Oh man, I miss what so hard. Can't find anything comparable today. Those were the golden days, when I could find obscure albums that you couldn't even pay good money for.
This is a very short-sighted view. Yes it has some immediate benefit in terms of pay, but you have to consider the long-term societal tradeoff of not developing addictive mental candy for people or developing societally useful technologies (or vice-versa, as it now stands). We can focussed on getting paid a lot now, or improving the wealth of everyone and generative the value we can all enjoy later.
Why would it be remarkable that a few popular technologies come out of a big, rich technology company? People who create such technologies work at places like that. But there’s nothing about React or GraphQL that makes them only possible at Facebook.
A big, rich technology company has the resources to put people on the project full time and a revenue stream to justify such broad architectural project.
There's also financial support for building a community around improving the tech, by encouraging outside contributions via meetups, conferences, social events, better technical documentation, etc.
At smaller scale startup an engineer is surely welcome to work on his skunkworks project, but justifying expensive large-scale architectural undertakings on company's dime is problematic. Especially if a quicker fix is available and buys the company a chance to kick the problem down the road.
With that said, it's not impossible to build a major popular piece of technology within a small company (Joyent and Node.js being a good example), it's just harder.
You’re repeating what I wrote - Big tech is likely to produce new tech, but new tech comes from other places too.
This discussion is mostly irrelevant to the fact that this particular company is completely reckless and unethical. The technology they accidentally produce while building a dystopia to make people click on ads[1] does not justify anything.
-Breaking democracy in the US and the UK by being _the_ platform for disinformation.
-Disinformation assisting genocide in Myanmar.
-Use correlating strongly with poor mental health
-Manipulating behaviour to encourage poor attention spans for the sake of ad-clicking
-Constantly violating basic standards of privacy
-(I could go on..)
Oh wait, excuse my arithmetic. I forgot to add another JS framework like Relay to the LHS of the equation, that makes it a net positive from Facebook! :D
I don't think its fair to blame FB on the decay of democracy in the information age. Surely Twitter is also to blame them. I think the blame is on the users. Its not possible to be perfectly informed. It is possible to keep your mouth shut if you don't know something for sure. Perhaps its the fact that in real life, to say something you need to say it to someone's face and on social media you don't have that social weight to carry. This brings about people more likely to share misinformation. If this is the case, its not the fault of social media, rather the fault of internet culture. More personal responsibility is the solution. Not an improved ML system to detect fake news.
It is a problem inherent in the structure of most social media companies. And Facebook is the most significant social media company, and thus contributor to the problem.
I think the sadder part of this argument is that nobody outside of software engineers know or care what GraphQL is, yet it’s being touted as a “societal benefit”. How about the fact that my grandma with limited mobility can still attend church virtually through the Live feature? Regardless of how often the scions of the Valley disavow their own technology (I would /never/ let my children use our products!), there are a billion or so other people who actually use it to real benefit in their quaint little lives.
> Breaking democracy in the US and the UK by being _the_ platform for disinformation.
Blaming facebook for "breaking" democracy in the US and the UK is ridiculous. I can't understand how this can continue being a claim remotely considered valid. I agree (or may agree, at least in part) on some of the other points, but not on this.
Claiming that Trump won just because of the russians putting ads on facebook is at least naive - and ignores the fears/actual issues a very big* part of the US population experience daily. Isn't failing public schooling a problem there also? Does that give us citizen more or less prepared to actually participate in democracy?
Politicians (of all sides) in the UK have accused the EU of being the root of all evil since they "joined", again and again and again: you lost your job? Blame the EU! We can't cut taxes? Blame the EU! You really want to blame facebook and NOT the politicians themselves because people voted for brexit?
If the Russians tried to manipulate (and for sure they did, oh gosh, I'm pretty sure the US and the EU states never do - or did - anything to manipulate elections abroad! Evil Putin, why you do this to us? :cry:) we rolled out the red carpet for them!
Democracy was broken because actual journalists did not do their job. Stop doing what they (may) want you to do, using social media as a scapegoat for their own (willing, sometimes, for sure, at least if you read what Chomsky has to say) MASSIVE failure of being the "champions of truth" they claim (and blindly believe - I worked on somewhat close contact with them for years, I've seen that) to be.
I agree with your premise, that many Facebook employeees would give society a better return on its investment if they were employed elsewhere, but that’s hardly Facebook’s fault.
