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.
There's certainly power, that's at least inherent in modding a popular platform. But as a _very_ casual observer mainly lurking around, I'm satisfied with interpreting dangs stance as anything with any traction gets boosted, yc or not.
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.
We don't do that - it's important that the interest in these things be community-organic. We're interested in tracking what the community is interested in, and we never try to gin up interest in anything (ok, except APL). It wouldn't work anyhow; that's not how a technology becomes influential, at least not in this community.
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.
HN: one of the last remaining Great Good Places of the Internet, a lone tavern in an iconic gateway town to the now not-so-wild west.
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.
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.
My personal feeling (based on what I upvote) is that ycombinator isn't getting enough quality writing about tech issues to fill the front page, so if it's "full of fly.io", that just means there isn't enough stuff about other systems at the moment.
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.
It seems like a combination of HN "top of mind" (ie that HN users submit articles on things they're currently reading/researching), social "top of mind" (ie that people write blog posts on things their peer group is talking about), and a side effect of HN positional age-decay.
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".
I regularly notice that when I read an HN-linked article that has a some solid links, maybe even sending me down a rabbit-hole of related pages on a new topic, when I resurface and return to HN I find a few a of those related page on HN themselves.
If there's significant, good, on-topic technical content that isn't getting posted to HN, for god's sake someone please let me know.
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 agree! It's flattering and it's super interesting to read what people think about us and we're all blushing about the "heir to the vast Heroku fortune" stuff (even if it's probably not true), but we're also cringing a bit.
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.
It's related to all the negative press recently around Heroku (security concerns + Salesforce neglect). People had a lot of goodwill towards the Paas, and a lot of that is missing what a PaaS does for you in the current environment of AWS or k8s complexity around devops, so they are looking for a replacement, and fly.io looks like one of the more innovative, or at least well-marketed, in this space.
This actually makes me wonder if people here generally pay attention, who posted what? Does that influence actual upvote status?
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.
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
fly.io is a solution but I don't know what the problem is. I can think of it like more dynamic CDN that can have more compute capacity (deploy whatever backed by SQLite/Postgres) to serve customers right way far more instantly.
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.
I mean, that's a cool aspect useful to some, but I spent a day getting a Laravel app running on there, all in one region, and that's fine; I'm looking for a place to move my hobby apps off Heroku right now.
The last time I remember such a run on HN was when we created Docker. It was on the front page or mentioned in front page comments almost daily for at least 6 months (late 2013 early 2014)
Fly.io has a great combination of user virality/momentum and fundamentally technically interesting content on a wide range of topics.
Given that Fly.io has been part of YC W20, and that they make some interesting technology choices (eg all-in on sqlite), it creates more traction on this site.
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.
A big competitor of theirs, tailscale, also does well here.
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.
I think the perspective of this article is a very healthy and productive one and I found it particularly useful.
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.
Generally, it is all YC hype. HN is biased towards YC startups.
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.
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.
That's incredibly generous of you, and it's true that our illustrator fucking rules, but if there are other startup people wondering why we do well on HN, I think it's actually really simple: we write for HN, not for our own marketing goals. One of the first rules in our style guide is that our model reader is never going to use Fly.io, and that our posts still have to be worth their time. I think that's all there is to it? If you can clear that bar, you're all set. Tailscale does that, too, and so does Cloudflare.
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?