skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Okay, 60,000 servers - for 1.23 billion active users. That's less than 0.0005 server per user. Facebook as such may cost millions to run of course, but the price they pay to keep your account active is so negligible that you're essentially selling your data for peanuts.
From the HN posting guidelines:

please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait.

I'd say this title should be changed to the original, as it is now it smells like clickbait. Or at least its purpose seems to draw unnecessary attention.
I feel like this article, like every other article about facebook, is based on a misunderstanding of what it is and how it should be used. It seems to me that everything on facebook should be to some extent a facade, an idealised version of whats actually going on. Its a really nice way to keep in some sort of contact with people that you've fallen out of touch with or people who you were never that close with to start (but they post interesting things). This is where the primary value of facebook is (for me at least).

The point is, information on facebook is pseudo-public, not private and hopefully not too personal. Use it like this, and it don't think theres any problem. There are plenty of other options for more private or personal communications so its not like they have any monopoly power in this area. So, regardless of the dubiousness of Mark Zuckerberg's vision for open communications, i think the problems written about in this article reduce to a lot of hyperbole.
Little Known Ways to Think about Discipline
Wow, that takes me back. The ZX81 was my first computer followed by a ZX Spectrum. I was browsing through the adverts and saw a couple of familiar ones, including the "50 Games £9.95".

I recall buying that and £9.95 was a lot of money. It was one of the most disappointing purchases of my life. The games were TERRIBLE. Absolutely awful, even by 1983 standards. They were basically of the standard of the games that you could type in for free from magazines such as Your Computer and Sinclair User.

You owe me a tenner, Cascade Software!
Sharing this to followup to the "screw motivation, you need discipline" post. Here's a quick summary:

* The writer makes a distinction I wouldn't- that discipline is only discipline when it's applied to things you don't enjoy.

* "Discipline is about willpower over base desires". I agree. Could also be framed as short-term vs long-term thinking and planning.

* "Discipline is, in some sense, enslaving ourselves to an ideal or goal. A critical component of this definition is that the setting of the goals, the choosing of our ideals is not part of discipline. " Fairrr enough. Important point that discipline without good goal-setting isn't worth much.

* "If discipline is a reduction of freedom, an intentional choosing of suffering, then why on earth would anyone want to have it? The obvious answer is because it lets you achieve goals. That is to say, it increases the number of possible things you can do. Paradoxically, increasing the number of goals you can achieve is pretty much the definition of increasing optionality, or freedom." Yup.

* "Intentional optionality reduction need not be an act of self-discipline. One person may exercise discipline to not smoke the cigarette, another might throw away the cigarettes. A classical example is “Odysseus tied to the mast”." Classic commitment devices.

* "People who are ruled by their passions and appetites can be ruled just as efficiently by any political system willing to pander to those things, while those who control themselves can’t reliably be controlled by anyone else. Thus the Roman government regularly sent Rome’s philosophers into exile, failing Chinese dynasties praised Confucius to the skies while doing away with anybody who took his teachings too seriously, and modern America uses every trick in the media’s book to marginalize those who remind us that the life of a channel-surfing couch potato might not express the highest potentials of our humanity." thatsdeepman.jpg

* Timescales: "I generally separate discipline & willpower, primarily on the time-axis. Much of what I have read on the subject seems to agree with this approach, describing willpower as a short term thing, deployed over a duration of minutes, or for the hardiest of souls hours, while self-discipline extends over days, or possibly indefinitely. Many disciplines are intended to last indefinitely."

* Interesting thoughts on discipline and empathy: "Working in the “all-is-now” perspective, I come to a very different answer, which is, “They would choose to suffer for the benefit of someone else”. In the most frequently described cases, “someone else” is either their own past or future selves, but one can easily imagine acts of self-discipline that are for the benefit of others. One example might be a hungry mother giving food to her child. Another example might be Pheidippides running himself to exhaustion in order to recruit the aid of Sparta for the Battle of Marathon. In this way, discipline and generosity begin to look confusingly similar."
I am aware of those, and frankly Google does a lot of the same

Also, don't install or use the FB mobile app (good thing it sucks)

There are browser extensions that hide G+/FB/Twitter buttons, it's a good idea to use them

" Even if you never posted anything, they can easily work out your age, gender, sexual orientation and political views. "

Why is this being said with a surprised tone? Oh and this happens in real life too, you don't need fb for that.

