skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is only a limited amount of credibility you can generate by paying reviewers from one extorted Bitcoin.
Indian tech media website NextBigWhat buying fake followers on social
When addressing criticism, it's not great to start "Ok so." (Or "Calm Down. Breathe. We Hear You" [1], to dig farther back in time.)

[1] http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook/calm-down-breathe-we-...
That is precisely why the author relies on his smartpen:

"After all, shorthand—at least my shorthand—isn’t foolproof. Even though, for short stretches, I can write 120 words per minute, the average American now speaks at more than 150 words a minute, so something is inevitably lost in the translation. With my trusty Sky smartpen, though, I don’t have to worry. Most of the time, when I get around to writing the story, I can rely on my handwritten notes for short quotes and background information. But when I need a longer, verbatim quote, I can use my notes as a kind of index to find the right part of the interview, and tap there with my pen to hear the playback. No more of the forward/reverse dance with a digital recorder when it’s time to transcribe. It’s an almost flawless system."

The article isn't just about a cool old technology (though he does spend a lot of time on it), but to demonstrate the novel combination of complementary old and new technologies.
Is there any free(for commercial use) candlestick charts available?
The parent is talking about subject consent, not board approval. These are two vastly different things.
Breaking Through a Growth Stall
Is it an ethical breach if I don't get informed consent from users when I do A/B testing on my website? Or is it only unethical if I publish the results afterwards? Or is it only if I'm actually trying to affect the user's mood specifically?
>There are reasons why research goes under ethical review before it is conducted

Did you miss that line?
isn't this same as tibco's event-bus offering ?
I believe the study was highly unethical. However, in many studies participants have no idea what's being studied about them. The participant content angle seems less ominous than the rest of it, and might be detracting from discussing more serious ethical implications that come from optimizing user engagement and it's derivative forms.
your setup is pretty bad (performance and security), here comes why:

1. combine all listen 80 - serverblocks into one, and then

return 301 https://$host$request_uri;
instead of rewrite, it is faster
and you can skip the if (scheme) - part, because if is evil
http://wiki.nginx.org/IfIsEvil

2. where are your ciphers? they are bad anyway and doesnt seem to be the defaults, and RC4 as preferred ciphers, phew!

3. you are vulnerable to the latest CCS-vuln
https://8ack.de/scan/result/sslvulns/71ba019e9d4bf25fd422ab0...

4. you use an quite old nginx-version; debian? you should use a newer one that supports SPDY (faster loading for all those images)

5. OH NOES .... https://wbsrch.com/admin/ rule nr. 1: never expose admin/backend-logins to the interwebs

6. no HSTS

7. you support TLS 1.2., but no PFS, is there a reason for this? otherwise, this is a bad decision
https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=wbsrch.com

8. define STATIC - resouces with django; advantage: you dont have to try_files and can skip the regex-location for static content
https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/howto/static-files/

9. why did you turned off ssl_session_cache???
https://www.mare-system.de/guide-to-nginx-ssl-spdy-hsts/#opt...

10. use proxy_cache for /

11. turn off server_tokens
e3c4676d14a8ddd07d140f6d3e771ae8994ff5f4a159ba70fa5f5a9eaf026ada9a9f61021ef5ec27466718573c8a73621d119c385eb284fe322eaefaff2d1b42

more on nginx + ssl: https://www.mare-system.de/guide-to-nginx-ssl-spdy-hsts/
Here: http://www.fusioncharts.com/javascript-charting-comparison/
Thanks for your feedback :)
At first we did load a shell extension but we stopped due to performance issues. now its just a user-registry entry that starts the executable with the dir/file as parameter.
Hello,

What does it say about the current state of our laws, that an individual had to register as a corporation in order to gain MORE protection over their personal information and their privacy?

Corporations seems to have way too much power, which is often at the expense of individuals and even governments.
This is where the real discussion needs to focus. These are the hard questions we need to consider
> The reason we did this research is because we care about the emotional impact of Facebook and the people that use our product.

That.. or getting users to click more ads.

Maybe ad inventory can be optimized for people in an certain emotional state, and the user's wall can be used to induce the most profitable state of mind for fb's available ad inventory. That would be awesome in an evil villain kind of way.
Yes, but so does keeping your code first order, avoiding callback functions even without the hazard of side effects.
sslabs gives you grade F
https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=wbsrch.com

btw, where are your cipher_suites from?
People calling this unethical have to explain why it is but A/B testing is not.
It's not trying to do well in the benchmarks, so no surprise there really.
And what about you?
Do you have any thoughts about the explanation itself? I made it past the first two words, and thought the explanation was fairly reasonable and satisfying.
> That.. or getting users to click more ads.

