skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Am I alone in being completely un-surprised and accepting of Facebook doing research in this way on its users? The News Feed as an interface for using FB is and has always been an evolving product and in the control of FB. They've been constantly messing with it, A/B testing different combinations of user/advertiser content and post/comment structure. They do this to test outcomes, and achieve goals that most likely include (and are certainly not limited to):

- Optimizing ad targeting
- Maximizing click-thru
- Maximizing engagement
- Minimizing abandonment/bounce rates

The News Feed already doesn't show you all your friends' posts and hasn't for quite some time. How they choose to "curate" what they do show is going to be dictated by their incentives/needs.

Getting outraged about any of this seems akin to getting pissed that the new season of your favorite TV show sucked...

Edited for formatting...
That depends on the goal of your A/B test. I can see a ton of possibilities where A/B testing could be used for un-ethical purposes.
FSF.ORG: EMAIL SELF-DEFENSE
> If you truly care about speed you'll have different optimizations for int32 and int64.

This is exactly why c++ allows template specialization, and if you don't care for hand-optimizing, you can get both implementations almost for free.

> Depending on who you are working with, the lack of generics is a blessing. Some developers can't restrain themselves and create over-complex abstractions that are used only once.

I can't comment on the competency of your coworkers, but I certainly see how Go could be useful in situations without the kind of performance-constraints which demand a language like c++.
You can also have a look at this calculator: http://foundersolutions.com/founder_equity_solution
A/B testing is more about the action of the user, as opposed to purely the emotional state of the user. Maybe I'm not aware that it is happening, but I can't remember sitting in a meeting where someone said, lets see which landing page can make someone depressed.
This made me remember how much I love German candy, and lo and behold: https://www.candygerman.com

It seems to be closely emulating Candy Japan. The fake NSA quote made me laugh. The unprofessional air to it seems genuine. Whatever, I subscribed. Hoping for some Dickmann's...
I agree with you all on points. All the points seem valid based on my experience when I was working on not-so-small projects. But would these be valid for some of the VERY successful products built by a few college students in a dorm room(e.g. Snapchat)? Because the cost of shipping products has decreased dramatically, the points might not hold true for such products.
You're not missing anything. Informed consent is important for many things currently classified as A/B tests and it isn't currently acquired by anyone. There are many existing products that rely on A/B tests to identify the best way to psychologically manipulate (if not addict) their customers (F2P games, online gambling, etc.)
Why should people be nice when calling out armchair scientists for writing utter unsubstantiated bullshit?

You want nice? Fine. Give everyone the downvote ability.

If the forum is still elitist then expect people to respond adversely to bullshit.
The next thing Silicon Valley needs to disrupt: its own culture
UNIX Power Tools by O'Reilly is a text I strongly recommend for this. It's a sort of hardcopy hypertext narrative through a number of command-line and terminal-focused tools.

Parts of it are dated now (it's ... gasp, 22 years since its first edition), but since it's one of those books based on UNIX philosophy it's aged quite well.

It, Linux in a Nutshell, the Sed & AWK book, are still a pretty good introduction.

http://www.powells.com/biblio/61-9780596003302-0
I agree. I expected rich technical details but only to see the showcasing of number and charts perhaps more about what is Google Scale than how to perform security upon that.
You seem to assume that A/B testing is implicitly ethical and this is unethical. That's not the case. The reason this experiment is considered unethical is due to the specific details of the experiment and other common A/B tests could easily be considered unethical if examined using the same criteria.

This particular experiment is getting scrutiny because they published the results in a journal and it is a rather egregious example (the hypothesis, and test methodology, both demonstrate a particular brand of recklessness you don't tend to see in website A/B testing.)

EDIT: For reference, I know a lot about this subject because I worked extensively at IMVU, one of the first consumer-facing websites to aggressively A/B test almost everything. I don't have a luddite perspective on this.
Ask HN: How do you write marketing texts?
It seems rather hard to find smart freelance writer and my writing skills and time are limited. What do you do if you need to write text for landing page/blog/email newsletter?
That's what I said: A/B tests improve the site "in aggregate."

The goal of this study was not to improve the site, though: it was to test a hypothesis about social psychology.
I disagree that they're similarly distasteful. It's "dying from a lack of medical attention" vs "being forced to participate in a system that asks for nothing more than some of your money".

And it ignores that people do not have an equal start in life. You get born into a wealthy, well-connected environment, and, well, even if you do some coke and maybe kill some people with your car, your community is still going to stand by you.

It's generally not a question of having to actively alienate people. Not being in a wealthy/powerful community is enough. The Y-believers don't have to hate that lone X-believer to fail to fund his medical bills. They just have to think of the X-believer as somebody else's problem.

