skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How to accelerate the demise of Facebook?
Dear HN

I consider Facebook a net negative in terms of societal value and a poor internet citizen. I find it an obnoxious open source participant with its patents + BSD license, and its insistence alongside google to spy on you across the web (don't use the widget but use any of its cdn-hosted code on your site? you're seeling your users too!). It allows and directly profits from free-booting content. It copies any startup that it please. Its incentives to extract the maximum amount of attention from you through any means necessary, starting with inflammatory click-bait, thus increasing the level of misinformation and rage on the internet. It is the embodiment of hubris and is devoid of ethics (it is, after all a for profit corporation). Its private echo chamber is the terminal form of ad-supported content. It (logically) uses the power it wields to further its own goals, which are inimical to users in general and their privacy in particular. It hires the brightest mind to extract ever more attention and information from its unsuspecting users to sell to the highest bidder. In terms of societal ill, I place it up there alongside oil companies and arms manufacturers.

I consider it anathema to the idea an open, well informed and free society.

Logically it too shall fall, like geocities, myspace, orkut, yahoo, ping, google+ etc... before it. But my instinct is less sure and is afraid it is really a unicorn that might really buck the trends of its ilk.

My other fear is that a challenger strong enough to overthrow it would end up being a successor in all but name and likely even more user abusing (machine learning rewrite/generation of news in click-bait format targeted especially for you comes to mind).

My only hope is that, as an ad-supported website, its ROI for advertisers might become less favorable and that enough of them will leave to fatally hemorrhage the company.

Are there any other ways to hasten or increase the likelihood of its demise?
Unfortunately for $FB, they may have bigger fish to fry than user revolt over cloying UX dark patterns.

The "Facebook reaches coveted non-existant people (NEP) demo" story would be amusing, if it weren't symbolic of greater industry-wide risks concerning click-fraud scrutiny.

But of greater concern as investigations into Russian meddling of the election heat up, is that $FB profited enormously from microtargeted ads specifically engineered as part of a program of mass psyops. With everyone looking for a scapegoat, this could result in actual indictments.

Why Nobody Can Trust Facebook

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-09-11/why-nobody-can-trus...

Facebook Wins, Democracy Loses

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/08/opinion/facebook-wins-dem...
>there are only a few phone numbers that can actually make my phone ring

Could you describe briefly how to configure that state of affairs? What OS do you use?
^ recommend these guys! have worked with the co-founder before on a multi-year project.
I'm one of these people. I'm very price conscious and have always avoided whole foods. But after seeing the price drop, I gave them a try. My bill was a little more than usual. But given the convenience (its next door) and quality I chose to continue shopping there. I've been going regularly for about a month.
SWIFT is the only single entity trusted by all banks in the world. I think they would be a perfect fit for a CA to issue online banking certificates, since there is no way to get around trusting SWIFT as a bank, so they might as well trust them for their certificates as well, instead of trusting Symantec or any other CA.

The less entities you have to trust, the better.
I'm not familiar with Wish and it appears that I need an account to look at their site.

More relevant to my comment, I am not familiar with public sentiment of Wish.
You've been using this site for primarily political and ideological purposes, which is against the site guidelines. Please stop.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Is it unreasonable to expect a foreign ecommerce site to use a CA that it's users can trust?
I thought the point of censoring hate speech was not to purify content but to prevent actual violence etc from occurring.... have we seen a decrease in violence against fat people since 2015? If not, I’m not sure what was really accomplished other than a slightly less annoying site...
I think he meant he could buy both of those instead of the Tesla.
It's a bit funny how it mentions these two things together in the same article:

> Today, almost every piece of software comes with a disclaimer on its user license that basically says that the product may not work as intended […] and that’s the user’s problem. It’s a wonder companies don’t insert “nyah nyah nyah nyah” into the tiny-print legalese.

> No software system can be free from bugs […]
This change alone is tempting me, and I have been diehard anti-apple for about a decade now for walled-garden reasons.

I know, I know, walled garden prevents users from opening their phone to vulnerabilities or guaranteeing a secure experience. I guess I wish I could have my cake and eat it too.
And don't we fall in love with people that are genetically different? Something about not liking the smell of relatives
So the thermonuclear devices detonated near the sea surface were in the ballpark of 10Mt. At least half of the yield (probably more due to reflection) went up into the atmosphere. I'm curious if a more powerful weapon (Russia's Tsar Bomba had a yield of 50Mt, with a theoretical limit of 100Mt), detonated below the sea (so that all/most of the energy heats up water) could achieve a hypercane, or if it's just a drop in the water (pun intended)
That's exactly how free markets work - "Your profit margin is my opportunity".
An physical debit card? Sounds intense.
> I have no interest in using an app that by default broadcasts my transactions to everyone.

