skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Whatsapp has near universal market penetration globally, especially in countries where most people can’t afford iPhones and use iMessage.

Even in countries where iPhones are ubiquitous the cross-platform nature of Whatsapp and the fact that everyone from your friend to your grandmother is on it, makes it dominant.

Yes you could use Slack to message your friends like you would on Whatsapp. The experience won’t be the same, and setup will be a hurdle. But would you use Whatsapp to replace Slack at work?

I think the term “compete” is used very broadly here.
This to me is the only compelling argument and I personally hope the government makes this successfully. Trying to look at IG/WhatsApp acquisitions is dumb imho.

But FB has consistently introduced open APIs and features, let them gain traction, then shut them down and replicated the most popular features.

I have been burned multiple times. Most recently new restrictions on Messaging.

If FB was mandated to restore some APIs possible make new ones for interoperability (while keeping the privacy changes over the years) that would be super super valuable to help other companies make value without trying some fruitless and probably not sound breakup.
After about 20 levels, I got more interested in skipping to the end for free. Poking around, it turns out that the game state is stored in browser local storage and fairly easy to reverse engineer (lesson for the motivated reader). Suffice to say with a few edits I was able to skip to the end and get to level 118. Still only 4 slices :)
Can you define what a "platform" is? And do you think there is a legal distinction between the two?

If this is regarding section 230, around which this dichotomy always seems to surface, then are you aware that the word "platform" does not appear in the text of said section?
> Yes, and this is fundamentally wrong approach to issues on which there is no broad public agreement.

Two important things here:

1. The judiciary exists to protect the rights of the people protected by the constitution, even when there may not be broad public support for those rights, even when those rights are unpopular. That's what happened with Brown v. BoE

2. 61% of Americans think that abortion should be legal in all or most cases. That is, 39% think it should be illegal. To compare, 49% think that burning the American Flag should be illegal, which the court has had no problem defending, and no one seems to consider was wrong for the court to decide.

> So would moving to, say, Canada or Sweden, which hardly makes it sound like a disaster.

Huh? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_v_Morgentaler)
Fair enough, I definitely can relate to that line of problems.

"Should we spend the time to do a thorough look at our monitoring needs, figure out where the gaps are, be more disciplined about using the tool consistently, etc.?"

"That'll take too long, I heard about this shiny new ops tool that claims to require zero configuration, let's just drop this in instead!"
Most of Linux kernel development happens on maillists and pull requests on GitHub are just for lulz.
In hindsight, i think a big part is that myspace's reach extended mostly to early adopter internet users. Early adopters jump on ships early, but also jump off easily too. Once everyone's parents and grandparents jumped on to facebook, that's a much better moat.

FB buying up the competition probably helped too.
>I think it's better to have a society where property rights and other natural rights cannot be infringed upon for any reason.

So hypothetically, it should be your right to own nuclear weapons? (I realize this is not a practical concern today, but I'm trying to find out if anyone truly believes there are no lines to be drawn on property rights.)
I think down the line that would be true, but Facebook's willingness to burn literal billions of dollars at this point is basically the only thing carrying VR. Id love to see it split off in the future though.
Yup, after Andy Rubin's sexual harassment allegations forced him to leave Google.
I was just trying to explain how Mapbox investors think. Their primary goal is to grow Mapbox as fast and possible and then make money, that's why they've invested in the first place. They don't care that some people could consider their strategy a dick move.
> If a majority of the population simply doesn't have the critical thinking and background knowledge necessary to weed out fake news, democracy simply can't work.

One could probably make this same claim about a wide array of things that people are not capable of on an individual basis, yet humanity can typically overcome these with various systemic approaches (why have every individual perform every task, when many can be offloaded to public services).

