skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I can see what you (or the parent) was getting at and somewhat agree that it's not a "full" truth, and there is some nuance at play.

The nuance is important, consider the statements:

1. DSA Direct sells data it has collected on you to Facebook.

2. Facebook sells data it has collected on you to advertisers.

These two statements appear to be the same but they are describing different things. The first statement describes the sale of data in a sense that a non-technical person would understand: Facebook gives DSA Direct money, and DSA Direct gives them data on individuals.

The second statement is deliberately crafted to look like the first (so as the ignite the same emotions) but describes something completely different. DSA Direct cannot buy data from Facebook. I cannot buy data from Facebook. People will go to great lengths (eg. "If I target a single person with ads, I can probe their information gradually") to equate the two, but they are not the same.
Exactly, perfect summary. Expanding on the first point, a debugger is invaluable for me if I can run my program up to a point and then use the "immediate" window to run a few API calls to see what would happen in that context.
Every single one of us has caused some harm to the community at some point in our lives. That doesn't mean it should be a criminal offense.
Well, IBM among others, provided the initial money to make Linux relevant anyway.

> Commercial use began when Dell and IBM, followed by Hewlett-Packard, started offering Linux support to escape Microsoft's monopoly in the desktop operating system market

-- Wikipedia
True and fb will have a wider social graph context.

Though it seems useful (for threat monitoring) to also have trimmed self-selections with only people who want to communicate privately and "speak freely".
I always thought my grandpa was making these numbers up but apparently it's true...
This is correct. Minting a platinum coin with any and unlimited value is already set in law just after the Great Depression, so the executive branch can do it alone. Anything else, including creating a new denomination in notepaper or other metals (or its alloys), needs the involvement of the legislature (power of the purse, power to... legislate), which right now... is in a deadlock.

I won't be shocked if this coin has been stamped there would be a court challenge, especially in terms of the said law's constitutionality.

(Edited because despite having "Depression" in my mind I still typed "Recession". The law was from the last century, not this century.)
If I understand it correctly they have DNS servers spread out at different locations. These locations are also BGP peering locations. If the DNS server at a location cannot reach the other datacenters via the backbone it stops advertising their IP prefixes. The hope is that traffic will then instead get routed to some other facebook location that is still operational.
Hard to find a real BGP router with full/partial INET table to peer with you.
Simple Testing Can Prevent Most Critical Failures[1], "We found the majority of catastrophic failures could
easily have been prevented by performing simple testing
on error handling code – the last line of defense – even
without an understanding of the software design."

1 https://www.eecg.utoronto.ca/~yuan/papers/failure_analysis_o...
> trigger the Firefox-internal memory-pressure warning allowing subsystems in the browser to reduce their memory use.

If the sub systems can reduce their meneory use why not do that by default?
Please stop down-voting thoughtful comments such as this just because you disagree with them.
Observing the achievements of this group of young talented devs only increases my imposter syndrome.

Awesome job, love the enthusiasm.
>While cigarettes are no longer a threat to societal health.

Cigarettes are the leading cause of preventable death in the USA (even moreso in countries where smoking is far more accepted widespread) so I don't believe this to be even remotely true.
Facebook Whistleblower Complaint [pdf]
Oh, then you missed the time they staged an entire press event to announce...an iPod dock!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod_Hi-Fi

Hell, I own an Apple battery charger for AA batteries. Actually at the time it came out it was reasonably priced, plus it uses the same AC power connectors as apple computer chargers so was actually handy when traveling. But nevertheless, absurd.
Whats up with those parentheses for context managers?

Python? Parentheses? I'm baffeled.
> I'm not sure what they should be replaced with

Try Edge, the collection feature is a game changer.
As I understand it the issue is with their recommender system and ad driven business model, not the alt right figures who want to cry about free speech and cancel culture because they can't be racist online while at the same time trying to whipe anything vaguely related to "critical race theory" from existence.

The allegations are that Facebook knows that there are people addicted to their products and who have mental issues due to what the platform decides to show them but they refuse to do anything about it because it's good for their real customers.

I wrote more about this here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28763413
I wonder how many of us would fare if subject to the same kind of scrutiny Jobs is.

As for the Wozniak thing, Wozniak forgave him. As he was the one wronged, we should let it go, too. Heck, if I didn't forgive my friends now and then, I wouldn't have any.
I haven't been on a social network since Google- jumped the shark in 2015, and I don't miss it. I'm certainly not going to be associated with a platform whose name rhymes with a childhood euphemism for piss (weewee).
Only drives his point further.
If the documentation site is worth its salt it will allow you to download a local html copy or even pdf. I personally haven't seen a documentation site that doesn't let you do this, since its important to store your documentation locally in the event the website goes down (happened to me so its not out of the question).
Two is One, One is None. There are absolutely ways around this, it's called redundancy. The marginal cost of laying an extra pair during physical plant installation is basically $0, which is why you'd never go "well we need a backup for the backup, so there's no point in having two pairs). Similarly, the marginal cost for having a second UPS and PDU in a rack is effectively $0 at scale, so nobody would argue this is unnecessary to deal with possible UPS failure or accidentally unplugging a cable.