It's tempting to think that without Facebook they would get involved in cancer research or interplanetary travel, but given the Silicon Valley's funding cycles, they would be more likely to end up building yet another food delivery startup or revolutionizing something by putting it on blockchain.
Also, a bunch of recruiting venues exploited by Facebook are not that accessible to smaller startups.
E.g. one of the top previous employers for Facebook employees was Google (or some other outfit within Alphabet group, like YouTube). Most likely those people would've stayed at Google.
Another hiring source was university recruiting, which involves participating at job fairs at various universities, exhaustive days of back-to-back interviews, flying candidates for on-campus interviews, and eventually covering relocation costs (and potentially visas and immigration paperwork) for someone moving from Pittsburgh, Waterloo or Romania.
Would a smaller startup have the financial oomph to run a similar recruiting pipeline?
There's also its ostensible goal to connect people. I logged in for the first time in months just to see if I had been compromised. In about 15 minutes of goofing around, I got to enjoy countless happy baby pics posted by old college friends, and had a nice chat with someone I hadn't talked to in almost a decade, after I randomly commented on a status update. Then I logged off. I know that my kind of limited use is likely not the average scenario, and I can definitely understand people suffering when they get sucked in. But it's a site that does a damn good job of making it easy for me to find and interact with friends, and I don't believe the tech and design involved is trivial.
What makes Facebook "addictive mental candy" other than you not personally liking it?
I know lots of people who feel they get and have got tremendous practical benefit from Facebook. It isn't "addictive" unless you use that term to mean anything some people make that other people enjoy.
"Our results showed that overall, the use of Facebook was negatively associated with well-being."
Naturally, even if this study is accurate it isn't definitive; the causation could go in the other direction, that the unhappy use Facebook more often than the contented. But it's still quite suggestive.
Tech companies are like glaciers, 20 people at the tip of this project will be leveraging all of FB’s internal tooling and might be able to get more done.
Also, it would be difficult and maybe a waste of effort to try to scale a team faster than that, with midterms so close. For sure they can increase headcount if it’s successful.
You're joking right? FB has over 25 thousand employees and you think 20 people is a significant reorientation effort? Or that a team any larger would have problems a scaling?
Then put 100 people in the room? 1000? Not sure what's the point of having everyone in the single room, when the entire company is in the single company anyway.
The article lists several on the team. They’re mostly senior executives, data scientists and engineers. They’re definitely pulling strings from that room - in total, there’s a team of 300 specifically working on the issue, not to mention the dozens of teams that make this type of real time analysis and decision making possible.
Depends. Can those 20 people then pull in other teams on a high priority basis and have them do work for them? I agree generally that 20 people can't do much, but if it is 20 people with the institutional support of thousands then it is a different story.
Yes, he sure doesn't know a dn thing about jazz...
Alice and Joe Henderson were doing great stuff in the 70's together too.
Beyond the chaos of the late 60's era in jazz, there are a lot of new directions jazz has taken since then. Jazz doesn't stand still, and I think that is core to it's nature. If this guy was looking to continue second wave bop for all eternity, he should just throw on some Branford/Wynton Marsalis and pretend like the 60's never happened.
I think the thing you could say about Coltrane was the he was the last musician who could change the shape of the whole genre, the way Armstrong and Parker did. After Coltrane it was fractured, and it was Coltrane who did the fracturing.
That's crazy. People weren't exclusively playing bebop before Trane and he certainly wasn't the only person who influenced the growth of free and free-ish jazz. Likely not even the most influential.
We also wouldn't expect any genre to stay in stasis forever. Fracturing isn't even a bad thing.
> We also wouldn't expect any genre to stay in stasis forever. Fracturing isn't even a bad thing.
This is a good point. Country music is the most popular radio format in the country. Yet Carrie Underwood doesn't sound much like Loretta Lynn and one could easily like one but not the other. Yet the "real country is dead" narrative gets little airing compared to the way the analogous complaint about jazz does.
If this author wants to say "free jazz is not to my taste" or even "free jazz is too dissonant," you know, he's well within his rights to say so. But "John Coltrane singlehandedly killed jazz with A Love Supreme" seems like a thesis impossible to justify.
Sounds like all the bad decisions about who to hire (low cost, inexperienced workers) and who to fire (higher cost, experienced workers), how long to force people to work, overuse of automation, etc., has caught up with Tesla. And now Musk wants to externalize it so Tesla doesn't look bad and loose _even_ more orders of the model 3.