Does it seem odd that no one's floated the idea that rather than providing information to the public only through a kind of whirlwind of conflicting news flashes and memes, that we also adopt an approach where we endeavour to assemble all important issues into a slowly changing master list, and then off of that we attach news updates, centralized, evidence-based fact checking, public debate & voting, etc? Of course this is extremely far from easy, and is surely impossible to do perfectly, but it doesn't seem at all like a crazy idea to me...and yet, I don't think I've ever heard the idea mentioned.
We may have the freedom of speech, but that doesn't mean that Youtube has to give you a megaphone?
I was going to cite concrete numbers for BD’s previous acquisitions — since I was certain I’d heard those figures being higher — but Wikipedia just gives the Google and SoftBank purchases as being undisclosed sums:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Dynamics#Company_histor...
Sounds like a quite low valuation...?
> night doesn't become day in a single instant.

How about 75 years?

> shows that you obviously grok the gravity of the situation.

The situation is thus: humans are one mean species, capable of great deeds of kindness as well as atrociously horrible deeds of evil. Throughout history people have done both, places where horrible deeds were done - say during the rise of the Mogul empire in India or the Turkish genocides (yes, plural, the Armenian genocide was only the last in a row stretching over a period of almost 40 years) on Christians in the Ottoman empire, the atrocities of the GULAG system in the Soviet Union and probably even during the cultural revolution in Mao's China - also showed people risking their lives to save those who were being persecuted, usually putting those who tried to save people in dire risk themselves.

Many people have learned to live with the knowledge that back in time ranging from centuries to a few decades their ancestors were subjected to annihilation, torture, murder, eradication, extermination, marginalisation... the list goes on. Those people have not forgotten but they generally realise that those who committed the atrocities are long gone and that the currently living generation of their ancestors' persecutors are not to blame for their ancestor's crimes. Those who do not realise this end up in generation-spanning blood feuds and vendettas. Wars were started over such things, leading to even more atrocities, sowing the seeds for yet more wars.

So yes, you can buy a Volkswagen without feeling the need to call it a "Nazi car" just like you can buy a Mitsubishi without calling it a "Jap car", an IBM computer without labelling it a "racist computer", eat a south-African "Outspan" orange without referring to it as an "apartheid orange". You may want to leave that iPhone on the shelves to signal your discontent with the circumstances in which it was produced because that is a problem which is happening right now instead of centuries ago. It is, in other words, something which can be changed in the here and the now. The same goes for that example of conflict diamonds you gave, nobody should buy those or any product they are part of.

Calling Volkswagen a "Nazi car" does not achieve any purpose other than signalling to others that you consider yourself to be virtuous, "not a Nazi", in your own words expecting everyone to give you kudos for it. Most people consider themselves not to be Nazis without needing to call out Volkswagen, Agfa (does that still exist? It was a spin-off from IG-Farben), Mercedes or Thyssen-Krupp. That does not mean those people are not aware of the history of those companies, it just means they can separate the past from the present. It does not mean they condone the crimes committed by those companies, it just means they realise that Volkswagen in 2020 is run by different people, with different goals, different outlooks on life, staffed by different people than it was back when Hitler and Porsche came with the first "Volkswagen" (people's car).
They have been trying for many years now. Its a consideration, but a pretty small one in terms of all the things that need to be considered.
Depends where you're from I guess.

Its also just the first backup which takes a (long) while. If you got only 10 mbit upload, then you're able to upload 600 mbit per minute, or 36000 mbit per hour. Which is about 4500 mB/hour (or ~4,4 GB/hour). Which results in 108000 mB/day (or ~105 GB/day). Its about 3/4 of a TB a week.

I'm glad I got 30+ mbit upload with my VDSL2. My first backups took ages (I got 5 TB with Jottacloud). First I thought it was Duplicati being slow with regards to cryptography or being .NET, but nope that ain't it.

Incremental backups during night are not going to hamper the connection though.
Thank you, doctor.
Your onto something, and I think another crucial detail is that the small, southern town I grew up in is more tolerant of gay folks now than the vast majority of big cities were 20 years ago. There's been such a massive shift in tolerance towards gay humans across the entire culture that comparing any place I go to NOW vs where I grew up WHEN I was a kid is a massive difference.

