eastdakota

I love this:

https://river-runner-global.samlearner.com/

Click on any spot on Earth and see where a raindrop there will flow until it reaches an ocean.

We’ve applied protection for all Cloudflare customers, including those on our free plan: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-customers-are-protect...

Before Cloudflare, I built a company around this called Unspam. It wasn’t commercially very successful, but it allowed you a ton of power around routing/filtering emails on a per-email basis (e.g., require senders to certain emails to pass a Turing test, add a header to others, turn up or down spam filtering by the address). I haven’t had the problem the author references, but mostly because I preface conversations with: “This is going to sound weird, but my email is…”

There’s a security benefit in making your email not-the-same across services. Yes, perhaps many of mine are guessable if you know the pattern I use. But it defeats non-targeted scanning. People target me (I was just sanctioned by Russia along with Mark Zuckerberg and Marc Benioff! Woot!!) yet exactly zero people have targeted me this way.

I’m still one of the few remaining Unspam users. Works great to this day. (Impressive given I wrote the PERL that powers it.) Actually think someone could spend a week with Cloudflare + Workers + Email Routing + Area1 and replicate the functionality+++. I’d gladly pay $5/mo for that. Wouldn’t be a big business. But an example of a bootstrappable lifestyle business that could easily cash flow enough to healthily sustain a couple developers.

Let me know if you build it:

crazyhnidea@matthew.unspam.com

Nope. Individual customer setting, not a Cloudflare policy. We work closely with the Firefox team on many projects.

I’ve used BBEdit since, I think, 1997. Paid user since 2000, or so. Even since I retired from writing code regularly, every Cloudflare blog post’s first draft I’ve written started in BBEdit. Real or imagined, can’t stand the typing lag in any other editor I’ve tried to use. Great product!

This is the most common misconception about our business. Bandwidth, when you're small. But the scale economics in bandwidth are unlike almost anything else. As you get more and more bandwidth, the cost per bit drops until, in most places, it will go to zero. If you know those dynamics are present in a market, you can forward price knowing that you'll get to those scale advantages. Today, servicing a new free customer is virtually costless to us. So, to this college-bound customer and others, welcome.

Uh....

We were profitable the last two quarters and cash flow positive the last quarter.

Tip to anyone reading this, even if you think you're going to be a software developer the rest of your life, take an accounting course.

> I guess I also wanna say that I'm sorry Cloudflare. I realize that I'm not the target market. I am literally not giving Cloudflare any money. There is no reason they should support an esoteric and bizarre configuration that I do. But what they do, they do pretty well. So, thanks, I guess, for letting me (and probably lots of other people) run their websites and services from a NUC under their dorm's bunk bed.

No need to apologize. Happy to have you. Promise, we won't sell your data or do anything sleazy. Too easy to leave us if we did. And good luck in college!

PS - When you get a good paying job after college and they ask whether they should use Cloudflare or not, hope you'll tell them how well we treated you. That's how we get most of our multi-million dollar customers.

Yes. That's the plan. Open Area1's incredible tech to everyone. Make phishing a thing you only read about in history books. One edit: months, not years.

Yes, but still checking Hacker News.

Sure, because we're hiring like crazy to build new things. As we said during our last earnings call, we intend to stay at break even as long as we can achieve extraordinary revenue growth and continue to deliver innovative new products.

The more relevant number for this comparison would be our gross margin — much we have to spend on things like bandwidth and servers to service our customers divided by the revenue those customers generate — which in Q3 2021 (our last reported quarter) was 78%. Which is… pretty good for a services business like ours.

I don't know the specifics of this customer, but I don't see anything that leads me to believe our margins would be out of the ordinary with them. There are a lot of scale economics in our business. In other words, we can definitely do things for less money because we service a lot of customers than any one customer could hope to do it on their own.

I upvoted Kenton’s post. He’s the reason Workers exists. Surprised anyone worried about him commenting. I’d only be worried if I were a competitor who pissed him off by publishing BS stats. I’d imagine there’ll be an incredibly thorough and totally unimpeachable benchmarking study that comes out of this. And, anywhere we’re not the fastest, we soon will be. Game on.

I am a lawyer and also the CEO of Cloudflare. I have no idea why that clause is in our ToS. It was a surprise to me when it was pointed out recently. Not sure when or why it got included. Best guess is it was when some “stress tester” services decided to “benchmark” us by performing DDoS attacks and we thought we needed another justification to shut them off. Has been a loooong time since we worried about such things. Regardless, we decided weeks ago we’re removing the clause during the next ToS refresh. That’s scheduled for the coming weeks. And, in the meantime, have no issue with anyone benchmarking our performance. And seems we should do a more thorough and unimpeachable set of comparisons ourselves. Stay tuned.

Alta Utah's Supreme Lift makes a 10° left turn without detaching from the cable using a traditional angle station: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uimHqekX__4

I hope it gets even better. :-)

Or we could do both?

You’ve figured us out! Damn it; it would have been such a great plan if we hadn’t decided to give DDoS mitigation services away for free. Dagnabit!

https://blog.cloudflare.com/unmetered-mitigation/

Many drives across the country Art kept me awake. The more crazy and outrageous, the more alert I remained. Seemed like a feature I’m sure saved lives in the short term; and seemed, at the time, harmless in the long term.

Why is this downvoted? This is some of the best advice ever on HN.

It does. If you’re having issues, submit a support ticket.

That I’m aware of, yes.

Building a DB. Several different flavors, actually. But one needs to be a distributed, multi-tenant, ACID compliant SQL database. We also need to have hooks to allow you to connect to any third party database that makes sense for your application. So… stay tuned.

Thanks for the feedback. I don't think we're intentionally charging to turn off CNAME flattening. May be that we just don't expose that to lower plans because we're worried it'll confuse people. Raised the feedback with the team. In most cases, CNAME flattening is a significant win on performance. But understand when you'd want to do it in some cases.

Will also check on NS delegation. Again, my hunch is that we only charge for it because it's something that less sophisticated users we worry would get themselves in trouble messing with.

I used to give all new managers at Cloudflare Daniel Pink’s book “Drive.” Summary of a bunch of interesting research on what really motivates people.

:-)

If we can get GPUs deployed at the scale we want, adapting to whatever language or framework you want to use to program them will be easy. The challenge is getting GPUs into enough machines in enough places to make this interesting. But, again, we're working on it.

Except you can put R2 in front of S3 and set it to "slurp" mode. That way as objects are requested through the normal course of use they'll be stored in R2. You can then keep S3 as a backup, or delete the objects that have moved over.

Being a proxy is cool.

It depends, as you said. You can look at our network map and get some sense of where we likely have a little vs a lot of equipment:

https://www.cloudflare.com/network/

But we deploy enough equipment to meet local demand (so will roughly correlate to population served). And that makes sense for ISPs to support because the alternative is them paying for back haul bandwidth themselves.