"Facebook" entries

Four short links: 18 November 2015

Four short links: 18 November 2015

Crypto Comms, Science Funding, Geo DB, and AI Ambitions

  1. If The Paris Hackers Weren’t Using Crypto, The Next Ones Will (Cory Doctorow) — But the reality is that criminals will be using crypto soon, if they aren’t already, for the same reason they’re using computers. Using crypto is the best way to communicate.
  2. Google $50M Heart Disease Effort — instead of taking bids for $250K chunks of the money, they will fund one team for five years. Applications close Feb 14.
  3. Pyro (Usenix) — This paper presents Pyro, a spatial-temporal big data storage system tailored for high-resolution geometry queries and dynamic hotspots. Pyro understands geometries internally, which allows range scans of a geometry query to be aggregately optimized. Moreover, Pyro employs a novel replica placement policy in the DFS layer that allows Pyro to split a region without losing data locality benefits.
  4. Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s Bold Plan for Facebook (FastCompany) — “One of our goals for the next five to 10 years,” Zuckerberg tells me, “is to basically get better than human level at all of the primary human senses: vision, hearing, language, general cognition.”

Blocked!

Will content-blocking change the Web?

tree-8810_620
“No one ever turns off JavaScript any more.” I remember when I first believed that, probably around 2007. The growth of Ajax had meant that more people were actually losing content if they turned off JavaScript. From what I could tell, most of the few folks still blocking JavaScript surrendered pretty quickly.

I don’t believe that any more, though, thanks to advertising and the doors that blocking advertising has opened.

While a key part of the last decade’s Web conversation has been performance, the walled gardens are taking advantage of our failure to deliver performance to make their own promises. Facebook’s Instant Articles offer a way for publishers to use the (relative) certainty of Facebook delivery, while Apple took a more direct route for demanding performance: blocking advertisements, and more.
Read more…

Four short links: 28 October 2015

Four short links: 28 October 2015

DRM-Breaking Broken, IT Failures, Social Graph Search, and Dataviz Interview

  1. Librarian of Congress Grants Limited DRM-Breaking Rights (Cory Doctorow) — The Copyright Office said you will be able to defeat locks on your car’s electronics, provided: You wait a year first (the power to impose waiting times on exemptions at these hearings is not anywhere in the statute, is without precedent, and has no basis in law); You only look at systems that do not interact with your car’s entertainment system (meaning that car makers can simply merge the CAN bus and the entertainment system and get around the rule altogether); Your mechanic does not break into your car — only you are allowed to do so. The whole analysis is worth reading—this is not a happy middle-ground; it’s a mess. And remember: there are plenty of countries without even these exemptions.
  2. Lessons from a Decade of IT Failures (IEEE Spectrum) — full of cautionary tales like, Note: No one has an authoritative set of financials on ECSS. That was made clear in the U.S. Senate investigation report, which expressed frustration and outrage that the Air Force couldn’t tell it what was spent on what, when it was spent, nor even what ECSS had planned to spend over time. Scary stories to tell children at night.
  3. Unicorn: A System for Searching the Social Graph (Facebook) — we describe the data model and query language supported by Unicorn, which is an online, in-memory social graph-aware indexing system designed to search trillions of edges between tens of billions of users and entities on thousands of commodity servers. Unicorn is based on standard concepts in information retrieval, but it includes features to promote results with good social proximity. It also supports queries that require multiple round-trips to leaves in order to retrieve objects that are more than one edge away from source nodes.
  4. Alberto Cairo InterviewSo, what really matters to me is not the intention of the visualization – whether you created it to deceive or with the best of intentions; what matters is the result: if the public is informed or the public is misled. In terms of ethics, I am a consequentialist – meaning that what matters to me ethically is the consequences of our actions, not so much the intentions of our actions.
Four short links: 13 August 2015

