skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Unless it's made with a user in mind, like Librem 5 or Pinephone.
Terrible day for many people. Both working for Facebook and those depending on their services.
I’ve heard a number of theories, here are a few:

Alcohol thins the blood, much like aspirin, which at small doses decreases all cause mortality.

Some types of alcohol, especially wine, are rich with antioxidants and flavonoids.

Alcohol may decrease stress and anxiety.

Alcohol is often consumed with friends and family, and we know socialization is correlated with better health.
Do you even know who these business owners are and what kind of life do they live? These are the guys that don't have a solid roof over their head, struggle to meet their daily needs and might have to sleep hungry if their day's sales weren't good. Diversifying is the least of the things they have to worry about. Whatsapp allowed them to reduce friction when it comes to communicating with customers, it helps their sales.

What might be a good thing for society in the first world doesn't mean it's necessarily good thing for society in the third world.
This appears to be the case.

Unlike one of the other comments, hn is slow relatively rarely (perhaps a few times a year).
"It's always DNS."
Revealed: The secret notes of Blue Origin leaders trying to catch SpaceX
> There is a significant difference between tracking by default and tracking only when issued a court order.

Is there? Either your data is on their server or it isn't. As if they can't give data created before a court order to a government after a court order...
I think this depends on what you define as "abuse". Many suspects are railroaded into plea-bargains to avoid bankruptcy or the risk of more severe charges regardless of actual guilt[1]. There are also abuses like civil asset forfeiture or false DMCA takedowns that rarely see any punishment.

I think it's possible to get justice in the US court system if you have money. This isn't really "rule of law" as one might commonly think of it though.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/innocen...
53k HQ USA Combolist Private
Google, DeepMind face lawsuit over data deal with Britain’s NHS
Right? Especially on global scale. Something doesn't add up!
Most of the stuff was probably implemented before COVID anyways.

They will fix the issue and add more redundant communication channels, which is either an improvement or a non-event for WFH.

And Zuck is slowly moving (dogfooding) company culture to remote too with their Quest work app experiments
Some people say ODD doesn't exist and that it's just "PDA" profile of ASD.

I mean technically anything can exist if it has a label in the DSM, but you know what I mean.
IIRC, e2e by default for audio/video; for text chats, can be enabled by marking chat as 'secret'. Is it true E2E? Probably not (i.e. Telegram has keys that can be turned over to any government, noone argues with that)

Does WhatsApp have a true E2E either? Ask hundreds of moderators employed by Facebook who review WhatsApp messages flagged as improper and the chat history around them...

However, accepting the fact that neither of the services is truly secure, Telegram experience as a service is much better for an average user.
Great shed! I have question. What about noise inside from AC and inverter? Could you measure it?
I stopped reading after the fifth one sentence paragraph or so. Author needs to stop reading successful bloggers telling them how to write for the internet. It just seemed to me like the article style was a symptom of the problem it was supposedly about.

That kind of writing

is so bloody annoying

please read some books

and then write more.
> An alternate explanation is that the algorithm tries to promote engagement and user retention. Presumably, people susceptible to radicalization engage with the content discussed in the article. It would be unreasonable to expect Facebook to not act in its own self-interest.

That's the whole point. Oh they're just trying to make a buck like everyone else is exactly the problem.

They are a running a paperclip maximizer that turns passive consumers of misinformation into "engaged" radicals and the system that is Facebook has no incentive to correct this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence
> General tip: If HN is being laggy and you're determined you want to waste some time here, open it in a private window. HN works extremely quickly if it doesn't know who you are.

Saw this from a user by the name of bentcorner in the "Facebook-owned sites are down" thread[0]. Figured I'd repost it here. It works because HN can cache pages more efficiently when it doesn't have to include user data.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28750513
This is a bit of a non sequitur. The benefits of drinking are obvious! And, yes, religions and political parties have opposed alcohol...because the harmful effects are equally obvious. The causal arrow runs that direction. There was indeed a prohibition on drinking a century ago, spearheaded mostly by women who were tired of their husbands beating them when drunk.

Prohibition is widely regarded today as an obviously ridiculous blunder, but that's mostly revisionist and ahistorical.

German Lopez at Vox did a couple good pieces on what people get wrong about it:

* https://www.vox.com/2015/10/19/9566935/prohibition-myths-mis...

* https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/6/5/18518005/prohibit...

There's also a bit of an asymmetry that makes weighing the pros and cons difficult. If 40 people enjoy a night at the bar, but one one of them goes home and beats their wife and another kills a family in a drunk-driving accident on the way home, do we just say, "well, 38 of the 40 peacefully enjoyed their evening, so it's mostly good." That looks like a horrific outcome, to me.
LOL - score one against building out all tooling internally (a la Amazon and apparently Facebook too)
time to start working at your mfing desk again, johnson
Virtual care with remote monitoring catches drug errors and reduces patient pain
Seriously? Is that how it works?
DNA virus creates computer virus
One real potential cost to FB here is breaking people's addictions to FB and IG. This might just be the little finger-snap to wake up a sizable chunk of the user base that they life is just a little better during the outage.
> I hope they don't lose their job.

