skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can agree with the "intentional blindspots" argument but turn it right around.

I'd like to explicitly note that the parent post did not say "X also provides benefit Z to other people" - it asserted "Facebook is an unparalleled titan in the realm of advertising" which is a substantially different thing; it's not something that some people simply don't care about and a benefit to some other people and considering those statements as equivalent is a (very large) intentional blindspot. The current way of how advertising is done (driven, in part, by FB) is also a harm to many people and society at large, so publicly making an implicit assumption that "advertising" is at most neutral is not okay, it's something that should be called out.

This very "unparalleled titan in the realm of advertising" aspect is a major cost on society, a net harm that perhaps should be tolerated if it's outweighed by some other benefits FB provides (such as the "utility-level communication system for a big chunk of the globe"), but as itself it's definitely not something that should be treated as benign just because some people get paid for it.

If FB advertising disappeared with no other drawbacks, that would be a great thing. Of course, there are some actual drawbacks, but even so it's quite reasonable to motivate people to ask about the actual drawbacks of FB being down, because "oh but ads" (with which the grandparent post started) is not one.
Yep, Telegram stopped sending messages a while back and not loading at all for me now.
DNS A and AAA records for Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp have been destroyed
I have the opposite complaint of OP (though technically orthogonal to his point). I'm extremely annoyed at having to sift through the thousands upon thousands of self-help tidbits and life tip nuggets that fledgling VCs and founders -- who have accomplished *literally nothing whatsoever* once you round down -- offer on social media platforms. I'm talking about people who have written 100 small checks, but who haven't hit even a single grand slam. Or entrepreneurs who built an incremental SaaS business and got acquihired 5 years ago, and think that people need to hear their hot takes about success and life. It's extremely annoying.

On the other hand, I really enjoy the occasional pieces of fluff and advice offered by, e.g., the true outliers (e.g., the Elon Musks and Peter Thiels walking among us; the people have have actually come into contact with reality and accomplished non-trivial things that are very hard to repeat and generalize from). Not just tech billionaires; I think the same for the comparably successful scientists and technologists.

These people can't give you cookie cutter formulas for success other than "try to break other formulas". It's still inspirational, IMO, and far preferable coming from them than the phonies on Twitter seeking validation and fame.
Organizational complexity grows super-linearly; in general, the number of people a company can hire per unit time is either constant or grows linearly.

Google once had a very quiet big emergency that was, ironically(1), initiated by one of their internal disaster-recovery tests. There's a giant high-security database containing the 'keys to the kingdom', as it were... Passwords, salts, etc. that cannot be represented as one-time pads and therefore are potentially dangerous magic numbers for folks to know. During disaster recovery once, they attempted to confirm that if the system had an outage, it would self-recover.

It did not.

This tripped a very quiet panic at Google because while the company would tick along fine for awhile without access to the master password database, systems would, one by one, fail out if people couldn't get to the passwords that had to be occasionally hand-entered to keep them running. So a cross-continent panic ensued because restarting the database required access to two keycards for NORAD-style simultaneous activation. One was in an executive's wallet who was on vacation, and they had to be flown back to the datacenter to plug it in. The other one was stored in a safe built into the floor of a datacenter, and the combination to that safe was... In the password database. They hired a local safecracker to drill it open, fetched the keycard, double-keyed the initialization machines to reboot the database, and the outside world was none the wiser.

(1) I say "ironically," but the actual point of their self-testing is to cause these kinds of disruptions before chance does. They aren't generally supposed to cause user-facing disruption; sometimes they do. Management frowns on disruption in general, but when it's due to disaster recovery testing, they attach to that frown the grain of salt that "Because this failure-mode existed, it would have occurred eventually if it didn't occur today."
> for the past few hours every social network has more active users than Facebook

That's literally the joke.
Shatner probably made more from his Priceline.com endorsement than the entire rest of his career combined.
Upvoted. I guess the author could do another great article, claiming the exact opposite.
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Ironically, it's both common knowledge and trivially verifiable. I'm not sure how this is a "debated" topic.
For the record, I have no issue with Protonmail (or other tech companies) following the law. But their claim was always that email was encrypted and they "don't track you" which was always nonsense. Just like Apple's privacy promises. In the end all tech companies either track you, have the ability to track you, and have to give you up to the relevant authorities.
I was excited to click through to this but was a little disappointed when I read it because it wasn't discussing what I was hoping for.

