6 ms·

The Dev Behind One of the Best SNES Emulators Has Died

184 points by AdmiralAsshat 5y ago

trainsplanes 5y ago
They’re one of the biggest forces to have ever existed in emulation, pushing forward accuracy when other emulators were made just to be good enough to play a game, as well as archiving countless rare games. A true legend and they will be missed.
- notsureaboutpg 5y ago
  I thought it's one dev who died? Is the whole team gone as well?
notRobot 5y ago
> Kiwi Farms was spun off from CWCiki, a wiki focused on Chris-Chan. They're a forum focused on cyberbullying other people. They especially tend to focus on people who are in vulnerable groups. For example, Byuu as far as I know, identified as non-binary, which is why they started harassing him. It seems like they're a major catalyst for this situation. Wow. A forum of people that bullies vulnerable people until they kill themselves. As someone who is non-binary and a member of multiple minority groups, this makes me furious. If there's any website that deserves to be DDoSed, this is it. Just saying.
- colanderman 5y ago
  CloudFlare is providing them DDoS protection.
  - winocm 5y ago
    They really need to stop. They did it for 8chan, why not this? How many more people need to die before anything changes?
    - smoldesu 5y ago
      I'm not endorsing what they do, but Cloudflare isn't the only option for DDOS protection. If you take them out now, you'll probably just send them deeper into the decentralized web, which is probably not a mutually amicable solution.
      - iameli 5y ago
        They well might be, realistically. Other similarly-atrocious sites that were eventually shut down by Cloudflare had a lot of trouble finding new hosts.
        hsbauauvhabzb 5y ago
        In addition, the dark web would result in them losing a large portion of their user base, both at the initial switch over, but also over time as existing members leave.
        smoldesu 5y ago
        Decentralized =/= dark web. Who's going to stop them from setting up a Mastodon instance, or making an invite-only Matrix server?
    - jchw 5y ago
      Dear Cloudflare. If you want to take a principled stance, you have to do it unilaterally, and defend it when it is being challenged. You want to be “neutral”? Then take the stance when it actually is being challenged. Otherwise, what you have isn’t a principled stance. It’s a public relations strategy. The moment you made an exception, you proved that you could and would disable a site over its content if you wanted. But when something like this continues to stay online, it proves that you are not actually policing content, but your own reputation. I get that it is genuinely impossible to please everyone. But this is a hypocritical and dishonest stance at best. What we have here is multiple deaths while their harassers run victory laps hiding behind pseudonyms on Cloudflare-protected properties. > we draw the line at platforms that have demonstrated they directly inspire tragic events and are lawless by design. I know you guys read Hacker News. Do you want to fucking acknowledge this?
  - qiqitori 5y ago
    You can't provide DDoS protection for the dynamic stuff.
    - oliwarner 5y ago
      You can. When you're as big as cloudflare, you can tell if clients are real people, and filter out bot traffic. If you have any doubts, you can force them through a captcha layer or just deny the traffic.
- labster 5y ago
  Someone bullied by Kiwi Farms decided to hit back at a forum member there. Said Kiwi also had an account on my wiki farm, so they demanded that I divulge PII about the user or else become a victim of cyber bullying myself. Suffice to say that I decided to enforce the GDPR, and to this day there is an attack page on the internet calling myself and my mother pedophiles because I chose to follow the law. Kiwi Farms is a toxic community where even their own targets are dangerous.
- arp242 5y ago
  I posted a bit on KiwiFarms a bit about six/seven years ago. I became involved somewhat involuntary as I was editing on RationalWiki at the time and there was rather a lot of conflict with the whole "GamerGate" thing going on, and I had no idea what that was about. I didn't care much for the anti-gamergate people on RW as I felt they were ... unpleasant ... and they kept talking about this "KiwiFarms" thing. So I created an account and figured I'd talk to some people to see what it's all about and hear out the other side a bit. At the time, from what I saw, it wasn't actually so bad. I would consider it distasteful, even offensive at times, but from what I've seen they weren't organizing harassment or bully campaigns. The general attitude was something along the lines of "haha, what a loser/idiot", and in some of the more tragic cases it was also followed up by "but this is very sad to see :-(". I don't recall seeing the targetting of people based on their sexuality or gender identity. The range of opinions on things like GamerGate were fairly diverse, but the main attitude was "petty manchildren crying about muh gamez". Plenty of stuff I disagreed with, and plenty of comments that I would describe as being made in bad taste or downright offensive, but my take-away was that, at the time, the description of a vile nest of horrible reactionary alt-Right bullies as some on RationalWiki claimed it, was pretty off the mark. We had plenty of trolls on RationalWiki for sure, and some pretty vile ones too, and most people on KiwiFarms thought they were just a bunch of losers. Yet, somehow, they were still attributed to KiwiFarms shrug. I don't know the details of the this situation, and it's been six years so all sorts of things could have changed, but based on my previous experience I'm very hesitant to immediately jump to the conclusion that it's a "forum of people that bullies vulnerable people until they kill themselves" because I've seen all sorts of hyperbolic claims before and found them untrue. Maybe it's correct this time, but ... yeah. Fool me once, fool me twice... And if this comment wasn't controversial enough already: I feel this stuff is sometimes taken way too seriously, and that this is actively harmful to people like Near. I completely understand why they would feel upset if people say ugly things about them, but a lot of this crowd seems to provide only validation and recognition for being upset, and not enough "just some rando losers on a forum, get over it and stop crying". I don't think this is helping and an (unintentional) but vicious feedback loop. The fact of the matter is that the world has ugly people saying ugly things. This has always been true for all of history, and will always remain true. It sucks, but we can't change that. You can either shrug at insults or slurs, or you can become very upset with it, and it's absolutely not a given unchangeable fact that "getting upset" is the only possible action. I don't want to put too much weight in this letter as it's obviously written from a place of grief and anger, but it mostly seems to externalize Near's problems to KiwiFarms. It seems to me that their problems were mostly internal, as is usually the case with people suffering from long-term depression. Perhaps the external KiwiFarms "pushed them over the edge", but that's not the same as being the primary cause. This is important because if you focus on the wrong things you're not going to solve whatever problems you have. However, no matter what I say here, or what the facts of the case may be (maybe it is as bad as claimed, maybe not) I think ... none of that will really matter here anyway :-/
- RickJWagner 5y ago
  It has to start with very public campaigns showing that cyber-bullying just isn't acceptable. So maybe start with Christy Tiegen. Or Chris Evans. Jim Carrey. Some big names. They've all bullied people, including school children.
chris_wot 5y ago
Oh God, this brings back memories. Something like this happened to me on Wikipedia, and nearly ended in disaster. Who are Kiwi Farms and how do we stop them? Don’t they violate CloudFlare’s ToS? Edit: looking into this more, it looks like the accused him of paedophilia, and when this didn’t work they went after his trans friends.
Causality1 5y ago
I will never understand the type of self-destructive attacks that drive this. I don't agree with but can understand the logic of attacking some public figure, but one of your own? An anti-establishment, anti-intellectual property nerd? The driving force behind one of the most impressive emulators on the planet? Even if you hate LGBT people you can't ignore it in the case of someone who's doing free work that directly benefits you?
- nine_k 5y ago
  I think you might mistake them for some people who care. A bunch of bullies does care about who the victim is, all they care about is the jolt of adrenaline and the feeling of power an impunity.
- kiawe_fire 5y ago
  It’s easy to start thinking that the bullies are bullying because of behaviors, identities, or politics they don’t agree with. But ultimately many of us have strong feelings on many things, yet still possess the empathy to care about the well-being of those we disagree with. In my experience, bullies may use a certain external “vector” to bully others, but they do so because of their own internal issues that they choose to deal with by inflicting pain on others by exploiting those vectors. In some cases this might be anti-LGBTQ, in others it might be classist, or really any place someone can find and exploit a weakness [1] in someone else. At that point, it doesn’t matter if the person you’re bullying is somebody “on your side”, because it’s not really about the surface issue to begin with. Unfortunately it makes situations like this even harder to deal with, because it’s not just a matter of trying to impart empathy on the bully. [1] which is not to imply any identity is necessarily a weakness, but rather may be something a person struggles with personally and therefore provides an opening for someone else to exploit.
zxzax 5y ago
