skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting. He really puts Facebook into the role of policing its users (and advertisers). He describes taking down thousands of fake accounts, investigating whether certain pages have connections with IRA and taking them down if so.

This will probably sound reassuring to legislators, but it pretty much permanently accepts the burden of responsibility for misinformation on the site. It sounds likely to force Facebook into a costly permanent arms race against every malicious political actor in the world. I wonder how regular users will get caught in the crossfire.

Not that I feel bad for FB here -- they make tons of money because they have the most captive attention of any entity in the world. Attention is valuable because it allows platforms to influence people's behavior toward certain actions. Advertisers are not the only ones who realize this, and FB has to take responsibility for all forms of influence on its site, not just commercial ads.
A bit off topic but yes, these days "native" apps tend to be memory hogs. Modern computers have tons of CPU and memory which makes the developers lazy, it would seem. Generally, noone optimizes their desktop clients.
Even if we had enough rocks, we'd still find something to fight about: ideas even.

Objectively, the number of wars deaths is going down, but tribalism overall seems to be going strong. Humanity has some growing to do, still.
Parts of the US have tap water you better not drink. I would imagine China is even worse.
GitHub Pages addresses this exact need, but it requires a small amount of additional work to set up vs. just tossing up a README file.
Seems weak, I hope some of the representatives have read Tim Wu.

For example when Zuck says:

>My top priority has always been our social mission of connecting people, building community and bringing the world closer together. Advertisers and developers will never take priority over that as long as I’m running Facebook.

This is either misleading or a lie. Facebook is a corporation, what Zuckerberg wants to do as an individual isn't even relevant, what's relevant is what the corporation "wants" to do to increase profit. So far that has been pursuing connecting people and building communities and then taking that information and selling it to developers and advertisers. The phrasing places community and monetization in competition but Facebook's model isn't of competition between those it's model is a monetization of community. So the testimony never speaks to the fundamental problem of having advertisers as any level of priority here.

Also to say that Cambridge Analytica abused the system sidesteps the issue of whether it was in Facebook's interest to allow this data to be collected and then misused. Cambridge Analytica purchased data which made Facebook the most attractive advertising platform for them because of the targeting they could do. That is good for Facebook's bottom line. They also don't address the total amount of information that may be out there, floating through advertisers outside of Facebook's control right now. Despite new restrictions how much about me is already out there? That's what I want to know.

Overall, it's basically what I expected but I really hope there are a few representatives who can set aside the specifics of this one incident and attack the wider notion of Facebook's purpose.
The electoral college is another gatekeeper, and many advocating for Facebook's better political advertising controls advocated for abolishment of the electoral college.
Thanks to Wordpress publishing an RSS feed endpoint by default (/feed) and Feedly's aptitude at finding feeds, RSS is not dead, or undead, or anything of the sort and I have been using it on a daily basis for over a decade now.
Please make your point without gratuitous inflammation like “shitposting”. Its effect on the threads should be apparent, and we're trying for better here.
I actually feel for anyone that buys ad space for politics on Facebook as they obviously don't handle it particularly well. Tons of times in 2016 I saw ads for where someone was running for in-state legislature of another state entirely (one I had never even been to or driven through) being rendered for me. What value is an impression if the receiver couldn't vote for you if they wanted? I did actually comment on a couple of them saying good luck from a guy out of state (and that the ad showed up in my state, hoping they can recoup some of their advertising costs).
There are existing prohibitions to how foreigners may participate in US elections. This seems to make it easier for Facebook to make sure it's following those laws.

https://www.fec.gov/updates/foreign-nationals/
A good example is when your parents did better at your current age..

Jobs were plentiful when your parents were your age. They were even more plentiful when your grandparents were your age.

Healthcare was reasonably priced then. Of course there was less that could be done, but people didn't go bankrupt because of a diagnosis.

Now we're seeing longevity declines and infant mortalities climb for the low and middle classes. Wealth disparity is also the greatest its ever been... But I'm sure they "worked hard" for being born into wealth.
The point isn't that avoiding scarcity thinking magically provides a solution. It's that it's very difficult to implement a solution when you have e.g. a lot of fishers who stand to lose out from it.

The idea is that we should work towards a society where the people who currently fish are happy to stop fishing if necessary, because they don't fear for their survival or comfort if they do.

I'd agree it's not really a good short term solution to acute problems though.
swift in response to public reaction maybe, they were aware of these issues years ago, they only started acting on them when they got air time. That is in no way a responsible stance.
Understanding the Security of Cryptographic Hash Functions
Is this appalling? What's appalling to me is the number of people who can't tell the difference between fantasy and reality.

