skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One thing I wish CF would address is their hand-waving about what "security services" actually means. Based on the original post from Wednesday, this seems to include caching services (though it is only mentioned once in the post). Despite saying they're not the host, providing caching services is effectively hosting. Consider, for instance, the "always online" feature, which literally makes sure your site stays online even when your hosting is down.

Yes, caching is also (in some ways) a security service, in that "security" can mean protection from resource utilization attacks. But that very feature also necessarily makes the cache the source for the content in the overwhelming majority of cases.

It doesn't irk me that Cloudflare provides security services to kiwifarms. I don't think, for instance, McAfee should withhold virus protection from 8chan, or clinics withholding vaccines from people they're ideologically opposed to. But it does irk me that they essentially provide hosting but wiggle out of the repercussions of providing hosting through some corporate doublespeak. It's one thing to have morals, but it's another thing to use loopholes in your own morals to (try to) avoid the consequences of those morals.
I guess the changes will be mostly within the kernel and not outside(possibly some new APIs). I thought applications would have to change which possibly is too hard to do. So anyone who misunderstood it the same way I did, nothing will change for an application developer.
At some point (maybe already) we will perform 50% of GDP online. That makes the Visa network essentially a seperate private tax collecting entity. I get the "local optimum" - it's hard to break. But if anything motivates governments it's competition
Personal websites die because the interest to keep them waning. Basically: a website MUST also means a personal domain name, that's like a home address, you can't be a netizen without one. But the domain is more interesting for emails or as a DNS-based way to quick reach something you host than a website.

Website as a living CV? Well... It's very nice as an idea BUT you do not normally want to give your CV to the world, you craft CVs tailored to their target, a generic one might be counter productive.

A website to share your thoughts to the world? Well... They are not regular so in general you might have a period where you publish much and a longer phases where you publish nothing. The sole thing that makes such websites usable for readers is RSS so those who read do not need to check regularly but find new posts pushed in their favorite client. Something similar to a newsletter with some differences. Something NOT much popular these days because on one side big&powerful do want people on their platforms for munge more data and direct people more, on the other side most people do not even know RSS and do not want to spend time installing and maintaining something.

Long story short a personal website have unclear and limited purpose and since demand a bit of effort...
The lack of free speech laws means its impossible to accurately determine whether the reported figures are accurate, since the government can just censor what they don't like. So no, I (and I imagine most conservatives) don't accept that conclusion.
> London Ontario police department said that Keffals was the target of swatting.
Xcel energy in Colorado turned off people's thermostats recently. There was an article about it on KF. Are they related?

> Keffals was doxxed by KF, and the site has a whole long thread on her.
KF republished information he posted online. Aggregating public content isn't doxxing as it's typically defined, which is people who are actually trying to maintain privacy.

>I doubt anyone was stupid enough to type out, "let's harass her!" But if you can't connect the dots here you've got your head in the sand.

And yet, "anyone" would need to, to actually be implicated.

I don't suppose facts, like actually interacting with any of the zoo-fauna being documented on the Farm, was incontrovertibly prohibited and would result in an instant ban?

It's easy to connect "dots in your head" when there's already a conclusion you've reached.
> But what changed in 48 hours that led Cloudflare to contact law enforcement?

Several hit-pieces in the media? Saw nothing out of the ordinary in the thread about Keffals a couple hours ago.
Some good tips there, I want to deepen my backend system/architecture knowledge and really become an expert in building and designing backend systems. Reading this article makes me rethink that... Should I look at front end too or is it enough to have some shallow knowledge of full stack so I know what's going on? Should I be more concerned with dev ops instead?
So much to learn, so little time...
Huh? Are you suggesting sites shouldn't have access to takedown requests? That is unreasonable.
On this topic of Cloudflare "finding itself right at the blurred edge of this line", people might find the Twitter account of Blake Reid--a Clinical Professor of Law at the University of Colorado Boulder that works a lot on both network neutrality and section 230 issues--interesting (and not just this one thread I have linked to here).

https://twitter.com/blakereid/status/1565389791251746817
Can you promote any of the roles internally? That will be the safest and probably most effective way, and it’ll be a fresh new challenge for your highest performers.

