skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Facebook wouldn't have standing to go after CA directly

Seems to be plain copyright infringement... FB licensed the data to Kogan, not CA, hence CA violates FB's copyright on the data.
Israeli Production Company Launches First #MeToo Reality Show
Article written by Russian banker living in Germany.
Can't possibly be biased.
Seeing that quote in the second paragraph got me so pissed
testifying in front of congress is just an opportunity for politicians to win points by kicking you around like a ball. very few people (let alone CEOs) stand to gain anything from it, and corporate counsel is paid to put up with abuse.

> ...my reservations about this congress over and above the average congress...

ugh, come on. it's not like the whole congress votes on how you're to be treated, and the questions you'll be asked. the biggest heels on both sides of the aisle are free to harangue you all they want.
> Law enforcement and courts aren't funded in a way that makes that effective

In the 1930s, the Congress realized that financial crimes were (a) prevalent, (b) serious and (c) difficult to investigate and prosecute. So it created the SEC [1]. Its specialists, with the budget, focus and mandate to pursue securities-related violations, have been effective (relative to pre-1930s finance).

Regulators make rules. They also enforce them. We have no top cop for technology. The costs of that gap are becoming apparent.
If it were some computation, aggregation or analysis this work, but a lot (I'd guess, most) applications might not fall into this category. How are you gonna present the data in a UI to users, if no data is supposed to leave the server?
A large security company or a nation state can absolutely attribute malware originating from nation-states (APTs) with a high degree of confidence.

We are not talking about some recombinant script kiddie malware: Slingshot is attributable, Stuxnet was attributable, the DNC penetration was attributable.

Nation-states with mature cyberwarfare capabilities, and their appendages such as Kaspersky, are routinely capable of identifying the authors of novel malware.
We have different approaches but we're on the same side in case you haven't picked up on that.

I agree with you on most of these points but until the proper investigations proceed not much will happen. And this administration will attempt to block or obstruct any investigations that they think are part of a "witch hunt" so putting too much emphasis on Trump himself seems risky in the meantime. Let the investigators put those dots together.

Also, Trump is just the tip of the iceberg in this story of corruption. Companies like CA and groups like Internet Research Agency need to share this blame because Trump didn't create them. He just benefited from them (because he has no morals).

PS: If you haven't contacted your representatives (or candidates) to ask them to support ongoing investigations into these particular issues (like the Special Counsel one). Do it please. Especially if you have a representative up for reelection.
Standard operating procedure for Facebook.
Let violations go on unless and until seriously threatened by PR damage or legal action. Deny knowledge, claim "mistakes were made", claim "We're so sorry. We will make sure it can't happen again", repeat.

Data exfiltrations of roughly this kind has been going on at least since 2009. Handled according to the formula above.
I just posted links to two writeups from back then:

http://theharmonyguy.com/oldsite/2009/05/28/about-that-verif...

https://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2009/06/09/how-privacy-f...
This is such a weird way to virtue signal. What’s worse is that they believe they are in a position of power to be able to insinuate such things.

How about they actually become outright superstars and then provide a road map for others like themselves? Get to the level of national notoriety and success before you start telling others how awesome you are in a startup that is likely to fail.

Do you think the kids in Liberty City, Chicago, NYC know what a VC, startup, or much less those people from the article are?

No they don’t know. Want to see a good spokesperson for hard working Hispanics ? Checkout A-Rod who’s always talking about his mom working hard and himself trying and failing and trying again. Kids can see him on Shark Tank tell his story and success. Not some virtue signaling nobody living in whacky world SV.
This is spot on. I would get rid of it as the only thing I really use it for is social logins, but there's the other issue of wanting access to the Facebook Developer stuff. I guess I could just make an account only for that?
Most apps that do "Login with Facebook" also support "Login with Google" and sometimes "Login with LinkedIn". The backend ownership issue becomes a bit more complicated.

This is even before we get into trust issues most developers would have with Facebook having access to their user data.
>You're basically saying that you don't believe advertising (or influence) works at all — which is bullshit.

No I'm not. I'm acknowledging that advertising has always worked.

>CBS and its ilk probably made a big difference compared to what was there before (radio?) and FB has has made an even bigger impact since (specifically with respect to scale and ability for fine-grained targeting).

I think you're over-estimating FB's ability to impact elections compared to being one of only 3 television channels. Particularly given the fact that we're not really talking about FB itself impacting the election, but competing parties utilizing the semi-neutral FB platform to advertise.
This is basically the end of Slack for me. It's over. I'm done.

I am now anti-slack. I am an opponent of slack.