This. 1 of my boxing trainers was using Venmo since 2016, and he even asked me to pay him through that at that time. So I came home and did some research, and in that process, found some payments that my other trainee friends had made to him, on his facebook wall.

I was like WTF?! Why would anyone broadcast their financial transactions, that too for something like Personal Training.

Moreover, the transactions I saw, for the exact same type of training I was receiving (pad work followed by sparring for 1 hour), was 20% to 40% less than what I was paying, and I felt like I was a sucker. I stopped training with him a few weeks later.

Never used Venmo either.
Sideloaded apps make attacks on non-sideloaded stuff a lot easier.
OK, I get it, Facebook marketing is dialing it to the 11 to get you to use it more. But really, how hard is it to ignore it? The article says:

There’s no respite from these messages, so it constantly feels like a gun to your head to get you to boost, promote, and pay.

Really? Like a gun to your head? So you are in fear for your life and you think if you don't click on this link, you literally are going to die this second? Or maybe it is a tiny annoyance which you completely can ignore and go on with your life, and you are over-dramatizing it a teensy bit?
That's not refining the question, that's completely redefining it.
When you need Apple or any technology to fight for your privacy against your own government you know you are in serious trouble.

The government has no right to interfere with your personal effects, this is fundamental to freedom and democracy, and the idea of the private individual.

Yet it seems this too is 'normalized' and citizens are more interested in technology workarounds to deal with this abuse from the state.
Default PIN has been 6 digits since iOS 10, and you can make it a long passphrase instead.
I agree. I see those as symptoms (assuming there's anything there at all). The important question is whether there's something driving them to that state.
Here's a few famous molecules if people are interested:

Caffeine: https://avogadr.io/?background=3C2923&foreground=E5B273&comp...
Wintergreen: https://avogadr.io/?background=1E5454&foreground=D6DCC2&comp...
Codeine: https://avogadr.io/?background=350D30&foreground=D0ACE2&comp...
Acetone: https://avogadr.io/?background=A03129&foreground=FF9800&comp...
THC: https://avogadr.io/?background=113617&foreground=A6BC74&comp...
Oxytocin (large molecule): https://avogadr.io/?background=3a0000&foreground=ffc7c7&comp...
Ethanol: https://avogadr.io/?background=4B98BC&foreground=D7E5FF&comp...
Actual paper is buried two links deep and currently seems to be unavailable. Here's the archived copy:

http://archive.is/0sxuT

https://www.pubpub.org/pub/direct-radio-introspection
How is that different from Touch ID?
I think we are overestimating amount of intelligence we humans need while driving...
A lot of it may be information leak worry. You want just your data to be stored and some workflow engines require more than what is needed to make a decision.

We actually are releasing a use-case video that shows how to keep your data local and still be able to use a workflow engine in the cloud keeping your data local while making decisions and orchestration external.
With it being such a closed platform, what are the odds this is actually true? There's no way to verify that they don't have a skeleton key.
This is definitely the most unwritten about part of working remotely. I'd said below that most of these articles are the same points over and over, but not many/any talk about the importance of the team and company you're working with. Anyways, thanks for highlighting it and sharing your team's experience!
Android has required the user to enter the unlock code to back up the device for years now. This is Apple playing catch-up.
'Less Secure Than You Think'

http://www.cnmeonline.com/myresources/fireeye/fireeye-cso-le...
It works for people being edgy online, but can we censor glorification of a more serious problem than “fat shaming” - say, gang violence - and have it reduce acts of “hate”? I’m not convinced similar censorship/propaganda can stop more serious problems which entail actual violence... or do we really consider people making fun of fat people a serious problem which having been solved improves society in a significant way?
For all reasonable adversary examples shy of panopticon, downloading from multiple physical sites and global proxies and comparing the same roots across downloads should be sufficient, no?
Clearly just stop his name getting split, but it's also a nice bonus that it's semantically correct http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=nob
I've got a circa 2000 manual until the privacy option arrives.
Some great suggestions here, really appreciate you taking the time to list them out!
The Bear Case for Crypto
A font to make sparklines in seconds
China wants to build credit score that dings online users for political views
By this logic you were "happiest" at all previous employers :) "None" implies that happiness levels (positive or negative) did not exist.
Did anyone tell the Arabs yet? Qatar wants to spend $200B to host a few week long soccer championship in 2022 http://gulfnews.com/business/economy/blockade-vexes-qatar-s-...
I actually like it this way. I think nested comments are hard to read, but that's the only problem.
Oh there we go with the "my time is worth $50/hr" thing.