I think there's also an issue where you can follow a bunch of people that are already very successful and at the top of their fields on Twitter; they comment on the latest news, post their big conference talks, their brand new tool on Github, etc. You may have had a very unproductive day (or week) at work, and seeing these other people continue to ascend and excel makes you feel like you are not working hard enough. If only you picked up that new front-end framework. If only you went and got another certification. If only you created your own side hustle and turned it into a profitable business.

There are benefits to surrounding yourself with motivated, successful people - it can also create and foster a drive in you. But it's also important that you can relax and take the night off after work , even if you're not keeping pace with the most vocal and prominent avatars.
YMMV but my gmail and dialer just recently got much uglier with blueish tones. Feels like Material UI was great looking around android 5.0 and goes downhill ever since.
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I don't know how to feel about the introduction of splash screens for all apps.

I imagine they were needed to disguise some initial rendering of the app, but as a user I really really don't want to see splash screens when opening an app on a mobile device...
I think the the point of the anecdote is that what you see online in no way reflects people's actual struggles. If you try to compare your real self against someone's online persona you will never measure up.

Unfortunately this fact is not made explicit anywhere - I can imagine the self-loathing Facebook or Instagram would have generated in my naive, socially-inept, teenage self.
Just thinking about all the conspiracy theories you could make of this. Yesterday pandora papers, today the internet stops working.
Are there any credible studies demonstrating a strong link between genetics and motivation/drive/work-ethic? I don't doubt that DNA plays a part, but I'm hesitant to accept claims that it's 100% genetic.
They're unique arrangement with Netflix predates their Video Partner Program and probably some of their other app store rules:

Peter Stern:

"Longer Version: I explained that these IAP tests are not OK for Apple. Our commitment to developers and customers is to run the world's best App Store, and when Netflix is cycling in and out, they are undermining that. I also explained that we run a principled App Store, and they have a unique arrangement because it was struck before the existing Video Partner Program came into effect..."
If you'd think about it, it isn't very useful to find a person who is responsible. Suppose someone cause outage or harm, due to neglect or even bad intentions, either the system will be setup in a way that the person couldn't cause the outage or that in time it will be down. To build truly resilient system, especially on global scale, there should never be an option for a single person to bring down the whole system.
Facebook hacked?
Does anyone else feel way too entertained by reading all this stuff about fb being down, all services relying on fb being down, and many services not relying on fb being down but being down due to being DDoS'ed by users trying to find out why fb is down?
It's an interesting thought experiment at least. What would the hidden incentives of something like that be?

For example, if a company wanted to keep growing, it would have to split organically into separate corporate entities. What would stop them establishing "favored" relationships with each other? Say for example Facebook splits out "Zuckerburg data centers inc" - what's to stop them pricing themselves above market to avoid taking on other customers, and then giving FB a hefty discount? You could mandate that there be no board overlap, but shareholders would probably receive a split.
Humble Book Bundle: Infrastructure and Ops by O'Reilly (Pay Wh
Why not $9bn a year?
If you're in a large city you can often get same-day delivery to an Amazon locker that should be a short drive away though
Finally! A small (or not so small) outage for FB, a large benefit for mankind :)
The NAND gate. One gate to rule them all
I don't understand how that is possible, and I quite frankly end up losing respect for the university system in the countries where I read about stuff like that. To get a phd you have to be accepted into a doctorate program, which means your master thesis should be delivered with good grades. To get your phd you should do your work requirements (publishing 3 papers and taking some subjects at phd level - where I am from). His master thesis might be wonderfull, but it is one body of work, not a position in a doctorate program, not published papers and not phd subjects. Is the student to skip the whole phd experience now and aim straight for tenure? He will miss out on a lot.
Thank you John for your work with WhiteBoxTools, I was introduced to it when a former student of yours entered our GIS program at Selkirk College a couple years back and have been keeping one eye on it since.

You've got some really excellent algorithms and tools in WBT, I've used them to shortcut some obnoxiously long lidar/pointcloud processing with other packages.

I'm not sure that this is "less complicated" than the linked tutorial though, but some great exploration for someone who knows a little more ;)
That was their best PR in years
This reminds me the last time the singularity nearly happened.

https://google.com/search?q=google

I beg you, don't go there.
Because all facebook-owned properties are down.

Previously:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28748203
DDG's privacy policy says:

> When you search at DuckDuckGo, we don't know who you are and there is no way to tie your searches together.

> When you access DuckDuckGo (or any Web site), your Web browser automatically sends information about your computer, e.g. your User agent and IP address.

> Because this information could be used to link you to your searches, we do not log (store) it at all.

https://duckduckgo.com/privacy#s3
This morning around 10:00 AM I've been posting on a forum a message in to which I have said that I'm hoping Facebook will get shut down..
Now, Facebook situation you see it might be my fault. Sorry folks, didn't meant that for real..
I still need FB's products!
=))

https://natrmd.com
"Funding research into it seems like a waste of money..."