Or both, with no contradictions at all.
In three letters: NIH. Management decision was that all IP had to be 100% owned by the company and had to be in 'C', in spite of an enormous amount of friction between C and the project as well as a bunch of work by others that could have been leveraged if we had decided to use code from other contributors. I got called in long after these decisions were made and it was very clear they weren't going to budge on those. There is a lot more to this story but I'm not at liberty to tell. Let's just say I learned a lot.
It seems to be that Facebook did something like an A/B test of their ranking algorithm, and then did a cohort study to see if there were any longer term impact.

If what they did requires informed consent, what about when the end goal is maximizing click through rate, e.g. by inciting an emotional response?

Let's say FB finds that certain types of posts in the feed cause a nearby ad to be clicked on more. They determine this through pervasive testing of everything that you see and do on their site. They could then adjust their algorithm to account for this behavior to increase clicks/profit.

I think the actions FB takes to monetize the user base are not only more intrusive by far, they are actively searching for and exploiting these effects for profit. If informed consent for TFA is not ridiculous, then I think we have much bigger problems on our hands? What am I missing about the informed consent issue?
HFT add liquidity on a second by second basis, but nothing on even a short term basis. Market makers speed up transactions slightly, but the cost for doing so is vary high.
Not even just A/B testing. Any form of interaction which is intended to alter the mood or beliefs of any person, including visual design, advertising, marketing, etc.
Let's not conflate cost and value here. The price people pay for my blood is at least the value to them. The same goes for my labor. I'd say the buyer gets a greater value per dollar paid from my lifesaving blood than they do from my relatively mundane laboring. By that reasoning I'm more valuable as spare parts, not less.

The implication of the calculation isn't nearly as sweeping as you think, it's merely that more people should donate blood. Especially if it has low "cost" to them compared to others (say, because they're not queasy about it).

Given what we know about what people are willing to pay for both, I think it's fairly clear what society values more. If an evil genie forced me to choose between reliving my life in a way that either deprived the world of my blood products or of my labor, and I knew that on the basis of money alone my blood was more valuable, then unless I was doing some particularly civic-minded work it would seem obvious I'd contribute more as an unemployed blood donor.
A/B testing is for commercial purposes, it's wildly different when you are testing the user's psychological state.
E-voting experiments end in Norway amid security fears
You are wrong about Erlang. It's threads ("processes") are not preemptive and must explicitly yield for another thread to execute. Most of the time the VM handles it for you, every few hundred bytecode instructions it checks if another thread should run. But if you write a C extension, call sleep(10) then the Erlang VM will twiddle its thumbs for 10 seconds.

It's not a corner case -- it means any call to a C library needs to be carefully vetted so as to not cause an overly long computation or blocking because just a single one will totally ruin your concurrent experience. ALL VM:s using user mode threads/fibers suffer from that problem.

Real kernel threads doesn't have a lot of overhead and are almost always a much better choice.
Saturn's Children was pretty good. From what I've heard, everything by Charles Stross is worth reading.
This comment on the piece aptly sums up my response, it's by Sean Tucker:

Adam, I don't know you -- I came here from the Buzzfeed article criticizing the ethics of the study that linked to this post, but it appears we do have a friend in common.

I just have to ask - you honestly had a hypothesis that amounted to 'perhaps we can make people more depressed,' and decided to test it on a group that hadn't consented to the experiment, with no way to track its impact on their actual lives, only on the language they used in their Facebook posts? And you ask us to trust that this passed an internal review so it's ethical?

Please take a moment to step back and consider that. That appears to have been the train of thought that led to this.

That's appalling. Completely appalling. The Atlantic piece is right -- there's absolutely no way this passes APA deceptive research standards.

Beyond that, you'll never know what impact this actually had on depressed people. You can only measure what they posted to Facebook, which isn't a particularly meaningful or realistic indicator of their emotional state.

If this passed an internal review board, that's only proof that Facebook's internal review standards aren't what they need to be.

You're in a position of extraordinary power, with access to more subscribers than any other field study in history, a larger population than most nations, and subject only to how you review yourselves. You could deceive yourself into believing you have informed consent because everyone clicked 'accept' on the Terms of Service years ago, but there's no way even you think that's a meaningful standard.

I trust you're a reasonable person who doesn't set out to cross ethical boundaries. But on this one, I think Facebook needs to admit it did and make some changes. This study was unethical by any reasonable standard. There's nothing wrong with admitting that and figuring out a way to do better.

There's a lot wrong with going ahead with anything like this, ever again.
A/B tests are different, though: in aggregate, they should make your website better for me, the user. Here the user is just fodder for an academic's fairly trivial journal article (my friends' feelings affect my feelings!).