Compared to 2020 Anywhere, 2000 Anywhere was a very bigoted place.
I do not doubt or dispute that Texas is cheaper to live in. It was the "significant" quality of life for children statement struck me as a red flag. It's a form of WASP signaling I've seen many times before (I may be a WASP too...)

It's a particularly egregious statement given that people the world over (myself included) would love to retire in California some day due to the wonderful weather, the abundance of high-quality food and the lovely ocean next door, not to mention the world-class in-state universities, and the abundant employment opportunities. Yes, SF is expensive, and perhaps it makes sense to move out, but leaving California altogether is a whole other kettle of fish. Resorting to Texas as being significantly better given its poor social safety net, open-carry laws, wide variation in schooling based on neighbourhood wealth, well "significantly better" starts to look downright fishy.
Maybe it's to do with social network advertising? (https://marketingland.com/almost-70-of-digital-ad-spending-g...)

I have no knowledge in this area, so just throwing it out there for more informed minds to fill in the blanks.
> You don't need evidence to form a belief

Please don't put words in my mouth. I said I did not need "perfect evidence." I cited evidence, albeit imperfect. Whether it's strong enough to change someone's beliefs is between them and their epistemology. That's all I have to say on this subject.
Lots of good stuff in here, including much more support for using UUIDs as PKs.

My favorite new feature is "delegated type" in ActiveRecord to offer a new way to map class hierarchies onto database tables. I wrote a blog post about it[0], but the actual PR is very readable as well[1].

[0] https://www.stevenbuccini.com/how-to-use-delegate-types-in-r...

[1] https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/39341
The beginning of Horizontal Sharding support is great to see.

More refined release notes here:
https://edgeguides.rubyonrails.org/6_1_release_notes.html

And yet more release notes:
https://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2020/12/9/Rails-6-1-0-release...
Other have rebutted the claim that the evidence of Russian influence was "tenuous" and "circumstantial", but one piece of information that they haven't mentioned is that the Republican led Senates' own intel report the coroborated the claims made by the Democrats.

Also, it was the Republican DoJ w/Jeff Sessions and Rod Rosenstein that commissionned the Mueller report (Robert Mueller, a Republican as well).

To continue to believe otherwise and post these false claims online only makes you part of the problem, not actually looking for a solution.

I say this as someone who is generally not a fan of the approach that Twitter, Youtube etc. make in terms of censorship like this. I just think we all need to call a spade a spade when we see it though, and the evidence here is overwhelming.
It is. I've spent time in most of the U.S., minus Alaska and a few north eastern states, and some states have very distinct boundaries between city and rural atmosphere. In some states, I found places I was not supposed to be and it was made abundantly clear to me. There are some places that saying the wrong words or having the wrong beliefs can be incredibly dangerous. The degree of difference varies from state to state and also seems to change based more heavily on latitude. Not sure I understand why it works out that way.
The point is very clear. But let me clarify it: there was an effort by state actors to manipulate and aid a specific party in a way that is fully illegal.
Precisely. Google essentially introduced this problem themselves with silent updates --- that and perhaps the rest of the software industry that wants to turn everything into a service...

The normalisation of silent change is one of the worst things to have happened to software in the last decade.
No, I am dumb, since clearly you are not like me I would love to know what are the 6 solid reasons to permanently deprive the whole population of basic freedoms.Because this is not the case of "I killed a burglar who pulled out a gun on me so he forfeited his right to freedom". Even if you strongly disagree with a position, if that position is censored, you are impoverished because of that, society is impoverished. Grievance must be vented openly, otherwise you push the fringe(and not so fringe) groups underground.
> Those four states bypassed thier legislatures in order to change their election laws.