I do! Oh well!
If you're not logged in it's likely static served from cache.
For every new release of android there is only one thing I care about, how will this affect termux?

So I did a google and looks promising ( https://www.reddit.com/r/termux/comments/nyayhq/comment/h1j9... ).
Rare Arabian leopard cub is born, raising hopes for the species’ survival
Stanford exoskeleton research demonstrates the importance of training
Unlikely, PagerDuty was invented for this kind of thing
> Facebook-owned sites are down

And the world rejoiced.
In the case of HN it's probably just heavier load than normal. It's much faster if you're logged out.
Happening Now: Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp Down
Thought experiment: what if they were down for a week and the world completely healed itself?
Have you tried to load it on a computer that is 30 years old or younger?
Most Facebook users don't know what HN is, but most HN users have Facebook accounts and will migrate here for the dopamine-inducing refresh clicks (don't let them try to claim otherwise ;) ).

If most Facebook users knew what HN was and congregated here when FB was down, the site would be utterly crushed.
That's what happens when you run your entire site off a VM running as a WhatsApp chat bot.
It's facebook outage rubber necking. Everyone who has been involved with keeping services online is like "oh heads are going to fucking roll today, let's go see what folks are saying happened". haha
I know. I simply wanted to highlight the likely cause for parent's message downvotes, as none of the downvoters did it and things went quite sour in the sibling thread.
Anonymous releases data on Texas GOP in latest Epik hack dump
> Don't know what the f is going on with "Modern" UIs.

I see this as a confluence of a few different things:

1. Monitors are getting higher and higher resolutions; a 4K display that's less than 27" is going to feel awfully tiny unless you start scaling things up.

2. Things have gotten more complicated over time, and the more complicated they get the more chances that something will mess up. At some point my gaming PC decided that it was going to take 30-90 seconds for the right-click context menu in Explorer to come up, and while it was waiting it would lock up Explorer. Simplification can be a good thing.

3. People designing software are getting older and have worse eyes, so larger, clearer, less noisy UIs are a godsend.

Probably some other stuff.
What is Facebook?
> The first 64-bit ARM SOC was argued not to be revolutionary because it offered only evolutionary levels of performance comparable to previous Apple CPUs.

It sounds like you are conflating AArch64 with Apple. Apple had nothing to do with AArch64, it was developed by ARM in-house; Apple simply released the first AArch64-compatible core (outside of ARM's Cortex series).
There's no option to "Log off" the internet, like we had in the 90s. Now even my fridge is always connected.
Some of those can probably be explained by facebooks traffic being redistributed to other services, overloading them
shoestring budget on a billion dollar product. you get what you deserve.
This is expected. I guess, the internal DNS is down, so the whole infrastructure is broken
ok mom i commented
Yes, that's normal. If you're not logged in, HN serves you a cached version that is a couple dozen seconds old. That's super fast. If you're logged in, HN has to generate the page based on the previous actions and properties of your account (e.g. upvotes, favourites, etc.) with every HTTP request.
I agree with everything you said. Unfortunately the folks here are stuck in a much older time and you would not be able to change their minds. There are enough churches and temples in the town near me to hold the entire town's population at once. Most places are closed on Sunday. The younger generations will eventually change things as more folks come out, but it will be a very slow change.
19 hours ago??
We're having some trouble serving your request. Sorry!
very likely - I'm noticing that too
Data, including PII of over 1.5B Facebook users is being sold
They supposedly can't enter facebook office right now. Their cards don't work.
I don't know. I doubt. It's just funny to think that you need email to fix BGP, but DNS is down because of BGP. You need DNS to send email which needs BGP. It's a kind of chicken and egg problem but at a massive scale this time.
make that two! ha
There is no need to make the case explicitly, just assume it as a given. Look at the article of this thread; it assumes nuclear power is bad merely by inference, never by explicitly arguing it.
It's very first world centric point of view. I doubt some of these commentator claiming whatsapp being down is good for the society have ever been outside of the first world and have seen how it actually helps people in need.
Thank you, I agree with everything you said here. But I'd also like to address the other things I was answering with the drawbacks quip...

> WhatsApp is basically a utility-level communication system for a big chunk of the globe.

Unfortunately, it's not an actual utility though, which is precisely my point. It's pure folly to build your business around a pseudo utility owned by a private company.

> Instagram is a key cultural driver of the Western world.