In this case, there are likely several things that can be changes systemically to mitigate or prevent similar failures in the future, and I have every faith that Facebook's SRE team is capable of identifying and implementing those changes. There is no such thing as "no way around it", unless you're dealing with a law of physics.
If you don't like Oxycontin, just don't use Oxycontin, Dilaudid, or Fentanyl. Don't know why so many people here think adults are not capable of regulating themselves.
Why return to the office if you’re just Zooming all day anyway?
which would be wild if at the end of the day politicians didn’t still have the last say
They have no choice. They MUST enforce their IP. That's how IP law works. If you don't contest it - you lose ownership of it.
> I'd be curious to see what systemic changes happen at FB as a result, if any.

If history is any guide, Facebook will decide some division charged with preventing problems was an ineffective waste of money, shut it down, and fire a bunch of people.
Yeah, too bad they don't develop new ideas like the watch or AirPods or design their own CPUs from scratch.
Facebook and other internet media have special Section 230 exemptions from libel and other things that print media and media using public airwaves do not.

How about we just remove that so they are all equal? Not special or "more laws," just equal.
Probably because they don't deem it safe enough yet. Tesla on the other hand is happy to sell tech that hasn't matured yet.
Well in the context of this post they're lionizing the individual as a stellar human, so I think it's fair to question you agree with this, or if it's even accurate.
That article should be required reading for all of us.
> so.....they had to use a jackhammer, got it
I know that somebody is raping someone in NYC right now and somebody will be killed in Chicago by the end of the day today. Should we ban the cities or at least force them to spend all their budget on security? Or set up curfew for citizens? May be public hanging a la Taliban - those definitely reduce crime.

Humans are using FB and where you have humans they commit crimes. Trying to eradicate all crime when you have humans in the loop is generally not great idea. Besides fighting trafficking/sex slavery with very few exceptions generally means harassing women with zero benefit to society or reduction in actual sex crimes.
You are correct that Steve, like most high profile CEOs, would have been vulnerable to the cancel police. I think this is one reason that many high net worth Bitcoiners choose to stay under-the-radar: not being vulnerable to the whims of the social media masses seems like the ultimate luxury. Bill Murray, the actor, had a prescient quote about this in an interview that occurred before metoo and the rest of the culture wars heated up:

”I always want to say to people who want to be rich and famous: 'Try being rich first.' See if that doesn't cover most of it. There's not much downside to being rich, other than paying taxes and having your relatives ask you for money. But when you become famous, you end up with a 24-hour job."

I think people today want more money and less fame, having watched many of the people they looked up to be publicly destroyed by the masses. Everyone makes mistakes, but famous people pay outsized prices for them.
My goal is to understand the fundamentals of curiosity so it can be implemented in some algorithm (e.g. for Artificial General Intelligence research), probably using genetic and evolutionary algorithms. What do you consider as the most basic trait of curiosity in simple forms of live or animals? Do you you think invertebrates have curiosity? Do you think bacterias have curiosity? Probably it depends on the definition of curiosity..
By analogy, there is "Microbial intelligence" (there's even an entry on Wikipedia about this).
In machine learning programs, "curiosity" could be the initial random states that search for solution. And this initial "curiosity" (search for different possibilities and solutions) decreases as the solution is found.
Original code would be correct, if not for a few spaces - probably a typo.
I double checked. The co2 effect seems to be around 1.3 compared to the effect on the ground, but there are other factors that increase the greenhouse effect beyond that. There seems to be a fair bit of uncertainty on the numbers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_effects_of_aviat...

The 10% combined efficiency of the three energy conversions matter because energy itself isn't 100% green. With the current energy mix, there are more emissions from synthetic fuels than fossil ones.
Who is Mr. Robot, Elliot?
BehaviorTree.CPP: C++ behavior tree library, batteries included
Welcome to Debt Ceiling Shenanigans....

Waiting for Fast and the Furious 14 where the crew have to steal this coin.....
And now I feel embarrassed for not knowing about this...Thanks for the link!
You seem to be misunderstanding what I was saying (or I wasn't clear). I am not at all saying we shouldn't have laws - we absolutely should have laws and rules. I am not saying that we should sue companies based on unstated ethics or morals (how would that even work anyway?). All I am saying is we should, as a society, have a better attitude and higher standards than stuff like greed is good, the sole purpose of a business is make profit, even at the expense of everything else etc etc.

