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Comment by loginusername | Hacker News Reader

Cloudflare posts to HN should be in the same category as post about YC companies that are hiring. Ads. No voting.

It is difficult to believe that CF does not have a "special relationship" with YC, give PG's close ties to Project Honeypot, the precursor to Cloudflare. Nothing wrong with that.

And one could argue even the "informative and well-written" posts are always done with a purpose: recruit developers. These blog posts almost always read like a PR piece described in PG's "Submarine" essay. Again, that's fine.

But they also get promoted to the first page on HN with uncanny efficiency.

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Sorry to break this to you. CloudFlare posts get upvoted on HN because people like them, not because of any special relationship.

Was PG involved with Project Honeypot? I wasn't aware of that.

But yes, recruiting is a very important reason why we write very detailed, useful and informative blog posts and open source a large amount of code.

You do normally write very detailed, useful and informative posts. With all due respect that is not what we have in front of us today. I will be honest, after finishing "the article" I have no idea why Mr. Fathi joined cloudflare; nothing in the article sounds like the genuine thoughts or emotions of an actual employee and using his name for such a thinly veiled advertisement sort of dehumanizes him.

When you imagine the candidates that you want to attract and hire do you think that they will believe that these are Ben's actual words?

Is there a set of questions you'd particularly like to see answered? I'd be happy to ask Ben and maybe there could be a followup, or just post them here.

(I do agree this post was pretty light on content. I think it's because he and everyone else is busy. Bio Q&A posts are second to funding announcements in inherent boringness, though -- so you could also just wait until there's a more substantive post about e.g. the new KV store or luajit optimizations or something from engineering -- although there's also generally a desire to have the individual engineers who worked on a project post about it, rather than the head of engineering.)

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