By that kind of reasoning, how much money can you save by reducing how much time you sleep by an hour each night?

Or maybe if I add 10 people to your project you'll get it done 10x faster?
Self-driving car can go slower in those cases. It depends entirely on how beefy its CPU/GPU is to process a lot of sensor data realtime. The more messy situation is, the more time it needs, the slower it needs to drive.
The edge cases are unclear: construction zone, heavy equipment, school kids, another car poised to enter the road.
That is objectively untrue. Every system that has allowed sideloading of apps has been compromised by that very feature.
From my experience, many of the people that inhabit these hate groups often browse subs like r/incel (involuntarily celibate). It may be the case that simply quarantining these groups may work to drop their numbers because members of these groups will simply not reproduce and not spread their toxic ideologies onto their kids.
Not sure that I agree. I'd say he's just doing something sooner than we expected. Exciting and bold, but I don't see people reacting as, "wait, what is this space travel that you speak of!?"
THanks for this! I love hacker news, you guys are amazing!
If legislators are so easily influenced by those with money, how is that not a failure of government? If a criminal gets caught and blames his peers for being a poor influence, do you suppose he should go free because he can't help being influenced to commit crime? Why then should we act as if the problem lies in the companies and special interest groups attempting to influence government?

Do you (as many other do) really think the best course of action involves more legislation from those we know can't be trusted? Or do you expect companies to simply "shape up" because a group of people wag a finger at them?

The bigger the government becomes, the easier it is for these kinds of things to fly under the radar. As government grows, so does its power, and as power grows, so do the incentives to infiltrate and control that power. If you'd like it to stop, reduce the size of the organization ultimately responsible rather than add fuel to the fire.
Unfortunately in the device world you have to pick one over the other. The more open a device is the less it can protect your privacy. We haven't yet seen a device that can do both.
> 3. The eyewitness account says ....

I don't think it is fair to call anything in the Bible an "eyewitness account".
I read a consistent argument. Expecting perfection is wrong. Expecting consumers to shoulder the vast majority of the costs of that imperfection is also wrong.
Magic mushrooms may one day treat depression
There is a reference for this as Apple published a security white-paper about it prior to the release of TouchID. Unfortunately, I'm not at a point where I can search for it. If I find the time today, I will update this post with a link.
They are probabilistically modeled already. You keep tracking other objects and compute various possibilities for their movement and depending on the past and present behavior pick the most probable one. If car encounters lower-than-threshold probability, it can always slow down or stop, like what non-reckless humans would do. Even end-to-end deep learning can recognize construction zones and learn to drive around traffic cones.
StubHub is owned by eBay.
Uninstalling the app and redirecting facebook.com to localhost are great ideas. I also sometimes logout of facebook.com on chrome on my phone so that it makes it even harder to get back on.

Now if I could only do the same for reddit...
It's useful to be able to communicate with people in situations where message notifications are awkward or prohibited. (ie work)

My wife exclusively uses messenger for buying and selling stuff on Facebook. She doesn't need nor want notifications.

There's also the creepy factor. I assume if there is any kind of exploit or corner case that allows an app to abuse privilege on iOS, Facebook is scummy enough to always ship it.
Yet another post on that subject... It's so disappointing that there are still people discovering life without Facebook when they should have uninstalled it long ago. They're very late in that process since sooo many have done it and written about it in thorough details.
Too many negatives in that last sentence.
This is why I switched to Instagram which is still technically Facebook but the experience is so much better.
I never said farmers markets are the one solution. I do think locally produced food and direct to consumer food could be a solution. It's better to deal locally whenever possible. And contrary to popular belief, local food is very possible to scale and do so efficiently.

Because everyone here seems to only understand the world through software engineer terms, I'll break it down for you: a distributed system is often very efficient and scalable solution to a supply and demand problem.
Stop Errors in Credit Use and Reporting Act or the SECURE Act
It's also bolded and, at least in the left sidebar of news articles, it was set to be 1pt larger than the surrounding font size.
For anyone concerned that authorities force you to give up your password to them (thus allowing them to image your device), you can pair your iPhone to a computer with a MDM (managed device profile), which will prevent any other device from connecting to it. iOS security researcher (now Apple employee) Jonathan Zdziarski has 2 blog posts on this:

Counter-Forensics: Pair-Lock Your Device with Apple’s Configurator:

https://www.zdziarski.com/blog/?p=2589

Protecting Your Data at a Border Crossing:

https://www.zdziarski.com/blog/?p=6918
iOS devices have always required the device to "trust" the computer before allowing the backup. Looking at the article, the only real difference now appears to be that you can't just use TouchID, you're forced to use the passcode.
> I’m not convinced similar censorship/propaganda can stop more serious problems which entail actual violence

I think a more useful framing of this is whether and how it changes the situation. I don't think anyone is arguing that this stops it, but it's not hard to imagine that given these two alternatives ((a) provide forums where a given behavior is allowed and (b) censor forums where a given behavior is allowed) that it might have some impact.