Who decides what experiments social scientists get to run on 1/7th of the world's population?
No not at all.I was not aware of that, will definitely check with the designer. Thanks a lot for informing me!
I wonder where the line is between A/B testing and 'psychological experimentation' and when it's been crossed. Was it crossed just because it was published in PNAS? The outraged don't seem to think so.

What if I'm Amazon or Yelp, and I want to choose review snippets? Is looking for emotionally charged ones and testing to see how that impacts users wrong?

What if it's more direct psychological manipulation? What if I run a productivity app, and I want to see how giving people encouraging tips, like 'Try starting the day by doing one thing really well.' impacts their item completion rate. I'm doing psychological experimentation. I'm not getting my users' permission. But I am helping them. And it's a valid question - maybe these helpful tips actually end up hurting users. I should test this behavior, not just implement it wholesale.

It seems like Facebook had a valid question, and they didn't know what the answer was. Did they go wrong when they published it in PNAS? Or was it wrong to implement the algorithm in the first place? I don't think it was.
I said `yes' to servant, since Sauron is a servant to Morgoth (or so). I guess the program had another idea.
PSLV-C23 Successfully Launches French Earth Observation Satellite, Four Others
I'm an engineer, and I had an extremely bad stimulant problem (amphetamine when I could get my hands on it, methamphetamine when I couldn't). It came pretty close to wrecking my life, but I got over it.

Don't take this the wrong way if you're reluctant to deal with the problem right now (before I got serious about quitting I hated it when people lectured me about this stuff), but here's what got me clean. It's really hard, but it's possible and I wish I had done it much earlier.

For me it took a stint in rehab (30 days), which I strongly recommend if your job will allow it. While it's certainly possible that owning up to your problem at work will cost you your job, HR folks usually have training and experience with employees with substance abuse problems, and if you're at all valued as an employee, they'll usually give you a chance to get your shit together. Most people have a sense that rehab is kind of shitty, but to be honest, I had a blast. Basically summer camp with group therapy.

Whether or not you're able to do rehab, you should absolutely check out Narcotics Anonymous. NA meetings are not all created equal, and some are really bad -- dealers showing up, no one really staying clean, that kind of thing. Shop around before you give up on it. I was pretty turned off by all the God talk, especially since I'm pretty sure that I couldn't actually get myself to believe in anything like that, but nobody shoves it down your throat, and in my own experience it works perfectly well whether you believe in God or not. It's mostly about social support.

Ninja edit: I don't have any personal experience with opiate withdrawal, but I've heard really good things from a lot of ex-junkies about Suboxone. It's not a magic bullet, but it's a fuck of a lot easier than being dope sick for a week.
Based on the other comments, it appears that the difference between kosher A/B testing and unethical experimentation with dire mental health consequences is either "Did you publish a paper when you were done" or "Are you a big, noteworthy company".
Thanks for the numbers.
Also longtime Boulder resident here. Yes, agreed 100%. Boulder and surrounding NW communities really got the shit end of the stick here. The phony BRT seems little different than what is in place now (just replace the ABX sign with BRT, and there you go), but something that we will probably have to live with for a generation at least. I don’t have high hopes for how the buses will perform during snow storms (unlike rail which has fewer problems in inclement weather). How will this be considered an improvement is beyond me. What is really disappointing is Boulder residents and politicians are just rolling over dead instead of either demanding the service they were promised and voted for or trying to get their tax money back. And I don’t expect RTD will ever be able to pass another tax increase ballot measure ever again. The rest of Denver-metro has their train (already or soon), so they won’t vote for another tax increase and neither will Boulder given how much they have been shafted in the past.

Apart from the NW corridor complete fiasco, yes FasTracks is really quite nice in other areas of Denver-metro.
Great website. But compared with hardware and software, I am more interested in what "tools" they use to help them work better, like their ways of thinking.
+1. It's all about the end goal.
For those like me who lived under a rock, here's the study: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/05/29/1320040111
I think it would also be visually distracting and place too much emphasis in how high stories are ranked. Note also that Reddit doesn't work this way.
There was a talk at passwords^10 (2010) about security of pins/keys in iphone/android/windows phone (IIRC). Don't recall who the speaker was, and all the links to talks/programs etc have gone to bitrot (might be possible to find on archive.org, I've yet to try that).

If I remember correctly an encrypted iphone (4 I guess?) was the most secure, but with a bit of hackery one could use the device itself to bruteforce the pin (and thus access the key, and then the data). Not sure if that's actually been patched in later iterations of the iphone.

If you find this stuff interesting, consider going to passwords^14 (August 5th-6th, Las Vegas): https://passwordscon.org/
> What are the odds of something like this becoming core to how the IETF writes it's recommendations?

This is a document mandating just that.

