skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Reading over the comments I see everyone thinking this is about “free speech.” It is not. It’s about what in the US you’d call “due process” and in all the rest of the world you’d call “rule of law.”

Our decision today was that the risk created by the content could not be dealt with in a timely enough matter by the traditional rule of law systems.

That’s a failure of the rule of law on two dimensions: we shouldn’t be the ones making that call, and no one else who should was stepping up in spite of being aware of the threat.

Encourage you when these issues arise to think of them in the rule of law context, rather than free speech, in order to have a more robust conversation with frameworks that have an appeal and applicability across nearly every nation and government.
Lol. Microsoft came up with the silliest error messages. Seeing an interruption box "illegal operation detected" after running traceroute as a kid... was a jarring experience.

I think I "yahoo'd" something about how much trouble I was in.
Their threshold for victim count and severity of organized crime hosted on their platform is way too high
That’s good to know. I’m missing how that argues against my point though.
The optimal number of terms to "formally well define" is pretty damn close to zero in an HN comment. Ignore that guy.
There is not such thing as a "medieval US" with American natives dueling with broad swords. Maybe in Las Vegas.
I don't know anything about KF but they sound like a vigilante group and people are responding to them with vigilante tactics. The internet has some flaws that people take advantage of and I support ongoing research to mitigate these. The internet still seems like the Wild West in some ways.
To laugh at silly people online.
This is how VC works, right?
What do you mean by that?

I am also 46, and it's easy to imagine doing this for another 20 years. I'm not sure what else I would do.
Apple launched the iPhone in the USA as an AT&T exclusive device. They had good relations with the carrier (at least publicly) and were able to offer service plans including data and SMS to customers with attractive pricing.
Archive link: https://archive.ph/4j5aP
"...pressure their respective governments to figure out what should be done, systematically, about hate speech on the internet."

Should be done by whom? If you mean "done by the government," then in the US at least the answer is clear.
> Not very familiar with Australia. But thinking that high paying company like Atlassian which produces a very crappy software which I unfortunately deal daily. To me it shows high pay does not guarantee good quality software which many(not you) seems to be arguing here.

That's a different problem. That's because you, the user, are not a customer of Atlassian. Companies and their micromanagers, however, love JIRA.

Microsoft is in the same boat. Virtually no users of their products are actually their customers.

That's how you get away with producing very crappy software, even if you hire the top talent.
It’s like trying to find a cathode ray tube TV anymore: technically possible to produce, but economically infeasible in terms of costs. Chips are just cheaper than going analogue, even with the current shortages.
> free speech as a philosophy is about allowing all speech, cause other it's just mostly free speech

Then that's a philosophy virtually no one actually holds.

Very few people think death threats, fraud, etc. fall under free speech. If you do your speech at 3am with a loudspeaker in a residential neighborhood, you're probably getting dinged for "disturbing the peace", because other people have rights too, and society winds up having to resolve the conflicts.

In this case, a similarly important right - freedom of association - also applies.
I see that Rick is on the thread and says he's not a psychopath, and I have no reason to doubt him.

However: anyone who thinks "rehabilitation" is the answer for all felons is full of it ([1], [2]). If they are actually psychopaths, therapy is just finishing school for them. It teaches them how to fake normal human emotions better. It gives them a better vocabulary for fooling therapists.

You need someone like Mr. Anon who can spot these con artists and see through their BS.

[1] https://www.psychforums.com/antisocial-personality/topic1931...

[2] https://psychopathyis.org/stats/
I do understand that Cloudlfare can't just violate SESTA/FOSTA.

That being said, the communication and messaging around those decisions were clearly different than what's happened with Kiwi Farms. I'm not expecting Cloudflare to violate the law, but my goodness is it really obvious to me that taking down Kiwi Farms was a much harder decision for you than taking down those sex sites.

This kind of feeds into my long-running criticism of how Cloudflare handles adult content in general. You launched a DNS filtering service that accidentally censored the GLAAD website -- and to be clear, my beef is not that Cloudflare made a mistake and I'm not implying that any of that censorship was intentional. My beef is that I can't imagine you making that same mistake around bigoted content. I firmly believe that if you were launching a DNS filter for hate speech, you would have done more testing before you launched it. You would have been scared enough about that filter that you would have made sure it wouldn't accidentally censor a mainline political blog.

But to this day, 1.1.1.3 filters adult content but not sites that are dedicated to hate speech. Kiwi Farms wasn't blocked from 1.1.1.3. That may not be intended as a statement, but it sure reads as one. It is impossible for me to look at those decisions and not come away with the conclusion that you are more comfortable censoring explicit material than you are censoring violent speech.