And let's be clear: it's not like this is a single-argument function or that there's only a single value that's being optimized. If it were only so simple :)
It's great. They essentially have a monopoly on providing privacy, which is and will continue to be a bigger competitive advantage.
>see the paragraph following that quote about how some borrowers will win and some will lose.

So, no change?
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/19/business/dealbook/race-st...

Centralized credit scores can be gamed, easily, helping those who are inclined to game them -- these are currently the "winners". Taking out a debt for no reason and then paying it back on time is a stupid economic decision, but it's great for your credit score.

The minimal increase in efficiency that comes from lenders having all this often incorrect, unaccountable private information about borrowers must be balanced against the damage the big 3 do as well as the damage lenders can do by exploiting the aforementioned information asymmetry it gives them. It comes up pretty short in my view.
I have FB on my phone and I'll check it once every couple of days, but it doesn't seem like it would be all that liberating to delete it. What makes it so liberating? FB always seems so optional that I'm never really pushed to read it. Work email on the other hand...
Android = Google

(No, aosp is unusable, and Google is working to make it more unusable).

Google = no privacy

Therefore, Android = no privacy

Q.E.D
Welcome :-) I hope it proves valuable.
Right, but net income is a fiction to begin with. It has almost nothing to do with a company's actual health. Last year was the first year that Amazon ever showed a NI over a few hundred million (for most of their life, it's been negative).

https://a16z.com/2014/09/05/why-amazon-has-no-profits-and-wh...
Technically, they do. You just have to pay more for it (aka buying a developer account).
Aside from the resources other people mentioned, many counties across the country (and almost all of them in California and the west) have local search and rescue teams. Team member skills range from "ground pounder" to swiftwater rescue, urban search and rescue, ICS (command).

Within California, there are mutual aid requests flying between counties almost all the time, along with support from CalOES, who coordinate heavy equipment, helicopters, communications, and other resources as needed.

Good search and rescue teams train regularly. In my current county, volunteers must at a minimum complete one of two wilderness first aid courses every year, CPR for professional rescuers every other year, show up to a minimum number of searches throughout the year, and a smattering of other training. (edit: overall training in my county is available almost once a week, with major mock searches a few times a year, plus an average of about 30 call-outs per year, usually including one major multi-agency incident. The folks that show up to most of this stuff get really good really fast.)

There are a lot of folks that just show up and dabble and provide the necessary manpower for basic tasks during an incident, and some folks that take it really seriously and try to complete as much training as they can and respond to as many incidents as their day job allows for.

Unfortunately, the county-level search and rescue teams rarely venture out of state.

I have some ICS training and could have managed a dispatch role, talked some folks through CPR, juggled multiple concurrent requests, and so on -- and I have software available that would have helped a lot. But this is the first I've heard of Zello.

FEMA is making some changes to SAR resource management and I'm hopeful that there will be improved cooperation between the states in the future.

And by the way: if you're interested in this kind of stuff, and want to do something hands-on helpful in your community, I really recommend checking out your county's SAR organization. If you're not sure where to start or what to expect, feel free to send me an email and I'll reply. If you're in California, I might even know some folks from your county's team. (SAR organizations could really benefit from more tech-oriented people, too.)
What data does Google collect that Apple doesn't collect? The only difference I can see is that Google is competent at making the data it collects useful to the user and barely usable to advertisers.

Your comment looks like trolling. We were discussing a feature to prevent others from backing up your device.
You put iOS in DND mode and whitelist VIPs by starring them or putting them in a contact group.
Which is why the styles should be something users can adjust when logged in.

It's very weird that the only real customizable part of this site is the background color of the topbar, and that's a perk that requires karma.
you are seriously out of touch with what life is like in a place so impoverished it can't even sustain a good grocery store.
You must not live in a city with over 100 bus schedules.. in my city, the offline app which uses your location data to tell you what bus stops are nearby and what the arrival times of each bus are, is immensely helpful.
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I deactivated on January 1, still find myself typing `f` in the address bar in a new tab. They've done a very good job of getting in the brain stem.
Cheers. I'd appreciate it.

Edit to add: I came across this one:

https://www.apple.com/business/docs/iOS_Security_Guide.pdf

It was linked from an article in 2014[1], though this PDF document is dated March 2017.

[1]: http://www.biometricupdate.com/201402/apple-publishes-whitep...