facebook

A 2018 Facebook UK ad, part of the 'Here Together' campaign, promising to do more to keep users safe and protect their privacy after the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Veritasium argues that Facebook's ad revenue relies partly on fake likes, after paying to promote his page and gaining tens of thousands of followers in developing countries who never engaged. He shares his experiment and cites other cases.

Veritasium's Derek Muller argues that Facebook's business model works against pages and creators, because it charges them to reach the audiences they built. He explains how filtering and paid promotion undermine the value of likes.

Kurzgesagt argues that Facebook's claimed 8 billion daily video views are inflated by freebooting, meaning re-uploads of creators' videos. It describes how this harms independent creators.

Destin Sandlin of Smarter Every Day explains 'Facebook freebooting', where Facebook users re-upload YouTubers' videos natively and the original creators lose views and revenue. He describes his own attempts to get Facebook to act.

Guardian News coverage of Mark Zuckerberg's 2021 reveal of Facebook's metaverse plans alongside the rename to Meta. It shows a glimpse of the VR and AR vision.

Destin Sandlin of Smarter Every Day investigates manipulation on Facebook, interviewing the company's team about content moderation. It is the third video in his series on social media manipulation.

A 35C3 talk by Privacy International researchers who captured and decrypted traffic between Android apps and Facebook servers. They show many apps send Facebook device and usage data immediately on launch, even for users without Facebook accounts.

Facebook engineers explain why they abandoned the traditional MVC paradigm for a more functional architecture, introducing Flux and React. They use the unread-message-count bug as a case study of the problems of bidirectional data flow at scale.

Louis Brandy presents the most common and infamous recurring C++ bugs seen in Facebook's huge codebase, including shared_ptr data races and operator[] pitfalls. He explains the surprising complexity behind seemingly simple code.

Julien Verlaguet of Facebook describes applying static analysis and type inference to a very large PHP codebase, using OCaml. The work led to the Hack language.

UploadVR covers a Facebook Reality Labs prototype that tracks facial expressions using cameras mounted in a VR headset. The updated version captures subtle micro-expressions for realistic avatars.

Tom Occhino and Jordan Walke present how Facebook builds JavaScript apps, in the talk where React was first publicly announced at JSConf US 2013.

An F8 2015 talk touring the tool-chain Facebook uses to let thousands of engineers build mobile apps, including its move to Mercurial, an Atom-based IDE and continuous integration.

A short satirical Onion News Network segment presenting Facebook as a CIA project. It plays on surveillance and data-collection fears.

A short Newsweek clip of White House press secretary Jen Psaki saying the administration is flagging problematic posts to Facebook that spread COVID-19 and vaccine disinformation.

Nicholas Ormrod's CppCon 2016 talk on how Facebook optimizes std::string with its open-source replacement fbstring. It covers storage layout tradeoffs, small string optimization and memory allocation behavior.

John Carmack's keynote at Facebook Connect 2021, where he speaks candidly about VR, Quest, and Meta's metaverse plans. He pushes back on hype and discusses retention and latency.

Scott Galloway's DLD15 talk assessing the competitive positions of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google. He argues about where each is strong and weak, including Amazon's need for physical retail.

A December 2005 guest lecture by Mark Zuckerberg in Harvard's CS50, discussing Facebook's early days, its technical choices and computer science. It captures him as a 21-year-old founder before Facebook's rise.

Chamath Palihapitiya's Stanford GSB View From The Top talk on money as an instrument of change. HN mostly knows it for his remarks on social media's dopamine-driven feedback loops and regrets about Facebook.

A documentary on how GraphQL came to be at Facebook, featuring its co-creators Lee Byron, Dan Schafer and Nick Schrock. It covers the problems it solved and its adoption at companies like Twitter, Airbnb and GitHub.

CNN Business compiles confusing and uninformed questions US lawmakers asked Mark Zuckerberg during his 2018 Congressional testimony about Facebook and Cambridge Analytica.

A one-minute Bloomberg report that Chinese President Xi Jinping declined to give Mark Zuckerberg's unborn child an honorary Chinese name. Emily Chang reports it on Bloomberg West.

Part two of Jason Calacanis's long interview with investor Chris Sacca on This Week in Startups. Sacca discusses his investments in Facebook, Twitter and Uber, and how he hustled his way to the top.

A Channel 4 News interview with technologist Jaron Lanier, who argues that social media damages people's lives. He discusses how Facebook, YouTube and Google use algorithms and data collection to shape what users see.

Jason Calacanis interviews Peter Thiel at LAUNCH Festival 2015 about contrarian thinking, investing, and building companies such as PayPal, Palantir and Facebook.

A 2018 VICE News Tonight interview with Apple CEO Tim Cook, in which he discusses privacy as a core company value, the Facebook breach, and Apple's iCloud arrangement in China.

A Channel 4 News undercover investigation in which Cambridge Analytica executives are filmed discussing bribes, honeypots, fake identities and manipulating elections around the world.

Sasa Juric explains what makes Erlang and Elixir suited to server-side systems, focusing on the BEAM concurrency model rather than syntax or ecosystem. He demonstrates processes, supervision, and fault tolerance.

Micro Men is a 2009 BBC comic drama about the early 1980s British home computer boom. It follows the rivalry between Clive Sinclair and Acorn founder Chris Curry over the BBC Micro contract and the ZX Spectrum.

Will Wilson of FoundationDB explains how the team tested their distributed database using deterministic simulation. By running the whole system in a simulator with injected faults and reproducible seeds, they could find rare concurrency and network bugs.

Code Rush is a one-hour documentary following Netscape engineers in Silicon Valley through the company's last year as an independent firm. It covers the Mozilla open-source announcement, the frantic push to ready the source for release by March 31, 1998, and the toll on engineers' lives before the AOL acquisition.

Ed Catmull of Pixar speaks at Stanford's 2007 Entrepreneurship Conference on running a creative company. He argues for surfacing small problems early and building good teams, with stories like the Toy Story 2 crunch.

Rick Reed of WhatsApp explains at Erlang Factory 2014 how the service scaled to billions of messages with a very small engineering team. He covers the FreeBSD and Erlang stack, Mnesia usage, server counts and bottleneck work.

Bryan Cantrill's LISA11 talk on how illumos arose after Oracle closed OpenSolaris. It covers the history of Sun, ZFS, DTrace and Zones, and the diaspora of kernel engineers, with a famous rant about Oracle and Larry Ellison.

Martin Kleppmann argues that databases are global shared mutable state and proposes treating them as an ever-growing log of immutable facts. Derived data such as caches, indexes and views is then built by stream processors like Apache Samza. The talk draws on Kafka and LinkedIn's experience with commit logs.

Rich Hickey's 2013 talk applies language-design thinking to whole systems, covering names, queues, data, failure, and the interfaces between programs. It ends with a call to action for building systems holistically.

Rob Pike's Google I/O 2012 talk shows how goroutines and channels solve tricky concurrency problems with simple Go code. It features a playful goroutine demo with gophers passing messages and a search engine example.

Martin Kleppmann's GOTO Berlin 2016 talk on how collaborative editors, offline apps, and multi-datacenter databases handle concurrent updates. It covers conflict resolution approaches including operational transformation and CRDTs, with a worked look at text CRDTs.