skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Users aren't fed every post by every one of their friends -- users would be overwhelmed with posts flying by so fast they couldn't keep up -- so it's no secret FB tweaks its feed algorithm to keep users engaged. And experimenting with network effects is what social networks do.

Every time you see a picture of someone you like it's like a little shot of dopamine goes off in your head. Facebook wants to optimize those dopamine shots to continually bump engagement and create an experience where everyone is habitually checking their feed every 10 mins.

This type of behavior design/economics research is done by Dan Ariely at MIT ("Predictably Irrational" http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_asks_are_we_in_control_o...) and the Stanford Persuasive Tech Lab (http://captology.stanford.edu/).
They have no business model. That's the problem they're facing. They expected higher growth and higher user numbers. They expected to heavily displace sites like Answers.com and Yahoo Answers, and that did not happen - both of those are mainstream, have not lost traffic due to Quora, and Quora has never managed to go mainstream in terms of scale.

Quora has to abandon the Q&A space as they've known it (aka pivot). There's no possibility of ever, under any circumstances, justifying a $1 billion valuation, much less say a $3 billion valuation (which their most recent investors have to be hoping for at least), in the traditional Q&A space. Answers.com is three times the size of Quora in terms of traffic, and they're worth maybe 1/5th what Quora is.
I think it's a great idea! I'm sure a friendly chess game between nations will not end up encouraging nationalism and political division :)
So as long as you aren't publishing the results of your experimentation, none of the ethics that apply to experimenting on humans apply?

That's an...interesting...theory.
Their method of removing happy posts is not the same as deliberately making people sad. Before the experiment it was highly plausible that people would become more happy if they saw less happy posts by others[0].

Moreover, I think companies should be doing more experiments like the FB one -- it's high time that human happiness be prioritized over other metrics such as profit, revenue, number of likes etc.

[0] http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2011/01/the_a...
http://pando.com/2014/06/28/facebooks-science-experiment-on-...

"Facebook itself could target certain users, whether they be corporate rivals or current/former employees. Having such strong psychological control over your workforce would certainly have its benefits. And if Facebook ever gets caught? Why, the company could claim it’s all part of a social experiment, one that users tacitly agreed to when they signed up.

With over one-tenth of the world’s population signing into Facebook every day, and now with evidence to back the emotional power of the company’s algorithmic manipulation, the possibilities for widespread social engineering are staggering and unlike anything the world has seen. Granted, Facebook’s motives probably are simply to convince people to buy more stuff in order to please advertisers, but the potential uses of that power to impact elections or global trade could be enticing to all sorts of powerful interest groups."
You'd think, but the Blackphone's Security Center manages to do that very easily, with great UX. I use XPrivacy on my HTC One and the UX is a mess of mystery buttons and weird, technical options. Blackphone has a on/off switches for things like "Camera & Audio", "Record audio", "Read contacts", etc.

There's also a tab for non-privacy-related permissions, e.g. vibrate, notification, keep awake, etc, which are on by default, to make sure the app isn't unnecessarily limited by default. It's miles better than the default Android permissions system, and one of the features I like best about the phone.

Android could very easily implement something like that, with a dialog asking if the user wants to grant the permission, with perfect backwards compatibility (since there are devices/software that does it now), and I hope they do.
Especially glad they're forcing the issue with cars. Imagine if a bug or security vulnerability in Maps led to an accident ("Now turn left NO TURN RIGHT TURN RIGHT NOW").

Functionally, since Google Auto probably doesn't touch the car's own computer system, it's probably no worse than a vulnerability in your phone. But the PR from "Google Auto bug causes accident" sounds so much more terrible than "smartphone bug causes accident".
Sundar is the kind of guy who gives you hope that the world is working as intended: Smart, kind, humble, hardworking.

Several of my friends work for him. They all love it. It's great to see him getting his moment in the spotlight.
The difference between Facebook and Twitter on your last point is that Facebook does it for you like a gentleman, and twitter has you pick feeds which will never disagree with you manually.

Either way you're just going to listen to the least dissenting material you can find, might as well let them figure it out for you.

Maybe the difference is between moral good with questionable ethics, and moral mediocrity with unquestionable ethics.
> My own way to reconcile this -- and I admit it's not a mainstream view -- is that advertisement and salesmanship should be considered just as unethical.

I agree with that, or probably think even more strongly - that advertisements/sales are more unethical than research. It's difficult to put limits though, because even if many salesmen clearly act maliciously, pretty much everything you do or say influences people this way or another; it's how we communicate.

