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I am particularly sad about current state of Meta. Regardless of what people think of Facebook and Zuck, he was unapologetically a hacker. I visited FB campus f

I am particularly sad about current state of Meta. Regardless of what people think of Facebook and Zuck, he was unapologetically a hacker. I visited FB campus few times and emphasis on hacker culture everywhere was just immensely delightful. He knew the value of good hacker and raised bar for the compensation across the entire industry. Ship your code today was absolutely refreshing. Number of open source projects that has came out of Meta is unparalleled for number of employees. MetaAI had been well protected and is one of the strongest engine for progress in AI. I always viewed it as a company run by a hacker for hackers.

iepathos 4y ago
"Number of open source projects that has came out of Meta is unparalleled for number of employees." Minor nit, the unparalleled part doesn't hold true here. Meta has about 600 open source projects which is nice, but Google has had over 8,000 open source projects. Meta is nowhere near Google's level of open source community support for the number of employees proportionally. Google has about twice as many employees but over 13 times the amount of open source projects.
- ignaloidas 4y ago
  Considering that most of Google's open source projects are of the "throw over the wall" kind, where they don't really care about the wider community, when most of Meta's projects (that I've seen) are interacting with and creating communities, it's not really comparable. TLDR: by KLOC Google might have more, but arguably Meta's have more impact.
guhcampos 4y ago
I do not think he is evil, just really disconnected from reality, which in all honesty most C-Levels are. From his statement it sounds like he really believed people would accept the pandemic’s restrictions as a “new normal” and this would leap-frog humanity into the virtual world for good. I am a highly cynical and pessimistic person and even I knew this wasn’t happening. People around the World were literally risking their lives and their loved ones for a little physical connection. Our generation, it turns out, is still very human centric and we are still ultimately social beings, not just social minds. Maybe kids born into YouTube, who are now coming of age, will be different, yet I still would not bet 11 thousand lives on it.
- landemva 4y ago
  > People around the World were literally risking their lives and their loved ones for a little physical connection. Other people kept working their blue collar jobs at mines and oil pads as if nothing had happened. Once I was on the mine sites, there was no indication of anything different. No masks or any other BS. My 'rona experience was totally different than the wfh keyboard careers.
  - tekknik 4y ago
    upvotes are unfortunately not visible. while my comment adds minimal, I want to amplify this comment.
- mckravchyk 4y ago
  It's the "caveman principle" [0] at work. We are still biologically pretty much the same. Hopefully, it means that something like Metaverse will never materialize or that it will take the emergence of a Matrix-like VR first. [0] https://associationsnow.com/2013/04/how-the-future-of-associations-rests-on-the-caveman-principle/ https://associationsnow.com/2013/04/how-the-future-of-associ...
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ASalazarMX 4y ago
Maybe it got to his head, like child movie stars that never enjoyed a normal childhood? Being a hacker is no guarantee of being a well adapted adult, specially if your hobby transforms into an international behemoth in just 15 years.
colordrops 4y ago
NSA is also probably a great place for hackers, but their mission is trash. Someone once drew a 2x2 grid for me. One dimension was competence, and the other was right mission. I was then asked what is the most dangerous square on the grid. The answer is competent with the wrong mission.
- lupire 4y ago
  What's wrong with the NSA's mission? Analysts stealing nudes isn't the mission.
- mike_d 4y ago
  You don't agree with the tiny sliver of the NSA mission that you know about. 90% of the work they do is purely defensive. The offensive work targets bad actors and foreign governments/militaries, compared to other countries intelligence services that also engage in economic espionage. In a perfect world they wouldn't need to exist at all. But we don't live in that world.
  - colordrops 4y ago
    You contradict yourself. If you don't know what they are doing behind the curtain, how can you be so confident that 90% of what they do is defensive? They don't work within the bounds of the law and constitution, and thus their mission is bad by my simple definition. I don't need to know what they do in secret.
    - gerdesj 4y ago
      "They don't work within the bounds of the law and constitution" So what has your research on this uncovered?
      - ajyotirmay 4y ago
        The first thing that comes to my mind is the whole Snowden series of events. Spying every citizen, is wrong. Also, I'm seeing the effects of something similar in my country, where this sort of spying is used to curb free speech, dissent, and completely kill the very essence of democracy. It is wrong, and there has to be better ways. I don't remember the exact procedure, but NSA didn't need much clearance to spy on any American citizen.
goodpoint 4y ago
> he was unapologetically a hacker Huh? Like Gates and Musk, he's not even a highly skilled developer, even less a hacker.
- goodpoint 4y ago
  HAH, downvoted to -4 for writing this on "hacker" news.
- antegamisou 4y ago
  Seriously I was never aware how badly the word's meaning has been butchered by the SV techbros until I joined the site. I first heard it used to traditionally describe computer security whizzes like Kevin Mitnick, Diffie & Hellman, Robert Morris (Morris worm) etc. But apparently the last ~15 years it's just a compliment for the next random corporate grifter who has 0 technical experience and is just in for the $$$. However Gates definitely deserves the title, he had helped make some significant contributions a few years before or right after dropping out of Harvard by co-authoring a paper in complexity theory next to a very prominent name in the field. https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=92236781 https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=922367...
  - DonHopkins 4y ago
    We have Eric S Raymond to thank for corrupting the meaning of "Hacker" to include himself.
    - DonHopkins 4y ago
      Plate of Shrimp: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33537629 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33537629 https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm >I blame Eric Raymond and to a lesser extent Dave Winer for bringing this kind of schlock writing onto the Internet. Raymond is the original perpetrator of the "what is a hacker?" essay, in which you quickly begin to understand that a hacker is someone who resembles Eric Raymond. Dave Winer has recently and mercifully moved his essays off to audio, but you can still hear him snorfling cashew nuts and talking at length about what it means to be a blogger[7] . These essays and this writing style are tempting to people outside the subculture at hand because of their engaging personal tone and idiosyncratic, insider's view. But after a while, you begin to notice that all the essays are an elaborate set of mirrors set up to reflect different facets of the author, in a big distributed act of participatory narcissism.
dantyti 4y ago
I get your point, but is that really such a great thing when it comes to business ethics? e.g., spying on people and hacking their private communications just to get ahead: https://www.businessinsider.com/how-mark-zuckerberg-hacked-into-the-harvard-crimson-2010-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/how-mark-zuckerberg-hacked-i...
- monetus 4y ago
  He was 19 there right? Thankfully I've seen people who were writing keyloggers at that age be very decent, good people, so that article isn't an indictment of who he is now - plenty of things to look at more recent than that. It would be really nice to hear him candidly express how he fucked up with the rohingya, and content promotion/moderation.
the-anarchist 4y ago
That is how cabals work.
kenhwang 4y ago
I never had much complaint about Facebook's engineering culture, it seems like they get more right than the other giant tech companies. Facebook's failures were always with business morals and product direction, and it's the latter that they really really screwed up on this time with the attempt to turn their cash cow into TikTok and the investment into the metaverse.

