skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Similar to balancing other social issues, I don't believe private companies should make all of the decisions on their own.

Then give up majority control.

This article needs a listen in compassion. It's all, "no we're not", instead of, "we understand why people feel this way and this is what we need to do"
> Imagine if you were trying to fix climate change, but under the condition that you weren't allowed to burn fewer fossil fuels. You may try very hard, and very sincerely, but it's fool's errand.

I like this. This helps me. Thanks.
> Syniverse and carriers have not said whether the hacker had access to customers' text messages.

I think it’s safe to assume that if you’ve been owned for five years the hackers have access to whatever they want.

That’s more seniority than the average tech employee’s tenure at a company these days.
Not sure if I fully agree with that argument. With the US being a superpower, the stakes are high and this invites unique foreign influence via social media. That foreign influence could be state coordinated or just come from regular people who have an emotional stake in US politics. I've seen it myself, outside of the US people are more concerned about US politics than their own and engage with it on social media which only adds to the pile of insanity. Also, because of limited bandwidth, only a small handful of topics tend to monopolize, and as such they are usually US topics.
Honestly, agreed..

Well to start, Facebook is neither good or nor bad - it is not a person and does not have morality. The human mind is not really capable of dealing with an abstract entity such as a corporation so we anthropomorphize the large mess of people, software, and hardware presenting us a little app on our phones as imbued with a personality and morality. Then we debate whether this mess, which has Zuch's vague face over it, is a personification of good or evil. It's neither - it is a morality-free phenomenon.

Facebook's properties have benefits for certain slices of the population in certain instances, and negative effects for other parts of the population. Businesses rely on Facebook's properties for communication, people rely on Messenger and especially WhatApp for communication, artists rely on Instagram for inspiration and social outreach, teens use the properties to connect with each other and to feel sad or happy about themselves in social contexts (as teens tend to anyway). In some cases the teen are happier, in others sadder.

I got to know my gf over Messenger, I have wasted tons of time on Facebook, Instagram has been a medium influence on me. Life happens, people happen, and now social media happens.

Zuckerberg is the public face of the organization now and it is his life's work. He has an entire society's worth of social media interactions he is tasked with controlling, censoring, and maintaining. People tell him they want it free for some speech, closed for other speech, they want Facebook to hire tons of people to censor and curate the content, they want great decisionmaking, they want to be be free to say anything they want to say (so long as it matches their specific moral values), they want their kids to only see good things online, they want their kids to find what they need but see only what they should see on all of Facebook's multifaceted properties. It is a huge task.

Why would Zuckerberg intentionally want to fail at this task and have people hate his company? To make more money? He is not an idiot and knows that the success of the company is dependent on its reputation. How exactly could he NOT do his utmost best to mitigate the negative effects of his properties, enhance the positive effects and thereby positively influence everyone - the users, the company, himself? I don't understand the cynicism which drives all these comments either
> I personally know and have previously worked with some of the people who work on trust and safety, specifically for kids. Good people who have kids of their own and who care about protecting people, especially children.

Those same people are protecting their children with $300k+ salaries and buying property in area where they can send their children to Gunn HS. While I empathize with these people the direct opportunity to protect your kin should not be understated. Do they mean well? Sure. Are they putting their best effort to fix things? Sure.

Here's the most important part:

Do you they know deep down inside that the only way to fix these things is to hurt Facebook financially? Probably. But they also know this means risking to protect their own children as a result (forced to move, lose job, less pay, etc.). What would you do? (I think I know the answer)

This can't be understated any further - in the end it doesn't matter what individual people at FB think because no one person or group of people has any legal, economical, or logistical ability to control the company except Mark Zuckerberg. He is figuratively and literally impossible to fight. Well, unless everyone deleted their accounts.
Why can a person not own their own DNA if we are to accept that a company can own a persons DNA?
You may already know, but that quote sounds a lot like Munger's “Show me the incentives and I will show you the outcome.”
The same reason you go to the doctor's to check if you have cancer. You make better decisions with more intelligence, even when it's "bad news".
> If we wanted to ignore research, why would we create an industry-leading research program to understand these important issues in the first place?

I mean...precisely to be able to control that research. Exactly like companies in other sectors (tobacco|oil|pharma|AI). It's asinine that this is presented as a rhetorical question [1].

For those (myself, as well) comparing portions of this response to tobacco, oil, and pharma companies controlling (and manipulating/suppressing) research, an example to keep in mind that's much closer to home would be Google censuring negative AI research [2].

[1] See for example, The Influence of Industry Sponsorship on the Research Agenda: A Scoping Review

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6187765/.

