the phone number column is really bad form.
Does someone actually think having visible phone numbers put up by unaware people scraped is a good thing? What am I missing here?
We know what you're doing
91–100 of 121 posts
Re: We know what you're doing
#92A great example that should remind people that it's probably best to assume that everything they say or do online (offline as well) is now (and forevermore) public. Assume that anything you say or do has the ability to be seen by anyone and everyone around the globe instantly - without any methods of recourse. The genie is out of the bottle. Hence one should adapt one's own behaviour and act accordingly (that doesn't…
It doesn't have to be that way; it's very easy to lock down your facebook settings to friends-only. I think it's quite ridiculous that that's not the default. This pessimistic assumption you mention where anyone can see everything might be the safest, but it's just not how humans work. When you're surrounded by a bunch of friends (or their status messages), you don't assume the rest of the world is overhearing you as…
You are right about that option. But I find it prudent to always reduce the chance of a type 2 error and increase the chance of a type 1 error (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4081972). It is best to assume the worst and trust nothing whilst acting probabilistically than to assume perfection/trust and act deterministically.
Hence, in this case, if you assume everything is public, you reduce the harm that can come to you when the trust you have in a service fails you (as it may well do). Just like an investor - take on risk, minimise uncertainty and price catastrophe correctly. This gives you the best of both worlds - risk priced in proportion to reward. You can have your cake and eat it too - if you only take a slice and no more.
Re: We know what you're doing
#93I have some doubts about the site's disclaimer: "I cannot be held responsible for any persons actions as a result of using this experiement." If someone gets fired upon a comment you took out of context and put under "people who want to get fired" then I wouldn't bet the above statement as your best line of defence in a lawsuit.
That's a terrible disclaimer. You can't just disclaim your way out of statutory liability.
There's probably nothing to worry about with re-publishing an already public fact, but the cases where errors are made e.g "I'd hate to be my boss" filled under "People who hate their boss", the casual reader may be confused (some might say mislead).
The solution is just to keep people informed, so your disclaimer may say something like: "the information on this site is automatically collected from public posts to Facebook. Posts are classified automatically, and as such our classification of their sentiment may be inaccurate."
Also, just in case one of the Facebook posts says something defamatory, hate speech, etc. you can gently remind people that you didn't write, edit, or approve of the content so "are not responsible for the content of messages".
Re: We know what you're doing
#94I'm surprised there isn't a column for people who are reading Hacker News. This guy for example: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?=743264506
I'm also a programmer, and I know how it works but I got to admit you freaked me up for a while :-)
Re: We know what you're doing
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
It doesn't have to be that way; it's very easy to lock down your facebook settings to friends-only. I think it's quite ridiculous that that's not the default. This pessimistic assumption you mention where anyone can see everything might be the safest, but it's just not how humans work. When you're surrounded by a bunch of friends (or their status messages), you don't assume the rest of the world is overhearing you as…
You are right about that option. But I find it prudent to always reduce the chance of a type 2 error and increase the chance of a type 1 error ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4081972 ). It is best to assume the worst and trust nothing whilst acting probabilistically than to assume perfection/trust and act deterministically. Hence, in this case, if you assume everything is public, you reduce the harm that can co…
As a completely off-topic side note: Since I was introduced to statistics, I always forgot which error was type 1 and which was type 2. I had to read your link to find out.
In code, "int errorType = 1;" would be a badly chosen variable :)
The expressions "false positive" and "false negative" reveal more semantics than "type 1" and "type 2", and are therefore much easier to remember.
Re: We know what you're doing
#96peterwwillis tweets "I LOVE MY BOSS, HE'S THE SMARTEST, I CAN'T WAIT TO WAKE UP EARLY AND FIGHT TRAFFIC!!!" Am I doing it right?
Sycophancy is more effective in person. You could waste a lot of time like this without getting your nose brown at all.
Re: We know what you're doing
#97I can't believe people are still publicly posting stuff about their bosses. Surely there has been enough press coverage about people getting fired for fb/twitter antics
Well according to the Gervais principle, there are two likely possibilities here. If it's a Loser insulting his Clueless boss then he probably has little to lose and probably enjoys the risk of his boss finding out while sharing a good laugh with his friends. On the other hand if it's a Clueless insulting his Sociopath boss then, well, there's probably a good indicator of why he's stuck in the Clueless caste.
Re: We know what you're doing
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are right about that option. But I find it prudent to always reduce the chance of a type 2 error and increase the chance of a type 1 error ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4081972 ). It is best to assume the worst and trust nothing whilst acting probabilistically than to assume perfection/trust and act deterministically. Hence, in this case, if you assume everything is public, you reduce the harm that can co…
As a completely off-topic side note: Since I was introduced to statistics, I always forgot which error was type 1 and which was type 2. I had to read your link to find out. In code, "int errorType = 1;" would be a badly chosen variable :) The expressions "false positive" and "false negative" reveal more semantics than "type 1" and "type 2", and are therefore much easier to remember.
You are correct, my apologies for explaining with improper terms - that's the curse of knowledge I suppose.
I quickly forget that the "map" in my brain is about 10 times more detailed than the vector representation I detail in my answer - and it often lacks ideas that may be critical to understanding.
I will use false positive/negative terminology from now on - apologies for the dense language and propagating difficult to comprehend terms - I'll try to stop doing that :D.
Re: We know what you're doing
#9999th percentile of people who either don't care or are not able to care about privacy
Re: We know what you're doing
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
My favorite BBS hack was that on some standard RA configs, unless explicitly turned off by the sysop, you could save received messages to disk even if you were just a normal user. This meant that you could send a message to yourself, i.e. 'del . /q /s' (or whatever zapped your dos disk, I can't really remember.), and then save it to 'c:\autoexec.bat' ... Other fun things where nailbombs, small .zip files that would e…
Kids these days improved on the old pranks: http://research.swtch.com/zip
Haha, oh wow, thanks for that :)