ankmathur96

Because while FB definitely doesn't like that this is happening, it will certainly cement their position. 3rd party ad services that are less tech/ML-forward are way way more reliant on the ID tracking than Facebook is, and this actually will probably cement them as the only game in town. This is a very complicated situation.

I don't believe this is a realistic take on open-source. There's not a single successful modern OSS project that's not basically controlled by a single organization (or was not at some point in its conception). Control can take multiple forms: most of the time, it's directional to the project, since the roadmap of the company managing the project dictates what gets done. Sometimes, it's in the form of how you can use the project. The great thing is that you can always fork the project and create a version for which the new rules/direction does not apply. The challenging part is making that a project where active development is actually happening.

Certainly, there's things like the Linux Foundation that serve as places where projects can live without formal control by a single organization, but in practice, orgs that commit most of the code control things (for better or for worse - I'm not saying this is a good thing)

It's not about whether or not it's foolish - the point is buying and setting up a subdomain, handing SEO, etc. is often more complex than some small business owners want to deal with.

Apple is literally the one recommending the PSL I have no idea what you're talking about

The entire point of these generated subdomains is that you do not have to buy a domain name...

Do you have an actual response to this point or are you just criticizing that multiple people made that same argument?

Your point about commoditizing an existing market segment is extremely underrated.

Companies should use open source where the existing solutions are blackbox but also commoditized. If everyone's doing it but keeping their doors closed, you have a chance to create an open standard. If it's successful, all the black box companies have to adapt it and basically have now wasted a bunch of time

The numbers that are reported are reported by the company. When Pornhub says "118", they're telling you they really didn't try particularly hard. When FB says 84 million, that tells you there's a whole team writing algorithms to detect and report. It's nearly impossible to determine the actual numbers

The reality is that this is being made out to be way more insidious than it is. Platforms should work with authorities so that bad actors like known terrorists can’t use a free platform to organize.

To the crowd who says “well you can do bad stuff if you pay” - If terrorists are paying for Zoom, they’re leaving a paper trail for the FBI. Free platforms are ripe for abuse because they’re free.

This is easily the most vacuous of all the comments here. You just take statements and call them disingenuous or obvious lies with not even a shred of backup

An aspect of this which has not been very well engaged with is how people see Facebook and its products outside of America. A common response to this from pundits is that it's an American company and therefore American values and perspectives matter more (as if American perspectives are the definitively superior kind). Without question, Facebook-owned products have democratized communication in third world countries (like India for example) and empowered those people to take advantage of the internet and its convenience. There's more than can go into a HN comment here, but an example is street side stores that have hugely expanded their audience by taking orders on Whatsapp. It just wasn't accessible to do this before, and Facebook has made that happen.

At some level, much of the criticism of Facebook (especially DHH) don't even try to put into words what Facebook "breach" they're upset about. Is it Cambridge Analytica? Is it one of the drummed up NYT pieces? If you care about this problem, yelling and waiting for someone to break up Facebook isn't a solution. We need discourse to identity what realistic changes we as a community expect.

100% agree

I think for (1), it's completely fair for a company to investigate the potential financial motivations of their critics (for example, people were not this upset when Google pointed out that the "search rankings are rigged" "independent" agencies were actually just Yelp and Microsoft paying for an attack.) I think the fact that a supposedly grassroots organization of protestors received a slew of money from a variety of significant liberal donors does point out that this isn't as grassroots as people think.

There was so much else that FB did wrong (Stamos admitted in his WaPo opinion piece that Sheryl was upset at him for telling the board about Russia and that PR pieces about that were obfuscated). Why is the media so focused on what seems to me to be a routine investigation which even they engage in? This just doesn't seem like a winning argument to me.

This is a completely absurd claim - if you’ve ever taken a class on modern day systems, you’d know Google is the source of many significant papers that inspired several huge open source projects that power almost every company that needs to scale.

“All the AI stuff is a result of acquisitions” - woefully misguided. Google is hiring academia leaders left, right, and center and growing a collaborative environment that’s innovating. They’re discovering a lot of stuff in-house on this team. They’re building an incredible open-source library with almost 100K Github stars for machine learning.

@self driving, they hired people building projects and are making it into a production self driving car. The latter is a far less constrained problem.

@assistants, The Google Assistant can do way more than Alexa. Not seeing how this is a me too game