skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> And Australia and the US and Japan and others are not going to step up to defend Taiwan because China, unlike Iraq, and Afghanistan, and most recent US foes, can actually fight back.

By the same argument you could say China won't attack Taiwan, because it and its allies can also actually fight back. And they are probably not so stupid as to think China's expansion will end with Taiwan, since taking Taiwan without others coming to Taiwan's aid will only embolden China, show them they can divide-and-conquer their way further.

> So, I don't see Taiwan committing mass suicide -- but a mass earth murder/suicide started by America?

How does China invading Taiwan work out to "started by America"?
Those historic cultures had shorter lifespans and essentially forced women to work as unpaid home caregivers. Times have changed.
With all of the zeal only a young adult can muster, I hated the first people to tell me that they knew about problems and waited for them to break before doing anything.

I get no credit for fixing things before they break, and sometimes it's shown up negatively on an annual review. If you have to cajole people to help you start to look pushy, or worst case like a bully. I've heard back from two former employers that the moment I left some manager tried to roll back things I did and be surprised when it turned out that the developers wanted to keep things the way they were.

You can see the lights go on for people in the trenches when some bit of software or step saves them from turning a 2 alarm fire into a 5 alarm fire, but the managers don't notice that non-verbal communication, and maybe half the time does someone editorialize the experience for all of the non-technical people (If I do it, it sounds like "I told you so" so I usually don't).
>It's common sense that you don't put vulnerable stuff online

Yes, but do people have a gut, visceral knowledge about this when they see stuff online?

Knowing something intellectually doesn't mean one's internal bias (and their effects on the individual) will stop working.
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It's really sad how quickly we all forget. I know people who are a bit younger than I am, and came onto the internet in the 00s, after the height of MS's anti-competitive behavior in the 80s and 90s. I occasionally will talk about how I can never trust MS again, but they're a lot more forgiving, and believe that MS has changed, especially after Gates and Ballmer stepped down and Nadella took the reins.

I remember a couple years ago when I bought a new laptop (with Windows 10 on it). I just wanted to get into Windows far enough so I could download a Debian installer and write it to a USB stick, and I was appalled at Windows' first-run setup experience, and the personal information it wanted me to give them, as well as the sheer volume of telemetry, ads, and other spyware I had to explicitly opt out of. And even then, MS was still pushing Edge and Cortana in my face all over the place.

My last serious use of Windows was Windows 2000, and man, things have gone super downhill since then.

I'm bummed that I was right to continue to not trust MS, but... well, there we have it.
Honest questions!

Do you have any ethical qualms working for Facebook?

Do you feel the criticisms are blown out of proportion?
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It's kinda in the name isn't it?

Phonebook... Facebook...
Because of the level of internal access required to do this intentionally I would assume it isn't a hack, but it could be. The timing is interesting with the whistle-blower news though.

But then the timing with regard to China sending 50 military aircraft over Taiwan today is also interesting... FB and communication infrastructure would go down first in times of tension, if you want to go full tin-foil hat.

Ok ... enough news reading for me today!
I am going to guess it’s one of those things the techies want to get round to, but in reality there is never any chance or will to do it.
There is always a step which involve to email the domain when a domain update its information with the registrar. In this case, facebook.com and registrarsafe.com are managed by the same NS. You need these NS to query the MX to send that update approval by email and unblock the registrar update. Glue records are more for performance than to make that loop. I'm maybe missing something but, hopefully they won't need to send an email to fix this issue.
> forcefully caching even failed requests to a configurable timeout

I've been doing ~SRE for 1.5 years and I've worked or helped on 3 outages related to negative DNS.. Please don't use negative cache, if you don't know how enough about DNS and can't monitor it
First Look at Oak Ridge’s “Frontier” Exascaler
New York Times has coverage.[1]

"A small team of employees was soon dispatched to Facebook’s Santa Clara, Calif., data center to try a “manual reset” of the company’s servers, according to an internal memo."

