skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-toomim-httpbis-b...

Looks really stupid when transfer-encoding chunked already exists for exactly this use case.
Could it be that autism is in part the inability to think abstractly around social situations?
I challenge you to find an organization that has never made a mistake. Truth is the uptime and reliability of Google services is very good, while operating at huge scale. And I have no association with Google whatsoever.
Teens invent a device that can filter toxic microplastics from water
I do encourage you to read the whole article cause there is some fine details in there. The main point is that we were happy to remove any domains apart from our main domain (which gets > 95% of our traffic) but Cloudflare did not give us that option or any other detail on the supposed issue.
Well, this is disgusting behavior CF.
I wonder if OPs company suing CF?
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_complements:

“Some people, notably Donald Knuth, recommend using the placement of the apostrophe to distinguish between the radix complement and the diminished radix complement. In this usage, the four's complement refers to the radix complement of a number in base four while fours' complement is the diminished radix complement of a number in base 5. However, the distinction is not important when the radix is apparent (nearly always), and the subtle difference in apostrophe placement is not common practice. Most writers use one's and nine's complement, and many style manuals leave out the apostrophe, recommending ones and nines complement.”

I.e., the distinction isn’t as well established as some claim, and in the context of binary presentations it doesn’t really matter.
When it comes to laws and taxes, "comply" and "evade" tend to be synonyms.

"In order to comply with tax regulations and donor laws, we had to structure our activities in order to make it possible for political donations to be classified as regular consulting income".
If we should only read things written by organizations that make no mistakes, then we will never read anything.
Pretty much nothing, at least for steel. You still need the carbon to incorporate into the alloy so like arc furnaces, they can only be used with mostly scrap material. That’s why steel makers still use coal. They need the coke.
This has been my experience with 80+% of these loud complaints about services, especially regarding "losing Google traffic". Dig into it just a little and you find out the complainer was doing something extremely shady that the service is often too polite/proper to call out in a public forum.
Eh, your traffic is a total cost you pay per month. That's how I would look at it. The one figure I know best of all is annual revenue, and how our annual revenue this year is on track to do compared to last year's.

As far as exact volume of QPS or TB/month or whatever, I really couldn't say.
If 90 or 95% of their traffic comes from a single domain (and presumably has for a while), that still doesn’t make OP sound guilty. If there was a legal issue Cloudflare legal should’ve stepped in, not their sales team.
Obviously you work for CF. I did read the full post.
I think the black supremacists thing is happening to you again.
10TB/month is 30 megabits/sec on average. Not much for a CDN. They probably need Cloudflare more for DDOS protection than anything else, I'd think?
A gallon of diesel, which you can easily carry, has about 40 kWh of (admittedly thermal) energy. You can pour it into a tank in a few seconds.

Edit: if it takes 10 seconds per gallon, that's 14.4 megawatts. Quite a lot. For instance, this massive wind turbine is rated 14 MW:

https://www.siemensgamesa.com/products-and-services/offshore...
Thermal output is where all the watts you pump into the CPU come back out. You can't have more thermal output from less wattage input or vice versa.

I believe the multi core performance claim in that the base M3 has 4+4 cores while the X Elite has 12. After that everything falls in line as "a much faster Qualcomm offering than before that's still a bit behind the competition". If it had released 2 CPU generations ago when they started talking about how fast it was it would have been more impressive.

I also believe the battery life claim in that if you put the laptop in airplane mode, then the screen all the way down, and run a video on loop it is fully possible it does this longer than Apple depending on how efficient the video decoder and ability to turn the rest off are. When it comes to actually using the laptop it'll be interesting what third party benchmarks say.
fortunately, there are better ways to write for loops in javascript.

and if i'm in a situation where i need the classic for loop because of js forLoop weirdness, then i will know when to use it with semicolons.
Over-charging is a legal way to effectively deny service. When I'm offered jobs I don't want, I sometimes tell them my salary is 3x what I really need.
I agree, I have coded undo stacks, it's a bit of a pain (assuming you mean a stack that allows you to undo and redo).

Although strictly speaking, you don't always need one, just a list of stuff the user can restore, in any order. That's because you don't always have dependencies between stuff, and/or you don't always need to be able to redo.

Or even one cell to be able restore the last deletion, that's already a step in the right direction and strictly better than the confirm dialog.

By the way, Plasma might be doing it this way (the list or the cell), you can't arbitrarily undo and redo stuff to my knowledge.
This sounds a lot like IPFS's strategy regarding anonymity, and AFAIK it resulted in basically no one being able to use IPFS anonymously. When anonymity requires building your own separate sub-community and maintaining your own custom plugin/patchset/configuration for the client, it's really hard to achieve that because the default non-anonymous project sucks all the oxygen out of the room.

Do you at least plan to provide some level of baseline consideration for privacy/anonymity in the main project, like making sure core protocols/libraries don't expose fingerprinting surfaces or leak information?
A reasonable scenario to me seems to be: An automatic "upgrade to the enterprise plan" requirement was triggered, and then in the process of the sales calls to make that happen, Cloudflare got serious eyes on the customer for the first time (whereas at a paltry $250/month previously they wouldn't have), and realized exactly what line of business the customer was involved in, and decided to fire them.
That's not true at all. That line of argument gets close to "if this product is free for open source, why is it not free for me? either it costs something to operate or it doesn't." You don't get to price the service.
So you’re describing what sounds to me to be an amazing concert.
That doesn't make sense. Neovim is not a .net citizen. It speaks Lua.
1stdibs, Grailed and Depop would beg to differ.
I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if DDOS protection providers were using DDOS on their prospective customers via proxy. Problem, reaction, solution. Did you pay your "protection" money this month, Luigi?
I think it does feel smaller, but only if you always leave off the cents. $0.99 feels smaller than $1.00, but $1 feels smaller than $.99 or 99¢
Sad Computers and Two Versions of the Church–Turing (2009) [pdf]
After reading this article carefully I have a few thoughts. Firstly you were knowingly in violation of TOS after they pointed it out to you. Violating their TOS is a fast way to have your account suspended.

