My personal Cloudflare pro/con list:
+ Keeps the web working at scale
+ Made me a lot of money in the stock market
- It's so very high-touch/sales-intensive. I want a tiered public price list that is universally adhered to. Otherwise there's always that nagging feeling that I'm getting screwed for not being aggressive enough, or something. I know I'm fighting an uphill battle here. See also this documentary about Jared Dunn/Ed Chambers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-CA2EW4Z_U
OTOH they also keep DDoS providers working at scale. Look for "stressers" or "booters" and check their DNS, 9 times out of 10 the attackers which Cloudflare offers to protect you from are themselves hiding behind Cloudflare.
And for that, I mean, is it really a big deal that it's behind cloudflare? There are plenty of similar reverse proxy services, I assume they just used cloudflare because it's reliable and cheap (and as people in the business, they probably know that it's effective). Would it make a big difference if they didn't use a proxy- are people going to start ddosing the ddos providers?
Well yeah, the DDoS providers are strongly incentivized to fire all of their spare capacity at each other to thin out the competition. It's just futile to do so when nearly every player in the game is fronted by one of the biggest DDoS mitigation services in the world, which consistently turns a blind eye.
I wonder how this will impact the blog-driven engineering culture.
I've always loved reading his blog posts on his own site, and learning / using the wide variety of his projects (hello POPfile!, hello Make!) and interests (Analytical Engine!).
Thanks for your efforts to get the British Govt to apologize for their actions towards Alan Turing!
Well deserved promo, Sir!
> It might seem lowly to be a Programmer, but in a world where so much is driven by computers there's nothing shameful in being the person who makes them go.
I find it interesting that in 2012 he thought the title of "Programmer" was shameful. In 2012 I was a somewhat recent grad and definitely more junior, at that time I thought programmers were the smartest folks at my company, exactly because they were "the [people] who make [computers] go".
In fact it didn't make the frontpage at all! and HN should definitely have a frontpage thread about this.
https://www.wired.com/story/lee-holloway-devastating-decline...
Hopefully he is at peace.
That said, I totally missed this announcement in March and, since it never made HN's frontpage at the time, I imagine most of the community missed it too. Therefore I propose to arrange a repost when the time is right and we can have a HN party to celebrate jgrahamc. In the meantime, I guess, both belated and premature congratulations!
andrethegiant•9mo ago
dang•9mo ago