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This ethnocentric approach to censorship is terrifying. Somewhere in Facebook is a small group of people who have the hubris to say they can decide on what’s right and what’s wrong, and are enforcing these views on some 1/9th of the world’s population. With outright banning white nationalism, they’re essentially shown us that they’re willing to play ideological kingmaker if anything enters the current news cycle that is viewed as evil.

How are people ok with this? Whatever your opinions are on the subject matter that was banned today are, are you honestly ok with the idea that people are now deciding what billions are allowed to see in broad strokes? History is filled with examples of controversial viewpoints being viewed as societal cancer only to be later accepted in some form as sane. Are we really going to now decide that we’ve reached final evolution and can now start judging wrongthink?

I view this as part of an alarming trend of people simply getting tired of seeing people they disagree with continue to exist and wishing they and their speech were just gone. It terrifies me that this is starting to get political will and we’re shifting to censorship as a solution.

Probably was just the product of leveraging the observations and knowledge their society had at the time to produce a novel solution to a region-specific problem. Humans don't seem to have gotten any more or less intelligent than our ancient predecessors, those of us in this particular time period were just were born with a different and relatively more advanced set of tools. If you constrain the set of possible methods to achieve a solution, you usually increase the creativity required to achieve that solution.

Unrelated, but I really enjoy this trend of people disclosing potential conflicts of interest relating to sponsoring at the beginning of a show or video like they did here. It’s so refreshingly honest and respectful of my natural distaste for being shown propaganda.

“Negotiations”? Doesn’t Google frequently blur out military installations on request? I’m as keen to bash big tech companies as much as the next HN commenter, but this reaction sounds overblown.

It’s probably just politics, but it looks to me like the GPA disparity between white and minority students is another issue entirely. This article making it the primary focus felt really sloppy and forced. Can’t we just report that professors with shitty attitudes affect students grades negatively and leave it at that? That’s what seems to be the common issue here, let’s have an inclusive solution rather than only focusing on one party.

>Are you going to optimize your recommendation as to make them take the longest time possible to achieve their goal ?

No, I'd link them to relevant videos that helped me in the past, and then maybe link them some more later on to help them further increase their skills after learning the basics. These hypothetical videos were interesting and helpful to me, and I figure that since I found them interesting maybe my friend will too. That's what it sounds like YouTube is doing, only they get money.

Yes, and that's one side of the relationship. The other side is that YouTube provides a free platform for anyone to upload and watch videos, and it even suggests videos it thinks you might like. Everyone here benefits. I fail to see anything as nefarious as the term "addiction peddlers" and hard drug metaphors would imply. The problems described in the text sound like they're mostly caused by mental illness and/or lack of personal restraint, both of which are and should be outside of the scope of YouTube to solve (unless we want to start accept third parties robbing individuals of agency "for their own good").

I don’t think that design goal in and of itself is toxic enough to warrant the connotation of the label “addiction peddling”. In YouTube’s case, it sounds like their recommendation engine is designed to simply reccomend videos people might like. YouTube obviously wants people on the site, but no user is being fooled here; they want to watch cool videos, YouTube recommends cool videos to them. Everyone here is fully consenting and benefiting in this relationship. It’s the outliers who seem to be the problem, and considering YouTube reaches billions of people without incident I think our threshold for “this is a problem” should also change.

Another small datapoint, but I’ll shamefully admit I pretty much only adopt new tech (programming languages, popular libraries, trendy design patterns) if I hear a lot of people talking about them or using them. Programming for me isn’t so much about choosing the right tool for the job, as I as a single human will always be the bottleneck regardless of what tools I use. I’d rather maximize the chances that other people (hopefully better than I am) will come along or be hired who can help. I’ve experimented with most programming languages or interesting frameworks as I’ve heard about them, but I don’t really ever use them in projects as it feels counterproductive towards my goals. What point is there in choosing a slightly better niche technology that 1000 people know when the mainstream equivalent has 100,000 or even millions?

All of the measures in this article to increase morale about work aren’t exploitative unless they’re being used to exploit workers. I don’t think the author made a really good case for this; instead they argued on the snuck premise that employers naturally want to squeeze their slaves dry and used that to conclude these measures are evil attempts to propagate “burnout culture” (look! A shiny new Term for us to use).

In reality, this is easily explained as an attempt to merely increase positive feelings about work. I like the work I do, but a negative working environment is infectious and is usually a big productivity sapper for me. The tech industry has plenty of managers attempting to juice their slaves for as many hours at the keyboard as they can get, but I think carved cucumbers encouraging people in their work is mutually exclusive to that issue.

I really wish more interviews asked these questions. They're not only good questions for the reasons you mention, but for the interviewee (at least for me) they tend to be pretty low-stress to answer. Those sort of questions are, after all, something that I might be asked to do or think about during my everyday duties at a new company.

