skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The person who mentions the banality of evil, dannykwells, has an excellent point.

But there's more at play here. I briefly worked on Twitter's anti-abuse engineering. Many of the people on that team cared a lot about protecting people. I sure did. But we didn't have the necessary power to actually solve the problem.

The people who did have that power were senior execs. They might say that they cared. In their heart of hearts, perhaps they even did. But their behavior demonstrated that they cared about other things much more.

My boss's boss, for example, was an engineering leader who had a climber's resume: quickly advancing through positions of more and more power. In my view, he cared about that a great deal, and did not give a shit about the actual harm to users. As soon as he got the chance, he pushed out my boss, laid off the team's managers, me included, and scattered the people to the wind.

I presume the same was true about the senior execs. They were aware Twitter was causing harm to people. If they wanted to know the details, we had plenty of research and they could have ordered more. Did they care? Impossible to know. But what they focused on was growth and revenue. Abuse was a big deal internally only as long as it was a big deal in the press.
Can't read it, don't have an account to log in with :D
We do not own shares in Alibaba (2020)
> According to internal studies retrieved by Haugen, Facebook found that 13.5% of teen girls say Instagram makes thoughts of suicide worse, and 17% of teen girls say Instagram makes eating disorders worse.

This is a snippet of the research mark's referring to. Oh good, only 13.5% of girls feeling more suicidal.
Honestly I have been so happy with the unreasonable effectiveness of RSS readers. It’s just incredibly delightful, and wish it weren’t as niche. However, perhaps I should revel in its ability to fly just off the radar.
Trans-Atlantic MagLev (2004)
Some real people, I guess, have more than one account, or an account that isn't under their real name, because they want to interact with friends separately from family or something like that.

I vaguely thought that the TOS required your real name, but it doesn't appear that is enforced.
Bubble sort only swaps adjacent elements. The one I used is a lesser-known sort apparently called "exchange sort".
> Was it because those industries thought those issues were more important than profit?

I take a more cynical view - they wanted to get ahead of the narrative before the public did. It meant a better PR angle, a more well thought out strategy to thwart external pressure, and a better forecast on how long you could milk the cow.
How is 27 counterintuitive?

> Let alpha = 0.110001000000000000000001000..., where the 1's occur in the n! place, for each n. Then alpha is transcendental. (Calculus, 4th edition by Michael Spivak)

Nearly all infinite sums involving factorial are transcendental.
No, there is no shoehorning here, just following you into the bathroom yelling slogans. Shoehorning is flat out wrong.
The UK doesn’t have a true multi-party system. First-past-the-post elections all but ensure there are only two dominant political parties. It’s really only been a game between Labour and Conservatives for longer than most of us have been alive.
The difference between weight and mass is domain specific to physics.

I actually get annoyed at people who are pedantic about these things. Precision is important in some conversations, but just elitist in other.

Anyway, the term “weight” to refer to mass outdates its use as a force - its only since Newton that we distinguish the two, after all.
Social media dependency is a real thing, with serious medical side effects, which can include Depression, which in severe cases can actually be fatal.

But, you know, prescription medicine dependence, its different, right? Right. Its gotta be different. And the reason its different is because... fewer people use social media? No. Fewer people suffer from mental health issues? Definitely not. Fewer people have overtly negative outcomes, including death, from mental health issues? Nope.

So, actually, the only reason its different is: We've fully studied and have a mature grasp of the personal and social impact of some chemical dependencies. The same can not be said of mental health, and all the evidence you need for this immaturity can be found in comments like some in this thread, or those from Zuckerberg.

The cigarette companies are commissioning studies saying smoking is healthy, and people still downplay the victims. If you've ever wondered how anyone can think smoking is healthy; in 10 years, some may look back to the '10s and wonder the same thing about social media. How could anyone have worked for Facebook, defended them, saying they've done more good than bad?
> What “does his majority control over Facebook” have to do with the accusations about Facebook’s behavior? Would the behavior be ok if it were majority controlled by mutual funds?

It has to do with the fact that if you control something, you are directly responsible for it. By having sole control of FB, MZ is completely responsible for it, for better or worse.
FB seems guilty, only because their internal findings were leaked.

I have no empathy for them. They bring out the worst in Humanity. They build walled silos of festering hate and anger, all driven by "user engagement", "hours on site" and money.
Government is prohibited from doing this. Intuit and anti-tax groups have made it so.
"At the heart of these accusations is this idea that we prioritize profit over safety and well-being. That's just not true."... SERIOUSLY?
We need to see the actual data to conclude either way. It's so easy to make a statement like that which sounds compelling but conveniently hides some nastiness somewhere else. Just as it is so easy for the whistleblower to cherry pick a stat to make her point. Neither of them are lying but their framing may have some level of dishonesty which is obscured from us since we can't look at the bigger picture. We have no idea how these questions were asked, the methodology, etc.

