skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I wonder why this choice was made.

Because it's a better architecture. There are numerous different approaches to anonymity, each with different pros and cons (mixnets, dining cryptographers, etc). It's better to have a system that can offer a choice of anonymity mechanisms without locking users into one approach.

The new Freenet is a platform for building interoperable decentralized systems. Some of these systems can provide anonymity, and can be integrated into other systems if the creators of those systems choose to do so.
It is hit or miss for me when I ask it to just show the changes. But I do wonder if it is more beneficial (albeit harder for us to parse) for it to keep posting the whole source code so it is always in context. If it just works on the little update sections, it could lose context of things that are already written in the code.

However as the context windows increase, I suppose this will be less of an issue.
Just rebrand this as “algebraic effects” and suddenly every academic will pretend it’s revolutionary.
Is this why cloudflare manages to be cheap?
> Perhaps Pichai needs to step down and allow a more capable CEO take over.

At a Google scale company (and any public company for that matter), CEO's job is not to drive product decisions. That comes down to product leadership.

The CEO's job is longer term strategy (as in these are the types of categories we need to build features for, these are the the kinds of customers we need to target, these are the core financial metrics we need to hit).

> Google should have released a disableable feature leveraging Llms for whoever wanted to use it not shove it in their search results

The PM that owned this feature definitely has UX A/B tested it and found that the majority of users just don't care.

For example, I don't see auto-generated LLM results when searching on mobile which is the majority of Google Search impressions.
Using this as a blatant example of why digital anarchism is needed nowadays
> Standardization tends to be about bigger companies trying to commodify their competitors.

Didn't you mean to commodity their complements? Like when Microsoft (software company) commoditied the hardware on top of where their OS ran.
Lisp to JavaScript Compiler
They manage to be cheap because it's massively multitenant infra
There are links in the article, for example:

"Small SaaS banned by Cloudflare after 4 years of being paying customer"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34639212

Also:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31336515
Maybe an unpopular opinion, but this type of content is useless and serves no other purpose than feeding the already bloated Google cargo-culting machine.
lol

This industry pumps out new model languages every week, but is unable to generate new names with simple Markov chains?

Anyone giving a project a name that is already taken is a clown
See also early "anti" virus industry.
!!! THANK YOU !!! (and George Nachman) I had no idea this existed and this is a dozens-of-times-daily pain point for me.
I inherited my brother's laptop and after having thought about it did a reinstall and wipe. I just didn't want to dig through his past or whatever he was doing. It might seem important to us now, but it won't be to our survivors.
How does paying $10k a month solve that?
I mean, sure, they’re probably doing some sketchy regulatory dodging or whatever. Which part of this can Cloudflare solve by having them pay $120k/year to them?
Freenet is free as in free speech, not free beer. The goal is to provide a platform that allows people to build sophisticated decentralized systems to replace today's centralized systems. The original Freenet architecture wasn't flexible enough to do this.
Ahh nice. If you can add a built-in transparent background that would be super helpful too. Thanks for the tool!
Yes, if you need a laptop for work and can't live without one, there is no other way but to live with the downsides of high costs, small screen and a battery.

Lucky me I no longer have to use a laptop for work and have a desktop without all the downsides.
I've seen houses where the heat from the fridge vents to a drying cupboard on the floor above.
John Varley in the science fiction novel The Golden Globe envisioned a future where there are two separate AIs: one that is solely designed to help people, that knows everything, and a separate AI designed for law enforcement that is constrained to a limited set of inputs. I don't know if that's practical, or palatable, but it was an interesting thought experiment, although he doesn't dig into it too deeply. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Globe
The Cloudflare CEO & co-founder is quite active on Twitter[0] and somewhat active on HN[1], would be interesting to get his perspective on this.

[0] https://x.com/eastdakota/

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=eastdakota
Real Madrid send-off for Toni Kroos [video]
Has google learned that doing quick tests that go over bad are acceptable by people as long as they change it pretty quickly
Hmm. My take is the casino structured its business to comply, not to evade interest. Further, I don't see how Cloudflare benefits by taking on the risk to charge more to help a customer avoid scrutiny. More like: they know it's a humming business and want a piece.
Just wanted to toss out that organic maps is offline and really quite wonderful.
The recommendations to, basically, not keep all your eggs in one basket and have backups of config are surely good ideas. But if you have to plan on dropping cloudflare in some arbitrary 24 hour window, perhaps it’s CF that’s the problem. This sort of stuff and other recent articles about CF are so worrying that it’s now being run by the finance team (hence why every email they got in this article was from sales teams rather than any technical folks).

Also; if not registering domains on CF does anyone else do at-cost or otherwise super cheap pricing?
This is a really important lesson here. Don't put your eggs in one basket, and if network delivery/etc. is core to your revenues and livelihood, don't trust a random third party host to look out for you.