Four short links: 13 August 2015

Learning Style, Artisinal Cash, Docs at Scale, and Homophily Research

  1. Elements of Style: Learning Perceptual Shape Style Similarity — code and data for research that helps perceive stylistic similarity between objects that transcends structure and function. For example, we can see a common style such as “Danish modern” in both a table and chair, though they have different structures. Until now, machines have found it difficult to do the same. (That quote cribbed from the phys.org writeup) Our new AI overlords may be cruel and heartless, but they’ll be able to tell Danish Modern from Shaker.
  2. The Advent of Artisinal Cash (NY Times) — details the rise of local physical currency around the world. Nonetheless, the use of traditional paper money is clearly on the wane. Perhaps these smaller, more attractive artisanal paper notes are merely last bursts of glory before it disappears entirely. Though as Mr. Deller, the artist behind the latest Brixton pound, said, “As long as there are drug deals and criminality, there’ll be a need for cash.”
  3. Documentation at Scale1. Acknowledge that brute force doesn’t work; 2. Make documentation a first class citizen; 3. Make documentation executable; 4. Track the intent.
  4. Exposure to Ideologically Diverse Information on Facebook (Facebook Research) — Friends shared substantially less cross-cutting news from sources aligned with an opposing ideology. People encountered roughly 15% less cross-cutting content in news feeds due to algorithmic ranking and clicked through to 70% less of this cross-cutting content. Within the domain of political news encountered in social media, selective exposure appears to drive attention.
Four short links: 5 August 2015

Four short links: 5 August 2015

Facebook Video, Lost Links, Regulatory Push, and LLVM Teases

  1. Theft, Lies, and Facebook Video (Medium) — inexcusable that Facebook, a company with a market cap of $260 BILLION, launched their video platform with no system to protect independent rights holders. It wouldn’t be surprising if Facebook was working on a solution now, which they can roll out conveniently after having made their initial claims at being the biggest, most important thing in video. In the words of Gillian Welch, “I wanna do right, but not right now.
  2. The Web We Have to SaveNearly every social network now treats a link just the same as it treats any other object — the same as a photo, or a piece of text — instead of seeing it as a way to make that text richer. You’re encouraged to post one single hyperlink and expose it to a quasi-democratic process of liking and plussing and hearting: Adding several links to a piece of text is usually not allowed. Hyperlinks are objectivized, isolated, stripped of their powers.
  3. California Regulator Pushing for All Cars to be Electric (Bloomberg) — Nichols really does intend to force au­tomakers to eventually sell nothing but electrics. In an interview in June at her agency’s heavy-duty-truck laboratory in downtown Los Angeles, it becomes clear that Nichols, at age 70, is pushing regulations today that could by midcentury all but banish the internal combustion engine from California’s famous highways. “If we’re going to get our transportation system off petroleum,” she says, “we’ve got to get people used to a zero-emissions world, not just a little-bit-better version of the world they have now.” How long until the same article is written, but about driverless cars?
  4. LLVM for Grad Students — fast intro to why LLVM is interesting. LLVM is a great compiler, but who cares if you don’t do compilers research? A compiler infrastructure is useful whenever you need to do stuff with programs.
Four short links: 9 July 2015

Four short links: 9 July 2015

Conservation of Attractive Profits, Prototyping Tool, Open Source PM, and Dev Snark

  1. Netflix and the Conservation of Attractive Profits (Stratechery) — Note the common element to all three of these companies: all have managed to modularize the production/delivery of their service which has allowed them to move closer to the customer. To put it another way, all of this new value is being created by specialized CRM companies: Airbnb for travelers, Uber for commuters, and Netflix for the bored.
  2. Origami — Facebook’s prototyping tool.
  3. Go as Open Source — keynote from this year’s Gophercon. I’ve been pondering lately how successful open source projects go beyond “anyone can scratch their itch,” and instead actively manage the tendency for scope creep. We’d rather have a small number of features that enable, say, 90% of the target use cases, and avoid the orders of magnitude more features necessary to reach 99% or 100%.
  4. The Universal Data StructureGiven the abysmal state of of today’s software engineering, I believe that a full embrace of the universal hash will result in better, simpler programs. Your weekly dose of snark.
Four short links: 12 June 2015

