Hacker George Hotz signs on for 12 weeks at Twitter

Hacker George Hotz signs on for 12 weeks at Twitter(techcrunch.com)

27 points by HarveyKandola 3 years ago | 21 comments

Seems to be following firmly in the footsteps of Elon - starts working at twitter, makes big claims (I'm going to fix twitter search), immediately shows he's out of his depth (Asks for other people to fix twitter search and send him the code MIT licensed) and then gets angry at everyone else when they laugh at this absurd turn of events, gets so angry he then starts bad mouthing the last decade of innovation in the tech industry, fully in the knowledge that time period covers the entire time period his own company operated. It's like our own mini-Elon.

elsurudo 3 years ago | |

I mean, I know he's a bit of an odd character and a showman, but do you actually think he's that "out of his depth" that he's desperately trying to crib other people's code? He's accomplished some pretty impressive things in a pretty short career – for now I would take him at face value re: asking for code as a clever recruiting strategy.

jsnell 3 years ago | | |

It clearly isn't a recruiting strategy. He is not a decision maker in hiring, claims to know nothing about it, beyond being able to make referrals:

https://twitter.com/realGeorgeHotz/status/159529448151060480...

moistly 3 years ago | | |

For example, Dr. Oz was a brilliant heart specialist, but he knows literally nothing about weight loss. One should not take him at face value.

nojito 3 years ago | | |

> He's accomplished some pretty impressive things in a pretty short career

Such as?

neaden 3 years ago |

And he's immediately asking for people on Twitter to write the code for him: https://twitter.com/realGeorgeHotz/status/159527086740295680...

HiIAmIlNano 3 years ago | |

I am pretty sure there is plenty of code he can copy from on stack overflow. Or maybe copilot...

devwastaken 3 years ago | |

Wow, offering an "internship" to do his job.

beernet 3 years ago | |

What's the matter here? Writing code is the easy part while this guy apparently has bigger fish to fry than staring at a debugger.

duckkg5 3 years ago |

Geohot had this weird mystique that was pretty appealing when it looked like he was building really interesting things better than (or as good as) large corporations. He should have stayed put because now he looks very average. Makes me feel better about myself but I really did think this guy was special.

mopsi 3 years ago | |

Not only that, but the Twitter thread trying to paint programming for him for free as "fun" and an "opportunity" while actually not hiring seems unbelievably sleazy and cheap. I'm getting no-impostor-syndrome from it; the more I read, the less I doubt my skills and overall sanity.

tibbydudeza 3 years ago |

Just like Elon.

I much prefer quiet genius of Carmack to loud self-promoting Hotz - he strikes me as a bit of BS artist but is also talented.

Carmack is working on cracking AGI, and he really thinks he might be able to make the leap that escaped others so far - but he will work on it and show something impressive like DOOM or admit it failed like Armadillo.

In the meantime, no twitch, tweets or YouTube going off on tangents.

Apocryphon 3 years ago | |

Carmack is a very self-assured genius, but also seems to have humility or at least an ultra-objective focus that keeps him glued to technical matters rather than playing up his own mystique.

Apocryphon 3 years ago |

So he’s culture war-baiting now and making questionable claims about tech history. Guess his internship is going well, he’s learning to tweet like the big man himself!

https://twitter.com/realgeorgehotz/status/159567728044908953...

newbieuser 3 years ago |

is this guy a troll? so he's playing a character? i know he's very smart and talented, but i can't tell if he's serious on twitter or a troll in his thoughts.

smcl 3 years ago | |

No idea. He claimed on HN to me years ago that he found the Arthur Whitney k interpreter code[0] to be easy to read, and said that I was revealing my own incompetence by saying I found it to be quite impenetrable. I see only one comment under his name so he's somehow got his comments bulk-deleted.

He's undoubtedly a good developer, he's just also quite ... headstrong shall we say :)

[0] - see http://kparc.com/b/a.c, worth noting that I was persuaded by another much more recently to give it a shot so my feelings towards this style have softened slightly.

piva00 3 years ago | | |

He's like many other amazing technical people: very good with their technical skills which they believe validate their own ego to be arrogant over the ones they consider to be lesser due to diminished prowess in the same set of skills.

It's an abhorrently sad state of living a life in my view. But they can make money and technical feats that not many others can furthering validating their inflated ego.