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Comment by mikert5671 | Hacker News Reader

FB and Google are the only ones pushing the industry forward. The huge amount of data and computing power is what brings these researchers, its not all about money. In the long run the scientific advancements from these companies is a much higher positive than the negatives they have in the present.

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Any researcher in this area worth their salt can easily get cloud credit grants and collaborations from Google, Microsoft, Amazon. I pose if you go to Facebook, it's very much about money.

But can they get the huge volumes of data they have tagged out? The real time pipelines and internal tools? The community of people they will be working with?

>>> FB and Google are the only ones pushing the industry forward. The huge amount of data and computing power is what brings these researchers, its not all about money. In the long run the scientific advancements from these companies is a much higher positive than the negatives they have in the present.

> But can they get the huge volumes of data they have tagged out? The real time pipelines and internal tools? The community of people they will be working with?

It's highly problematic when a researcher pushes ethics aside in order to gain access to data and chase "long run ... scientific advancements."

the huge volumes of data they have

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_of_the_poisonous_tree

What actions by Facebook do you see as particularly heinous above what's done at Google?

Can't speak for the parent but for one thing I don't recall reading about Google messing with 600,000 users’ emotions without their knowledge.

This is incorrect, in my opinion. FB and Google are where capital is currently concentrated in the software industry; therefore, they are able to hire a lot of the top software talent out there. This talent is responsible for pushing the industry forward, and it often does so in a manner that is largely company-agnostic. This is why we get React help pages telling us to use Enzyme from AirBnb for running tests - because the work is being done by software developers who are building general infrastructure for the web, and who would probably end up doing the same basic work regardless of who was paying their salaries.

It's best to think of Silicon Valley as two entities: a mass of technology workers who build software, and a financial extraction function that attempts to extract value from the work they do.

In the long run the scientific advancements from these companies is a much higher positive than the negatives they have in the present.

That’s really the main question, isn’t it?

tell that to the royhinga who were betrayed by facebook and subsequently killed.

i'll be waiting for the scientific advancements to be useful to the public. so far they've increased rates of depression, anxiety, etc while enabling totalitarianism.

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