[1] https://archive.is/iBzs3
I wonder if any big DNS servers will artificially cache a long TTL NXDOMAIN response for FB to reduce their load. Done wrong, it would extend the FB outage longer.
No body/bury = good
You're very, very right - and insightful - about the consequences of sharing this information. I agree with you on that. I don't think you're right that firing people is the best approach.

Irrespective of the question of how bad this was, you don't fix things by firing Guy A and hoping that the new hire Guy B will do it better. You fix it by training people. This employee has just undergone some very expensive training, as the old meme goes.
Facebook's algorithm prioritizes divisive political content that is commonly disinformation because it increases engagement. Yes, people are creating and sharing the disinformation, but facebook itself is choosing to rank that content highly.
This article refers to TLDs as domain "extensions" in a few places, which is not really a thing(1). Please don't make it a thing.

1. Or at least to the extent that it is currently a (small) thing, it's the wrong thing.
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Is the LinkedIn profile linking back to the hn account?
Google’s New Spyware in Chrome 94
Show HN: BiteSize – Cards with psychology based tips
I've always found it interesting that this fairly influential site rarely changes and hasn't kept up with modern internet standards.

I get that it's an ambiguously useful project for a venture capital firm and all, but you would think that they would throw it a bone or two given the level of influence it has.

It also seems like they're trying to make some kind of point about dead simple web design and running a web server off of old laptops or something. I'm not sure, but there's definitely some combination of neglect and hubris going on with this site.
I'm having issues with telegram as well. Images won't send and the app continuously says "updating" on the top status bar.

How could facebook dns issues cause this?
Every app with facebook SDK used for whatever reason, like login or metrics or ads...
>Facebook has dispatched a small team to one of its California data centers to try and manually reset its servers in an attempt to fix the problem.

>(It's chaos to even try to contact folks, but people are resorting to zoom, discord etc)

https://twitter.com/MikeIsaac/status/1445118465258364928
Plain Old Telephone System
https://www.relevantmagazine.com/culture/tech-gaming/almost-...

well not just mary-sue down the road disinforming but that of nation level actors doing so to spread discord to the detriment of their enemies. facebook amplified the velocity and reach of this disinformation.
WhatsApp is (at least supposed to be) e2e, so unless they're restoring from every user's personal backup, it seems an unlikely course of action
Regulators don't _see_ every single facet of an acquisition. I'd bet they didn't even think about a scenario like this. Their concerns were probably more along the lines of anti-monopoly, preservation of competition, etc.

That said, who wants to go back to ICQ?
alcohol suppresses the immune system, making infection more likely. TB is also correlated with homelessness, poverty, incarceration, and addiction to other drugs, which all have obvious relations to heavy drinking, and TB treatments are generally hard on the liver, making prognosis worse and progress from exposure to disease more likely for heavy drinkers.
Not the greatest time for a Chinese war I think.
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Because making even two pebbles fight is their business model.
Facebook has this too, but they require facebook.com DNS to work, so they are also down.
You know how after changing resolution and other video settings you get a popup "do you want to keep these changes?" with a countdown and automatic revert in case you managed to screw up and can't see the output anymore?

Well, I wonder why a router that gets a config update but then doesn't see any external traffic for 4 hours doesn't just revert back to the last known good config...
This does a good job explaining how SERVFAIL caching works: https://serverfault.com/questions/479367/how-long-a-dns-time...
The essence:

obsessively --> dangerous.
I wouldn't suggest any ISP should do that (and I am none) but probably host this for own personal usage/home networks. If recursive DNS servers go down under the load of "smart devices", having a local copy of a larger number/set of IPs I usually visit might come in handy (and none of my requests would worsen the issue of server overload).
one of the firsts things they taught in law school was that the legal system wasn't just created to uphold "justice" but really to protect the wealthy and powerful
Kevin Beaumont:

»The Facebook outage has another major impact: lots of mobile apps constantly poll Facebook in the background = everybody is being slammed who runs large scale DNS, so knock on impacts elsewhere the long this goes on.«

https://twitter.com/GossiTheDog/status/1445118907187175427
Exposure to deadly urban heat worldwide has tripled
Glad you liked it. But, um, it was not done on purpose...
Nope, for the most part all the ads that Facebook serves are for facebook owned sites and properties. They don't sell data, or have general ad placements on 3rd party websites.
The outage is very good in that is will remind people to have backup way of communication for people that matter to them.

