skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Main stream media and social media are recursive.

Social media shares main stream media stories.

Main stream media stories use social media as sources.

Social media shares social media source as story.
It is important to discuss because its the INTENT behind what is being done, not so much HOW they are doing it technically - we 'technologists' love to know the how, but everyone needs to know the 'WHY' -- especially non-technical users.

Just because most people are non-technical does not make them stupid... and it doesnt remove their humanity, which, as unpopular as it may seem, throughout human's entire history there was more privacy than there has been in the last 75 years.

So, as we have evolved with actual privacy (due to lack of adequate/developed survellance technologies), and its idiotic to say that humans should have no expectation of privacy.

Then why are you wearing clothes? is the intimate nature of your body not referred to as "private parts" -- so there are "private thoughts" and "private personal details" that shouldnt just be available because "government" says so...
They seem very high quality, however here in Germany they cost so much!

E.g. https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Will-Larson/dp/1732265186, 46.70 euros against $23 on amazon.com!
You should get over it
Also a fan and user of Timescale, and I hate the serverless phase.

I'm pretty sure everyone is pushing it so they can make money from SaS. But if this allows them to give it away for free, then I'm all for it ( just won't be using it ).
Writing verbose logs is very expensive.
She'll be fine. She is now globally famous for doing something an awful lot of people think is brave and admirable, and she has also shown off on TV how sharp and eloquent she is. There are a huge number of companies who will jump on the chance to bring her onboard.
The discussion around FB, and social media in general, has gone off the deep end. There is no nuance. Facebook is Hitler, Philip Morris, and Purdue combined.
> Bringing her in to the media and Congress as this star witness that understands exactly whats going on seems misleading

I mean, they tried bringing Zuckerberg in, but he apparently just lied, so she seems like the best option to get honest informed answers.
Treat addictive social media companies like addictive cigarette companies. Lets see some huge warning labels about how mentally harmful it is to continue scrolling on facebook right on the first result where its unavoidable to see. Lets tax the hell out of social media companies to generate local revenue just like sin taxes. It won't be a huge change but it will be a great starting point and will come with revenue that can fund potentially mental healthcare programs for people damaged by these companies.
Not exactly what you are asking for but ...

To sort ~500 student tests by name, my favorite algorithm is

* Each person grabs a bunch of test. Split the test in 4 piles, using the first letter: A-F, G-L, M-Q, R-Z The same 4 piles for everyone. (I don't remember the exact borders. It may depend on your language. Perhaps 5 piles is better.)

* Each persons grabs a pile. Split each pile in subpiles by the first letter again. If some letter is too popular, split it using the second letter.

* Sort each small subpile, that has only 10-20 tests, probably using insert sort.

* Make a giant pile.

This can be classified as a combination of radix sort and insert sort. It's easy to parallelize to 5-10 persons.

If you later realize there are ~50 more test, just sort them using your favorite method and then use merge them, like in mergesort (or timsort?).
Agree with the Olin point. But disagree on the scope argument; I agree with GP about banality of evil - doesn't matter how small or minor it is
Did the studies show a negative impact in any meaningful sense, though? "Some teens report that Instagram contributes to or triggers to mental health issues" is my understanding of the most supposedly-damning finding; I understand why this can be turned into a high-engagement news story with (at best) genuine ignorance on the part of journalist and editor about how hard it is to defensibly turn survey results into interesting causal psychological claims or (at worst) mild deception, but I really don't think it tells us much about whether a world with any plausibly different Instagram or no Instagram at all would have less extreme or less frequent mental health issues in teens overall, or even in many of the specific people who report these problems.

I don't think declining to publicize the results of an internal study that will be predictably grossly over-interpreted by media and therefore by the public is actually wrong, and I read the FB response you posted an archive link to as saying "this research has been grossly and selectively over-interpreted", not "this research isn't very good".
Fear and drama sells news. This is to be expected.
IIRC the real nail in the coffin for Camino was the phasing out of support for embedded Gecko. (I was a Camino dev.)
This. And then when people started buy more cars instead of less, the automotive industry squeezed out all silicon for themselves with their contracts and power. Here we are from other industries without a single chip, while the car manufacturers probably are sitting on 2 years of supplies now.
She's also handed over lots of material to the SEC, which has the responsibility of deciding whether there have been any violations. But that's a separate track from congressional hearings.
Censorship Alert. All Science must be ordained by the Science Ministry for the USA Fact-Check Algorithm before public consumption. The Science Ministry is the only arbiter of truth.
> You also need the ability to raise prices when there are shortages in order to encourage buffering.

No, but I can see how someone would some to that conclusion by thinking narrowly in terms of pop free market dogma.

> Unfortunately, the people who like anti-price gouging laws appear to prefer shortages and misallocation of goods.

