skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Now that today's testimony is over, I wanted to reflect on the public debate we're in. I'm sure many of you have found the recent coverage hard to read because it just doesn't reflect the company we know.

Yeah, we know you don't know, because you're looking at it from on top of a mountain of 100 billion dollars, Mark. There isn't a single damned thing that can change your picture of it being the absolute greatest thing ever.

> We care deeply about issues like safety, well-being and mental health.

What you care about, and what you say you care about, are nothing compared to your actions.

> It's difficult to see coverage that misrepresents our work and our motives.

We don't know your motives, other than the obvious ones. We know your actions.

> At the most basic level, I think most of us just don't recognize the false picture of the company that is being painted.

That's because you live in a big dumb bubble where chat apps are somehow world-changing innovations and creepy stalker behavior is completely fine to you. You are out of touch and people are screaming it at you. You think you are entitled to encroach on everyone's private lives, intermediate on every interaction and mine it for vulnerabilities to auction off to advertisers. Your entire model of the world is broken, Mark. No wonder nothing makes sense.

Stopped reading after this point. I'm sick of billionaires with megaphones blaring their virtues.
Yeah it’s always annoyingly jarring when people assume that. You can even see in the comments on this topic that people attack the suggestion of gender neutral language, which further compounds on the feeling like we don’t belong or are explicitly unwanted.
"people that do set such a standard, do care about what you dismiss as fluff"

Quick poll among my friends, 15% care about read reciepts but 100% care about money.

My mom is about the median age of a what's app user, who are these magical people that set the standard more than she does? Based on what evidence do you believe their preferences are different to her's?
A fun gotcha like this is that if you write to an S3 bucket fast enough, they auto-upgrade you to a more powerful set of servers... but this incurs a short outage. Unfortunately, this outage will happen exactly when you don't want it to: when the system is busy with a high write volume!

You just have to "know" that these things happen, and because it's all serverless, it's essentially invisible and out of your control.
Good for you. My experience has been the opposite. Companies ghost you.
Mesh networks are a white whale.

It needs to be solved, but no one seems to be sure how.

Early internet, in many million people, dense, rich cities most people had computers, but monthly internet costs were too high, in general and especially for video. People tried to do mesh networks and couldn't. In theory you'd install $200 work of equipment and get email and a huge amount of free warezs, better than today's Netflix. It couldn't get to critical mass.

Within really dense locations like Universities, cabled Warze networks did work and exist, so it wasn't because of legal issues.

Cuba's Sneakernet is not a mesh network, it's more a poor mans Asian warez market.

Keep on dreaming I guess. Amazon Sidewalk is the most innovative so far, big big corp is it's innovation. Else without an innovation you are just another naive group doing what's been tried many times before.

It failed in Hong Kong, and their innovation was a good one, using phones with a motivated user base. We also see Covid apps failed even with updates that gave them extra power.
Facebook is an awful environment, but this political witch hunt is many times more dangerous than anything social media can do.

It's a charade, parading out the typical "threat to children" and "dangerous to society" rhetoric politicians always use when they want to grab power. The entire goal is to make a pretense to control speech online.

Stop using Facebook, and stop falling for authoritarian claptrap.
I do have adblock, maybe huh!
I think you're missing some key nuance. Zuck mentions the research as industry leading because the research has uncovered something deeply embarrassing for Facebook.

It's relevant that this is "industry leading" because no one else has done this work. The implication is that the same patterns at Facebook are likely true with other forms of media.
Yup, sleep sort: https://rosettacode.org/wiki/Sorting_algorithms/Sleep_sort
Ban Facebook 1 month before an election.
Honestly, it sounds like he is completely disconnected from reality.
Commander BGP (aka DATA) entered the "sleep" command. The faceborgs found they can't enter building, connect to the collectives or take over the Galaxy.
A grid (even if local) is far more efficient. Moving things takes a lot of energy. It would be more efficient to just put those batteries in the grid, since everyone will be generating surplus at the same time, and it would never be unutilized while disconnected.
Translation and TL;DR: It’s business as usual and your privacy is going to pay for it.

Now login back into Facebook and keep on scrolling!
Oh, you're totally right. It was almost ten years ago that I used a Nios II, so I read the state space wrong without bothering to look it up. Lol, classic mistake on the internet.
"If I supposedly murdered my wife, why would I put a $1mm bounty on finding the killer?"
Love the Dirty Harry vibes of this comment.
whistleblower : a person who informs on a person or organisation regarded as engaging in an unlawful or immoral activity.
> If we wanted to ignore research, why would we create an industry-leading research program to understand these important issues in the first place?

> 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?

This is HILARIOUSLY out of touch with reality.

