skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This decision is yet another distraction. It's attempting to treat an ephemeral symptom in a rapidly evolving landscape of digital identity and communications. Things are only getting faster, easier, more connected, more distributed, and more encrypted. There is no going back.

Until we collectively acknowledge that it's real humans behind these actions and create modern ways to identify and prevent them, a DDoS/CDN company turning off their service is about the most inconsequential change of all. Making some internet comments go away solves nothing.
There was a study on that which suggests that pithy quips might not be the best source of advice:

http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf
Well, this is a very good way of teaching people how to double their problems effectively.
Why is CloudFlare having to deal with this rather than their ISP?
Prosecutors plea bargain slam dunk cases all the time.
It's unfortunately easy to find sociopathic engineers.
Like “doch” in German
Yeah, like that!

I'm impressed. Older services like that were asking $1 or so per article.

Edit: I do see The Wall Street Journal, which is cool. But do they include The NY Times?
Seems to me like a lot of the arguments against why this shouldn't happen or isn't effective basically amount to some sort of whatabouttery. Well done Cloudflare, I hope their next host takes the same attitude or can be induced to.
Tor's onion service will always there to provide hosting to the less popular ideas. The censorship-resistant network is there. Make sure to give it some love.

Last time I checked, people were discussing how to murder, exchanging nazi manifestos and conspiracy theories. I was looking for anarchist discussions but I actually ended up having these on reddit.

Don't get fooled by the current positioning of IT firms, it only depends on a fistful of people who will transmit their power to their biological offspring, no matter how fucked up they are.
Perhaps the authorities will closely monitor people who make obscure & dramatic claims online. There's probably an effective scoring system & NLP in place anyways. We think "social credit" only applies to China...
https://whereisscihub.now.sh
I question the redefinition of predator, an organism that hunts and consumes its prey, in this term micropredator. I wonder how accepted and widespread its use is.

And the author doesn't use this much more restricted term. He didn't title his book A Human History of Our Deadliest Micropredator. Because he's going for sensationalism, as is more fully demonstrated in quotes from the book given later in the article:

> In total, Winegard estimates that mosquitoes have killed more people than any other single cause—fifty-two billion of us, nearly half of all humans who have ever lived. He calls them “our apex predator,” “the destroyer of worlds,” and “the ultimate agent of historical change.”

To your own assertion that mosquitoes kill a lot of humans - they only do so indirectly as a vector for disease. This is a very important distinction - if we are going to eradicate anything it would be better to eradicate the microbial killer parasites they carry, such as Plasmodium falciparum, not the carriers themselves (which are an important food source for many actual predators).
This comment is wonderful. As a company founder (and de-facto CEO), I'd love it if all of my employees did this every year (or even continuously!). I think I am going to steal this and make it part of an annual review process (once we get big enough to have those).

I did notice however that one thing that isn't your list is your salary. I'm curious if that was intentional or not?
> Everyone does it, rich and poor alike

No they don’t. Even if a “poor person” wanted to, they have nowhere near the scope available to “arrange their affairs” such that they can minimise their taxes at the same percentage (of income) as the rich do. To believe otherwise is naive in the extreme.
I see. Typical territorial domineering of an immature ego.
What's your definition of trashy here if its not simply using drugs?
Bed bugs have long been assumed to be essentially a harmless nuisance, but research increasingly suggests they can transmit Chagga's Disease, the same infection carried by "Kissing Bugs" (so called because they frequently bite a person near the mouth).

https://entomologytoday.org/2018/01/30/study-further-evidenc...
> No elite ever invented any such things.

That's very easy to disprove as a claim. Engineers in the US and elsewhere routinely get very wealthy from companies they found or are involved with and their inventions.

Robert Noyce invented the first practical integrated circuit and was quite wealthy. As a brilliant engineer he co-founded both Intel and Fairchild. There's probably nobody in the history of the semiconductor industry that had a greater impact. He's a big part of the reason Silicon Valley exists. Gordon Moore was another talented engineer along with Noyce and a co-founder of Intel (resulting in a ~$20b fortune).

Ray Dolby was a brilliant engineer that became a billionaire from his inventions and eponymous company.

Linus Torvalds, a very skilled engineer, created Linux and is now quite wealthy. He was a self-made millionaire in his 30s.

Thomas Edison was both relatively rich and a very prolific inventor.

George Westinghouse was a very skilled engineer as well as a prolific inventor and became extremely wealthy.

James Dyson is both an inventor and extraordinarily rich.

Robin Li was a skilled engineer and helped pioneer search engines.

