[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 : 263 points
Date : 2025-01-09 23:01 UTC (4 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.
| pfannkuchen wrote:
| You can't call Christians mentally ill on Facebook? Really?
| pessimizer wrote:
| If wanting to kill yourself over your sex isn't mental
| illness, I have no idea why insurance or the state should be
| concerned about it. We're not collectively paying for flat-
| chested women to get breast implants, or ugly men to get nose
| jobs, although they both may be upset about their bodies.
| We're also not labeling it as "life-saving."
|
| I don't understand how we can insist that these conditions
| are both the worst mental illnesses, and not mental illnesses
| at all, at the same time. And maybe you do understand, but
| it's not so clearly explained that people shouldn't be
| allowed to discuss it in public.
|
| > though not any other group (e.g. religious people).
|
| Is this made up?
| KittenInABox wrote:
| > We're not collectively paying for flat-chested women to
| get breast implants, or ugly men to get nose jobs, although
| they both may be upset about their bodies.
|
| Umm...We actually do pay for breast implants/breast
| reductions in the case of medical need which can vary from
| reconstruction to hormone imbalances, the latter of which
| makes sense to consider being transgender under since
| hormones do quite a bit to help with the illness.
| sunshowers wrote:
| Is pregnancy an illness, mental or otherwise? Should
| insurance or the state not cover the medical costs of
| pregnancy?
|
| What are your credentials, anyway? Why do you think you
| know more than decades of in depth research and millennia
| of anthropological evidence?
| intended wrote:
| Why bring logic to an emotion fight.
|
| They have a whole media ecosystem, the actual main stream
| media, giving them training and talking points to subvert
| these conversations and successfully move away from
| facts.
|
| They only follow the style of debate, not its substance.
|
| Limiting your self to the substance only weighs you down
| against an attacker of this nature.
|
| Engage, but just waste their cycles.
|
| Eventually there is always a missing definition,
| something extremely basic that's being alluded to. Or a
| contradiction that shows up.
|
| Point that out and you will get the "go google it
| yourself", retreat flag show up.
| playa06 wrote:
| > Should insurance or the state not cover the medical
| costs of pregnancy?
|
| Do you think pro-natalist policies (anything that can be
| seen as incentivizing the act of having more children)
| need to come from a desire to see more equality, or human
| dignity?
|
| In fact some of the most evil people of the 1900s thought
| it was good to support the medical costs of pregnancy,
| and even thought you should /pay families if they had
| more children to incentivize having more/ (see pro
| natalist politics in Western Europe in 30s, 40s, 50s. The
| ones in my country, France, actually had their strongest
| push in 1939, and are a large part of the reason why
| France's baby boom was one of the strongest in Europe
| later on).
|
| You will find out that people who usually hate social
| programs will have different opinions about anything
| related to demographics, and it's not complicated to
| understand why (whether their motives come from racism,
| or selfishness ie a desire to preserve the GDP and make
| sure the country won't be an empty hell hole of old
| people dying in the hospice when they retire).
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| Do you at least acknowledge that some people hold that
| position for not-evil reasons. That seemed like the
| missing razor in your final couple sentences.
| dani__german wrote:
| pregnancy is certainly a condition, though to call it an
| illness wouldnt be appropriate. Additional care should be
| provided to pregnant mothers from any human organization
| of any variety that hopes to continue existing.
|
| He doesnt need credentials. No one needs credentials to
| be correct, their statements should be evaluated on their
| merits alone. Credentialism is a choking ideology,
| leading to higher prices and possibly higher quality in
| many things.
| sunshowers wrote:
| Gender dysphoria is also a condition, not an illness.
|
| Having studied or lived through something makes you far
| more likely to be correct than simply thinking about it
| with your giant brain. You don't need them to be correct,
| but they really help.
| brooke2k wrote:
| Gender dysphoria is a potential cause of mental illness,
| not a mental illness in itself. If someone has a job they
| hate or an unhealthy relationship which is causing them to
| be severely depressed, the best treatment is simply to quit
| that job or that relationship and work towards something
| better.
|
| It's just the same for transgender people. Growing up
| feeling that you're in the wrong body can cause a lot of
| mental distress, and the best and most universally
| effective option for fixing that distress is to simply
| transition to living as another gender.