What will you and your co-founder do once the roles are filled?
Telling underaged children to buy hormones made in a sketchy lab in Brazil that say “Hide from parents” on the anime loli-themed box art, all without medical evaluation or oversight, is reckless and monstrous. Children cannot consent to puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones.

This is explicitly and exactly what Keffals and co-owner Bobposting do on the DIY HRT Directory. See “Homebrew Sourcing,” first vendor:

https://archive.ph/hP6pT

Box art:

https://m.facebook.com/Spaghattas/photos/a.106898500685482/4...

Isolated and confused children are sexually lobotomizing themselves to the encouragement of their favorite Twitch streamer. This is without even mentioning the “Catboy Ranch” Discord server, now scrubbed, where a nearly 30-year-old Keffals charged sexually and shared photos privately with minors.

None of this has been include in NBC or anyone else’s reports, except Kiwi Farms and one radical feminist blog. Now that Keffals can illegally DDoS KF, the archive links will be harder to find.
> don't know quite how extreme KiwiFarms is

I have looked at the site and it's doesn't seem that extreme, unless there's a bunch of content not visible to guests. It looks like any anonymous IB from the early 2000s. The people who are calling it "extreme" seem to mostly be trusting other people's descriptions of the site.

> SWATting of minorities

As far as I can tell, the only people verifiably being swatted are KF site operators. I have yet to see a case of swatting with compelling evidence of attribution to KF.
For anyone not aware, the CEO has responded.

https://twitter.com/eastdakota/status/1566160152684011520
Related, an interesting apology by KF's operator: https://web.archive.org/web/20220819014610/https://madatthei...
I agree that what you are saying is literally correct, but I don't think it's really a good thing that it's this obvious. They should have either caved much earlier, not at all.
You seem to misunderstand - or at least I hope you are misunderstanding.

If a group is doing something illegal, the government should act. You seem to imply "Well if they are doing something illegal, people shouldn't have to work with them."

I think you know what I know - they aren't going to be targeted by the government because they are not, in fact, doing something illegal.
My interpretation of hate speech is that it attempts to "dehumanize" a category of people with malice.

Not a lawyer or a linguist, just Yet Another Internet Spectator.

Sometimes hate speech can be done with a smile and a calm voice, but it's still toxic. I'd posit that that kind of speech has been quite effective in ramping up the political divide and I only see it getting worse.

I recognize that real censorship is a dangerous thing, but would counter that there's a lot of speech that, while legal, should not be celebrated.
Wait what, there aren't any nazi states as far as I'm aware but the PRC and North Korea are both real and have nukes? There are still communist political parties in every western democracy.
Yes and no.

Big Cos pay high rates often with less aggressive demands, however, the quote above is 'build a business from start to finish' which is something else entirely.
Perhaps not, but WinFS (Windows Future Storage)[0] comes closer.

> In 2013 Bill Gates cited WinFS as his greatest disappointment at Microsoft and that the idea of WinFS was ahead of its time, which will re-emerge.

WinFS was supposed to be released with the codename Longhorn version of Windows, but Vista was released without it. WinFS was disbanded and parts incorporated into other products and features.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS
No harassment.
Keffals has willingly and knowingly admitted to providing HRT to minors and hosting a cat boy ranch Discord server.
Link to the page there.
https://kiwifarms.net/threads/keffals-clara-sorrenti-lucas-r...
People may agree or disagree with posts being made - this is what makes us a society. It is a tragic age when a person gets to predate on children and nothing is done, not even an investigation.
Keffals also frequenty deltes tweets like this one:
https://archive.org/details/unknown_202209
I will close with the following- the website contains information on several very dangerous individuals ones that still walk free despite being reported to law enforcement multiple times.
>limit the victims' speech

And the hosts. Server owners have rights not to host content they don't want to host, for any reason at all. Business rights which 'that side' conveniently forgets about when it suits them.
They are not just providing transit. They are the front-end webserver receiving the request and sending the response. Transit is someone like AT&T or Sprint.
DDoS-Guard it is.
I've only recently learned of this site, and being a NZer, with the name Kiwi in the title I assumed some sort of connection to NZ.