You had me, but now you lost me.
Hacking the Heist
Discover how to stand out in remote work
To prevent nuclear war, borrow from 1973
Have you ever looked at FB's ad platform? You don't download everyone's data and target the campaign yourself. You target, "18-25 males in these zip codes who like the yankees". I don't see how you go from that platform (hosted and controlled by facebook) to something else.
Part of the reason is likely a lack of true demands, like the example you gave. BAT have shown that they don't lack talents to run computing infrastructure. However they probably don't have enough properly funded long term basic research projects that truly require HPC.
Archived copy, which can be read without JS enabled:

https://archive.is/iPwXi
How would you enforce a smart contract guaranteeing that data was deleted and not copied?
If you compare the cost of a mortgage, and a rent, they are very similar in Poland. So after 30 years you can sell the flat/house and you will get half of that money back. It's better than nothing.

Half, because usually the total mortgage cost for 30 years is about 100%.
On point 1: Facebook are going to be forced into this by law. The EU is introducing a major piece of regulation, entering into effect in late May. The 'right to be forgotten' is an important part of this[1]. It's possible this will become the de facto standard worldwide as a result. The penalties for non compliance: "In the case of non-compliance with key provisions of the GDPR, regulators have the authority to levy a fine in an amount that is up to the GREATER of €20 million or 4% of global annual turnover in the prior year."

[1] https://gdpr-info.eu/art-17-gdpr/

[2] https://www.imperva.com/blog/2017/03/gdpr-series-part-4-pena...
Perhaps the government should protect us more actively. It could hand us fake-ids we can use when dealing with these companies. And it could give us fake home addresses, etc. Like a witness protection program, but for everybody. And it could provide an API for sending (e)mail to real users, using their fake info. And it could set up a VPN service for everybody to mask IP addresses.
"Muggles"? :)
Do they still weed out candidates who don't have a background in math and algorithms for roles as SRE ones? When I read about your improved triage experience, it's the first question that pops to my mind.
I remember when the 2014 chance occurred. It meant my little script stopped working:

https://penguindreams.org/blog/discoverying-friend-list-chan...
I can see that but I don't think this will ever be a particularly popular reason, numbers-wise. Not everybody is born zealot.
Reverse Mentoring
I have to wonder if Facebook was even competently exploiting people's data for money. It sounds like they essentially gave away nearly all of their users' profiles for free to any app developer who could get a user to sign up. Facebook didn't even charge app developers for access to the Platform.

This would allow app developers to create a copy of the data and re-sell that. And Facebook wouldn't see a dime. If their crown jewel is people's data, why would Facebook give away a copy of their crown jewels?
on macOS i use a bash script to get all Facebook ip addresses:

whois -h whois.radb.net '!gAS32934' | tr ' ' '\n' | awk '!/[[:alpha:]]/' > "/etc/pf.anchors/usr.home.sub/facebook.list"

and then use a pfctl anchor to block them all

table <facebook> persist file "/etc/pf.anchors/usr.home.sub/facebook.list"
block drop quick to <facebook>
In that situation, I guess there's not much power Company A has with regards with Company B, right? Unless Company B is worried that they'll have a future relationship and thus will be willing to submit some kind of audit.

Zuck's announcement seems to have a decent outline -- start with investigating apps with access to large amounts of data, audit apps with strange behavior. But after a year, after the CA (and other) controversies are forgotten, what I was thinking was that FB should be doing regular, random audits/investigations, and publicize the punishment.

I don't mean identifiable shaming, e.g. "Last week, we banned Jane Smith and her Flappy Farm app for misusing the data of 3,000+ users". But maybe weekly/monthly tallies of apps that were shut down or sanctioned, and a breakdown of the reasons why, and users affected, etc. Every once in awhile, an app maker might post a "We Fucked Up" article on HN, which helps even more in reminding people of TOS.
Russia Secretly Helped Venezuela Launch a Cryptocurrency to Evade U.S. Sanctions
The Evolution of the D&I Workgroup at Clover Health
I basically quit after Beacon.
He's missing the most important segment on the graph
> First, we will investigate all apps that had access to large amounts of information before we changed our platform to dramatically reduce data access in 2014, and we will conduct a full audit of any app with suspicious activity. We will ban any developer from our platform that does not agree to a thorough audit.

I remember the old days of the graph API - there was a whole lot you could do with someone's account, and it was common for users, especially non technical users to blindly hit accept on the permissions screens. If I'm not mistaken, you could even make a developer account without a verified phone number at the time.

I don't think banning some of those apps is any kind of consolation really. The API sat like that for years. Anyone with nefarious motives already took what they wanted and ran. What repercussions will they face? The will be banned from Facebook? The apps are probably long gone. There was a time when Facebook apps were at their peak, that fad died off. The data is probably sitting in a database somewhere today. If I'm not mistaken, Facebook Games could still grab the friend list permission until quite recently.

Also what authority does Facebook have to do any kind of audit? How would that audit even work? If someone copies all the data to an external drive and locks it up, what will the audit reveal? "Yep there's no data here, pinky swear!"

