Hello, I have been a C++ software engineer for 3+ years mainly writing backend code for a training platform. I had 2 internships in full-stack web development and 1 in Java/C++. As well as a unique experience to work on a web data mining project with Mozilla. In my spare time I've built some apps with Go and Typescript. I'm knowledgeable in C++ multi-threaded environments. I'm really flexible and eager to learn and grow my skills.
Is Hackernews being brigaded with anti-Facebook content or is it finaly Facebooks time to die? This is the 5th anti-FB post I've seen today.
I would be interested if theirs any information on a big tech company rolling out a FB replacer or if Mark did something to really anger someone. From what I can tell most posts seems to be around Britain releasing information. Not trying to start a conspiracy just trying to understand why all the posts today.
Is Hackernews being brigaded with anti-Facebook content or is it finaly Facebooks time to die? This is the 5th anti-FB post I've seen today.
Facebook is in the middle of a media scapegoat frenzy: https://jakeseliger.com/2018/11/14/is-there-an-actual-facebo.... So we're going to keep seeing anti-Facebook articles for a while; it's more attractive to blame Facebook than it is to examine the media's role in the 2016 election or to look carefully at underlying forces, a la The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium by Gurri.
I feel like what we’re seeing is less of a focus based around the 2016 election and more just general societal scrutiny of what they are actually doing. These are powerful tools for bad actors in general - It’s not Facebook vs society, it’s social media/ad-driven personal information vacuuming vs society. It just so happens that Facebook is by far and away the most used.
Facebook also is an enemy of publishers because of the way it’s platform dominates how people use he internet. Journalists have no love for FB because they are taking clicks and ad money away from publishers.
A friend of mine just quit his job there. He says it's absolutely terrible to work there, and he thinks 2018 will be remember as the year Facebook began to die and that they would be screwed without Instagram. I don't know that I quite agree, but it felt confirmatory of all these articles.
Really this. All these stories stand on their own. Together they form a narrative. Facebook is terrible because they say they are doing one thing, but they are doing something else, but really they are doing even more than something else while releasing PR pieces and thinking the public will just absorb them and absolve Facebook of their wrong-doing.
There has been a solid anti-FB wave for the past year or so. The Cambridge Analytica situation didn't help. And especially with GDPR fresh in mind the media has been continuing to rail them for various privacy issues (as well as the usual social media addiction topics, political interference, etc, then add on any shady-looking business moves like this...)
Yeah, but honestly, among its core userbase, nobody cares. It's great for finding out about groups and events in one place, and instagram is the biggest social media platform in the world.
No I saw this on Reddit earlier but didn't see anything about it here. Thought I'd post it just to see some HN discussion because I find its usually higher quality than Reddit.
Don't have any opinion on it, just wanted to read other people's takes.
> Is Hackernews being brigaded with anti-Facebook content or is it finaly Facebooks time to die?
IMO, neither. The media in general does have a large amount of anti-FB fervor that is substanceless (this article isn't one though the exact same link was posted already [0]). However, regardless of frequency on HN, the crowd here is too niche to affect FB's sustainability.
While I'm no FB fan I actually don't think these stories are anywhere near as important as the non-stop media brigading would suggest.
* Cambridge Analytica: A company accessed friends lists via an api and sold them to another company. Friends lists are pretty much public on every other service. Very low quality data. Happened years ago. Original company accessed the data legitimately via api.
* Soros: Billionaire investor in FB starts publicly bad mouthing FB. FB hires team to find out why. Non-story.
* This story (strategic use of data with various partners): Literally every company that sells data does this. Some shady user practices, yes, but nothing out of the ordinary.
Altogether these are pretty minor things but the media coverage would have you think FB is causing the world economy to collapse.
My theory is that this is happening for two reasons:
1. Old media business models continue to deteriorate. FB is the new gatekeeper so the old gatekeepers are attacking it.
2. Extreme left-wing political bias in major media companies is still looking for a scapegoat for the 2016 election results and trying to to stop platforms that can circumvent their narrative.
Again, FB has a lot wrong with it, but to not view this as a coordinated attack from a handful of centralized mainstream media players is to miss the real story here.
Brigading, brigading. I keep seeing that word tossed around whenever people are unhappy that something inconvenient for them starts getting more attention than they think it deserves.
Personally, I'm happy that the media is finally starting to pay attention. Facebook has been doing shady, unethical, user-hostile stuff for a long time - since way before 2016. This has been building for a while now and I think the attention is entirely deserved.