Price gouging is actually a worse misallocation of goods. It's still a shortage, but it just doesn't hit rich people as hard. If you have food stockpiles to barely feed everyone through winter, it's not a proper allocation to let the market price food so richer people can feast and some poor people starve to death.

Price gouging introduces a lot of (especially short term) inefficiencies as greedy parasites make profit-seeking decisions based on their greed and not social need.

Markets work very well in some contexts, but it's a mistake to think they work best in all contexts. Crisis shortages are not one of the contexts where they work well.
> But, she was a PM for 2 years in FAANG.

More like 15 years. I've known Frances since 2009 when she was a PM at Google, where she worked on a few products including Google+. She also spent several years an Pinterest which, while not technically a FAANG, is certainly a major social network that does lots of algorithmic ranking. She is definitely an expert in the topics she is testifying about.
Region selection coming soon. Price should be cheaper for most configurations. Also, offers decoupled storage / compute, so is more cost effective than needing to resize both at the same time. But let me know if you are seeing differently.
I can't reply to the dead comment here, but if you're looking for a tunable version of this functionality try https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc...
That's the intent, not the problem.
'caste' => 'cast'. I've screwed up twice this week by not reading my posts after posting (just gotta stop posting from the mobile on-the-fly and stick with the laptop). :-)
Make Invoices Fast
I have seen jobs at Mozilla that I'm interested in, but I'm just too afraid that they'll do more eng layoffs that I don't want to go through the hassle of applying.
I don't care about Facebook, and am not interested in using it, but after reading the spiral of consequences Facebook has been in, it made me think:

1. To all the governments that want to tighten more control on communication, this is great kindling to show people "we the government should further control tech for your own good".

2. You can hardly get the US gov to agree on anything, but when it's about hating each other as much in the digital world as in the physical world via a common source, everyone's at attention.

3. Facebook is so ill-equipped to handle most of the issues that were brought forth. The expectation that the gov/people places on Facebook =/= reality of what Facebook can deliver. Facebook is running around frantically trying to manage an existing mess of a switchboard, they are not going to pull a miracle.
Freedom of speech also includes from being compelled to speak of things you don't want to, so forcing companies to make their recommendation and moderation systems publicly visible would be eve more of a free speech issue than expecting companies to moderate violent, hateful, or deliberately misleading content.
The comparisons are completely relevant. All are companies that provide a product with significant negative societal externalities. The only difference is that social media has yet to be regulated in any way.
I always try to think of the log like I think of the UI, i.e. make it usable with as little knowledge as possible. If the user/1st line support can use it without calling you that's the goal.
I think Apple would be an even more interesting company if he were still around. Maybe not as big or as profitable, but certainly more interesting.

I wish he hadn't been so strongheaded about herbal remedies and whatnot. He had the more curable kind of cancer, had he taken it seriously earlier. As someone who has lost family to pancreatic cancer, it really upset me to learn that he didn't use his vast resources to do everything he could to live.
Frankly, I'm not expecting any meaningful legislative response, given US antitrust has blessed the WhatsApp and Instagram acquisitions by Fb as well as Google's acquisition of DoubleClick and YouTube.
Your link says "This research, some of which relied on input from only 40 teens, was designed to inform internal conversations about teens’ most negative perceptions of Instagram"

I think its a bit of a stretch to consider this as research.
None of those cable channels are even close to 100s of millions of viewers.
That is not fair at all. TV networks are local, there are only 330M ppl in the US. Also, you are not counting how many viewers TV networks and their employees reach via FB/Twitter.
There's a neoliberal bias where the peace prize is given out to Kissenger, Obama, Arafat/Perez/Rabin.

But if you only gave it out to actually peaceful people there would probably be a massive leftist/progressive slant (which makes no sense to the people in the crowd who think the CCP is leftist, but that is their problem).
Personalized advertising.
At minimum it needs to be someone who is aware of the company strategy.

She simply doesnt have any relevant knowledge.

This is all politics.
Well this is free software, but u less you're competent to audit it yourself, it's still unwise to rely on its security promises. But for people who don't need the guarantees, it would be nice if Tox were more convenient to use.
I use borg with rsync.net (and another host as a backup-backup). Works on linux. Backs up what I tell it to, I can mount any historical backup as a filesystem and copy stuff over. Uses encryption, is open source. You can point it to multiple backup locations for local and remote backups. Works for me. Takes about three minutes to do an incremental backup to two locations every evening.
While cigarettes are no longer a threat to societal health. We have monitoring programs in place, insurance costs (smokers pay higher premiums) factored, and ways to prevent our kids from being marketed to.

The alternative is we go the banhammer route, and as we learned with prohibition era, that had unintended/undesirable consequences.
Now let’s not try to imagine the skeletons in the closets, when it comes to the Chinese economy.
>1. lied to the public 2. lied to lawmakers 3. didn't change the product in ways that positively impacted kids.