What I'd love to see is Facebook creating an opt-in option for an user to be a part of further sociological research. I'd gladly turn it on and be happy that I'm helping humanity, while Facebook could limit their studies to people who explicitly consented (there's an issue with selection bias though). They have too good data to be not used for the betterment of mankind.
I always check out this website before buying any products in dating and relationship advice - www.catertoya.com. My personal favorite is Capture His Heart - a product that helps you earn the man you want and enhance your relationship. No joke, this stuff is legit
What I'm hoping for is a new group of services that help with permission seeking and politics.

I don't really need help fining an expensive laser cutter to use or even a Chinese guy to make products for me. I need help getting an FCC cert for an intentional radiator. A UL listing for a power supply design. CE for Europe, whatever for Australia and Canada.

Then patent protection. Mostly protection from patents, not filing for.

Import/Export. There's countries that its a federal crime to ship electronic gizmos to. Which ones, what kinds? What forms do I have to fill out so that my products don't spend 6 expensive months in a bonded warehouse in New Jersey while I get permission to receive them?

Do I need product liability insurance? What kind? Where do I get it?

These are the thing I think makers that want to convert into businesses need help with the most. Making the actual product seems like the easy part.
The only thing I don't care for in all this is the deification of Swartz, as if he played no part in the dilemma he found himself in. That said, something need to be done about the prosecutors in this country, who overcharge and bend the law in way not intended.
Personal Programming: A 4D videogame which displays 3D renderings of arbitrary hyperplanes and allows for arbitrary rotations (so you're not limited just to axis-aligned views). Leading up to that, a 3D videogame which is experienced via arbitrary 2D planes, displayed in raycaster-style 2.5D. Turns out to be incredibly difficult to navigate a 3D maze with only a 2D viewpoint....

Personal Not-Programming: Building a pair of 5-foot single staffs with woodburning decorations, metal end caps, and quarter pound lead weights embedded in the end for more angular inertia. Also trying to estimate the electric field in orbit around a pulsar for a science fiction story.

Professional: Building a web-based annotated media player for foreign language instruction that supports video, audio, and plain text, and provides a uniform interaction model for interactive text in plain text documents, transcripts, and subtitles with both automated annotations derived from electronic dictionaries and manually edited annotations.
Um...I don't see it in your profile.
you can choose to enable permissions on a case by case basis if you install XPrivacy. You can either enable/disable permissions upfront, or have XPrivacy prompt you as an application attempts to access various functionality.

The downside is it requires root, but it works very very well.

http://forum.xda-developers.com/xposed/modules/test-xprivacy...
I'm using xprivacy. It is a pain in the ass but does give me the functionality you mentioned. Root required. Asks with popup on requested permission. Tracks app permission request history. Fresh installed apps restricted by default. I paid for the pro/donation version which fetches community curated restriction lists. Honestly I don't know if its worth the bother but seems like the least I can do. I do get some comfort finding many apps I install actually use less permissions than they ask for at install.
http://bit.ly/Capturehisx3
I believe Cambridge was the first place to be declared "complete".
What Amazon forked is not the Android the licencees like Samsung use. That Android, the one that most people use, is exactly as 'open' as Windows.
>how can wealth not become more concentrated over time?

While in a laissez faire system wealth will tend to concentrate this can be countered by tax and similar measures regardless at to whether they are injurious to the economy or not. In the UK we've had technology undermining workers since the industrial revolution and people protesting it since at least the Luddites in 1811. In spite of things like the introduction of electrical equipment in the 1920s, inequality fell substantially between then and the 70s due to tax rates going as high as over 90%, free education, the NHS, council housing and similar pro equality policies. Then since the 80s with Regan / Thatcher things have swung the other way. Political policy can override much of the technological pressures on equality. Indeed both extremes, everyone owning everything equally or one king owning everything and everyone else owning nothing and being his serfs/servants can be approximately achieved by suitable political and military power.
Well that seems to me to be a core issue here. Otherwise, you'd need to get IRB permission for every A/B test you do on your website.
As a side project I've been working on http://saved.io a simple way to store bookmarks across devices
The sense of depth in the logo is pretty incredible. In other news, does anyone know if there is a terminal client for Spotify?
Getting the right answer in 20 questions actually relies on a rough implementation of binary search over a huge possible "thing space". A problem I can see with applying this to medicine is that medical conditions don't always present in the same way and measurable factors are not binary, so you often can't rule out a hypothesis with a certain result, even if it reduces the probability of that hypothesis.