And I'm not even part of the Elite Secret Socialist George Soros-Funded Left-Wing Media Cabal.
All the anti-FB opinion articles on and off big-media domains. There are a large amount. You can just browse https://www.nytimes.com/search?query=facebook if you'd like. Many lack substance.
If you dig through that list to the articles that are actual journalism (as opposed to explicitly labeled opinion and commentary articles), the last 3 are:
- "Facebook Used People’s Data to Favor Certain Partners and Punish Rivals, Documents Show" [0]
- "A Hot Seat for Facebook, an Empty Chair for Zuckerberg and a Vow to Share Secret Files" [1]
- "On Thanksgiving Eve, Facebook Acknowledges Details of Times Investigation" [2]
All three strike me as substantive. Yes, the NYT opinion section is a bit fluffy, and yes, that strikes me as a problem in a world where folks are increasingly unable to distinguish between journalism and editorial, but at the end of the day commentary like that is what the "opinion" label is for.
Sure, if you add filters and dig you get substance. The initial contention was about the large amount of substanceless anti-FB content in the media in general, not specific types of content. That you have to dig is the issue, not what you get once you have done so.
I think any issue of substance getting media attention will also generate a lot of fluff/opinion commentary on the few articles of substance. I don't think this wave of media attention on Facebook is different.
There are likely some positive articles about Facebook posted to HN daily too, but they don’t make it to the front page. There is a great deal of anti-Facebook sentiment here. An anti-Facebook article is much more likely to reach the front page than a positive one in this community, and that’s why it seems like HN is overrun with negative FB articles. Positive articles exist - they just won’t get upvotes here.
Lol. Is hackernews such a bubble these days? I come here and see so many bizarre takes on Facebook's malfeasance it makes me wonder if HN is being brigaded with pro-Facebook trolls? Or is HN just full of people who have the same bizarre and twisted view of the world as Facebook's execs? Has nobody here ever taken training in business ethics? Facebook's "shenanigans" could be slapped in as examples of what not to do for those ethics classes, much of it is on its face blatantly illegal.
Not that they don't deserve it but articles critical of the major tech companies are a large portion of the content here so a few anti-Facebook stuff in a row isn't really at all surprising.
What if it is not "anti" FB - but more like an influx of posting from a more realist perspective on what FB IS.
This is an OPPORTUNITY for HN readers in general to take a critical look at what this particular incarnation in Internet future-history is.
We should be documenting every detail and aspect of what is happening in tech, SV, FB, Goog, appl, etc all around us - as - how will we reflect on everything come 5, 10, 20 years from now.
We can't just assume "media" is doing it... HOLY CRAP - what was his name who fell from grace - the Micheal-something/AOL/Gawker?/WTF-was-his-name - who was ousted as a jerk and now we can't even recall his name... frak.
I think Facebook would like to be perceived as a liberal tech startup but keep in mind they knowingly sold the user info to Cambridge analytics for the republicans. The truth is their in it for the money like every other company. Apart of that means maintaining public perception.
Afaik the Democrats had done the same thing in 2012 with their micro-targeting "strategy" and they were praised for doing that (even here on this website). From here[1]:
> They used classic micro-targeting online advertising to reach those groups. Obama's team's use of Facebook this time was also very clever, tapping into Facebook's individual profile data. A million users downloaded the Obama 2012 app on Facebook. The app was able to identify their Facebook friends that fit favorable profiles located in key swing states, encouraging them to contact these friends to remind them to vote. Sources say one in five of those contacted this way were influenced positively by this contact.
If it matters I'm not a US citizen and I've never set foot in the States so I had almost no direct stake in the 2012 and the 2016 US elections.
I think there is also a distinction in the granularity of the data harvested and what it was used for.
Knowing someone's location, age, etc and using that to classify whether or not someone should reach out to them to remind them to vote is one thing.
Harvesting everything they've liked on facebook to classify them by big five personality type to predict how to use disinformation to manipulate someone (often by scaring them into thinking they needed a gun to defend themselves, or that they needed to deport immigrants because they were gangerous, or into thinking islamic extremism was a real threat to their lives, as people high in neuroticism are more heavily motivated by arbitrary negative emotional impulses) into skewing their political preferences is an entirely separate game.
> A million users downloaded the Obama 2012 app on Facebook.
I'm pretty sure that the friends of those 1 million people that had opted-in were not consulted about anything, though, but I may be wrong of that. And I'm pretty sure that those friends were the real target of said campaign.
