throwaway6845

I would really like you to clarify your intentions on serving non-HTML content.

I say this slightly nervously as a Cloudflare customer who serves some amount of binary data. One message is "it's ok if you're on a paid plan". Another is "it's not ok at any time". My suspicion is that "it's ok unless we notice you".

If you could come up with consistent understandable messaging that would help a lot. I don't mind paying (stay competitive against AWS and Hetzner and that's all I need) but the uncertainty is not good.

> I'm sure it would become evident that they know more about spam and anti-spam efforts than anybody else in existence

Really?

I can point you to Hard Problems that have been solved better at little startups than at Google - or, indeed, at any other bigco. That's why acquisitions happen.

Why does Google having 1000 engineers working on a problem automatically mean they are the smartest?

there was also his Thaddeus Zu/Ashley Madison story, which was pure conjecture

It's a common HN fallacy that everyone here is a developer whose main life aim is to remain employable as a developer.

Lots of us are here to ship stuff; to provide viable products that customers will like.

Moving to AWS from Hetzner would not help me ship stuff. Moving to AWS from Hetzner would not result in a better product.

Mostly, headspace. If I run my own server, I just need to apply my existing Ubuntu sysadmin knowledge. If I use AWS, I have to learn a whole load of AWS-specific domain knowledge, starting with their utterly baffling product names. My time is more valuable than that.

Also, sheer cost. Literally everyone I know in my particular part of the industry uses Hetzner boxes. For what I do, it’s orders of magnitude cheaper than AWS.

This is very similar to my experience. I recently measured the difference on my site as 10%-15% (also a non-tech site, though sadly not at $8m a year yet!)

While I don't enjoy the blog either (partly for the reason you cite, and partly for the unspoken assumption behind many posts that FAANG-like companies are a good thing and a good working environment), I wouldn't phrase it like that. There is enough misogyny on the internet that starting a critique with "I hate" is not going to get your point across lucidly.

What's wrong with finding out how people use my site, so I can write more of the content they like, and make it easier for them to navigate through?

I agree. I have a big problem with UBO etc. blocking self-hosted, single-site Piwik. It feels like being penalised for doing the right thing.

> Elon Musk (right) has drawn comparisons to Gerald Ratner in recent years

The 1980s British businessman who Musk most reminds me of is not Gerald Ratner but Robert Maxwell.

Other RDBMSs Are Clearly Less Egregious

> I don't want my ISP to inject JavaScript to random pages or analyze my traffic. That should be downright illegal. They should be like water supply company: provide me damn clean water and get out of my way.

I don't want my search engine to do that either. They should provide me damn accurate results and get out of my way.

Unfortunately, whereas I have a choice of several good ISPs here (UK), I have a choice of precisely one good search engine - Google - and it analyses my traffic to high heaven. (And I've tried DuckDuckGo, on several occasions for several weeks at a time, and I'm afraid it still sucks.)

OS X has always had it, albeit a fairly limited implementation. Try it in TextEdit.