You don't call someone a whistleblower if the reports they leaked were TRANSPARENT and PUBLIC.

Seriously what is wrong with this man? Does he have any clue whatsoever what impact that his majority control over Facebook has over the behavior of the world?
Well, take a look at their other submissions with "showdead" on: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=fspacef
If you own a lot of assets like stocks and real estate the last year and half of printing dollars has been tremendously good for you. If you work for a living and your income is mainly your salary, it hasn't. Your rent has gone up while your wages and opportunities have lagged.

This is true.

Yet somehow people expect bitcoin to change that rather than exacerbate this. It's pretty obvious that bitcoin is only going to help a select group of people. After all, if it catches on, people who own this asset will benefit and no one else will, obviously.
> Most U2F services allow at most 1 registration.

We debunk this often several times per week on HN

Yes, AWS doesn't allow you to enroll more than one FIDO authenticator. No, AWS isn't "most" services, in the same way that Jeff Bezos isn't "most" people. When you mean "AWS" just say "AWS" not "Most services".

I have multiple Security Keys enrolled with, among others, Dropbox, Facebook, Google, and GitHub.
You can have love for the profession and no especially additional love for the job you apply for and perhaps get hired to. I’ve settled before like that, and as long as the people you work with and for are open enough, you can make it more into the job you want.
Yeah, you are not wrong.

Also, although I recently moved off of Mac to Linux for most desktop computing, I think I tried every single remote desktop solution for macOS over those years.

The best thing I ever found (in terms of being able to remote desktop into a 5K display and have usable latency and at least eventually show the screen at full resolution) was AnyDesk.

For my last year on the Mac, that is what I recommended for remote desktop. (It does work on Linux too, but on Linux I find xrdp works fine, just like on Windows.)

One tip: If you are connecting from macOS, using Microsoft Remote Desktop, that app crashes with 6K and 8K screen sizes. But there is an app called Royal TSX which can be an RDP client, and it handles those resolutions fine.
Wow, you must be new here.
Yeah, that's a tradeoff for sure. Until they find a way to fit a biometric reader into a 'nano' form factor at least.
I mean, what else is he going to say?

"We just don't care. We will keep milking our users no matter what."
For me, it's the almost complete lack of guilt or awareness that his company has caused pain and even death. Yes, FB and its acquisitions have brought many many good things to my life and to the lives of others. They have also brought a lot of pain to me and to others as well. No service only provides good. He doesn't seem to say this.

Instead of him trying to remind us "we do good things" I wish he would also say "and with any platform so large, we are going to make decisions that will hurt people. Sometimes we get so wrapped up in our culture that we may not be aware of the pain we're causing to others and, while the research can help, sometimes we still miss it. Judging by the backlash of many people here, while many feel very grateful for FB, some may feel a lot of pain when thinking of our services and we want to do better and we need your help."

Something that expresses some hint of awareness that many people are being hurt and a desire to take the lead to try to fix it.
Yeah but in Big Tobacco's case they made sure the research reflected their products favorably.

Why would Facebook create research programs that have outcomes unfavorable to their core product?
They do a lot of good bringing people together, but it’s a double edged sword with massive potential for abuse. It’s not up for debate that Facebook causes harm. The only question is how much is too much? At what point do we step in, tell them their mitigations are ineffective, and break up or regulate their systems?
I’m strongly inclined to disagree. I generally find that the best way to prevent an organization from abusing its power is to deny it power.
so many CEOs would come back with tail tucked between their legs when there is an aggressive PR attack, it's so refreshing to see someone unapologetic for a change, standing their ground against blatant lies and angry mobs with pitchforks. This gives hope in the American future.
I think at this point, if you are currently employed at Facebook, the best way to make an impact is to outright leave.

Period.
The Crypto Future of Video Livestreaming
Yup. I once saw an accountant write, "Don't tell me your priorities. Show me your budget and I'll tell you your priorities."

Facebook's whole history is not really caring about those things. What they care about is not looking bad. Which is why they trot out those lines when things get too awful for the public, the press, and legislators to ignore.
With the caveat that I don’t know much about Facebook’s research projects… the question “If we wanted to ignore research, why would we create an industry-leading research program to understand these important issues in the first place?” sets alarm bells ringing for me—because I can imagine a cigarette company saying the same thing about the scientists they hired to argue that smoking isn’t so bad after all, or an oil company saying the same thing about the scientists they hired to argue that it’s too soon to act on climate change (especially since they’re “leading the charge” on renewable energy research).

(I’m influenced here by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway’s work in “Merchants of Doubt.”)
The Internet doesn't need any more regulations, but maybe Facebook does.
Logging 101
No, but I have an excellent compression algorithm that is completely lossless in the semantic domain.
We don't need to put it anywhere though? Trees can live for a long time.