10TB/80TB at 120k/yr, either way, Cloudflare is taking you for a ride.

If you aren't self hosting, you're really doing it wrong.
What’s especially shocking is how closely coupled sales and engineering are. Like I get they talk, but for a sales call to end in engineering pulling the plug…
The new version will offer a choice of approaches to anonymity. I wouldn't call it a mess but there is 25 years of history to the project which does inevitably lead to some complexity. I summarize the naming situation here [1]

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Freenet/comments/1d05zw9/questions_...
That's not what they're talking about. On Android, notifications have a "channel". So you can disallow certain types of notifications while still allowing others through.
So the thing that stands out in the article, is that cloudflare's initial communications (and the final communications, when they moved to ban) implied issues with their behavior (trust and safety team, terms of service violations), but in between it sounds like the didn't talk about ToS at all, just sales team asking them to buy enterprise. Though it's possible OP is omitting some explanation given by as why enterprise plan would alleviate ToS issues.
Thanks, I was genuinely curious
The point is more that the author is an unreliable narrator and you need to apply a little salt to the rest of the story. Cloudflare absolutely shouldn't be taking bribes to permit regulatory evasion. But if they are, I want more evidence than a substack post.
Tyler Cowen: The Rise and Fall of the Chinese Economy (2015) [video]
I am a little hamstrung by my principles on that. I do feel like the reason I got upset was valid, so I cannot apologize to him for anything pertaining to that.

I can apologize for yelling and I probably will but I don’t know that I can apologize for the content of what I said itself.
A hack that has worked for me is having another person set up the code for screen time settings, in a way that there is just enough friction for the often unconscious reflex to open XYZ app and proceed to get sucked in.

In my case I both set a daily time limit and block certain apps to only certain hours of the day
That’s a perfect solution for me, thanks for the idea!
It's not satire! It really was an official poster campaign (some 20 years ago).
you're misreading the comment. this a about filtering the kind of notification from a single app.

notifications from a single app are split by category, and you can disable in the phone settings notifications from a single category will keeping the rest for a single app.
(though this categorizing is done by the app dev not you, so the dev can mix annoying stuff with the useful)
Im reading between the lines here but it seems like the traffic amount, the saas subscription tier, and the actions required to remidiate some issue were all unaligned.

1. Its quite possible thar CF having this site on some multi-tenant infrastructure could be threatening. Not unreasonable at least to ask them to have their own IP block.

2. If thats the issue then a clear explanation should have been provided. Routing to sales is inexcusable. Someone isnt being transparent.

3. If it’s a pure cost / revenue issue then say that, set a deadline and negotiate. This is bad karma and even though CF is clearly the market leader, what they do isnt rocket surgery. Not worth it.
Well, yes. If they are currently funding new ventures - it doesn't take any "ran out of money" scenario for them to (say) decide that investing more in their existing portfolio is currently a better strategy than adding new ventures.

And certainly they're free to source their pitches via closed networks of "the right people". I'd guess that that does not involve Linkedin - but only "the right people" actually know, and I'm not part of that social set.
> Cloudflare was the company that went viral for the firing of an account rep not hitting her goals.

How is that something worth going viral over? Salespeople get fired all the time for not meeting their sales goals. Engineers similarly get fired all the time for not meeting their productivity goals. If you don't do your job well, don't expect to keep it.

And if I recall correctly, in this particular case, she was a green employee who hadn't even made a single sale yet! What more obvious of a layoff target is there than that? Would you keep a green unproven salesperson over a proven veteran salesperson who's landed 9 figures in sales?
Could you elaborate on why you think that? Just stating that does not really add to the conversation
So, LLMs can’t do basic arithmetic very well at all but people use them to analyze financial statements?
Yeah, there's some pretty key info being left out. I don't doubt that Cloudflare communication sucks especially when dealing with their sales team (aka bizdev which is what OP was originally contacted by), but the second screenshot is pretty damning.

My guess: Their account fell out of the non-enterprise TOS for some reason which is being obscured in the post (probably domain rotation related). Their T&S team proposed moving to enterprise for a custom resolution. OP's company refused, their account was purged because they had gotten several warnings about it.

I'm sure this sounds frustrating to the average HN dev who runs a legitimate startup with cloudflare on top and is now biting their nails worried to death about what will happen to them. But "online casino" immediately raised a million alarm bells in the post.
Actively supported versions of windows still supports 4 architectures for apps (x86, x86-64, ARM, and ARM64) and long term at least 3 of those (both c86 and ARM64) aren't going away (32 bit as an install target is but not as an app type which you might need depending what your app does) so everything as a fat app isn't a great choice like it is on macOS where there are 2 options and long term there will be just 1.

