skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Spanish orthography is objectively much, much simpler to read and write than English's.

To be clear, I didn't mean teaching Spanish as a second language: I was imagining a world where everyone was already a native speaker.
>I think it's disingenuous to suggest that this decision wasn't primarily catalyzed by the PR calculus

You seem be taking a very uncharitable view of CF here. Why isn't "the PR around blocking Kiwifarms made Kiwifarms posters more agitated until they did something that CF couldn't take lying down" an option? That's perfectly consistent with recent events and what CF posted in their blog (and frankly, more likely).
I find this sad, and perhaps this comment will die amongst the rest, but there really is a misunderstanding on what KiwiFarms is/was.

The website was one created by a lunatic who wanted to say whatever he wanted amongst other people who felt the same. A true free speech advocate, who abided by every law the US has regarding content moderation but did nothing additional.
The bulk of KiwiFarm users were not Nazis, they were just people. Everyone is a bit fucked, and some people like being able to say anything about odd people on the internet. The downside to that, is you will get genuinely harmful or crazy people who take it too far.
But that's nothing new, Facebook has hosted live massacres, snapchat is a vector for nude stealing and distribution, Pornhub hosted child or underage porn and probably still does.
The point is, KiwiFarms wasn't the issue, it was the small minority causing huge problems as they always do. What will change now that it's gone? Nothing.
You'll still have the same people who take it too far, you'll still have the regular people who just want to be able to talk without having to care how other people feel, you'll still have the oddities on the internet, they'll just disperse somewhere else. No issues have been fixed, no problems addressed, but everyone will pat themselves on the back and feel good. Another pillar of the internet gone, and we'll see what is the next to go.

KiwiFarms going down changes nothing, but the act of it being taken down by such a formerly neutral, and vital part of internet infrastructure is a terrible precedent. When everything is political, when everything is responsible for everything else, then only the most milktoast, party-line response will be allowed, and since politics is pendulum shaped, everyone celebrating this now will unfortunately reap the rewards when it swings again.
Most major sites started out as being pro-free speech, and ultimately bowed to public pressure in removing various forms of content. There is little reason to assume that cloudflare won't ultimately do the same. It's admirable that they are trying to avoid becoming censors, but I predict it will ultimately be futile.
They aren't giving us any details. Nothing really changed over the last two weeks. My guess is somebody is using suicide threats as leverage here.
This is a nice platitude, but I'm not seeing the relation. Service providers that follow the law will in fact, stop tolerating a client when law enforcement tells them to do so.
Corporations aren’t throwing you in jail for questioning the decisions of the King.
Actually, yes it is. Just because you made up a new word to describe opinions you don't like doesn't mean those opinons aren't covered by free speech.
I'm not sure about them, but i'm sure the fourth is know how to remove your code.
A timely reminder for all of us that "half the internet has a single point of failure called Cloudflare". [1]

[1]: https://easydns.com/blog/2020/07/20/turns-out-half-the-inter...
>contained anti-trans jokes

Should everything with "anti-trans jokes" be taken down? Better take down every forum, every game chat, Twitter, Whatsapp etc .

Why add this?
Not an accountant, but I believe if you’re working on a side-project you can expense a lot (essentially, the side project is just another service your company offers) and thus you can “expense” (not technically expensing because it’s paid by the company in the first place) a lot of stuff - hardware, cloud bills, software licenses, etc.
I think the point is that this isn't even KF's first go at the bomb threat thing. They've organized bomb threats, swatting, stalking vulnerable people at hotel rooms they've fled to, and worse things besides... and CF was always OK with. Always.

Until now.

When KF forced CF into a choice between protecting KF and protecting the victims of KF, CF chose KF, repeatedly.

Until now.

I'm glad CF has made the right choice, finally. But it clearly is not going to come from within, it's going to have to come from continued public awareness.
I spend 30 mins on kw (through archive.org). It is a very pathetic forum with low value. I don't have any problems with cf disabling them. Free speech does not include assistance from others.