If we did plant a hundred trees and the average age of a tree is even 50 years. It gives us 50 years to workout what to do next.
I think Zuck writes them himself and nobody has the cojones to edit.

Facebook has had a really consistent, weird, “true believer” voice over the years. I can’t believe they can keep indoctrinated PR folks around that long.

It’s pretty scary. The dude is too rich and powerful.
They didn't. That's my point.
Does anyone else remember when facebook got rid of the friends only feed ~2014/2015? That's when I stopped using facebook so I'm not sure if it's been brought back since then, but I'm assuming they haven't.

To me getting rid of that feed is in direct conflict with "Meaningful Social Interactions".

I'm not sure if anyone else feels the same, but a lot of this post feels very gaslighty to me.
Yep. Honestly when I read that sentence I turned off.

This note is a rant against the whistle-blower, without even an empty apology.
There's no point in having this discussion if you're continuously going to represent my words.

1. I said vast majority. I didn't day such people weren't present. These are not large groups to begin with.

2. Once again you are twisting the word "armed" to conflate flagpoles and bear mace with guns.

My original point stands. You don't go about an insurrection in 2021 without bringing your guns. The rest of what you wrote is irrelevant. This was neither a coup nor an insurrection, because the vast, vast majority of protestors did not bring guns to the capitol, and in fact I'm not aware of a single such firearms arrest/conviction.

You could say that it was a 99.9% peaceful riot - and again I'm only aware of a single person being shown to have a gun, not "armed" with flagpoles and mace, out of hundreds of protestors.
Marc Benioff was right. Facebook is the new cigarettes. The internet has transformed our lives and societies in dramatic ways. Some of them for the better, many of them for the worse. At the heart of the damage being done today, you will find none other than social media, and in particular, Facebook.
Show HN: MaryJane – Mjpeg server in 30 lines of async Python
This is about as "us vs. them" as it gets, which is to say that it's about as political of a statement as it gets.

I don't think any of this fight is about the actual issue of social media's impact, but perhaps I was naive to ever even think that it was about those issues to begin with.
> 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?

Maybe I am missing something obvious, but who is he talking about here?
> Does he have any clue whatsoever what impact that his majority control over Facebook has over the behavior of the world?

Of course! He probably likes it that way.
I think Facebook is “that bad”, but one point I thought was believable was about major advertisers not wanting to be associated with hate mongering posts in the first place.

I’m prone to believe that, but also not sure that is has anything to do with the other issues at hand.
That's just the right solution if you know x and y (or even just x?) ahead of time isn't it?

And don't you mean "27" into register 27-x, do. 18 etc.?
Yeah, what I really want CRIU but for tabs.
I hear you. I keep hoping they will add more calculations in future versions, and they do, little by little.

My suspicion is that it is deliberately deprecated due to pressure from for-profit tax prep companies.
He is right about polarization in the US. The people are the problems not FB.
"Come on, the worst case is that these people will keep living in poverty, they aren't going to terrorize the west to demand a higher standard of living."

"Is this supposed to be some kind of joke?"
I'm having a hard time reconciling all this right now. On the one hand, from the outside, I can see the actions that Facebook takes and they seem awfully guilty of what they are accused of. But on the other hand, 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.

The best I can come up with is that Facebook is so big that the "evil" is an emergent property of all the different things that are happening. It's so big no one can comprehend the big picture of it all, so while the individuals involved have good intentions with what they are working on, the sum total of all employees' intentions ends up broken.

So maybe Zuck is telling the truth here, that they are trying to fix all this. But no one can see the forrest from the trees.

I can't reconcile it any other way.
He is right about polarization in the US. The people are the problem more than FB or any other social network.
> If we attack organizations making an effort to study their impact on the world, we're effectively sending the message that it's safer not to look at all, in case you find something that could be held against you.

Someone on HN actually linked to the slides, and it does seem like there's a lot of FUD being created.

This reminds me of moxie talking about damaging research focusing on Signal:

> To me, this article reads as a better example of the problems with the security industry and the way security research is done today, because I think the lesson to anyone watching is clear: don't build security into your products, because that makes you a target for researchers, even if you make the right decisions, and regardless of whether their research is practically important or not. It's much more effective to be Telegram: just leave cryptography out of everything, except for your marketing.

source: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=moxie&next=16117487
Not the OP, but I think Facebook is a near monopoly in 'posting vapid selfies for likes' category via Instagram.
This is one of those moments to remind everyone that computers and computer algorithms do not, and can not, replace human empathy.
If we split insta from FB, what incentives change that will cause a change in behavior?
I love the enthusiasm of people reading this and supporting it, but something we need to understand is the scale of carbon in the atmosphere. We've released more carbon into the air than contained in all the plants alive on earth today, and we're on the path emitting more carbon than contained in all living organisms on the planet. Our climate is on the path to Miocene where temperatures were 3-4C above today's levels.