That said you can still achieve something similar. Windows comes with the x86 emulation layer enabled by default on all system types so if your installer is packaged as x86 you can have it contain multiple install packages and select based on the system architecture. This is known as MSIX bundling. Alternatively for online installs the installer can just be the thing that grabs the right version for the machine and launches it.

Of course it's more work to create a fat app style bundle so most don't bother. The possibility is still there though.
"Now this needs a bit of context on what they are talking about. We do have multiple domains that mostly act as mirrors to our main domain. We have these for a few reasons. One is that since we are a casino, we have different regulatory requirements we need to comply with in many countries. For example, many games are only available in some countries. Some countries we block completely. Then we have a few different domains that remove certain game groups or site features - for example our social features (chat, user tipping / interaction) or our sportsbook. Another is that we use them to target different global user groups and affiliates and track conversions long-term. This also means that if a country DNS-blocks our main domain, a secondary domain may still be available. This could arguably be seen as a violation of the Cloudflare TOS, as they wrote above."

Looks like they COMPLY with regulatory interest, to me.
It is a simple trick, but in practice you probably want to know the position of the last nonzero bit instead of the 2^n pattern. And most CPUs have instructions for that, which are more efficient and as a bonus also document better what is happening.
>Hopefully Cloudflare provides a perspective.

Well HN is the unofficially official Cloudflare Support forum. I think we will hear from them soon. From past experience normally their response time for anything Cloudflare on HN is within 2-3 hours.
Miami Freedom Park
It played a major role in ending apartheid though it took decades and there were also other factors at work - the Berlin wall fell.
Sounds logical. I don't mind which mechanism is behind it, but the ability to heat up any sleeping spot to a comfortable temperature for two is feature I quite like.
I’d say be wary of any public company and actively make plans to get out of any company that gets acquired by private equity.

Actually had a sales call with Cloudflare in the last month and I got some bad vibes from the whole experience. We did not end up going with them.
A paragraph ends with:

> This could arguably be seen as a violation of the Cloudflare TOS, as they wrote above.

And the very next paragraph begins with:

> In any case, we receive >95% of our traffic through the main domain that’s been unchanged since our founding, and were happy to resolve this issue in whatever way...

And then they complain about paying up?

The only issue I see here is around the aggressiveness on the CF side. But, I was not in those meetings and the way above reads tells me that I might have been slightly mad so perhaps the CF was just taking it out on them?

Anyway. I don't think this is a CF foul.
This idea that the UK is a surveillance society that is meaningfully different to other western societies is somewhat misplaced, based on motivated misreadings of a US article about surveillance in King’s Lynn in the 90s.

The vast, vast majority of CCTV systems in the UK, that are part of this “culture”, are just store and private CCTV systems that police can get access to with a warrant, by going door to door. The same as in almost all western countries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance_in_the_Unite...

There’s almost no police CCTV network, and there’s no reality to the fantasy element of police being able to see you wherever you go in the UK in real time (with the exception of a few crowded high crime areas where tourists get robbed, ironically, and a few high violence and terrorism risk areas, public transport facilities and live road traffic cameras).

There are some council-owned networks in high crime areas which are pretty contentious, and then there are these police facial recognition vans which are clearly offensive bullshit overreach.

In particular a lot of visitors misunderstand the prevalence of cameras pointed at our roads, which are not live feed cameras at all but speed-triggered safety cameras.

Basically it’s important to understand that the vast majority of cameras in the UK are people and businesses legally protecting their own shit, just like in the USA.

One key cultural difference is ANPR. In America the general perception is that privacy includes where you go in your car, because you treat it as a portable living room. There’s never been that presumption here. ANPR systems probably can track cars in metropolitan areas and on some motorways, but live traffic cameras are unusual in most of the country.

There is definitely a slightly less self-centred lean to the balance of individual rights compared to community safety compared to North America. But this is also part of why we don’t have to put up with anywhere near the same risk of violence or crime, even in areas that are significantly more densely populated.

We also have pretty good laws governing this stuff.

In short, Hot Fuzz ain’t real, and I think North Americans like to project this idea of a surveillance culture onto the UK without considering that they are likely under the exact same sorts of surveillance in the same sorts of places, without as many of the same legal protections.

(And with plainly discriminatory surveillance systems like Shotspotter to boot)

Do you think retailers in the USA and Canada are not using the systems described in the article? Because you would be wrong if you do.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-12592563/wal...
I'm not defending Cloudflare's exact actions in this scenario, but it seems reasonable that there are cases where yes, for $10k Cloudflare is okay.

Risk can be mitigated, especially if you take care to know what the risk is, but risk mitigation and the salaries of the risk mitigation teams are not free.