I honestly have no idea how this is being presented as a good thing. A "key cultural driver of the western world" is an app whose entire purpose is to harvest your data and sell it to dodgy partners who will use it to usurp democracy.
Facebook employees badges aren't working, unable to enter buildings
Is there any decent Android (non Chinese) device that is free of Google privacy invading software ?
Love this metaphor and progression, but I thought Principal was ahead of Staff in the Ladder?
> That being said, I've seen theories that certain non-FB sites are slow just because DNS lookups are so backed up.

I have been getting a Hacker News error message more often then usual today. So I don't think it is just DNS.
> They continue to think Netflix as a physical product ( As they often like to compare Physical Software distribution before App Store )

Framing the relationship this way gives Apple more power and control, so that's what they're doing, no surprise. They're too smart to be merely misunderstanding such things.
Right? Their response comes off a bit arrogant.
> Algorithm "skills" are probably overrated in the sense that people can memorize textbook algorithms and their analyses all they want ...

Memorizing algorithms has very little to do with algorithm skills. You can memorize any algorithm textbook you like, then go take part in an algorithm competition and see how far that will get you (spoiler alert: not far). If you are good at algorithms, you have the ability to construct efficient solutions to problems you have never seen before. And by "construct" I don't mean pattern-matching to previously-memorized algorithms, I mean writing something that didn't exist before you wrote it.

> People are getting technical interviews wrong if (as interviewers) they ask standardized algorithm questions ... But as the interviewer, ideally they'd want to be able to find the candidate who can discover a good solution for a novel problem they never saw or thought about before.

I agree with you 100% here. Good algorithm questions are questions that can't be solved by memorized answers.

> I'd further claim that while some of these skills can be learned and improved through training, there's a different "ceiling" for everyone since a lot of the intuition and imaginative aspects of problem solving can't really be taught or acquired [...] The model in the original article assumes that these kind of skills come with experience, but in my experience that's mostly not true if you're dealing with "hard-ish" problems like how to vastly optimize text layout in terminals.

Again I agree with you 100%. This also why I went in a different direction with my comment compared to the expectations set in the article. As you noted, the writer of the article expected everyone to learn these skills. In contrast, I said that it's ok for different people to have different skillsets.

> In practice things are much more nuanced than what you learn in school and textbooks. Sometimes [...]

This argument is presented way more often than it actually holds water. Yes, sometimes things are nuanced and complicated and whatnot, but we don't have to look at hypotheticals, we can just look at this actual case that we have right here. In this case things weren't nuanced and complicated and whatnot justifying a 40x performance drop when rendering colored text. In this case things really were simple: turns out this was just a horribly inefficient solution (like Many products written by Microsoft are). Furthermore, turns out Microsoft devs truely were incapable of recognizing that a few simple optimizations would deliver orders of magnitude better performance without breaking anything, and without introducing unnecessary complexity. We know this, because Microsoft devs called the prospect of optimizing this performance a "doctoral research project", and then some guy did it in his free time over a few weekends.
> for text chats, can be enabled by marking chat as 'secret'. Is it true E2E? Probably not (i.e. Telegram has keys that can be turned over to any government, noone argues with that)

That was my problem, and your confirmation means it's still as good as nothing.

> Does WhatsApp have a true E2E either? Ask hundreds of moderators employed by Facebook who review WhatsApp messages flagged as improper and the chat history around them...

If one of the ends decides to share a message, it's still E2E. That is the big difference.
> Otherwise this comes off as a thinly veiled "Wintel ew, Apple good!" regurgitated bit of fanboy wank.

No, the M1 Air is just a substantially better product than the Intel variants. You can find dozens of HN threads where people explain exactly why.
I was referring to the WFH aspect the parent post mentioned. My point was that the admins could get the same level of access as if they were physically on site, assuming the correct setup.
> Notification UI updates - We also refreshed notification designs to make them more modern and useful.

Please.... please just for a couple of years can we stop doing this? Why does my notification UI have to change so frequently?
I can't believe I have to argue that there is a difference between always tracking everything by default and only turning on tracking once a warrant arrives.

In one case, you track everything.

In the other case, you don't track everything. But you have the ability to turn on logging when required (like, for example, with a warrant).

>As if they can't give data created before a court order

This is surprisingly simple. You just don't track the data until you have to because of a warrant. Then you say "Sorry, I don't have data before your warrant arrived because we do not track it".
I agree. I love reading articles like this because it forces me to question what I think is the right perspective rather than just digest whatever perspective the author is feeding me.

