Live data from Hacker News

I'm Joining CloudFlare

words.steveklabnik.com

101–110 of 124 posts

Re: I'm Joining CloudFlare

#101
post #33

This is a genre of post that I've never really understood. Klabnik is great and all, but, ok? Sure? Were people really record-scratching over his totally reasonable decision to take a good-paying job at a big company? It's obviously not just Klabnik. In fact, when we did Starfighter a few years back, I think Patrick did one of these posts as well. But: like every other post about Starfighter on HN while we were worki…

>But I felt the same way when Yegge announced his job at Grab --- just, "why am I reading this?"

Because many others on HN liked the story and upvoted it, it's not all about some individual's preferences.

"Intellectual curiosity" aside, it's also not all about discussing algorithms, startup strategies, and the nth JS framework this year. It's not like we don't get enough variety or that it's all "new job" posts...

The thing is once you do a number things in the open in geek-land, you become a short of mini celebrity in some circles. And people are interested to learn news about your career and progress -- e.g. of people like Steve, Katz, Abramov, Dahl, and so on.

Those sorts of posts also let people know how other people think about their career, the sort of process involved when interviewed/or asked to work with companies like Google, Cloudflare, etc (which someone reading HN and starting out with the whole programming thing from say Poland or Australia would not have the chance to know first-hand), and often what to expect from the person taking the job (e.g. I'll be working on X as part of my new job, and contribute back to the Open Source X).

Re: I'm Joining CloudFlare

#102
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems pretty reasonable for an internet-famous blogger/tech evangelist? Why shouldn't bloggers communicate with a willing audience? Their fans like to pay attention to them, and such people do at least informally participate in their company's public relations. (Yegge's rare recent posts are pretty transparently a hiring pitch.)

Is that what Klabnik is? An "evangelist"?

That was part of his role with Rust, so yes.

Re: I'm Joining CloudFlare

#103
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> CF still has a less sophisticated targeting system than these larger companies that have been doing this for a long time. Targeting is everything when it comes to CDNs. Do you have pointers to public data comparing services?

Just look up Maglev from Google. I mean, that stuff is years ahead of CF (don’t get me wrong, CF is fine). Argo from CF is a year or so old and that sort of stuff was done like 10+ years ago at Akamai. Cotendo had a great system that was more impressive 5+ years ago. Stackpath don’t have the sort of resources that CF has but have been doing edge compute for a while now (though not WASM).

This is why I asked for data: I was hoping someone might have some numbers for what this actually means in practice. For example, using the very broad numbers at https://www.cdnperf.com/cdn-compare?type=performance&locatio... shows that Google has the performance nod in North America but is slower in Africa, Oceania, and South America by over twice that margin where e.g. Akamai still has a substantial edge.

Those are also not numbers I'd want to base a serious decision on since when I've benchmarked CDNs in the past it usually came down to things like reliability and something like 90th percentile numbers since the median numbers were usually fast enough but the outliers were what made people mad. Similarly, some providers had surprisingly high DNS latency (500+ms!) in various parts of the world but delivered competitive performance after that, requiring some judgement.

Re: I'm Joining CloudFlare

#104
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As to why I'm commenting on it: because it was submitted for our comment, and this is my comment. Was it? Is there any particular expectation that HN users must comment on stories, as opposed to simply reading them and gaining whatever value they gain from that exercise? I don't know about you, but I certainly don't feel compelled to comment on every HN post. And judging by how many posts hit the /newest page and dis…

This is on the top/front page though

Do you posit that the presence of a story on the front-page implies that every single HN user is expected to comment? Personally I don't buy that. Hell, I don't even think "presence on the front page" implies that all, or even most, HN users will even read the link. But, who knows... maybe I'm wrong.

Re: I'm Joining CloudFlare

#105
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is on the top/front page though

Do you posit that the presence of a story on the front-page implies that every single HN user is expected to comment? Personally I don't buy that. Hell, I don't even think "presence on the front page" implies that all, or even most, HN users will even read the link. But, who knows... maybe I'm wrong.

You are, there is no maybe about it. The plain English meaning of 'it was submitted for our comment' is not 'everyone is required to comment on every story'. That's just a misinterpretation of your own.

Re: I'm Joining CloudFlare

#106
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you posit that the presence of a story on the front-page implies that every single HN user is expected to comment? Personally I don't buy that. Hell, I don't even think "presence on the front page" implies that all, or even most, HN users will even read the link. But, who knows... maybe I'm wrong.

You are, there is no maybe about it. The plain English meaning of 'it was submitted for our comment' is not 'everyone is required to comment on every story'. That's just a misinterpretation of your own.

AND.... THREAD DEATH.

Re: I'm Joining CloudFlare

#107
post #49

This wasm-at-the-edge stuff is so exciting! It's always dangerous to predict the future, but one possible future for the web feels like it's starting to come into focus: javascript as the default language everywhere (frontend, backend, edge), plus the ability to compile lots and lots of other languages to WebAssembly. A runtime that works everywhere (or, more accurately, a handful of partially compatible runtimes) wi…

You don't need WASM to deploy compiled binaries to a web server, so I don't understand the excitement. It may be convenient for the provider (CloudFlare), but not necessarily for the customer. Performance will be better without WASM and it's an additional step in the build pipeline, compared with CloudFlare supporting any x86 binary. WASM's purpose is to compile languages to run in a web browser. A CloudFlare "worker…

It's useful to be able to write code that runs on your server, and in the browser, and in an "edge" thingy too (for some definition of "edge"). x86 binaries aren't going to be able to do that.

Re: I'm Joining CloudFlare

#108

Of course the submission disappears in true corporate controlled fashion once uncomfortable comments appear. Must be a fun place to work at. Is Cloudflare tracking this post?

Indeed. There were like half a dozen people from the company all commenting on this post including their CTO. And then poof, gone.

Re: I'm Joining CloudFlare

#109
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you posit that the presence of a story on the front-page implies that every single HN user is expected to comment? Personally I don't buy that. Hell, I don't even think "presence on the front page" implies that all, or even most, HN users will even read the link. But, who knows... maybe I'm wrong.

You are, there is no maybe about it. The plain English meaning of 'it was submitted for our comment' is not 'everyone is required to comment on every story'. That's just a misinterpretation of your own.

The plain English meaning of 'it was submitted for our comment' is not 'everyone is required to comment on every story'.

In the context of how it was used, that was absolutely the implication. Tptacek submitted that as the rationale to explain his commenting, when he (obviously) could have easily skipped the whole thread. Ultimately there was no real reason for him to bother commenting in the first place...

Re: I'm Joining CloudFlare

#110

Of course the submission disappears in true corporate controlled fashion once uncomfortable comments appear. Must be a fun place to work at. Is Cloudflare tracking this post?

Indeed. There were like half a dozen people from the company all commenting on this post including their CTO. And then poof, gone.

We certainly didn't want the post to disappear. It was flagged by HN (either the mods or people with enough karma to flag), we would happily have it be restored if it were under our power.

I've read through every comment on this page and there's nothing here I wouldn't stand behind, even if much of seems to be misunderstood as in this thread.

Post reply on HN