|
| Not all people who are transgender experience severe enough
| dysphoria to cause serious mental health issues, and yet
| they still decide to transition and report being happier
| afterwards. [1] However, many transgender people do
| experience distress over it, and a proportion of that
| population are even suicidal over it.
|
| This is why I consider it to be a cause of mental illness,
| not a mental illness in and of itself. And it's important
| to note that, even for the group that experience
| suicidality, transitioning is _still_ an effective
| treatment. [2] [3]
|
| Plastic surgery, on the other hand, is not even close to
| universally effective for people who are depressed about
| being "flat-chested" or "ugly." Cosmetic surgery such as
| breast enhancement has been shown to have a much, much
| higher rate of regret than transgender surgeries. [4]
|
| In short, the reason that gender-affirming care is
| considered a treatment for gender dysphoria, whereas breast
| enhancement and rhinoplasty are not considered treatments
| for body dysmorphia, is simply that the former is effective
| and the latter is not.
|
| 1. https://www.apa.org/topics/lgbtq/transgender-people-
| gender-i...
|
| 2. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10925986/
|
| 3. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7869522/
|
| 4. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38688814/
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| I don't think (most) queer people nor (most) religious people
| should be called mentally ill at work or on social media.
| However, I also don't think a standalone policy should
| address either case specifically. Professional decorum and
| the typical "no hate speech" should cover it. What say you to
| that position?
| freeone3000 wrote:
| It would be if those were not _specific exceptions to the
| hate speech policy_ : " Mental characteristics, including
| but not limited to allegations of stupidity, intellectual
| capacity, and mental illness, and unsupported comparisons
| between PC groups on the basis of inherent intellectual
| capacity. We do allow allegations of mental illness or
| abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation,
| given political and religious discourse about
| transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious
| usage of words like "weird.""
|
| Source: https://transparency.meta.com/policies/community-
| standards/h...
| sunshowers wrote:
| You are welcome to take this up with Mark Zuckerberg.
| 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?
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| That doesn't even show ms. Add something like +%s%N (ns) to
| the options if you want finer resolution.
| mkl wrote:
| The problem is using watch you have no control* over when
| in each second it's getting the time, so it could be nearly
| a second late (e.g. it's getting the time once per second,
| but happens to be doing it when it's a few milliseconds
| away from ticking over to the next second).
|
| * Okay, you have a little control in that you can press
| enter, or otherwise set it running, at a particular moment.
| Izkata wrote:
| So don't have any delay: while true; do
| date +%s%N; done
| mkl wrote:
| There's still a delay with that, as date takes time to
| run. You need a program that gets the current time, waits
| an appropriate amount, prints, and repeats. It'll still
| be slightly off unless you can measure the printing and
| flow control accurately.
|
| I have a program I use in shell scripting called
| sleepuntil that does something like this, but it doesn't
| try to be millisecond-accurate.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| The problem that I noticed is if you open two terms on
| different hosts (say by ssh) and run watch commands then,
| regardless of resolution, they'll be out of sync. There's
| no hard tick event common to both kernels. And as someone
| already said, you introduce sampling effects.
|
| So I figured you need a time "diff", a single command
| that updates from both timeservers and then presents the
| offset in a single operation. So (I just researched this
| again and) there's three answers here [0], using ntpdate
| and something I've never seen before called clockdiff.
|
| [0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2296981/how-can-
| i-work-o...
| mkl wrote:
| Right, as I said, watch is the wrong tool here. The event
| in common is the synchronised clocks, or an NTP server.
|
| To see the NTP offsets of a machine you can run something
| like: ntpq -pn
|
| ntpdate -q doesn't seem very consistent to me, even
| pointing it at a nearby server.
