Live data from Hacker News

We raised a bunch of money

fly.io

281–290 of 484 posts

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#281
post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you are telling us what fly will be spending the money on. what OP is asking is, what did the investors receive in exchange for giving fly the money.

Stock.

this might be the weirdest conversation I've ever had on this weird site.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#282

Will you be publishing a follow up blog post about how you’re increasing API user fees once you’ve monopolized your particular market? Or how about how you’ll be increasing margins for investors in 5 years as you prepare for your IPO? Why won’t you suffer the fate of every single other tech company that raises a shit load of money which is completely and irrevocably selling out any pretense of being beneficial for cu…

Welcome to capitalism, mate. Without exploitation there is no excess, no abundance. Without exploitation there are no profits.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#283

It's always seemed to me that Fly has a really awesome, modern perspective on software engineering and that they'd be a great place to work, but I've also always felt like there's a glaring inconsistency between their marketing and product. What I mean is it seems like their marketing (and docs) are all about how trivial it is to spin up globally distributed app servers but the only customers who would need globally…

It's the age old conundrum where every other startup presumes they will hit "Google-scale" and therefore needs the latest shiny Google-scale architecture from day 1, whether that is K8s, SPA, GraphQL, or edge deployments.

Sell spades during a gold rush.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's the promise of pay-per-minute (or even second) cloud computing, right? Maybe I misunderstood your point, but that's the promise for cloud computing customers . Fly.io is a cloud computing provider , and those are all hugely capital intensive businesses.

Fly.io can be a cloud computing provider while being a cloud computing customer, just like Heroku and others.

They can be (in theory), but aren't (in reality)

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#285

Will you be publishing a follow up blog post about how you’re increasing API user fees once you’ve monopolized your particular market? Or how about how you’ll be increasing margins for investors in 5 years as you prepare for your IPO? Why won’t you suffer the fate of every single other tech company that raises a shit load of money which is completely and irrevocably selling out any pretense of being beneficial for cu…

Yeah, I follow the same view, I've stopped paying attention to companies that raise venture capital or are publicly traded (aka, they don't truly own the direction of their own business). Whatever good is there is _always_ subverted by the persistent need for "growth" and "increasing engagement" and hitting metrics that are pleasing to investors. It'll start out pretty minor, but the trajectory is persistently altered at nearly every single point of decision. The sway is there, no matter what, and sometimes major decisions are driven solely by "it's what our stakeholders want/need", and the thought of the end-user of the software is practically an afterthought or side-effect.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#286
post #18

I like fly.io because it's just (much) better Heroku. I also liked Heroku, so it's sad to see their status now.

I'm looking to deploy a $5/m DigitalOcean server (single binary) to run a simple HTTP[s] server, with persistent sqlite/fs and backed up via braindead rsync to my local system. Is fly competitive with this? These sorts of calculations are always awkward for me with PaaS providers. I know what i'm getting with $5/m with DO, but with PaaS it often feels abstracted and sneaky. Heroku in my very, very old memory was a co…

I ran fly for a six months and it went from free to $10/mo and I still don’t know why.

I’d say if static pricing is important to you stick with DO.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#287
post #48

> There are two kinds of platform companies : the kind where you can get your Python or Rust or Julia code running nicely, and the kind where you find a way to recompile it to Javascript. Throwing shade at cloudflare edge workers?

Anyone familiar with an up-to-date comparison between the two platforms?

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#288
post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you couldn't raise money, then only people who are already extremely rich would be able to start a business of any size, let alone one that requires deploying physical hardware in multiple regions You’re describing the current state of the world We’re there already. The entire system is built to exploit everybody who does not have significant capital to fight back against it

I am so curious why you repeatedly spit in the collective face of the millions of small business owners in the US and around the world. If what you say were true, the world would exist as a series of 3-5 megacorps, and small businesses would not exist. Since they do exist, how do you square that with your claim that only the "extremely rich would be able to start a business of any size" is currently true?

I would also add to your point that starting a business is easier than it has ever been. While far from perfect, the internet has been an amazing equalizer.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#289
post #72

Have you had a crack at making VoIP call quality better globally? It’s one of those things you can’t cache but I bet there are still some fancy things you can do to speed it up.

Fly.io does VoIP calling?

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#290
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My impression is that when fly.io has been discussed in the recent past on HN, its founders/employees/whatever swarm the comments to try and control the conversation, heh.

Have you seen other attempts by other companies to do this here, though? They often end badly. It only works for fly.io because they know how to read the room and aren’t trying to do something horrible. EDIT: Oh, and they often add valuable info to what they posted, too.

Yea, tbh i've not looked closely at fly before (but am now), but i have seen exactly what you've said from other companies.

The responses here do feel swarmed, but also informative, "honest"[1], and often interesting about tech/mindset/etc.

This post swayed my upcoming DO purchase, so.. it works a bit at least, hah.

[1]: As much as we can assume, of course.

Post reply on HN