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rustamm

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Just because a managed fund outperformed a market doesn't mean it didn't happen by pure luck. There are lots of managed funds and most of them are not profitable. If each chooses portfolio randomly, some of them will outperform the market.

You're so right about this. I'm surprised so many HN users just blindly accept any critical claim about facebook.

The article on Ars is pure click bait. Nowhere in the article 6yo kids are mentioned. The article doesn't even contain any news material, it just regurgitates things published a week ago.

Reliance on self reported studies, that doesn't even paint Facebook bad by itself. If you want to prove that Facebook is bad for mental health, show me at least an observational study that so that I can compare the baseline prevalence of mental health disorders with the mental health of FB users. I doubt it would be different for any other social network user. The key word here is comparison. Raw numbers rarely mean anything by themselves.

What I don't understand is what is the point blaming other forces/countries for exploiting something that is so easily exploitable. If you have a wide-open security holes in your system they will be exploited by everyone who can potentially benefit from this.

Other than Russia/China/<Villain of the week> there are many other actors who have incentives to meddle in the society, e.g.

- The US government

- Large Businesses

Example from the article:

"Reopenmississippi.com was registered on April 16 to In Pursuit of LLC, an Arlington, Va.-based conservative group with a number of former employees who currently work at the White House or in cabinet agencies (link: https://projects.propublica.org/trump-town/organizations/in-...). A 2016 story from USA Today says In Pursuit Of LLC is a for-profit communications agency launched by billionaire industrialist Charles Koch."

- T-shirt sellers?

"A number of other sites — such as reopennc.com — seem to exist merely to sell t-shirts, decals and yard signs with such slogans as “Know Your Rights,” “Live Free or Die,” and “Facts not Fear.” WHOIS records show the same Florida resident who registered this North Carolina site also registered one for New York — reopenny.com — just a few minutes later."

At this point it is so easy to anonymously set up these websites and protest groups that a bored high-school student can do it.

Instead of putting blame on this or that country, efforts should be focused on creating some kind of a online reputation system so that any content posted would contain a signature that ties it to the author. If the signature is missing then you know the source is likely untrustworthy. Pros: no need for censorship. anyone can still post anything online. Cons: users need to be educated about this feature. It has to be supported by major browsers as a first-party component.

Otherwise we see more ridiculous initiatives like this from GitLab where they ban hiring engineers from Russia on certain positions: "WIP: Support Engineer Job family country-of-residence block" (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/issues/5555).

EDIT: fixed typos

Phone numbers are awful for authentication. I stopped using my Russian phone number once I moved to the US and mobile carrier just reassigned that phone number to some other customer.

I found out when I saw myself in my Telegram contact list having other person's avatar and I assume people who had my old phone number in contacts also saw a new account in their Telegram contact lists under my name.