John Carmack and Tim Sweeney are both inventors and rich (extraordinarily rich in the case of Sweeney).

Larry Page invented PageRank, which was a critical shift in the way search engines work versus all the existing peers at the time. It was in fact the very foundation of Google's dominance.

Bill Gates started the first software company. It's easy to argue he didn't invent much, however he did help blaze the trail of software as an industry unto itself.

Larry Ellison - a skilled engineer - along with his co-founders, launched one of the first relational database products.

The founders of Cisco were both skilled engineers and got very wealthy from their ownership (despite conflicting with the VCs and being tossed out later).

Steve Wozniak was both a very skilled engineer, an inventor, and someone who got relatively wealthy.

Paul Allen was both an inventor, skilled engineer and someone who got extraordinarily rich.

Jensen Huang was a skilled engineer and got extremely wealthy by founding nVidia.

Robert Metcalfe, a talented engineer that co-invented ethernet, got wealthy from 3Com and various companies he was involved with over the years.

Andy Bechtolsheim was a very talented engineer that became wealthy from Sun Microsystems, Arista and investments.

Marc Andreessen was an engineer that helped to co-create Mosaic and went on to found Netscape. Few people did more to spark Internet adoption than Andreessen's early browsers.

James Clark was a skilled engineer that founded Silicon Graphics.

Pierre Omidyar was a skilled engineer and helped write the early code for eBay, which was one of the first online auction sites.

This list keeps going. These people all fall into the "elite" category and they're all engineers.
They've kicked people off their service before for content based reasons (eg, Daily Stormer), so this changes nothing. In any case:

> I thought there was some sort of legal distinction if they were totally agnostic to what travels over their wires. Is that not the case?

Not as far as I'm aware, no. The closest thing I can think of is if they were discriminating based on people's membership in a protected class, eg, if they announced a strict "no female clients" policy. This is clearly vastly different.

From a PR point of view, yes, every time they kick someone off for being bad, the more their failing to kick someone off will be seen as an implicit endorsement. But again, that ship has sailed.
Ah - you might want to clarify that point then, the marketing copy on your site implies that is (will be) usable in any python environment.
Cloudflare in the past was a staunch defender of free speech when people tried to get them to take down a website that was an outlet for pro-ISIS propaganda (I think the quote from the CEO was "A website is speech. It is not a bomb").

When they stopped hosting the neo-Nazi website they mentioned in the link, they made a big deal about how it was a one-off decision and they'll never again again stop serving a website because of its content. Clearly they've changed their minds about that.
The creator of regexone.com also created sqlbolt.com for SQL, which I also highly recommend.
That is absolutely true, and in the original article there was a mention of folks trapped by US visa rules (leave your job, go back to your origin country).

To address your question though, if I were mentoring Alice I would ask which is more important to her, money or happiness? I learned long ago that it is useless to argue which is more important but it instructive to know in a person which one is key.

If she thinks happiness is more important, then the advice would be to interview elsewhere for a spot where she could be happy and ignore the salary if it is sufficient to her to live on. If she thinks money is more important, then the advice would be to focus her personal development toward being able to demand the salary that she wants to be paid.

The bottom line is that its easier to put up with poor working conditions when it is simply a stepping stone toward a different (ideally less poor) place.
The Financial Times also did a feature this weekend, see https://www.ft.com/content/af232e7a-b516-11e9-8cb2-799a3a8cf... .. international print version was different. Both Economist and FT probably prompted by market research announcement.

Here in China, consolidation continues but there remain quite a number of smaller players. It's a brutal space, very high capex, very low USP, thin margins, no return unless you scale. Basically the main players exist through VC and eyeball trading. You have to wonder what security they have against eg. Tencent/WeChat just sidestepping them. Especially as there is a lot of history of nasty backstabbing marketplace-takes-your-model in China, eg. we saw Qunar do this to hotel reservation networks (I used to run one). One area of resistance to commodified last mile delivery seems to be large chains, like KFC/McDonalds, who offer their own delivery drivers in a bid to retain control, customer ownership and margins. A major play right now for delivery operators seems to be ghost kitchen establishment and operator partnerships.

We anticipate entering the Chinese consumer food retail market within the next two quarters with closer-to-consumer, robot-produced, personalized cuisine cooked to order in an autonomous kiosk format (wholly owned and operated).
>While I don't agree with the way he spoke, was C# one of the de facto or explicit in-house languages of the company, and Ruby was not? If so, he may have been referring to the fact that the company already had many libraries in C# that you could use. Plus, if C# was one of their areas of expertise, it's typically best to use that as opposed to a new, unfamiliar language unless you're explicitly testing out a new approach.

