skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is terrible.

The chan boards are some of the last bastions of actual free expression.

Here, if you post something that someone doesn't like, your comment is downvoted into oblivion.

Case in point, I posted "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" and within 2 seconds it reached 0 votes. If you post anything anti-capitalist on this board (I'm pro-socialist) then there are paid trolls who will literally down vote you until your comments and submissions disappear. Hackernews is owned by propagandists literally by design - it has a moderation system that is created to be gamed. Post enough popular click bait content and you get the points necessary to down vote others. I'm sure that there are entire offices purpose built and operated around policing Hackernews for political purposes.

The /pol/ board on 8ch is a disgusting cesspool. Yes, and? Cloudflare is a de-facto monopoly (monopsony?) and they have the ability to control information. Whoever controls the free flow of information controls the world. What happens when a fascist decides to control Cloudflare? What do you do then? And if you think that is unlikely, well Rupert Murdoch exists.

This should be unlawful by regulation. A free press and free speech means that people should have the right to express opinions that you disagree with. And monopolies prevent that.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Does CF enjoy publisher protections for the content that moves through their servers? Because if they do, and they “curate” opinions they don’t like, that’s an issue.
>That doesn't mean they must block every potentially bad actor.

Unfortunately obligatory "I don't support 8chan".

I dislike this idea that people can stomp their feet and demand CloudFlare kick off "bad actors".

Who is to say the bad actor of tomorrow won't be the "good actor" of today. CloudFlare and other internet utilities should remain apolitical tools that leave law enforcement to law enforcement (even that is a slippery slope, but I'd much prefer an open internet that isn't open to individual whims of what is right and wrong)
Well yes, and ultimately noticeboardflare has the right to do whatever the hell they want.

And if your noticeboard is inciting nearly weekly mass homicides, maybe the noticeboard you're trying to support is a shitty noticeboard.
> They are practically a utility.

LOL. They are not.
DDoSes are rarely prosecuted as the perpetrators are rarely caught. This is even more true when the DDoS is done by large groups of people (such as the scientology attacks a decade or so ago).

Further, 8chan is run in the Philippines, which would add a lot of complications to any prosecution
I think OP was referring to the act of arranging one's affairs to make their taxes as low as possible, and not the ultimate reduction in tax rate achieved.
I have sympathy with the guys watching the metrics seeing a huge spike in outlier response times and go investigating after this made its round.
That'll fix'er.
>When I was younger I thought I was a few speech absolutist. Then I went to where was free speech was absolute and saw what was discussed. Now I favor moderation.

How do you determine what speech is "good" and what speech is "bad"? I feel like there is no absolute way to determine this. (I am being genuine in asking, I want to know what caused this change and how you see "free speech")

All speech is good in my opinion. Some actions are bad. 8chan is supporting these actions, they've crossed the line.
Ok. But if you can't view more than a paragraph, why not just judge the article by the headline.
They are not a utility. At all. They are not comparable to your water or your electricity in any way.

They are comparable to a self-storage place you might keep your boat. Or an office you might rent to house your business. But they are not anything like a utility.
Thanks for the writing.

So, doesn't the MVP need to be sellable?

What kind of feedback are you are expecting to get from a "junk" MVP?
たった今霊団が「１９」と降らせてきました。これは使命遂行前のブログ「青いグミと赤いグミ」の事を言っているのです（祈）†
At some point, the price is unacceptable in light of the benefits conferred.

And Cloudflare isn't a utility. I agree with Cloudflare's decision. I hope whichever host 8chan runs to will do the same. Free speech is not a suicide pact.
> Mass shootings (generally) don't kill that many people. They are scary, yes, but not that deadly (statistically)

Logic like that is usually applied to forces of nature. Or at least things that provide utility in return for this risk (e.g. cars). Mass shootings don't really fit that mould.

"stop telling people things" strikes me as a strange response. We could have a nationwide epidemic of mass shootings flying under the radar entirely. Sometimes issues need to faced head on.

(and even if the national media didn't say a peep, 8Chan would be all over it, tracking the number of deaths for their high score board. It's a forum for radicalisation that's been ignored for a very long time)
Rock Ventures, http://www.rockventures.com/ , was founded by Quicken Loans billionaire Dan Gilbert.
Very well written and cogent post. But as they point out, the internet is designed to be open and free. And this type of hateful content will still have a platform. There's sadly nothing that can be done about that. You can always suppress and control speech, but the people who want to hear it will also always find a way to seek it out.
Good luck proving that a "reasonable person" shouldn't have done it. Most people on HN probably do, but I wouldn't be surprised if everyone coming out of a 3 month coding bootcamp only knew to hash passwords and nothing else. The other comments in this thread seems to suggest that the company is filled with bootcamp programmers.
I'm sure this comment section is going to be a dumping ground for the poorly thought out MuH FrEeDoM oF SpEeCh arguments, but for the people actually caught up on this topic, this is the beginning of the end of tolerance for stochastic terrorism and it's about time.
This always has been and always will be about publicity. 8ch started getting mentioned on national television, and there started to be questions directed at cloudflare. Reddit used to happily host discriminatory, violent communities, and only banned them once people started paying attention and companies became afraid to advertise on reddit because of its perceived connections to hate by the public. The message to hate communities is to lay low and not get noticed by the media.
Salary as a variable has changed over time;