"Guess your age and gender"? People on the street can do that too, I better walk with a paper bag over my head.
This didn't exist a couple of years ago, but now there's a - supposedly permanent - way to delete your account: https://www.facebook.com/help/delete_account

I assume that they will still keep some data around in order to spot possible new accounts with fake names (by people who deleted their real name accounts), like phone numbers and e-mail addresses. But it's a start...
> I don't Like Books/Movies/Games, whatever else.

But every time your friends (who know your taste) share with you, it's pretty much the same thing.
>nobody said that.

What's your definition of "nobody"? :-)

Actually, many people said it all the time -- especially during 1995/1996 when Java hype was gearing up. It was touted as a selling point in Java books, JavaWorld articles, usenet postings, etc.

Examples:

--Java also implements automatic garbage collection, so you don't have to worry about memory management issues. All of this frees you from having to worry about dangling pointers, invalid pointer references, and memory leaks, so you can spend your time developing the functionality of your programs."[1]

--Programmers can be relatively fearless about dealing with memory because they don’t have to worry about it getting messed up.[2]

--Java also implements automatic garbage collection, so the programmer does not have to worry about memory management issues.[3]

--The entire interaction with memory is worry-free in Java.[4]

The issue of "GC pauses" or "extra memory footprint required for performance" is not mentioned in any of those sources. It's not Java's fault that it's presented this way because every technology is hyped by only listing the advantages and avoiding the talk about disadvantages.

[1]1996 edition of David Flanagan's "Java in a Nutshell" -- https://books.google.com/books?ei=ZDHOVOztD4z8sASIsoKYAg&id=...

(he removed the phrase "don't have to worry about memory management issues" from newer editions of the book: https://books.google.com/books?id=mvzgNSmHEUAC&printsec=fron...)

[2]James Gosling - http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~mckeeman/cs118/references/Origi...

[3]http://www.trailstone.com/softdeve/java/overview.html

[4]http://wellscs.com/robert/java/productivity.htm
My roommate likes to say the following, which I strongly agree with:

"Several years ago, when Diaspora hit the big news channels, we hackers should have picked up the slack, joined en masse, building a decent early adopter user base while helping with the code.

What we did instead was bickering about technical aspects of the implementation, pointing at the crudeness, and pretending that 'getting off all social media is the best'. And then we all joined Facebook."
Tell your friends that you are not willing to accept their terms of friendship. On multiple occasions I've asked my friends/acquaintances to not post a specific photo that I'm in, and they've stuck to it. They might still keep it, as a keepsake, but it's not publicly available. If I wanted to go any further than that, I'd have to ask myself the extreme question of... "Why go out in public at all" due to all the times I'd have my face or actions tracked.
In fairness, while I think the previous comment is a bit clueless myself, I'm inclined to ask how many of those servers would be necessary if FB wasn't logging so very much data on everyone.

If FB's job was once again just to show me my fucking posts, instead of building the most complete profile of a human being in the history of mankind so that it can sell me out to governments and corporations, it seems to me the data load would be a lot lighter.
As far as I recall, Facebook battled companies that offered "social suicide" (automated deletion of private data from the service). Eg. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0_Suicide_Machine#Controv...
It is only an implementation issue if it is possible to solve the issue.

Nobody has ever built a garbage collector that does not slow your program down or cause it to use vastly more resources than it would otherwise. (Claims to the contrary are always implicitly caveated).