[2] 'Google told its scientists to 'strike a positive tone' in AI research - documents'

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-alphabet-google-research-...
Never forget: Steve was a sociopath.
I have a small apartment and realized my WiFi router power levels are by default set to 100%. I dropped it to 25% with no meaningful reduction in bandwidth. It's a simple precaution and while I don't believe I am sensitive to RF fields maybe my neighbor's children are.
r/programming is pretty good in my personal opinion.

Also, niche tech subreddits tend to have great sources of information, even if some tend to become echo chambers over time.
I think that the point here is that all the controversy is because of a study from Facebook's own research. If a cigarette company came out with a study showing cigarettes were dangerous, perhaps it would be a different story.

Of course, I wouldn't say that being aware of the problems your product causes makes you less culpable; just the opposite.
Very calm in tone. In Zuckerberg's place, I would have been tempted to instead write something like this: "Hi, censorious ninnies. In the 50s you would have been blaming godlessness for hurting children, in the 90s you would have been blaming video games for hurting children, now you blame Facebook. Please take your desire to police content on Facebook even more than we already police it and shove it up your own ass."

I have no love for Facebook, but my problem with it is not that I think they police content too little, it is that I think they police content too much. No, I do not want to police content on Facebook to save children. Similarly, I do not want to ban controversial books, I do not want to ban extreme sports, I do not want to ban fast food, and I do not want to ban many other things that sometimes hurt people. If I have to choose between, on the one hand, Facebook with all of its shadiness and, on the other, puritanical moral busybodies who want to control what people see "for their own good" - well, I choose Facebook.
Facebook’s whistleblower tells Congress how to regulate tech
Indeed. Was important for them to show a different narrative that let people think that tobacco was good and oil was not affecting the environment that much.

So same for Facebook I guess, they want to show us that they care and that they're not the evil here.

There are plenty of unbiased independent research that show the opposite of what they keep claiming
Aircraft Powered by Variable-Buoyancy Propulsion Takes Flight (2019)
Well for all the money & resources they have, it's a pretty tone deaf message. No remorse or even the slightest admission that they could be doing better. Pretty much asking everyone to not believe what we've all been experiencing for the last few years.
The IRS Wants to Look at Your Bank Account
What “does his majority control over Facebook” have to do with the accusations about Facebook’s behavior? Would the behavior be ok if it were majority controlled by mutual funds?
I am curious about something.

It has been quite a while since i had any job that required me to think about DCs.

Back in the day we would have a setup of regular modems.

If all hell broke loose, then we could dial up a modem and
have access to the system. It was not fast, and it was a pain, but we could get access that way.

(I am skipping a lot of steps. There was heavy security involved in getting access)

I guess landlines might not be an option anymore??
SentiMATE[1] looks at one of the reverse problems in a way - training an engine on commentary data - although it's not exactly what you're talking about.

I think this line of thinking could eventually lead to automated metrics for commentary evaluation, which could in turn lead to better methods than top-k/top-p for turning a bunch of sequential logits into a sentence or paragraph - basically treat it like MCTS/PUCT also.

The problem is that if you look at high-level commentary - maybe Radjabov-MVL on https://www.chess.com/news/view/2021-champions-chess-tour-fi... (I'm not the best judge, just a quick search) - it's not often possible to predict the move starting with the comment. And if you did, you might end up with very dry metrics and reverse commentary.

But this direction has a lot of potential I think, beyond just chess, into more of an algorithmic/generational support for pure NN-based language models.

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1907.08321.pdf
I consider Kubrick one of my favorite directors and I think it's hilarious and somehow fitting that this is one of only maybe 2 things I've ever heard him say
Ask HN: Why a 4-day workweek don't get traction or a major movement?
If people are struggling with mental health (myself included) - I just read about it everywhere - why a 4-day workweek don't get traction?
As a person who basically sucks at Chess, it would be great if you keep developing this into something that can help players improve (though I don't have a lot of confidence in my intelligence to expect marked improvement :))
Why wait until a crash is imminent? Before I hop on an important video conf I have to remember to open Activity Monitor and manually kill all the FirefoxCP Web Content processes. It crashes each tab and frees up all the memory.
Does anybody have informed opinions about the future of RISC-V? The pace of development in the space seems frantic (though early) and the IP situation seems like it's ripe to eventually become a major force in processor ISAs.
Think Thundering Herd problem on the scale you already know from context. Partial service is a kind of backpressure.
Not just that, it sounds child-like. I have trouble imagining someone who went to Harvard writing that way, even if they did drop out.
Airships would have greatest utility on long trans-oceanic travel. Virtually all continental travel would be far better suited to rail. But could trains tackle the oceans? Maybe. I'm increasingly thinking that an intercontinental rail network would be more viable than trying to resurrect airships.

