skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Replace Google with an ISP, and all of a sudden, it seems everyone says the ISP shouldn't be able to do that.

Well, for starters, in a hypothetical scenario in which Google does this, Google is not making profit off of it, as ISPs probably would in every hypothetical not-netneutrality scenario which we thought of.

> If the web is supposed to be the future of communication, but can prevent you from voicing your opinions just because they're a "deplorable" or you don't agree with them, how is that argument valid? Can someone explain that to me?

You can't shut them down. They can always host their website from the .onion domain, without Cloudflare, and handle all the traffic they want. You can shut down their domains (see: Pirate Bay), you can shut down their CDN provider (see: this example), you can shut down anything you want, but you still won't be able to shut them down completely. Even if you do, their history is on both archive.is and Wayback.

What you can do is distance yourself and do everything to make it complicated to spread their ideas. And that's what these companies are doing. By making conscious decisions, they're refusing to provide a service to a certain website. That is completely legal to do, with very few exceptions (listed here: http://www.phrc.pa.gov/File-A-Complaint/Types-of-Complaints/...).

> Also, by not hosting Daily Stormer, you simply push them further down. One of the big reasons Trump won was because people felt like they weren't allowed to voice their opinions easily.

I completely agree with you in this section.
I don't like this...

If I have a controversial opinion (hypothetical, unrelated to the current subject matter) and it gets removed from CDN's and if I then put that opinion in my self hosted blog and someone powerful decides to DDoS my little server (and consequent hosting attempts)... Am I then not effectively censored on the internet?

It's interesting in how many places (internet and real world) this is happening lately... Interesting but mostly just scary.

I'm sure Cloudflare meant well but this action should have been thought through more.
>Credibility is much more apparent than you may think on sites like HN/Reddit. Shameless self-promotion without any substance won't get you far.

Then why is the comment at the top of this thread, which says nothing of substance (for the HN crowd at least), the top voted comment so far?
No, that's an opinion, just as religion is. Please do give up.
X: The First Fully Modular Software Disaster

http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/disast...
I do often wonder wth is going on with bloat. I can understand a videogame which has huge amounts of media might be large. But business apps?! It doesn't make sense.
He said so himself in May that every website deserves due process before taking it offline.

“Whenever you have a private organization which is making what are essentially law enforcement decisions, that is a risk to due process. And I think due process is important,” Prince said in the interview.
Do you think I should have a sign on my business door that says "no blacks allowed," too? Also the cake incident also involved the owners posting the names and phone numbers of the gay couple on facebook and asked people to harass them.
No, it's not.

Wiki:

Freedom of speech is the right to articulate one's opinions and ideas without fear of government retaliation or censorship, or societal sanction.

Cloudflare (a private business) terminating their relationship with the Daily Stormer after members of the Daily Stormer deliberately and publicly mischaracterized the nature of said relationship does not constitute censorship or societal sanction.
Speaking generally, the board and shareholders would never allow a CEO to sacrifice the stock price for the CEO's morals, unless those morals aligned with the good of the company. Very naive to think otherwise.
Review: System76’s Galago Pro Solves “just Works” Linux’s Goldilocks Problem
More piracy except with VR.

Honestly, Netflix had a chance to really damage piracy by costing the product at the market rate not the "We can get away with this because we own government" lobbiest rate (It's called the Mickey Mouse Act for a reason after all).

The incumbents decided they didn't want that, so instead they'll split into a whole bunch of services that combined cost more than netflix would have done for the same amount of content and the people who would have paid a fair price but not an unfair price will just go back to torrenting or whatever Blockchain(TM) DarkNet(TM) thing replaces it.

If I was running the government (perish the thought), I'd actually be wary about cracking down too hard on copyright infringement (on the consumer side at least) because it will push users towards solutions that are genuinely anonymous (porn and movies will do that, expressing their democratic rights..probably not) and frankly as the sole voting member of Noirlord-topia that'd scare the shit out of me a lot more than Disney been pissed they made slightly less.

I don't watch much TV tbh (I'm in the UK and I don't have a TV license, haven't had for years) and I still have a Netflix subscription because occasionally I'll watch the odd movie, it's worth 7.99 a month to watch the odd film once or twice a month plus the occasional TV show, it's not worth 4.99 * 6 services.

I think I'd actually prefer a "£0.5 per episode, valid for 60 days" model to that.

Think is I can go watch a movie for £4.99 at the local cinema that has some absurd 8K screen, 27 speaker surround and comfy seats, why would I pay so much more to watch the odd movie.

I simply wouldn't.
What about being upfront about a lack of principles and also marketing a the company as critical internet infrastructure?

I've pretty much reached the point where when someone vehemently declares their adherence to a principle I decide they probably haven't thought about it a lot.