If, as you say, you cannot (and should not) ban alcohol, then finding out how bad it is, and in what ways, is somewhat important.
wat? It might be possible to take this article seriously if it were written 20 years ago. In 2021, knowing that priests are having sex with other consenting adults is actually beneficial for the Church's image.

Everyone's got their own path and intellectual needs, but there are serious reasons why religiousness is at an all time low. I'm sure Christianity and Catholicism were fantastically positive revolutionary movements when they first came about. But over time, every structure ossifies and ends up attracting those who focus on the power and prescriptivism rather than the enlightenment.
makes perfect sense, there's lots of killing in animal husbandry.
Let's play a little game:

Suppose I'm sent back to undergrad, and I want to host a side project I'm working on. What's the path of least resistance?

Is IBM anywhere in this conversation?
> I can't fathom how they didn't plan for this

Maybe because they were planning for a million other possible things to go wrong, likely with higher probability than this. And busy with each day's pressing matters.
That's an idealistic sentiment, but the fact is that some people have no alternative to car ownership. They either live in the middle of nowhere, or their job is very hard to impossible to get to without a car, or they have poor transport links. Ultimately, for some it's about survival and the inability to work from home.
My company runs copies of all our internal services in air-gapped data centers for special customers. The operators are just people with security clearance who have some technical skills. They have no special knowledge of our service inner workings. We (the dev team) aren’t allowed to see screenshots or get any data back. So yeah, I have done that sort of troubleshooting many times. It’s very reminiscent of helping your grandma set up her printer over the phone.
I was a little surprised that it seems to outperform the M1 chip. This M1 chip has been an absolute joy to use since the moment I started using the Mac Mini. After 5 mins I decided that I am totally willing to burn the bridges. Lets drop x86 as the legacy arch that it is and don't look back. M1 Mac Mini was so snappy that I was taken back to the mid 2000s when new computers were extremely exciting again. It provided so much delight and joy.

To think they are just casually outperforming their desktop chip in the benchmarks. Man I can't wait for the next M1X/M2 or whatever they call it.
I recognize that for WhatsApp users around the globe this is probably more than an inconvenience, but the rest of humanity is getting something of a reprieve here.
A Business Idea to Give Away: Fuel Delivery
Yes, absolutely, people make mistakes. But the thought I was trying to convey is that some people make a lot more mistakes than others, and by not attributing individual fault these people are allowed to thrive at the cost of having less error-prone people in their position. For example, someone who triple-checks every parameter that they input, versus someone who has a habit of just skimming or not checking at all. Yes the triple-checker will make mistakes too, but way less than the person who puts less effort in.
If Zuckerberg data centers wants to keep growing, then at some point they will have to find external customers.
Is there any data that points to causation?

Is there any reason to believe the chemicals in alcoholic drinks would boost your health?

My intuition is it's behavioral or emotional in that maybe drinking a glass of wine a day is relaxing, maybe more likely to be drinking with friends?
Weird banner at the top, seems like false advertising as it says a couple lines down: Expires on 2030-03-29
what if the executive had been pick-pocketed
AOSP is practically dead, all important parts replaced by proprietary Play Services. I think it is only a matter of time before google replaces Android and Linux with Fuchsia.
working for me
This is naive, IMO.

Even if the app store was run differently, say allowing a competing way of installing apps, Apple still have plenty of fungible power to make such deals. You might have ticked a box to make it technically fair, for some definition of, but that would probably be just cosmetic. IE, app store would still represent most revenue and everyone is in the same position but a few geeks.

The "platform game" establishes market power, where buyers and sellers need to go through you. They have no negotiating power, and you can price to make deals that take all the "surplus utility" off the table, in classic economic terms.

So... reality isn't perfect and some players are big enough to negotiate. Netflix is that player here. They negotiate when they have to, but try to keep it quite.

When the market is this structured, this is how it works.
Further, if someone were to train a machine learning model to predict which people googling "chloroform" actually went on to become kidnappers, you might find yourself at the front of the list -- not for a good reason, but because the term "MAC" is shared between tech and anesthesia, so some innocent fishing around for the OUI prefix on a smart fridge might be misinterpreted by a black box algorithm as the logistics of a kidnapper trying to determine the Minimum Alveolar Concentration of anesthetic required to accomplish their goals.
I think he nailed it about the overtime bit.