This is incredibly saddening news, near was an active HN user whose posts I always enjoyed reading. These cyber stalking websites needed to be shut down long ago.
colanderman 5y ago
Dup of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27652814 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27652814, which inexplicably is on the third page despite 200+ points.
- naikrovek 5y ago
  it isn't the number of points that determines position on the homepage, it is the number of upvotes per unit of time. once the upvote rate decreases, so does the story's position. very explicable.
  - geofft 5y ago
    It briefly got to #2 but was deduped with other posts from earlier that hadn't gotten many comments. I guess that makes the algorithm count comments relative to the original timestamp and it fell to page two.
  - striking 5y ago
    The person you're replying to is right, actually (aside from the merging a sibling comment mentions). Twitter links are default downweight by HN.
  - colanderman 5y ago
    What @geofft said. Several stories of Near's passing with many comments were on the front page, but got deduped with the oldest which was not on the front page, and did not get bumped up in ranking accordingly.
sodality2 5y ago
>Byuu as far as I know, identified as non-binary, which is why they started harassing him. Previously this comment contained an ill-mannered correction of the mistaken pronoun usage. However, this is completely unnecessary so I will replace it with this message, and a reminder that Near used they/them pronouns. Apologies.
- mkr-hn 5y ago
  It's possible to be nonbinary and use any variety of pronouns. However, the letter from Near's friend used they/them, so that's probably the right set.
- loeg 5y ago
  Pretty tone-deaf and unnecessary to nitpick a eulogy.
  - sodality2 5y ago
    This was not the eulogy quoted. Regardless, that was absolutely not my intention. I meant to highlight the pronoun misuse because I've seen a handful of comments here misgendering them, and it's really sad to see that happening to someone who just passed. My apologies if it came across as rude or tone-deaf. I attempted to edit after but I am on a mobile client that doesn't support it, nor even deleting comments.
    - hsbauauvhabzb 5y ago
      I’ve always been curious, is this intentional correcting of seemingly innocent mistakes actually something that non-cis people care about? There’s asshole intentional misgendering and there are legitimate accidents, which can be a slip of the tongue (I regularly misgender people accidentally, despite wanting to be respectful, I put it down to many decades of cis programming which I now need to undo). As a gay man I’m more than used to people assuming I’m straight, I don’t speak for all gay men but the consensus in our circle is to politely correct but not get obnoxious, I would guess other queer demographics would be similar.
colesantiago 5y ago
What is the average age of a Kiwi Farms user? Is it possible that these are all just kids with a lot of time trolling people? Of course what happened to Byuu/Near is repugnant and horrible and shouldn't happen to anyone. I just don't understand the mentality of people to do this and not feel remorse.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- vlunkr 5y ago
  I think for many people in communities like this, it's easy to just place the blame on the rest of the community. If dozens of people are participating, they don't think their actions count for much. As for the people running the site, I don't know, they are just cruel.
- woodruffw 5y ago
  > What is the average age of a Kiwi Farms user? KF itself has been around for nearly a decade, and some of their targets had been harassed by members of KF for years prior to founding a dedicated website. There might be kids on KF, but the average user is firmly in the adult demographic. > I just don't understand the mentality of people to do this and not feel remorse. It's a mentality of dehumanization: their targets, in their eyes, deserve less than the basic dignity we give to human beings. That capacity for dehumanization stems from years of indoctrination in reactionary communities.
- Covzire 5y ago
  One interesting metric I think might be rate of psychopathy of KF users, since a forum dedicated to discussing (read: mocking) people seems to me like it would naturally attract people who revel in schadenfreude.
FounderBurr 5y ago
You can’t put any weight into what people on the internet think of you. Especially if you have no real life support to buoy you against the never ending torrent of free abuse available if you go looking for it. Be weird, do your own thing for your own reasons and let that be enough.
- mkr-hn 5y ago
  Humans have a wide range of emotional response curves. Sometimes they're really steep and being harassed is an absolute nightmare of highs and lows. This is called Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD) in neurodivergent discourse.
- hsbauauvhabzb 5y ago