Even in the US where there is a strong, fundamental legal protection of speech, it can't be said to be a principle. There's all sorts of places where it is compromised.
Cloudflare CEO on Terminating Service to Neo-Nazi Site (internal Email)
> "Sunlight is the best disinfectant"

It's not, actually. Fire is much better, and even alcohol is preferable. That's why there's very little open-air surgery.

> It is not wise to pretend that an opinion that you do not want just simply does not exist.

Reality doesn't support this idea. Every single country except the US has more stringent limits on what's acceptable speech. Yet among democratic countries, only the US has para-military right-wing terror groups in almost every state, and no country comes close to the dozens of deaths every year.
These days, for the situations in which I want to make my own distro, I go to [buildroot]. I recently (well, 2 years ago) built an image to replace DOS on a Pentium 75 system. Built an small distro containing nothing more than a a couple users and minicom, with minicom attaching to the serial port, and ssh access. Sure, I could have done this with a raspberry pi and a usb serial adapter, but this was more of an educational side project. I was already re-using the PC power supply and case to power a standalone APRS setup, and figured I should be able to re-use the computer and serial port to provide remote access.

[buildroot]: https://buildroot.org/
For me this is similar to junk that I receive by snail mail :). They go directly to recycling.

Same with Facebook (for any other media type, for that matter). I put my filters on, and I don't get distracted by the adds.

Also, on Facebook, I'm arguably pushing more information than I'm pulling. So my consumption and communication is somewhat limited to the notifications that I get. So I already have a filter when I connect: I look at my notifications. I don't browse Facebook aimlessly. My time is precious ;).

There are reasons why snail mail is not so popular anymore. It's not because we are technology junkies, but mainly because snail mail is inefficient and much less interactive. Why don't we play chess by mail, or play a an RPG game by mail? Certainly some people still do but we have much better ways of doing it now.

I like "writing" and I have a decent handwriting. But, to me, writing letters for everything I want to share with my friends and family looks like overkill to say the least.

I'm not happy that Facebook is the most efficient way for me to communicate with friends and family living abroad, but until there is a better alternative, I'm afraid I'm stuck with it.

Only exception is my grandma and a good friend who refuses to be on FB (he lives in Australia). I use phone and video to catch up with them :).
> wouldn't that mean AMP is not a desired product?

Well, kind of, in the same way that common-sense lightweight HTML/CSS/JS pages aren't a desired product for the people who make those decisions on publisher websites.
> Distance doesn't mean you can't be friends. But I do make a point to talk with them once a week (we game together) unless someone is gone on a vacation or something like that.

I know, I too have some close friends that I only saw in person many years after we became friends. We do have an IRC channel for a lot of these friends, but the 9 hour time difference seems to really throw a wrench into things.

Especially now that people have gotten lives. They close the computer after work (which is when I start waking up) and go do stuff with their partners. When they're online and chattering away, is most often when I'm asleep.

So yeah distance doesn't matter at all in my experience, but timezone difference matters a lot.

That said, these are not friends I would invite to a huge party anyway because they're too far to make it. We hang out when we're on the same continent.
can we get some proper discussion about this or some stronger moderation in here please? this thread is awful on all accounts
High-level problem solving the startup isn't capable of on its own.
The point was he wanted to test a service which does not ask him for his billing address, CC info and other stuff, which not only completely deanonymize him, he would also have to trust them to store this information safely (which you cannot really expect any company to do).

So in a way, his test was completed (no I don’t want to use this service) before he was even able to test their product.

Just imagine you want to test the food of the newly opened restaurant downstairs. Before you actually get to test the meal, have been treated like shit. Sure, you could have stayed to try the food, but you have already decided that it is not worth it.
I can assure you many people had no idea what the Daily Stormer was before they were "kicked out" of the US internet. So no, not knowing about it doesn't mean living under a rock.
Pirate streaming but that's already a thing. I think the interesting thing about piracy, ignoring the entire cost/no-cost and legality debates, is that pirates have the potential to always focus entirely on the end-consumer's experience because they don't care about the red tape that constricts the services provided by legitimate businesses.
"I will disagree with what you say but will defend your right to say it."
models can be trained off-line to operate on sensor streams just fine.

I mentioned this in another comment, but I don't know that we can train these models just fine, a human can get a lot more information out of an audiovisual stream than a rudimentary transcription of recognized speech, objects and/or text.

If we make these models more sophisticated to capture more information (e.g. body language, tone, context), we have to decide how that information is structured and communicated to the "higher level meaning interpretation" stage. No matter what, their output is going to be more rigidly structured and will contain less information than the raw stream. The extent to which the sensory processing model captures the human-recognizable information in the stream is the extent to which you have created an intelligent system.