[...]

>I don't think RoR is trash, but if you were starting a large program that would be used across multiple departments whose in-house language was C#, it was probably the right call to suggest switching to C#.

According to the parent comment, he was working at a startup that was in the "Quicken led start-up space". My interpretation is that Quicken was acting like an incubator, and he isn't working in quicken, and so the engineering teams are separate. Therefore I don't think organizational inertia applies here.
There are already people doing that stuff. Given that's the case, why should they not act?
The problem is we live in a digital society, and comparing Cloudflare to a notice board is wildly reductionist.
Is it just a scapegoat though? Allowing these groups of disaffected people does seem to be a significant part of mass killings.

There were a lot of ISIS inspired attacks until ISIS was destroyed. Which effectively shut down the community.

This entire age of frequent mass shootings coincides with the internet and media coverage in general.

I personally believe that this has more to do with the notoriety and following these attacks inspire than gun laws, which have always been very weak.

A lot of these attacks are similar to streaking imo, which basically stopped when the media coverage stopped.
If some guy is stupid enough to make that mistake do you think a law is going to stop him?
In every other sane retail environment, this should have never happened at all, regardless of how rude the customer is, unless they're being racist or intentionally degrading or belittling the staff.
I think more engineers are realizing that if you've been working for Uber, Facebook, Twitter, and maybe now (or depending on how they act, maybe not) Cloudflare it severely curtails your future opportunities, both as an employee and socially.
It's kind of a joke though, isn't it? Like, Blizzard isn't doing any real work in Barbados or Bermuda. So you could probably argue it's wrong, unless you feel like arguing that all taxation is wrong from an Individualist perspective (which I'd be fine with).

And aside from wrong, the fact that they've agreed to pay a fine of $345 million means it was probably illegal. If they just phrased something wrong they could probably just correct the phrasing, and, more importantly, I think they probably tried really hard to get the phrasing right when transferring billions from one company to another.

I own offshore companies and minimize my tax burden, but let's call a spade a spade.
Wow, just 30 years to global extinction? I just might live to see that! /s
They are utility though. Have you thought about that people support neutrality/common carrier style behavior with 8chan existing being the acceptable price to pay and not 8 chan itself?
> you signal a green light to all the other potential shooters that this is how you get attention.

As pointed out by an ever prescient Charlie Brooker almost ten fucking years ago. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PezlFNTGWv4).

On a similar subject, The Samaritans publish very specific and thorough guidelines as to how to report and publish suicides (https://www.samaritans.org/about-samaritans/media-guidelines...) which are still ignored by many even if unknowingly.
The problem is that a company named Noticeboardflare has practically monopolized protection of noticeboards, and that if you do not have their approval, your noticeboard is impractical to operate.
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.
If anyone is interested in learning Spanish I highly recommend comparing the above with ProSpanish[0][1]. It aims to get you conversational in Spanish very quickly. There are some of the videos for free on youtube[2].

[0] https://www.prospanish.co.uk/

[1] https://www.prospanish.co.uk/?page_id=1783

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rj6pAX7aAkg
Tech giant's demonstrating their own right to free speech by choosing what they will host?
It's quantum agreement. You both agree and disagree until someone clarifies, at which point it collapses into a classical argument.
I'd complain. I wouldn't demand from them millions of dollars or suggest they be locked up in a cage like the EU would.
All around the world people listen to and see the same news stories. I woke up yesterday thinking that the media was reporting on the same mass shooting, but I figured out it was another new and predictably American assault rifle massacre pretty quickly.
Very unpopular opinion.
The internet should be free for everyone and no provider should have the ability to cut off services.
The problem is not the platform but the people, hate the player not the game.
Bullying people is the worst way to get them to agree with you.
>Until we collectively acknowledge that it's real humans behind these actions and create modern ways to identify and prevent them

Surely this has no downsides at all. For example, you can rest easy because YOUR ideas and YOUR opinions will never stray off the “approved” line.

... how is it people in tech can’t see past their own noses on things like this?
Garbage. See my comments there: it's bad math, and worse research. No longitudinal study like Terman or SMPY (https://www.gwern.net/SMPY) of high-IQ types has ever supported his claims. High IQ is an (unearned) privilege and a huge advantage for things like going to Harvard Medical. As Murray puts it, "life is yours to lose". (So what does that say about people with high IQ who gravitate to Mensa or blog posts like this to complain about their failures in life...?)
>Given that, this seems like a reasonable exercise of that power, and that's about the best we can hope for.

