An unrelated, yet honest question.
There have been many posts hitting the HN frontpage regarding fly.io recently. Is it healthy to have so much content about a single PAAS platform showing up here so often now?
There have been many posts hitting the HN frontpage regarding fly.io recently. Is it healthy to have so much content about a single PAAS platform showing up here so often now?
> I wish more startups would achieve this, YC or not. Whenever I run across one that's trying to succeed on HN, I try to help them do so (YC or not)—why? because it makes HN better if the community finds things it loves here. Among the startups of today, I can think of only two offhand who are showing signs of maybe reaching darling status—fly.io (YC), and Tailscale (not YC).
Personally too both these companies are doing a lot of incredible things. I also love Litestream, phoenixframework and other things they are doing.
To the examples, fly.io caught my attention primarily by offering a useful free tier DB, and tailscale has my attention as a "beat this" offering for some homelab access stuff (meaning some stuff could but I at least have a benchmark). Until this post I didn't actually know one was YC and another wasn't. I'm interested in both purely because of HN posts.
I put the OP in the second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool, explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308), but that was according to the usual 5-second standard of "I think the community might like this one". I didn't look closely enough to tell whether the article was positive or negative towards Fly.io, nor is it our job to care about that. What we care about is intellectual curiosity (see https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).
There's one big exception to the above, which is the official Launch HN posts we do for YC startups - those are described at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html - they get official placement on HN's front page, as explained there. But they're always clearly indicated by "Launch HN".
I personally find it super interesting which startups end up achieving HN darling status - the classic examples of this are Stripe and Cloudflare - I'd add Hashicorp - and it would be fun to make a list of others. But from a moderation point of view it doesn't matter whether such a startup is YC-funded or not and we try to be as neutral as we can that way. I'm not saying we don't have unconscious biases or conflicts of interest (such a claim is impossible!) but we're strict about how we approach this consciously, and we have quite a lot of practice with that.
It's a natural concern of course, and I'm always happy to answer questions.
p.s. Incidentally, there's at least one HN user who has made a long series of accounts angrily accusing us of secretly favoring a non-YC startup (the one mentioned in the GP comment). We haven't, but because that startup is well-loved by the community, it's easy to see how it could come across that way, with threads appearing frequently and filling up quickly with comments.
Beyond the western borders of this little town, the tech gold rush has both expanded to epic proportions, affecting all the economies in the world, and also gone through enough booms and busts that the phrase "gold rush" seems somehow off.
As more and more young'uns join and jaded veterans return to throng the tavern alike, it often seems to be on the brink of either exploding with the largest gun fight in history, or jumping the shark.
And yet, against all odds, it retains its original magnetism - drawing throngs that grow in number and diversity while seers like [https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=patio11](https://news.y... and [https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=tptacek](https://new... continue to return - dispensing worldly wisdom worth its weight in gold from corner tables.
The secret is the man at the corner of the bar @dang, always around with a friendly smile and a towel on his shoulder. The only sheriff in the west who still doubles as the friendly bartender: always polite, always willing to break up a fight with kind words and clean up messes himself.
Yes a cold-hard look from him is all it takes to get most outlaws to back down, yes, his Colt-45 "moderator" edition is feared by all men, but the real secret to his success: his earnest passion (some call it an obsession) for the seemingly sisyphean task of sustaining good conflict - letting it simmer but keeping it all times below the boiling point based on "the code":
"Conflict is essential to human life, whether between different aspects of oneself, between oneself and the environment, between different individuals or between different groups. It follows that the aim of healthy living is not the direct elimination of conflict, which is possible only by forcible suppression of one or other of its antagonistic components, but the toleration of it—the capacity to bear the tensions of doubt and of unsatisfied need and the willingness to hold judgement in suspense until finer and finer solutions can be discovered which integrate more and more the claims of both sides. It is the psychologist's job to make possible the acceptance of such an idea so that the richness of the varieties of experience, whether within the unit of the single personality or in the wider unit of the group, can come to expression."
May the last great tavern in the West and it's friendly bartender-sheriff live long and prosper.
Same reason for a while the world seemed full of Rust articles -- at that point in time there wasn't (speaking as a C++ programmer) a pile of quality C++ articles around which the Rust was pushing out.
If there aren't new and different articles to fill the HN front page, then there has to be something.
And that something ends up being a base layer of blogs about "current stuff".
If it's getting posted to HN but not getting traction, for god's sake someone please let me know that too.