It's possible to build a continuous rail link from the south of Africa to the British Isles, Siberia, and Malaysia.

Tunelling across the Bering Strait would be within reason for an Asian-American link.

Crossing the Atlantic is appealing as population centres are closer to both coast, though sea distances are greater. One possible answer might be a "floating tunnel", of the type envisioned for use in crossing Norway's fjords. Suspended from buouys and anchored to the seafloor, at a depth of about 30m, muliple bores could carry passenger and freight rail traffic. One possible route might extend from Scotland via Iceland and Greenland to the Labrador coastline.

For the floating tunnel concept, see:

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

Transit times might range from 15 hours (at about 240 kph / 150 mph) to as little as 2.5 hours in a hyperloop-like evacuated tube at 1600 kph / 1,000 mph. The former is about a quarter the speed of present-day jet airliners, making short day excursions between continents infeasible but allowing for an overnight "hotel train" or working daytime trips. At higher speeds, service is comparable to present aircraft, and at the (admittedly unlikely) extremes, several times faster.

Similar crossings could be reasonably be made to Indonesia and on to Australia, crossing from Singapore, then to West Java and Timor Leste, and across the Timor sea to Darwin. A southern Atlantic crossing between Recife and Monrovia might also be possible.

There are of course formidible costs and risks. But the technology and routes are at least within the realm of possibility.

A north-Atlantic rail crossing was amongst the concepts mooted in a BBC piece some years back:

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-23969607

A more complete proposal is in this 2004 PopSci article:

https://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2004-04/trans-atlanti...
Eichmann in Jerusalem is the book that coined the phrase for anyone passing through, and it's a pretty wild story.

It's essentially Arendt, a Jewish exile from Berlin who fled the holocaust, wrestling with her realization that Eichmann, who reported to Hitler and organized major portions of the holocaust, wasn't a psychopath, but a completely mundane and thoughtless career focused bureaucrat who was trying to rise in government and believed in doing what you are told, who then organized one of the most evil acts in human history without reflecting on what he was doing.
The question is how many alternative systems and services people could use to keep touch with their loved ones Facebook steamrolledby network effect and questionable business practices.

Services that might not require you to expose your real identity to the whole internet, that might not exfiltrate your full contact list from your phone or would not apply questionable morals and censorship on the content you exchange with your loved ones.
Gabriel's Horn was cool till someone pointed out to me that you can have a line of infinite length within a square (trivially).

When comparing something of a certain dimension with something of a higher dimension, it's not at all surprising that the lower one can be infinite and the higher one finite.

Usually it's phrased as "a finite amount of paint can paint an infinite area." But why do I need the Horn to realize this? It works in the Horn only if there is no lower limit to the thickness of paint. If you accept that, then I can take a drop and paint an infinite plane with it. Why do I need the Horn to demonstrate this?
I really appreciate this distinction. I've noticed that when I feel ashamed, I tend to hide from someone, whereas when I feel guilty I tend to feel driven to open up to apologize to them.
For anyone like me who actually likes keeping up with friends / signing up to groups and events on FB, check this FB alternative out: https://mewe.com/myworld

The subscription based revenue model by itself makes it hugely different from FB and unlikely to evolve similarly. And while there are of course network effects etc. , this one seems surprisingly large already, so it might just have a chance...
This is exactly the point Frances Haugen is making, and it's why this is so different and so much more significant than the other Facebook scandals and leaks in the past.

Haugen repeated over and over again her testimony today that Facebook is full of smart, thoughtful, kind, well-intentioned people, and that she has great empathy for them, even Mark Zuckerberg. Her point is that they have created a system of incentives that are inexorably leading to harmful outcomes. It is not about good and evil people, it is about the incentives. It's exactly as you are saying.

That's why she is not advocating to punish Facebook for being evil, but rather to force Facebook to reveal and permit research so we can understand the system and fix it, because Facebook is too deeply trapped in its own tangle of incentives to fix itself. In this I think she is absolutely correct.
In High School 2004 I made a license plate detection system for our IT class project. It was not perfect, granted, but was able to locate license plates in a photograph pretty reliably and do OCR on them.

Teacher was like, nah, that's not possible, and clearly hadn't even read it. Gave me an A just to stop me complaining, still not understanding the project.
It’s like saying that the people working in the slaughter houses are actually kind folk who do like animals and care deeply for their well being. That can be absolutely true, but they still work for a slaughter house. Your care and trust doesn’t matter a bit because the fundamental nature of the organization is that it profits from cruelty. I understand it pays well, and that maybe they are trying to be nice and all, but yeah there’s only so much purity of heart you can insist while still working for the slaughter house that is Facebook.
I'd argue that Brexit might not have gotten the same amount of traction and neither the Catalan Independence Movement
Well you've demonstrated pretty clearly why you don't write public statements for large companies.
I'm so baffled by Mr. Zuckerberg's response here: the core complaint is that research was sidelined and deemphasized, not that it didn't happen at all.