Initially of course there was a minimum to meet my goals. My target was to be able to live somewhere, cover my cost of living, pay down my debts, and save 10% of my salary in long term savings.

Then as expenses started moving from being "in the future" to being "in the past" I was able to be more flexible on salary.

It helps that I have never equated what I was paid with how much I was "worth." It also helps that I don't have a lot of innate materialism. Although the funny story there is when I went back to Los Angeles to visit my old roommate from college I was showing him a fancy laptop that I had saved up for an bought. He had a pretty crap laptop but had recently bought a nice late model Mercedes Benz. Meanwhile, I had a 10 year old car at that point. We laughed at how the two different areas of California encouraged different status symbols.
The Christchurch madman livestreamed his vile murders using Facebook. Isn't it long past time we removed that hate site, a nest of debauchery, from the internet as well? Of course there will be evil persons that will disagree and support the existence of hate sites, but it is not necessary for sane individuals to listen to anything they say.
Cloudflare is a CDN. 8chan has free choice to pick another. It's not a common carrier or a public service in any way. It's just big, which isn't the same thing.
regex101 and similar sites like [1] are great

but, I always try to add a warning when recommending - should use them only for the flavors supported (PCRE, Python, etc) I've seen many using it for cli tools and wonder why things like non-greedy or lookarounds don't work.

[1] https://www.debuggex.com/
Then when would they become one?
A common carrier is a specific thing. They're not one.
This is because Tech Recruiters are not Interviewers. You first need to pass the Recruiter filter. Tech recruiters are (and I quote) looking for "honey holes" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvpByue1M4E such as GitHub and StackOverflow. There is even a cottage industry of Tools that will Index developers on their public profiles, nowadays.

(I ran into that video while I was searching for "tips on searching for specific source code fragments on GitHub" and this title matched, and it was not what I thought it is :D)
BlobCity – An All-in-One Database
Where did CloudFlare make or where was CloudFlare quoted as making the “moral obligation” argument? That just looks like a random tweet to me.

Edit: Looks like CEO comment to the Guardian earlier today

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/aug/04/mass-shoo...
How come Twitter is not is trouble for enabling (or being A loudspeaker for) people that riles up other people, fuels their fire and so on.

Trying to understand this from a ethics and philosophical perspective. Appreciate your comments.
It's for each privately controlled platform to decide.

If you want tools that are open for everyone, create a public utility that must comply with the first amendment.
I don't know why you are getting downvoted. It is the same here. Every time I see a US city name in my Twitter sidebar here in Australia, I just know that it is another mass shooting without having to click.

I hate that it has become so common now that I have just stopped clicking to find out more about them. This sort of thing used to horrify me, but nowadays I just feel so numb about it, and that scares me because I feel that I am becoming less empathetic and more cynical.
> They are a utility.

They are not even close to a utility.
> Meyer suspects one of the factors leading to this divide can be found in the numbers: according to her book, there are 500,000 words in the English language, but only 70,000 in French. This means that Anglophones are more likely to have the exact word to say what they want, whereas Francophones must often string together a series of words to communicate their message. This not only forces the French to be more creative with language, it also allows them to be more ambiguous with what they want to say. As a result, ‘non’ in France does not always mean ‘no’.

This is definitely a case of bad linguistics.

Without even cracking the nut of how many words are in either language,

* French tries to have an official authority while English does not. The academy is reluctant to admit new words, especially if they are borrowed, even when a word is otherwise in common use.

* English, like other Germanic languages, likes to compound words. French also compounds but it's not as productive. Very successful English compounds drop spaces or hyphenate and get inducted into the dictionary. Lexical procreation.

N.B. A word being in a dictionary is a matter of judgment, as a common word can be missing or a word that is almost never used can be present!

* Where a word is needed but absent, one will be invented or borrowed. Speakers are not constrained to be "creative" under the tyrrany of a limited lexicon from this time until the end of time.

* It's not clear that a limited lexicon would mean playing games with a concept as simple as "no". This seems strictly cultural.

* English may have, in some sense, 500k words but the vast majority of those are rare and not part of the principal vocabulary. And why would you think this is related to ways of expressing degrees between yes and no?