|
| To see the clocks ticking visually you can do something
| like the following and run it on each machine (assuming
| they have the same ping). #include
| <time.h> #include <sys/time.h> #include
| <stdio.h> void main() { struct
| timeval tv; struct timespec ts;
| ts.tv_sec = 0; while(1) {
| gettimeofday(&tv, NULL); ts.tv_nsec =
| 1000000000 - 1000*tv.tv_usec; //number of nanoseconds
| left in the current second nanosleep(&ts,
| &ts); gettimeofday(&tv, NULL);
| printf("%lu.%06lu\n", (unsigned long) tv.tv_sec,
| (unsigned long) tv.tv_usec); } }
|
| Note that the sleep and second gettimeofday call take a
| little time (between 70 and 300 ms for me, but it depends
| what else is running), so the tick times reported won't
| be exactly on the second.
| 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.
| pessimizer wrote:
| What's important is that we break these companies up so
| they aren't used as tools by the powerful. Neither
| Zuckerberg's or Musk's income streams should be allowed
| to have such an important effect on everyone's lives, but
| as long as these communication companies are allowed to
| exchange their obedience for a regime's lack of antitrust
| enforcement, our 1st Amendment rights are meaningless.
|
| > This is why it's important not just that people do the
| right thing but also why they do it.
|
| I care about what Zuckerberg, Loraine Powell Jobs or Musk
| feel the right thing is about as much as I care about
| what my bus driver thinks the right thing is. What we
| need is a functioning government.
| antonvs wrote:
| A functioning government is not possible as long as money
| is speech, corporations are people, etc. That directly
| translates to government by the wealthiest people.
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| I've noticed a distinct trend in the last month where
| even the most casual mention of the oligarchy attracts a
| bunch of downvotes. I'm trying to decide if this is an
| indication that some cohort of users here are deeply and
| passionately delusional about the political state of
| play, or merely uncomfortable about having it pointed
| out.
| onemoresoop wrote:
| It could be bots as well
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| That's a dangerous assumption to habitualize in its own
| right...
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| And yet it can't be dismissed out of hand either. AI's
| contributions to society are truly multi-faceted.
| XorNot wrote:
| It hardly need be AI: just a couple lines of Python.
| skellington wrote:
| Zuch was granted his wish and was turned into a real boy.
| And now he knows he can do a lot better.
| dani__german wrote:
| Gen Z exit polling data from the 2024 US Presidential
| Election shows a significant rightward shift among gen Z
| voters. Instagram is still popular with "the kids", and it
| does tend to have more lax moderation. It leans somewhat
| conservative/right favored through inaction/sheer mass of
| posts.
|
| https://www.newsweek.com/democrats-genz-kamala-harris-
| trump-...
| cipheredStones wrote:
| > Gen Z were heavily supporting Trump in the recent election
|
| What on earth are you talking about? 18-29 year olds were the
| most Democratic age group, as usual. 18-29 year old men
| _might_ have _slightly_ favored Trump, but to a significantly
| lower degree than older men.
| ren_engineer wrote:
| Gen Z only voted democrat by a 4% margin which is an
| absolute death sentence for the democrat party considering
| people only vote further right as they get older. For
| context Obama won that demographic by 20% in 2012, and won
| it by even more in 2008. If those numbers hold democrats
| have no path to winning national elections
|
| https://apnews.com/article/election-harris-trump-women-
| latin...
| cipheredStones wrote:
| > Gen Z only voted democrat by a 4% margin
|
| Yes, which is not remotely the same claim as
|
| > Gen Z were heavily supporting Trump in the recent
| election [and therefore Zuckerberg needed to change
| political course for his social media to stay relevant]
|
| which is the false claim I was responding to.
|
| > If those numbers hold democrats have no path to winning
| national elections
|
| Yes, it's certainly the case that if Democrats keep
| getting the same percentage of votes as in elections they
| lost badly, they'll keep losing elections.
| intended wrote:
| Right wing streamers who are not part of Fox themselves put
| two and two together and came up with section 230.
|
| They even said that Trump could threaten Facebook with
| specifically removing protections for the platform, and then
| turn around and not do it: resulting in damage to the
| platform without having to do anything.
|
| I think everyone knows why Zuck is doing it. If there were
| any other republican government, the capitulation wouldn't be
| this abject.
| 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.
| llm_trw wrote:
| That policy change reads like a more liberal version of Obama's
| first term compaign platform on social issues.
|
| Lets not pretend that the current climate in SF isn't both way
| outside the Overton window for most of rest of the US and most of
| California until ten years ago.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Wtf is this comment in relation to? Certainly not the article
| which is about a strictly technical issue or how to deploy time
| smearing for the first time.