Anyway, there's lots of research on social media done in universities, so we don't need to take their word for it.
> So maybe Zuck is telling the truth here, that they are trying to fix all this.

Maybe they are trying, but also maybe they are trying to have their cake and eat it too.

What I mean is that very likely the proper way to fix things would financially hurt FB, which seems it’s something they really don’t want to do.
Dunno if it’s common, but the justification I’ve heard is that if you have financial problems you’re more likely to be tempted to commit petty theft and/or embezzlement to compensate.
Do you use a VPN? I do and it requires login, but not if disabled.
This can also be solved by ensuring one copy stays in the library but buying extras if they're popular and held out for long periods of time.
Here's what's new: she is explaining the situation to politicians of both parties in terms of the perverse incentive structure at Facebook, and successfully diverting the conversation away from whether it should censor more Democratic or Republican content, toward the real issue: that no one has both the resources and the information to assess and improve safety on the platform.
Insanity. Oh, it's San Francisco.
Les Etats-Unis annoncent détenir 3 750 têtes nucléaires
At the end of the post is a link to a Github issue to "support compiling and linking c++ code":

https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/4786

It was closed in March of 2020.
The political climate in the UK is pretty savage right now, Brexit pretty much split the country in two. I don’t think this is just a US phenomenon, especially given a lot of what happens in US politics bleeds into the rest of the world (which is why a lot of us follow it so closely).
A lot of small businesses seem to have most if not all of their online presence on Facebook.

The sort of businesses that are well known in a niche, but haven't figured out how to get https to work on their website.

On Facebook, they will have all sorts of pictures of their work, and information on what they are doing lately.
I agree that this is the likely biggest contributor but it also makes me incredibly sad because I don't see anyway that this is fixed.

There is absolutely no way either political party will allow a multi-party system to ever exist.
And, you have deep divisions there. If you perceive one single enemy, all your efforts will be focused on that one. If you have three, your efforts are spread out.

This makes the divisions, rhetoric and social environment seem less severe, but the problems are just as big.
This is much better, incentivized but not punished.
I think the American elite, and the Republican party are trying to frame this issue as if it is about regular Americans. Even the title of this link does that. I imagine the IRS would use this to pursue the wealthy who regularly use tax loop holes. I've heard that the IRS is massively defunded and toothless. We all know the American elite pay very little taxes and we all know the WSJ carries water for the American elite.

Disclaimer: I'm not American.
I will never forget the exhausted desperation in the voice of a young woman talking to her parents in an undisclosed middle America location: 'there are no jobs'. The words are cliche, I know. Nonetheless I'd recommend taking a few days and visit such a place as opposed to yet another scuba trip in French Polynesia. Won't get as many likes on Instagram, but may give a bit of a perspective. There are vast swaths of this country that are not thriving.
> So maybe Zuck is telling the truth here, that they are trying to fix all this.

Except they are just playing around with the outrage algorithms, the problem is created by Facebook, not some natural occurence. If they wanted to "fix" anything they would make their algorithmic timelines opt-in, or at least an option, for starters.

It is of course very much in the interest of the people working at Facebook to make this seem like a problem that is just there and that it is some "difficult to solve", that "moderation doesn't scale" etc.. These are deflections to make everyone ignore that Facebooks tampering is where it starts.
Greed is only good when the greedy actions do not have negative externalities
>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?

And yet I have family who are absolutely convinced there are nanobots in the vaccine.
Is it true that polarization has not increased in other countries? Is there published data on it? Would be interesting to see which countries are experiencing historically high levels of polarization.
> Typically I don't want side-effects to all live in one thing. It's cute but "we want to change the world," don't we?

I don't really understand the argument here? Usually we want to properly separate concerns and make sure each thing has one responsibility. Monads are a big help with that.

Any time you have a secondary concern that you don't want to be dealing with explicitly in your straight-through code is a good use case. Any time you would be tempted to use aspect-oriented programming, or a global/thread-local variable, or similar hacks (and IMO they're still hacks when they're built into the language, e.g. exceptions).

E.g. authorization, audit logging, database transactions, error handling - rather than having to use some magical decorator/annotation/macro that breaks all the rules of your language, by using monads you can write code that uses these things as plain old functions working on plain old values, but there's an extensive library of standard operations (e.g. traverse, *M variants of functions like cataM) that you can use to make working with them almost as lightweight as if you were using the magic way.
I despise first-past-the-post, but it does not force two party systems. Look at the UK and Canada, who have two parties able to form a government, but multiple viable parties.