We can both be satisfied Facebook is seriously researching its impact on society, and also appalled that it has been too slow to act on the results of serious internal research. Our complaints with Facebook are complex; Mr. Zuckerberg is giving such a naive response.
Good people have gone to work at facebook (and google) on jobs like privacy engineering and really try to do good work.

however, no matter how capable and ethically sound they are, the incentives are forever misaligned with the profit models for both, and adtech over all, as it currently stands. truly good people can chase money and hope to do good things in the process. it's as easy as this.

the writing was on the wall when alex stamos, by all measures the best example of the type of person you're referring to and FB's chief security officer... left. started in 2015 and was out of there by 2018. not many c-levels walk away from a job like that for the reasons he did, and when they do that should be the even to pay attention to (looking at you, sheryl "lean in" sandberg). this was the marker event if people were looking.
Reminds me of the last year and a half of my life...

I play table top rpg's a lot online and it would be nice to have something besides roll20 and the various play-by-post options.

The thing is, I think the best thing you could is something less data intensive than roll20 and something more aesthetically pleasing. If the video is a guide, this seem like a thing that an average consumer machine is going to completely choke on. Roll20, the go-to full-featured ttrpg server is infamous for audio, video and general connectivity problem, to the point most people doing video on a different server (zoom, discord, google-meet,etc) and just use the server for simulating the table top. I'm doubting this thing, even more feature heavy, could work better.

And just generally, succeeding in making this truly look like a video game might not be realizing the imagination-based ttrpg ideal.
I find clickhouse with proper time-series encoding and tiered data storage to be a better alternative than timescale. There were also some issues with ingestion speed with a timescaleDB.

Can we think of timescale as OLTP for timeseries data with gurrantees from postgres and clickhouse as OLAP for timeseries data?

Continuous Aggregates is a neat feature though.
Google - YouTube
This is not selection sort. It is not insertion sort. And it is not bubble sort. Those three algorithms are sort of intuitive. This is not.
It's a good statement, I just wish he'd spend more time on 'yes, I stole the original Facebook, and I tricked the Whatsapp founders into giving up their company to me, and I've routinely lied in the past, but moving forward...'
Libraries don't let you check out books which can't be replaced economically. You might have heard the word "circulating" in the context of libraries: stuff from Tom Clancy and Harper Lee and Kevin Feige circulate. Out-of-print or rare or college textbooks usually have to be read at the library, where staff discourage you pocketing or photocopying things or whatever.
Yesterday free speech was so important that platforms must syndicate all topics equally and fairly. Today these platforms are so extremely dangerous to society that they should be shut down entirely.

I’m not a fb apologist by any means, but maybe we should stop blaming these websites for everything and invest in education instead.
No, but I have generated the look at Mark Zuckerberg's face as he was writing it: https://rybakov.com/images/hiq/sadmark4.jpg
Answering a suppositional question with yet another question is, well, questionable.
But, hey, if we're going to play games like this, then I'm game to take a stab at answering these questions to questions with yet even more questions.

> If we wanted to ignore research, why would we create an industry-leading research program to understand these important issues in the first place?
- Because it allows you to learn potential results before anyone else, thus giving you the advantage to control the narrative by releasing first?

> If we didn't care about fighting harmful content, then why would we employ so many more people dedicated to this than any other company in our space -- even ones larger than us?
- Because the cost of that labor is relatively cheap in comparison to your earnings, and making a visible effort (however well or poorly executed) gives you a convenient scapegoat to point toward in exactly these types of situations?

> If we wanted to hide our results, why would we have established an industry-leading standard for transparency and reporting on what we're doing?
- Because if you don't make it appear like you're playing ball, senators and congressmen would be more motivated to hammer down your door to appease their constituencies?

> ... if social media were as responsible for polarizing society as some people claim, then why are we seeing polarization increase in the US while it stays flat or declines in many countries with just as heavy use of social media around the world?
- Because you don't apply the same algorithms or suggest the same content across all geographic locations?
I’m gonna report my interest income at tax time anyways. Is there a way I can opt in to the government just collecting all my finance records and then filing my taxes on my behalf?
> There are as many whole positive numbers as all fractions

According to a specific non-colloquial definition of "as many".
That reminds me of that example from many a game theory class where you take a pair of people, say Alice and Bob, and you say "I have $100 to split between you. Alice, propose a split. If Bob then agrees to that split it shall be done. If Bob does not agree to your proposed split neither of you gets any money".