But it looks like there isn't? It's American based, and when the NZ govt made a request related to the Christchurch mosque massacre, the admin told them to pound sand.

So, why is it called Kiwifarms?
A person, claiming to be a moderator on Kiwifarms, swatted Marjorie Taylor Greene (but unfortunately misspelled it as "Kiwifarm" in the note claiming responsibility). I have no doubt that this person did it with the express intent of getting Cloudfare to withdraw their services. Up until then Marjorie Taylor Greene had been quite popular on Kiwifarms.
I use a samba shared drive with my family. Shortcuts on the desktop, there's a top level folder 'sharing', a script on the server monitors for changes to that folder, and rsyncs to external hosting, plus updates a list.txt that has a url for each file (it's predictable, but the txt file updating also lets you know it's working).

There's also a recipies folder which has a similar script that builds an html + a tad bit of javascript so it's easy to read those files from a browser; useful for looking up ingredients while at the store, etc.
oh ok, well if were in the conspiracy zone then you just have to accept that actually they have a 1 million times greater economy, because no figures can be trusted.

Facetiousness aside, the censorship laws in the EU are around hate speech like flying Nazi symbology, not laws that let them silence people reporting economic numbers.
It’s a basic matter of human decency. They’re hurting people every day. Cut off their fucking access. There is no business or humane reason Cloudflare _should_ be a morally neutral arbiter; it’s a weird fetish of their CEO.
Or go at the source and switch to Debian.
well the shooter was wearing a shirt that said "kiwifarms sent me". He also left a sworn testimony at the scene of the crime that said "i'm doing this because of kiwifarms"
So transparency is bad?
You can always just use Imperva or fastly or any other competitor for ddos mitigation
Was expecting to see Covid among the Big Things since WWII is deemed the "great-grandfather" of such stuff in our age.

Honest question: am I overestimating the pandemic's impact on the future, and why? Isn't it another tail event, a Black Swan?
The middle east is _not_ sub Saharan Africa.
> SWEs at companies like Walmart Labs make much more than SWEs in Europe.

Good. Find out how Walmart retail workers are doing. And Housing in US is lot cheaper for majority of people.

> ... risk tolerant culture with stronger work ethic

Yup, from Uber to Wework and dozen more food delivery service did awesome job with generous money in creating enduring businesses with strong work ethics.
Why is Cloudflare supposed to be a common carrier but a regular hosting provider isn't?
What? Hydrogen fuel nor the RS-25 had anything to do with either Shuttle loss. In fact RS-25 has an almost flawless history. Yeah it was expensive - nothing like all those other space planes that were way cheaper hey.
If you say the word 'business' you're hustling a bit ...

... if you say 'product', then ok.

The 'product' part for many businesses is often very easy to do; sales, channel development, marketing etc. which lead to making a 'business' is the hard part.

If you're opening up major clients, or large numbers of small clients through channel sales then you're really worth something.
> those outrageously high FAANG salaries occurs because of ... 2) Excessive surveillance...

This is an absurd and lazy take.

There are plenty of high paying software jobs in the US that have nothing to do with surveillance (e.g. the AWS part of Amazon, Apple, SpaceX, all sorts of robotics companies, etc).

Europe's concerns in this area are a strength that they should be taking advantage of.

