Puer

I wonder what the NYT will write about when FB and Trump finally stop being newsworthy?

Ah yes, more unsubstantiated claims about Chinese tech and culture on HN. Can you back up a single thing you've claimed?

In an alternate universe where Apple produces babies, they'll eventually become so thin they'll snap and bend if you look at them funny.

My office replaced our 2015 Macbook's with the "latest and greatest." I hate sitting next to my coworkers who use them now. They're good typists and prior to the switch I didn't even notice their keyboard noise, but the new keyboard design made keystrokes noticeably louder because the cushioning was sacrificed in the name of thinness.

It's distracting in the workplace and I would feel bad if I ever had to use one in a library or any other "quiet" environment. These were considerations I never had to make with the previous keyboard.

The NYT editorial board seems to have a personal vendetta against FB/Amazon in particular. Twitter and Google get passes in mainstream media, for whatever reason.

I wish they would give the same scrutiny they gave to FB for the past year to Equifax or cellphone carriers that sell our location data.

The vast majority of Americans don't know/care what the active ingredient in Tylenol is because its effects have been extensively studied and tested and there's strong evidence consuming it over long periods of time has minimal to no harmful health effects.

The same cannot be said of marijuana.

This is the Nirvana fallacy. You aren't addressing the main point of the article, which is even if marijuana is legalized its use perhaps shouldn't be widely promoted because its health effects--both positive and negative--aren't fully understood yet.

I wish the NYT gave Equifax half the scrutiny they give FB.

Anecdotal, but I am not a heavy phone user at all. Within a year of purchasing my brand new iPhone SE, the battery capacity dropped from 100% to 82%, causing it to begin to lag considerably doing even basic tasks and shut down randomly two or three times a week. This should not happen to a product that's only a year old.

Not that there's anything wrong with reporting on the same topic by multiple publications, but this article just seems like a poor copy of this WSJ article published in August:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/airplane-noise-complaints-are-s...

https://outline.com/Kp3HcG

Out of curiosity, are there journalistic guidelines about publishing duplicate articles when there are seemingly no new pertinent developments? I haven't seen anything like this before.

You're right, but the aforementioned "12/13" years ago was only 2006. I don't think many significant changes have been made in that period, but I may be wrong.

I would also be interested in this. Many soft drink recipes are well-established and rarely adjusted because even small, well-intentioned changes can damage the brand and customer loyalty. Furthermore, it seems counterintuitive that producers would increase sugar content by as much as 1.57 times because that would inherently cost them significantly more money over time.

That sounds like poor parenting more than anything else. Also, the "sugar -> hyperactive ADHD kids!" thing is a myth.

My greatest accomplishment as a kid was beating BG2 on "Insane" difficulty as a solo character.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wa8JV3z-Oeo

I must have played through the game at least two dozen times and I never got tired of it. To this day it's still my favorite game of all time. Modern RPGs just don't compare in terms of storytelling and gameplay experience, in my opinion.

Nice resource, thank you for sharing. It's been a why since I've used Ocaml but this will be a good opportunity to review.

Elements of Programming Interviews in Python is excellent imo. The authors give a crash course in all of the data structures and all of the code is written extremely cleanly. Most of the problems give standard solutions and also idiomatic ones using iter/functools. I've been programming Python for years and felt like I gained a lot from it as a developer even though I bought it to interview prep.

Quick example of the "look and say" problem:

def look_and_say(n: int) -> str:

    s = '1'

    for _ in range(n - 1):

        s = ''.join(

            str(len(list(group))) + key

            for key, group in groupby(s))

    return s

The author's thesis is fundamentally flawed. They say it isn't clear why everyone was so excited to have a Facebook, but that's exactly the answer - because everyone had a Facebook. One of the biggest appeals of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter (which is arguable even more useless than FB), etc. is that every nobody has direct access to an audience of millions. They can scream their offensive, unoriginal, spontaneous, nuanced thoughts into the void and instantaneously get sympathy, disgust, praise, and simple acknowledgement with little to no effort.

Contrast this with maintaining a personal website. Even in a world where FB doesn't exist, it's still a chore to get people to memorize yet another URL and regularly visit it, especially if it isn't updated on a consistent schedule (which most personal websites aren't.) Furthermore, given that the author seems to be advocating for self-sufficiency as much as possible and avoiding centralized platforms, assuming you're hosting your own website and not using a cookie cutter template, you're now fighting Google for search engine visibility and that's a battle that is absolutely not based on merit of content.