Given that this is the case, it really does start looking like a language issue. Yes you can rearchitect the GC to care more about locality, but you are just pushing the dust around on the floor: you will find a different problem.
Switching drivers is a great way to bring someone into a code base. Make sure the new member is actually the driver though - it's easy to become a typing drone if you're overwhelmed.
The Rules of Open-Source Programming (2001)
Was there actually a ZX82? It's my understanding the ZX82 was the code name for the ZX Spectrum but it was never released under the moniker of the ZX82. There was certainly a ZX80 as well as the ZX81.
That could work, but I think that in the case of a "nationally known tabloid" chances are low.
The sad thing is all of the technology essentially already exists in some form or another - it's just that no one put it all together in an easy-to-configure box with a web interface. RSS for updates, chat over XMPP, messaging with SMTP+TLS+PGP. At this point it seems like most of the tools for the backend are done and the rest is would just involving plugging them together, putting a nice interface on top and acquiring the user base (I know - understatement of the year).
I don't understand the idea of "...an ethical responsibility to work full time" at all. Why shouldn't the amount of labour you want to sell be open to negotiation?

The fact that it's relatively hard to find "normal jobs" in my field in formats other than full time is one of the factors that makes me seriously consider the jump to freelancing.
Ah, Ok, I stand corrected. I only used CouchDB very very briefly some years ago and was under the illusion that its document version numbering could be used to keep track of document changes. I didn't realise it was purely for MVCC purposes.

Yes, Datomic advertises that it keeps track of a documents history.
I'm definitely a fan of the LSD game for Playstation, but Sato is getting a little more credit for supposedly establishing a genre than he deserves.

Check out the game "Cosmology of Kyoto".
Remote RDP, Windows 2008 R2 Datacenter 64bit with 15 GB RAM in “kiosk” mode. But you can easily run almost anything there, system is very badly secured.
Maybe you should have read the rest of the sentence before deleting it? I'll reproduce it here for your benefit:

"[...], the name economics has for this is "network externality"[1] - the monopolization of a dominant communication system by one entity has a cost for those who don't participate, which is not acceptable."
Placing stuff on your lens usually affects bokeh - try f1.4 in the night with distant lights in the background with something stuck on your lens - you'd see the effect everywhere ;-)
Before Gears, Before Unreal, There Was ZZT
This is it for me. Its rude and I despise it when some @'s me on a big public post. Share that shit and don't plaster my name where thousands of eyeballs can see it. Let me control what I'm connected to.
While obviously the results show that scratches and smudges can be practically unnoticeable, this article is a little misleading.

For one, dust, smudges and scratches will affect the contrast of an image, and more noticeably with a deeper depth of field. I'm sure you've noticed this on cell phone shots with oil or makeup on the lens, as it's much more noticeable with deeper depths of field. This is simply because incident light will diffuse into all areas of the sensor/film, causing dark areas to get lighter than they should be.

Additionally, the results here are incomplete. The author keeps his lens aperture wide open, which will keep depth of field pretty shallow. The deeper the depth of field (from smaller apertures, wider lenses, or smaller sensors) the more noticeable the scratches and dust will be, since it will localize the effects of the diffusion on the sensor/film.

Deeper depths of field are often preferred by landscape photographers, to keep fore-, mid-, and background elements all in focus, which will make smudges/scratches more obvious. Additionally, many lenses are much sharper when stopped down (smaller apertures) from wide open. Same problem.

I think it's a bit of a shame to see a perfectly good lens ("optically and mechanically fine"), which could have been donated or still sold at full cost (no photographer worth their salt cares about body scratches), be completely destroyed because the author wanted to prove a flawed point.
You are absolutely right on the fact that it doesn't, but I have seen plenty of people claim that high-level languages absolve you from having to think about memory.