An edge service having problems about edgelords. Almost poetic.
Exactly, and that's the problem: they can't have it both ways. They can't claim they are a common carrier while simultaneously deplatforming entire websites no matter what the justifications. The correct answer is for people who feel they've been wronged to file lawsuits. We must stop this extrajudicial form of justice-seeking; it will only end in death.
> literally nobody wants to be in the business of defining the exact boundaries of allowed speech

That's because there shouldn't be one global boundary enforced centrally. This kind of problem is a direct consequence of the scale and alignment miss-match between the technical structures (here cloudfare) and the scale at which there is political cohesion (apparently much lower scale here, since there is such an irreconcilable disagreement). Each politically cohesive group should have the ability to make their own policies. That's how federated things work (email, mastodon or bgp). Hence these kind of clashes we get regularly because of the size of most things has become so huge which is completely nonsense imho (eurozone, food/simple goods production, media).
Our TV regularly blanks when I get up from my living room couch. Even seen it happen once when our (large) dog was sprawled across the same chair and slid off. Just measured it, and there's 2.2 meters between the TV and the couch.
The mouse won’t randomly move on the table and trigger the sensor, because Apple’s horrible mouse has to be charged upside down, looking like a dead beetle. I hate that mouse.

I should have put an ellipsis at the end of my fly comment.
They're type of caching is definitely hosting, to the point that I would argue that it's not (just) caching.

They're providing the HTTP servers that serve the client requests.

IMO they're both hosts that work together. Want to prove that the downstream server is the real host and isn't just part of the hosting? Okay, point the DNS directly to the downstream server.
Turns out half the internet has a Single-Point-of-Failure called Cloudflare (2020)
> And of course, why does Cloudflare proactively take down other sites that have anything to do with sex work but require a billion justifications for sites like this?

It’s almost certainly cultural more than anything else. Sex workers are regarded negatively by vastly larger proportions of most communities, while hate groups are incredibly partisan. Not that it justifies the distinction, if anything it should be a clarion call to humanize and decriminalize sex work.
> Did you mean "average European software company"? A lot of the German Mittelstand companies are the opposite. Instead they sell into a niche through trade shows (another thing probably going away).

I do. My area has Mitteltstands as well, mostly in biochemistry. I had a bizarre experience interviewing for one of those where they posted a Python job offer but they actually wanted me to write Java and a dozen other things on top of it.
> SpaceX killing everyone on their first attempt is a tragedy and they quickly move on

I think you're confusing Virgin Galactic with SpaceX here.
>They are the front-end webserver receiving the request and sending the response.

When providing ddos protection they are mostly filtering out the attacks then forwarding traffic to the customers back end server. That describes 'transit' pretty well.
Cloudflare Pgbouncer
Is this really a problem with European companies or more a problem with older companies which didn't need much software 30 years ago?

Are Ford and General Motors better at this than the European car manufacturers?

Maybe it is also caused by people staying very long at their employer in Europe. It is not uncommon to stay till retirement after you got into a big cooperation.
I thought AWS held this title.
Good.

I'm sorry, I'm generally Mr. "Raw raw free speech", but let's not kid ourselves; by all accounts KiwiFarms is (and always has been) a cesspool of horrible people. It's not like 4chan or something, where it might have started with reasonable intentions and just became horrible; KiwiFarms was started for the specific purpose of bullying Chris-Chan, hence why it was initially called Cwcki Farms. KiwiFarms has been implicated in multiple suicides, and countless cases of bullying (and possibly doxing), and Null's response to all of these allegations has been almost entirely ambivalent.

At some point, we have to ask: is this the world we actually want to live it? I think Marjorie Taylor Greene is a moron, but even I think that the doxing and SWATing campaigns against her lead to a really bad world to live in, and that's not even getting into people I actually like.

I'm just some idiot on the internet, but I think that the world is a better place without KiwiFarms.
>Crimes were committed," "People lost their lives" bad. Unjustifiably bad.

Crimes are committed on Facebook, Messenger, Whatsapp, Instagram, Tor, Signal, Telegram everyday. Better take those down too.
Correction: someone who claimed to be associated with KF swatted a member of Congress. The username mentioned (which I will not quote here) denied all responsibility on the site. Surely we're not taking artificially voiced 911 calls from VoIP numbers at face value here are we?
There is no "legend" of Atlantis, it's simply an allegory in Plato's works. To the best of our knowledge, no one in the ancient world believed that Atlantis had existed, any more than we believe today that Hogwarts was a real place.
Compare it to US states. Hint: its at the bottom in GDP and income per capita
"A trip" is more than just a pill - set & setting are just as important. And what it gives you is an alternative perspective on your own life, which you still have to convert into actual change in your mindset/life afterwards.
There isn't really anything else to respond to here. This person doesn't like homebrew but doesn't really say why, so we can't discuss their reasons. The rest of the post is instructions to solve a problem most people don't have, so there isn't really anything to say about those. The end result is that you're left with nothing but tone-policing and people who just read the title and decided to post their unrelated complaints. The tone policing gets upvoted above the latter because it's at least vaguely about the thing we're hypothetically commenting on.