Yeah, if he calls me directly on the phone or via text messaging (SMS, chat), there's nothing wrong with that. A definite no about my name and other info being in the database of a political party without my consent, based only on my friend's approval.
You support foreign intelligence agencies covertly, anonymously meddling with our elections. Especially through our social media platforms, like Facebook. Because Obama's campaign had an app.
no-one in this comment chain has supported intelligence agencies meddling in elections. Please don't be disingenuous. If anything, the parent was arguing against both.
Yeah, I most certainly oppose 3rd party voter databases like the ones you linked to, I only see them as tools to win elections by using "sales marketing"-like strategies.
I think that winning elections in such a manner is very bad for the future of democracy as you cannot fool the electorate indefinitely, because at some point the electorate will resort to other political "products", meaning the general populace will start looking at democracy and the electoral process as a "fake product" (as it usually happens to products that are pushed down consumers' throats based on marketing alone) and will choose other, "truer" products (like the rule of a sole individual that will not rely on the electoral process etc).
I don't generally support intelligence agencies but I most certainly do not support them meddling in any country's elections. I was just saying that the Obama campaign had used tactics similar to the ones used by the Trump campaign in 2016, that is all.
As a dev straight out of university this blog resonates with me. I know I don't even come close in knowledge to a senior dev so in interviews I try to emphasis that I have a hard working personality, positive attitude, strong desire to learn, etc. Traits I think a company would really want if a dev was lacking in the specific skills. Sadly it feels like it always falls flat and I end up coming across as naive.
I think mainly the problem is rooted in employers cynical approach to hiring employees. It's hard to evaluate people on less measurable data points when you don't trust them. It's easier to trust tests with easily quantifiable results rather than those with grey areas.
You make a solid point about what you radiate in an interview. I can tend be passive which might come across as aloof or uninterested. I could probably be more active.
I would love to live in Boston but I'm Canadian. Do you think I would have a chance of getting a visa and job in Boston? I've definity heard that if you want to progress in the software business you need to move companies often, unfortunately.
I'm intrigued by the tests you mentioned. Would definitely be helpful for finding weak points.
Many firms that have software operations in the US have operations in Canada as well, usually in the same time zone.
For instance Pac Northwest firms such as Amazon and Microsoft hire in B.C., Calgary has a scene in systems programming, embedded systems that I know of and probably lots that I don't. Toronto has everything from Geoff Hinton to internet porn. Montreal has game super-studio Ubisoft as well as ASP.NET and mainframe programmers, great nightlife, a goth loli clothing store, ...
So far as personality I would be worried more about a person who was too reckless than I would somebody careful.
If you want to appear interested in people it helps to ask questions. Sitting on either side of the interview table I would see it as an opportunity to get information I couldn't get any other way about the state of the industry so I am always interested. People mostly like talking about themselves and if they are talking you don't need to think of something to say or open your mouth and risk scoring an own goal.
To get in the mood you can pretend that you already have the job and you are coiled like a spring to start and you are going to ask all the questions you need to start such as "what kind of computer do i get?", "what is the schedule?", "where will I be working?", as well as getting an understanding of the job enough to get ready to do it.
If you find that hard to do consider acting lessons at a Meisner school and they will teach you to be coiled like a spring in the second term!
I was wandering that myself. My numbers seem low. I wrote version control for my CLs to improve the speed but I need the discipline to sit and create them.
You do have to play the numbers game. If you had sent me a dev CV at most points in the last 5 years it would go in the bin, but suddenly one week I need a dev...and you would get a shot.
All the companies gave a general overview of my ability at the end of the intership. The first company I worked at was a start up and they folded up. The second company was pretty great, code/tech was ok, told me they would love to hire me and the team lead said that I was probably a better dev then some of the current members on the team but they didn't reply when I messaged them. The 3rd company I refuse to go back and work for: would never progress my career, underpaid devs, Nightmare code, etc.
is their any other options beside previous internships?
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: No
Technologies: C++, Qt, VS, ZeroMQ, Go, Typescript, Python, Django, Backend
Resume/CV: Request Via email
Email: alexmccallum94@gmail.com
Hello, I have been a C++ software engineer for 3+ years mainly writing backend code for a training platform. I had 2 internships in full-stack web development and 1 in Java/C++. As well as a unique experience to work on a web data mining project with Mozilla. In my spare time I've built some apps with Go and Typescript. I'm knowledgeable in C++ multi-threaded environments. I'm really flexible and eager to learn and grow my skills.