skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
NYT's "The Daily" podcast discussed this a little over a year ago in response to the Parkland shooting, and I found it to be quite insightful. I believe it was this episode, but I could be wrong[0].

A major factor impeding law enforcement is the sheer number of people posting violent threats on social media. I can't remember the statistic, but they mentioned that the US justice system basically wouldn't be able to effectively process everyone in a timely manner that posted indications of violent activity on social media, it's just too frequent. It's easy to look back after a shooting and ask why law enforcement failed to see the warnings, but it's much harder to predict looking into the future. Simply posting angry threats on social media doesn't meet the threshold of committing a crime, but perception around that could be changing.

Another major issue is that this isn't a mental health issue, despite how it's characterized by politicians and the media. Deeply angry young men aren't mentally ill by any classical definition of mental illness; they're just really angry. They don't necessarily exhibit traits of schizophrenia or bipolar disorder; they're driven by hatred and anger, and that's just not something mental health professionals are equipped to diffuse.

0: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/23/podcasts/the-daily/gun-ac...
In the interests of keeping things pari passu, how about implementing mental screenings as part of voter registration as well?
> This seems like a knee-jerk reaction to moral panic and bad PR

I’m not so sure. We “ban” drug markets and terrorist groups by denying them access to infrastructure all the time. Private businesses get to decide which businesses they provide services to. Freedom of assembly doesn’t mean you get to live in a trash strewn public square, nor on private property that is leeching toxic waste into the surroundings.
That's total nonsense. The AWB accomplished nothing at all, and did not remove access to any weapons for anybody. It banned specific models of weapons and a few specific features that don't correlate to anything in particular. Manufacturers basically instantly made minor modifications and kept selling the exact same thing.
It’s a distasteful site but I think it should stay. No speech should be silenced.
How much stuff does one need to keep adding just to make it work like iTerm does already?
One thing I learned by watching US culture warfare in recent years, is any value have a limit to it. If it has been codified or been treated as absolute and untouchable, then it becomes its own weakness.

So does free speech. Certain speech that are known to cause violent result/response from its audience should be dealt with carefully. In which case, if 8chan has popularized itself as the platform to announce when and where to kill innocent people, and broadcast such message to its susceptible audience to follow, then to me it feels like indifference or dysfunction of a community to have it slip through under the umbrella of 'free speech'.

When you know you are ill, just take medication, not just set in vain to wait for your immune system to ultimately cure yourself.
Open source implementation for Apple's Combine specs
Reddit is an independent subsidiary of Condé Nast's parent company, Advance Publications. They are a large part of what is commonly referred to as "the media."
Just sayin.
I feel that an easy rule to apply is that speech about hurting or even killing others is unambiguously bad speech

Everything else is up for debate. But this single exception I hope every human being can agree on.
> we are terminating 8chan as a customer

Probably a good idea, if only to send the message that there is a limit to how much garbage you can allow people to dump on your site before the neighbors decide to do whatever it takes stop the terrible smell.

> The Rule of Law requires policies be transparent and consistent.

That's great! Most tech companies seem to prefer the Rule of Men where they try to fix problems behind the scenes with obscured methods and inconsistent (and often arbitrary) policies.

> Cloudflare is not a government.

While technically true, as your control of infrastructure approaches monopoly, you tend to acquire more and more government-like traits. At a functional level, "is a government" is not a Boolean value.

> that does not give us the political legitimacy to make determinations on what content is good and bad

That's true, but your success in the market ("a result of that, a huge portion of the Internet now sits behind our network") gives you a lot of power to make that kind of determination. If that power isn't managed carefully (e.g. with a consistent and transparent Rule of Law), it is easy to accidentally use that power in dangerous or irresponsible ways. The fact that you're even talking about a Rule of Law means you're already acting far more responsibly than most big tech companies.

> We will ... engage with lawmakers ... as they set the boundaries of what is acceptable ... through [their] due process of law. And we will comply with those boundaries when and where they are set.

(I'm interpreting "[their] due process of law" as referring to the lawmaker's process, not something implemented internal to Cloudflare. If this is incorrect, ignore this section)

Engaging with lawmakers (and other relevant organizations) is incredibly important. I would expect any company that wants to act lawfully to comply with legislated regulations. It is also important to realize that governments are often slow. You cannot simply abdicate responsibility to the government when you de facto have significant power over and involvement with a problem.

> We ... have an obligation to help propose solutions

Yes, proposing solutions is part of that obligation. If you really are concerned with creating Rule of Law, then you also have to act in ways consistent with that goal. If you're going beyond the limits of an uninvolved/neutral "common carrier" and terminating a customer for reasons unrelated to the technical services you provide, you need to make sure you have and follow your own "due process", while the lawmaker's solution is still pending and/or incomplete.