I'm sure governments are going to come down hard on Zuck for "allowing disinformation to be spread", but won't give a second thought about cutting education budgets.

It's hard for politicians to make it illegal to lie or to run a platform where people might lie. People are always going to lie and try to deceive others. It would be more effective for these politicians to actually educate their constituents. This is just one of many benefits of having educated citizenry...
Awesome, thanks! I will definitely check it out.
_Nice_. I tried a cheesecake once and the cooking time in the dutch oven was about 8 hours longer than expected (gave up waiting at 10p and left it in the coals overnight to finish). At least it was a nice breakfast.

I have an idea on how I would do it but do you care to share your method?
> In 2007, we launched the Facebook Platform with the vision that more apps should be social.
Your calendar should be able to show your friends’ birthdays, your maps should show where
your friends live, and your address book should show their pictures. To do this, we enabled
people to log into apps and share who their friends were and some information about them.

Anyone who was in a FB sales meeting when OpenGraph was launched knows this is a very calculated understatement. I've heard them explicitly sell the information of an entire user's friends list to anyone willing to pay.
I am a fast webpage (2016)
> Facebook is a corporation, what Zuckerberg wants to do as an individual isn't even relevant

Zuck is a majority shareholder, so what he wants to do as an individual can actually be fairly significant here.
If anything, we need more gatekeepers like this that are shedding light on the dark money used for political advertising.
"What We Are Doing" under the "Cambridge Analytica" section is crap, i.e. lightweight or hypothetical (e.g. "we’re in the process of investigating every app that had access to a large amount of information before we locked down our platform in 2014").

By contrast, the same section under "Russian Election Interference" is well thought out. There's some hand-wavy stuff (e.g. "in the U.S. Senate Alabama special election last year, we deployed new AI tools that proactively detected and removed fake accounts from Macedonia trying to spread misinformation"). But requiring "every advertiser who wants to run political or issue ads...confirm their identity and location" and mandating the ads "show...who paid for them" is meaningful. That they're "starting this in the U.S. and expanding to the rest of the world in the coming months" is more encouraging. I'm also genuinely optimistic about their "tool that lets anyone see all of the ads a page is running" and "searchable archive of past political ads."

With Cambridge Analytica, a core component of Facebook's advertising business model is threatened. Hence the inaction. With Russia, Facebook and political advertisers' interests are aligned. Hence, action.
"I'm not dead yet!" :D
You could also buy a circular polarising filter for a camera for $5 that would do the trick: https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/972392-REG/bower_fp67...
A really profitable blog isn't passive at all. You spend a lot of time creating content and optimizing things.

You could potentially farm out the work but that applies to a lot of businesses. :)

I have a technical blog/youtube and most of the "profit" is from having that on my resume.
If you add a billion users to Youtube or to Facebook or to any other major platform, the marginal costs won't be 0 or close to 0. They'll be substantial. Existing servers won't account for the new demand. Electricity needs to be generated, new hardware needs to be procured, more employees need to be hired, etc. So I'm having trouble understanding how we're entering an age where the digital entities have marginal costs approaching 0. For a single additional customer, that's true - their costs are effectively zero. But if you start adding millions of users, the costs are not approaching zero.
There is a Crostini subreddit where people are trying different things with it: https://www.reddit.com/r/Crostini/
> Versioning is simple. Old software is version 1, today’s software is version 2, software in the future is version 3. Nobody can actually tell which version has been delivered to the customer.

Many such cases
And there are people who claim performance doesn't matter, only correctness does. Hmm..

Also: we chose C++, because it is fast.
It certainly was.
He is extremely set in his view and feels that by me
wanting to purchase my options I'm somehow am personally
taking advantage of him or his business.

Funny, since by trying to get you to forgo part of the compensation HE AGREED TO he's attempting to take advantage of you.

If he doesn't want those options exercised, he should be prepared to replace them with something of equivalent value.
Some people take off clothes for love. This doesn't seem to reduce the demand for people doing the same for money.

Hence it appears to be a matter of quality and demand somewhat negating the premise of the article.
> You can't just say production is a better use of resources than consumption

We're not talking about resources though -- capital is "the means of production". It's not the final good which is consumed. Capital, in the case of an Iowa corn farm, is neither the corn itself nor a choice about how to distribute the corn. Capital would be the land underlying the farm, the "seed corn", the farming implements, and the funding (liquid capital, e.g. money, credit, debt) for the operation. The farm employees and owners are ostensibly human capital but are usually considered separate from "capital" in general.

