skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One, most of the mainstream news has at least basic editorial processes in place that do a rudimentary check on truthiness. Facebook, along with some of the sketchier news outlets, are the opposite: they profit off (and optimize for) disinformation.

Two, it's a matter of scale. Facebook reaches a far larger audience and has far more detail into their preferences and can nano-target personalized stories for them and corral them into groups, creating perfect echo chambers. The news companies are way too small and in some way irrelevant. Even if they all went bankrupt overnight, Facebook's algorithms will keep working, keep producing personalized truth bubbles. Is fake news a problem in general? Sure. But the news companies are tiny compared to Facebook, and not the immediate and persistent threat to democracy that Facebook is, just because they're much smaller. Even if you take the entirety of local news networks as a whole, they don't have the same saturation and engagement feedback loops that Facebook has.

The Powers That Be are typically reactionary forces, and has long battled the news industry over free speech and censorship etc. Facebook is a relatively new villain, different than the old ones, and way more powerful. Further regulating the news industry won't really deal the Facebook issue since they can keep on aggregating from anywhere and everywhere. It's a different beast altogether.
This is simply forgetting the context.

Someone said she doesnt know firm strategy,

The response was that she is one of the best people to speak on this topic.

And then your response dismisses the value of her credentials.

In context, her credentials rebut the claim that she has no perspective. A Harvard MBA and Data Science degree give her unique perspective and valid perspective on what she is talking about.

Further I have watched the Whistleblower deposition and she has said things within the ambit of what she has said.

Additionally I personally have a position to know this particular space and she has repeated things that many already know.
One thing that makes Facebook distinct from other big Internet companies is that they allow far-right speech on their platform.

That is probably why the Democrats and liberal media are targeting Facebook but not twitter, YouTube, reddit, Snap, TikTok etc.
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Supertweet (http://supertweet.co)

Do you schedule tweets in advance? Maybe you should. Consistency is the most rewarded practice on the platform. Being consistent without scheduling your tweets is just impossible. BUT, if you've ever tried to mass schedule, you'll see it takes less time to write the content, than to select the date and actually post. This is what Supertweet does. You click Tweet and it automatically schedules your tweet on a set schedule.

Tweethunter (http://tweethunter.io)

Ever wondered what to tweet next? Well, Tweethunter is the answer. You just open the app and you get bombarded with great tweets to copy and paste on the platform. The tweets are usually tweets >1 year that have done well, so you get the most out of it.
Browser Plugin: Readable
Facebook is much, much, much worse.

Assuming general equivalency in manipulation of public opinion to hide their malfeasance,

the impact of that malfeasance is orders of magnitude worse for our society, democracy, and world culture.

If you have any doubt about this, you haven't looked at any of the reporting, not just from this latest data dump, but from any of the other whistle-blowing, leaks, third party investigations, etc.

It's not just that they bury and spin any internal findings which may compromise their ability to pursue "engagement," it's so so much worse.

Look at the documents. This whistleblower brought the receipts.

Their continued operations as a monolith represents an acute and active threat. They should be broken up and subjected to transparency requirements.

That's what you get when you pursue profit and power at the expense of social cohesion, functioning government, and in the case of many in harsh realities outside the US, assistance in brutal political suppression and worse.
Do you have evidence for this, or is this just a knee-jerk "ooh, scary illegal drug!" reaction?
> a command was issued with the intention to assess the availability of global backbone capacity, which unintentionally took down all the connections in our backbone network, effectively disconnecting Facebook data centers globally

From a security perspective, I’m blown away that a single person apparently had the technical permissions to do such a thing. I can’t think of any valid reason that a single person would have the ability to disconnect every single data center globally. The fact that such functionality exists seems like a massive foot-gun.

At a minimum I would expect multiple layers of approval, or perhaps regionalized permissions, so that even if this person did run an incorrect command, the system turns around and says “ok we’ll shut down the US data centers but you’re not allowed to issue this command for the EU data centers, so those stay up”.
well as the success of the US economy shows, those greedy capitalists create millions of jobs and goods and increase overall "happiness" of millions (of perhaps less greedy) people.

Greed and free markets make for a healthy society.

As a counter-example see what happened with the Soviet Union, I can tell you first hand that didn’t work very well. Demonizing "bourjois" values of private property and prosperity, while fetishizing the “common good” and all-controlling government made the entire society very unhappy (except for a few fat bureaucrats) and led to its eventual collapse.
Facebook has a much wider reach than Bic Tobacco could dream of.

As far as actual impact on thousands of lives, it's probably a tossup since Facebook has many means of ruining lives (psychological manipulation, distrust in government, pandemic misinformation, political misinformation). But I'd wager that Facebook has probably already caused way more harm than tobacco. It's hard to measure though.
I thought you might be having this issue, which is why I tried to be very explicit.