If you get born into the wrong environment, all you've got is "the people who think no one deserves to get left out in the cold" - and those people's resources are stretched way past the breaking point. How much do we pay nurses? Does charity provide for adequate medical care for poor inner-city black kids? No.

This libertarian stuff pretends to be progressive, but the actual outcome of the suggested policies is incredibly regressive. It's no coincidence that libertarianism is a politics espoused by the already-privileged.

In the end, I am very happy to choose human dignity being more important than property rights as the hill to die on.
Can't wait to see your rewrite go live!
Show HN: Digestable Ingredient Database
Recently I’ve become frustrated with the ingredient labeling on packaged foods. The ingredient label is meant to empower consumers, but we eat strange chemicals every day without knowing their origin, function, or safety.

So I wrote Digestable, an ingredient and food additive database. My goal is to make the ingredient label accessible to everyone. Each food additive is explained in short, simple terms- no chemical formulas, and avoiding or explaining jargon.

In addition to the ingredients, I've started a blog series that explains some other aspects of food additives. (e.g. "What is an emulsifier?" "What's in a Red Bull?").

http://digestable.co

API: http://digestable.co/api

Let me know what you think!
That's absolutely true. The main difference here is that the experiment's negative impact was unabstracted yet they still went ahead with the experiment. The hypothesis was more or less 'we can make people depressed', without the slightest hint of defensible motives or objectives ('we want to make our ads more effective', 'we want to find the best way to convince customers that they want our product'.)
50.1% of all living things for it to be biologically normal.

50.1% of human beings for it to be emotionally normal.

But; let's also add your comment is nonsense. I don't need empirical data to state suicide is not normal.

I am a human being, that is alive and capable of reason.

The HN propensity for immediately crying foul at lack of empirical evidence is almost child like.

Are you that incapable of applying reasoned judgement to your daily life?

On another tangent; Why do you think sexuality is a choice? That statement alone shows you are not equipped to discuss the issue with any thing resembling common sense or informed opinion.

You are just tossing out a bunch of arbitrary control questions that mean nothing.
You don't actually have to run the numbers, because you can look through the dollar values to the underlying consumption distribution. And running the numbers is complicated by the likely discontinuity in wage and price inflation.

Is there enough food in the US to feed everyone? Undoubtably yes.

Is there enough space for housing? Yes, although the spatial distribution is a problem. But if it's no longer so essential to live where the jobs are ..

So, if the scheme is targeted to that everyone can afford a minimum standard of living, and taxes are increased so that income above that sees less of an increase in standard of living, the feasibility is obvious.

The real problems are the desire to exclude "undesirables" and "non-contributors", which results in an expensive, bureaucratic, and vindictive system.

(The UK is heading in the other direction with the "bedroom tax" and other changes leading to a big rise in demand from foodbanks)
Of course then there'd be relatively few people doing your mundane laboring...

That's my point: this calculation doesn't produce a meaningful number. It's why we regulate and exclude it from the market to start with: its get weird quickly, and its why my example is as it is - because it you really start thinking about it, making more blood isn't that difficult.
Whatever. I work at Microsoft and use sysinternals tools all day and then come home and use my Unix box where all that shit is built in and composable via like 4 command line apps.
The main indications that a line was crossed are the combination of a blatantly questionable hypothesis ('we can make people depressed or unhappy') with an intentional lack of informed consent & a huge set of test subjects.

If you're doing medical testing in order to roll something out as a pharmaceutical for prescription use or over-the-counter sales, the tests are rolled out in stages, with initial testing being done on a very small number of patients under extreme scrutiny, and even that is only done after the medication has been vetted carefully using animal models. It's extremely important to avoid harming your test subjects.

In comparison, they basically went full-steam on this experiment on hundreds of thousands of people despite the fact that emotional manipulation of this sort is EXTREMELY DANGEROUS. When I say extremely dangerous I mean potentially life-threatening.
The line I quoted implies that the OP thinks that the research did not go under ethical review because if it had they would have required informed consent. But it did and they did not.
Yea ~1500 gallons of water for every pound of beef
> As in There where US treasury bonds issued at 17%

That has much more to do with large-scale experimentation than exogenous factors.

> At current interst rates our debt is sustainable but bump that to 10+% for to long and it would distroy our economy.

Without a peg/convertibility the central bank will always have the last say on bond rates[1].

[1] http://www.cfeps.org/pubs/wp-pdf/WP53-Fullwiler.pdf
You're not alone, but I think you do yourself a disservice by underestimating the potential negative impact of an experiment designed for the purpose of manipulating a customer's emotions. There's no defensible business objective here, and furthermore, any business objective that relies on this kind of emotional manipulation is suspect.

