skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Me too, haha. I like the new UI and privacy controls, but this is always the most important consideration.

By the way, as far as I know, Termux (at least as we know it) is for sure eventually doomed, which is really sad. Here's a brief explanation for those uninitiated:

* Android 10 introduced a restriction that apps targeting API version 29+ can no longer invoke exec() on files within the app's home directory, which breaks Termux [1].

* An app can target any API version. There is a hardcoded "min_supported_target_sdk" in the Android source code (23 as of Android 12) [2], but as of now targeting a lower version only produces a warning, and it will likely take quite a long time before it reaches 29 anyway [3]. The main problem is that the Play Store won't allow new app updates targeting <29. For now, the Play Store Termux build is very out of date and it's recommended to get Termux from F-Droid. But for some reason, the developer of Termux has decided that they want to make Termux API 29 compatible [4]. (Perhaps to ensure long-term compatibility if the "min_supported_target_sdk" ever increases past 28 AND starts to actually be enforced, or maybe just because they want to distribute Termux in the Play Store, even though most of its users would be perfectly comfortable getting it from F-Droid?)

* Making Termux API 29 compatible will make it a lot less fun and a lot less practical to use. All executables will have to be distributed inside separate APK files which must be individually installed, since exec() can now only be called on files in the read-only /data/app directory [5]. Say goodbye to `apt install <name>`.

* Google continues to further restrict the OS in ways that break certain functionality within Termux.

* Termux still works mostly normally for now in Android 10 and 11 (and 12, it seems), but its developer is already at work on the weird APK packaging system.

[1] https://github.com/termux/termux-packages/wiki/Termux-and-An...

[2] https://android.googlesource.com/platform/prebuilts/fullsdk/...

[3] https://github.com/termux/termux-app/issues/1072#issuecommen...

[4] https://github.com/termux/termux-app/issues/1072#issuecommen...

[5] https://github.com/termux/termux-app/issues/1072#issuecommen...

=== EDIT ===

According to the README, the current plan is actually to continue targeting API 28 for now:

> There is currently no work being done to solve android 10 issues and working updates will not be resumed on Google Play Store any time soon. We will continue targeting sdk 28 for now.

They are looking for contributors to help make an API 29 compatible version though:

> @termux is looking for Termux Application maintainers for implementing new features, fixing bugs and reviewing pull requests since the current one (@fornwall) is inactive. Issue https://github.com/termux/termux-app/issues/1072 needs extra attention.

https://github.com/termux/termux-app/blob/master/README.md#g...
The problem is that Facebook is disinforming people and just getting rid of everyone isn't an option.
September updates: some about my days
Also when parents and grandparents join, kids start to leave.
yea when you've built a reputation to a certain point there is less motivation to innovate. any mistake you do have less consequences as well, so if you fail your clients will just shrug and go "well it's IBM.... if they can't do it then nobody can"
Devil's advocate- that is one interface the feds will be trying to exploit in order to extract evidence but this change makes it a little harder.
You forgot Twitter, which imo beats FB on toxicity at times.
Even if it can’t, it’s trivial to use it for an important subset, ie is Facebook.com down, is the ns stuff down etc. So there is an argument to be made for still using an outside service as a fallback
Can't recall when it was the last time I played game with no internationalization support
If they get fired we may be looking at a GoFundMe situation.
> That said, I can't see how FB managers and engineers would actually agree to carry out something like this intentionally.

They can either agree to comply with the orders from up above or they face consequences? How is that hard to comprehend?
Many pockets of humanity are materially worse off today because of these outages. The (perhaps sad) reality is that tens of thousands of small businesses are completely dependent on WhatsApp and Instagram, especially in developing countries. This outage will cause lots of lost business by people who don't have massive cash reserves to ride out the lost revenue, unlike Facebook itself.
I also didn't know about the whistleblower until seeing it as a top tweet, however...

