> First, Congress should pass legislation compelling Facebook, Instagram, and all other social-media platforms to allow academic researchers access to their data. One such bill is the Platform Transparency and Accountability Act, proposed by the Stanford University researcher Nate Persily.
> Second, Congress should toughen the 1998 Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. An early version of the legislation proposed 16 as the age at which children should legally be allowed to give away their data and their privacy. Unfortunately, e-commerce companies lobbied successfully to have the age of “internet adulthood” set instead at 13. Now, more than two decades later, today’s 13-year-olds are not doing well. Federal law is outdated and inadequate. The age should be raised. More power should be given to parents, less to companies.
> Third, while Americans wait for lawmakers to act, parents can work with local schools to establish a norm: Delay entry to Instagram and other social platforms until high school.
None of these suggestions actually fix anything. The problem is the feedback loops on the application itself that encourage constant comparisons because they increase engagement. It turns out that constant comparisons with others leads to lower self-esteem and increased anxiety in teenagers. None of these solutions actually address the underlying mechanics of the application that leads to the negative outcomes for teenagers. [1]
Because the internet has no real infrastructure for identity. If everyone could create a public/private key pair then signatures on the internet would be a non-issue. So these companies are filling a gap in the web stack. Do we need so many of them? Probably not.
I personally prefer keybase but to each their own. UX matters to most people and there is no obvious solution here that I could recommend to people that are less technically savvy than the typical HN commenter.
What about offerings geared to enterprises like Docusign or to smaller enterprises? Are there no technical barriers at all? What's the bare minimum to be a digital signatory to a document? Obviously it varies by jurisdiction to jurisdiction....
Yes, highly depends on jurisdiction and purpose. E.g. for basic contract stuff, especially B2B, that in principle often doesn't need any formal signature to be valid, so any signature process really only needs to fulfill "are we happy that we can successfully argue that the other party actually agreed to it" - you can form a contract with a phone call or an email too, it's just harder to prove.
For more critical things, legal requirements are higher, and often aren't met by these services. E.g. in Germany (although the digital part is EU level standards), some things either require ink on paper or what's called a "qualified digital signature", i.e. a cryptographic signature, signed with a key that an officially registered CA has provided a certificate for, after verifying the owners identity. That's more process to properly meet (you need to be registered, do ID verification to spec, have requirements on bookkeeping and auditing, ...), and people have fallen into the trap of not using it were required.
E.g. a delivery service here was recently in the news because they had used a "draw on screen" signature with Docusign for work contracts - which meant the contracts they had intended to be limited-term contracts actually were contracts without end date.
That's my point. It seems there are some lax rules (or none) accepted in some jurisdictions and void in others that even require a certificate authority. I guess you have to be careful for international contracts on which digital signature provider you use for court validity in case it goes to litigation.
Yes, although I suspect the "simple" case of B2B contracting or purchases of goods is fairly universal in the low formal standards, and that's what all these services generally target and provides a relatively easy entry level to start a service with. The differentiation is in a) how well they can provide supporting evidence when challenged and b) which higher-requirements processes they support. a) is vague and most people probably have little idea what works and what doesn't, and b) is not so vague, but on the customer to know when their specific contract needs something better.
Not sure. Last time I was close to any HR software it seemed like all you needed to do was make sure to capture some identifiers like location and IP address before storing the signature. So presumably the regulatory barrier is very low, you just have to make reasonable effort to prevent scams like one person impersonating another.
The framing here is off. This has nothing to do with racism and all to do with profits. Political pundits don't understand that class and material conditions are primary and the rest is just window dressing to cover up the widening gap between the rich and the poor.
Racism obviously exists but making the case for racism on Facebook is nonsensical. Facebook doesn't determine school policies and working conditions at Amazon warehouses, politicians do and Facebook here is just a scapegoat. More generally, whenever there is some story about the tech giants being racist then it's safe to assume it has nothing to do with racism and the writer is just not versed enough in actual political and economic theory to properly frame the real issue.
Frontend is what will get you. The kids have decided everything now needs to be compiled and transpiled so you won't be able to avoid the hassle of frontend development. If you want to avoid all of that then Flutter/Dart might be a good option: https://dart.dev/web. But this is just me giving random advice. I tried Dart for a while and it's a nice language, no worse than all the other contenders when it comes to web development.
I looked at the flutter gallery and it looks like they just compile everything to js files and paint the widgets on a canvas element. Would be interesting to know if they're investing any effort in different backends like WASM. Would probably solve their performance problems. Canvas is obviously a sensible option for rendering but it looks like it might be another reason why their performance isn't great.
They are actually pretty active on the WASM GC group because yeah I think that is the exact plan in the future to ship Flutter web apps as WASM rather than JS.
