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Twitter announces layoffs

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Re: Twitter announces layoffs

#62

> Emails like this are usually riddled with corporate speak so I'm going to give it to you straight. Well, since you said it that way, I should assume that what comes next will not sound like a steamy pile of meandering corporate speak, right? > The team has been working around the clock to produce streamlined roadmap for Twitter, Vine, and Periscope and they are shaping up to be strong. The roadmap is focused on the…

He said he would give it to you straight, not ELI5. They are focusing on fewer things that they believe are the most valuable, and stopping stuff that isn't core to their purpose. What about this is confusing to you?

Re: Twitter announces layoffs

#63

"Emails like this are usually riddled with corporate speak so I'm going to give it to you straight." Three paragraphs later... "So we have made an extremely tough decision: we plan to part ways with up to 336 people from across the company." Edit: My bad, I should have been clearer in what I meant. There isn't really any corporate speak, but I wouldn't call 3 paragraphs of fluff 'giving it to you straight'

It's not great, but it's certainly better than something like "We've decided to move forward with a new strategic initiative that will involve a synergistic restructuring of our organizations and in that process it's possible that some people may find themselves seeking opportunities"...

Where I work, they called it a "workforce rebalancing," which I thought was a nice touch.

Re: Twitter announces layoffs

#64
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems unsuitable for coordinating mass protests to me, because it's a single point of failure. In many countries, the government controls all Internet access, so blocking Twitter would be relatively easy. Sure, people can use Tor, but will enough people have it when Twitter gets blocked? Seems like what's really "needed" is a distributed Twitter-like platform, using a DHT or something. Keep it small and simple eno…

> It seems unsuitable for coordinating mass protests to me, because it's a single point of failure. In many countries, the government controls all Internet access, so blocking Twitter would be relatively easy. Sure, people can use Tor, but will enough people have it when Twitter gets blocked? No, you can set up endless blogs (using Wordpress or Joomla or any other CMS with Twitter plugins), and include a twitter stre…

Sure, you can set up what are effectively Twitter proxies, and sure, the censors won't be able to keep up playing whack-a-mole.

But then the users have to do the same thing, preemptively finding such proxies and jumping between them. I'd guess that that would be a good enough result from the government's perspective.

And that's just read-only stuff. Post by email? DPI could drop packets containing emails addressed to Twitter, even if they're being sent through a mail server in another country. And, sure, you can proxy stuff, but again, the point here is the masses. If 95% of people are blocked from access, that would probably prevent mass protests from happening; or at least keep them from happening quickly and unexpectedly.

But besides all that, when the government cuts off the country's Internet access entirely, creating a nationwide intranet, none of those blog proxies are going to help. The only thing that is going to truly work in such a situation is peer-to-peer stuff.

Re: Twitter announces layoffs

#66

> Emails like this are usually riddled with corporate speak so I'm going to give it to you straight. Well, since you said it that way, I should assume that what comes next will not sound like a steamy pile of meandering corporate speak, right? > The team has been working around the clock to produce streamlined roadmap for Twitter, Vine, and Periscope and they are shaping up to be strong. The roadmap is focused on the…

Eventually people in a certain environment just start talking like that. He might not even realize how silly that sounds.

Re: Twitter announces layoffs

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few automated trading algorithms would become marginally less effective. Some poorly written ones might crash or make a few million dollars worth of bad trades. So, you know, there's that.

I don't know why the parent post is being downvoted: trading using Twitter sentiment analysis is apparently a thing [1][2]. [1] http://www.deltixlab.com/research/an-automated-trading-strat... [2] http://cs229.stanford.edu/proj2011/TrusheimChakoumakosYendlu... Edit: typo

there have even been a few instances shown on HN where these algorithms picked stuff up from the internet and have run with it, i.e. placed real trades. I remember at least 2 instances of this recently, once where the story was fake and once where an earnings forecast(i think) was released on a site but they had not published the URL so the assumption was no one would see it. The bot made a significant sum on the second example.
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