FWIW I think the surveillance itself is lazy. People just collect stuff because it's cheap to do, but the evidence that it is that useful in most cases is scant. If the FTC took a reasonable position that just having that info is a liability to be managed, most companies would stop and their businesses would do fine.
Where are these "escalations" and "agressive" contents? Why was law enforcement "too slow" and who judges what is an appropriate time frame for law enforcement? Does Cloudflare?
Survey: Apple cars more popular than Tesla even before they hit the road
No single company has "the ability to exercise total control" on the internet, otherwise Kiwifarms / DailyStormer / 8chan would all be offline. This is not censorship, it's cause and effect or consequences or the free market depending on your slant.

Free speech is limited to that - the speech is free, but you have to pay someone to make it available on the internet. Cloudflare decided the cost-vs-profit equation was unbalanced, so now KF will need to pay some other entity more for the cost they will be forced to incur, or need to not have risk of reputational damage e.g. 1776 Hosting, Epik, SkySilk, foreign countries.

I'm pretty sure KF could win damages, but that's not the point. It's more expensive (reputationally) for Cloudflare to continue to provide service than for them to settle damages, even treble damages, for this one expensive customer.
It's a modern day witch-hunt. I grew up in an environment where thinking that deviates from what's commonly acceptable is deemed not worthy and such person should suffer the consequences. It takes time, maturity and probably most important seeing a lot of world to get it changed. I bet a lot of those people on that site are completely lost when it comes to purpose or their place in life, so they end up focusing on extremely negative things as a way to justify their actions or escape their reality.
I’ve never visited these sites, and I’m sure I’d find them generally repulsive. But: I’d also be willing to bet that this level of censorship will be used to suppress political dissent against the most crucial imperial PR narratives within the next five years.

The censorship will most likely be justified by labeling the people in question as domestic terrorists, fascists, anti-Semitic, homophobic, anti-trans, or otherwise bigoted and anti-science.
> those infrastructure services would find themselves feeling justified pressure to develop terms of service prohibiting that conduct

I don't think you understand how infrastructure works or is regulated…

And yes, sometimes this is the case. Even now: Electricity providers are as guilty of keeping those forums online as Cloudflare is. Whatever your "primary means" is, electricity is just as needed as Cloudflare's services are (more, in fact). So… no, you're wrong, there's been zero pressure on the infra, because that pressure is not possible.

Law enforcement needs to intervene, period.
> “Try different things” is the key, of course.

32 year programmer here (started at 19).

I cannot “amen” this sentiment enough. But probably not in the way most will read it.

Most will interpret this at a macro level: Learn some Smalltalk! Now go learn Lisp! And then Clojure followed by Haskell, throw in some Java or C++ so you know what pain feels like! This is OK, it is good to be somewhat travelled in your journeys as a programmer.

But I find that there is a micro application that gets overlooked. You can do a lot of “try new things” right in the stack you’re in without having to bust strange new worlds. Most languages end up with many ways to do things. You can and should take time to explore those. Learn the conventions/idioms, but then push/challenge those.

I was afraid of C macros until I took time to really try some things with them. It didn’t mean I suddenly used them for everything, but overusing them for a bit helped me better make good choices about them.

C pointers intimidated a peer until I forced him to forego index based for statements, using all pointer math instead.

Smalltalk context objects were kind of “behind the scene” magic until I decided I’d like to figure out how to implement goto in Smalltalk. After that, they opened up for me.

Python decorators are “magic” until you make a few of your own.

The examples could go on and on.

Try new things.
Does the "rest of the state" have jurisdiction to run the town?
The folks who write science fiction are often very creative. If, while reading a SF novel, you encounter something that strikes you as different, see if you can simplify it, or restrict it, or otherwise reduce to the point that you just might actually succeed in writing it.
Cloudflare is a private busniess and can refute service ofc, but should the owner not get some notice of the termination to move to another service in time?
When private companies start having so much power they can literally make or break voices from being heard at all, this argument of "private companies are private therefore they do what they want" becomes much harder to defend.