If you want a culprit, blame the lack of whipping that both US parties do as a matter of political culture. Since you have historically had all these cuckoo crazy subgroups within both parties, it has meant that other parties simply do not have the bandwidth to exist.

However, in the last four years, the Republicans have started to blindly follow their leader as a matter of pride. I see that as the one positive change the Trump era has brought; yes the man to bring it about has been a disgrace, and has used it for vile purposes, but if both parties stick to following their political platforms and leaders far more, the US can end up in a better place.
I have to disagree with the name 'forward party'

during civilizational decline I think different messaging is needed.
Soil contains 4X the amount of carbon than in the atmosphere, so while scale is enormous, it isn't impossible.

The post goes through numerous sequestration techniques that could reach the scale to sequester 1000B tCO2e
I’ve only used discord a couple months in a handful of servers and I get spam dms..
I've been framing this whole thing as a universal property of human society and it seems to fit pretty well for me.

Outrage attracts attention in all group interactions. I can't think of a single large scale group forum where this isn't true. It's integral to an absurd degree in our news cycle. Howard Stern exploited this property in his rise to fame. It's a core element in state propaganda, well documented throughout human history.

I'm old enough to remember when the internet was a lot more free - when there generally wasn't some parent corporation imposing content censorship on what you put on your homepage, or what you said on IRC. All of the complaints regarding Facebook were true of internet communications back then too (on the "sex trafficking" issue, compare to Craigslist of yore!)

The big difference seems to be there's an entity we can point a finger at now. Communications on Facebook aren't worse than what was on the internet two decades ago. In fact, they're far, far more clean and controlled.

What I look to is whether Facebook is more objectionable than alternative forms of communication, and I can't find any reason to believe that this is the case. Is twitter better? Is reddit? Is usenet? No.

So why does Facebook draw such ire?

Are people calling for controls on Facebook also calling for controls on self-published websites? On open communication systems like IRC or email? Where is the coherent moral philosophy regarding internet speech?

To be honest, my biggest concern when I read the news surrounding this issue is that most of the internet might not be old enough to remember what it means to have a truly free platform, unencumbered by moralizing. Why are people begging for more controls?
As a reader of the financial press since the 1970s, I never "got" commercial paper. Everybody just assumed it was as safe as a govt. bond. Yeah it had slightly higher rates, but wasn't backed by anything.

Then 2008 happened.

One of the ugliest stories was that a family sold a US port for $1 billion just before then, and specified to their advisors to put the proceeds in safe instruments. Commercial paper was used, which then seized up for years.

In fact, disclosure laws were weakened for it, which explains why you don't hear much about the risks:

https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?a...
> Log after, not before

I tried this recently by accident, and the drawback of that approach immediately became apparent:

The logs will be very difficult to read, because for nested function calls, low-level callee functions will log before high-level caller functions, and you have no idea why they are called until later:

Finished string comparison of length 4
... 200 more lines...
Finished string comparison of length 2
Finished Boyer-Moore string search
Finished searching for example.com
Finished searching for disallowed domains
Finished checking email address
Finished logging in user

With the suggested approach, you'll have to read your logs backwards to make sense of them.
"You must log in to continue." Is this posted elsewhere with no login requirement?
No, reading stuff off a screen is not a problem; it won't let you bypass authentication or achieve remote code execution.
Show HN: Ads Tracking for SaaS
Billionaire says company that made him billions good. Evidence: all the billions he has spent on making the world better...
How would you categorize FB/whatsapp-driven genocide in Myanmar[0], polarization(+) or polarization-lite?

The semantic acrobatics in statements like this drive the discussion into pedantic details that successfully lose sight that on net, this is a cancerous product, with a pathology unique to each culture it touches.

like, there's been leaked FB PM discussions on this very topic and phrasing it like a product challenge versus the moral calamity that it is.

[0]https://gizmodo.com/facebook-still-working-on-the-whole-geno...
[0.5] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...
> It is a well established idea.