I don't know why more journalists don't write like this. Is it just that people prefer being told what the right and wrong opinion to have is? Or is it simply because most journalists care more about reporting their opinion than trying to fairly represent both sides of the story in question? I guess it could be argued some opinions are so clearly wrong that they don't deserve the benefit of the doubt, but even then there is often a lot more nuance than is typically reported.
I agree. I also like Kari so it's not her. I dig tech stuff, I just don't need a cheerleader.
Yeah, it kind of reminds me of when they used to say we shouldn't panic about the coronavirus. Of course you shouldn't panic, because panic isn't a productive response, but you should anticipate, prepare for, and mitigate risks.

Of course, then the people who told us not to panic about the coronavirus ended up panicking about the coronavirus because when they said "don't panic", they meant, "ignore the problem until you are overwhelmed by it", which is exactly what leads people to panic in the first place.
Somehow they convinced people to pay them more than $77 billion last year. What do they even sell?
I believe the LGR channel has shown some DOS programs from before 1990 that had the entire catalogue of the US phonebook available in a neat DOS UI, where you just choose a location/state (or non at all) then enter a letter and it would filter every entry on the chosen filter...

(Name was ProPhone 1993, so not really pre 90's)
https://youtu.be/yBupNdYe08g?t=1078
How to Build an ETL Source Connector in 30 Minutes: A Video Tutorial
The market is globally competitive. How would expect tech companies to compete if you have policies that continuously place them at a disadvantage against global competitors.

Tariffs don't solve these problems either. OP's suggestion is pretty decent idea relative to playing wack a mole with price fixing while trying to make sure your country's corps can compete on the global market.
Facebook's DNS servers are unreachable, so a lot of devices are querying DNS servers repeatedly - this overload is probably the cause of a lot of the other issues we're all seeing today.
You have a good point.

File this under “proof of what everyone already knew, but couldn’t verify.”
You mean the same problem as when GMail goes down and Googlers can't reach each other?

I guess good decentralized public communication services could solve those issues for everybody.
Matthew Effect
But death threats are already illegal. What does your proposal bring? Making it extra illegal? A failure of the police and other authorities to act does not mean that the law is at fault.
LOL! They should have used the USA Fact-Check Algorithm from the Science Ministry.
People either have to work, creating load on GitHub, or waste their time elsewhere, creating load on HN and Slack.
* had

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

Looks like he's been on Oculus since 2014

The fact that both Carmack and Abrash are at Facebook is endlessly disappointing :(
This information about the nature of planaria is fascinating.

See also the work that Levin's lab is doing, e.g.: "What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjD1aLm4Thg
and "xenobots":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenobot https://cdorgs.github.io/
and "Growing Neural Cellular Automata, Differentiable Model of Morphogenesis" https://distill.pub/2020/growing-ca/

Also check out Trichoplax adhaerens, an organism on the cusp between single-celled and multicellular lifeforms:

> Trichoplax are very flat organisms around a millimetre in diameter, lacking any organs or internal structures. They have two cellular layers: the top epitheloid layer is made of ciliated "cover cells" flattened toward the outside of the organism, and the bottom layer is made up of cylinder cells that possess cilia used in locomotion, and gland cells that lack cilia.[2] Between these layers is the fibre syncytium, a liquid-filled cavity strutted open by star-like fibres.

> On both sides of the septa [fibre syncytium?] are liquid-filled capsules that cause the septa to resemble synapses, i.e. nerve-cell junctions that occur in fully expressed form only in animals with tissues (Eumetazoa). Striking accumulations of calcium ions, which may have a function related to the propagation of stimuli, likewise suggest a possible role as protosynapses.

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

You can push a trichoplax through a sieve that forces the individual cells to split apart and they will crawl around independently and reform the organism. You can dye two trichoplax different colors, split them, put the cells near each other, and the cells will form a single "piebald" organism together.

> It is also possible to rub Trichoplax adhaerens through a strainer in such a manner that individual cells are not destroyed but are separated from one another to a large extent. In the test tube they then find their way back together again to form complete organisms. If this procedure is performed on several previously strained individuals simultaneously, the same thing occurs. In this case, however, cells that previously belonged to a particular individual can suddenly show up as part of another.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichoplax#Regeneration
> And I don't think they had location/address

They most definitely did have addresses.
iphone 11. checkmate
> Mercury itself is light enough to cancel that out.

No, it does not cancel it out.

You need about 12km/s delta V to get to Mercury from Earth and then the same to get back. Remember, if you need to lift anything from Mercury, you need to actually transport fuel TO Mercury, before you can use it to lift anything out of Mercury.

And you don't just need twice more fuel for twice more delta-V. The fuel requirements grow exponentially.

Now imagine, how poor idea it is to transport mountains of fuel to Mercury just to get a tiny bit of what exactly? Raw materials? What kind of raw materials are present on Mercury that would warrant it?
Oh I'm sure everyone knows whats wrong, but how am I supposed to send an email, find a coworkers phone number, get the crisis team on video chat etc etc if all of those connections rely on the facebook domain existing?