The answer of "no, we will not host you unless you pay us enough money to hire people to make sure we're not breaking laws by hosting you" makes plenty of sense, and an online casino that is likely dubiously legal in many countries is definitely a place where you might use that answer.

I'd also expect there are cases where Cloudflare enter into enterprise agreements with customers, get a good hard look at exactly what's happening, and then tear up the agreement and walk away.
Sam Altman's tech villain arc is underway
For $10k / mo paid 1 year in advance, your cloud provider does a legal review of the situation and figures out how to make your problem work on both the technical and legal level. It's not a "special plan", it's consulting.

Edit: "How do you know?" -- I don't know it's actually what happened, but when switching to enterprise, you don't go from 10% margin to 98% margin. The added costs actually represent added budget for the provider to deal with your "special case". ALL enterprise pricing tiers are disguised consulting contracts.
Your Orwellian tracking fantasy is still possible. Someone's got to press the call button. They could put fingerprint readers on the buttons as well. It's not like it's something only possible because a screen is involved.
It's unclear as it shouldn't be possible to be cheap. That said, in a world of data, Cloudflare being a massive man in the middle (MITM) probably means something [1].

[1] Cloudflare decrypts your traffic, reads it, and then forwards it. They see all encrypted data going to and from your website, in plaintext.
So this lets you essentially run Lua standalone, and then compile those scripts into executables. Seems like a mix of Cython and bash. In going to give it a try, it might fill a niche of some dev tool scripts I make for the team.
- "This also means that if a country DNS-blocks our main domain, a secondary domain may still be available. This could arguably be seen as a violation of the Cloudflare TOS, as they wrote above."

Attorneys love it when people put everything in writing like this.
> Make backups of your configuration on Cloudflare. It's an unexpectedly large pain to recreate all those configurations

Better yet, configure CloudFlare through terraform, so all your config exists in your own repo all the time. It also helps day to day since it's not that hard to accidentally flip some switch in the dashboard.

But yeah, do research alternatives. CF has too much power already and will either ignore issues, destroy you, or pay lawyers to protect people trying to get you murdered, depending on their mood. There are better options.
Best way to understand how a method works? Construct scenarios where it fails
It also seems strange they dont know their Traffic Numbers.

>Note that 80TB is the number they tried to sell us, I don’t know if it is accurate since they removed all our access to historical analytics.

I mean you dont need accurate Data but surely most would know by heart their traffic in rough figures? Or am I the old dog where every new Web Dev are so used to Cloud and Serverless they have no idea what they are using?
The part where Cloudflare is happy to turn a blind eye to any “issues” if they get their $$$, apparently
$250/month sounds like nothing at all for a site with a claimed 4M MAU. The enterprise rate of $10k/month sounds a lot more reasonable. If everything presented here is accurate, I'm not understanding the sharp discrepancy in pricing tiers. If anything they should've already been paying more than $10k/month for massive traffic on the basic plan and then be able to save money by paying for massive scale when negotiating rates for the enterprise plan.

Also this sounds like an online gambling site of questionable legality, knowingly serving customers in jurisdictions where it's illegal, so I can't say I have too much sympathy, and I feel like Cloudflare effectively fired them as a customer when they realized what they were up to.
Personally I think the article tackles too many things which is a bit frustrating if any of the threads are interesting but it’s your article

I thought it was interesting
If it's legal but burdensome (somehow) to host a particular industry, requiring more money to deal with the increased burden seems reasonable. For instance, if their legal department needs to deal with complaints from various countries, that probably costs more than $250/month.

That being said, I doubt that's the core issue in this case.
The rate of change of your power consumption?
This doesn't pass the sniff test. From the actions Cloudflare took and their communication, it's very clear that there was something about the way their services were used that they were unhappy about. The post doesn't include what that problem was, but I have a very hard time believing that the author was not in the know and just got their account nuked without any further commentary, especially after being in a number of calls with real human beings from Cloudflare. Surely they'd have plenty of room to both ask and tell to figure out what the issue is. More than anything, this sounds like they knowingly did something shady and are now trying to shift the blame.
If that's the take, that means Cloudflare is okay with 'breaking laws' so long as they can take a heavy cut of the ill gotten gains? </sarcasm>

Let's not try to find reasons to harm the messenger and stick to the facts -- a paying customer was suddenly extorted for hundreds of thousand of dollars out of nowhere.
It was the opposite? To comply with regulation.
Taking a step back, why would they even care if their platform is supposedly neutral and not responsible for the content ?

If they can indeed stop providing services to a casino, why cannot they shutdown a website spreading pro-war propaganda, or a website selling illegal services ?

It means they are making editorial choices, instead of just being the technological provider and being a neutral "internet pipe".

Not sure it's really in their best interest to self-police in the end, as they could lose their DMCA safe harbor provision ?