decasteve 3 days ago [-]
The concept of Facebook was always terrible. Why do we need a single platform for people to congregate socially? We have a distributed platform built with common protocols and services that we can all use.
Let the web be distributed physically, organizationally, and socially. Let people congregate for purpose and not for the sake of congregation itself.
We are here on Hacker News because of a common interest. I belong to a number of sites fulfilling a way of connecting to people who share the same niche interests. I don’t want everything under one roof or in a single walled garden. AOL failed and the Internet succeeded—stop trying to bring it back because it’s more profitable for those that run it.
.. Facebook’s downfall as a service won’t be another social service that has the same features but is distributed/blockchain/FOSS/quantum/whatever. Facebook has an enormous amount of resources and talent that will allow them to keep their moat in the social networking space.
No, its downfall will come from a paradigm shift in technology that renders the feed-style social network obsolete. This is how most behemoth companies fall, they don’t get outcompeted at their own game, the game just changes around them. Maybe it’ll be VR, maybe it’ll be a virtual social assistant that has no browsable UI but helps you keep in real-time contact with the people you care about, maybe it’ll be a new kind of device or screen or wearable that completely changes the game. But it won’t be another social networking service.
Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook’s hardest year, and what comes next
“The Myanmar issues have, I think, gotten a lot of focus inside the company. I remember, one Saturday morning, I got a phone call and we detected that people were trying to spread sensational messages through — it was Facebook Messenger in this case — to each side of the conflict, basically telling the Muslims, “Hey, there’s about to be an uprising of the Buddhists, so make sure that you are armed and go to this place.” And then the same thing on the other side.”
Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted
noobermin 2 days ago [-]
Allow me to ask the obvious question.
Who doesn’t do the something like this?
Not to alleviate facebook of blame, but who’s to say data on almost every other social media service isn’t also just flagged for deletion?
replytraskjd 2 days ago [-]
We don’t soft delete payloads at Raygun (https://raygun.com), for the very fact that typically if one of our customers wants to delete something it’s because they might have sent something they don’t want a third party to have. We have filters and other PII filtering tools etc, but it every now and then something might be sent by mistake.
Having said that, you’d be amazed how often folks ask for things to be undeleted (despite a big warning dialog).
Clearly developers pervasively believe soft deletes are occurring everywhere.
replySomeone 2 days ago [-]
It isn’t that hard to combine soft deletes with delayed hard deletes: generate a new encryption key every day for “data deleted today”, and encrypt deleted data with it. After X days, destroy the decryption key.
If you use asymmetric encryption, you can keep the group of people who who can recover “deleted data” small. You could even have an independent party generate your encryption key pair, give you the encryption key, and your customer, on request, the decryption key (I think there is a business model for a non-profit here).
Under Trump, a Strong Economy but Murky Policy Outlook
Researchers find uncertainty about economic policy is slightly higher now than during Obama’s entire tenure
During Barack Obama’s presidency, uncertainty about U.S. economic policy was much higher than it had been during the previous 25 years, according to calculations by a trio of academic economists.
You would think uncertainty would be low now, with economic expansion advanced and secure, the global economy on a stable footing, and a president in the White House focused on helping business by cutting regulation.
But it isn’t. The researchers find economic policy uncertainty is slightly higher under President Donald Trump than it was during an Obama era marked by deep recession, auto bailouts, unconventional Federal Reserve interventions into the financial system and routine brinkmanship between Democrats and Republicans on fiscal policy.
.. “Obama was president in a time when you needed extreme policy action,” said Mr. Bloom. “Trump has incredibly benign economic conditions. He should have very low levels of policy uncertainty.”
It is hard to say exactly why uncertainty is high now. Mr. Bloom said it is likely partly because of big policy changes happening in Washington—such as an aggressive new stance on trade—and partly because of the decision-making process, which he described as chaotic.
.. “It has been a gut punch to tech investors,” Daniel Ives, chief strategy officer at GBH Insights, an investment research firm, said of the Amazon and Facebook developments. “These stocks and their multiples were not factoring in increased regulation.”
.. Complicating matters, it is hard to see a comprehensive policy framework behind Mr. Trump’s interventions into the economy, making it hard to predict what might come next.
.. Some analysts have described the nation’s evolving trade approach as mercantilism, a government effort to prop up exports and restrain imports in pursuit of trade and financial surpluses. But Qualcomm, AT&T and Amazon aren’t about that. Nor is it quite industrial policy, which is government selection of certain industries over others, as Japan practiced in the 1980s and 1990s.
.. “He’s picking winners and losers,” said Matthew Slaughter, dean of Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, who also served as an economist at the Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush. “But it is not obvious what the unifying strategy would be and it is not obvious what the definition of winners and losers are in these cases.”
.. “The regulatory machinery is not likely to be put into motion because the president has a grudge against Amazon,” he said.
His advice to Wall Street: “Don’t fear the Tweeter.”