sources:
https://mobile.twitter.com/RARohde/status/144389061943324672...
https://medium.com/climate-conscious/cogs-in-the-climate-mac...
The joy of young kids reading books is alive and well, you grinch.
Taleb is going to love this one.
I'd like it if he at least addressed the real criticisms face-on instead of at a glance:

>The argument that we deliberately push content that makes people angry for profit is deeply illogical. We make money from ads, and advertisers consistently tell us they don't want their ads next to harmful or angry content. And I don't know any tech company that sets out to build products that make people angry or depressed. The moral, business and product incentives all point in the opposite direction.

The actual argument is that companies like Facebook make money by increasing user engagement and that polarizing and outrage-inducing content is one way to effectively increase engagement (be it deliberate or recommender algorithms simply discovering on their own that this kind of content is effective for engagement).

He also glides over the issue of incentives and the algorithmic aspect. Simply saying "no tech company sets out to make people angry or depressed" is a truism that has no bearing on the argument. Of course their end goal isn't to make people angry or depressed. But is it an instrumental goal? Is it an unintended consequence that they nevertheless find useful, or at least find it too profitable and difficult invest 100% of their effort into mitigating it when it happens?

This is the kind of vague, wishy-washy, feel-good politics/CEO-speak that everyone hates. It's inauthentic and calculated. Have a genuine, honest, PR/lawyer handler-free discussion about this in public and then maybe a few people can at least try to throw your behemoth of a quasi-nation-state a tiny bit of the benefit of the doubt. With this kind of defensive, political approach, you'll do nothing but lose even more of the sympathy you're already so bereft of.
> And 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?

That's a point I've made myself before, and I think there is some truth to it. Social media can't explain the high and increasing degree of US political polarisation, because other countries (including other English-speaking countries) consume social media about as much and yet have less polarisation, and don't show the same degree of increase in it either. The real explanation must lie in other aspects of US culture, or the US political system
Only sort of true. It doesn't make sense to compare n dimensional volume to n+1 dimensional volumes, so the limit of the volume of an n-sphere isn't meaningful. The limit that does make sense is the ratio of volumes of n-sphere to an n-cube. That that goes to zero is maybe not so surprising.

In particular, it's equally valid and frankly nicer to define the unit n-sphere to be volume 1 rather than the unit cube. Do that and we see that this statement is just saying that the n-cube grows in volume to infinity, which makes sense given the fact you point out that it contains points increasingly far from the origin.

I have a hobby of turning surprising facts about the n-sphere into less surprising facts about the n-cube. So far I haven't met one that can't be 'fixed' by this strategy.
Lasers still can cause potentially blinding unwanted reflections. Still likely a better option than supersonic shrapnel from standard proximity fuzed rounds though as collateral damage goes.
The image at the top of this article is from Lupin, which indeed has excellent subtitles. There was one moment in the first episode though which stood out to me as almost a translator's flourish - it was just a beautiful subtitling choice.

An auctioneer responds to a bid at one point with, "if we'd started at this price, we would've saved some time."

Then he shrugs, and, in the original French dialogue, he says "Mais, enfin, c'est très bien," which basically means "But, in the end, it's fine".

The English subtitle the translator chose, though, is perfect. Their auctioneer says:

"But c'est la vie."

Knowing when you can get away with a subtitle like that must be the height of pleasure for a translator.
Put an electric car charger on the side of your shed?
I used to volunteer at my local library. Every couple years they'd have an amnesty week where you could return overdue books and the fees were waived. In that week, almost HALF of the long-overdue books were returned.
I don't get the hate for the guy. Dude needs to sell ads, just like everyone
else.
I don't understand. The Shows page lets me hide played episodes and mark individual episodes as played without downloading them. You can click the "..." or long press on any episode in the Shows page to mark it as played.
For example:

> In fact, in 11 of 12 areas on the slide referenced by the Journal -- including serious areas like loneliness, anxiety, sadness and eating issues -- more teenage girls who said they struggled with that issue also said Instagram made those difficult times better rather than worse.

All the reporting has been about how the research found that Instagram was so terrible for teenage girls, but that seems to be a total mischaracterization. Honestly, it seems like if you ask teenage girls about anything (clothing stores, schools, television) there's going to be a mix of positive and negative experiences. Is the bar we are holding facebook to that no matter how much good they do that any negative experiences outweigh that? Is that a bar we would hold anything else to?