The real question is why it got upvoted given that seemingly no one read it and has anything to say about the content of the post. I'd guess it's the people who just wanted a place to air their unrelated grievances.
The term this discussion is searching for is "true threat" [1][2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_threat

[2] https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/20/20-1459/198236/202...
Hmm, Northern Ireland isn’t exactly famous for its stance on LGBTQ issues, or poutine.
> Given that they should never be in this position, Cloudflare is choosing between "platforming the bad guys" and "censoring free speech". They have navigated this imperfectly, but have done better than most would, I think.

They chose what's more convenient for them, as a private company, since the stock had a bad response after their previous statement.

They are, after all, a company that has to responds to their shareholders.
So less granular and can be assymetric. Don’t think that’s a good thing
Agreed. There should be (and I thought there was with Section 230) a very, very clear line between being a platform--"dumb pipe"--and a content provider with moderation and censoring capabilities. I agree with others that the law has a lot of catching up to do... but when it does catch up, that doesn't mean it will favor folks demanding censorship of this type of content no matter what.
"OS-level CPU" is just normal CPU that's been configured and handed out by some program (conventionally, the OS) for other things to use. If that initial process management program (call it an OS) also supports communicating with similar setups and receiving/dispatching jobs and queries then that's precisely the distributed OS you're looking for.

You could _also_ architect a comparable system as user-space networking on top of a conventional OS, but that's by no means required.
They go into it a little bit by referring to AWS' 7 principles of well architected applications one of which is being event driven. From experience my gut feeling is a large number of services running on servers PaaS are event driven, therefore it's important to build them to be idempotent beause of the "at least once" property of many messaging systems.
I feel the "not providing hosting services" argument doesn't really hold water. If the content is only accessible over the internet when I connect to Cloudflare, it sure feels like they are providing hosting. Sure, they only provide a proxy ... which is a copy of the content on their servers, which is hosting.

Obviously Cloudflare wouldn't be willing to provide the name of the company doing the actual hosting for very good reasons. However, this makes it impossible to make the hosting provider aware of what they are hosting. I don't think a lot of hosting providers want to willingly host neonazi sites, however when set up behind Cloudflare, it is quite likely they have no idea they are hosting neonazi sites to begin with.

If CF was "just" DDoS protection, it does seem quite reasonable that CF should not be obligated to do any moderation. However, the service they provide comes with quite a bit more: instant production-grade global web hosting (caching) infrastructure and ability to hide your backend infrastructure from the general public.
> IMHO the only countries that really understand software at both a technical and business value add level are US, AUS, Canada, China, with India less so but in that group and Japan just barely getting in.

What are Australia and Canada doing in there? Australia has… Atlassian? Besides that, I’ve only heard of developers in Aus/Canada/Japan being well paid if they work for US companies like Google or are parked there because of US visa issues.

Australians are well paid in general though, even if they don’t value software like FAANG does, because Australia is a petrostate pretending to be a service economy. Japan values software but doesn't pay anyone well because of the system where you earn salaryman virtue by suffering for the first 30 years of your career. (Hot takes.)
My government should and cannot ever be trusted to moderate hate speech.
these were obviously (stupidly poor taste) jokes, and they were removed as soon as the site admin was made aware. death threats are against the rules of the site. what exactly makes this so urgent that KF has to be blasted off the internet?
Wow, there sure is a lot of flagged/dead comments here that mentions some inconvenient info..
Yes, you may be pro-censorship, but if so don't claim to be for free speech.
dont buy it then. Or even better since we are on an SV incubator website create a product that doesnt need it. Big market?
one screenshot by someone crying wolf as much as possible proves exactly nothing.

the post was deleted within a few mins, so extremely sus. violent threats are posted on all major websites, idk why this one is so exceptional.

doesn't even look real, smells entirely like bait. or someone trying to get KF taken down.
Not necessarily CloudFlare itself, but narrative censorship moving up from the platform level to the infrastructure provider level.

The difficult part is how to agree that these sites are not “kin to 8chan, the daily Stormer, and kiwi farms.” Like I said: that will be the outward justification.

Look at how MAGA Republicans have been labeled violent fascists and domestic terrorists. Look at how the same labels were applied to the Canadian trucker protests. Very similar with anyone aligning with Russia in the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
Neither are governments most of the time. Martyrs cause problems, much safer for evil governments to just deny publication.
Interesting. Their messaging on that isn't great in that case. I've used them for years and was under the impression that their full DDoS suite (aside from case managers and such) was part of free tier.