> What's hard is defining the policy that we can enforce transparently and consistently going forward.

I agree that this is very hard. It's also an obligation you accepted when you decided to take responsibility (and profits) for a large piece of infrastructure that many people now rely on. This is where transparency can help a lot; it's a lot easier to ask for forgiveness for a mistake if you have a reputation of openly explaining your reasoning.
Interesting, never heard about that. Are there are other things too?
A black person cannot stop being black, nor is there any reason they should.

A person who believes black people should be killed or kicked out of the U.S. can always change their mind, and they should.

Advocating bigotry or violence is not a political affiliation nor is it a protected class.
That seems like "if you're not with us you're against us" reasoning to me, it excludes the middle ground. Not banning something is not the same as endorsement.
What makes such people seek out like-minded people, the "radicals"?

The roots are firmly in the meatspace.

The seed was planted well before he know what 8chan was.
I'll second this, it's immensely useful when I can't wrap my head around a regular expression.
‘Yeah na’ in New Zealand.
I don’t think Cloudflare is trying to claim liability (that would be a bad move on their part), but just that they want no part of that kind of behavior. They don’t want to take money from or enable that kind of behavior in any way.

Why shouldn’t they have that choice?
There has been a significant uptick in everything online over the last 25 years because in that time the internet population has grown from 0.5% of the worlds population to over 55%.

Literature says that the internet does facilitate extremist communication/nucleation, but does not replace the meatspace as the primary radicalization agent.
https://academic.oup.com/ia/article-abstract/93/5/1233/40982...
This is a very complex situation and a lot of factors need to be considered. Everyone seems keenly aware that 8chan was a place where hateful ideologies could fester and spread, and nobody wants that. But it seems few people are aware of the fact that cutting people off from society usually results in feelings of social rejection that drive people deeper into isolation, bitterness and hatred. Being socially rejected, or believing such, is fairly strongly coorelated with mass murderer psychology.[1][2] This action could actually have the opposite effect of what was intended.

There is also an effect similar to martyrdom where whenever some subgroup of society is mistreated they gain in power. Many see being cut-off as over-the-top and thus a mistreatment, irrespective of the fact that the group has a clearly evil ideology. There is a risk this action will embolden their cause, as a natural instinct to protect the mistreated and come to the defense of the underdog kicks in. Read some of the other comments and you'll see what I mean. This comment itself is admittedly partially motivated by my instinct to come to the defense of the mistreated (granted the obviousness that the murdered and their families are clearly the most mistreated).

Like I said, this is complicated. The simple ideological answers are simply not good enough.

So the hard question is this: how do you prevent the spread of their ideology without excising them from (online) society? I believe it is possible, but it is going to take a more nuanced approach going forward. We could start by not labelling people as racists or white supremacists. We should reserve these labels for actions, words and ideologies, not people. Attack the ideas, not the people. Deplatform (censor) the posts (if you control the platform), don't ban the accounts. Throttle accounts of repeat abusers as necessary. And always be willing to talk.

BTW I always feel queasy posting things like this to HN because I know some people will utterly reject me and downvote me, but I feel this point is just too important.

[1] Katherine Newman, https://www.livescience.com/21787-predicting-mass-shootings....
[2] James Knoll, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/saving-normal/201405...
According to the European e-Justice Portal [1], the right to legal aid is contained in art 6(3)(c) of the ECHR and art 47 of the CFR. However, the first right only applies in criminal cases and the second right is limited 'in so far as such aid is necessary to ensure effective access to justice.' Apparently, 'the broad objective in some States seems to be to make legal services and access to justice generally available, whereas in others, legal aid can be available only to the very poorest.'

Based on that summary, it seems like the position in most of the EU is probably much the same as the common law world (US/UK/CA/AU/NZ): you'll probably get legal aid if you're destitute and facing potential imprisonment, but you're unlikely to get legal aid to defend a copyright infringement case, especially if your net assets are non-zero and you can easily make the case go away by just removing some web links. That may mean that you are thereby deprived of your rights, if your legal argument is correct, but resource-starved legal aid bodies will prioritise cases that involve a smaller chance of someone being wrongfully convicted.

[1] https://e-justice.europa.eu/content_legal_aid-55-en.do
You have an implicit model of how radicalization works which is out of sync with the model others are applying.

The counterexample is that, when racist/fascist/white supremacist content became easier to access through online unmoderated forums such as 4chan, the level of online & offline activity and recruitment became higher.

Secondly, it's hardly news to these communities that they are disliked by others. Have you met an Edgelord?
Or just as insidious, thinly veiled advertisements.
If they can't really compete on engineering they are done. Everybody can pretend services and style and brand makes up for it but it don't. They were built on engineering and without it and leadership to actually do something it's just a matter of time. The rate might be faster than expected. Looks like it to me.
> But, neither does anyone have a right to an audience.

