> It's sort of like modern art. Maybe you could have done it, but you didn't.
This makes zero sense. Changing a screen in a page is not a technical challenge. It is a Product Management call. Things are the way they are because the product owner sat with one or more UX designer and determined that that's exactly how they want the screen to be and to stay like that for all users. The only input developers have is to get the product vision to become a reality, and bolt a bunch of tests.
I've done this many times and it comes back shortly afterwards. I'm not saying they should optimize for my use case and I have enormous sympathy for the Twitter engineers. However on a personal level this removes a huge annoyance when I need to read tweets. Now if I could just get Reddit to stop redirecting me to their app :)
A lot of people can’t fathom actually doing what they love for a living and what that really means, the implications that is has on your decision making process etc. I completely understand why he’d do that, and can imagine lots of cool problems that I’d do the same thing to work on. We’re blessed.
I mean if we all want to be realistic, he's neither an intern nor a manager nor a real employee.
He's a prominent person in the industry who got given an ambiguous role in the company by tweeting the CEO. I doubt there's much strict definitions towards roles and responsibilities in the company right now, other than to try and satisfy Musk.
I'm confused - isn't he supposed to be an AI genius, who can "fix Twitter search" in 12 weeks - and he's asking for help that amounts to ~10 lines of basic JS to process the search results and display them differently? (based on some of the tweets with solutions he commented on)
The reason so many coders think coding bootcamps are viable and a CS degree is not a good fit or not useful for a dev is because they are all javascript plumbers and haven't seen good code in their life.
If plumbing was done with the same skill level, talent, and rigor as most websites, your average bathroom would look like the pipes screensaver.
I don't really see how this would make sense or even be possible purely from the frontend, I think you'd need to modify the typeahead service unless I am misunderstanding the requirements.
Exactly and with any modern frontend a solution "purely from the javascript console" can only be a terrible DOM hack. The actual code driving the UI is encapsulated from the global variable namespace that you can potentially modify from the console and in any case is typically transpiled as well.
So, I'm all about dunking on Musk's yacht-crashing antics... but did anybody expect Hotz to sit down and write search from scratch in complete isolation? Looks to me like he might recognize the scope of the problem, and he wants to hire some people to help. Briefly: are you using "Tom Sawyering" to describe "management?"
At first I thought him trying to engage the community as a whole for technical contributions was good and upbeat. But it also makes me question- then what is he bringing to the table then? His celebrity, to engage those people? Is his internship to be a technical manager? Is he actually going to credit these contributors, let alone ask Musk to give them internships? It's not managing if these people are just random volunteers he's using ad hoc.
Passionate hackers love to solve technical challenges, sure, but it does feel weird that he posted this open-ended call to action. I'm not saying they must be paid, as per the free work detractors, but even in FOSS you get credited and on Stack Overflow you receive karma.
> did anybody expect Hotz to sit down and write search from scratch in complete isolation?
Based on his reputation, people sure act like he is some sort of supercoder polymath who is able to pick up on any stack.
Regardless of all this, this kind of job "interview" is better than 99% of all tech interviews I have given.
Ask me to prototype something that I would use in the actual job. Don't ask me random algo question. Don't ask me why I am so excited to work for your stupid company that I hadn't even heard of before applying
I'm pretty sure if a company asked me to implement a feature for them as part of the interview process and didn't offer to pay me I would know up front that it's a bad company. Maybe you have a point that it is a good "interview" since it flags the place as a crap hole.
> Looks to me like he might recognize the scope of the problem (...)
I find it very unlikely that search, of all features, has problems where UI development is remotely relevant, let alone the solution. UI-wise, search consists of firing dumb requests to the backend and just update the UI with the results.
He made an job offer while acknowledging that he doesn't know if he is allowed to do that and he stated that the interview for it is to do free labor for him.
In this case he seems to be either unwilling or unable to (it becomes more clear in one of the tweets further down the thread) to even implement Does the query begin with "from:"
It would be less weird if people would apply even the tiniest amount of good faith. But no, everyone is so eager to dunk on people trying to build things. All this is going to do is discourage him and others from being transparent and building in public. Everyone trying to tear George down for this comes off as completely miserable. It's fucking sad.
> haha of course you can’t ship this, which is why the “free work” comments are so odd.
> if I just get rid of the pop up I still consider my internship a win. I have a chrome extension on my laptop to block it. reminds me of the guy who got a job at Apple, made Wallet automatically delete your expired boarding passes, and quit the next week https://twitter.com/realGeorgeHotz/status/159490847387517337...
But what is the point of this entire exercise? Was he actually asking for React help? Is he actually hiring an intern team? Did he just want to engage the community by presenting a technical challenge? Is he signaling that Twitter is going to open itself up and invite greater developer interaction? It's all very strange.
> All this is going to do is discourage him and others from being transparent and building in public.
He's a celebrity hacker, he's used to it. He is not fragile, judging by his public persona.
still a mystery to me why anyone wastes their life 140 characters at a time
....I mean. I'm wasting my life on HN. but at least I learn something from it occasionally.
(job interview: someone make a filter for HN to remove all the stupid blog posts that are just opinionated rants and startup ads? I'll hire you if you do. but actually I won't hire you. but do it for me anyway)
Dude he said robo-taxies by 2020 as a hard deadline in 2018. Why is our memory so short?
I think it's admirable they're pushing forward with these hard tasks, and I do see there's progress, and I do support them in continuing.
But he definitely had promised like a dozen times now throughout the years that it'll "be done in a year". Elon's promises mean absolutely nothing at this point.
EDIT: I... like totally didn't read the username I'm replying to.
Did George fully move on from Comma? I saw he was stepping back from the CEO position, but I guess I assumed he's still tinkering with the core AI stuff in the background.
I wonder if Comma hit a roadblock or a plateau.
I'm not smart enough to be impressed by the jailbreaking, but Comma was a long term project making physical objects you can buy and use while driving in your car right now. And from what I've seen the tiny company was keeping up with Tesla and KIA and others. Better in some ways, worse in others. But especially impressive considering it wasn't even built into the car.
I would say he is irrelevant but that doesn’t discount his work. He found a niche in the autonomous driving space that targets a very specific technically-inclined consumer. In the grand scheme of the space it’s no where near adequate for mass market and the average driver. It’s a much bigger problem than Hotz and his work.
