[HN Gopher] Pushing the whole company into the past on purpose
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Pushing the whole company into the past on purpose
Author : senkora
Score : 107 points
Date : 2025-01-09 23:01 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (rachelbythebay.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (rachelbythebay.com)
| senkora wrote:
| This seems to be the reason for writing about the topic right
| now:
|
| > So, yes, in June 2015, I slowed down the whole company
| [Facebook] by a second.
|
| > Of course, here it is ten years later, and the guy in charge
| just sent it back fifty years [by ending fact checking?]. Way to
| upstage me, dude.
| klooney wrote:
| Facebook maybe? She mentions the cat factory
| sunshowers wrote:
| The fact checking is the tip of the iceberg -- it's what the
| marketing machine led with because it's the least
| objectionable. Far far worse is letting queer people like
| myself be called mentally ill, though not any other group (e.g.
| religious people). Yes, it's part of the common discourse, but
| the common discourse is objectively morally abhorrent.
|
| I worked at FB for a decade, and I now am rooting for its
| complete destruction.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Nice descriptive article. I've done this on purpose too to debug
| remote filesystem syncs and cryptography problems where machines
| are out of sync. My GPS wall clock is handy for adjusting NTP,
| but the time it takes to scan my eyes from the wall back to the
| monitor.. you really do need two stacked like she did. So I now
| figured to use transparrent terminals each logged into a
| different host and lay them over one another running "watch -n1
| date".
|
| Would have been nice to have some more network, code and command
| line examples. You need to set up a local ntpd and need to point
| your local master at that temporarily. A better utility to write
| would be "timediff -s1 -s2" that takes two time servers and shows
| the offset. I bet there's a way to do that in one line. Anyone?
| fishstock25 wrote:
| > watch -n1 date
|
| Um, that's a pretty inaccurate way to notice an offset in the
| millisecond range, isn't it?
| singleshot_ wrote:
| I'm not sure I get the fifty years bit at the very end. Anyone
| care to explain?
| drewbug01 wrote:
| I believe the author worked at Facebook in the past. The "fifty
| years" bit is likely a reference to that company's recent
| policy change that explicitly re-authorizes the use of what are
| rightly considered slurs - even if they were common sentiment
| to express publicly fifty-some years ago.
| singleshot_ wrote:
| Aye, that makes sense (not the slurs, but the explanation).
| Thanks.
| ashoeafoot wrote:
| "Reenact the past , be the past, past becomes glorious present"
| Isil
| wodenokoto wrote:
| > Of course, here it is ten years later, and the guy in charge
| just sent it back fifty years. Way to upstage me, dude.
|
| I feel like there's a link to a story missing there
| isoprophlex wrote:
| The guy in charge being Lizardman, who almost tripped over his
| own claws to get rid of fact checkers, to allow calling non-
| heterosexuals metally ill, etcetera etcetera now that we are
| witnessing the second coming of The White House Cheeto
| this_user wrote:
| It's about the company's recent course change, which includes
| Zuckerberg's Joe Rogan interview from last week. IMO this has a
| lot to do with the younger generations. Gen Z were heavily
| supporting Trump in the recent election, and Zuck has probably
| realised that he needs to align Meta with them if they want to
| remain a relevant player in the social media space.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| I don't buy it, Gen Z hasnt swung right, but the young left
| has swung apathetic. Zuck has his own reasons for sucking up
| to Trump and it's not to stay popular with the kids, who have
| already moved on from Meta properties.
| XorNot wrote:
| The hypothesis I saw proposed is that his marriage is
| breaking down/actually done. Basically he's going the Elon
| route.
| fishstock25 wrote:
| This is why it's important not just _that_ people do the
| right thing but also _why_ they do it. Circumstances can
| change, but if people do the right thing for the "right
| reasons", then what they do won't change.
|
| Doing sth because of somebody's spouse is a bad reason,
| imagine the relationship goes sour and they face a
| divorce, boom they change their tune.
| Animats wrote:
| Is there a standard "smearing" period now? For a while, Google
| had a 24 hour adjustment period, 12 hours on each side of the
| leap second, while Facebook used a shorter period.
| fanf2 wrote:
| Not as far as I know.
|
| The cosine adjustment that Google originally used is not the
| best: NTP aims to measure the difference in rate between the
| client's hardware clock and real time, and it works best if the
| rates are fairly constant. With the cosine smear, the rate
| changes continuously! If you use a simple linear smear, NTP
| just has to cope with two small rate changes at the start and
| end of the smear.
|
| The smear needs to be slow enough that NTP's algorithms have
| time to react without overshooting; 24 hours is a reasonable
| choice tho you can go a bit faster. There's some disagreement
| about when the smear occurs relative to the leap second; if the
| leap is in the middle of the smear the max offset is 0.5
| seconds, but if the leap is at the end of the smear the offset
| is always slow. They were able to test the up-to-one-second-
| slow scenario in a system-wide live trial, whereas they could
| not do the same for the sign flip. I think if you can cope with
| a 0.5 second offset from real time then a 1.0 second offset
| should not be much more troublesome.
| quitit wrote:
| >Of course, here it is ten years later, and the guy in charge
| just sent it back fifty years. Way to upstage me, dude.
|
| Seeing that this was written by Rachel by the Bay, I thought it
| was going to be a post about Facebook's recent policy change, and
| indeed it was.
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