Free speech includes the right to be heard.

That's why the government is allowed to kick you out of political rallies/meetings if you're just there to protest or whatever; you're not allowed to try to shout over someone else to prevent them from talking, rather if you disagree with them then you need to go find your own followers to try to convince.

edit: To all the people downvoting me, do you not realize I'm literally just paraphrasing the relevant supreme court ruling?: https://www.thefire.org/say-it-again-for-the-people-in-the-b...
I have been using Logitech K380 for 3 years now, both for my daily jobs and at home. I love it so much that I bought it twice.

Key travel and typing feels great, especially for programming. Also because I am using 2016 Macbook Pro so I need a replacement keyboard for work, but honestly this is the best keyboard I've been using so far.
I would say that Matthew Prince and associates just wanted to feel better about themselves, avoid further bad PR, and not have things be awkward around town.
Generative Image Inpainting with Submanifold Alignment
And now I know where the "energy vampire" from What We Do In The Shadows draws inspiration.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nyZqO0AclU
I’ve found it’s easy to get much better performance in CPython by simply replacing their malloc with my own. Mine allocates a large block of memory on the stack, then pulls from it. Won’t work for large programs, but for smaller scripts it’s a good amount faster. I think this is because CPython makes something like 1000 malloc calls just to startup, so if those can be made ~instant you get a lot of benefit.
It sure looks like Wordpress, but are you sure? They don't have the wordpress login page at /wp-login.php and I don't see references to /wp-* in the source.
Give it a bit more time, and anyone with two brain cells will be able to experiment with anthrax in their garage.

What then?
Photons are by definition quantized energy packets. If the energy weren't quantized, it wouldn't be a photon.

What you're probably referring to is quantization of the electron energy, but I believe that only happens for bound electrons. If an atom loses or gains electrons, things can work quite differently. This is also different for electrons in a metal's conduction band, which are somewhat free, since they are bound to the metal, but not so much to individual atoms.
Your statement about Section 230 is a little unclear, so to clarify - what you are expressing is what you want the law to be, not what it actually is.

“Platform” vs “publisher” is not part of the actual Section 230, which allows platforms to keep the protection while doing all the active censoring and moderating that they want. There’s a good summary on Wikipedia.
Why does Python use its own allocation abstractions when the C allocator is likely doing the exact same thing underneath it? Or does it only employ these when it's directly getting pages of memory from the OS?
Of course it will be true on its face that "bad speech" will be disliked by the people claiming it is bad.

This phrase suggests that ALL speech that non-absolutists dislike will be categorized as harmful enough to society to be disallowed. That is a view nobody I've ever met holds.

I am not a free speech absolutist. I believe 99.9999% of speech I dislike, even speech I dislike intensely and believe is harmful to society, should still be allowed by society. That I think 0.00001% crosses a line where its harm outweighs the benefit of an zero-tolerance, non-negotiable absolute freedom of speech.

Throwing off a facile "oh, you'll just ban speech you don't like" is just jingoism. It's no different than saying people who favour less immigration are Nazis, or people who favour universal health care are communists.

It avoids thinking by name-calling.
The Other Crisis in Psychology
Historically very little speech could be made without social consequences, the internet broke that paradigm
>In every other, let's say, G20 country, someone shooting up a shopping mall and killing 20 will absolutely make national news - they will talk about it for months and it will be ranked "top ten worst news for $country in 2019", if not the absolute worst.

I don't think this would apply to China and India. Every other country in the world has a lower national population than the US. Yet I doubt that your statement even applies to countries such as Brazil and Nigeria.

You really do have to take population numbers into account when you look at what the media focuses on. No other western country even comes close to the population the US has, so it gives the impression that the US is somehow much worse.
I wonder if this verbiage is coming from Apple or Goldman Sachs (as I take it, banking apps are generally not too pleased when they run on jailbroken hardware).
Cloudflare has also come out directly in support of "net neutrality" (https://blog.cloudflare.com/tag/net-neutrality/).

Broadly speaking, there's (at least) two forms of net neutrality:

1) Different classes of traffic will be treated identically and not throttled indiscriminately (VOIP vs web content vs bittorrent etc.)

2) Content cannot be arbitrarily restricted by a technical provider.

If there was substantial abuse with their platform based upon technical reasons in case 1, I could see that as cause for termination.

Their arguments against denying service to 8chan are based upon case 2. Given where Cloudflare sits in the internet infrastructure layer, their supporting a pro-net neutrality position enforced upon ISPs while not applying that standard to themselves strikes me as more than a tad hypocritical.
How about you go and campaign to ban major news networks from reporting on successful drone strikes and bombing raids in Iraq/Syria /other such places.
Sure, but if he can't find a group in person that will validate and amplify his views and also can't find such online, he will probably remain some run-of-the-mill uncouth jackass without feeling so strongly about it that shooting up a mall seems like a good idea he should totally act upon.