There is some form of this structuring and reducing happening inside our brains, but we will never get machines to do that if we continue curating structured data sets. We, the researchers, are using our human intelligence to process raw sensory data and put it into a nice format for the AI. They need to be able to do that themselves.
I blog for other things: technology and book reviews. But it is too public for personal stories that I share with friends & family.
I highly recommend, 'The theory that would not die' as a highly entertaining account of the history of Bayesian statistics.

It is not a technical text on the subject, but it provides some of the high level reasoning as well as several of the most important stories of success over many years.
> The tipping point for us making this decision was that the team behind Daily Stormer made the claim that we were secretly supporters of their ideology.

For those interested in more info behind this statement[0]:

In a post, [The Daily Stormer] site’s architect, Andrew Auernheimer, said he had personal relationships with people at Cloudflare, and they had assured him the company would work to protect the site in a variety of ways — including by not turning over data to European courts. Cloudflare has data centers in European countries such as Germany, which have strict hate speech and privacy laws.

Company officials offered differing responses when asked about Auernheimer’s post. Kramer, Cloudflare’s general counsel, said he had no knowledge of employee conversations with Auernheimer. Later, in an email, the company said Auernheimer was a well-known hacker, and that as a result at least one senior company official “has chatted with him on occasion and has spoken to him about Cloudflare’s position on not censoring the internet.”

A former Cloudflare employee, Ryan Lackey, said in an interview that while he doesn’t condone a lot of what Auernheimer does, he did on occasion give technical advice as a friend and helped some of the Stormer’s issues get resolved.

“I am hardcore libertarian/classical liberal about free speech — something like Daily Stormer has every right to publish, and it is better for everyone if all ideas are out on the internet to do battle in that sphere,” he said.

Vick at the ADL agrees that Anglin has a right to publish, but said people have the right to hold to task the Internet companies that enable him.

[0] https://www.propublica.org/article/how-cloudflare-helps-serv...
I'm cringing at the cognitive dissonance. Every major silicon valley tech company helps China oppress it citizens on an unparalleled scale to allow them to continue to operate in the country, but one "terrorist attack" (unplanned murder with a vehicle, a hate crime) occurs in a state in the US and suddenly the gloves are off.

Edit: This country isn't getting fixed without empathy, understanding, and compromise on a national scale. Without that, we're all just yelling how lovely the moral high ground is when we're all wallowing in the mud.
Now I want to see Mappy used to map out Mappy-Land (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mappy-Land).
I like the article as that it still shows that they're committed to being neutral, however, they will respond when you try to drag them down with you. From the article, it sounds like the stormer bit the hand that fed them.
A sensible business decision by Cloudflare, and a fine moral stand to take. There is nothing positive to be gained by servicing such neo-Nazi websites, and Cloudflare is under no obligation to keep them as customers.

Similarly, the Daily Stormer is free to take their custom to a provider who turns a blind eye to or supports their toxic ideology.
Is this used by vanilla docker / ECS, or just k8s?
It did. They're completely offline now. Since their .com got taken down, they had a .onion domain, which now simply says that they've moved to .ru, which is currently down thanks to Cloudflare. They'll probably return to that .onion domain shortly, but, as I'm writing this, they're completely off of the Internet.
> It's almost always better not to drive these kind of people to the underground

Seems more like this would remove the echo chamber than drive them underground, I would agree with your point if it was about public shaming. But if FB goes offline I wouldn't consider anyone being "driven underground", more like forced above ground.
Don't know how feasible this is, but can you get satellite internet and a hotspot? Code while you rest, hike while you think/brainstorm :)
It depends on where the line in the sand is, or if that kind of discrimination is legal or not.

If AT&T wanted to terminate service to the Stormer organization they could do it without consequence, it's not their responsibility to provide coverage to anyone plus dog like they were under regulation. It's a free market. Stormer can find someone else.
> The Pirate Bay and DDOS gangs are okay, but this was the line? The worlds gone sideways.

Yes people whose namesake is derived from a group of people that committed genocide is where I draw my line. Do you even hear yourself right now? What kind of mental gymnastics did you have to perform to equate internet vandalism and theft to hate groups who call for a return to Nazi practices?
Improve Your Ruby/Rails/GraphQL APIs with Batching
I want to prevent my users from being datamined, even if they found my site via Google.

But I also don’t want to end up basically deranked on Google by sites that have nothing to do with the result.

Just look at this example to see how AMP distorts the actual search ranking, by moving pages to #1 that have nothing to do with the topic, but happen to be on AMP: http://i.imgur.com/84FvZmA.png
If you are talking about Bi-Rite creamery near Dolores Park, I feel you, but hear me out.

Three things:

1. I fucking despise lines. I will pay money, I will forgo comfort, I will give up on a thing I want, if a Line is an obstacle. I'm the jabroni paying VIP entrance to clubs not because I want to be cool, but because I can't be fucked to stand in a line. I won't do it. I'll go hungry before I stand in a line. I bought a motorcycle so I could skip car lines.