Literally the only thing we're trying to do is have HN be as interesting as possible. Missing out on the best content is disastrous for that goal—sort of like missing out on the best startups is disastrous for an investor.
We have a big announcement/technical post queued up --- we'd planned to run it on Monday --- and we're holding off on it because of the "organic" attention we're getting this week. We'd much rather talk about things like Litestream, app pentests, hiring processes, and how we replaced Nomad in our architecture.
But we're as aware as everyone else is that the front page has limited bandwidth, and we can't be on it all the time, so we're waiting for this (hopefully short) wave of attention to crest before we post our own stuff.
I never look at the person name when replying or voting, only the content. For example, I remembered this tptacek not because I remembered his posts, but because they get frequently mentioned in other people posts.
It didn't for me. I also don't look at who posted links. But fly.io is leaning into a concept I want to use and want to become more of a thing, and that's using SQLite for more web scale applications. Because there's web scale of Google and there's web scale of the rest of us, and I'm sick of paying the operational overhead of having a full database cluster when the app doesn't utilize its features any more than it would a SQLite db.
But in the past everyone turned their nose up at SQLite because they were cool and you were dirty and gross if you wanted to simplify things.
Don't you know we just need horizontal scaling because any second now we're going to get more than 10 write requests per second?
But fly.io leaning into litestream for replicating those databases is a thumbs up to using simple boring technology (SQLite), while still getting 80% of the benefits of doing containers hosted in a cloud platform.
This is why Cloudflare is generally beloved here as well: the principles show up in the comments whenever it’s mentioned.
There's also a lot of momentum for the Elixir/Phoenix right now, and they're pretty tightly integrated with that community.
There are an awful lot of programming languages and methods that receive no hype. I have wondered about this, the most likely reason
Is that the majority of the crowd at the site come from a shared sphere, and to some agree the same type of priorities.
Personally, I like to stay away from the bleeding edge technology.
That does not constitute much of a problem for a lot of companies.
The annoying part is that recruiters often cram all sorts of technology into requirements for a CV and a job, even if the client has no need for those things, at least not yet.
There are millions or at least 100,000 of "enterprise" software projects out there.
I do admit it is not as sexy as the latest and greatest and start ups but it is a field where there are a whole lot of devs working in.
They do perhaps not spend as much time on HN, or they are quiet
Most applications and bigger chunk of them, are transactional and enterprise software is all about consistency and accuracy.
Nevertheless, I think its a great engineering fiat in and of itself anyway and hence gets discussed often probably could be the explanation.
The usecase I had for my startup (a few years ago, before fly.io) was "I have an Elixir/Phoenix application - stuff working in the background plus web frontend". I would like to host it with as little thinking about individual servers, load balancers etc. I went with GAE at the time and it was fine.
Fly.io seems like a much more streamlined version of the same thing, with the addition of "global load balancing" stuff on top, if I got to the point of caring about international customers.
Fly.io has a great combination of user virality/momentum and fundamentally technically interesting content on a wide range of topics.
Typically this type of thing goes in phases, and I wouldn’t worry about it, assuming you’re already OK with HN being biased towards YC-funded startups.
I think the lesson is partly that the typical somewhat-deranged writing style/topics are popular. More companies should try to write engaging blog posts and be more open if they want to be successful.
It seems to have paid off for them as I would guess at least some of the people trying it out are learning about fly.io from HN.
How does a container/database as a service platform competes with a Wireguard as a service platform?
Assessing if attending on the shoulders of the new Giants who stand up every few years is a difficult problem that I'm interested in and I appreciate the amount of context given here considering different use cases.
There are other alternatives like Render.com, railway.app, etc but it is clear that fly.io is unsurprisingly overhyped by the HN crowd, especially if you are looking for a Heroku alternative.
It’s like asking a barber if you need a haircut.
fly.io spends a tremendous amount of time on creating interesting technical content that attracts this type of attention. The company is intentional about this as a customer acquisition strategy. They have an illustrator on staff for their unique art style, for example. Their founder and senior technical staff engage with these posts and answer questions, etc.. It's not YC favoritism, it's a deep understanding of the developer first mindset / ecosystem and targeting it as a company strategy.
Planetscale does a good job at https://planetscale.com/blog
In particular "Generics can make your Go code slower"[1] which received deservedly a lot of attention here.
1 - https://planetscale.com/blog/generics-can-make-your-go-code-...