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We know what you're doing

weknowwhatyouredoing.com

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Re: We know what you're doing

#111

Post by troels »

brlewis wrote: post #106
troels wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While that's true, I would kind of expect Facebook to do better than most sites. Oh, well.

Facebook tries to do whatever maximizes engagement. Technical correctness only matters when it serves that primary goal.

Some times a benefit can be indirect and hard to see immediately. Being "technical correct" reduces complexity, which again reduces costs down the road. For example, it makes it easier for third parties to integrate with your service, to name one benefit.

It may never be clear for each individual feature, but violations compound to form a mess of unpredictability. Facebook generally appears to me as being a company with a very strong engineering culture and so it surprises me a bit that they would let something like this slip. Maybe I'm just not seeing the whole picture and it is a clearly thought-out tradeoff and not simply negligence.

Re: We know what you're doing

#112

Post by sesqu »

mduerksen wrote: post #95
confluence wrote: post #92

Earlier 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.

While I do agree that false positive and false negative are better names, they do have one shortcoming in comparison:

Classical statistics suffers from the inference problem, where instead of "tested positive for presence" you have to say "tested negative for absence". So a type I error is a false negative as much as it is false positive, which can get confusing.

Re: We know what you're doing

#113

Post by yread »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #110
yread wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Searching for '743264506' reveals that it is actually quite an old trick. And the poor chap whose facebook profile number it is doesn't seem to be a geek so he probably didn't invent it

What? It isn't anyone's profile number. It's a random number in a broken profile URL.

https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=743264506

Re: We know what you're doing

#114

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

yread wrote: post #113
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? It isn't anyone's profile number. It's a random number in a broken profile URL.

https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=743264506

It's a coincidence that any profile exists with that number. It's meaningless too, you could use ANY number.

Re: We know what you're doing

#115

Post by dinkumthinkum »

megablast wrote: post #54
lukevdp wrote: post #16

I 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

Most bosses do not have the time, wherewithal or care enough to do this. There is nothing wrong with people blowing of steam.

I think this is so naive. Sure a "good" boss probably won't be snooping on his or her employees. However, I'm pretty sure most bosses are humans and humans tend to snoop on each other

Re: We know what you're doing

#116

Post by dreadsword »

I'm guessing the site is making an API call to pull each user's thumbnail. Remember, your capped at 350 API requests per hour per APP ID. You should cache image links to avoid all the broken image icons.

Re: We know what you're doing

#118

Post by yread »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #114
yread wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=743264506

It's a coincidence that any profile exists with that number. It's meaningless too, you could use ANY number.

Sure you could. But do a google search on this one and compare it with a google search for a random number of similar length. Besides you can see from the search that it is this number that is used quite often with this trick

Re: We know what you're doing

#119

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

yread wrote: post #118
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a coincidence that any profile exists with that number. It's meaningless too, you could use ANY number.

Sure you could. But do a google search on this one and compare it with a google search for a random number of similar length. Besides you can see from the search that it is this number that is used quite often with this trick

People have copied the URL, that's all. Similar URLs have also been copied.

What is your point?

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