I guess the one signal I had is that WAF is a paid product.
Not .bmp bitmaps used to store photographic images as I would have guessed:

> Bitmaps are arrays of bits used to store sets of integers.
They work by setting the Nth bit when an integer N is in the set
Yes, I can do many such calculations on 10’s of thousands of variables quite easily. Accurately throwing a ball while running for example is a complex activity.
All of this is irrelevant and besides the point, 'hate speech' is not a magical word you say when mean people on the internet say things you don't like.

If you can't prove material damage in a court, it should be allowed.
To be fair, if the opponents of KF were willing to illegally ddos the site then it’s not a stretch to say they wouldn’t be willing to do a false flag.
I'm in Czechia.

I really don't know more about resolving complaints as I haven't had any problems. I guess at some point things would go to courts.

Employment is the thing that's defined as employment by the labor law, where the employer signs an employment contract with you and then pays you salary and sorts out your taxes/insurance... Contracting is having a business licence and sending invoices to a customer - with zero relation to labor law. In particular, no concept of vacation, and you pay your own taxes and insurance.
You are spot on.

I see this attitude in many domains, even among younger generations in startups where the majority of co-founders aren't developers, or after the original co-founders are sidelined by business people.

Software is just considered a necessary chore needed to do business, almost never a core part of the business with inherent value.

It's one of the reasons why Europe has almost no significant players in the IT space.
It is rhetorical. CF admits that they have contacted law enforcement several times about contact in kiwi farm. They clearly get the hosting of the “problematic” content. They understand how that site is used. That seems like an admission of guilt to me!

Anyone who wants to be a bit of an activist investor: who at the company is putting the company at needless legal risk?
>They've organized bomb threats, swatting, stalking vulnerable people at hotel rooms they've fled to, and worse things besides

all of these things are against site rules, users who do them are banned (and mercilessly mocked).

the MTG swatting was so obviously a false flag, whoever did it said "YES I AM FROM KIWIFARMS AND THIS IS MY EXACT USERNAME", there was no actual discussion of a swatting attempt in the thread prior to that; nobody would just straight up admit who they were while committing a crime like that, especially after null repeatedly said he hands over people's info to law enforcement if they post illegal shit.

remember, the site is currently being DDoSed, which is a crime. people want it gone. so is it that impossible that the DDoSers would also do other illegal crap (like swatting) and blame it on KF to get their way?
Boeing has outsourced so much of their engineering they can't even build airplanes anymore. What's the point of this beyond funding life support for a defense industry dinosaur?
Yea - It's something I've seen brought up recently that really helped me think about these issues. Yes, annoying people or just insulting them is valid speech that I wouldn't necessarily trust a government to decide on the legality of, but It's important to balance between multiple speakers - just because someone is the loudest or most notable doesn't mean they automatically should have their right to speak be upheld the most. In this case, and in many others, the "free speech martyr" is explicitly engaged in speech meant to suppress others' ability to speak and express themselves.
Your electrical service can and will be shut off if you use it in a way that the utility provider objects to. If you've never read the rules for your power company it might be enlightening, the ones for PG&E I just pulled up are dozens of pages and list lots of obligations the customer has.

ISPs will also shut you off if they feel like it, for example if you run a server or they otherwise object to what you're doing. CloudFlare already did this too - they have a history of cutting off sex workers who use their services.
Very few companies have the infrastructure that CloudFlare does.
Hi debacle, I was not a user but I perused the site and was fascinated with it. It appeared to be a big 'mumsnet', or a Facebook, but the only rules were to gossip about people others found interesting, to not interact with them directly, and of course, no child pornography. The website is cited I think for killing 3 people, a transgender male to female by the name of Chloe Segal who blamed KiwiFarms in her suicide note, but it is noted that her partner stated there were major issues with Chloe way before KiwiFarms and that she struggled with a lot prior to her death. I cannot remember the second, but the third was a fella in Japan who is cited as killing himself by a friend of his. I think the Kiwis gathered Japanese data from the police of deaths of foreign nationals and there were no American deaths for the timeframe the guy was meant to have died. It appears he may not be dead.

In terms of crimes, I think there were people who did make threats, there were two users if I remember who went on to commit shootings, but my counter to that is that Facebook too has had users who committed mass shootings. I believe the KiwiFarms wasn't the issue, more the actual users who did the crimes.