Wikipedia says:
>"[High level languages] may [...] automate (or even hide entirely) significant areas of computing systems (e.g. memory management)"
And I think most people who make such claims have read similar statements and simply confuse memory-management with thinking about memory issues. (The distinction is that well defined anyway).
It was pretty much a document search system. It was really useful at the time when I was at university as a number of universities and organisations had gopher servers with information not available on the then fledgling world wide web. It was in no way comparable with the web or http. My comment was more nostalgic than anything!
I am getting similar specks from the dust on the sensor, not so much on the lens on a D7000.
Unfortunately, it's not as simple as not uploading a single photograph. If Facebook has scraped your friend's (or grandma's) contact lists, the shadow profile has been created, and the friend tracking has begun.
Ask HN: What are the 20% tips that will get my code to performance 80% faster?
I'm looking for resources that can improve the execution of my code dramatically. The 20% tricks that will get my code to perform faster 80% faster.
Off-topic, does anyone have any idea why the text looks so horrible on Firefox running on Linux? I'm using firefox-35.0.1-3.fc20.x86_64. I've also tried midori-0.5.9-2.fc20.x86_64 and it's the same. Only google-chrome-stable-40.0.2214.94-1.x86_64 renders it in a readable way.

P.S. Screenshot: http://imgur.com/m4rLSHQ
Bad title. Interesting bug, and it shows you just how much being aware of implementation details can pay off. I'm kind of surprised that Erlang doesn't keep a 'length' field under the hood for lists, but that's nothing the OP couldn't fix by keeping one for himself.

The Erlang VM fix isn't really a fix from a user point of view, installing a package like this should not require patching the VM, I do think that the Erlang VM maintainers should be made aware of this issue and then they can decide if they want to roll the patch or a more serious version of that patch into the distribution, it would seem to me that they are not the only people that have been hit by this bug.

As for the bad title: The higher level your language the more place there is for bugs to hide and if you actually believed that higher level languages would isolate you from the machine sufficiently that you could ignore reality then you had it coming.
How Pipes helped you in January 2015
Do you mean the overall platform (OTP etc) ? While different, the Erlang language is small and much simpler than most programming languages IMHO.
"but I don't really have an alternative (as you say)."

Which is another way to say that you in fact do have an alternative. People in oppressive regimes tell themselves the same, which is how they do get perpetuated. The change happens when people accept the fact that there is an alternative.
Looks fine on Firefox on Linux to me, maybe you've zoomed the page by accident? Try ctrl-0 to see if that fixes it.
I was about to complain about the constant, ubiquitous and severely annoying (for me) confusion between "it's" and "its". I'm finding it more and more, everyday and everywhere, in articles and posts. People, what's so difficult about it? "It's" === "it is". Therefore, "it's own" === "it is own"; "it's merit" === "it is merit". You can work out the rest.
Yes, that is the kind of question that dissidents in societies that work(ed) like facebook do/did ask themselves.
I think transparency is good. The secretive (and superficial) society we have now favors cheaters and liars.

If there was a way to publicly expose everyone for who they really were, maybe society would start to value those individuals who have real integrity (as opposed to greedy, manipulative, two-faced individuals). Absolute social transparency would allow power to be placed in the hands of people who are actually worthy of trust.

That said, I'm skeptical about Facebook's intentions. It looks like they just want to take people's personal information and use it for their own benefit. Their primary goal is not to make society more transparent for everyone - They just want to keep this information for themselves and keep everyone else in the dark - That way they get leverage over everyone else.
And admin manual for the product

http://cloudinternetexplorer.com/Ericom_AccessNow_Admin_Manu...
Quick question: is Facebook tracking what you articles read online on third party sites even when you are not logged in to Facebook? This can be done via cookies, browser fingerprinting, and other methods so long as the third party site (e.g. Buzzfeed) is firing a FB tracking pixel?
Everything Stupid Can Kill You: Welcome to Goodell World
Croatia just canceled the debts of its poorest citizens
Facebook has too much value because of Groups and Events. Both are incredibly useful and when everybody else is using it to organise things it can be hard to stay in the loop without.