The basic premise of Facebook is flawed. If your private thoughts or photos are posted on a platform where you don't control the data, the data is never safe. A good product that serves the user faithfully and takes this into account is probably closer to a decentralized product - maybe something like Mastodon (I haven't looked into it in much detail). Facebook has already acquired the users - if they can figure out a way to make money and switch to a decentralized model at the same time, they can solve this once and for all. They would arguably even gain users who would now have a reason to trust their service.
These are mostly bad examples, and pretty much none of them are examples of the phenomenon being talked about on this particular subthread:

1. Keeper is suing Dan Goodin, a reporter, for (I think?) defamation. (Keeper is evil and you should never use them, but they're not pursuing the researcher under CFAA or DMCA).

2. Chris Vickery found a database backup of a whole company, analyzed it and found that they were shady, and published directly from the database backup. That's not really vulnerability research, and is a bit akin to finding a vulnerability and then using it to dump an account table to Pastebin.

3. PwC C&D'd (but didn't sue) a firm called ESNC. The software ESNC was testing was available only under an NDA license; I assume ENSC got access transitively through a client. This happens a lot in enterprise pentesting. ESNC published anyways, and nothing happened.

4. DJI rescinded KF's authorization to continue testing when he refused to accept the terms of a bounty (which included both disclosure limitations [which may or may not have been reasonable] and a promise not to do post-compromise pivoting [which is entirely DJI's prerogative]). KF rejects the bounty terms, and DJI legal gets involved and demands that he delete any DJI IP or secrets he's taken. This is unfriendly, but not a lawsuit.
"Only interesting problems/solutions/results get published"

I'm afraid we're already there. Journals are very much strongly incentivized to publish only interesting or novel results.
"What all these data breaches are teaching us is that data is a toxic asset and saving it is dangerous." - Bruce Schneier [0]

[0] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/03/data_is_a_tox...
> Community feels like the good old Ruby days, but better

I really miss that old Ruby community. It was full of that hacker spirit, everyone trying stuff, no one to crush your creativity. Then the startup hipsters took over and came up with good practices, style guides, gems you absolutely had to know to get hired, etc.

It drove me away from Ruby, actually. It just wasn't fun anymore.

I hope it doesn't happen with Rust. I did not have so much fun writing code for a long time.
This begins and ends with the fact that if you can see something, you can record it. The only way to prevent this is through on-site access only with a thorough physical search and no electrical devices allowed.

You can do some clever things to figure out who it is that leaks stuff, but that's another issue.
> Without using any batteries, I can go take a wire strippers and 2 extension cords, make a male-male 120VAC cable, plug it into the gas generator in my shed and plug it into an outlet in my house when the powers out and shock a lineman.

Yup, and that's highly illegal because it can kill someone. If you want to do that you're required by code + law to have a mains transfer switch.

I don't think anyone is saying you can't play with battery packs, it's just that this guy is a freaking idiot for doing it in his house where any miscalculation can cause a chain reaction that may kill him and his family.

It's about orders of magnitude and safety mitigations.

Look at blackpowder/low power explosive regulations. You can keep a small quantity in your house to reload/etc. However if you want to store more you need a separate shed + BATF is allowed to show up at your house and inspect it any time. Back when I was involved with amateur rocketry all of the our vendors went through this process. It's a standard thing when you're involved with elements that have a high potential energy and can go wrong if not treated with the right respect.
The UI could be a web page, mobile app, etc just like FB.com. But to see any user data you would actually have to be authorized as that specific user. I.E. a developer could test their app by logging in with their own FB account and using their own data but would have no capability to look at the raw DB entries of other users.

Or perhaps their could be a limited capability for developers to log in to their app as another user of it, but those accesses would be logged and periodically audited (just like the as-another-user-logins of regular FB engineers are).
I summarized this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16642155

Long story short: they didn't sue him. Their legal demanded that he delete DJI IP and secrets. It wasn't a friendly demand, but that's all it looks like it was.
Fair enough. I would never argue that Vim's text editing functionality wasn't superior. However, the advocates I've encountered all touted it as superior, "...in every way." and I just haven't seen that.
I don't get what's going on here, people getting downvoted, what has Peterson said that was that bad?

I heard he telling people to clean their rooms, and people getting offended by it.

I'd like to get enlighten on how is he in the same camp as Alex Jones.

Even then, I would bet Alex Jones and alt-right are not the only ones buying views, that shows the article is biased and HN too for that matter.
Literally everything on Facebook is microtargeted ads. Engagement, including resharing, is just part of the targeting algorithm.
Scoble was a fanboy of Rackspace until they stopped paying him and since then he doesn't have a single good thing to say about them.