It's due to a cygwin and how /dev/cons* are different from /dev/pty* cf https://cygwin.com/pipermail/cygwin/2020-May/244878.html

I've tried to explain that a bit better in server-client.c (check line 251) to give the user a clue of what's happening with *cause = xstrdup(c->ttyname)

Unfortunately, even in 2021, properly configuring a terminal can be complicated.

That's why sixel-tmux page has a step-by-step configuration guide, and why I often provide config files in other projects like https://github.com/csdvrx/indent-rainbow : if needed, check https://github.com/csdvrx/indent-rainbow/blob/main/config/wi... even if I need to update it that should give you a good base to start tweaking from.

I strongly encourage you to check your configuration with the steps suggest on the sixel-tmux page, or at least the minimal set of steps shown in http://github.com/csdvrx/sixel-testsuite (which I should update to show how font change should work, with sixels being resize to be kept in perfect alignment with the text, as done in mintty, as several people seem to believe it's a sixel limitation)
I'm reading through The Lab Notes from Alexander Obenauer[1], and I'm noticing lots of coincidences. Universal data portability [2] in particular shares the same code insight of reusing all user data in any context where it's needed, and Universal reference containers [3] are the primary use case for my idea of Wit.

With the example interactions in that website you can get very close to what I imagined my system to be (though I would use a "select+tag" metaphor more often than the cumbersome drag&drop).

I still have the idea to allow spreadsheet-like processing on top of those metaphors, but the essence of the system is quite similar to that one; many information systems are converging in that same direction toward a similar model of interaction.

[1] https://alexanderobenauer.com/labnotes/000/

[2] https://alexanderobenauer.com/labnotes/002/

[3] https://alexanderobenauer.com/labnotes/003/
What do you want to be done exactly?

Public algorithms, or at least some 3rd party review. Ban infinite-scroll on social media platforms. Require feeds to be configurable (users can set to "newest first" or "top picks" or whatever else). I'm sure I could come up with more, that's just off the top of my head.
This exact mistake used to be in e.g. Qt, KDE, and Chromium code. That shit causes real world damage !
Yeah, isn't part of government using progressive tax, regulations, and antitrust laws to prevent that sort of dominance?
So someone ran "clear mpls lsp" instead of "show mpls lsp"?
Before the official lockdown happened in NYC, the city was basically already deserted. Virtually no one on trains that didn't have to be, and restaurants/bars nearly empty. It was going to happen regardless of government intervention.
Thanks for the response.

One difficulty of claiming a double standard is that often there isn't a perfect parallel.

The Obama and Trump campaigns were different, but I sorry--i dont believe the backlash is because of their campaign strategy but instead their politics.

You mention obama being 'positive' but that's very subjective. To other people, Trump is positive and hopeful.

And I don't agree that Trumps antics really had much at all to do with Facebook--nevermind social media or the internet at large. When Trump was testing his rhetoric at his gatherings, there wasn't any Facebook around.

And the meddling was greatly exaggerated. It's the type of freedom internet paragons all espoused. The internet is international. I didn't know we weren't allowed to comment on foriegn politics (Im not American citizen... Am I interfering right now?).

People talked about the internet creating a more democratic society. One where anyone can challenge the elite. Well guess what--thats exactly what happened. We just didn't like what came out when most people started opening their mouth.
With an outage this big, even a post for a technical audience will get read by non-technical people (including journalists), so I'm sure it helps to include details like this.
Sounds like a Palladium Mag of software engineering. Much love for publications like that.

We need more long form and high quality publications.

I posit a stack consisting of Substack posts, quality magazines, academic papers as the optimum knowledge supply.
Something surprising I learned recently is that this is an anti-pattern when building an iOS app. iOS has a memory compressor, so if you try to purge resources in a low-memory situation, it can cause memory use to spike as the things you're trying to free get decompressed.

The SDK provides a notification when memory pressure is high, so people try to get aggressive and purge their caches and unused assets when that notification arrives, but that only makes the problem worse.
I highly recommend watching the Senate hearing from today, and I'm a person who normally can't stand these things. This was totally different from any other hearing I've seen -- little grandstanding, no partisan bickering, no evading of questions. Most of the Senators seemed genuinely interested in what Frances had to say, and she gave meaningful insights backed by real data.

A lot of what she's saying is stuff that has been generally known in the tech industry for some time -- that algorithmic content ranking amplifies division and outrage. But the detail she gave about actual research quantifying it goes way deeper than I think most of us were aware of.

https://www.commerce.senate.gov/2021/10/protecting%20kids%20...
Brownouts is probably the most proximate concern - a sudden increase in demand will draw down the system frequency in the vicinity, and if there aren't generation units close enough or with enough dispatchable capacity there's a small chance they would trip a protective breaker.