That said, it is possible to use Facebook and insulate yourself. I use a fake name, a fake email and never added my phone number. My use is limited to Groups, Events and Messages - I don't doubt that they are still mining data for my account, but my account doesn't link to me.
A minimalist translation of Clojure's core.async to Scala
This is disturbingly true and points to larger problem in tech.
Frankly, the problem described is not a problem at all, as it would be weird to rely on cache hits to ensure performance of linked lists. Cache misses are an expected drawback of linked lists, as they have other advantages.
Nope, it's the same.
What do you mean by "doesn't link to me"? Is your online identity not "you"?
If only someone could invent some sort of invisible electromagnetic way of sharing data.
No, just encrypting the data. Anything more would have seemed excessive for my use case.
Understanding What Is Stored in a Canon RAW .CR2 File
There is movement in this area - see sandstorm, owncloud, disapora, etc. Slap it all in an Odroid and you have control of your data again. But people won't pay for it.
Isn't the "shadow profiles" thing somewhat of an urban myth?

What would be the benefit for FB to store shadow profiles? If they can't use that data publicly or internally or with advertising partners, why would FB need shadow profiles?

I'm not convinced there's a secret hidden profile page with my details on FB. Unless of course they're planning to use that data one day to try to convince me to sign up to FB... this is about the only reason I can think of for them to have such data. Any other reasons you can think of?
Can anyone name 3 alternatives and the strategy to get people to quit FB and sign up for something new?
Auto Submit Directories AutoBOT Marketing Software – FREE TRIAL
Start saving, study anything you can that would help you achieve that dream and just go for it. Don't waste your life away on the chance of being laid off.
"People on the street can do that too, I better walk with a paper bag over my head."

But there is no one person on the street that can do that for all other people on all the streets on the planet. Concentration of information in one "brain" is the problem, not that not everything is top secret. There is a difference in the possible consequences between some neighbour on the street seeing you and someone having a database of all public movements of all people.
Does anyone know if deactivation helps with any of these privacy concerns? I have had my account deactivated for 4 years. I keep it open just in case I need to get ahold of someone if I can't get through through phone and email (which has happened!).
GNU Social?

GNU social is web software you can use to run your own social network, either privately or publicly.

The software supports both single-user and community modes and can be used in an intranet environment or as part of the wider GNU social federated social network.
The software has been used in production environments for over five years and is very stable. GNU social also easily communicates with other GNU social servers, and traditional social networks such as Twitter.
Because GNU social is written in the de-facto web standards of PHP and MySQL, it runs virtually anywhere you can run a common piece of web software, such as WordPress or Drupal.
And because GNU social is part of the GNU project, it's 100% free software, with no malicious features, spyware or advertising.

http://gnu.io/social/
> I'm inclined to ask how many of those servers would be necessary if FB wasn't logging so very much data on everyone.

Hmm, but that's how they make money. They log, they analyze, they show you ads and they sell your data.
Software Architect: The Best Job in America
I've never talked with the ARL PAO folks about open source, but in general you're right. They have several writers who have to cover everything ARL does (that they can talk about). So they're like most civilian reporters: generalists who talk to experts to learn enough about an event or subject to write a report for an audience that knows less -- or nothing -- about the subject.

Full disclosure: I work in the PAO at RDECOM, of which ARL is a part.
Use a profiler.

Make your code do less work.

Use less memory so more of your code/data fits in the CPU cache.

Understand the algorithms that you use, their strengths and weaknesses.

No magic tricks, just hard work.
Splunk.
Here's my latest Splunk log analytics app:

http://www.mensk.com/#prettyPhoto/0/
I am off Facebook for more than year now and very happy.
No, Windows 7 Start Menu is different.

If I open it, start typing, and switch to a different window, then it loses all of its state, and has to restart from scratch if I go back to it.
I would think that if you were to ask people about a sudden and unexpected 9-fold drop in performance, they would say that it was a problem.

Certainly to me, never knowing when your system might slow down by three orders of magnitude (base 2, nearly one order of magnitude base 10) is a problem.