Further there been plenty of sexual harassment claims under his name. I doubt that he worries too much that he will catch some more dirt for praising Facebook these days.
While that may be true for regulations/ethics related appearances, this is not true for things such as funding. For example both Elon Musk and Bruno have gone before congress multiple times to discuss private space programs/ contracts and to justify their cases. Admittedly Elon did send Gwynne Shotwell several times but she is still the COO of the company.

More accurately there is risk in talking to the US congress when the topic sounds more like an inquisition than when congress is asking for opinions.

The matter then is why is it a risk for Facebook to discuss the CA issue? Are they worried about a witch hunt or a public ethics execution?
This is the business model of cable TV providers.
You would still have the history of those transaction(s) before they were pruned though...
I like the idea of having a centralized exchange for buyers (readers) and sellers (writers). I would actually prefer it to be variable-fee rather than flat-fee, with buyers paying per article, and the exchange truly playing the role of an _exchange_, taking a commission per transaction.

There's still room for publishers, in the form of editing, curation, and financial support - say, funding a correspondent's trip to a war zone. I'd be fine with some of the price, ideally a transparent amount, going to publishers (or labels or guilds or whatever you want to call them).

The comparison with Spotify is interesting, because I would prefer Spotify to be this way too, and I say this as someone who uses Spotify very regularly. From my (admittedly non-firsthand) knowledge, Spotify has a kind of swap going on between listeners and artists/rights-holders where they take a fixed stream from listeners and pay variable streams to artists. (Although the variable leg is a percentage of the total fixed payments, so in aggregate Spotify pays a fixed leg and there's never a financial mismatch for them.)

At such small payment scales as "price of a song," I don't object to variation in payment being passed through to me. Spotify can take a cut for providing delivery and the app. If I feel like I'm spending too little or too much per month on music, I can scale my use, much like other expenditures in life. My inclination is to feel similarly about print media.
It definitely opened my eyes to the realities of this contract world that's strongly established by now. I'd recommend reading it, its a pretty fun read too being an ethnographic study and all. Covers the historical evolution and causes for it and basically the interests of the three parties that form the triangle of vying interests: employer, staffer, contractor.
This is an extremely researcher-friendly VDP, and, powerfully, includes essentially a demand that Dropbox partners adopt comparable VDPs; Facebook did something similar (but less formally) a few years ago when BlueCoat started threatening researchers.
Isn't that what the "tragedy of the commons" describes, with the internet being diluted or poluted by content that doesn't add much value?

I think you can probably find a suitable subset of the internet and it still feels like the old days, but then you have to be happy with a much smaller community.

And fair point to regard money from software as a potential net negative, and I just don't have an answer that is objective. There is a lot of software that highlights the creativity of people, and I like it, and am happy to pay for it, and also happy to get it for free. Like paying for books or borrowing them from the library.
Most media criticizing Facebook run Google Analytics and many other trackers. Fortunately HN is clean, according to Privacy Badger.
I'm also not convinced that it wasn't Facebook that did most of the work for CA. It was to Facebook's short term profit motive to provide the best micro-targeting ad tools to potential ad buyers. It's still in the realm of possibility that CA did get rid of all illicit data sources such as Kogan's dataset in 2015 and still had enough tools in that FB's ad sales platform team were more than happy to build for them for the easy short term profits.
Pump your breaks there kid - the only thing that is being denied is that occupied Poland had anything to do with the installment of the holocaust by the Germans (they were next in line to the chimney). As much as I don't like the asshats from PiS, I do understand where they are coming from, after seeing "Polish concentration camps" in the western press on a monthly basis. To your other point - most of the polish judiciary has roots in the communist prosecution apparatus and is actively shielding all of the assholes that had a soft landing after the "toppling" of the communist government. Fuck'em.
Thats their marketing arm that explains it to those who buy their services. You are not the customer. They already have you.
You can go back much further than they do here to find truly delightful and extraordinarily rude poems.

Catullus 16[0](composed roughly 60 BC) is the obvious example, whose first line was not given in English translation until some time after 1950. (and look, i'm doing the same thing right now!)

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catullus_16
On the occasions that I have disabled my ad blocker and visited major new sites, I found the ad experience made me greatly question the judgment of the sites editors.

How can I trust the authority of a news site, when I am also seeing clearly deceptive ads playing right next to their content?
where non-compete agreements require material specific pay

That's materially different. Anywhere in the United States, AFAIK, non-compete is not part of a "golden parachute" with continued post-severance pay except for C-suite people - sometimes. Employment is at-will on both sides in the United States in the vast majority of private labor.
Is that mortage cost in real terms? If interest rates are close to appreciation rate, you might break even in real terms (apart from tax/maintenance costs).
Takeout creates a lot of trash. It doesn't have to
Maybe it's just you and a small handful of people, but I don't find any fault in the typeface. Beautiful!
I find it interesting that you are not having a problem finding Jr SWE roles. I co-run a computer science career community (CS Career Hackers) and I often get a lot of complaints by new grads about the lack of Jr roles.