I always sigh in relief when a company I'm interviewing with asks me something like that vs something like "implement x algorithm to solve y niche computer science problem you probably learned in college at some point".

I felt immense pity for the mother in this scenario, and after reading the article I agreed that FB aught to have some sort of way to indicate that such advertisements are offensive and should not be shown to the user. Ideally, I'd like to see a paid tier that gets rid of advertising altogether.

Then I read some of the comments here and on other sites. To put it bluntly, I don't understand the tone of entitlement people have when they demand FB/Twitter/etc fix their individual problems. I mean, I obviously understand it - such services are very popular and play a big part of peoples' social circles and lives. What I don't understand is why they think they have a right to demand that a platform they aren't even paying for should cater to them.

If everyone who disagreed with Facebook's revenue model were to leave Facebook, another platform would inevitably pop up that would cater to that new market niche. This seems to be the most fair solution to all parties, but instead it seems like people demand that someone compel FB to change based on their wants. I disagree with this not onlt because it's immoral and unfair, but also because it just means that those future FB competitors will have all sorts of obscure and unique regulatory hoops to jump through.

Am I the only one who thinks this way?

Last I heard it can be psychologically addictive but not physically addictive. For me, I treat it similar to how I treat coffee. Good for an occasional boost when I’m in need of its effects, but I don’t personally find myself indulging often.

I totally understand your frustration here, but I’d ask how else you propose learning the skills that OP needs?

OP’s approach makes sense to me. They don’t seem to expect to actually make money, rather they view the whole thing as paying for a valuable lesson. You seem experienced in the work OP is doing, how did you learn?

>This is a huge leap. Who said their entire argument is based on winning vs losing? Losing can be fun, it's not the same thing.

I think this is a key difference of opinion we have here.

I enjoy the challenge of trying to beat people in games, and failure obviously gives it that challenge. That being said, there's a point where there's a big enough skill difference that it is practically impossible to win against another player. This is what I'm mostly arguing here. I see the management of cheaters as the same problem as the management of overly skilled players being matched against those who aren't. Go look at some pro CSGO players for example, their performance is sometimes almost indistinguishable from cheating.

> Being beaten by a hacker with super-human reaction speed and is completely unkillable is experience ruining.

Doesn't Fortnite immediately let you enter a new match? How likely are you to encounter new cheaters long enough for the experience to get tedious? Why is suing cheaters a more fair solution to the problem of reducing this probability vs figuring out how to ban the specific cheats that have the largest userbase? Banning cheats in general is hard problem. Banning specific cheats is often not (barring crazy shit like the cheat running at hypervisor level).

What is the difference in your mind between someone who is really good at the game vs someone who is cheating? At the end of the day, my displeasure comes from being beaten, so morally speaking I don't see a difference.

Does Fortnite not have a ranking system? Why are people who are extremely good at the game (or cheaters) being exposed to new players?

Call me cynical, but I'm not sure this was about achieving anything other than political points. I doubt anyone cared about who they galvanize into disliking this genre of legislation.

Out of all classes who experience unequal representation on corporate boards, why were women chosen as the exclusive beneficiaries of this legislation? My guess is because a lot of the hot button social issues being discussed right now focus on women, thus there's a lot of political capital to be gained if one takes a radical position in favor of women.

Missed a spot with that rebase, looks like you accidentally put it back into the repo.

Does anyone truly believe that regulation is going to fix that in a way that leaves people the ability to freely express their thoughts -- something that is and should be a human right?

I think the real issue here is that social media has moved us to a place where people's real thoughts are visible to all, and the problem we need to solve is how society will work now that the genie is out of the bottle. Social media isn't the cause, it's helped us see the world more clearly.

Solving that problem is going to mean empowering people with the knowledge and tools to assess the quality of information they read and make decisions backed by critical thinking. This is a problem that needs to be solved by society, and expecting a governing body to prescribe to us how our society is meant to think is no solution.

Anecdotal, but I got my job at Google through participating in their bug bounty program. The first set of interviews you have that ask general CS questions might not care what you did last week or last year, but when you talk with the team who wants to hire you they certainly do care.

> Only difference is that if you put it on the internet it's like building that shed in a public park

The difference here is that code published online has no assurances of being correct or adequate to the task.

Someone building a shed in a public park is, as far as I'm aware, generally not a regular occurrence and certainly you'd agree that a building on public property could be reasonably assumed to have been built to some sort of safety standards by a public body. There's a tacit agreement that, if I enter such a structure, I can reasonably assume it won't collapse on me due to poor design.

Code, on the other hand, is published online by hundreds of thousands of developers everyday. No reasonable individual can expect that any selection of that code is likely to contain anything that can be considered production-grade. Why are we taking the liability from the irresponsible corporation whose service gets pwned because they didn't review my shitty experimental crypto before using it?

