a nice way to succinctly refer to the notion of understanding the perspective and level of familiarity of others.

I hate to be that guy, but who is Nathan Marz?

One of the more commercially successful figures in the Clojure world. Early employee of a YC company (Backtype) with a successful exit to Twitter.

[1] http://www.crunchbase.com/company/backtype

[2] https://github.com/nathanmarz/storm

His talk "Become Efficient or Die" (not currently on his talks page) is very insightful: (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDT8OH1x28E&playnext=1...) Most startups I know lack many of the most important things he mentions.

(I realize I probably shouldn't respond to this question, which would have been satisfied by simply reading the link. But it gave me an excuse to post this talk.)

I absolutely loathe videos. There went 15 minutes of my life to get a short message: be minimalistic in processes and code. Not that it isn't a good message, but hardly worth more than the ten seconds needed to scan it in text.

Actually, the talk is the 3 videos in that playlist, not just the initial one. For instance, he gets into "knowledge debt", using Clojure and Neo4j as examples.

I suppose potentially interested people will want to skim until they find something they're interested in; it starts out slow. Sorry you didn't find it worth your time, though I found it worthwhile.

From TFA:

"I open-sourced Cascalog, ElephantDB, and Storm, started writing a book, gave a lot of talks, and in July of 2011 experienced the thrill of being acquired. My projects spread beyond BackType and Twitter to be relied on by dozens and dozens of companies."

He's pretty well known on HN. "Hacker-News-famous", you could say.

Among other things, he leads Storm (where I know his name from). It's a tool for processing unbounded streams of data (think Mappers and Reducers for Twitter Firehose-style datasets).

You are not alone in wondering.

I use cascalog and storm everyday at my startup http://truelens.com and they are great contributions to software and big data systems. I'm looking forward to what Nathan is cooking up next.

I can't wait to find out what Nathan has in store. I'm not a fan of Twitter's mission, I hope he continues building useful infrastructure that's not directly influenced by the need to show more ads to more people.

Oh I thought it was some random tweeter closing his account. That would be news.

Am a big fan of storm. Can't wait to see what he is onto.

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