This is not to mention the unpleasantness of using most personal websites because they're poorly designed (light text on a white background), or they try and guilt-trip me into supporting them with Patreon/Paypal popups, or the only consistent content produced is content promising to produce more content in the future, etc.

I'm probably reading too much into the author's article, to be honest. It's a nice sentiment and I agree, but at the same time the thing I don't understand about the recent trend of publishing articles on mainstream news sites preaching the life benefits of going cold turkey on social media is that it isn't a binary choice. I know it's a novel idea, but you don't have to quit FB to pick up that hobby you once loved again! You don't have to quit FB to maintain your personal website! In fact, you can probably use FB and your audience on it to grow your readership on your personal website! Even if you accept the author's argument that personal websites fulfill the purpose that FB does (strongly disagree), they give no reason why you have to pick one over the other.

¿Porque no los dos

I said this this morning and I'll say it again: There's a lot of indefensible stuff Facebook has done in the past 5-10 years that they rightly deserve to be criticized and called out for. The NYT is an esteemed news publication with a history of excellence and their coverage of FB and the other tech giants is important and something that should be extended in the interest of protecting individual privacy for unscrupulous actors.

That said, dishonest reporting for unknown agendas only hurts and delegitimizes this cause. At a news organization with the stature and editorial resources of NYT, narratives are no accident. Every word is meaningfully articulated and scrutinized before it goes it's published. NYT's decision to create a narrative for their largely technologically illiterate readership that Netflix, Spotify, and RBC could unilaterally control and access private user messages is not only disappointing and unnecessary, but harmful to their credibility and to the overall goal of holding FB accountable.

P.S. To whichever admin flagged this as a dupe, as far as I can tell this story has not been submitted. FB released two statements today:

[1] https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/12/facebooks-messaging-par...

[2] https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/12/facebooks-partners/

I don't believe this one has been posted (according to a quick search).

Well in the latter the user specifically gives permission to Spotify when they choose to connect their FB account to Spotify's desktop app. NYT's wording makes it sound like they have unilateral control regardless of user consent. You can revoke Spotify's access whenever you want from your FB account settings.

I apologize if my argument wasn't clear enough. My issue isn't that they aren't being factually incorrect, it's that they're seemingly using "facts" to be misleading.

Example: Saying Spotify has full editorial control over your messages is a very different narrative from "If you connect your FB account to Spotify, you can then send FB messages to your friends from Spotify's desktop app."[1] In one, the implication is that Spotify as a company somehow has the power to directly modify a users' private message. In the other, the user has the power--through Spotify's app--to modify their own private FB messages.

NYT is being factually correct with their reporting, but they're also being misleading, and my argument is that at a news organization of their size and stature this is no accident. Just read the comments from their readers and you'll quickly see how many of them are misinterpreting the above information.

[1] https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/12/facebooks-partners/

News organizations as established as NYT understand the weight of their words because every single one is scrutinized by a board of editors.

"Facebook also allowed Spotify, Netflix and the Royal Bank of Canada to read, write and delete users’ private messages, and to see all participants on a thread — privileges that appeared to go beyond what the companies needed to integrate Facebook into their systems, the records show."

I find it highly unlikely that these companies actually had the power to delete individual's users private messages. There's a distinct difference between needing general read/write permissions so that Spotify can insert a song into your message and Spotify actually having the power to delete your individual messages, read them, or write them on your behalf to their fullest wishes.

I claim "intent" because how an article will be interpreted, especially for a story of this scale, is no accident. Hacker News has a much more tech literate population than the NYT's general readership, and yet even here there are people misunderstanding what permissions Spotify, Netflix, RBC actually had because NYT framed the information to be interpreted that way.

They needed those permissions to allow for sending/receiving of payments over Messenger. NYT is being intentionally misleading with what "permissions" mean here.

1) This is just a duplicate of the NYT article already on the front page

2) NYT seems to intentionally not elaborating on the "access to users' private messages" part and conflating app permissions to actually scanning, parsing, storing, deleting, modifying individual messages. Until disproven, it sounds like these are just standard app permissions needed to implement functions like song sharing in Messenger chat (in the case of Spotify), or sending payments over chat (in the case of RBC).