A person I know on the power grid side said at one data center there were step functions when FB went down and then when it came up, equal to about 20% of the load behind the distribution transformer. That quantity is about as much as an aluminum smelter switching on or off.
WTF, the only version you can download is the Linux version. The page says Windows/Mac/Linux, but there's no way to select one: https://sourceforge.net/projects/opentaxsolver
Unless that civic event had significant unresolved elements such as the failure of the sitting president to actually concede the election but rather to contest it.

And it's not like Facebook isn't a global company that deals with a more or less constant deluge of important elections in many countries.
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I'm not sure what you mean. I read mewe from my browser on the desktop all the time.
I can scarcely find any powerful entity interested in opposing social media. It clearly expands the reach of American influence in the world, so the state must be happy. It’s good for advertising, so pretty much all businesses are happy too. The public gets their high-sugar circuses.

Who has the interest in opposing social media? Apple?
Profit is different from greed.
The government doesn't belong in the bedrooms of the nation, but somehow should decide which meme graphics two adults can share online. Lets Go Brandon.
Or have a minimum of three plants.
I should have simply said "This is a good start"
I am often pulled towards this comment for an article that asks, "Are Designers Crazy?" [0]

"""

No, designers aren't crazy. You just don't understand a very fundamental concept of design. It even applies to engineering. It's okay—many people have the same frustrations as you do.

But those who care about the details achieve truly high quality results overall. It extends to all areas of the design, not just to the parts you can't see.

In the movie "Who Framed Roger Rabbit," there's a scene in a dark room where Roger Rabbit (an animated character) flies across the room, knocks a hanging lamp around, and the lighting becomes so dynamic that all the shadows move around including the animated character's shadow. Here's the scene in question: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EUPwsD64GI

This was such a small detail that it would have been forgivable if the animators had left it out entirely: if they had not moved the lamp, kept the shadow steady, no one would have really noticed the difference. It would have been 100 times easier to animate and the effect wouldn't really have been that different.

But they did it anyway. The term was later coined, and "bump the lamp" is used throughout Disney (and probably other organizations) to mean something akin to "go the extra mile"—but I see it as having a special significance to design.

You're right, most people won't notice. By that logic, you could cut corners a lot of other places too. You could be lax about button colors matching exactly, or per-pixel sharpness on the map and buttons. No one would probably notice.

But if you go for every detail like it was the most important detail, you have the possibility of reaching a level of design quality that is superlative, and some people will notice. Others will not notice directly, but will see that the piece exudes style and quality subconsciously, due to the attention to small details. If you carry this into other areas of your work—programming, customer service, market strategy, marketing, and more—then you have a chance to create something of true quality.

If you don't pay attention to detail at that level, well, you might have the chance to actually get something done. Yes, it's a balance, like everything else. But you have to know that it won't be quite as good, and understand that yes, you are sacrificing something, even if you can't see it.

"""

In the same way, Stripe creates a superlative product and branding site, and in the mere act of doing so, it attracts those who also wish to create such products. It may seem high effort for those who may not seem to care, but for those who do, they immediately understand the value.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5002262
> That aside, my theory about whistleblowing is that it is a counter-intuitive exercise that results in very little at the expense of orgs tightening their security policies.

Oftentimes this is the point. An organization with tighter internal security policies and lower levels of trust internally is significantly less efficient. Over time, this leads to them being unable to respond to competitive pressures and then getting eclipsed in the marketplace. It's not that the whistleblower kills the organization, it's that the whistleblower triggers the organization into killing itself.

This was the explicit goal of Wikileaks and of Osama bin Laden. They knew they couldn't take down governments themselves, but they can make government so inefficient that their own citizens take them down.
Probably with the help of psychologists who can offer more concrete definitions of addictive behavior and dark patterns than you or I.
Drone Shows: How they work, how much they cost and their future
This might be where I finally sit down and experiment with Timescale Cloud.

$24 / month is an entry point price that I can use to start a project with at least.
Portugal, in a very depopulated rural area. Per building. There are some restrictions around use (can’t be a permanent residence without a permit). So far we’ve only put up a single 45m2 cabin, but have plans for a few bits and bobs, spread over ~10ha. Building out our own power and water grids, vermiculture sewage treatment where needed. Their attitude is “it’s your land, you do what you want”.
I use the llvm-mingw (targeting ucrt) for that, it's available on GitHub and has been updated to 13
Google had a comparable outage several years ago.

https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/cloud-networking/19...