The decision algorithm in the article is amazing in its accuracy and simplicity. There is probably some other low-hanging fruit in reproducing this method in other areas of medicine by working with someone who already has a high degree of accuracy in their diagnoses, but doesn't fully understand their own process. But outside of areas where anyone has the current ability to make such accurate diagnoses, it would be a lot more complicated.

You'd need to determine which factors are important, which of those are covariant, and how that relationship works. Then from there, work over tons of data to establish a bayesian model with weightings to apply to each factor so that you can observe the evidence, plug it into the model, and get out your probability distribution over possible diagnoses. It's no easy task, but I believe that this kind of approach is the future of medicine.
With a hierarchical UI, the permissions can be controlled easily as finely or coarsely as desired. Something like this:

- [*] Phone
| |--[ ] Make outgoing calls
| |--[ ] Answer incoming calls
| \--[X] Read call log
|
+ [X] Access Location Services
|
- [ ] Network
| |--[ ] Outgoing connections
| \--[ ] Incoming connections (listen)
...
You don't have to move to Europe. Just Oakland.
You expect GMail to show you every non-spam message sent to you in your inbox. On Facebook, on the other hand, you expect a curated list of recent posts - otherwise you wouldn't be able to keep up with what your 500+ friends and 1500+ liked pages post every day. So comparing GMail to Facebook makes no sense at all.
You are right I should have clarify that. thank you
155,000 users for each treatment of the experiment, says the paper. Let's presume random selection, and that the occurrence rate of mental disorders is the same for Facebook users as the general public (probably not too far off). Then Facebook intentionally downgraded the emotional state of:

10,000 sufferers of Major Depressive Disorder

5,000 people with PTSD

4,000 bipolar disorder sufferers

1,700 schizophrenics

and a plethora of others with various mental disorders.

11/100,000 people commit suicide each year in America. How many were part of that treatment of the experiment, without consent or knowledge?

As a scientist, I'm fascinated by the research. As a human being, I'm horrified it was ever done.

http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/the-numbers-coun...
Some kind of platonic ideal of economics may be about experienced utility, but in practice it's just more politics.
Good point. I guess my concern -- recognizing this makes me sound like a Luddite or someone going on about "humans were never meant to know about this" -- is that the results of research like this aren't going to be used for the betterment of mankind. Rather, it'll be all about how to use a new mental vulnerability to get more eyeballs on someone's content or to increase the dopamine hits from browsing the site.

What I would love -- and what I would eagerly opt-in to -- would be a system where Facebook could educate users on irrational behaviors. "We noticed that 60% of users like you spent an average of 30 seconds more looking at this kind of content... this is because your brain etc etc etc". Creepy, perhaps, but if there were a way to help people be more aware of and defend against advertisement that would be neat.
Counteranecdatum for the author: I find your choice of foreground and background colors, syntax highlighting colors, font style and size, and line length inside your code blocks to be quite legible and pleasant to read.

Please make these sorts of choices again in the future!
You are right, I missed that. But you should have protocol relative urls on servers which run https.
For Android emulation try this http://www.genymotion.com/
off-site backup
RIP 16 karma
I was born in Portugal and lived there for most of my life. Virtually everything the OP said could describe some portuguese person just as well. Hell, I could have written it at some point and it would be a surprisingly accurate summary of my life back then. These are symptoms of problems that live in you, that consume you from the inside, they will follow you wherever you go, you can't just run away and escape them all. I don't have any recommendations, but you have my empathy and understanding. I believe you will find your way out, maybe by finding some deeper meaning to your life, maybe by finding your place in the world or maybe by just stop giving a fuck.

On the other hand I have a feeling that something is pretty fucked with western society in general. And as the western model of society is pretty much expanding everywhere it is becoming a global problem. I can't quite put by finger on it but maybe it has to do with ever growing expectations, the idea that we can be or do everything, that is all in our hands and only depends on us puts an immense pressure on our shoulders and leads to immense pain. The truth, I think, is that luck plays an huge part in our life, on our successes and on our failures.

I am not sure if I made any sense, if I did not, please accept my apologies ;)
I am Tim Pope, crafter of Vim plugins. AMA
> It's possible that for it to be published, a higher standard would be needed. That is, the actions they took were ethical, but perhaps inappropriate for scientific publication.

> But, if that were the case, the peer reviewers and the journal in which it was published should have flagged that. That it was published shows they didn't have any significant concerns.

This would not be a scientific ethics issue if they explained their IRB review in the manuscript. It is so unusual to not do this that it is a reasonable assumption something funny is going on, in my experience.