To the parent's request, something needs to be concrete and egregious for a prosecutor to chase this.
For the DBaaS services the problem is more of simplicity and developer experience; they are more of a transparent box which can make things more complicated than necessary. You should be able to have a clear paved path for an excellent general database experience with automatic backups, scale, and functionality to improve developer ergonomics. While at the same time, under the hood having this DBaaS like experience which allows you to take more control as needed. Of course it is not easy to offer both simplicity and flexibility, that's a fine line to draw but that is our goal.
Yesterday's post from Facebook

https://engineering.fb.com/2021/10/04/networking-traffic/out...
As the famous Levine's quip goes, "everything is securities fraud". From first reading of the article, it seems to me she just wants to nail Facebook with SEC, with everything else being just noise to get media attention.
Is Zuckerberg lying to congress illegal behavior? These docs seem to have made a pretty clear case that he did that.
Why do computers keep getting more and more memory? 640KB should be enough for everyone, if people would just fix whatever is using up all the memory. /s

Not all OOM situations are because of a malfunction or leak.
Stuff like this happens... but the real question is why FB had to send employees to physically go to datacenters to fix this. Sounds like their OOB management had a dependency on FB being online which seems like a bad design. If you're that paranoid about security issue revokable one time pads to a select set of employees.
Eight Things We Learned from Implementing Payments in the DoorDash Android App
What's the optimal sorting algorithm for your Bridge hand? Sorting and holding 13 cards is tricky enough to make me wonder.
As I got older, the stuttering became less and less of a problem; now in my late 40s it happens rarely. I probably wouldn't actually stutter talking to a device (might be different with other people present).

I just that since I was young I have always preferred text over voice whenever there was a choice, and this is no different.

I think the singing thing is true but someone who is extremely self conscious of how their speech comes across is never going to sing instead.
This is not meant to be passive aggressive but it's going to sound like it is; how much would an audit actually cost? If someone set up a GoFundMe for a Tox audit, I would definitely contribute ten bucks to make that happen.
The claim is FB mislead shareholders about their product and committed securities fraud.
Exactly. TimescaleDB is essentially "Postgres++." You get everything Postgres has to offer, plus better performance, scalability, storage consumption (via ~95% compression), etc.

(Also a Timescaler)
OP asked about the legal ramifications, not the social and professional implications of her whistleblowing.

But that said, I think there are a lot of cynical takes in this comment thread. I don't think Frances will find have a difficult time getting a job. There are plenty of people in tech who think what she did was admirable and are very proud of her, including her alma mater. Sure there will be many people and companies who wouldn't hire her, but there are also many who will.
Surely you must admit that even an extremely memory efficient implementation of a set of tabs has a physical limit on how many can be open if they’re all loaded into memory.
The issue is that her experience at Facebook did not put her in a position know the company strategy.
People choose to spend time on social media, instead of going to park and volunteering. Banning social media isn’t going to fix that, people will waste time in other ways.

At some point there needs to be personal accountability
First reaction: That really is tinfoil, if you don't include how the outage would help in that process..

Second reaction: Huh, employees were locked out of their offices, VPN was surely down, yeah if there was someone inside the data centre deleting files off their Intranet no one from outside the data centre would be able to notice, due to the lack of connectivity.

But it would have to be a very good scrubbing and people would notice things missing anyway, "Hey wasn't there used to be a PDF here..?". Hah, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_hole
> Not playing that game.

What game are you playing, then?

> You don't need to correct for that because it will correct itself after some time, but only if we stop discriminating.

How much time? Do we start counting from the end of the Civil War, or just from the 1960s? It seems like your approach has had plenty of time to prove itself and failed to produce results.
The fact that the whistleblower has connections to the Democratic Party (donations, legal representation), and is calling for more censorship... makes me wonder about the possible ulterior motives
Air superiority automated "hunter" drones.
Solving Defense Optimization Problems with Increased Computational Efficiency
Uhm a cigarette you cannot change the base ingredient of, it's tobacco. A cig by definition burns the carcinogen tobacco.

A site you can specify certain requirements like no doom scrolling or requirements like PUBLISH YOUR ALGORITHMS.

Why go full California with another banner? People will ignore it and you will have done nothing of substance.
Every small engineering team I have worked on had its own product manager.
I think that's the right approach. Legally you could require every social media company that collects and sells data on its users to advertisers to allow the users to access their internal algorithmic interface (for their own account).

Now, what controls are on the internal algorithmic dial? Apparently that's top secret, but a legal requirement to expose the interface to the users seems reasonable.