And it does make it harder for me to believe you when you claim that taking an absolutist position towards platforming even organized doxing sites is protecting marginalized groups. Because you're already launching your own services that make it easier for network operators to attack those marginalized groups; they're not seeing the same level of consideration that doxing sites are getting.

I lost a lot of respect for Cloudflare's "free speech protects everyone" argument when 1.1.1.3 launched. You can't simultaneously argue to me that we have to care about the principles of speech when it comes to banning a doxing site, and also that technically your sex-specific DNS censorship service is optional so it has no implications for free speech and it's just fine.
Keffals decided to leave North America after one SWATing of unknown attacker provenance. Josh Moon, owner of Kiwi Farms, has been SWATed numerous times (as have been many larger Twitch streamers) and even had trans activists show up at his house with weapons.
1. What crimes?

2. Has the owner of the site ever allowed illegal content or behaviour on the website?
Congratulations on getting here! I’ve been part of a few management changes from the board level, and have seen them go bad and really well.

I also started a company 3 years ago where I just finished hiring a management team including a new CEO. It was hard to do, but the company was going well and I needed more personal time. If your goal is to extract yourself for more personal time, you need to be mentally ready to let the company become the new management team’s company as much as it is yours. Your stress won’t go away unless you give them enough room to make it their stress.

Executive headhunters can help save a ton of time if you don’t have existing relationships — be ready to pay $90k retainers for each role.

Hire someone who you think is smarter and more experienced than you. They’ll do things differently than you. They might fail just as you might flounder due to a number of unforeseen future events. Hire someone you’re comfortable saying, “if they fail, I probably would have failed too” and let them do their thing.

As with any role, there’s a decent chance you hire the wrong leader. Go with your gut and fix it sooner rather than later.

I can introduce you to some good executive headhunters I’ve used in the past if you message me.

Lastly, if you haven’t done so, now would be the time to get the company in an annual planning cycle with board meetings, a model that’s basically designed for large shareholders to not have to be involved day to day.
I agree with some of what you said but even banning someone from say HN is censorship. It just means you prevent them from saying something, they can bypass your censorship or find a different platform but banning for the cause of restricting content is censorship even if the censored can still get services elsewhere. Also, for the utility part, neither are ISPs technically so by that it just means they want the same telco rules to apply to them.
>what the hell should be done, systematically, about hate speech on the internet.

Nothing. It's words on the internet.
Couldn't agree more. This sets an awful precedent for people who want to start websites dedicated to harassing people to the point of suicide.
I think this better encapsulates what I was going for with my comment. For whatever it's worth, I strongly agree.
Not taking any sides here, but here's an article I read a few months ago before knowing anything about this situation. Certainly offers another perspective:

https://www.commonsense.news/p/he-was-a-world-renowned-cance...
The posts are public on a public forum. You dont need an account. Like Twitter! :)

>realtime tools what is being done on their network.

That inspects every post? That sees some hidden forums for ultra doxxing and crime?
Every government. No government should be in the business of policing hate speech.
What is kiwifarm? It think it should be the first paragraph.
> Do we know they actually cut KF off without notice? Also no - it's possible this is after they gave KF's operator time to respond.

From the Admins Telegram: "Cloudflare's decision to block the site was done without any discussion. The message I've received is a vague suspension notice. The message from Matthew Prince is unclear. If there is any threat to life on the site, I have received no communication from any law enforcement."
Have you ever visited a place which has no billboards?
I'm new here, and I see a totally fair comment below this has been flagged. Same as the thread on 'decline of nude sunbathing' where my comment and the few obvious supporting comments from actual women and Europeans in question were flagged, despite that safety from assault is the basic existential underpinning of being naked and women's key fear.

If hackernews won't allow cultural topics at all, great. But when it does, it's morally repulsive to flag and target and mute the voices from the key subjects.

Direct "lived experience" by actual women on any topic takes second fiddle to the neoliberal narratives of nerdy men running these echo chambers?

Someone please give me the wink wink defactos here, is the hackernews enforced narrative the same as the r/twoxchromosomes clown world, where women's voices on their political and social interests get moderated by those without two x chromosomes?

Guess we're back to the false feminism of "only nice girls allowed" where nice girls only do and think what men let them.
>a horrible attempt at a joke by my reading

No. Just no.

"We should just blow everyone up, lol, j/k" < This is fascism in practice. This is the behavior that leads to violence.

>Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past. --Sartre
Hardly. They are both designed to evoke an ultimate position of unassailable moral superiority. No discourse, dissent, or discussion is permitted with such obvious moral correctness.
As usual, you'll have to turn to Substack for a much better coverage of what actually happened -> https://www.commonsense.news/p/he-was-a-world-renowned-cance...
Adjacent to this, I've been looking into what's possible with regards to glasses frames that incorporate bluetooth bone-conduction audio. If I can find some of sufficient quality I might use them the next time I need to get prescription glasses.
You mean after they ruin people's lives?

Obviously they posed enough of a threat to human lives that a publicly traded company would distance them immediately.

Doesn't take much to figure this out. This is not some censorship or content moderation.

It appears people have trouble distinguishing between platforms that promote terrorism/violence vs free speech.

This weird extreme idealistic version of freedom of speech doesn't include harming humans or threatening peace.
Cloudfare really snatched defeat from the jaws of victory here. Their Wednesday post was fantastic, and for once I had an ounce of hope they’d do the right thing.

Of course they took less than a week to completely cave, falling back on their spineless nature. This kind of institutional rot starts at the top, they desperately need a new CEO.

Utility “companies” don’t get to pick and choose, if you pick and choose you are just a regular company which opens up the whole monopoly trust-busting side of things.
As a data forensics person, I would simply rip a copy of each CD, and then do a bitwise comparison. Of course the results will be the same. I would even do them on completely different systems to demonstrate that no matter what, the resulting digital stream is identical. That's how digital recording works.

I definitely enjoyed his demonstration with inverted waveforms sampling. He proved it quite well after the DAC stage. A bitwise comparison of the ripped content would show they are the same before the DAC stage as well. The shaving and marking literally does nothing but cost you money.
Unless law enforcement was actively telling you to do this, you really dropped ther ball.

So people post info they find via a Google search. Them not posting it on Kiwifarms isn't going to make the information any less readily available.

Pulling screens of random users posting threats is disingenuous. Other users actively discourage such activities constantly.

This all started because people wanted to laugh at someone being ridiculous on Twitter, but then they kept digging and found more and more deplorable stuff. The only reason the campaign to drop the farms exists is to cover up the activities a narcissist openly talked about on social media.

The site is no more dangerous or racist than Jaime Cochran was.
The map is not the territory. Perhaps computation is a good model, but not really what's going on. Sort of like how the standard model in physics needs an understanding of quantum gravity.

It also gets into metaphysics, as some people believe that mind is not limited to the brain.
At the top end, life in the US blows life in any other country out of the water.

Outside that, you're better off in Western or Northern Europe, or Canada.
> second item isn’t even close to an illegal threat in the USA

They said they called people to "plant bombs" where the woman was going and had posted "armed men...waiting" for her. That sounds an awful lot like "the speaker means to communicate a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence to a particular individual" [1].

[1] https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/538/343/
I feel like I'm missing something

so what exactly happened on Kiwifarms website in response to the deplatforming campaign on Twitter?

how could Cloudflare write that entire justification without giving an example to someone that wasn't following the drama? To me it looks like Cloudflare arbitrarily took someone down specifically after writing that they wouldn't, in the same blog entry.
So you'd advocate against treating (or indeed, aborting) for all genetic or congenital conditions where the child may live to an adult? That seems extreme in and of itself.
I don’t think they’ve done well, and I think we can say that regardless of our opinion of this choice unless you think they should never deny service.

The mistake they’re making is this: they’re treating each event like a unicorn. They need to consider the overall decision making process. What are the inputs? What are the outputs? And they need to make these transparent.

The failure to do this results in the CEO publicly regretting previous ad hoc decisions. It’s also bad for the Internet. If you need to maintain the option to remove a customer — and you do — you need to be clear, consistent, and transparent.

It’s similar to ransomware decisions. You don’t want to make a decision about paying or not paying ransomware while you’re under pressure. Stress damages your ability to make rational decisions. Write a playbook and use it as your base for decision making.
Agree with this. Contractor expenses are low. You can run a lot more through your biz if you want (travel, food, computers) but over the long term i'd say it\s 80-90% profit.
States needs to ratify amendments so having enough state legislatures and laws to support the amendment is the best way. Having someone propose it at the fed level is the easy part.
I am not the OP and I’m not sure how to directly message you - there is no contact info on your profile and HN does not have DM support. Nevertheless, I am very interested in your last sentence - may I take that as well? Happy to provide more context over the email listed in my profile. Thank you.
Yeah, those comments are either extremely ignorant or disingenuous. It takes about 30s of browsing KF to realize that it is coordinated harassment - there are entire subforums devoted to harassing one individual person with thousands and thousands of messages each.

