Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Early Facebook and Google Employees Form a Center for Humane Technology

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 191 posts

Re: Early Facebook and Google Employees Form a Center for Humane Technology

#21

Post by blawson »

gaius wrote: post #15
mstank wrote: post #8

Facebook and other social media platforms might be heading for the type of reckoning the fast food industry had in the late 90s and early 2000s. http://marko.la/facebook-is-mcdonalds/

McDonalds is still a viable business. When Facebook goes, it will evaporate like MySpace did. And not a moment too soon.

I'm not too sure. I think there's a lot of value in a centralized identity management system. Facebook seems to have filled that role. I can see a near future where it acts as a sort of SSO for the web. That doesn't necessarily sound like a $550B company, but could still be worth quite a bit.

Re: Early Facebook and Google Employees Form a Center for Humane Technology

#22

Post by dang »

[deleted] wrote: post #17
dang wrote: post #11

> Ads warning teens about the dangers of technology, that's definitely going to work. That's a good point of course, but on HN if you make your point as a snarky dismissal, we get lousy discussion. So please don't do that. There's no point worth making that can't be made thoughtfully. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16304411 Edit: since the comment was edited ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16304414 ) I'l…

[deleted]

Much better! I'll detach the original reply so your comment can run free.

Re: Early Facebook and Google Employees Form a Center for Humane Technology

#23

Post by [deleted] »

dang wrote: post #11

> Ads warning teens about the dangers of technology, that's definitely going to work. That's a good point of course, but on HN if you make your point as a snarky dismissal, we get lousy discussion. So please don't do that. There's no point worth making that can't be made thoughtfully. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16304411 Edit: since the comment was edited ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16304414 ) I'l…

[deleted]

Re: Early Facebook and Google Employees Form a Center for Humane Technology

#24

Post by jdcarr »

yaacov wrote: post #18

> “The largest supercomputers in the world are inside of two companies — Google and Facebook — and where are we pointing them?” Mr. Harris said. “We’re pointing them at people’s brains, at children.” I'm not sure if I should be concerned that the leader of this initiative is wrong about something so trivial. https://www.top500.org/lists/2017/11/

While the wording by the author is technically incorrect in that Google and Facebook aren’t operating a single supercomputer, the computing resources in possession of each company would almost certainly exceed any entry in the top500.

Re: Early Facebook and Google Employees Form a Center for Humane Technology

#25

Post by cube2222 »

yaacov wrote: post #18

> “The largest supercomputers in the world are inside of two companies — Google and Facebook — and where are we pointing them?” Mr. Harris said. “We’re pointing them at people’s brains, at children.” I'm not sure if I should be concerned that the leader of this initiative is wrong about something so trivial. https://www.top500.org/lists/2017/11/

The author used the wrong name, surely what he means is the biggest group of computers working as one system software-wise.

But that really doesn't strike a chord, especially for lay people.

Re: Early Facebook and Google Employees Form a Center for Humane Technology

#26

Post by [deleted] »

yaacov wrote: post #18

> “The largest supercomputers in the world are inside of two companies — Google and Facebook — and where are we pointing them?” Mr. Harris said. “We’re pointing them at people’s brains, at children.” I'm not sure if I should be concerned that the leader of this initiative is wrong about something so trivial. https://www.top500.org/lists/2017/11/

[deleted]

Re: Early Facebook and Google Employees Form a Center for Humane Technology

#27

Post by [deleted] »

chiefofgxbxl wrote: post #14

Looking at their website, they should really swap the landing page [0] with their "Problem" page [1] if they mean to communicate the strongest message they can about this issue. The landing page isn't as clear at what they're looking so solve. I'd love for them to have a sort of "shop" to raise awareness. If I could just get my hands on some stickers, I'd be posting them around in public to point people to the /probl…

[deleted]

Re: Early Facebook and Google Employees Form a Center for Humane Technology

#28

Post by fma »

With smartphones being ubiquitous, and we all have a few minutes here and there to spare...we just need to come up with a better and productive way to kill those time where you are idle. Any suggestions? Right now I'm waiting on my wife to get ready before we head out and spending it here on HN, but still, it's not productive.

Re: Early Facebook and Google Employees Form a Center for Humane Technology

#29

Post by dang »

whatshisface wrote: post #19
dang wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't post reflexively dismissive comments to HN, especially when talking about other people's work, and extra-especially when it's the first comment to a thread. You might have a good point, but the genre itself drowns it out in a medium-is-the-message way. Discussions are sensitive to initial conditions and we're hoping that HN can be better than that. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I think the pattern where the comments usually disagree with the article is healthy. It's a point-counterpoint argument structure, where the odd layers in the tree are arguing opposite to the even layers. The article makes its case, the first comments make the case that was missing from the article, the replies make the case missing from them ... and so on.

You're right, and we're not asking commenters to always agree with an article—but when disagreeing, to reflectively engage rather than reflexively dismiss. The article doesn't necessarily deserve such treatment, but the community does. We all share an interest in HN being a place for quality discussion, and this is how quality discussion emerges.

It is most important early in the thread, because discussions are sensitive to initial conditions and the blank page is most vulnerable to rapid, shallow responses. By the time the more thoughtful ones have had time to emerge, the thread is often already choked by faster-growing weeds.

Re: Early Facebook and Google Employees Form a Center for Humane Technology

#30

Post by ipsum2 »

yaacov wrote: post #18

> “The largest supercomputers in the world are inside of two companies — Google and Facebook — and where are we pointing them?” Mr. Harris said. “We’re pointing them at people’s brains, at children.” I'm not sure if I should be concerned that the leader of this initiative is wrong about something so trivial. https://www.top500.org/lists/2017/11/

Technically true, but if you were measuring raw compute power it's possible that tech companies can beat super computers. (Numbers are hard to come by because companies are secretive about how many servers they have)
Post reply on HN