For example, the journal could be incentivized to look the other way in order to publish a high publicity article. I'm NOT saying that's what PNAS did, but just because something is published doesn't mean it's ethical. (See: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20137807)
No, what is meaningful is not what the effect size (a number) is measuring, it's just a statistical metric. So in this case, I think it's clearly meaningful if humans have the power to impact other humans inner-state non-verbally. For example, if one smile to a stranger makes their inner-state more positive, that's impactful and they then have the same power for their emotional state to impact others. A trivial encounter can, in such, make a significant positive or negative impact. This study proves that the effect is extremely robust in both directions.

Effect size tends to get smaller the bigger the sample size for any kind of psychological/sociological study. This was a study of over half a million N, most studies use < 1000. In other words, the effect size is impressive despite looking small.

Side note:
It's interesting to note that paranormal researchers often get criticized for finding small effect sizes in their studies. (Part of that is thinking that it's more likely due to chance or noise) For all intents and purposes, if you believe the effect to be real but small, it would still have paradigm changing consequences on how we view the way brains work, a radical departure from what mainstream science currently believes. It's another example of why a small effect size can be incredibly interesting, course altering even.
Really? In what terms?

Can companies do that? I mean, are you suggesting they basically orchestrated this whole piece -- they have that much power over journalistic outlets?

I actually believed it, my friends at Google pretty much say the exact thing the article was saying, that Sundar is a very non-confrontational and amicable guy who wants everyone to get along.
Ask HN: Review my startup, PoorlyProgrammed.com
Hey HN,

I'm sort of new around these parts! You see, I'm sort of new to the serious-web-development-scene.

Anyway, I've just made a website, PoorlyProgrammed.com, where you can make your own website. Woopty doo, right? Well.. there's more to it. You can get a free subdomain name, free hosting, free designer templates, free plugins.. and you'll never have to drop a penny.

In fact, the website itself never asks for any form of payment unless you choose to upgrade to another package (yeah, there had to be some way of making money). You can upgrade your package to include more storage space, premium plugins and themes, and even give you the ability to place your own ads on your website.

My point being: I believe I'm offering a genuine service here. It would mean a lot to me if you guys could give me some pointers, tell me what I'm doing wrong, and more importantly: tell your friends about it.

Thanks, HN.
It's a matter of algorithmic scale. What would be the result of a social network (or anyone really) creating fictional users for the purpose of running social experiments on humans whose permission was not requested?

The speech of one salesman/politician is different from thousands of machines impersonating human speech. Speech is protected in some countries. Fake speech (e.g. experiments/spam) decreases the trust of humans in all speech on the network.

In anyone wants to run large-scale experiments, they can:

(a) ask for volunteers

(b) pay for labor

Those who want to volunteer or microtask can (a) opt-in for money or fame, (b) disclose that they have opted-in, so that others know that their conversations are part of an experiment.

Why is advertising (e.g. a promoted tweet) differentiated from non-advertising? Why is "disclosure" required in journalism? Why are experiments differentiated from non-experiments?

The act of observation changes the behavior of the observed. If experiments are not disclosed and clearly demarcated, users must defensively assume that they may be observed/experimented upon, which affects behavior in the entire network. As a side-effect, this pollutes any conclusions which may be drawn from future "social" research.
> Rather, it'll be all about how to use a new mental vulnerability to get more eyeballs on someone's content or to increase the dopamine hits from browsing the site.

Sadly, you've made a great point here. It's very likely that the end results of research will be used exactly for that - as it already happens with most of psychology.

I hope though that some of that research will be used to create better policies and help the society.

> What I would love -- and what I would eagerly opt-in to -- would be a system where Facebook could educate users on irrational behaviors.

I'd happily opt-in to that as well (and opt-in all my relatives too ;)). I don't expect Facebook to ever do that, as it'd exactly opposite to their goal to be able to a/ influence their users, and b/ cater for advertisers, but there already are websites doing exactly that (e.g. LessWrong). They're niche places though; I'd love to see something popular enough to reach general audience.
So what distinction, exactly, do you propose? Somehow a definition has to be offered that can be consistently applied by the courts. I don't see what that could be.

Algorithms are mathematical structures, and they're also machines. Both of these claims are true in the plainest, most common meanings of the words possible. An attempt to create a distinction between classes of algorithms has to be based on something. Again: what could that be?

EDITED to add: just so it's clear where I'm coming from -- I think algorithms are clearly patentable subject matter. The problem we have with software patents is that the obviousness bar is far, far too low.