Personally I have a least one other messaging app + email address of people I contact regularly. At worst I could send a paper mail.
Now I'm a bit worried.

Could this bring down the whole internet for a while?
Could you reword this comment please? I have no idea what you are trying to express.
I still found benzos "fun" but they definitely made me more sleepy and chilled out than alcohol. The disinhibition is still there which is where I suppose the "fun" comes from. The memory loss was far more extreme for me than alcohol though, which eventually made me stop taking them.
Gonna need some sources if you want people to take an accusation like that seriously.
US Postal Service tests paycheck cashing; could change how millions access money
I am sure it is just a symptom of the Facebook outage, but it seems like every website I am going on is slower than usual today.
I'll take the other side of that bet. Who messes with routing tables at noon on a Monday?
Plain old telephone system. Aka a phone.
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That's just an 'appeal to authority'.

No-one knows or cares who made the statement, it may as well have been 'water is wet', it was useless and adds nothing but noise.
Facebook down, publishers up [realtime data]
This is a fun one because it's a good example of how to bend the truth with the truth.

About 80 to 90 percent of people who have lung cancer were smokers.

Only about 10 to 15 percent of smokers will develop lung cancer.

So it's not a guarantee. It increases the risk.

Just like alcohol (https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/a...)

The problem with doing RCT with alcohol and with smoking is that we're talking about lifestyle studies. You can't really do a study with the goal being "see if we can give this dude cancer during his lifetime".

And let's also remember that the study that people who drink moderately had longer lifespans just really notes correlation. It does not prove a causation.

Drinking is ubiquitous. Most people drink. Drinking is also a luxury. So if you're poor, you either drink a lot or very little. Because you either have a problem or you're too broke to afford it. (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3185179/)

Guess which income bracket engages in moderate drinking the most? That's right, the income bracket that also allows you to afford better health outcomes overall. So while it may be true that moderate drinking correlates with longer lifespans, it's a knock-on effect to the fact that being poor sucks.
Plain old telephone service https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_old_telephone_service
Thanos snapped his fingers and Zuckerberg vanished with the keys.

My (very large) employer had a worldwide outage a few years ago where a single bad DNS update stopped everything in its tracks (at the time many things were still in our own data centers, now more is in Amazon/etc). It took most of the day to restart everything. But it's not something most people would have noticed like FB. Thankfully I worked in mobile so not involved.
> kept up with modern internet standards

Like increasingly long page load times, pervasive use of JS for even the simplest things, and throwing up a million banners before you can read anything?

I, for one, am very happy that HN is, for the most part, just plain old HTML that loads instantly and just works 100% of the time (when the servers can handle the load, that is).
Woz never seemed bad at teamwork. "Whole banana" was the results of jobs obession with dictatorial control, not the cause of it. Woz tried to add expansion ports to the Apple computer, but Jobs refused. Jobs seems to be throwing Woz under the bus (as usual) to deflect from his own flaws.
The design is perfect. It’s information dense while being really clear and easy to use. There is absolutely nothing wrong with the design.
Tell me your industry and I can probably tell you ethical problems with it.
Can someone explain where these links are located? I don't think I've ever come across one.
re 1:

In principle that’s something that I could enable eventually. It’s a nice idea. I’ll think about it.

re 2: There is a standard usb plug at the far end of the cable. It can be plugged into a usb charger.
Ryzen is where it's at. Zero loss of general computing freedom, 12 hour battery time on laptops and faster than Intel.