One way to allocate this capital is Zimbabwe or South Africa style, which says give it to the needy. Or Venezuela style which says give it to the public (i.e. government). Again, the question of capital allocation is distinct from the question of consumption good allocation, though the answers tend to be highly correlated.

> The real question is what's the best trade-off between expanding productive capacity, and producing consumer goods?

In general, expanding productive capacity results in producing more consumer goods. Any "lag" concerns are trivial, which would be the only tradeoff here. The best thing for people lacking in consumer goods is to produce more goods by expanding productive capacity. What's the real alternative? How would you propose to allocate capital towards people in poverty?

When we get to free nanoreplicators, that will be great in terms of raising living standards for everyone, and this entirely consistent with capital theory, particularly in terms of maximizing consumer welfare. It will be hard to "make a living" as a producer in such an economy, but no one needs to "make a living" beyond pushing the button on their nanoreplicator.
For the curious, the paper only addresses marine biology, according to the abstract.
Sure. I like meat, but if there's a version that I can eat that doesn't involved slaughtering animals, that's a net positive.
>Average turn-over for the newcomers: 3 months, the legal time to leave your job in France.

Can someone explain the meaning of this? I think something got lost in translation.
Plus, he was a kid.
Thanks!

For us it was really important to find people that help us along the way, and that definitely includes all our investors, as well as Ycombinator. We're engineers and we definitely learned so much about building a product and a go to market strategy during our time at YCombinator. Having a technology alone is often not enough.

We also raised money form some silicon valley veterans and angels, and I use them as a resource for advice and expertise. One of the was the first CTO of Cisco for example, and I always learn so much in talking with him. Pretty cool to see how one can apply things from those companies also today.

But most importantly, it's the team. you need a great to come to this point, otherwise you struggle quite early. I'm really proud to work with our folks, they really do all the work.
You seem neat and open, personally, I wouldn't put a future price here unless you expect to really hit it. I've already got that in my head. :)
TL;DR: "You are the product", says rich guy who runs competing business.
I wonder which ones specifically? I am reading into it because I am onto implementing it in our small company.

Everything is as in citation from GDPR:

"Taking into account the state of the art, the cost of implementation and the nature, scope, context and purposes
... implement appropriate technical and organisational measures ..."
Dissident.ai
After hearing several friends say that they cooked for fun, to unwind after a long day, I decided it is ingrained in personality, possibly genetic --- so vast was our difference in attitude, like how some people marvel that I like programming.

I wonder if your dream of communal kitchens are somewhat hampered by urban layouts, at least here in the U.S. If every time you want to eat you have to hop in the car and drive a mile, it adds a strong point to the side of just finding something at home.
> People keep sharing that “nightmare letter” link but won’t point out which question gives them nightmares and why.

There is a standard way in which "reasonable" regulations kill small companies. It works like this. You impose some small burden, something like an hour of labor a week. That won't destroy a small company, but that is not the only rule in the world. That rule takes an hour, another rule an hour and a half, a third rule a half hour. By the 60th rule, a two person company is past sunk. Even if every individual rule is nominally reasonable, the combination is hopelessly destructive.

The problem with tech companies is the rules don't just add together, they get multiplied by the user base, and it's entirely common for a very small company to have ten million users.

So you take a letter like that. The first time you get one it will take you a week to figure it out, but over time you get the response time down to an hour. Only with 10 million users, if 0.1% of the users make such a request per year, you're looking at 27 of those every day. That's more than three full time employees doing nothing but that. For this one "reasonable" regulation.
Software engineer? High(ish) education level, high(ish) prestige. The delightfulness varies from job to job, though...
Kirkland sources their products with regional/national producers and rebrands them. So the contents of your Kirkland water depend on which Costco you purchase it from.

Source: A friend of mine brokers deals with producers to rebrand them as Kirkland products. Perishables like 'Kirkland' Ham, 'Kirkland' Cheese, 'Kirkland' Ice Cream are packaged by different companies depending on the Costco (Costco Canada, Costco East Coast, Costco West Coast). Where as other stuff like 'Kirkland' jeans are brokered globally. Water likely falls at the national/regional level with one of the major brands, so 'Kirkland' water in Canada is likely a different kind of 'Kirkland' water sold in California.
Very easy with ChromeOS 67.

Just boot, launch a chrome window and type Ctrl alt t.

Then type vmc start dev.

Then you can use whatever distribution you want as you have full GNU/Linux.

Only works on Pixelbooks but Google will extend and will share more at Google IO.

You can even package up gnu/Linux applications. One click and they run in a container but on a second Linux kernel.