* Why should number of words be used to estimate the expressive power of a language?
The problem is that Cloudflare keeps trying to position themselves as not being in the business of deciding what can be on the internet, but they have twice made the decision to do so. Also, since you mentioned it and hence made this disclaimer obligatory: I have zero sympathy for 8chan, and I don't agree with the views espoused there.
Calculus For The People
I don't get it, either. Even New Zealand deep-state spy bureaucrats followed around a pro-democracy protestor just to win some favor with the Fijian government. These systems are already abused like this. The Intercept runs a series called Trial and Terror where they pick up on people like this so we know they are doing it. How is NZ following around a pro-democracy protestor and not the NZ shooter? Let's hope it is incompetence. Source, btw: https://theintercept.com/2016/08/14/nsa-gcsb-prism-surveilla...
> Maybe, this event may become the precedent for all future hosting providers of unpopular opinions

Maybe it won't!

I feel like every time a controversial site gets shut down message boards are flooded with slippery slope arguments, but by and large I haven't seen it ever transpire.
Spoken like a true fascist.
Except that it's not just about Westerners full stop; there's also an element of exoticism, compounded by the lack of proper interactions with the West by most of Japan for around a century. Clearly these depictions of the West are done from a hugely emic point of view, with the distortions of the depictions of the West distorted partly by the art style but partly from the lack of accurate information.

And yes, the concept of the Other is not easy to illustrate because it has less to do with the parties involved and more of their understanding of each other, the lenses through which these preconceptions are analysed still being debated to this day. It's helpful that there is a word, even if it's merely shorthand, to describe this concisely.

There is nothing black and white about the Other but equally this being a story simple of Western and Japanese is not as night and day as you claim.
>8chan is supporting these actions

You don’t know anything about the chans if you think 8chan collectively supports shootings.
> It is more difficult for McDonald’s to have 100,000 delivery drivers across its various channels and make money — which is why they didn’t do it.

In some places they do.
Using BCP 38 to prevent IP spoofing
They've also removed sex worker websites (including a forum that was just sex workers talking to each other), but for some reason no one complains about it.
This feels like a misunderstanding of the word freedom. Freedom in speech means that I can say what I want.

It does _not_ mean that a hosting company has to host it or that a CDN has to optimize it or that a search company has to rank it or that an ad-network has to monetize it. Each of those players is free to do what they think is best with their time, resources, etc.; which often includes thinking of what "the public" will think of them doing (or not doing) a thing.

Freedom does not mean that I have the "right" to be heard or the "right" to be amplified—either as much as the next person or at all.

The net, as in a network of computers, is quite close to free. Being a part of a society is not.
Ted Kaczynski was not arrested for writing manifestos beyond the pale of normative capitalism from a self-built cabin in Montana. He was arrested for sending bombs. The moment one person freely decides to harmfully affect others, those others can do something about it.

It seems much of the hand-wringing about freedom—when we talk about the internet and corporations—is that extremist speech does not have access to the same megaphone, the same means of monetization (and therefore survival). And that…well that's what living in a society is all about.

Are there bad parts about tech as we see it today? Absolutely! But it hardly seems like the problem is "not enough shit is allowed on the internet." I don't know, maybe I'm wrong.
Scalable Place Recognition Under Appearance Change for Autonomous Driving
People are constantly calling out Twitter and Jack Dorsey for the horrible aspects of the platform.
You may be thinking of the "CDA 230" nonsense that will not die, where people claim that companies can't moderate their customers because they'd be liable for what they post.

The opposite is true. CDA 230 makes it clear that companies can moderate their content without becoming responsible for it.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190507/16484342160/one-t...
A utility is typically a natural monopoly providing some sort of essential service. Cloudflare is neither.
It's like the paper mill refusing to sell paper!
As the author/maintainer of a once popular text editor I feel it is easy to get started then very hard to finish. Modern text editors require a lot of details and even more demands from those who use it. It’s a fun programming challenge. I still find myself thinking about awesome features to add.
And all that is addressed in the article. Specifically the paragraph that starts with "We do not take this decision lightly"

The point is that what 8chan is doing is egregious enough for them to step in and cease doing business with them. This isn't a slippery slope kind of thing.
May create a cascading effect where less and less CDNs will accept them.
I think they are and have been for quite some time. It seems to come up a lot. They've made some Terms of Service changes, and banned some people. I saw an article just today or yesterday criticizing them for their decision to handle right wing extremists differently from other terrorist groups.
Isn’t the DDoS a form of free speech though? At the risk of being uber pedantic, on the internet, speech is reduced to packet delivery from source to destination.

Therefore, one could make an argument that DDoS protection is in itself stifling free speech?
8chan claims not to be able to ban content because of the way they are set up, as such they have no real control even over people running pedo boards.