When these special measures were enacted in March to accommodate voting during a pandemic, ample time was given for public comment and legal challenge. Why weren't these suits raised at that time? It seems awfully suspicious that plantiffs had no issue with the mail balloting until they lost the election.
Doesn't matter. It is obvious to see that publishes (newspapers, books) were the "gatekeepers" of massive, worldwide distribution of information.

I am pointing out the difference between traditional media and internet media. One has checks and balances, and the other is wild wild west.
No one’s salty or cares.

The fact is Musk extracted all his value from California then “fled” to Texas.

He’s a parasite.
I've never seen this behavior in SF, especially considering how many people wear red 49ers apparel...
> The FTC is seeking a permanent injunction in federal court that could, among other things: require divestitures of assets, including Instagram and WhatsApp; prohibit Facebook from imposing anticompetitive conditions on software developers; and require Facebook to seek prior notice and approval for future mergers and acquisitions.

If the FTC has their way, Facebook will need to seek prior notice and approval for future mergers and acquisitions.
Yeah, thank God you'll have a couple big companies owned by the same people to tell you what is the real truth.

China has different media as well. I'd like to see one of them saying the CCP should leave or something against them.
I'm not convinced the misinformation thing is as big of a factor as many people believe. I think it's just a symptom of the real problem: echo chambers.

Every contentious issue in US politics gets divided into two major camps, each championed by one of the major political parties. Those parties use their resources to plant the seeds of powerful echo chambers, which eventually become self-perpetuating thanks to our natural tendencies for group preferences and confirmation bias. The misinformation crisis is just a result of an echo chamber throwing crap at the wall to avoid questioning itself.

The problem of echo chambers is a hard one to solve, especially when it comes to politics. However, I think an improved voting system would actually do a lot to help in the long term. By introducing a transferable vote, citizens could vote for third-party candidates without fear of "wasting" their vote. Over time, that should hopefully empower more moderate political groups and make the middle ground between echo chambers more accessible.

A more accessible middle ground should result in fewer echo chambers. Fewer echo chambers should result in less incentive to create and circulate misinformation. At least, that's my two cents.
Didn't gorhill update its view with the change made since to the v3?
Ok it's actually back up now. I ran into a rate limit, and then another rate limit, and then another...but things should be good now. Sorry.
A few takeaways for me here:

I'm kind of weird in that having the latest shiny technology makes me unreasonably happy. Which means there might be an arbitrage opportunity for companies to pay slightly less and cater to weirdos like me.

A lot of this is not unlike personal finance: if what you have now is fine, do you really need to upgrade? And also a lot of costs are just sort of non-negotiably baked into the budget (e.g. payroll, mortgage), and what's left is relatively small and carefully spent. I could see how tight cash flow could make this even more of an issue.

The more-frequent-replacement requests I've had have more been around new capabilities rather than raw performance. Like being able to charge off an iPad charger in a pinch, or being able to run iOS apps natively.

Lastly I'd point to The Joel Test[1], which has mixed results in terms of how well it has aged, but mostly that some of the items are even more "table stakes" than they were at the time it was originally published. But a lot of it still rings true, and number 9 is Do you use the best tools money can buy?

[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-s...
Oh, I definitely have doubts. I have doubts about the legality of voter suppression tactics like defunding the USPS, doubts about gerrymandering, doubts about influence by foreign actors and much more. They're just not the baseless stuff that Youtube is now removing.
All right then, show me where exactly can you see the dog-whistling here: https://archive.md/e5mwk
A chat sold for $27.7bn just few days ago, and a far more valuable company with real hard engineering, robotics challenges just for $1b ???