This event left a lot of scar tissue across all of Technical Infrastructure, and the next few months were not a fun time (e.g. a mandatory training where leadership read out emails from customers telling us how we let them down and lost their trust).

I'd be curious to see what systemic changes happen at FB as a result, if any.
Teenagers who are responsible for managing the family router?
> Similarly, collectivist organizations always seem to result in top-down totalitarian regimes when they win the government.

Substantially, that's a matter of history rather than ideology. Collectivist organizations that aren't top-down organized tend to be unsuccessful in overthrowing states and remaining in power in the face of more authoritarian opposition. The fact that the Russian revolution led to Stalinism is more survivorship bias than anything else.

You may also be underestimating the authoritarianism of right-wing institutions in US society just because they seem natural and normal to you.
I'm saying there doesn't need to be a single arbiter centralized in one place, I'm not saying there shouldn't be a process to regulate obviously-wrong harmful nonsense.

It's a failure of the imagination to not see the difference.
I don't think you'll find much objections to doing good, but but where do you stop? Say the minimum wage is $10 and you decide to pay your workers $15. You still get flak from people who want you to pay even higher (see: amazon getting flak despite paying above market/minimum wage). Do you just turn your business into a non-profit? After all, any profit means there's money that could be spent doing good.
Let me ask you something: How much of the "bigger picture" did Snowden have?

Because, you know, one person is male and the other is female, and I'd really like to believe that gender has nothing to do with it.
Firefox runs on systems with 512MB RAM. [1] Can you imagine keeping a Slack tab open on a system like that? Never mind 100 tabs.

[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/93.0/system-requiremen...
I think the specific euphemism "refocuses on his personal life", as opposed to a more general "pursue other opportunities", reads more like serious illness or family disturbance. It provokes sincere concern for his wellbeing beyond a job move.
FB is much worse because there's no sense of moderation.

In mainstream media, there's someone who vets content, fact checkers etc. You can disagree on whether you think Tucker Carlson is "factual" but effort goes into not running afoul of legal rules and fear of being sued. Scripts are written, it's edited, etc.

With social media, it's just straight up lies. Not even "a little bias" but just straight up garbage. They hide behind "free speech" and "light moderation" but the reality is that there's no rules like traditional media have to take into account.

> when they’ve been damaging America for much longer than FB has existed

Has modern mainstream media been implicated in major events like the Jan 6th insurrection?
He screwed over a ton of Apple employees. In Jobs' mind he truly deserved all of the credit and profits for their success because he was the vision guy. Woz and the rest of the team were just doing the boring implementation stuff.
Big MIT press vibes. I love this so much.
Yes, and how will government regulation appear? Just randomly, for no reason?
> redefining terms and norms.

AKA rhetoric and persuasive language.

Likening something that looks an awful lot like a literally-against-the-law crime, to that same crime, is about as mild as that sort of thing can possibly be, and I don't think my post was particularly tricky or deceptive.

Your position also assumes terms and norms weren't already redefined to make this stuff not seem awful. I know in the 90s my co-workers would have been shocked by the suggestion we do a small fraction of what a place like FB does, to track people. It would have been considered, obviously, incredibly unethical. Some may even have assumed it was illegal under some law or another, in fact.

Accepting that terms and norms as currently defined are correct is just accepting the worldview of, and supporting the interests of, whoever redefined and shifted those last. This is not the same as saying that "nothing actually means anything", mind you, but rather a call to consider things on their own terms, not to accept another's framing. When I do that, well shit, it sure looks like a bunch of modern tech's business model is "being a gross, creepy stalker, at scale". Why would that be OK? It's not even close to the border of OK.
We have a lot of evidence that local/municipal agencies are a huge attack vector for hackers. You have the resources and talent pool of a small city who now has to defend against attacks from all over the planet. Consider the ransomware attacks against the city of Baltimore: https://www.govtech.com/security/for-second-time-in-a-year-b...

I'd much rather my sensitive digital information be stored with FB (knowing how much they spend on cyber security) than the CA DMV.
But the stock has bounced back today. A lot of tech stocks dipped yesterday.
I hope the rest of your day is as pleasant as you are, sir.
This is my favorite kind of Open Source project! It's obviously a labor of love and it has a wide impact. Truly this is for the greater good.

The icing on the cake is that there is a nice TO DO list guiding new contributions.
Ask HN: Did Facebook delete a lot of evidence yesterday during 'the outage'?
Serious question.
Am I the only one who found the Facebook Files reporting very overwrought and stretched? There were some issues and red flags in there, but mostly it seemed... not that bad?
That doesn't mean they are incorrect. Personally, I read a wide range of sources.