Even popular and well used libraries and software shouldn't be held to this standard. You're expecting people who are building something in their free time to bear legal responsibility for the mistakes of an organization who is paying nothing to use their software. That's beyond not fair -- that would absolutely kill open source software and completely ruin the current ecosystem where a single developer and huge enterprises are on a similar level from an access-to-technology standpoint.

Disturbing High Modernism? More like disturbing high mindedness. The author here is making claims that can be summarized to "I don't like Facebook and it's different from how we've usually done things, therefore we need to get rid of Facebook-like services."

The author, in other words, is trying to argue that, because they think that other people can't handle Facebook's "frictionless communication", no one should be able to use it because it'll do something bad to society. What that bad thing is isn't clearly specified, instead the author only claims that "tribalism, authoritarianism, extremism, disinformation, and hyperbolic outrage" has increased on these platforms, and implies that they think this outweighs the positives these platforms have also provided or that this is a change relative to how a world without Facebook would operate.

The author makes no concrete or quantifiable argument in this piece, only parrots the opinions of others they consider authorities. This text is the same sort of technopanic rhetoric that was used by luddites to oppose things like the printing press and electricity. We can argue about the ethics behind Facebook's method of funding itself, but the author here is conflating that with an argument against free communication.

The usual answer is to choose the parameters in such a way that targets the largest verification time that your servers can stand. I'm not aware of a recommended minimum value. In general, though, you're making a pretty good choice by choosing bcrypt, and so long as you're using the above you should have far better security as compared to sha*/md5/etc

>The basic problem is bandwidth. If you don't decentralize hosting with something like BitTorrent, then only a few large organizations have the bandwidth to safely host videos that could go viral.

Video storage would be out of scope for the index, and for good reason; other projects do it better than a completely new project not focused on decentralized file storage could be expected to.

The solution to the bandwidth problem would in fact be to just support existing storage solutions like bittorrent, ipfs, etc. So long as the video player supports it and the upload process is not complicated for non-technical users, problem solved.

I'm not sure there's an algorithm in the world that would be able to recommend videos that aren't similar to the ones you currently watch but that you would still like. I think the best route is to just reccomend videos that are similar and rely on external sources (friend/community recommendations, Reddit, etc) for lateral movement across genres.

I've always wondered why people want to decentralize hosting of content. This, IMO, is a much harder task which leads to such restrictions as

> Please don't install PeerTube for production on a small device behind a low bandwidth connection (example: a Raspberry PI behind your ADSL link) because it could slow down the fediverse.

Why not simply decentralize the content index and let other people worry about storage for videos? When I go to Youtube, I'm there because it's a platform where I can find a large variety of entertainment without putting any effort into it, not because Google is hosting them. I'm picturing the backend here being a decentralized database of video metadata (including where and how it is hosted), and some sort of frontend where every video in the index can be viewed through a unified player.

If we're trying to give oppressed people the ability to host their controversial content, just have them host it behind Tor or over the bittorrent network and then add it to the index. Otherwise we could just let people link to videos on other video hosting sites or on their own personal websites.

I think there's also a level of cultural gatekeeping in play as well. Programming (and many of its sub-focuses) are considered a fashionable career path, and there are many people who want the reputation that being a programmer/hacker/etc conveys more than they actually want to do the work to learn.

The Security Stack Exchange is full of a similar sort of people. Almost all of the new questions at any given time are either tech support "I think I have a virus!!" or low-effort handholding questions "how do I use kali linux to hack server". I think folks who spend a lot of time on these sorts of websites have adjusted to be more jaded towards questions that look similar. I've learned to ignore it and be thankful that (in general), questions that I ask on stack exchange tend to receive helpful answers.

What could CNN possibly write about a company relating to their advertising on InfoWars content that would outweigh the very real $$ savings now that there are less competitors to advertise to InfoWars's massive audience?

This is good news for any firm who just wants as many people as possible to see their ads, and I suspect this consequentially won't mean any real loss (and potentially a gain as other firms rush to fill the void) for InfoWars.

The way I see it, CNN only managed to scare off these big firms because the specific employees who manage their Youtube advertising campaigns were scared the (very real) possibility of being fired because a nasty article might reflect badly on their firm and would "tarnish the brand" or some other such intangible reasoning.

Ideally then those politically unpopular organizations and their members would move to Sprint, ATT, or another carrier who would love to have some new customers.

I don't like the idea of letting a government body regulate how a communications company how to run their business.

Ignoring the moral implications of holding a gun to a business owner's head and forcing them to run their business the way you want, are we not opening up the doors for legitimate censorship down the line?

If we're concerned about world leaders making official pronouncements on Twitter, why not just dictate that they don't do that and instead utilize a different platform? Something decentralized preferably.