It's one of the most awful places I've ever seen on the internet, and I have zero respect for the people who try to launder large-scale harassment into "it's just free speech!"
What was the actual threat? Was it posted on Kiwi Farms, or transmitted via another channel?
> - The optimal amount of fraud in society is 0

If you had zero fraud in society then nobody would build in any defenses against fraud at all.

You'd have a society of completely naive and trusting souls, which sounds blissful until someone wakes up one day and realizes that they can commit as much fraud as they like since society has no defenses against it.

It is like saying that the optimal amount of disease is zero, but if you have never had your immune system challenged by any kind of disease, then the first virus you come across will probably kill you.

Your suffering from childhood colds and getting burned by something like the car-out-of-gas scam help build defenses.
It's rising at one foot per century, so they've got some time.
While some issues have been solved, a lot of them simply migrated from the core ports system to the ports themselves.

The difference in goals and tooling between the dpkg (Fink for macOS), ports (MacPorts for macOS) and brew systems seems to make all the remaining volunteers flow towards brew as the work required to fix ports is either harder, or getting the fix into MacPorts is harder. And sine Fink is dead, there is no dpkg-way to try out anymore.

I think RPM was never tried, and Nix is still an option but since you'll end up learning functional programming to use it, it won't get the hold the Nix-enjoyers seem to enjoy. Maybe Guix can inspire something, but I think the bar to entry with brew is really hard to beat.

The end result is broken and/or outdated ports, and even with the fixes post-macOS Forge the lack of content and port-fixes just makes it a non-starter when things like brew exist.
I'm saying you're talking from hindsight bias, but that's ok it's impossible not to.
I'm a Canadian living in Australia.

Australia has much more than just Atlassian. Canva is the 9th most valuable private company according to crunchbase [1].

But you need to look deeper than just "who has the biggest most successful companies. Note, the comment says "countries that understand software".

From what I've seen, and one of the reasons I moved here, Australia values quality production. They understand where software drives business and invest in that.

I'm former NICTA/CSIRO, and those organizations used to be drivers of technology and research.

Canada is a major technology hub. Microsoft and Facebook both have major development centres in Canada. Of course, being so close to the US, most of the brain drain goes directly out of the country, but that is part of the country and the people understanding the value of software. The education is good, and so people go to where the dollars are.

Canada and Australia are not going to be able to compete with the US from a dollar perspective. So many of the best Canadians, Australians, Chinese and Indian are going to end up in the US.

[1]https://www.crunchbase.com/lists/crunchbase-private-unicorn-...
Why does this matter? Both the brain and the workstation have finite amounts of memory, since they have finite masses, and can do random errors when trying to go through a series of steps. It is just the magnitudes that differ regarding these two aspects.
Big Atlus fan. I'll try this game, thanks for the interesting history!
>what is the purpose of the site

It is a forum.

Should sites have to have a "purpose" and does this need to be vetted by some authority or the hosting provider?

What is the "purpose" of Twitter, Facebook, Telegram, Signal, 4chan or Discord?

>by sharing their personal information

I mostly saw public Twitter screenshots being reposted. I swear some people dont seem to understand that Twitter is public and not all DMs.
That’s pretty funny as well!

Made me remember when my friend’s father got this spanking new PC XT and I was super excited to play with it, since I only had an MSX computer back home.

I started playing with all sorts of different commands and I remember I found this one called TREE.COM. I ran it and minutes after the computer took a crap.

I was desperate with his father confronting me asking if I had done something bad and after a lot of pressure I confessed I ran TREE.COM and he thought that is what killed the computer.

It was eventually reformatted and got back to operating fine but it took me YEARS to figure out the dreaded TREE.COM command had nothing to do with it :-)

Anyways thanks for sharing!
It blows my mind that someone would judge a company for not hosting a literal neonazi website.
I don’t think Whataboutisms are a good arguing tactic. I am against the doxing of anyone, even if I don’t like them. Hence why I mentioned that I think MTG is a moron, but I’m still against her being doxxed.

I couldn’t find anything about home addresses of congresspeople being public. I am not a lawyer, but I would be very surprised if that was public info. I could be wrong.
The big counter celebrating the number of people they've harassed into committing suicide? People have gone to jail for it. CF should be the least of their concerns right now.
Fine, but I'm not making a legalistic argument. I'm just pointing out that eliminationist hate speech is inherently censorious.