zombieprocesses

Is this an ad? News? What are we supposed to do with this submission? How did this make it to the frontpage?

> Why would the elites try to reign in social media?

To better control it?

> I'd want them revealing all the intimate details of their life, so I can better manipulate them with targted advertising.

Yes. As long as they control the targeting and advertising.

> You don't need a conspiracy theory to explain the recent uptick in articles about social media's negative effects.

It's not a conspiracy. It's reality. It's what happened with every communication medium. Print, Radio, Film, TV and now the internet. To believe otherwise is the real conspiracy.

> It's called a news cycle.

It doesn't span years.

> Remember when lead was discovered in Flint, MI's water supply? And then there was an uptick in stories about lead poisoning?

Crazy how quickly that downed down huh?

That the elites want to control the means of communication is standard policy for thousands of years. And it spans all nations. The chinese elite, russian elite, saudi elite, the european elites, etc all want to control communication. Our elites aren't different. Societies, like humans, have similar organs.

> For some reason I'd not considered HN compromised, but considering the nature of Ycombinator and their investments, it's probably safe to assume that all my activity here is 'out in the open'.

If you aren't paying for it, you are the product. It's the model that google popularized in the early 2000s. I'm really puzzled ( though I have my theories ) on why FB is being targeted for something everyone does.

> And linking this information to my person is probably easier than it already seems in my occasional thought experiments.

Given enough data points it shouldn't be that hard. Browser fingerprinting, IP address ( even if you have dynamic IP ) and enough raw data, it should be a cakewalk. Throw in browsing pattern analysis, writing analysis, click analysis, etc and they could tie much of everything together.

> like every single company ever?

That was my point.

> Unlike Facebook that deliverily hides or obfuscates the fact that its customers are really the product

How did they hide it? It was their business model. The one they copied from google.

> but the price for Facebook use is not so easy visible.

Are you saying that facebook forced the grandparents to use facebook?

I'm not a fan of either facebook or Apple. My dislike of apple goes back. But I taken aback by the anti-fb posturing justaposed by the pro-google and pro-apple lobby here.

I'm not saying that facebook is good. I'm saying apple isn't good either.

It's so striking how an innocuous comment in every anti-fb thread is met with downvotes and attacks.

I agree with you. Facebook is terrible. That's why I don't use it and never have. But I also don't use apple products because apple is terrible. Is that okay?

That's my thinking as well. Regulations help the incumbent, not the up-and-coming.

... arstechnica, HN, Reddit, newspapers, tv, etc.

The same could be said of arstechnica, HN, news and most of media. They are selling "customers" to their advertisers. Also, not sure where Tim Cook has any room to talk. By most measures, Apple is just as bad or worse than facebook. They are in bed with china exploiting slave labor, using advertisement to peddle overpriced junk to the uneducated masses and of course using tax loopholes to avoid paying taxing.

Microsoft used to say something similar as well. But when they realized that they could make much more money off customer data, they went converted to an ad-centered model with their OS.

The only reason Apple is acting high and mighty is because they are able to rob their customers by charging ridiculously high priced products.

Also, will the deletions be logical or physical. Will they be shallow or deep? Keep in mind that there are many types of "deletion".

Logical deletions would be just marking the user/comment as deleted ( updating a column in a table ) while keeping the data internally. Physical deletions would mean they remove the data on their servers.

Then the next question is whether the deletions are shallow ( superficial ) or deep ( complete ). For example, they can just do a shallow delete of the account/user on their front-end servers. But that leaves back-end servers, disaster recovery servers, staging servers, storage tape long term backups and also log backups.

Even if data is deleted on all live servers, database and log backups stored on tape and sent off to storage facilities still have your data.

Deleting your account/comment isn't as simple as people generally think.

> Am I the only person that has a healthy relationship with social media?

You are confusing a propaganda campaign against social media with actual news. Also keep in mind that the author of the Op-Ed was pushing a book he was writing.

Billions of people have a healthy relationship with social media. Just like billions of people have a healthy relationship with alcohol, food, working out, tv, sports, cars, etc. But it's funny how every day we are bombarded by the news media on social media ( ironically enough ) about how evil facebook and social media is.

OP's post is from November 2016. Why do you think it was posted on HN? Billions of dollars being spent on "cambridge analytics" style firms to put pressure on facebook, google and social media in general. So expect to see a lot of social media bashing as the elites try to reign in social media.

That's all it is. Once zuckerburg bends the knee like most social media entities have, the media and the will back off. Just like they did with reddit and google/youtube.

"When trained to paint celebrity faces, the agent is capable of capturing the main traits of the face, such as shape, tone and hair style, much like a street artist would when painting a portrait with a limited number of brush strokes:"

That's interesting. Do we know how artists draw? Is it as "algorithmic" as the article lays it out? I don't draw so I always assumed it was more intuitive and personal rather than a "step by step" process.

Is this an advertisement? Because it reads like one.

Postgresql and most mature database systems already have topN/offset/paging solutions.

Also, what's the point of aggregating JSONB data? If you need to calculate topN, why not normalize the data properly and index the data? Then top N will be blazing fast without needing an extension?

If the data set is extremely large then you can maintain an internal "Top N" table that gets calculated when data is added/removed. It all depends on the workload, but inserts/updates/deletions may be slightly slower, but reads of topN will be constant speed.

> Actual propaganda is used to propel an agenda, ideology or belief system.

Yes. What do you think #deleteFacebook is? We don't really have news anymore. We have agenda. Foxnews has an agenda. CNN has an agenda. The entire media has an agenda. The days of objective journalism is long gone. I think that's obvious to anyone paying attention. I'm not holding my breath on it returning anytime soon.

> None of those things are part-time considerations.

Sure they are. Bloomberg doesn't have to spend 24/7 on facebook. But they along with the rest of the media can.

Anyways, this is pointless. The evidence is right there for you to see. You can choose not to accept it if you want. Maybe it makes sense to you that we get 24/7 propaganda about facebook. Doesn't make sense to me.

> It would be enough for me if it declined into the confused and nonelastic state Microsoft was in around the times of Vista. That was enough for Android to appear and take over, forcing a paradigm shift.

What? Android and Vista are on two different spaces. You are comparing mobileOS to a desktop OS?

Android didn't compete with microsoft. It competed with apple.

> It also seems like leasing a 1.1M asset for 36k/year is poor retirement planning. 3.2% pre tax won’t ler you live that well.

Maybe he was betting on the price of taxi medallions to increase considerably.

> Putting a million into medallions because they’ve risen in value for 80 years is dumb.

It's the basis of investing in a lot of assets - like NYC real estate. Limit supply will protect your investment and it will always increase. This is also the basis of dollar cost averaging into an index. The assumption is that the markets/indices will always increase in value over the long term even if it may fluctuate up and down over the short term.

> These weren’t mostly owned by mom and pop individual owners.

Yep. Regulations and limit supply will do that. Just like most of the farm subsidies benefit the mega corporations, not the small farms.