There have been studies. Radicalization is generally the product of a social environment that magnifies certain views and actively encourages people to become more extreme.
8chan didn't cause the incident. The shooter did. If we find out that the shooter played a specific video game that a previous shooter played..should it be banned as well?

I'm old enough to remember all of the court cases that involved distressed parents blaming hard rock/metal bands for influencing their children's suicides.

These sorts of incidents are starting to remind me of the religious right's censorship crusade in the 90s...this time it's coming from the left.

Banning these sites will only push them underground. They aren't going away. The end result will be absolutely no way of knowing when and where a shooting may occur.
Which is the response that is arguably the most mature and best for society. Unfortunately, not everyone reacts that way.
The repo: https://github.com/JacksonKearl/cpython/blob/master/README.r...

My allocator isn’t included as it is part of a class project, but you can make your own malloc pretty easily.

Alternatively you can just do some LD preload magic, but I don’t know much about that (and this was needed to match the class spec)
Actually not sure. I guess even for 2, why is there more attention received for some vs others? So it's a bit tautological / recursive.

The media is in the middle of the feedback loop, it can both generate attention and react to it. Given that position they push a narrative if it gets more ad views.
It had already been against Cloudflare's ToS to transmit unlawful content, like child pornography or sex trafficking. These things do not exist on 8chan. I am suggesting that Cloudflare could have clarified or expanded "unlawful content" to include certain types of incitement to violence that are normally considered within 1st amendment bounds.
> Countries like the US and Australia are low-context cultures where people generally say what they mean and mean what they say.

Ever heard an american woman talk? everything is just always amazing and awesome. 'customer service' they call it. and its nice and charming, until you try to figure out what they actually mean which can be a bit of a puzzle.
Lithium in the water supply.
And even after heat treatment, the histamine they poop out can remain for up to 3 months. Stubborn little twits.

https://gizmodo.com/bed-bugs-are-pooping-histamine-into-our-...
I didn't mean to imply any particular motive to the pro-gun / pro-2A camp. Like, I personally tend to think most live in somewhat rural areas, and value firearms as tools for self-defense and deterrence--in areas where there is zilch, zero chance one could scream or even effectively telephone for help from the police or a neighbor--plus hunting, protecting livestock, and the like. Surely there are some Americans who dream of resisting government oppression, but surely even the able-minded among them understand the pure futility, plus the crushing societal and economic collapse that would come with it.
Related question: How does one balance objective, numbers-driven reporting like this with the terms of an NDA? I imagine that most companies would consider the financial impact (or other similar statistics) of many features to be a trade secret.
I know of no restaurants that would charge you if you got food poisoning. But saying that when you ordered a colossal burger it went straight to your waistline isn't a good excuse not to pay. Don't go in if you don't want to pay.
At the risk of staying the obvious, the various media outlets in the US have all by this point joined either the red or blue team and now report only on those incidents which could harm the other team in the eyes of the public.
But... on what? Something a la google glasses?
The sunk cost fallacy (2011)
You are correct, you'd definitely lose the freedom to own a gun that fires 10 rounds a second, to defend your home. In Australia you'd just have to make do with the freedom to own a bolt-action.

On the other hand, A whole bunch of civilians in malls would gain the freedom to live.

Freedom would expand.
Absolutely will happen, not suddenly but ....
I agree with the premise, not the argument

We can arrive at truth through dialogue, but dialog can also lead to propagation and affirmation of misinformation. One does not necessarily converge on truth.

Though, to entrust any government to control free speech to that end is an entire different point.
> it's a step in the right direction

How? It does nothing to solve the problem. It simply kicks the can down the road.
I think most of the comments here are incredibly short sighted. I see this as a huge development. Nobody cares about fuel consumption when inventing a new mode of transportation that says goodbye to roads, airports, boats. This is just insane and could change the world.
Does Silicon Valley and the left in this country realize elite hackers aren't on their side?

They should thread carefully and slow down the censorship.
It's really weird that this has a name. Reading papers and deducing new knowledge is all theoretical physicsts do. The same goes for theoretical-anything-else.
We named people like Bob "Oracles of Wrong".

In any big enough group there is always an Oracle of Wrong. They are very precious. It's very hard to be right all the time, but less hard to be wrong all the time.

Over decades I have puzzled over the existence of Oracles of Wrong. One clue is that they always come from privileged backgrounds. Taking the easy, wrong choice has never caused them any personal discomfort, but has often saved them some minor inconvenience that the hard, right choice would have cost.
What you were suggesting in the parent comment was a pay-as-you-go system wherein you pay something like $0.10 per article.