I think you just have a lot of pot shots to take against Tesla (most of which seem to have no precedent??), and want to project them onto this situation. This story relates to an internal email Musk sent around, telling staff to speak up about suspicious behaviour. It's not like he brought this to a shareholders meeting.
I disabled everything from Pocket I possibly can when I downloaded and setup Firefox, in the `about:config`. That integration annoys me to no end. Who decided I needed pocket in my browser?
The belief most people have that Mozilla puts things in the browser they expect to be useful to users is mistaken and needs to die. They didn't decide you needed Pocket in your browser. They wanted Pocket in your browser, so that they could sell story spots (read: ads) to the highest bidder.
Note the PR-speak in that article. Advertising, by its very nature, cannot "provide value to users". If a publisher is paying to promote a story, it's because they want the story to capture more of users' attention than the users themselves want.
I agree but I didn’t want to say that as it seemed obvious (at least to me).
Mozilla, a non-profit, which produces primarily a browser with currently a small market share, needs to do something to bring in some revenue. Having Google as the default search at one time (and may still be) a revenue stream for them.
But on the last point about advertising. I disagree with your statement. In many cases, advertising allows consumers to know about services and goods they might otherwise not know about. This isn’t inherently bad. I believe the adtech way, though, is because it puts at harm a lot of people’s data for, often times, a very negligible benefit in reaching consumers.
> In many cases, advertising allows consumers to know about services and goods they might otherwise not know about.
I agree that advertising can help in that way, but I'm not sure how often that actually happens. The largest markets tend to be for products where everyone is generally aware that they exist (otherwise the market woulndn't be large) and most products are only differentiated by brand (e.g. fashion) instead of novel features. Because generic internet advertising follows the money, it ends up as a zero-sum game about moving market share between brands.
If there were a site that allowed only ads for completely novel products, or if the ad is just a link to a double-blinded study comparing along a measurable dimension against a competitor, I might subscribe voluntarily to be advertised to. Until then, HN comes close enough.
I will absolutely take the Pocket integration in Firefox over ad-banners any day of the week. I've used browsers with ad banners in the past, and this is infinitely better.
I see three links (on mobile) of actual content; articles or blogs with substance that I may or may not find interesting. They fall below the list of my most visited sites, and they're eminently missable. Depending on how I open Firefox I will not even see them due to bypassing the start page.
I've read several of those articles and found them interesting. It's value added to me, and I don't have to see ad banners for stupid crap in the bargain.
They could even be adventurous and offer multiple downloads with different extension bundles. These would be easy to implement; because extension bundling already exists as "collections"[1]. Something like:
- Standard Firefox with our officially recommended extension. (use for the front-page/default download)
- Minimal Firefox without any extensions or other optional features. ("Try this on older/slower computers")
- Developer Starter Kit with a selection of extensions related to web development.
- Social Media Special with more extensions like Pocket plus quality-of-life features for people that spend z lot of time on Facebook/etc.
Having a variety of options is important, because there isn't a universal spaghetti sauce[2].
Not really. One of the things prohibiting the market is the Price-Anderson Act, which stipulates, irrespective of the sort of reactor (and since there have been newer and cheaper reactor designs) a level of insurrance that nuclear plants need. Effectively, this has made it impossible to enter the market with reactor designs that are smaller and safer and do not require the insurance proscribed by the act. I don’t personally know operational costs for these other sorts of reactors, but suffice it to say there are artificial limitations in place that skew this market.
How does it not (potentially) skew the market? If one such alternative plant had a higher operating efficiency and therefore lower cost, wouldn't the fact that there is a law preventing the lower cost from being reached skew the market? Am I missing something?
>Those were built out by private companies, but operated under a regulatory regime called "common carrier,"
No. "Common Carrier" classification under Title II of the Communications act of 1934 comes more than 30 years after the introduction of the telephone, much longer than the telegraph. More than that, it could be argued that that, along with the Kingsbury Commitment were the contributions that led to an AT&T incumbency in the first place.
"Common Carrier" classification under Title II of the Communications act of 1934 is just one implementation of the legal concept of common carrier, which dates back to transportation systems in England. (warning: simplified)
No issue with what you're saying here. The primary point I wanted to emphasize was that our application of regulations to the telephone system is not in line with whom I was replying to said, that there was around a 30-40 year gap.