The whistleblower is kinda silly

If FB could increase revenue by having a "safer" algorithm then of course they would. Every company is just trying to increase revenue..
There’s nothing simple about it. It would require pages of statute as well as regulatory guidance, and some of the most wealthy and capable forces in our modern world would be arrayed against it trying to avoid and evade the rules.

None of those things make the proposal impossible however.

It would be a dismal society indeed if we unilaterally surrendered to every instance of centralized malevolent power without a fight.
Networked (as they are now) but with a complete local cache seems pretty straightforward. If you've already got an embedded device doing network requests, it's not much of a stretch to stick in a 1GB SD card or whatever.
Counterpoint: I had not even heard about the whistle-blower until seeing stories about the outage. One of the largest web services in the world being out of commission for multiple hours is a big deal in 2021. It's a top story on most news sites and other social media (e.g. here at HN, reddit, twitter). If you want something to pass under the radar, it's probably best to not attract global attention.
how about instead of "no more app stores" you and others with your interest go make more app stores. more is better. if you have a good product you will gain the leverage you need.
I am 29, my only marketable skill is programming and I am
incredibly scared of my future. I just don‘t see myself as manager. I live in Europe and we don‘t make enough money here as devs to retire early.

What‘s your advice?
> so take this with some salt

haha I actually laughed out loud that a very good line.

(aluminum salts being in antiperspirant is the "biggest" source for odd levels people bring up)
If you're an ISP that is anything bigger than a mom-and-pop operation, you should have at least 3 or 4 geographically distributed anycast recursive resolvers.

Recursive DNS is pretty easy to do for really large volumes on a $600 1U server. It's not like the days of 15 years ago...
> So basically, everything I used to be able to get in a phone book.

Even if people didn't have unlisted numbers, phone books would allow listing only last name and first initial of one person in the household, without any location data beyond the phone book service area (you could provide more if you wanted to be found), and didn’t include gender.
> so take this with some salt

haha I actually laughed out loud that was a very good line.

(aluminum salts being in antiperspirant is the "biggest" source for odd levels people bring up)
I didn't have the time to watch the interview yet but... wasn't it common knowledge for years?

Is there anything else in the interview the whistleblower alleges, or can prove?
It's basically turned every device, especially mobile devices with the app running in the background, into botnet clients which are continually hitting their DNS servers

Anecdotally, it also seems to be draining the batteries of those devices with all of those extra queries. At least that seems to be what's happening on my wife's phone.
> The mass outage comes just hours after CBS’s 60 Minutes aired a much-anticipated interview with Frances Haugen, the Facebook whistleblower who recently leaked a number of internal Facebook investigations showing the company knew its products were causing mass harm, and that it prioritized profits over taking bolder steps to curtail abuse on its platform — including disinformation and hate speech.

I'm hoping that this is just a coincidence
This page provides a good description of how CMS determines which prescription drugs are covered under Medicare Part D.

https://medicareadvocacy.org/medicare-info/medicare-part-d/
... and the facebook SDK. Every single app that has facebook SDK is blowing up now.
I just maintain an anonymous one and never comment. Lets me follow whatever topics I care about and no worries about anything coming back to bite me. I make sure to try and include people I disagree with as well to a certain extent as its a good way to see other points of view and also to reinforce why I disagree with them in the first place. Lets me know I am not in an echo chamber and at least 51% of my opinions are probably my own... maybe.
Facebook's algorithm prioritizes divisive political content that is commonly disinformation(propaganda) because they figured out it increases engagement.
Scion: A Secure Internet Architecture
May I offer an alternative/supplemental approach: rather than thinking of the situation from the perspective of a human within a tribe, analyze the system from the perspective of an ~alien who is outside the system. Treat it like a standard systems analysis exercise: isolate, decompose, and abstract the various objects within the system. So what was formerly a person, is now an agent running a sophisticated yet obviously hilariously flawed biological neural network, running on top of a similarly flawed set of data...and so forth and so on.