So Android shares the ChromeOS kernel where gnu/Linux will run in a container on top of a VM using the KVM.

It is interesting that Google did not feel just using containers for GNU/Linux was secure enough.
IMO, Most American got used to the life use the money in future. CC is the simplest way to loan money from the bank now, and pay it back in future. Meanwhile, the bank also like this, as lots of people wouldn't able to pay the debt on time with full balance, so they can make money from the interest.
Whatever Facebook decides to do they are still a gatekeeper...
In india, a pin is mandatory for all the purchases even when there were no chip cards.
Uber had some trouble because it could not charge credit cards like they do in US, as our cards needed two factor auth.
Or you just build your permissions and opt-in platform as a base for the social app.

We wouldn't let a self driving startup ignore traffic laws because it's "too hard". Likewise we shouldn't let a social startup ignore privacy laws and auditing.
If capitalism is limiting our ability to prioritize anything other than the creation of more capital, how do you explain ventures like SpaceX, which are highly capitalistic but demonstrably moving humanity forward?
they still have to support older clients. so it is not that easy to just change the protocol.
Windows 3.0-style file browser lets you navigate like its the 90s
This crafty term "political or issue ads". Is that a legal / enforceable term, or is this something that Facebook gets to decide?

Whatever it is, we're going to see that "ads which influence the public for political aims" are going to bleed juuuust on the other edge of that definition.

Also interesting that Facebook's response to this issue is to collect more data -- this time about "advertisers with specific political agendas", which seems like an interesting database to mine (although maybe not that hard to collect, idk).
I took it as you aren’t allowed to quit until you’ve been somewhere for three months.
> respond to that email in under quarter of an hour.

Let's take an app like Instagram as an example. Instagram had over 1 million users within two months and 10 million within a year, and no profits. You're running on a shoestring trying to keep servers online without any serious budget to speak of. It's probably you and a few friends/associates working closely together.

All of a sudden with GDPR, you have to pay a lawyer to help you understand what you need to do to comply with the regulations. You also have to spend engineering time developing solutions to enable the queries in that letter, enable purging records from long-term backups, etc. And people have to spend the 15 minutes responding to each request.

Now, let's say each request does only take 15 minutes like you suggest (which I find highly unlikely). If a small fraction like 0.5% of your customer base sends such a letter, then that's 50,000 letters. At 15 minutes each, that's 12,500 hours which is over 6 full-time employees. Many small business don't even have 6 employees to conduct the entirety of their business right now!
My point was that in 2014 when Facebook understood that one of the dozen of thousands of partners could abuse the data that they were collected, they acted swiftly and asked their partners to justify their use case; they asked the accused parties (Kogan, GSR and SCL) to delete the data and obtained legally binding documents. I’m not sure how they could, legally force themselves into a business in a different jurisdiction when that business had not broken the law — only a Platform user agreement.

Facebook did that four years before the law, namely GDPR, came into action. That’s not even accounting for the fact that outside of Europe, US and elsewhere, what CA did appears legal. Who the US Congress should be judging is probably whomever is in charge of writing laws.

Unless Facebook had a way to let, four years later (an eternity by Facebook standard) the programmatic ad platform know that those three entities (Kogan, GSR and SCL) that the compliance team interacted with four years earlier were related to CA; or even that CA, working for the official Romney campaign was related to the Pro-Trump SuperPACs buying ads (which would be coordination and illegal) blocking them without the revelations of Alex Wylie would be prescient.

I really don’t think you are making yourself actually smarter by judging Facebook in hindsight.

As Facebook done shady stuff? Absolutely: the Android Contact thing is certainly representative of the “gather first, ask questions later” early attitude which explains why Messenger is so bloated. Anyone familiar will confirm this is laziness over mischief. I worked there: you don’t need to make things up to find issues with Facebook.

On the particular problem in point, GSR, Facebook was outwitted and made misinformed decisions but they would absolutely not have been helped by either the public opinion of developers (we wanted more sharing) or the law (inapplicable) at the time.

The company learned to be more careful; its critics should too, because we absolutely will need those critics to be smart.
You have to work for 3 months before you can quit an employer in France. It's not "at-will". At least that's how I interpreted it, and given France's stronger labor laws I wouldn't be surprised if that's the case.
I've never felt that I was in a great situation to do that between jobs and I've never felt strongly enough about it to take leave. I have run into a few people who were able to negotiate an atypical amount of annual leave. One of them was a lawyer who basically worked about half the year and traveled most of the rest of the time. But that's very unusual and presumably isn't all that stable over the course of a career.