I fully understand this sounds idealistic and maybe it is dumb to expect people to do better, when much of humanity is trying to do the minimum and get the maximum in return.
Well he hasn't disputed the claim under oath :)
I just read that as "fiat currency has failed."
Why stop there?

Let's make it a $10 trillion coin!
That was my assumption too - though if it was my project I'd probably have shied away from it since it also suggests "toxic"... (that could be a plus, too, depending on your tastes, I suppose).
Even if it's technically possible to work around it, it would be a ridiculous amount of effort for not particularly good reasons.
Are there transcripts?
Uh... the cloud?
Are people who had COVID actually more likely to have had significant periods of physical isolation in 2020 than people who didn't have COVID? I'd expect the opposite, if anything. Amin-Chowdhury et al asked about "loneliness" and found a slightly lower rate in people who had had COVID than in the control group, though the difference wasn't statistically significant.

There is some weak evidence of a higher rate of anxiety among people who've had COVID, including [0] as well as another nonzero but statistically insignificant difference from Amin-Chowdhury et al. But the difference in anxiety prevalence would only be a few percentage points (point estimates of 4.3% and 4.2% respectively), nowhere enough for that to be an underlying causal explanation for long-term symptoms that occur >20% of the time.

In any case, unless you're claiming that social isolation causes a loss of taste and smell that persists for 8+ months, it's pretty clear that some symptoms of COVID persist for a long time in a significant minority of the population. I think you'd really have to jump through hoops to argue that (1) some symptoms caused directly by COVID persist for a long time, (2) other symptoms caused directly by COVID reliably go away after a few weeks, but (3) people who have had COVID re-develop those same symptoms at a higher rate than the general population, months later, for reasons not caused directly by COVID.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8282115/
It does matter, because FB (social media such as Reddit and Twitter as well) create echochambers which amplify crackpot stuff and encourages people to act out in destructive ways (see basically all of the RL anti-mask agitation) in a way that was not happening before social media.

Social media creates literal mobs, with literal (tiki) torches if not pitchforks.

Yes, the difference between two cranks bitching over coffee alone versus the amplification which happens over social media IS FUCKING HUGE! (sorry for caps, but seriously -I've lived through both and the difference is fucking huge)
continue working form all other data centers, possibly without users really noticing.
Sex slavery is being facilitated by telephone conversations. What is the phone company's obligation to do about that?
Don't, I only learned about it recently, and the standard itself is quite young!
But if I don’t log everything, why did I build a massive ELK stack for my big data logs
or not

https://twitter.com/MikeIsaac/status/1445196576956162050

https://twitter.com/cullend/status/1445212476652535815
Congress has delegated lots of its powers to the executive's bureaucratic apparatus, so I'm not sure why this would be any different.
Apple Maps directions now mispronounces the word "South" (who knew it had three syllables?). This word is so common in street names I'm shocked it made it out of testing.
I'm so mad at all the phone keyboards for not having some kind of priority for predictive. And ability to remove words.

There's some typos I get consistently and the correction is from a very normal word (probably, for instance) to a really seldom used word (poetically, in this example) and I'd prefer to remove poetically from my dictionary than to keep having it pop up.

Repeat this for a couple dozen very common words that consistently give me problems.
I don't know if I've experienced a crash in Firefox in years. I would really suggest taking a look at the crash logs and maybe do a checkup on your machine's health.
Don't forget "tech companies" that are basically just thinly veiled excuses to engage in regulatory arbitrage and skirt employment laws.
Except, I quoted exactly where they were.
Put so honestly in that way it reads like something out of Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. The utter absurdity of it all.
Personally, in the rare cases I really do not understand the behavior, I tend to just stare at the code. (It's not a recipe or so, it's just what I tend to do.) Having subtile or no syntax coloring helps.
bullwhip effect, this stuff has been known for decades. Our entire global economy depends on ideal conditions to function properly

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullwhip_effect
And how do they make money on ads?
This "contributions" you're talking about someone elsewhere would have done it, and we can just imagine how better the world would be if those contributions would be for the benefit of the world and not for a company.
Steve quotes in the video "I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been" which is of course a Wayne Gretsky quote, and I think it captures this sentiment very well. Moving from leader to follower is such a classic move for an incumbent like Apple, and with Steve they never seemed to lose that insurgent mindset, even when they were absolutely enormous. They've steadily stagnated and truly lost that founder's mentality, and it sucks. I miss Steve Jobs a lot, and think about him often.
Totally agree. I think the intent was to let people focus on the types of comment they want, but it just ended up gamifying moderation.

Which reminds me of another HN feature that I think is material to its ability to sustain its culture:

- Private vote counts
Can we please update the title to clarify it's Steve Jobs. I know that's the original title on the site but it's a bit confusing when it comes to Steves and Apple. My heart dropped when I read it and thought it was Steve Wozniak.
Interesting thought on the two sides being a negative effect on more climate focused groups. Takes the air out of the room in a way.
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_freedom.
It's their own judgement. They say they wish they were where I'm at.