iepathos 4y ago

"Number of open source projects that has came out of Meta is unparalleled for number of employees." Minor nit, the unparalleled part doesn't hold true here. Meta has about 600 open source projects which is nice, but Google has had over 8,000 open source projects. Meta is nowhere near Google's level of open source community support for the number of employees proportionally. Google has about twice as many employees but over 13 times the amount of open source projects.

ignaloidas 4y ago
Considering that most of Google's open source projects are of the "throw over the wall" kind, where they don't really care about the wider community, when most of Meta's projects (that I've seen) are interacting with and creating communities, it's not really comparable. TLDR: by KLOC Google might have more, but arguably Meta's have more impact.

guhcampos 4y ago

I do not think he is evil, just really disconnected from reality, which in all honesty most C-Levels are. From his statement it sounds like he really believed people would accept the pandemic’s restrictions as a “new normal” and this would leap-frog humanity into the virtual world for good. I am a highly cynical and pessimistic person and even I knew this wasn’t happening. People around the World were literally risking their lives and their loved ones for a little physical connection. Our generation, it turns out, is still very human centric and we are still ultimately social beings, not just social minds. Maybe kids born into YouTube, who are now coming of age, will be different, yet I still would not bet 11 thousand lives on it.

landemva 4y ago
> People around the World were literally risking their lives and their loved ones for a little physical connection. Other people kept working their blue collar jobs at mines and oil pads as if nothing had happened. Once I was on the mine sites, there was no indication of anything different. No masks or any other BS. My 'rona experience was totally different than the wfh keyboard careers.
- tekknik 4y ago
  upvotes are unfortunately not visible. while my comment adds minimal, I want to amplify this comment.
mckravchyk 4y ago
It's the "caveman principle" [0] at work. We are still biologically pretty much the same. Hopefully, it means that something like Metaverse will never materialize or that it will take the emergence of a Matrix-like VR first. [0] https://associationsnow.com/2013/04/how-the-future-of-associations-rests-on-the-caveman-principle/ https://associationsnow.com/2013/04/how-the-future-of-associ...