  Try saying that when ‘those mean internet people’ are doxing your friends, or emailing your coworkers. Don’t downplay the issue.
- psyc 5y ago
  The biggest problem with KF, as I see it, isn’t really what they do and say. Most of what they do is quote people, and most of what they say is snappy, mean quips about the quotes. I’m sure there have been incidents when forum members escalated further, but it’s not their usual MO. The problem is that they specifically select targets based on how they react. The more a target obsesses over their own thread or responds emotionally to what KF posts about them, the more KF focuses attention on them. So KF’s favorite targets who get the most abuse are going to be exactly those who are least equipped to handle it.
edoceo 5y ago
Also in this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27657610 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27657610 Which links to an Google Drive doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/12pOhaaFh998B0kyc5Sm4IhlhIp1c9t5gDNTVVPaiJgI/preview?pru=AAABenS60fs*tnT9LrVbCkcTprLB89HsBQ https://docs.google.com/document/d/12pOhaaFh998B0kyc5Sm4Ihlh... Which claims to be from a mutual friend and is so fucking sad I couldn't finish reading.
umvi 5y ago
I'm half hoping the tech community bands together over this and shows Kiwi Farms that they poked the wrong beehive. I wish first and foremost all the KW bullies involved with this are tracked down, doxxed, and put through the US (or whatever their country of origin is) legal ringer. Additionally I wouldn't mind if KW itself is pwned by some Lulzsec type group.
- xwdv 5y ago
  As someone who had the shit beaten out of him all the time in middle school and could easily have been bullied into suicide if I had been born a generation too late, I’d prefer someone take the expedient and less politically correct route and just kill these people off, with little to no mercy.
- somabarium 5y ago
  Yes, I too want the prosecutor who drove Aaron Schwartz to commit suicide for their own financial/career gain to be put through the ringer. Get back to me when you get this done. Then we can talk shop about what the farms did.
Daneel_ 5y ago
What a tragedy. I've been very fortunate to be part of the SMW romhacks community for a few years, and have seen bsnes used heavily over that time. It's so sad to hear this news. There are a few prominent figures in the romhacks community who are notably trans, and the community is so welcoming and kind - I've never even really seen it come up during streams or other interactions, they're just a person doing things and it's a non-issue. I had hoped that things were improving, and that the world was starting to shift to be more accepting, but I know it's a slow process. Too slow for Near. What a loss. We have to do better.
someperson 5y ago
byuu/near was active on Hacker News too: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=near https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=near
- someperson 5y ago
  Here is byuu's emulation retirement post from 15 months ago: https://archive.md/2020.03.21-185629/https://byuu.org/articles/farewell https://archive.md/2020.03.21-185629/https://byuu.org/articl... (and previous HN discussion on that retirement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22644647 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22644647)
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
btmorex 5y ago
I just read a couple Kiwi Farms threads and damn that place is depressing. Just an entire forum filled with cruel, shitty people.
gaudat 5y ago
>For a utopian future, we need to start an initiative to pair every talented programmer with a dedicated on call 24/7 tard handler. No massive HR departments, just one handler per programmer and the massive value they could potentially produce gets split 50/50. The programmer does their thing, and the handler tells them to stop posting shit on Twitter or hanging out on Discord and takes them on walks outside when they're about to have unstable meltdowns or send six figures to someone who runs a bully website.
thatfrenchguy 5y ago
I remember looking at bsnes/higan and feeling so impressed. Such a loss. Hope the people who caused this are brought to justice.
Minor49er 5y ago
Moon (Null) published the exchanges between him and buyy before byuu took his own life. In summary, byuu told Null to accept his offer of $120,000 to take down the byuu thread on Kiwi Farms, or else byuu would publicly post his own information and take his own life. Needless to say, Null declined: https://kiwifarms.net/threads/byuu-byuu_nyan-setsunakun0.43056/page-14#post-9313342 https://kiwifarms.net/threads/byuu-byuu_nyan-setsunakun0.430...
kurofune 5y ago
Is a Google Docs file written by an anonymous source proof enough of the death?
rkuykendall-com 5y ago
I'm unsure why their last Twitter thread seems to be unlinked everywhere, but here it is for anyone who wants to read their own words: https://twitter.com/near_koukai/status/1408940057235312640 https://twitter.com/near_koukai/status/1408940057235312640