This is disappointing journalism, to be honest. FB has done a lot of bad things and they deserve the negative press, but it does seem like NYT has some kind of personal agenda against the company and they aren't afraid of exploiting the tech ignorance of their readers to accomplish that goal.

This is like publishing "Popular privacy extension uBlock Origin 'Accesses your tabs and browsing history'". Yeah. Because it needs those things to function:

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Permissions

Anyone who's ever written an Android app or a Chrome extension should see right through this sensationalism.

Facebook isn't tapping your phones microphone 24/7. It's a nice little dystopian theory that's been disproven time and again.

A far more probable and less exciting explanation is that your credit card provider (or the store you bought the wine from) is selling your information and Facebook happens to be one of the buyers.

Furthermore, people grossly overestimate how unique they are. At any given point in time you're a target market for millions of products, you just don't notice the ads for the ones you don't buy. Just because there's a correlation doesn't mean you were singled out as an individual.

They'll go right in the same comfy cell as the Equifax execs. Oh wait...

Yep. I've never put any kind of personal information on FB aside from a profile picture and a name. My profile has otherwise been blank for the past 10 years. I've never liked any pages or products or left any meaningful comments that reveal anything of importance. Today, I block all of their ads and scripts (I haven't seen an ad on Facebook for the past 10 years). I've never shared my contact book as annoying as they make the popup in Instagram. Facebook has gained nothing from me directly. Others might argue they've gained more information than I could know from the people I choose to associate with, but I can't really control that.

Today, I use Facebook because it's useful for connecting with people I just met, long lost friends, and because Messenger is the most convenient messaging app out there. Instagram is a great app that I enjoy using and will continue to use (also anecdotal, but I've never seen an ad in Instagram either. I guess I must not follow enough people?)

Realistically, the only way I stop using FB's services is if they start charging for them. That's my personal red line, just because I'm too lazy to pay and I figure most of my friends will be, too, so they'll just move on to the next big thing.

(Citation needed)

Boy, if you think the amount of data FB sells is creepy, wait until you find out how much information your insurance provider sells, or your cell phone provider, or your credit card provider, or your health provider...

If you ever get in a car accident in the United States don't be surprised to get mail the very next day from accident insurance attorneys because you bet every service you use is selling every aspect of your life without your explicit knowledge or consent. Every time you use a credit card to purchase something that information is sold to a network larger than you can imagine, who will in turn sell it to their network. Your geographical location is sold by your cellphone provider whether you realize it or not and whether you think you have GPS tracking turned off. If you have a SIM card that's tied to you as an individual, it's being sold.

Here's just one example: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/06/19...

Notice how the keyword is "suspend"? I don't doubt that they've quietly resumed the practice. In fact, I bet all of these companies and service providers are overjoyed right now that the media is so focused on FB to care about all of the shady shit they're doing on a daily basis.

I'd rather not have any of my data shared, of course, but if I had to pick and choose between my health insurance being sold and versus what TV shows I liked on FB, I'll take the TV shows any day.

Yeah, I think nytimes is intentionally being misleading here. I don't doubt FB made some shady deals with the big tech companies, but it seems like they're conflating granting app permissions so that certain functions like sharing Spotify songs over Messenger work with granting access to all user data.

I don't care about how many likes or how many followers I get. I use Instagram to share my photography which is my hobby. I only follow my friends and people whose posts I genuinely want to see. Through Instagram I've been able to connect with other likeminded photographers that inspire me with their work and support me in mine. I also find it a great way to keep up with old friends that never used Facebook in the same way.

If your happiness is dependent on the attention you receive on these social media apps, there are likely deeper problems that you should address beyond simply deleting the app and telling everyone else who uses it to do the same.

There's a certain irony to all of these posts that have been cropping up lately on how "I deleted (insert social media service here) and it made me happier". Many of these posts cite the cessation of the race for validation as the reason for their increase in happiness. If you weren't expecting the same validation that you got from the service you just left, would you have really made the post? Couldn't you have simply just quit and be done with it? Deleting Instagram may temporarily improve your mental health, but it isn't a cure for a deeper underlying problem.