I find that from this perspective, all the pieces start to fit together the more you think of it. Not only does what we are living through increasingly make sense, after a while it starts to seem logically inevitable (under present conditions, that is).

And once you spend sufficient time on this phase, ideas might start falling out of the sky on how to plausibly rectify the situation.
Most people outside of the US don't even know what "60 Minutes" is. Even fewer have heard about that report. And even fewer care. But everyone has now heard about the outage. This would be the worst possible way of trying to stop the spread of the story.

The more likely scenario is that this was the final straw for some disgruntled employee who decided to pull the plug on the entire thing.
Ddos is a strong way to put this. Are we talking malware that is sending thousands of requests per device, or a bug from a connectivity issue?
Yup, it's terrifying how much is ultimately, ultimately dependent on dongles and trust. I used to work at a company with a billion or so in a bank account (obviously a rather special type of account), which was ultimately authorised by three very trusted people who were given dongles.
If it helps them break free of the facebook ecosystem/tax authority it could still be good even if expensive in the short-term.
Seems that way to me too. In this case too it seems to be a hack around Windows 10 still bundles IE11 to this day and there are some situations where users (for whatever wild reason such as wilting old Group Policies that should have been updated half a decade ago) still have IE11 as a default browser, and yet Microsoft knows from a QA perspective these pages no longer work on IE11 at all.

On the one hand, at least this "hack" is implemented as its own protocol handler ("microsoft-edge:") which is how Brave and Firefox can "intercept it" (it's not like they are hacking some "interceptor", they are registering for the protocol just as any other protocol might see multiple registrants). On the other hand it is sad that this protocol was seen as necessary hack to Microsoft to get around Windows 10 backwards compatibility needs and the mistake of bundling IE11 with Windows 10 as a "fully supported browser for the life cycle of Windows 10" rather than an optional enterprise feature with an end date on the box.
Having worked for a similar company, I remember there were some good old IRC servers up and running to communicate in an emergency just like that.
Good article. I do this using 2 tools on top of Gsuite.

https://reclaim.ai/ - I found this on HN a couple of months back. It schedules tasks you add to your Google Tasks on your Google calendar, fully automatically.

https://tasksboard.com/ allows you to have multiple Google tasks lists displayed as a kanban board.

Drag your task into your reclaim.ai "todo" list and time gets blocked out in your calendar automatically. et viola!
That article is from 2012. Admittedly a lot of people moved off for the pricing reasons but essentially everyone I communicate with in the US uses SMS/iMessage today.
I tried going one size down in settings and while it does make the system UI better (more space for notifications etc) the majority of apps get unusable - everything is too small and hard to read, plus UI elements are closely packed to be clickable with fat fingers.

I'm hoping that some apps adjust and start responding to the lower scale in a way that still makes it usable but maybe that can't be done and I'm stuck with the ridiculous UI.
Does everyone just buy in that this is just a network change gone wrong? OR could they be mitigating a breach/hack? OR could it be some other theory?
Yep, I always make it a point to cache cache-misses in my code.
Who reads the article? If I google "Facebook" to see if there's an outage, I see the first headline that says it's an outage and leave. Maybe curious few percent will.
I'm sure there are measures in place to prevent it, but at the end of the day someone almost certainly could and would have to be able to.
Yes, going from WhatsApp to Telegram is a sidegrade at best. Probably a downgrade for most people, since Telegram is unencrypted by default.
Wait until HN readers find out what these faceless companies that appear around election time and mail me junk are able to gleam from public voting registration data.
And of course this is flagged.
I like to think that it went down, and they just decided, you know what? It's probably for the best.
I love a good tinfoil hat theory, but in this case I doubt it. I have FB blocked on my network via pihole, but I don't explicitly block Instagram. Until sometime late last week (I noticed on Saturday), blocking facebook.com also blocked Instagram. As of this weekend, Instagram works just fine even with those blocks in place.