Status-wise, this is a BCP (Best Current Practice) document, so it's as senior and authoritative as IETF documents get.
BCPs are on the same top tier as IETF's Standards Track documents, they go through a heavy (as far as IETF goes) process involving IESG approval etc.

This means that specs have to take this BCP into account in their (mandatory) security considerations sections, and spec reviewers are required to take issue if a spec isn't doing that.

Like rules in general, this is subject to gaming on various levels, so if a working group is manned by snooping enthusiasts they can conspire to do this weakly. But it's still something!
I'm going to try and avoid the minefield that is this research vs. ethics.

One thought I've had is that the blowback against this incident is less about the research itself and how ethical it is, and more about perception of Facebook in general. My suspicion is a lot of the opposition at this point comes from long-simmering distrust of Facebook and the increasingly negative perception of its brand - this incident is merely the straw that broke the camel's back, for some.

And if the popular response to this revelation reflects people's general views on Facebook, it's not good for the company.
Wow, what an amazingly tone-deaf post. It demeans Facebook users who were offended at the company's actions into simpletons who did not really understand what the study was really about. Sample this:

> Nobody's posts were "hidden," they just didn't show up on some loads of Feed.

How is hiding any different from not showing up?

> And at the end of the day, the actual impact on people in the experiment was the minimal amount to statistically detect it.

Not what your own study claimed.

> I can understand why some people have concerns about it, and my coauthors and I are very sorry for the way the paper described the research and any anxiety it caused.

We are not sorry about the research, but only for "the way the paper described it".

> In hindsight, the research benefits of the paper may not have justified all of this anxiety.

In hindsight, our users are hyperventilating frogs. They should learn how to relax in the nice warm(ing) Facebook waters.
It won't work, since the average number of people living in one building varies with the country. I guess it should be around 10 people per building in USA and 100 people per building in Russia, for example.
The other option they are working on besides balloons seems more manageable in that regard:

http://www.cnet.com/news/google-buys-solar-powered-drone-com...

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/google-will-beam-gigabit-in...
They only make the site better for you if you're on the "winning" side. If A/B tests made the site better for everyone being tested, they'd not be very useful. Unless you mean "they should make your website better for me [after the test is done]", in which case they have the same goal as Facebook's study.
I don't think you missed anything. I don't see any reason to trust blackphone more than a properly configured Nexus.

The OS might have some neat UI for privacy stuff, but fundamentally if it's closed source and has a closed baseband (afaik, there's no phone with an open baseband), then there's no real security.
The omission of truth is more disingenuous than contradictory.
It seems there is a ground based repeater, at least initially. See the second article picture: 'Project Loon team members install a Loon Internet antenna while schoolchildren look on.'

That said we have satellite phones now. Given the lower altitude of balloons getting a signal back should be realistic over future developments.
Spark – use Cassandra as a Resilient Distributed DataSet source
New article on using Cassandra database as a resilient distributed dataset source for Spark with openstratio to operate on WorldCup matchs
But a lot of A/B testing does test a user's psychological state. One could argue that doing it for commercial purposes makes it worse.
> Did you miss that line?

Do you understand the word 'consent'?
Is Ramadan becoming too commercial?
The last paragraph does not give me warm feelings about Facebook's internal controls on this kind of research:

"While we’ve always considered what research we do carefully, we (not just me, several other researchers at Facebook) have been working on improving our internal review practices. The experiment in question was run in early 2012, and we have come a long way since then."
source: http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.org.user-groups.bsd.nycbug/...

edit: or the way more useful entire nifty(1) gmane-thread http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.user-groups.bsd.nycbug/871...
I'd imagine you reveal too much information with your personal latex writing style.
...I'm talking about throwing an exception or something similar, not getting a segfault. Like in Java.
FusionCharts can export charts to PNG, JPG, PDF and SVG. I've been trying both FusionCharts and HighCharts for past few weeks and I can say that I am a bit inclined towards FusionCharts. Had this discussion the other day as well when Epoch[1] was released.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7948560
Haze OS
why was this dead from the first second I posted it?
If your A/B testing is intentionally inducing a negative mental state in your users without letting them know up front, I'd say that's probably an ethical breach.

In general, A/B testing is studying the website. You're not testing us, you're testing the best ways to convince us to do stuff. On top of that, when users visit your website (which is presumably pitching something to them), they know they're being pitched. They know the website is going to try to convince them to do stuff--click over here, watch this video, sign up for foogadgetmcawesome. Same drill with advertising. Yeah, this commercial with the freaking Budweiser puppy made me cr--er, chop onions--in its attempt to get me to buy beer, but I know they're trying to sell me beer, and I knew as soon as the puppy hit the screen that I'd probably start sniffling.