If by "established" you mean that it's well known, then yes, you're right. If instead you mean that it's agreed-upon or widely accepted, you'd be wrong. There's a lot of great debate / critique, both about how well the phrase actually applied to Adolf Eichmann himself (Arendt was famously only at the trial for like 5 days), and whether evil in general is ever, in fact, all that banal. Sadly the conversation around "the banality of evil" hasn't received a fraction of the attention that the phrase itself has.
I don't ever ( except this ) post here and don't use Facebook and trying my very best to get all my contacts to at least try something different other than whatsapp. I've not read the statement but I'm pretty much sure I know the gist of it.
The easiest thing I/You can control is what apps are installed on your phone and I choose to not have them.
I find Facebook and Instagram is incredibly toxic walled garden even just a lurker like me.It is fair to say that most people have Facebook/Instagram for fear of missing out on some event of some kind.
I suppose why I posting is that no matter how much bad Media/press Facebook gets people will be people and just continue on. I even think mark Zuckerberg could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and still people would use Facebook.
Anyway rant over.
World Community Grid: Donate your spare cycles to advance science
Short, dense podcasts aren't unusual. Scientific American's "60 Second Science" is a good example. "NPR News Now" is just a few minutes long and updated hourly.
To be clear, I was being sarcastic. I agree with you and don't think it is in anyway cynical. It is the obvious reason. It allowed these industries to change the public discourse regarding these issues. For example, the oil industry was a big force behind the "personal responsibility" angle of fighting environmental problems trying to shift public perceptions from blaming the oil industry to blaming individual consumers.
I worry about what regulation could look like. Some of the hearings Congress has held feel more like pressure to censor per the whims of those in power (https://greenwald.substack.com/p/congress-escalates-pressure...). Another possibility is that regulation turns into regulatory capture that perpetuates the market share of big incumbent companies.

What I would prefer instead is updated and enforced antitrust regulation, utility like protection of customers/viewpoints for large platforms with network effects, subjecting politically non-neutral actions (like algorithmic biases) to election/funding controls, and an outright ban of social media for minors (with age verification).
It's going to be a lot easier to take it out of the ocean. I don't know why people insist on working on the atmosphere. The ocean is a natural carbon buffer, the perfect place for us to draw down from with easy options for disposal.
Could using something like AlphaZero.jl make it more efficient?

https://github.com/jonathan-laurent/AlphaZero.jl
All I can suggest is look at the actual data and not the reporting on the data.
The implicit assertion is that this behavior wouldn't happen if not for Zuckerberg personally causing the behavior.

As someone who has worked at large tech companies though, I find that to be an extremely questionable assertion.

FB has incentives. Zuckerberg didn't invent the dynamics surrounding their business, and I don't see how having a faceless bureaucracy in charge would lead to an organization that is more willing to reject its own incentives.

If anything it would seem like having more obscure and diffuse leadership would lead to less accountability, not more.
It’s interesting that you don’t even agree with the fact that Zuckerberg claims. That polarization is declining or flat outside the US. Your claims that it’s less than in the US, but still increasing outside the US is a lot more aligned with reality.

But the fact is that this isn’t the defense Zuckerberg thinks it is. In fact, it may even suggest the absolute opposite.

Facebook has never been as popular outside the US as it has within it. The best indication of this fact is FB’s $19Bn purchase of WhatsApp which was largely driven by the fact that FB Messenger was basically only popular within the US, with the rest of the world preferring WhatsApp, which was also an indication of how FB’s network was simply not as entrenched outside the US as it was within it.
Not all evil looks that way to outside observers, unfortunately. I believe that the assumptions of FB that allowed it to get so big, "optimize engagement above all else", built a system that in many ways is at odds with the values of our society when everyone is a user.

Internally at FB, everything looks good, you hit all your OKRs and believe users are better off. Maybe you don't, but you're bonus is huge so you'll put your head down and keep on. Externally, it's an entirely different picture. Connecting people is a comically small issue society needs FB to solve, relative to our need for them not to harm children, or promote extremism, or hide research when testifying to congress.
Honest question to know how others think.

It doesn't really matter, does it? The rate of evaporation is irrelevant to the problem. Mr. Potato could have waited a year, or dried them on the Uyuni salt plains.

Why do you care? Would this distraction affect your ability to solve the problem?
> So maybe Zuck is telling the truth here, that they are trying to fix all this. But no one can see the forest from the trees.

Ah, this is what I think of as Schrodinger's Accountability. Zuckerberg and Facebook's senior execs are simultaneously: A) so brilliant for running Facebook that they deserve to be incredibly rich, and B) so normal that they can't possibly be expected to understand the consequences of their actions, and so are morally blameless. Heads they win, tails we lose.

I say it's one or the other. If Facebook is too big to be understood, it should be broken up into small enough units that mere mortals can see the forest and tend it responsibly. And if not, the execs should be morally and legally culpable for the harm it does.
This is a good observation, but I don't think it absolves social media. There are likely many factors increasing polarization, and social media may amplify those factors and/or turn otherwise harmless factors into harmful ones.

The core idea behind social media is that it amplifies various voices, instead of those few who's job it is to participate in the media. In the US, this has effectively turned our right to freedom of speech into a right of freedom to broadcast.

The total size, wealth, and political influence of the US are much larger than the most culturally comparable nations. The value for those within and without the nation to spend effort using social media to influence discourse and election results is high, and is likely at least a partial factor.
Intermittent fasting in mice improves long-term memory retention
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