Intentionally making a customer depressed is not something you fuck around with. It's incredibly dangerous, and doing it to a huge subset of your audience with no mechanisms to ensure you don't inflict real harm is utterly reckless and irresponsible.

The individual mechanisms and approach used here for the experiment are not, in and of themselves, objectionable. Many A/B tests are wholly defensible. The end goal and process are the problem here.
Pretty cool, but I don't think anyone wants to carry an extra rectangle with them just for a flash.
Ethical review by facebook is not ethical review.

That's like asking a serial killer about his opinion of murder.
When I do user interviews, I always try to talk a little bit at the beginning about something not directly relevant. It's especially good when I can offer something about myself; if I open up to people, they'll often open up more to me. It may look like a waste of time, but the better results say otherwise.
I don't see the distinction. It's fine to market your product, but there is such a thing as distortion and as a scam. Providing a fair representation of your product factors into ethics, as does Facebook fairly presenting the feed of your friends news, with a reasonable attempt at NOT distorting it.
A Pocket of Near-Perfection (2004)
Sure, there are definitely a few. I dig Always Sometimes Monsters's use of the aesthetic. But for the most part, they're pretty grim.
It was also reviewed by a Cornell IRB.
First principles thinking: a better way to innovate
Another key difference that I couldn't see in the article is that degrees in the UK are focused on depth (and last three years); while degrees in the US focus on breadth and last four years. This probably also relates to how students in the UK specialize a bit earlier (during high school / A levels) while students in the US leave that decision to their first year of college.
These will make you happier.

GTAC 2013: Drinking the Ocean - Finding XSS at Google Scale: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rd5TZKRg-lc (from Google Test Automation conference).

Google I/O 2012 - Security and Privacy in Android Apps : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPJENzweI-A

This one is fun to watch. (GTAC 2011: Keynote - How Hackers See Bugs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onpxOG3TrWg) Not technical, but good for a bus ride.
You'll be down voted over nothing on this site. It's not worth defending.
I am really trying to understand both sides of this. Focusing on the actual research, what about it do you think requires informed consent?

Do you understand how widespread this kind of research is? Literally everyone does this.

The act of publishing can't be the ethical breach -- just focus on the research, what do you think they did wrong there?
Experimenters have tell fibs in order to discover the truth about your behavior: the only way to prevent you from thinking of the word "elephant" is say the experiment is about cats. This is generally considered OK, provided that you won't be upset when you find out what was really going on.

And, without the benefit of hindsight, it is hard to see why people would get upset about this experiment. I reckon Facebook users are more upset by the truth, that their "personal" feelings are so influenced by trivial aspects of their environment, than by the way Facebook demonstrated it. The truth sometimes hurts, but science isn't to blame.
> If you truly care about speed you'll have different optimizations for int32 and int64.

I'm pretty sure that's what C++ templates specialisation is for...
In their summary there's a pretty massive gap in their lack of obtaining informed consent and how dangerous that might be:

"Significance:

We show, via a massive (N=689,003) experiment on Facebook, that emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness. We provide experimental evidence that emotional contagion occurs without direct interaction between people (exposure to a friend expressing an emotion is sufficient), and in the complete absence of nonverbal cues."
The Economics of Star Trek (2013)
(was posted six months ago, but fell off the radar.)
SLC is heavily Democratic, like a little San Francisco, while the outer suburbs are the most Republican urban areas in the USA. Utah County's suburban voters make it the most Republican urbanized place in the USA with frequent 80+% results for Republican candidates.

But both areas -- Salt Lake and Utah counties -- vote for transit.

Part of the reason is that there is no Religious Right in the Utah Republican Party. The local Republicans are libertarians, western Republicans, country club Republicans, and big business Republicans. But that cultural revanchiste Religious Right just doesn't have a foothold in Utah. The organizations that promote it are unrelentingly hostile to the Church (Specifically the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints).

My theory is that the people who hate transit are linked to the Religious Right cultural suburbanists and possibly the Neocons. Utahns may happen to live in suburbs, but aren't emotionally invested in hating the kind of people who ride the train. Also, Utah suburbs tend to be close knit because of the prevalence of one church where the community meets regularly.
White iPhone 5 LCD replacement touch screen digitizer
For a fraction of the cost, this iPhone 5 LCD replacement and touch screen digitizer can repair a damaged touch screen and the LCD display at the same time. This complete front assembly in white will allow you to see images clearly again, without inky spots or scratches to the touch screen. If the touch screen is not responding properly, this assembly can replace a broken touch screen.
This is Facebook. Is has a tremendous effect on peoples lives. And that's precisely why it's worth $100B. This is nothing more than a tweak in their ranking algorithm -- much larger and even targeted/dynamic modifications occur all the time. How can a reasonable person be upset by this?