But sure, we can say they achieved just as much (and possibly more) because they achieved contentedness or happiness or whatever, which is great for them, and they are just confused?
I wouldn't mind having Ping back. Yesterday's events demonstrate the world still has room for more social networks, even if only for a few hours.
Good Q! It is something we are looking at/trying. It's a bit more complex as you have to have a pool of suspended renderers to swap the html into as the user switches tabs (the HTML still needs to be properly sandboxed). Then you include static asset loads, etc it becomes less 'instant'.
BGP is spoken between networks. There are a lesser known "IGP" protocols stitching together the insides of those networks. IS-IS and OSPF being the most notable. Though the nature of the beast is that when you screw up BGP everyone sees it, and when you screw up your IGP it could just look like servers or load balancers having a bad day. Though if a telco messes them up everyone notices.
Do the Linux kernel devs use Zoom? Do they work together in one building? How about any of the BSDs? Do they use Zoom or work together in one building — aside from hackathons?

No, but the rest of us are supposed to put up with this bullshit? Bosses and CEOs will literally force workers to Zoom from the office instead of going to therapy.
I am baffled by this display of lack of ethics. Do we need a Walmart comparison to put Facebook’s action in perspective? Facebook - by its own acknowledgement - negatively affects teenage mental health and the democratic processes in many countries. Do you see how different this is from selling more mayonnaise jars in Walmart?

Facebook doesn’t have a duty to manipulate content. This is a very weak excuse that works mostly for people directly benefiting from the situation. Didn’t cigarette companies have a duty to maximize profits? Pharma companies pushing accessible opioids? Is that a more apt analogy?
Can anyone provide links to the actual documents?
Thank you for this. The Love of Complexity is Real in this field. While I encourage and support the goals of anonymity and security everywhere, everything has its design envelope.

This is an e-zine of public content. Sure, "SoMeOnE cOuLd InTeRcEpT", but why bother? Even with encrypted sockets, logs would still show your IP going to the site. What information are we trying to protect or malicious activity are we trying to stop by using SSL?

... And is it worth the unfortunate webmasters having to deal with bullshit like LetsEncrypt's root certificate expiration and all the main of keystores and PKI management so random "Very Serious People on the Internet" can say "ah, they follow The Standard on security."

Controversial statement in 2021, I'm sure, but I think a use case for simple HTML over HTTP websites still exists. Your personal page with pictures of cats and your resume probably doesn't need to be some bastion of cybersecurity.
I think that they should name it Beautiful Sort
> Big tobacco has caused millions of deaths

And if some of the allegations and concerns are correct, the current trajectory companies like Facebook are taking us on are poised to cause far worse. We've already seen Facebook used to facilitate genocide, and there are very concerning trends that indicate it's impacting how entire societies engage each other. It's forcing increased polarization in politics and resulting in extremist candidates.

That good also exists is certainly important. But gauging the harm is not exactly straight forward, and we're only just beginning to understand the 2nd and 3rd order effects.

> I'm yet to see any evidence that FB has caused harm.

But that is quite literally the focus of the leaked research. There is growing evidence that the algorithmic prioritization of hateful/polarizing material is directly eroding the public's trust in civic institutions, and has facilitated the kind of mob mentality that led to the events of Jan 6 (for example).

Again, the issue is not social media. The issue is the application of ranking algorithms that manipulate and amplify certain kinds of dialog on a global scale.

Switching analogies, video games aren't inherently a bad thing. Microtransactions in video games aren't inherently a bad thing. Specific kinds of gamified microtransactions turn out to be strikingly similar to gambling, and are arguably extremely problematic.

I’d argue this is similar to what's happening here. Social media isn't inherently bad, and in some cases is actually quite good. But if participating in social media automatically means that all of my worst tendencies are validated and amplified by the platform, the platform is no longer a neutral factor and instead has become actively harmful.
whataboutism...

those deserve their own attention on their own merits.

But not directly relevant to this discussion, particularly if it defers or interferes with the FB discussion specifically.
It's not even half as bizarre as someone buying a GIF of some cartoon cats as a sort of cryptocurrency token.
You're talking about the idea of some one who hurts and abuses other people no longer being allowed to be a part of polite society, and the people that want that to be the case, like its a bad thing.

It is just mind boggling. Do you read your own comments?
Sure. Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt and any other celebrity do not employ the same nefariously data driven agenda on a scale that begins to come anywhere close to that of Facebook; They are not comparable in this context. Scale is a highly differentiating factor. A more genuine comparison would be to the likes of Robert Mercer, Roger Ailes, etc.