You lose so much right now with an M1 and later you'll lose even more. Honestly, you'd have to be a fan boy to get behind this.
Facebook down, traditional publishers up [data]
Every Facebook App on every phone is DDoS-ing the DNS system

https://twitter.com/blazejkrajnak/status/1445063232486531099
There are many open source contacts, calendar, etc. apps. Google is so caught up maintaining its own apps that talk to its services that I don't know why anybody would want Google's own half-assed open source implementations. Even if you wanted Google to maintain open source versions of those apps, why would you want them to be updated at the cadence that AOSP is and have them be developed in AOSP's non-collaborative manner?
Reporters are going to opportunistically start writing about those comments vs having to wait for a controlled message from a communications team. So the reddit posts might not be "so bad", but they're also early and preempting any narrative they may want to control.
What's a "reader app"?
It would not be the first time
In a company the size of FaceBook, "everything is turned off" has never happened since before the company was founded 17 years ago. This makes is very hard to be sure you can bring it all back online! Every time you try it, there are going to be additional issues that crop up, and even when you think you've found them all, a new team that you've never heard of before has wedged themselves into the data-center boot-up flow.

The meteor isn't made of cocaine, but four of them hitting at exactly the same time is freakishly improbable. There are other, bigger fish to fry, that we're going to treat four simultaneous meteors as impossible. Which is great, but then one the day, five of them hit at the same time.
I hate this when in visiting "Outlook.com" and especially when I go from mail to calendar.
Brilliant, why hadn't I thought of this?
We all knew Facebook is bad for society. The whistleblower showed us that Facebook has done internal studies and that these studies have shown their products are bad for society/contributed to the insurrection/promote human trafficking/damage teen mental health/etc. But even with these studies, Facebook has decided to prioritize growth and revenue, rather than fix the issues that are bad for society. What this whistleblower leaked will hopefully lead to some sort of government regulation on social media.

Without regulation, social media will always prioritize profit.
FB's mistake was using this kind of complicated over-engineered setup. It works great when it works... but when it does not, it blows up everything and its complexity means recovery is extremely complicated.
https://archive.is/newest/https://www.washingtonpost.com/bus...
Folks are still chatting here... seems to work as designed...
@xemoka Thanks for the kind words. I will respectfully disagree about the level of complication involved though. In this case, you simply open the ShadowImage tool, specify your input DEM, choose a palette, name the output and press run. I realize that there is a lot of GIS knowledge that is required in many cases, but this one is fairly straight forward to run.
China preparing for possible war with Taiwan
Unrelated anecdote, I once worked in an office where the light switches were powered by the cloud. If you pressed the on and off button at the same time, there would be some sort of a race condition and you'd get blinking disco lighting as two threads presumably went

while (!bright) {
increaseBrightnessBy10%();
sleep(100ms);
}

and

while (!dark) {
decreaseBrightnessBy10%();
sleep(100ms);
}

Then someone had to log into a server and reboot a process before the blinking stopped.
That seems to be a US-specific oddity. My German mobile plan still charges per SMS (a few cents per message), and apart from verification codes or delivery notices, I never receive any SMS at all. No one uses them for personal communication over here, to the point where people don't know how to send them and I wouldn't know of another country apart from the US where SMS are still widely used.
>How would expect tech companies to compete if you have policies that continuously place them at a disadvantage against global competitors.

We can look at a map of most popular messaging apps per country in the light of todays downtime and see that they don't or they compete with themselves.

It also shows the only places where competition can grow to a scale where it can even hope to start competing and survive is where there's first a protectionist policy in place favoring domestic players.
s/the//

Google has more than 1 L8 SRE.
Schmidt had some incident where some info about him was posted. He was really upset. Pretty sure he threatened or did do legal action. Coming from his position of power.

Doesn’t make what he said untrue. Just funnier.
Talk about a tactical attack.
Whistleblower interview goes up.
BGP weakness likely hacked.
Facebook down.
Facebook internal tools for communicating problem and fix also down.
Everyone is WFH because of COVID.

The fix may have been easy, all the tools and comms down you need to fix is making it hard. It's all so interesting. Good riddance to Facebook.
Clients should really be using something like exponential backoff ethernet-style.
Facebook's BGP is not advertising any routes (as I understand things), so knowing the IP address won't help you because your ISP will have no idea how to route packets to that address.

FB have really managed to knot their own shoelaces together here.
luckily not... would be absolutely terrible to have the backbone only on linux