It reduces the effort of learning different frameworks for the frontend and the backend. You use one language that includes simple interoperatbility between the frontend and the backend. It will still obviously need to be compiled into a format that browsers can work with but if you're gonna use a framework anyway then Dart/Flutter is a reasonable choice (modulo performance issues as mentioned by others in this thread).
The point is no one uses plain javascript anymore so if you're going to use some domain specific language with its own build pipeline to generate compiled assets for the browser then Dart/Flutter is no worse than any other javascript framework.
My point is the frontend web stack is already very complicated for no good reason so using Flutter/Dart instead of dealing with webpack or whatever the latest build tool is for frontend web projects isn't that big of a difference.
Dart is very easy to learn so whether a lot of people know it or not is not really an issue. Any competent programmer will be able to learn it in a few days.
And my point is that since you're going to learn a JS-like with build tools, you would better be served by JS or TS instead of Dart, since Dart isn't that popular, the frontend experience is terrible and there's not much choice in terms of backend and libraries.
I've tried js, ts, and dart and dart is a much more pleasant language with simpler tooling than the current js/ts web stack. We can continue going back and forth on this but I don't think we're getting anywhere. My suggestion was to someone that was looking to avoid the main hassles of web development and I suggested Flutter/Dart to simplify the toolchain and not worry about having to pick and choose frontend frameworks and build tools because all of that is baked into Flutter/Dart already.
In my brief experience, learning the language and framework only took a few days and it was much easier than making sense of all the issues with the current frontend web stack. Dart also has JavaScript interop so using libraries written in js is not an issue. [1]
That's very ambitious. Hopefully they make real progress towards that goal but there is no way they're gonna put a nuclear power plant on the moon within a decade.
Zig and Nim are good bets. Both are pushing the state of the art forward on what is possible with system programming languages. D is probably another good bet.
That's news to me. I didn't know D had actors but I like it's meta-programming features because it cuts down on all sorts of boilerplate. I haven't used it that much, I just looked into it briefly for some low-level programming projects.
What's the state of safety in zig? does it allow footguns like in C/C++ ? What about borrow checker(it makes program safe. isn't it?)?
I would like to know advantages as well
The best answer I can provide is this document: https://ziglang.org/learn/overview/. It covers the main features of the language and how they compare to other languages like C, C++, and D. I personally think it has enough features like option types instead of null pointers, array bounds checking, generics, compile-time code execution, etc. for writing safe code but others might disagree.
As long as participation on social media is sponsored by advertising dollars the problem of misinformation will not go away. This project is gathering volunteers to do free work for Twitter and enrich its shareholders which makes sense from their perspective but not from the perspective of whoever is contributing to this project. So what's gonna happen over time is this will turn into another meta-layer for misinformation games because contributors will realize it is in their best interest to moderate content that seems to be against their own interests. Doing otherwise only enriches Twitter and its shareholders so there is no incentive for the contributors to be honest in their work.
The business model is the problem. There is no way to keep the advertising based business model and reduce misinformation because the underlying incentives are fundamentally adversarial. Twitter cares about keeping people engaged because that's how they make money. They have no incentives to propagate truthful information because the advertisers don't pay them for that, they pay for attention regardless of what it is directed towards. Eventually people realize this and that's why there is such a high prevalence of sociopathic behavior on social media, every person is acting in their own best interests to grab as much attention as possible in order to shill some weird but personally enriching ideological doctrine. There is no common cause uniting groups of people together other than going viral to maximize attention from other participants. All the other weird behaviors like doxxing and cancelations follow directly from this incentive structure, those behaviors get attention and so people internalize them because that's what the platform encourages.
Social media, instead of AI, is what Nick Bostrom should have been worried about. Encouraging sociopathic behavior is antithetical to maintaining stable societies and that's exactly what we're seeing.
> Second, Congress should toughen the 1998 Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. An early version of the legislation proposed 16 as the age at which children should legally be allowed to give away their data and their privacy. Unfortunately, e-commerce companies lobbied successfully to have the age of “internet adulthood” set instead at 13. Now, more than two decades later, today’s 13-year-olds are not doing well. Federal law is outdated and inadequate. The age should be raised. More power should be given to parents, less to companies.
> Third, while Americans wait for lawmakers to act, parents can work with local schools to establish a norm: Delay entry to Instagram and other social platforms until high school.
None of these suggestions actually fix anything. The problem is the feedback loops on the application itself that encourage constant comparisons because they increase engagement. It turns out that constant comparisons with others leads to lower self-esteem and increased anxiety in teenagers. None of these solutions actually address the underlying mechanics of the application that leads to the negative outcomes for teenagers. [1]
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=29313367