Note that this might not affect what ads you get served (that seems more on the private business side, although banning prescription pharma ads makes sense), but it would affect what shows up in your feed, what content you get served, etc. You could write your own exclude lists, for example (i.e. if you never want to see content from MSNBC, FOX, or CNN, that would be your decision - not the algorithms, etc.)
Start funding space and defence sector, and parallelly start funding university research labs to feed talent to those sectors. Attract domain experts into both education sector and the space and defence sector. Once this ball starts rolling, other things follow. It takes some planning and strategy to get this working.
Right, but my point is that even if she ran the entire civic engagement group it's naive to think she couldn't find out more about what's going on in other orgs if properly motivated. She'd have to go out of her way to do it and do a fair amount of digging but it's far from impossible.
> What you don't like is people being able to communicate easily with each other and reach a wide audience.

That's what the internet allowed with blogs. And blogs were (and are) relatively great! What's the difference? Blogs could not be shoved in your face by manipulating your "timeline" based on commercial considerations of "engagement". SEO has somewhat damaged blogs over time (another victim of ad-funded incentives), but IMHO it's a far better situation than Facebook.

> How would FB being non-profit prevent individuals advertising products on their own page?

Maybe it wouldn't but maybe that content wouldn't end up in everyone's face as often either. It's hard to say because we don't have a non-commercial social network to compare to. The best example of a non-commercial internet service is Wikipedia - unfortunately this isn't a great analog. It's hard to reverse engineer which of Facebook's worst features are there because of commercial considerations, but surely some of them are. Things like the algorithmic feed or suppressing content from people you explicitly follow (unless they pay up) are there to squeeze more money from existing users.
I agree. I've been using Elixir for almost five years and I wrote my first macro this morning. I needed _slightly_ customized code in each instance of set of GenServers and it turned out a macro was the cleanest way to do it.

That said, understanding macros will help you sprinkle in your own "magic" in Phoenix though. I normally import a custom view helpers module inside the lib/<project>_web.ex file in this macro like this:

defp view_helpers do
quote do
...
import <project>Web.ViewHelpers
end
end

Then you can add methods in <project>Web.ViewHelpers and they are automagically imported into all your templates, eg.

> lib/<project>_web/view_helpers.ex:
defmodule <project>Web.ViewHelpers do
use Phoenix.HTML # this allows you to use link(), ~E, etc

def tagline, do: "Running light without overbyte"
end

> lib/<project>_web/templates/foo.html.heex
...
<div class="tagline">{tagline()}</div>
There should be some laws about using addictive patterns imo. I'm sure that's fine and profitable and coca cola would continue to like putting cocaine into their drinks to make their customers want it all the more, but we have laws preventing that behavior in the meatspace and therefore we can have laws preventing this sort of evil behavior with technology companies too. Tie it into website accessibility laws that are already codified in law and can be used to sue certain companies today.
> sin taxes

How about we don't let the state decide what I get to do with my body (and mind)?
It wasn't fair to blame all of cancer on Big Tobacco, either.
I've never seen Firefox unload an inactive tab without my permission, but it looks like according to the docs it's had a 'memory is low, unload tabs' mechanism since 2019. It looks like that behavior was further adjusted in this release, though it's not clear to me what the difference is.
Interesting. They used to have bundles of some Increment issues on a topic along with accompanying books, but they don't offer that any more.
Steve Jobs wanted the computer to disappear, for better and worse. It was that kind of vision that at least made Apple kinda interesting to me, but their recent shift back to just "consumer technology" has really sucked all the air out of the room.

I do wonder, same as you, what things would be like if he was still around. Maybe technology would be friendlier, and have a better place in this world. But at the same time, I remember how the man lived: eating fruit to supposedly stave off his cancer, violently berating his employees to get things finished faster, and even telling his daughter that she smelled like a toilet on his deathbed. Steve Jobs was a man, imperfect yet aligned just so that his manic side was completely hidden from the public (as opposed to, say, Ballmer). In any case, I'm tired of tech CEOs being self-important and elitist. Steve Jobs was the genesis for that, and his inability to admit when he was wrong ultimately lead to his demise.

I'm saying this from a truly impartial, empathetic and caring place: Steve Jobs' behavior should serve as a warning sign for what happens when you let infinite ego expand unchecked.
Pandora Papers put South Dakota in unsavory company
> Lets tax the hell out of social media companies to generate local revenue just like sin taxes.

Very interesting idea, actually. There is evidence Social Media causes harm to some individuals' mental health (in a widespread manner causing some measurable societal harm), so a proposed tax on all social media companies with revenue going towards mental health programs seems worth exploring.

Generally I'm not much in favor of implementing new taxes (would rather close existing loopholes) but if implemented reasonably and backed by scientific evidence this seems valid.
Somehow, I don't think that the best solution is to promote a governmental and economic structure where a massive central government spends much of its energy battling massive corporations, while they both collaborate to surveil, regulate, and control the citizens.