184 points by AdmiralAsshat 5y ago

They’re one of the biggest forces to have ever existed in emulation, pushing forward accuracy when other emulators were made just to be good enough to play a game, as well as archiving countless rare games. A true legend and they will be missed.

notsureaboutpg 5y ago
I thought it's one dev who died? Is the whole team gone as well?

notRobot 5y ago

> Kiwi Farms was spun off from CWCiki, a wiki focused on Chris-Chan. They're a forum focused on cyberbullying other people. They especially tend to focus on people who are in vulnerable groups. For example, Byuu as far as I know, identified as non-binary, which is why they started harassing him. It seems like they're a major catalyst for this situation. Wow. A forum of people that bullies vulnerable people until they kill themselves. As someone who is non-binary and a member of multiple minority groups, this makes me furious. If there's any website that deserves to be DDoSed, this is it. Just saying.

colanderman 5y ago
CloudFlare is providing them DDoS protection.
- winocm 5y ago
  They really need to stop. They did it for 8chan, why not this? How many more people need to die before anything changes?
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    I'm not endorsing what they do, but Cloudflare isn't the only option for DDOS protection. If you take them out now, you'll probably just send them deeper into the decentralized web, which is probably not a mutually amicable solution.
    - iameli 5y ago
      They well might be, realistically. Other similarly-atrocious sites that were eventually shut down by Cloudflare had a lot of trouble finding new hosts.
      - hsbauauvhabzb 5y ago
        In addition, the dark web would result in them losing a large portion of their user base, both at the initial switch over, but also over time as existing members leave.
        smoldesu 5y ago
        Decentralized =/= dark web. Who's going to stop them from setting up a Mastodon instance, or making an invite-only Matrix server?
  - jchw 5y ago
    Dear Cloudflare. If you want to take a principled stance, you have to do it unilaterally, and defend it when it is being challenged. You want to be “neutral”? Then take the stance when it actually is being challenged. Otherwise, what you have isn’t a principled stance. It’s a public relations strategy. The moment you made an exception, you proved that you could and would disable a site over its content if you wanted. But when something like this continues to stay online, it proves that you are not actually policing content, but your own reputation. I get that it is genuinely impossible to please everyone. But this is a hypocritical and dishonest stance at best. What we have here is multiple deaths while their harassers run victory laps hiding behind pseudonyms on Cloudflare-protected properties. > we draw the line at platforms that have demonstrated they directly inspire tragic events and are lawless by design. I know you guys read Hacker News. Do you want to fucking acknowledge this?
- qiqitori 5y ago
  You can't provide DDoS protection for the dynamic stuff.
  - oliwarner 5y ago
    You can. When you're as big as cloudflare, you can tell if clients are real people, and filter out bot traffic. If you have any doubts, you can force them through a captcha layer or just deny the traffic.
labster 5y ago
Someone bullied by Kiwi Farms decided to hit back at a forum member there. Said Kiwi also had an account on my wiki farm, so they demanded that I divulge PII about the user or else become a victim of cyber bullying myself. Suffice to say that I decided to enforce the GDPR, and to this day there is an attack page on the internet calling myself and my mother pedophiles because I chose to follow the law. Kiwi Farms is a toxic community where even their own targets are dangerous.
arp242 5y ago
I posted a bit on KiwiFarms a bit about six/seven years ago. I became involved somewhat involuntary as I was editing on RationalWiki at the time and there was rather a lot of conflict with the whole "GamerGate" thing going on, and I had no idea what that was about. I didn't care much for the anti-gamergate people on RW as I felt they were ... unpleasant ... and they kept talking about this "KiwiFarms" thing. So I created an account and figured I'd talk to some people to see what it's all about and hear out the other side a bit. At the time, from what I saw, it wasn't actually so bad. I would consider it distasteful, even offensive at times, but from what I've seen they weren't organizing harassment or bully campaigns. The general attitude was something along the lines of "haha, what a loser/idiot", and in some of the more tragic cases it was also followed up by "but this is very sad to see :-(". I don't recall seeing the targetting of people based on their sexuality or gender identity. The range of opinions on things like GamerGate were fairly diverse, but the main attitude was "petty manchildren crying about muh gamez". Plenty of stuff I disagreed with, and plenty of comments that I would describe as being made in bad taste or downright offensive, but my take-away was that, at the time, the description of a vile nest of horrible reactionary alt-Right bullies as some on RationalWiki claimed it, was pretty off the mark. We had plenty of trolls on RationalWiki for sure, and some pretty vile ones too, and most people on KiwiFarms thought they were just a bunch of losers. Yet, somehow, they were still attributed to KiwiFarms shrug. I don't know the details of the this situation, and it's been six years so all sorts of things could have changed, but based on my previous experience I'm very hesitant to immediately jump to the conclusion that it's a "forum of people that bullies vulnerable people until they kill themselves" because I've seen all sorts of hyperbolic claims before and found them untrue. Maybe it's correct this time, but ... yeah. Fool me once, fool me twice... And if this comment wasn't controversial enough already: I feel this stuff is sometimes taken way too seriously, and that this is actively harmful to people like Near. I completely understand why they would feel upset if people say ugly things about them, but a lot of this crowd seems to provide only validation and recognition for being upset, and not enough "just some rando losers on a forum, get over it and stop crying". I don't think this is helping and an (unintentional) but vicious feedback loop. The fact of the matter is that the world has ugly people saying ugly things. This has always been true for all of history, and will always remain true. It sucks, but we can't change that. You can either shrug at insults or slurs, or you can become very upset with it, and it's absolutely not a given unchangeable fact that "getting upset" is the only possible action. I don't want to put too much weight in this letter as it's obviously written from a place of grief and anger, but it mostly seems to externalize Near's problems to KiwiFarms. It seems to me that their problems were mostly internal, as is usually the case with people suffering from long-term depression. Perhaps the external KiwiFarms "pushed them over the edge", but that's not the same as being the primary cause. This is important because if you focus on the wrong things you're not going to solve whatever problems you have. However, no matter what I say here, or what the facts of the case may be (maybe it is as bad as claimed, maybe not) I think ... none of that will really matter here anyway :-/
RickJWagner 5y ago
It has to start with very public campaigns showing that cyber-bullying just isn't acceptable. So maybe start with Christy Tiegen. Or Chris Evans. Jim Carrey. Some big names. They've all bullied people, including school children.