I suspect Facebook was making some change to their DNS generally, and they made some kind of mistake in deployment that blew up this morning.
Yep, still down.
I never said I had a problem donating money to help; what I have a problem with is lack of access to, and lack of share-ability (not sure if that's a word, but I'm going with it anyway) of the source code.
Indeed! I don't know how to refer to this in a colloquial way because while having every single switch on a single screen isn't exactly a dark pattern, it does incite many people to just turn everything on because they "paid for it" and want "the best and greatest".
Good buying opportunity
By "Facebook disinforming" people do you mean people disinforming people using Facebook? Or has Facebook inc. itself been a source of misinformation?
Many people added you like that? Just asked a few people. No one gets many FB rando requests that aren’t super obviously fake. It isn’t that common.

I’ve had FB since 2007. Don’t recall there ever being a surge.
>Sure, a highly motivated user might go to alternative app stores.

Highly motivated users like kids who want to install Fortnite on their phones? That would give an "iOS Epic Store" a foot in the door, and while I'm not a huge fan of Epic, I think that would at least introduce some competition for Apple.
Is there no response code for a DNS to say "I don't have what you want right now, come back later but wait at least xxx seconds"?

I guess alternatively you could return garbage (127.0.0.1) with a 5 min ttl or so to get clients to backoff but also problematic.
If only they had a database that could, uh, "span" geographic distances.
> The outage has pretty much buried that story, and perhaps more importantly, stopped its spread on FB networks.

Buried the news ... which is basically as noteworthy the news that water is still wet. What exactly did she reveal that was not known before, or is it somehow newsworthy that Facebook also knew what everyone else knew? The real news ought to be how that managed to make it to the headlines.
I'm sure the disinformation and hate speech is about steel dossier and all the mean things said about Trump supporters. Or do you mean they prioritized profits over censorship?
You can also just log out instead of opening a private window. Users that aren't logged in are served cached pages.
After changing the screen resolution all operating systems will prompt the user if the applied settings where correct, otherwise it will time out and reset to last known good setting.
Maybe time for the core internet infrastructure to implement something similar? :)
And even Hacker news is strangely slow to respond.
That's what I meant by 'ads on its own site' - but I was under the impression that Facebook generated most revenue from selling data/ads for display elsewhere (as well as on Facebook.com itself, and other subsidiaries). Perhaps I was wrong about that? Quick search shows up 'audience network', but I'm not sure to what extent that's what I was thinking of.
And the glyph rendering is offloaded to the gpu, which as any good development team should know, is much faster.
it's more about how they recharge rather than how they act. you can be introverted as well as outgoing and assertive, and vice versa.
Internet of Things finally being useful
I'd thank anybody who would post a tutorial/configfile to setup a DNS server (dnsmasq?), forcefully caching even failed requests to a configurable timeout, and large cache sizes. We might need them in case DNS servers going down under the load of requests from "smart devices" :)
I don't really get the Facebook hate, how are people ending up with such "terrible" stuff on their news feed?

I haven't really changed my default settings and all I see are posts from my friends, the same ads over and over again, and posts from my groups (recipes, potlucks, language practice meetups, going to museums, rooms for rent, questions from expats).

There's absolutely nothing that could "radicalize" me. If you add garbage to your RSS feed reader I wouldn't blame the software, I would blame the person.
„commit on the first day”
PagerDuty does not solve some of the problems you would have at FB's scale, like how do you even know who to contact ? And how do they login once they know there is a problem ?
This isn't remotely true. Nearly all the advertised Android 12 features are in AOSP, not Play Services. People vastly overestimate how much stuff is in Play Services.
>if you can find the person that _isn't_ naturally good at the skill but was somehow able to get decent at it, even if they're not the best at it, they're more likely to have beneficial advice.

This reminded me of the advice to learn how to run a marathon, don't look at what most people in the race were doing to train, look at the person who's doing well despite looking like they shouldn't be there.

I.e., don't look at the 140 lbs guys at the front of the pack for advice, look to the 280 lb guy in the middle of the pack.