Maybe, this event may become the precedent for all future hosting providers of unpopular opinions and where denial of service attacks become used against these hosting providers. Losing protection from anti-ddos service(s) becomes a process to eliminate the unpopular opinions being expressed.

I think this is dangerous recourse and even if there are competitor services like cloudfare. There are limits in services available and state actors can understand this problem. Then make it impossible for unpopular opinions to be expressed by either orchestrating what's needed to get the anti-ddos services to resent their customers or by other means.

Me personally, I'm alright with 8chan being deleted from the internet but I don't think that will even solve the problem. People with poor quality of life will continue being radicalized and do these acts of revenge in their eyes against a system that made them live in pain (somehow unjust to their views). I think we just need to improve quality of life for people equally without leaving some people left behind because of whatever circumstances. Otherwise people feel the need to leave with sometimes a couple bangs.
Ask HN: How to prevent ISP provider from giving your location to Google et al.
The political advertising section is fascinating. You can see exactly what ads each entity ran, when, and how many impressions they received. Surprising to see the GOP dominate the spending overall!

I could spend hours here.
Cloudflare happily provides hosting for al-Shabab, Hamas, the Taliban, the PLF, the PKK, al-Quds Brigades, and the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade. They don't give one good God-damn about hatred or murder; they care about negative media attention affecting their bottom line. Not that they're not entitled to only care about that, but pretending it's any other reason makes them liars and hypocrites.
That they abandoned those principles due to PR pressure does not mean it was not about principles. I dislike such motivated, deceitful arguments.
So you think people who engaged in fringe ideologies will be slowed down by having likeminded people banned and deplatformed from popular social media and chan forums? And not instead just pushing them further and further into their ideological bubbles (complete with a new self-fulfilled victim complex) on platforms where they are the only ones and they get to police their own wrongthink?

Even ISIS seemed to have an extensive social media identity despite countless attempts to prevent them from having any platform. Which included plenty of DDOS'ing too.

I’m sure some level of banning and administration makes sense on content sites (not so sure about DNS/WAF hosts) but I’m curious at what point it becomes “feel good” slacktivism while these guys just hop onto the next forum.
I think because CloudFlare is a US company and the other is not...
All hail the profits!
CloudFlare is not a notice board. They are practically a utility. PG&E aren’t a government, and they can’t cut off your electricity because you’re an extremist.

What about ISPs? Should Cox, Comcast, Frontier, etc be liable for what flows through their pipes? Media companies say yes, but what do you do when your ISP says “bye” because you visit 4chan? Go to another ISP? In most areas of the US, you can’t
I have people citing research with useless AMA standard. If you want both parties to agree, they need to see the Data.

Most studies become uninteresting after you read their terrible data.
> For the "Free Speech is freedom from government prohibition and this is a private company" brigade. I dont want to live in a world where color people is being prohibited to enter a night venue, or gay people cannot order a simple cake, or YES, dude who think their race is more superior being able to blabber their nonsense online as long as it is nothing illegal. After all similar sentiments are expressed (veiled or openly) from many powerful spheres and nobody does nothing.

> Nothing illegal

I think at some point it goes up against the "yelling 'fire' in a crowded movie theater" exemption of free speech.

There are more fundamental fish to fry. 1 Violation of terms of service should categorically be NOT a criminal matter. 2 I strongly believe possession (given we meet safe storage provisions) should never be illegal. ...

I also agree with you that people blabber all the time but when multiple unrelated people take the next step seemingly after reading...
This effect is not limited to the EU. US suffers a similar problem with the GOP actively trying to shrink the IRS budget, even though it has an incredible ROI (estimated at >$4 for every dollar spent)
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/01/business/economy/irs-tax-... discusses in further detail
If you think vigilance internet justice is a solution to America's gun problem, you Americans are very deluded.
by not reporting on it, the public is not made aware of this very tragic problem which can in fact be improved by several orders of magnitude with the return of some simple political will. Political will requires media publicity, so in that sense, the media is doing the right thing here.
> Cloudflare is not a government... [we do not have] the political legitimacy to make determinations on what content is good and bad... Questions around content are real societal issues that need politically legitimate solutions. We will continue to engage with lawmakers around the world as they set the boundaries of what is acceptable in their countries through due process of law. And we will comply with those boundaries when and where they are set.

This is a horrifying and immoral position to take. Governments are the entities that have no legitimacy to restrict speech or "make determinations on what content is good and bad". Man requires free speech because the freedom to think is essential to man's existence. The role of government is to protect man's rights so that he may think, evaluate ideas, and live a productive life.