chris_wot 5y ago

Oh God, this brings back memories. Something like this happened to me on Wikipedia, and nearly ended in disaster. Who are Kiwi Farms and how do we stop them? Don’t they violate CloudFlare’s ToS? Edit: looking into this more, it looks like the accused him of paedophilia, and when this didn’t work they went after his trans friends.

Causality1 5y ago

I will never understand the type of self-destructive attacks that drive this. I don't agree with but can understand the logic of attacking some public figure, but one of your own? An anti-establishment, anti-intellectual property nerd? The driving force behind one of the most impressive emulators on the planet? Even if you hate LGBT people you can't ignore it in the case of someone who's doing free work that directly benefits you?

nine_k 5y ago
I think you might mistake them for some people who care. A bunch of bullies does care about who the victim is, all they care about is the jolt of adrenaline and the feeling of power an impunity.
kiawe_fire 5y ago
It’s easy to start thinking that the bullies are bullying because of behaviors, identities, or politics they don’t agree with. But ultimately many of us have strong feelings on many things, yet still possess the empathy to care about the well-being of those we disagree with. In my experience, bullies may use a certain external “vector” to bully others, but they do so because of their own internal issues that they choose to deal with by inflicting pain on others by exploiting those vectors. In some cases this might be anti-LGBTQ, in others it might be classist, or really any place someone can find and exploit a weakness [1] in someone else. At that point, it doesn’t matter if the person you’re bullying is somebody “on your side”, because it’s not really about the surface issue to begin with. Unfortunately it makes situations like this even harder to deal with, because it’s not just a matter of trying to impart empathy on the bully. [1] which is not to imply any identity is necessarily a weakness, but rather may be something a person struggles with personally and therefore provides an opening for someone else to exploit.