2. I'm a food snob.

3. I've traveled a lot. Combined with (2) this means I eat as much as I can all over the world because I have a passion for food and I want to eat the best before I die.

Bearing those things in mind, know this: Bi-Rite creamery is the best ice cream I have ever had in my life, and I will stand in line for an hour for it. It is worth the line and my god there are few things in life I will say that about.

EDIT: By the way protip, you can skip the line if you get a pint. So... I kind of cheat now, when I go I just buy like 5 pints of different flavors :P
This is all very true, but I feel like we (as users) haven't really gained proportionally compared to the increase in computing power and storage.

For example IDEs: Visual Studio in 2017 is certainly better than Visual Studio in 1997, but do those advancements really justify the exponential growth in hardware requirements?

How'd we get so little usable functionality increase for such a massive increase in size/complexity?
What Is the Social Justice Endgame?
Freedom of speech does not cover incitement nor hate speech.
This is the paper https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/b9bc/a3c9f531002854af48de12... that this is based on. They claim to be able to extract the key using hdparm. Afaik that needs elevated permissions to run.
"Also, by not hosting Daily Stormer, you simply push them further down. One of the big reasons Trump won was because people felt like they weren't allowed to voice their opinions easily. There were people, basically closeted Trump supporters, who said they didn't like Trump, but secretly did. Pushing people down because they're "deplorables" simply reinforces their opinions."

I supported Trump(though didn't vote since I live in a deep blue state) and don't really agree with cloudflares decision, but I wouldn't use Trump supporters and "deplorables" as an argument for the Daily Stormer. It's one thing to be against immigration... heck it's one thing to be racist... but what the Daily Stormer engages in is dehumanization(and normalizes it). There's little on there that isn't said elsewhere more tactfully.
I don't know if it's really fair to blame Netflix for this one. There's no obligation to charge the minimal price for your product, just the minimal competitive price. As for content, Netflix was able to dominate streaming early on because nobody had realized how big the market was going to be yet. It's a lot harder to dominate the market with other people's content now because everyone is realize how valuable their contracts with Netflix were and are starting to pull the rights to stream their content in favor of hosting their own platforms which forces Netflix into the content creation business if they want to stay relevant. None of that is really Netflix's fault in isolation.
Ok, what other tools are we talking about, then? :)

Somehow I doubt these die-hard ex Nintendo devs are insisting on using Emacs or Lisp. I'd say those are "modern" tools anyway, in the sense that they still hold revolutionary insights for modern software development -- and also probably were NOT used for Nintendo games.
Malware distributors, DDoS purveyors, sellers of stolen credit cards, all those welcome as customers. However nazis isn't.

Good to know they had a line somewhere. I was just surprised to see it.
The Kardashian Decade: How a Sex Tape Led to a Billion-Dollar Brand
The answer to your question is no: google's search results only ever link to google's cache for your page.

Link here:

https://blog.branch.io/google-accelerated-mobile-pages-amp-a...

> Anyone can use a CDN to set up and run an AMP cache, but only content in Google’s cache (which Google has stated can be used without restriction and at no cost) is currently getting preferred search results treatment

But the whole point is kinda moot because AMP requires that your assets be "cacheable", which means google will come along and cache them, and the search results will use the google-cached version.

So sure, another CDN could cache your stuff, but nobody clicking through a google search result will ever hit it.
The thing is, if my favoured group specifically revolved around oppression of groups of people (ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, what have you), I would deserve it.

This isn't a tough definition. I'm fine with republicans hating "lefties", broncos hating raiders, xbox hating playstation. When hate is directed at non-chosen traits, that's the red line.

Am I crazy? I feel like I am with all this defense of literal nazis (flags, signs, salute, speech and all).
"Yup, they're Nazis".

What more due process do you require?
I mean, he just has the authority over the company and can deny service to them, he can't effectively shut them down. Just give them downtime. I would compare this to a DoS more than a shut down.
Unless I have a reason to seek out The Daily Stormer or similar sites, why/how would I know about them? Some of us just want to go about our lives without having to be stressed about all of this.

https://xkcd.com/1053/
> I need very little social interaction

Don't let that stop you from telling others how to socialize correctly!
There's like a million places for good brunch though. And if you're willing to extend your reach into the Bay Area in general, those options increase exponentially :)
> I am fully convinced that you are a Facebook addict in denial

This is certainly your right, but I am not. Someone said "denial"? :)

I rarely get religious and passionate about things. I don't have FB shares. I'm simply pragmatic. It serves its purpose. Nothing more.
I agree. There's probably a line somewhere but let's get a little closer to it than literal Nazis celebrating a murder before the hand-wringing starts.