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Comment by ohashi | Hacker News Reader

Can we still be angry at incompetence?

Possibly even more so than at malice. If an organization acts out of malice, you can change its behaviour by educating it about its best interests or moving to disincent its malicious behaviour.

But incompetence, especially systemic incompetence, is extraordinarily difficult to change. Facebook appears to have ADD around user privacy and its interface. Designs come and go, defaults change capriciously, and security seems to be an afterthought.

We've seen this movie before, with MSFT in the role of the bumbling centi-billionaire. Hopefully Facebook will steer a different course.

Hopefully users will steer a different course.

Insightful,thanks. Helps me understand some situations I have been in.

Not really. Everyone on this site has worked in software development at one point, right? So everyone here has written a bug before. Its reasonable to expect every piece of software (short of the stuff on the space shuttle) to have bugs. It simply isn't feasible for most software companies to find and fix all of the problems with their products.

Facebook, like all other software, is bound to have bugs. If you don't want your personal information/conversations to be exposed by a potential bug I'd suggest not using the service.

Well, a lot of this is the flip side of FaceBook's "changes are pushed to the live site as soon as they're checked in" policy. That lets them innovate quickly, but also means that whenever anyone screws up, it's immediately visible in a very public way. Other companies have release processes and QA procedures to stop this.

On the whole, I think the rapid innovation model tends to make things safer overall. Tiny changes can be rolled back more easily, or patched more easily.

Release processes and rigorous QA procedures seem more appropriate for client-deployed software like operating systems than for centralized web applications.

Every single line of code is peer reviewed by at least 2 people before it can be pushed.

But tested by nobody?

What happens to the reviewers that let this thing slip through, btw?

From chatting with a few Facebook engineers, I'm pretty sure it's not quick to get checked in code -> production (unless it's super urgent)

so you're proposing that if someone doesn't like software bugs that they should stop using software?

that would be mighty difficult, as software and their potential bugs are present in most every facet of modern life.

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