Not sure how sage that advice is, but it was an interestingly different way to frame the problem.
Maybe "intentional" in quotes. My money is on a major security breach and they've shut everything down until they can deal with it. Even if you go to Instagram by the IP address [1], you get a 400 error. So it looks like things are off line because they want them off line for now.

https://31.13.65.174/
The one with Mark and wire cutters was pretty amusing.
I haven't worked for a FAANG but it would be unthinkable that FB does not have backup measures in place for communications entirely outside of Facebook.

Hmm well I mean for key people, ops and so on.
Not for every employee.

Only a few people need that type of access, and they should have it ready. They need to bring more people there should be an easy way to do it.

Maybe the internal FB Messenger app has a slide button to switch to the backup network for those in need.
Do you have more info on #2?
In fairness the tweet doesn’t say all employees but the title here is ambiguous.
Care to elaborate? Are you also against the notion of paying to enter a concert or sporting event? If no, could you expand on what you believe the difference between these two things to be?
Top Anti-Google Investigator Quits European Commission
I prefer John Carpenter’s “Hoax Watch”, tho :)
Plain and simple: populism.

It's the political equivalent of "No one ever got fired for buying IBM". It's the safest opinion you can have, so everyone will spout out without reserve because no one will challenge you on it, and if they do they're clearly just a Zuck bootlicker.
Some can bootstrap yes, but it's still a giant mess and takes time to build back up. Jumpstarting it off hydro or neighbours is preferred
A misconfiguration of BGP would absolutely do it.
I'm always try to side with Occam, but let me speculate here: This may be a sign of resistance from within? A hacker group so good, they were hired by FB only to carry out a huge, clandestine hack that results in FB being down for hours, if not days?
I have spent a bit of time googling, but really can't find a whole lot. I am feeling around in the dark, and have no experience with CV (but would like to learn). Do you happen to have any resources relating to the roulette idea?
Perhaps we'll find out. As fun as internal sabotage would be, schadenfreude-wise, i think it much more likely this will turn out to be a time when Hanlon's Razor applies
Negative responses are cachable with the appropriate time to live from the Start of Authority record for the zone.
Well, the world is a bit bigger than the US. Everywhere, apart from the US and a few other (East Asian?) countries, WhatsApp usage is widespread.
See that's the thing, I think we've painted journalism as existing on some imaginary spectrum of "just the facts ma'am" which is good, and "editorializing with an agenda" which is bad.

But by far my favorite pieces of journalism are dripping with opinion and character and full of bias. The X factor that makes the result, to me way less biased than most journalism, is that they are introspective of their own biases, display empathy toward everyone involved, argue in good faith for everyone involved, and draws their own conclusion from the results of their imaginary argument with their crew of alter-egos.

It takes something special (and a lot of practice) to argue for someone you disagree with in such a way that that someone would say you did a good job.
I find myself a little bit happy that it's down. I use Facebook quite often, but mostly because everyone else I know uses it. If everyone is forced to find an alternative, that'd be fine by me.
What is POTS?
You don't have to die of cancer. If you got it, and you're sure it's terminal, there's really not much need to wait, there are ways.

I'm still an alcoholic. I may drink less than before, but it's the only drug that affects GABA receptors that I can reliably get. If doctors won't help me, well, it's the only thing that keeps me sane lol.

I used to be careful with drugs, now I try everything I can get my hands on and note the results. It became sort of a hobby of mine.

Still remember the time I was fading in and out of consciousness from phenylethylamine and alcohol (wack interaction, do not recommend), the absolute despair that 7+ grams of pure GABA puts me into, and the time I passed out and pissed myself on too much Imipramine+L-DOPA+Valerian extract.

Ah, if only I could get the good stuff that works for my actual problems, but apparently prescriptions are not for subhuman citizens like me.

If I die, I die. If I become disabled/impaired, I die. Harder than it sounds, but I'm gonna test the limits.