This is the world we live in !
If you got disks from the same brand, and same batch, chances are they will fail at the same time before a resilver.
Note that the states filed a separate suit that is slightly broader in scope: https://ag.ny.gov/sites/default/files/facebook_complaint_12....
I'm center-left.
NY has many of the same budget woes that CA does.
Apple moved in this direction because Apple is all about restricting you from running any code Apple didnt sell to you in the first place. They are in a war against general computing.
From the article, the claim is:

> illegally maintaining its personal social networking monopoly

"Monopoly" is a term that's fairly overloaded/misunderstood; while in economics refers specifically to a situation where there is a single supplier for a good/service (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly#Market_structures), in the legal definition "monopoly power" is defined much more loosely, as "the power to control prices or exclude competition" in the US (e.g. https://www.justice.gov/atr/competition-and-monopoly-single-...), and there are complex tests for monopoly power in the EU including >50% market share which I'm less familiar with.

I think common discourse tends to interpret monopoly in the economics sense, which leads to confusion when we look at antitrust enforcement like this. Not to mention that under antitrust laws you don't even need to have (loosely defined) "monopoly power" to be engaging in illegal anticompetitive behaviors.

Specifically analyzing those competitors:

LinkedIn is a business social network, not a personal social network as they define it. Forums are not "social networks" as commonly defined (graph of relationships).

Twitter is a competitor, but they have far less market share, e.g. see https://www.t4.ai/industry/social-media-market-share#:~:text... which puts Facebook at 69% of social media users, (a monopoly in most definitions), while twitter is at ~8%. Somewhat confounding because users can be on both, but the magnitudes are what's important.

TikTok is a valid competitor too, but again they don't have nearly as dominant a position as Facebook <25% of FB's MAU according to https://datareportal.com/social-media-users?rq=tiktok.

I think Ben Thompson has the best analysis of antitrust as it pertains to Facebook, as he deeply understands the market dynamics that give Facebook and other large tech companies their market power, e.g. see https://stratechery.com/2017/manifestos-and-monopolies/.
This is the most boneheaded move from the US government ever. This will hurt the US position on the Internet. It will also cause Silicon Valley salaries to go lower. Developers are getting paid high salaries because of Google and Facebook; any moves to split these companies into smaller companies will cause the salaries to drop, as smaller companies will not be able to pay the salaries Google and Facebook pay to its employees.

This will hurt the Valley.
Not bad for a company they reportedly bought for 100M and pumped about another 400M over these three years. But all these ownership changes really show how hard it is to find the product and market fit for complex robotics.
PhD here. Indeed a lot of academic curricula are indoctrination and mostly useless bullshit. The Humanities are quite out of touch with reality.

My advice to students is to pay lip service and keep quiet.
>The democrats collected evidence, went to court, and lost. Russiagate, however misfounded, was legal. To imply that there were no other avenues for them to go down so they turned to voter fraud is laughable.

You forgot a few steps. First, they claimed there was fraud (w/o evidence). Then they 'leaked' the Steele dossier and other nonsense documents. Then, there was 24/7 wall to wall coverage for months and months of it (including insane stuff like the pee tape) to manufacture consent. High profile Democrats happily went on TV expressing fake concern and repeated unproven allegations. They happily were the 'inside source' to NYTimes, rollingstone, nymag, etc, etc for more ridiculous stories. Then, they wasted tax payer money knowing full well that it was bogus.

Respectfully, I would invite you to do the same as you ask others. Take a step back, and consider (even if you aren't convinced) whether you've been had by the Dems on the most ridiculous story (if not on all of them) about Trump.
It's telling that none of these "fraud" arguments ever make it into the president's campaign's lawsuits. They're only ever repeated on sympathetic propaganda outlets.

It's almost as if they realize they're peddling bullshit.
Argos catalogue was standard toilet reading here in the UK
> The political party I agree with is factually correct! The other party is insane!

Yes buddy, sorry to be hard about it, but sometimes you're right and the other side is wrong. It's not about partisanship; it's about objective reality.

And the objective reality is that for anyone who's not stuck on the Fox/OANN spin cycle (which includes the billions of US outside the US watching from afar) the results are clear, conclusive and bright as day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyundai_Motor_Group