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Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every post in the timeline

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351–360 of 367 posts

Re: Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every post in the timeline

#351
post #53

I interviewed at FB recently (didn't pass the in-person) and the one question I asked each interviewer was "tell me about the parts of FB I don't see" - because they have an odd hiring process where you don't figure out what team you'd be working with until after you are hired...and I had no interest in pushing Ads, but understood that wouldn't be a great pitch from my side. Turns out there is a LOT about ads at FB.…

If you don’t want to participate in the central economic function of a company you would not have been a good hire regardless of technical skill. You don’t want employees who are willing to work at a company they think is a blight on humanity.

> You don’t want employees who are willing to work at a company they think is a blight on humanity.

If that was true nobody would have any henchmen

Re: Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every post in the timeline

#352
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ethics aside, this actually sounds kind of fun to me. It's the kind of clever puzzle solving many of us love about programming - it's basically a cat and mouse game.

Ethics aside is a HUGE aside. You've just internally justified serial killing.

This escalated quickly :) So if I put ads on my site, I'm literally Hitler?

Re: Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every post in the timeline

#353
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like a fun challenge. It's just ads. If we're talking about some ad for a coffee maker, whatever. Now their whole selling data to unscrupulous folks, taking money from parents via their kids, selling fake news that makes people hate other people (now that gets into the ad space...) .... That's where I'd want to nope out.

It can be demoralizing to work on anything that’s against the end user’s satisfaction, regardless of whether it’s actually evil. I remember working as a junior developer on a desktop app that had so many fatal bugs that it crashed very often. Instead of being given the time needed to fix the crashes, I was told to build this watchdog ‘launcher’ EXE that would simply re-run the application every time it crashed, resto…

Hey, you invented crash-only software! https://lwn.net/Articles/191059/

Re: Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every post in the timeline

#354

This example is likely not specifically targeting ad blockers, but ad scrapers for transparency: https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-blocks-ad-transp... > Our tool recognized ads by searching for that word. Last year, Facebook added invisible letters to the HTML code of the site. So, to a computer, the word registered as “SpSonSsoSredS.” That article also links to this tweet in that paragraph.

> We have collected more than 100,000 political ads in this way. But Facebook’s latest update blocks tools like ours from clicking on the “Why Am I Seeing This” menu. > The company added code that prevents clicks generated by computers — including browser extensions — on just that one button. Web browsers make a distinction between a click generated by the computer and one generated by your mouse. Clicks from your mo…

Ah, this explains why so many of my GreaseMonkey attempts didn't work!

Re: Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every post in the timeline

#355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like a time span of minutes wouldn't be fast enough for on-the-fly blocking of sponsored posts?

Oh yea - I guess I had a specific use case in mind when I said that =) What I meant is that I can hammer out some Node/Python that will grab an image w/text and put it through OCR for character extraction. "Programming" it would take me a handful of minutes.

Ahh, that makes sense!

Re: Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every post in the timeline

#356
post #57
post #18

If you don't mind getting rid of every post in the timeline, there's News Feed Eradicator for Facebook: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicat...

At this point, maybe just delete your Facebook account?

Messenger is way too powerful to catch up with friends.

Re: Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every post in the timeline

#359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All engineering hires go through bootcamp, period. The only engineering hires that don't go through team selection are domain experts hired for a specific team/role ahead of time.

> The only engineering hires that don't go through team selection are domain experts hired for a specific team/role ahead of time. Is this a significant fraction of hires? Because I find it really odd to waste the time of a say an embedded software engineer trying to teach them React when they're pretty set on working on something else anyways…

Someone joining to work on embedded systems would probably be "pre-allocated" during the hiring/offer process ... so they go through bootcamp, but skip team selection and go straight to their team. There's also a separate hiring pipeline for AI/ML roles since those require specialized domain knowledge vs. a "generalist" software engineer.

Re: Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every post in the timeline

#360
post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I run an old collaborative writing (roleplaying) forum populated mostly by teens that's paid for by a banner ad. When I read HN comments about ads, I see people who are forgetting what ads have actually gotten us: more people able to create more things that are available to everyone for free. HNers like to say "well, then adapt your business model," but look at the incredibly friction that exists for getting people t…

The problem isn't ads per se, it's all the crap around them: * invasive, industrial grade stalking * wasted screen real estate * trackers * page load time * bloated third-party garbage * blinkenlights * dark patterns * bandwidth hogging * CPU hogging * drive-by-malware potential (compromised ad network is an incredibly powerful attack vector) And so on. Quite a long time ago I actually wrote down what I consider the…

Facebook ads are among the most reasonable of ads. They appear like normal content and are easy to scroll past. You can even hide ads that aren’t relevant or that you don’t like seeing. You guys are crazy.
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