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Comment by jgrahamc | Hacker News Reader

Read our S-1, it's all in there.

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1477333/000119312519...

II love cloudflare. It has really helped out with several sites/projects that I have worked on and the service is top notch. I am also an investor. I tend to invest in stuff which I use a lot or trust/respect the employees. Weirdly what made me really invest is the level of geekiness on the company. I remember seeing you guys using a lava lamp wall to generate entropy and just thought "that's awesome". I just wanted to say don't change. Your lz4 implementation, aes gcm golang optimizations have directly benefitted me. Coupled with really high quality post mortem articles, articles on interesting things like compression, encryption, networking, a few random articles (the privacy focussed file system recently comes to mind, written at the same time I was making my own distributed fs) just leave me with a lot of respect for the culture there.

I was worried a bit when I saw the initial IPO that the free tier would leave (despite promises it wouldn't) but that doesn't seem to be the case. Literally the only bad thing I've seen on the site is recently you switched from recaptcha to a new one that I had a real tough time with logging in today - it was a bit glitchy on my pc. The only suggestion I thought of as well would be a simple "maintenance mode" similar to the "I'm under attack mode" which would allow those of us without super-ha to quickly toggle on something to pop up a "sorry server"/site is down form maintenance page without having to mess with our proxies/web servers.

Anyway I know this comes across as totally kissing-ass but I just wanted to say thanks to someone who actually works there. Everyone fat fingers stuff every now and again,don't sweat it.

If you use Cloudflare workers, you could put together a maintenance page with a simple script + Cloudflare Workers KV as a toggle switch. It would cost $5/mo if you're not already using workers.

It's a bit of a sad story, but maybe you'll like this read about one of the guys who laid the foundation for their tech and his sad decline: https://www.wired.com/story/lee-holloway-devastating-decline...

I really liked the stories of his skill when he was in his prime. Very inspiring.

Sounds lame but this story really touched me. I recently visited a family member who's nearing the end and it broke my heart to see them in that condition.

I'm not sure what to take from this. But thank you for sharing it

Wow, thanks for linking to the article. What an awful story. Makes you think about the wisdom of undertaking major elective surgery if it's not absolutely required in the short term.

His wife saw it as a turning point, but the doctors and neurologists don’t seem to think FTD is linked to surgery in any way

I dont know how I missed the Cloudflare IPO and this Story. So thanks for posting it. Extremely good writing, though the story was very sad.

I wonder if there are any relationship between FTD and how clever a person or how much brain a person uses.

Nothing beyond the normal "cognitive reserve" findings that high education and broad cognitive engagement makes the brain pathology take longer to reduce your functioning to a dementia state.

Reminds me of this part of Robert Sapolsky's Human Behavioural Biology lecture series:

Robert Sapolsky - Phineas Gage and frontal damage https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wKDXzk8Wm4

Never heard of him but I read this article in one sitting (extremely hard thing for me) and I felt some unexplained connections with this story. A Beautiful Mind is another book which I very often go back to and go through similar emotions.

In all, it was a captivating read.

> I remember seeing you guys using a lava lamp wall to generate entropy and just thought "that's awesome".

To be sure (and for the sake of internet rando completenessism), it does look like CF waited until the original SGI patent on the technique ran out. :)

https://patents.google.com/patent/US5732138

> it does look like CF waited until the original SGI patent on the technique ran out.

As ever, innovation was brick-walled until IP got out of the way.

> To be sure (and for the sake of internet rando completenessism), it does look like CF waited until the original SGI patent on the technique ran out. :)

That's right. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23860658

I work at hCaptcha, we run CF's captcha. If you're having problems in the future, popping open a debugger and capturing the results can help us figure out what's going on. But also: browser, OS, site, ...?

Right now: there is an issue with Safari users on the most recent iOS and OS X, where 3rd party cookies have now been disabled by default. We're working on a solution.

If that's your issue, you can fix on your side in the short-term by not using Safari, or by enabling 3rd party cookies.

I'd love to see your reply to the blind person commenting on your product here.

Here it is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23903405

I cannot believe apple decided to roll that out in the middle of COVID. I got hit pretty hard with it and am finally rolling out a fix for my own stuff.

(posted in case others are hit by this) using `requestStorageAccess()` on a user click event seems to work and that's what we're rolling out :/ https://gist.github.com/iansltx/18caf551baaa60b79206

The relevant excerpt seems to be here:

Market Opportunity

We believe our platform disrupts several large and well-established IT markets. The key markets that are addressed by our platform include VPN, internal and external firewalls, web security (including web application firewalls and content filtering), distributed denial of service (DDoS) prevention, intrusion detection and prevention, application delivery controls, content delivery networks, domain name systems, advanced threat prevention (ATP), and wide area network (WAN) technology. From our analysis based on IDC data, $31.6 billion was spent on those products in 2018, which is expected to grow to $47.1 billion in 2022, representing a compound annual growth rate of 10.5%. We also are actively developing new products to address adjacent markets including compute, storage, 5G, and Internet of Things (IoT) that are not included in the estimate of our addressable market.

That’s just general market analysis. It doesn’t say anything about what their hedge is. Or was it simply that the existing actors were that inefficient/price gauging.

LOL, I'm sure it is, but referring someone that is wondering about the "back of the napkin math" to an approximately 250 page S-1 filing is sort of ludicrous.

Congratulations with growing so big. Why aren't there dozens of lookalikes by now?

I mean CDNs that will let you override the origin's cache instructions and do a decent job of DDOS protection, and whose feature list otherwise looks a little like Cloudflare's.

Yes, why isn't the CDN a commodity?

CDNs are expensive to build, and often not very useful to customers until you've built out a large portion of it (actual hardware required, you can't just run it atop AWS). On top of this, much of the money is in Enterprise. So you've got to compete with Akamai, AWS, Fastly, Incapsula, Cloudflare, and several other notable ones to get any customers to speak of.

There are smaller CDNs out there. You can find them readily enough.

Yes, but for a customer it's trivial to swap out one CDN for another, isn't it?

Depending on how you integrated it and how deeply, it may be trivial. Certainly going from one DNS-based CDN to another can be pretty easy - a Cloudflare / CloudFront swap could be quick.

Which suggests to me that CDNs are already a commodity in some ways.

One answer - It's much, much harder to build and operate a global network infrastructure that it might seem. It's also even harder to invent some sort of "killer feature" or other genuine innovation on the experience. You're likely not using Cloudflare simply for commoditized pipes alone, but for other features or designed experiences in their offering.

A second answer - there are a bunch of bottom-barrel commoditized pipe services. You likely haven't heard of them because they're so generic. They've existed before Cloudflare, and more will be created in the future https://www.citrix.com/products/citrix-intelligent-traffic-m...

Hey John, thanks for taking the time to reply.

Respectfully, the info in the S1 (flywheels, etc.) seem to be what sustains you _now_.

Maybe a better question is "how did you identify and kick off that flywheel?"

Don't take this as being glib, but isn't this the entire point of funding rounds? Demonstrate growth and talk about a few approaches to creating a business model that you're investigating, which then brings investors on as they're betting you'll find one that'll succeed?

Since you’re here, any response to the top comment re: inaccessibility to disabled persons?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com