| schoen wrote:
| It's a reference to the very last paragraph of the article.
| llm_trw wrote:
| And the title.
| jacoblambda wrote:
| Not really? The title is a reference to the article's
| topic of systematically manipulating time standards
| (which results in the time for the entire company getting
| slowly sent "into the past") for the purpose of avoiding
| complexities like leap seconds, etc.
| aikinai wrote:
| Read to the end. The time smearing article was just a clever
| ruse to set up her political jab.
| rcarmo wrote:
| The fact that she has the experience (and the stories) to
| set it up in the first place more than makes up for it,
| IMHO.
| gortok wrote:
| With this comment you seem to be putting the Overton window
| farther right than I've seen it in recent memory --- outside of
| very rural areas.
| playa06 wrote:
| > farther right than I've seen it in recent memory ---
| outside of very rural areas.
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/985183/size-urban-
| rural-...
|
| >>In 2023, there were approximately 55.94 million people
| living in rural areas in the United States, while about
| 278.98 million people were living in urban areas
|
| If Trump won, it couldn't have been solely because of people
| in the boonies, who represent a much smaller proportion of
| total demographics. The same goes for Brexit, and all the
| happenings that have been shifting Western societies as a
| whole towards the far right.
|
| This sort of obliviousness is not helpful in fixing the
| situation. Same energy as the media acting like Trump could
| never possibly become POTUS. These incompetents are getting
| in positions of power because the left and moderate right
| are, it seems, still not perceiving what is going on outside
| of their very specific bubbles.
| hmmm-i-wonder wrote:
| Urban voters represented 20% of voters. Sub-Urban 45%.
| Rural 35%
|
| 63% of Urban voters went Harris, 35% Trump. 63% of Rural
| voters went Trump, 35% Harris. Suburban went 52% Harris and
| 47% Trump
|
| The 15% more Rural than Urban voters, combined with
| gerrymandering and state vote power differences offset the
| 5% Democrat lean of Sub-Urban voters.
|
| If we look at who ACTUALLY voted from the voting age
| population, then the boonies certainly did win it for Trump
| despite the other 65% being pro Harris to varying degrees.
| If we consider people who didn't vote at all that could
| have, and assume the majority of those would have voted for
| Harris, then we can likely blame those that didn't vote for
| leaving the power in the hands of those in the boonies.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| Eh, that's more an overstatement than you're claiming of GP.
| Just my opinion, but yea I guess I don't see how this isn't a
| return to the centrist-status-quo-liberal perspective of like
| 2005-2014. Massive hand waving implied
| jiriknesl wrote:
| The guy isn't sending the company 50 years back.
|
| I come from a post-communist country which had a lot of
| censorship. It was happening 50 years ago as well (it was
| happening since the end of 40s to the end of 80s). Call me
| sensitive. ;)
|
| The guy is removing the company from 50 years back.
| purplethinking wrote:
| No no, the guy is definitely sending the company back 50 years,
| to a time when free speech actually meant something, and when a
| single party didn't control 90% of all media outlets, social
| media, institutions and controlling policy at most Fortune 500
| companies.
| techfeathers wrote:
| 50 years ago when there were like 3 television channels? Do
| we really want to return to the "free speech" when no one had
| a voice
| noobermin wrote:
| I wish I wasn't so stupid or unlucky. In another life I could be
| doing amazing shit like rachel by the bay instead of pushing code
| no one cares about and rushing deadlines only to get paid late.
| DecoySalamander wrote:
| "Amazing shit" like devops or bad political puns? Surely it's
| not too late for you to try either or both.
| Havoc wrote:
| Surprised it takes 20 hours to smear one second. Normal desktops
| definitely aren't that sensitive. Anybody know what sort of gear
| is?
| ghostpepper wrote:
| I wonder how much those broadcast/studio clocks are worth. I
| looked everywhere to find a digital alarm clock with orange LEDs
| and couldn't find one.
| jelder wrote:
| The cheapest one I could find was about $250:
|
| https://timemachinescorp.com/ntp_poe_wifi_dotmatrix_clock_ti...
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