I’m quite sure the hacker who pressed the button feels plenty bad enough already, and I hope the people around them were as kind as the people around me were.
In the comment benreesman only said that enough data was deleted to cause 50-100M$ in damages. They might very well have managed to save half the data, but the lost half was already quite expensive?
Edit: thanks for replies! :)
See "How big is a billion?" from Numberphile:
You can even read about it in this paper which publicly described the system contemporary to that event: http://www.quinonero.net/Publications/predicting-clicks-face...
If you read it and are still steamed up, well, then you hold that opinion honestly, but I suspect most would be like, “cool story bro”.
Well, it would probably bankrupt most companies, but it wouldn't bankrupt most people's employer.
The average employee works at a larger than average company. Similar for the average customer or average investor.
That's just because big companies have more employees / customers / investors to contribute to that kind of average.
All of these things benefit from advances in binary classifiers, and have therefore been massively subsidized by click prediction R&D. Maybe those benefits outweighs the costs, maybe they don’t.
We have GPUs because shoot-em-up games were “the big thing” in the 90s. Net win? Personal preference. But entertainment if one form or another often pushes advances in computing. The BOPR stuff from the linked paper originated on XBox Live matchmaking.
It’s perfectly fair to be like: I don’t like the ad-funded internet. There are tons of plausible reasons why someone wouldn’t like the ad-funded Internet, but most reasonable objections to it are of the form: “my internet experience is worse than it would be without ad funding”, past that you rapidly wander into “other people’s preferences are inferior to mine”.