Four short links: 12 June 2015

OLAP Datastores, Timely Dataflow, Paul Ford is God, and Static Analysis

  1. pinota realtime distributed OLAP datastore, which is used at LinkedIn to deliver scalable real time analytics with low latency. It can ingest data from offline data sources (such as Hadoop and flat files) as well as online sources (such as Kafka). Pinot is designed to scale horizontally.
  2. Naiad: A Timely Dataflow System — in Timely Dataflow, the first two features are needed to execute iterative and incremental computations with low latency. The third feature makes it possible to produce consistent results, at both outputs and intermediate stages of computations, in the presence of streaming or iteration.
  3. What is Code (Paul Ford) — What the coders aren’t seeing, you have come to believe, is that the staid enterprise world that they fear isn’t the consequence of dead-eyed apathy but rather détente. Words and feels.
  4. Facebook Infer Opensourced — the static analyzer I linked to yesterday, released as open source today.
Four short links: 10 June 2015

Four short links: 10 June 2015

Product Sins, Container Satire, Dong Detection, and Evolving Code Designs

  1. The 11 Deadly Sins of Product Development (O’Reilly Radar) — they’re traps that are easy to fall into.
  2. It’s the Future — satire, but like all good satire it’s built on a rich vein of truth. Genuine guffaw funny, but Caution: Contains Rude Words.
  3. Difficulty of Dong Detection — accessible piece about how automated “inappropriate” detection remains elusive. (via Mind Hacks)
  4. Evolution of Code Design at Facebook — you may not have Facebook-scale scale problems, but if you’re having scale problems then Facebook’s evolution (not just their solutions) will interest you.
Four short links: 12 February 2015

Four short links: 12 February 2015

Finance Instrument, Retro Predictions, Trust Engineering, and Haptics

  1. Update on indie.vcWe’ve worked with the team at Cooley to create an investment instrument that has elements of both debt and equity. Debt in that we will not be purchasing equity initially, but, unlike debt, there is no maturity date, no collateralization of assets and no recourse if it’s never paid back. The equity element will only become a factor if the participating company chooses to raise a round of financing or sell out to an acquiring company. We don’t have a clever acronym or name for this instrument yet, but I’m sure we’ll come up with something great.
  2. How Nathan Barley Came True (Guardian) — if you haven’t already seen Nathan Barley, you should. It’s by the guy who did Black Mirror, and it’s both awful and authentic and predictive and retro and … painfully accurate about the horrors of our Internet/New Media industry. (via BoingBoing)
  3. Trust Engineers (Radio Lab) — Facebook has a created a laboratory of human behavior the likes of which we’ve never seen. We peek into the work of Arturo Bejar and a team of researchers who are tweaking our online experience, bit by bit, to try to make the world a better place. Radio show of goodness. (via Flowing Data)
  4. DARPA’S Haptix ProjectThe goal of the HAPTIX program is to provide amputees with prosthetic limb systems that feel and function like natural limbs, and to develop next-generation sensorimotor interfaces to drive and receive rich sensory content from these limbs. Today it’s prosthetic limbs for amputees, but within five years it’ll be augmented ad-driven realities for virtual currency ambient social recommendations.
Four short links: 4 November 2014

Four short links: 4 November 2014

3D Shares, Autonomous Golf Carts, Competitive Solar, and Interesting Data Problems

  1. Cooper-Hewitt Shows How to Share 3D Scan Data Right (Makezine) — important as we move to a web of physical models, maps, and designs.
  2. Singapore Tests Autonomous Golfcarts (Robohub) — a reminder that the future may not necessarily look like someone used the clone tool to paint Silicon Valley over the world.
  3. Solar Hits Parity in 10 States, 47 by 2016 (Bloomberg) — The reason solar-power generation will increasingly dominate: it’s a technology, not a fuel. As such, efficiency increases and prices fall as time goes on. The price of Earth’s limited fossil fuels tends to go the other direction.
  4. Facebook’s Top Open Data Problems (Facebook Research) — even if you’re not interested in Facebook’s Very First World Problems, this is full of factoids like Facebook’s social graph store TAO, for example, provides access to tens of petabytes of data, but answers most queries by checking a single page in a single machine. (via Greg Linden)