zxzax 5y ago

This is incredibly saddening news, near was an active HN user whose posts I always enjoyed reading. These cyber stalking websites needed to be shut down long ago.

colanderman 5y ago

Dup of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27652814 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27652814, which inexplicably is on the third page despite 200+ points.

naikrovek 5y ago
it isn't the number of points that determines position on the homepage, it is the number of upvotes per unit of time. once the upvote rate decreases, so does the story's position. very explicable.
- geofft 5y ago
  It briefly got to #2 but was deduped with other posts from earlier that hadn't gotten many comments. I guess that makes the algorithm count comments relative to the original timestamp and it fell to page two.
- striking 5y ago
  The person you're replying to is right, actually (aside from the merging a sibling comment mentions). Twitter links are default downweight by HN.
- colanderman 5y ago
  What @geofft said. Several stories of Near's passing with many comments were on the front page, but got deduped with the oldest which was not on the front page, and did not get bumped up in ranking accordingly.

sodality2 5y ago

>Byuu as far as I know, identified as non-binary, which is why they started harassing him. Previously this comment contained an ill-mannered correction of the mistaken pronoun usage. However, this is completely unnecessary so I will replace it with this message, and a reminder that Near used they/them pronouns. Apologies.

mkr-hn 5y ago
It's possible to be nonbinary and use any variety of pronouns. However, the letter from Near's friend used they/them, so that's probably the right set.
loeg 5y ago
Pretty tone-deaf and unnecessary to nitpick a eulogy.
- sodality2 5y ago
  This was not the eulogy quoted. Regardless, that was absolutely not my intention. I meant to highlight the pronoun misuse because I've seen a handful of comments here misgendering them, and it's really sad to see that happening to someone who just passed. My apologies if it came across as rude or tone-deaf. I attempted to edit after but I am on a mobile client that doesn't support it, nor even deleting comments.
  - hsbauauvhabzb 5y ago
    I’ve always been curious, is this intentional correcting of seemingly innocent mistakes actually something that non-cis people care about? There’s asshole intentional misgendering and there are legitimate accidents, which can be a slip of the tongue (I regularly misgender people accidentally, despite wanting to be respectful, I put it down to many decades of cis programming which I now need to undo). As a gay man I’m more than used to people assuming I’m straight, I don’t speak for all gay men but the consensus in our circle is to politely correct but not get obnoxious, I would guess other queer demographics would be similar.

colesantiago 5y ago

What is the average age of a Kiwi Farms user? Is it possible that these are all just kids with a lot of time trolling people? Of course what happened to Byuu/Near is repugnant and horrible and shouldn't happen to anyone. I just don't understand the mentality of people to do this and not feel remorse.

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vlunkr 5y ago
I think for many people in communities like this, it's easy to just place the blame on the rest of the community. If dozens of people are participating, they don't think their actions count for much. As for the people running the site, I don't know, they are just cruel.
woodruffw 5y ago
> What is the average age of a Kiwi Farms user? KF itself has been around for nearly a decade, and some of their targets had been harassed by members of KF for years prior to founding a dedicated website. There might be kids on KF, but the average user is firmly in the adult demographic. > I just don't understand the mentality of people to do this and not feel remorse. It's a mentality of dehumanization: their targets, in their eyes, deserve less than the basic dignity we give to human beings. That capacity for dehumanization stems from years of indoctrination in reactionary communities.
Covzire 5y ago
One interesting metric I think might be rate of psychopathy of KF users, since a forum dedicated to discussing (read: mocking) people seems to me like it would naturally attract people who revel in schadenfreude.