I'm eager to "educate" myself about how this kind of things, truly.
That's only a few providers and too expensive for anyone but someone using Google ads to fund their operations, because Cloudflare created that cost by its illegal actions.
> (Hint: It's a "seat warmer", not a "butt heater".)

File a bug report. Clearly there is insufficient personalization.
There are two trends at work here: the most generic is the tendency for clickbait to drown out more substantial work. In this case, the provocative title isn't supported by the contents so it'll leave most readers disappointed.

The second is that there are a lot of HN users who are active open source developers and that community has grown increasingly tired of whining by people who feel entitled to have their opinions shape projects without doing any work to help those projects. Starting with “Brew Is a Bad Neighbor”, he basically craps all over a huge amount of work which hundreds of developers have given him for free and can't even acknowledge things like them having given him the ability to do exactly what he wants – note the little snide parts like “(grudgingly?)” or the way the information presented in the default documentation is described as some kind of secret reveal.

Note that he has _never_ attempted to contribute to either project:

https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/issues?q=author%3A...
https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/issues?q=author%3Apudquick

It's perfectly fine not to contribute to projects you use, or to have strong opinions about how to architect things, but it'll definitely rub people the wrong way to not to contribute but have a “Why Wasn't I Consulted!?!” post.

It's also common for people here to question things because they don't agree that a particular post is worth the community's time. Many of the comments here seem like meta-discussion to the submitter.
For a lot of such algorithms there are also pretty cheap ways to remove jitter from the measurements (in case you're operating on top of a general purpose OS or something) -- you expect for many algorithms that in the absence of external factors the runtime is convex monotonic as a multivariate function of the input sizes and that external confounders don't speed things up. Under that assumption you can measure the runtime for many different input sizes and de-jitter each data point by pushing down that convexity constraint, even if for each input size you only gather one single noisy data point.

Where possible, I always liked arrays of function pointers for each next power of 2 in the input sizes. A few popcounts and a jump later, and you're executing the right routine. It's not great if you're throwing a general-purpose tool against tiny problems, but it's not a huge amount of overhead either, and it's dead simple to code.
>> What I mean is, I’m 46. I’m not 96 and done. I have at least twenty more years of this left, and maybe fifty years

No. Sadly no. This is not the way it works.
This is nonsense. No man is an island. You are effectively saying that fame and peer pressure don't exist.

There's obvious motivations to take things "just one step further" with a community that eggs such behaviors on.

And that's true from a legal perspective as well. Tons of law deals with people who were not the individual to did the criminal deed, but instead offered the opportunity to do it or encouraged it.

We don't live in some libertarian fantasy where every individual operates wholly separate from one another. It's just not how we as a species are wired.
Yeah, I'm noticing some goalpost shifting from the poster you're replying to. That's some real bad faith posting (edit:on their part) right there.
What’s second and third?
Even if you have no moral or ethical qualms with them (unlikely as that is), it seems like a legal liability issue in general.
>sites that were dangerous/etc.

What does that mean? What content was "dangerous" that the site admins of Kiwifarms could not be notified of and have removed instead?
> It takes a whole lot more effort to provide good information on a complex matter, and virtually none to spout bullshit.

"A lie will fly around the whole world while the truth is getting its boots on."

Misattributed to Twain, Churchill, and others, but very accurate.
The 'spooky' abandoned train tunnel of Blue Bell, N.B
I first visited HappyPuppy in a text only browser, no idea what it was called, I was probably running Win 3.1 at the time. This brings back memories, very vague memories...
I had to google the guy's name to make any comparisons. Usually in an article comparing things, you don't have to do that.
I publish a WordPress plugin and have worked with PHP for twenty years, and given the number of sites I've investigated that output notices and errors, what you've said seems false. Even if the stock version that is officially distributed doesn't output this by default, a wild number of hosts do.