That is pretty obviously 'lawless by design'.
My bad. He isn't. I suppose this was a 'strictly news' piece. Separate analysis coming soon.
I see your point, but violation of TOS has to be a very clearly defined situation and it is rarely is, at the end it can be ambiguously interpreted to kick anyone if you have the right lawyers, so we are back to step 1.
I dunno, when you need cloud storage to live.
In the same way you need water, power, gas, and these days communication (ISP, etc). But hosting your files is not crucial to your survival I don't believe.
To be fair, our sales, income, and wealth tax policies also reflect our societal values. Some jurisdictions tax sugary drinks partly as an attempt to "punish" or reduce consumption.
> All speech is good in my opinion. Some actions are bad. 8chan is supporting these actions, they've crossed the line.

It looks like you've just made a determination of what you consider is bad speech.
> How do you determine what speech is "good" and what speech is "bad"?

Ultimately the courts determine which speech is "good" or "bad" by interpreting the law, but all property owners can determine what speech is permitted on their property (like what cloudflare is doing).

I accept some limits on free speech. I think you shouldn't be able to start a panic without cause (yelling fire in a crowded theater). I think conspiracy is a crime. I think threats are a crime. I support the idea of copyright laws even if I think our current system is bad.

From an internet freedom standpoint I think this signals we have an over dependence on cloudflare, not that we have a free speech problem.
Only governments can censor; it is not a concept that applies to private parties. Cloudflare's decision to not continue a business relationship with someone is not censorship in any meaningful sense of the word.
I think we will have self driving cars. A lot more fully electric cars. Much more practical home automation. Hopefully a commercial space craft will be on mars. Good chance for the first time co2 levels will either be stabilized or declining but not increasing. Smart phones will use transparent aluminum (https://youtu.be/DduO1fNzV4w)
this will pretty much end the cell phone repair industry...

We will probably have way more cameras that are doing all kinds of scary facial recognition for good and evil.

I’m hopefully we’ll have made some pretty steady progress with crisper gene editing and have a far better understanding of the role of bacteria in the body for good...

I think the future is bright
Who's being bullied here, and what are they being forced to agree with?
They literally said that they would not kick someone off their platform anymore after they did it to The Daily Storm. Then they did to 8chan because enough people threw a hissy fit
"Hate online is a real issue. Here are some organizations that have active work to help address it:

- Anti-Defamation League

...

..."

Wikipedia:

"The ADL has faced criticism for its support for Israel, charges of defamation, spying allegations, its former stance on the Armenian Genocide, and possible conflation of opposition to Israel with antisemitism."

Thanks a lot Cloudflare. First you are complaining about hate and online discussion and then you share shit like this.
It seems there is nothing but lies ja propaganda these days. Either far-right or far-left or some other far-shit.
Considering blizzard kills less humans than the United States government, legal and moral?
*so in that sense, the media is juicing its numbers

thats all they're doing

>public is not made aware of this very tragic problem

everyone is quite aware of what the problems are, many view the children murdered during Sandy Hook as the end of the conversation. The decisions were made.

most first world countries have solved these problems, the US meanwhile...

‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens
It's ridiculous that this is remotely controversial. "Freedom of speech?" How about the freedom to not obligatorily aid the organizing of white supremacist hate groups? Slippery slope's ass.
Shameless plug: I've written books [1] which focuses entirely on the specific flavor supported by the tool or the programming language. I use plenty of examples to present the features one by one. These can be used for learning purposes as well as handy reference guide.

I think of regular expressions as a mini-programming language, and use loose fitting analogies

Anchors --> adding if conditions
Alternation --> Conditional OR
a(b|c)d = abd|acd --> a(b+c)d = abd+acd
Quantifiers --> string repetition and range operators
Dot metacharacter + quantifiers + alternation --> Conditional AND
Capture group and backreference --> variable
Subexpression call --> function
Character class --> sets
Lookarounds --> custom conditionals
Flags --> like command line options

So far, I've written books for Ruby and Python regular expressions, and BRE/ERE/PCRE/Rust for "GNU grep and ripgrep". Currently writing a book for GNU sed.

[1] https://learnbyexample.github.io/books/
How do you filter spam if you can't moderate at all? HN only exists as a service because it's quite carefully moderated.
> with the return of some simple political will

Gun control is a "third rail" in many political jurisdictions in the USA. Many Americans will vote against any agent who would disarm them; those voters are unlikely to see disarming to diminish the (very roughly) ~0.000001% chance of death by mass shooting as a sensible--or even Constitutional--trade.
> I posted "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?"

Not a particularly insightful comment :/
>There will be another 8chan to fill that void soon enough.

8chan totally still exists. All CloudFlare did was essentially erase the link between their IP and "8chan.org".

It took them probably 15 minutes to "go back up", if they hadn't already been abandoning CF anyway.