100%. A lot of these things were set in motion under Ballmer and he tee'd it up for Satya. That doesn't excuse Ballmer's missteps and of course Satya deserves credit for a lot of the execution, but I think people like to latch on to the simple narrative of Satya Good, Ballmer Bad.
Seems for them the cost (financially and in terms of overhead) of building that team vs. buying a very experienced one was not worth it. They almost have ~$300 billion just sitting around.
Doesn't Instagram use the same approach on their Stories Camera on Android? Seems more of an issue with Android Camera performance/APIs than an engineering critique.
So instead we should wildly speculate with no evidence? I personally prefer my android phone and the only true advantage for iOS I see is that Apple actively fights for privacy.
If Apple claims to care about protecting privacy, the onus is on them to prove that they actually do, e.g. by publishing the source code to show everyone that it doesn't collect anything.
While I appreciate the sentiment that we should be distrustful of every large company that has our data, including apple, I take issue with the assertion that unless that publish their source code, they are selling our data.
Logically, apple has no reason to be selling our data in even close to the same way that google does. These arguments have been thoroughly outlined in the threads above. Furthermore, showing us the source code would not prove whether or not apple is selling our data, though it would certainly prove that they are collecting it. And even if they showed people their algorithms for differential privacy, you could always make the argument that they were hiding something.
Essentially it seems that there is no condition that would satisfy the criteria. It's obvious that we have to trust apple's word to some degree and that the relationship is asymmetrical. I've been convinced by the arguments about business model / risk outlined above. What hasn't convinced you?
Companies exist (only) to make money. The only reason Apple has to not sell users' data is because they think the reputational and other costs are more than the profit from selling it.
If at some point in the future, the expected costs and profits change to make it profitable, they will do it without a second thought.
If the code is closed source, the users are less likely to be able to tell whether their data is being sold. This reduces the expected costs of selling the data (in PR expenses, customers who take their business elsewhere on principle and so on).
If the code is open source, it's more likely to be more costly to sell users' data, so it's more likely that it won't be worth it even in the future.
But the user database should already have backups, importing those backups into an analysis server should be easy, and running queries like that on an analysis server should be easy.
Counting messages, or users with X messages, etc. is also largely a function of whether your backup/restore system works. But this time you do it in chunks.
I helped build Twitter's data platform, 2010-2016.
There isn't an "analysis server" and analyzing user activity is not done on a "user database backup" at Twitter's scale, though indeed that's a common way that would be done for smaller businesses.
By the way, if by user db you literally mean the db with user accounts, that's not the right data source -- you want the user _activity_ db to count active users, and for high-scale applications, those are different things. Presumably user activity updates are orders of magnitude more frequent than user object updates. You don't want to thrash your user db by constantly updating some "last seen at" field. Put that stuff somewhere else.
That said, it's true that counting is simple, it's just a Hadoop / Spark / distributed computing platform of choice job. Filter, distinct, count. It's not even hard in real-time if you have enough ram or are ok with approximate counts with bounded error, thanks to Storm, Heron, Flink, etc.
Defining what exactly constitutes an active user and catching edge cases such as this Digits thing is where things get tricky; the number of weird scenarios that cause under/overcount for what seem like reasonable and straightforward definitions would surprise you.
Thanks. Note that I wasn't trying to guess at what twitter does, just to provide a workflow that should be viable almost anywhere, in the absence of easier options. It's good to hear that the underlying idea of "calculating the metric isn't the hard part" is true.
I have a 2011 Macbook that I am writing on. I believe that's the perfect compromise. Anything more than this at least for me is going in the wrong direction. Solid (aluminum body), powerful (i7 16gb ram), and repairable. If you just kept making more powerful versions of this size and repair-ability I would be a happy camper.
>[As a man], I have zero problems with this and am actually a little salty I spent the time to type this reply about a non-story.
Added additional context to your statement.
Why is the question you are asking is "Why are we getting upset over this?" instead of "Why do people say unnecessarily sexist jokes that aren't actually funny?"?
I'm not making that assumption. The only assumption I'm making is that the parent is a male, which is based on Hacker News demographic and the type of person who usually makes these arguments.
I think everyone would agree with that. The question then becomes: did The Intercept not follow best practices here? Once again, there is no evidence and any "yes" answer relies on trusting the NSA/DOJ.
They did not. They told a government contractor that the document had been printed and mailed from Augusta, GA, who then reported it to the government. That's what got her, microdots or not.
You can read the search warrant at https://www.buzzfeed.com/stevenperlberg/a-federal-government..., which is more complete than the arrest warrant. Just read paragraphs 12-19, which cover the relevant probable cause. If the FBI don't know how it leaked (printed) and from where (Winner's home town), the case becomes extremely difficult. Instead, they had so much that she just confessed when they showed up.