FounderBurr 5y ago

You can’t put any weight into what people on the internet think of you. Especially if you have no real life support to buoy you against the never ending torrent of free abuse available if you go looking for it. Be weird, do your own thing for your own reasons and let that be enough.

mkr-hn 5y ago
Humans have a wide range of emotional response curves. Sometimes they're really steep and being harassed is an absolute nightmare of highs and lows. This is called Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD) in neurodivergent discourse.
hsbauauvhabzb 5y ago
Try saying that when ‘those mean internet people’ are doxing your friends, or emailing your coworkers. Don’t downplay the issue.
psyc 5y ago
The biggest problem with KF, as I see it, isn’t really what they do and say. Most of what they do is quote people, and most of what they say is snappy, mean quips about the quotes. I’m sure there have been incidents when forum members escalated further, but it’s not their usual MO. The problem is that they specifically select targets based on how they react. The more a target obsesses over their own thread or responds emotionally to what KF posts about them, the more KF focuses attention on them. So KF’s favorite targets who get the most abuse are going to be exactly those who are least equipped to handle it.

edoceo 5y ago

Also in this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27657610 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27657610 Which links to an Google Drive doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/12pOhaaFh998B0kyc5Sm4IhlhIp1c9t5gDNTVVPaiJgI/preview?pru=AAABenS60fs*tnT9LrVbCkcTprLB89HsBQ https://docs.google.com/document/d/12pOhaaFh998B0kyc5Sm4Ihlh... Which claims to be from a mutual friend and is so fucking sad I couldn't finish reading.

umvi 5y ago

I'm half hoping the tech community bands together over this and shows Kiwi Farms that they poked the wrong beehive. I wish first and foremost all the KW bullies involved with this are tracked down, doxxed, and put through the US (or whatever their country of origin is) legal ringer. Additionally I wouldn't mind if KW itself is pwned by some Lulzsec type group.

xwdv 5y ago
As someone who had the shit beaten out of him all the time in middle school and could easily have been bullied into suicide if I had been born a generation too late, I’d prefer someone take the expedient and less politically correct route and just kill these people off, with little to no mercy.
somabarium 5y ago
Yes, I too want the prosecutor who drove Aaron Schwartz to commit suicide for their own financial/career gain to be put through the ringer. Get back to me when you get this done. Then we can talk shop about what the farms did.

Daneel_ 5y ago

What a tragedy. I've been very fortunate to be part of the SMW romhacks community for a few years, and have seen bsnes used heavily over that time. It's so sad to hear this news. There are a few prominent figures in the romhacks community who are notably trans, and the community is so welcoming and kind - I've never even really seen it come up during streams or other interactions, they're just a person doing things and it's a non-issue. I had hoped that things were improving, and that the world was starting to shift to be more accepting, but I know it's a slow process. Too slow for Near. What a loss. We have to do better.

someperson 5y ago

byuu/near was active on Hacker News too: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=near https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=near

someperson 5y ago
Here is byuu's emulation retirement post from 15 months ago: https://archive.md/2020.03.21-185629/https://byuu.org/articles/farewell https://archive.md/2020.03.21-185629/https://byuu.org/articl... (and previous HN discussion on that retirement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22644647 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22644647)

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btmorex 5y ago

I just read a couple Kiwi Farms threads and damn that place is depressing. Just an entire forum filled with cruel, shitty people.

gaudat 5y ago

>For a utopian future, we need to start an initiative to pair every talented programmer with a dedicated on call 24/7 tard handler. No massive HR departments, just one handler per programmer and the massive value they could potentially produce gets split 50/50. The programmer does their thing, and the handler tells them to stop posting shit on Twitter or hanging out on Discord and takes them on walks outside when they're about to have unstable meltdowns or send six figures to someone who runs a bully website.

thatfrenchguy 5y ago

I remember looking at bsnes/higan and feeling so impressed. Such a loss. Hope the people who caused this are brought to justice.

Minor49er 5y ago

Moon (Null) published the exchanges between him and buyy before byuu took his own life. In summary, byuu told Null to accept his offer of $120,000 to take down the byuu thread on Kiwi Farms, or else byuu would publicly post his own information and take his own life. Needless to say, Null declined: https://kiwifarms.net/threads/byuu-byuu_nyan-setsunakun0.43056/page-14#post-9313342 https://kiwifarms.net/threads/byuu-byuu_nyan-setsunakun0.430...

kurofune 5y ago

Is a Google Docs file written by an anonymous source proof enough of the death?

rkuykendall-com 5y ago

I'm unsure why their last Twitter thread seems to be unlinked everywhere, but here it is for anyone who wants to read their own words: https://twitter.com/near_koukai/status/1408940057235312640 https://twitter.com/near_koukai/status/1408940057235312640