If the study is unethical by any reasonable standard, does this amount to condemning the whole company, even the whole industry? Because if this is unethical, you are calling out an extremely widespread practice...
Does someone remember the name of the NSA program concerning psychological manipulation on social networks ?
Most of my engineering and math courses worked on a linear curve. The highest grade in the class was made into a 100% and the rest of the class was slid up by an equal number of percentage points.

Sometimes this happened for the entire class grade, other times it just happened with tests.

In my general experience, a 70% was a pretty good score. Most profs aimed to have tests hard enough that 80% was around the top anyone got.

All that said, having everything rely on final exams seems foolish. Computer Science is mostly taught through projects, I feel as though my upper level courses had exams more as a matter of "well I think we are supposed to have tests, so, umm, here we go" than anything else.

Not to mention finals lead to cramming, which lead to horrible retention of material. Small cumulative exams spaced throughout the quarter/semester lead to much better recollection of material overall.

Edit: As for cheating, well....

I only ever cheated in one course, and only then because the material was horribly unfair and the professor was terrible at teaching. Cheating in this case consisted of putting material that we were expected to rote memorize (!!) on to my calculator. (For reference, it was chemistry class, before that class I used to really like chemistry... :( )

Asides from that? I think everyone knows of the student who seomehow got through even a hard program (such as CS!) without really doing his or her fair share, but from what I noticed (although I am pretty oblivious) cheating wasn't all that common.

In regards to grades, they mattered far less once I was in my department. :) (Thankfully!)
yeah swiftkey is cool. I just tap normally, but you can be extremely sloppy with it (increasing speed) and it'll correct your mistakes as you go.

Only dig on it is that it leaves up a notification that you can't get rid of on some android phones. That's more an android issue from what I read though.
> It explains how natural language is a very poor way to express programs, and how it held back science and progress for many centuries.

I'm not interested in using natural language to implement the software (write code). I'm interested in using natural/technical language to create an ontology for the architecture. This is where things get gray.

When I think of an architecture, I think of something that evolves over time. I think of architecture as a tool to facilitate communication between programmers, designers, project management, domain experts, & users.

This ontology evolves over time as the software, understanding of the domain, & the domain itself changes.

I see this fuzziness as an accurate model of the conceptual domain, which is ultimately based on the understanding of multiple humans. This understand is fuzzy and heavily dependent on context. And yet, the ontology attempts to coral this fuzziness into more strongly defined concepts, which map to the implementation. The implementation should not be fuzzy at all.

> Other invariants are similar. Instead of documenting them or keeping them in your head, you let your compiler worry about them.

I usually use guard clauses to protect against nulls. I rely on my tests & production monitoring systems to prove that the implementation is incorrect. When there is such proof, I correct the system. In environments that support rapid feedback & deployment, like the web, this works well. In environments that don't support rapid deployment, iteration, and where lives are at stake, not so well.

> But Go is extremely inflexible. It has a very primitive set of tools to do everything, clumsily. A language like Haskell, for example, lets you have Go-like coroutines and channels. But it also lets you program with software transactional memory, or use other parallelism constructs.

That sounds good to me.

> Also, the inability to specify invariants of your program isn't flexibility.

That mostly sounds good. I would want invariants to be optional, which sounds like is the case.
The thing that I fear though, is that broadband monopolists would use metered service to price gouge high-end users. The lack of competition makes this too easy to exploit.
The most crucial step in that recipe is using a device without a GSM baseband. That rules out anything sold as a 'phone,' such as the OnePlus One.
You don't need to copy those boilerplate functions everywhere you go. Bash and others have "set -e" which will make the overall script exit with an error if one of its commands returns an error. Also useful is "set -u" to detect the use of unset variables (though some people write shell scripts which depend on those, so it's not as universally applicable).

Try writing "set -eu" as the first line of your shell scripts. It's sort of like compiling with "-Wall -Werror"--not the default but perhaps should have been.
I'm fairly sure they will have some discussion about this there.

Look, mistakes were made. These could have been addressed with a suitable apology. Instead you get this bs and hiding being 'but it was reviewed' when clearly there is a disconnect between the way this study is perceived by the subjects and the people that conducted it and those that reviewed it.

Maybe it is that facebook is not exactly associated with ethical conduct, maybe it is that the review boards were asleep at the switch, maybe it is that in a corporate context ethics is so far removed from the stated goals that such discussions are meaningless.

But for all the review that took place and all the points in time at which this study could have been halted the fact that nobody steps up and says: "we were wrong to do this" tells you more than enough about the state of ethics at facebook.

And I'm not at all surprised, there is a good reason I don't have an account there. But I'm still surprised at how bad they are handling the fall-out from this. They're essentially making it worse, not better.

Do you work for facebook?
Awk and sysadmin tips from Charlie Stross.

Life is good.