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

ASalazarMX 4y ago

Maybe it got to his head, like child movie stars that never enjoyed a normal childhood? Being a hacker is no guarantee of being a well adapted adult, specially if your hobby transforms into an international behemoth in just 15 years.

colordrops 4y ago

NSA is also probably a great place for hackers, but their mission is trash. Someone once drew a 2x2 grid for me. One dimension was competence, and the other was right mission. I was then asked what is the most dangerous square on the grid. The answer is competent with the wrong mission.

lupire 4y ago
What's wrong with the NSA's mission? Analysts stealing nudes isn't the mission.
mike_d 4y ago
You don't agree with the tiny sliver of the NSA mission that you know about. 90% of the work they do is purely defensive. The offensive work targets bad actors and foreign governments/militaries, compared to other countries intelligence services that also engage in economic espionage. In a perfect world they wouldn't need to exist at all. But we don't live in that world.
- colordrops 4y ago
  You contradict yourself. If you don't know what they are doing behind the curtain, how can you be so confident that 90% of what they do is defensive? They don't work within the bounds of the law and constitution, and thus their mission is bad by my simple definition. I don't need to know what they do in secret.
  - gerdesj 4y ago
    "They don't work within the bounds of the law and constitution" So what has your research on this uncovered?
    - ajyotirmay 4y ago
      The first thing that comes to my mind is the whole Snowden series of events. Spying every citizen, is wrong. Also, I'm seeing the effects of something similar in my country, where this sort of spying is used to curb free speech, dissent, and completely kill the very essence of democracy. It is wrong, and there has to be better ways. I don't remember the exact procedure, but NSA didn't need much clearance to spy on any American citizen.

goodpoint 4y ago

> he was unapologetically a hacker Huh? Like Gates and Musk, he's not even a highly skilled developer, even less a hacker.

goodpoint 4y ago
HAH, downvoted to -4 for writing this on "hacker" news.
antegamisou 4y ago
Seriously I was never aware how badly the word's meaning has been butchered by the SV techbros until I joined the site. I first heard it used to traditionally describe computer security whizzes like Kevin Mitnick, Diffie & Hellman, Robert Morris (Morris worm) etc. But apparently the last ~15 years it's just a compliment for the next random corporate grifter who has 0 technical experience and is just in for the $$$. However Gates definitely deserves the title, he had helped make some significant contributions a few years before or right after dropping out of Harvard by co-authoring a paper in complexity theory next to a very prominent name in the field. https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=92236781 https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=922367...
- DonHopkins 4y ago
  We have Eric S Raymond to thank for corrupting the meaning of "Hacker" to include himself.
  - DonHopkins 4y ago
    Plate of Shrimp: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33537629 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33537629 https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm >I blame Eric Raymond and to a lesser extent Dave Winer for bringing this kind of schlock writing onto the Internet. Raymond is the original perpetrator of the "what is a hacker?" essay, in which you quickly begin to understand that a hacker is someone who resembles Eric Raymond. Dave Winer has recently and mercifully moved his essays off to audio, but you can still hear him snorfling cashew nuts and talking at length about what it means to be a blogger[7] . These essays and this writing style are tempting to people outside the subculture at hand because of their engaging personal tone and idiosyncratic, insider's view. But after a while, you begin to notice that all the essays are an elaborate set of mirrors set up to reflect different facets of the author, in a big distributed act of participatory narcissism.

dantyti 4y ago

I get your point, but is that really such a great thing when it comes to business ethics? e.g., spying on people and hacking their private communications just to get ahead: https://www.businessinsider.com/how-mark-zuckerberg-hacked-into-the-harvard-crimson-2010-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/how-mark-zuckerberg-hacked-i...

monetus 4y ago
He was 19 there right? Thankfully I've seen people who were writing keyloggers at that age be very decent, good people, so that article isn't an indictment of who he is now - plenty of things to look at more recent than that. It would be really nice to hear him candidly express how he fucked up with the rohingya, and content promotion/moderation.

the-anarchist 4y ago

That is how cabals work.

kenhwang 4y ago

I never had much complaint about Facebook's engineering culture, it seems like they get more right than the other giant tech companies. Facebook's failures were always with business morals and product direction, and it's the latter that they really really screwed up on this time with the attempt to turn their cash cow into TikTok and the investment into the metaverse.