It's harder to exploit a 40 year old than a 25 year old.
for something as distributed as Facebook, do multiple somebodys all have to race down each individual datacenter and plug their laptops into the routers?

As someone with no experience in this, it sounds like a terrifying situation for the admins...
I'm noticing the same thing. I thought it was my ISP as Facebook was down earlier as well.
DNA is just one puzzle piece that explains human behavior, together with many other factors.

Those factors are not yours to control. Even if you are able to influence some of them, the ability to do so is dependent on factors you do not control.
Uff, I see no reason to smile about it.
A good idea could perhaps be to add a way to hear it in action without signing up.
Burke specifies "valuations" as well as outcomes, so the observation stands. (Not that Palantir is any kind of monopoly... If you will recall, the usual criticism is that it's just a consulting shop with zero moat or monopoly.)
The app review processes explicitly are testing the backend components for compliance as well.

The Fortnite app behind the lawsuit that we got these docs from was explicitly taken down for failing app review by not complying with IAP guidelines.
> I hope they don't lose their job.

FB has such poor integrity, I'd not be surprised if they take such extreme measures.
My guess is that Blender's 3D rendering and lighting is far better than most GIS packages, including QGIS.
> If the Pi foundation had access to cores, processes, and even pieces of this level of technology the overall computing world would be so much more capable.

Even if they had access to it I don't think it would be anywhere near as affordable as the Pi foundation wants their devices to be. An M1-powered Raspberry Pi would be amazing, but also probably several hundred dollars.
There's such a thing called the "Thundering Herd" problem, that partially matches.

From wiki: the thundering herd problem occurs when a large number of processes or threads waiting for an event are awoken when that event occurs, but only one process is able to handle the event. When the processes wake up, they will each try to handle the event, but only one will win.
I think he nailed it about the overtime bit.

It's harder to exploit a 40 year old than a 25 year old. Employers know that and prefer the younger worker.
> an organization that hasn't actually thought through all its failure modes

Thinking about any potential things that can happen is impossible
> Facebook is an unparalleled titan in the realm of advertising

Not unparalleled - Google exists.

And we need less advertising, not more.

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

Many other such systems exist - Telegram, Signal, Google Chat.

> Instagram is a key cultural driver of the Western world

Western culture will get along just fine without Instagram.

> the overall impact would transform the world around you.

For the better.
Burzum [1] comes to mind, and certainly a lot of British bands from the 1980s right-wing Oi! scene like Skrewdriver [2].
There are a few rappers in Germany who are open white supremacists like MaKss Damage [3]. The entire idea of white supremacist rap/hip hop seems quite absurd to me given the genre's Afro-American heritage, but I guess that I'm putting too much thought into that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varg_Vikernes

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skrewdriver

[3] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/MaKss_Damage (German)
> If I was in charge I'd give them a modest EOY bonus for being helpful in their outreach to my users in the wider community.

That seems pretty unlikely at any but the smallest of companies. Most companies unify all external communications through some kind of PR department. In those cases usually employees are expressly prohibited from making any public comments about the company without approval.
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.
> Releasing big updates of the open source code like this feels pointless.

Custom ROMs still benefit
You are not illogical:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28714516
Vodafone is down in Romania too.
4chan is disturbingly resourceful at times. I have heard them described as weaponized autism.
Well, ok, not real news - perhaps changing the title to "Facebook.com is wrongly listed as available for purchase by registrar" would be fitting -

but the fact that it is listed is in itself curious and may give raise to fruitful discussion (as in - why? Folks have already answered here in other comment chains)

Not to mention that it was momentarily amusing to ponder how lucky I am to not be the hypothetical guy responsible for renewing that domain
https://twitter.com/Pytlicek/status/1445085177475223559
https://twitter.com/Pytlicek/status/1445094265739173905
I agree, but try to explain that to PR people...
> Unfortunately this fact is not made explicit anywhere

It's common sense that you don't put vulnerable stuff online. Parents should explain this to children when they are growing up. Sure I guess you could put disclaimers everywhere "LIFE MAY NOT BE AS HAPPY AS IT APPEARS" under each photo. Maybe California will require a banner for that soon.
> (then, somehow, the CEO gets arrested by regular cops, lol).

Because he had a gun in hand not because of his forced labor practices.
This really is a fascinating case-study of what is truly resilient systems. More often than not, they are not centralized.
> What are they afraid of?

Zuckerberg Loses $7 Billion in Hours as Facebook Plunges

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/zuckerberg-loses-7-billion-ho...

Stop the hemorrhaging. Too much bad press for FB lately and it all adds up.
Talking about monopolies, why does Facebook and HN have network issues at the same time.