Secondly I'm a little confused why they would require you to pay a year upfront? I would like to hear from cloudflare as to why they required this? It's pretty fair for them to ask you to pay a year in advance because of the risk that you carry as a gambling company.

Cloudflare needed you to have to enterprise plan to remove liability from them. It's not even a big request, they have specific pricing plans for a reason.
> I'm a SysOps engineer at a fairly large online casino. We have around 4 million monthly active users. We had been happy Cloudflare customers since 2018 on the "Business" plan which has some neat features and costs $250/month for "unlimited" traffic.

Sorry to be “that guy,” but, you’re serving 4 million people at a casino and paying $250 a month for shared multi tenant infra, and you’re SURPRISED you have problems? Really?

To be honest, I’m glad these sorts of businesses get kicked off Cloudflare because it causes problems for others sharing the same IP space and infra. I’ll let someone else with experience discuss how many times a day the network would see a hacking or DDoS attempt against the online casino, which is by far the favorite target of hackers. But in general, I just don’t want any of my infra touching the same stuff as these guys.

Like another person here, I am assuming that Cloudflare ops told someone “tell these guys to get their own IPs and upgrade,” and then the message went to Cloudflare’s (utterly lousy!!!) sales people to try to fix before shutdown, and then it all turned into the mess we see here.

The true moral of the story, I think, is, if you’re running an online casino on a shoestring budget, expect bad things to happen to you. Of all kinds.
> ...as it makes the contract between a caller and a callee hard to determine, and makes your code highly coupled. I prefer the Go or Rust style of handling it through return values.

There is literally (literally!) no difference at all between throwing and exception and returning it as a variable. Except for the fact that in the exception passing style you have to write the boilerplate by hand, instead of letting the compiler do it for you.

Why anybody with a sane and functioning brain would want to do that by hand in 2024 I will never understand.
Yet there are testimonials here in this thread that it can make a damaged drive worse. For some use cases the professionals are worth their high fees. SpinRite is for low stakes situations or folks who cannot afford better.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40479468
This reads more like a shakedown than anything. Even if the casino was being dodgy, CF went in asking for more money, not demanding that they stop doing whatever it is they were doing.
> causing… irreparable loss in customer trust

> I'm a SysOps engineer at a fairly large online casino

Oh no, a casino losing the trust of its customers? Those places are normally so scrupulous!
Over 90% of our traffic is cached, since it is static assets. I can look up how much traffic reaches our origin, but the main factor is the number of static files hit. We used Cloudflare Analytics (part of the business plan) to track this, and since it didn't really impact our tech much until now I don't have an exact overview. I mainly know which (uncached) endpoints are hit how much. Fastly is currently saying 15TB per week which seems roughly the same range as Cloudflare's 80TB / month number.
It has become apparent that doing business with Cloudflare is a liability.
According to Cloudflare themselves, 80TB traffic should cost around $100/month. See: https://blog.cloudflare.com/aws-egregious-egress
Prototype iPod 3rd Generation(DVT Stage),Unreleased Tetris Game by Apple [video]
This is my first post on Hacker News as I primarily just browse. This situation kept me intrigued, wanting to know how it would unfold.

The Google Cloud situation and all these little happenings, including the proliferation of Gen AI into everything, make me long for the days when companies had their mainframes onsite, in closets or separate rooms, away from CDNs and cloud networks. It seems like a better idea to use these cloud networks as a separate off-site backup rather than for primary use.

I’d love to learn more about what will happen next in this saga. I’ve seen a post where a Cloudflare exec has posted here on HN before. They probably won’t say anything for legal reasons, but what repercussions can Cloudflare expect for this? Will they be, or can they be, sued for this downtime and the related expenses?
Agreed. We don't have a lot of UI unit tests in our software in our day job (almost none), but we have extensive tests for utility and data processing functions.

And that's pretty much the same for me in the game I'm making in my spare time. I have no unit tests for UI (it's not worth it, I can easily see when something in the UI isn't working, it's more important for me to just log the bug so I don't forget about it).

But for game logic, like verifying calculations for A.I. are happening as expected, or functions that manipulate numbers on the screen in different ways (scores, power adjustment, etc), yeah I write unit tests for those. And to the article's point, sometimes I have to significantly adjust or redo or even scrap them because I happened to think of a different mechanism and it seems to play better.

There was a long time (over about a dozen games I made) where I never bothered to write a unit test, and I still might not for a tiny game. But for my most recent bigger game (which I started a few years ago), I finally decided to write a few for some tricky numeric logic in the game, and it immediately helped me resolve a logic bug I was seeing periodically but was having a hard time pinning down the cause of it with breakpoints and logs. So I do try to do it more often for checking those things.
The OP does not give their company nor domain name. I wonder if this is related to recent efforts by the Dutch to collaborate with Cloudflare to prevent online gambling companies operating in the Netherlands.

https://igamingbusiness.com/legal-compliance/legal/cloudflar...
I get where you are coming from.

Books like Influence the art of persuasion and Thinking fast and slow wrestle a bit with the morality of studying this kind of stuff.

It’s certainly possible to misuse the insights to manipulate others, but it’s also important to be able to recognize when and how you’re being manipulated.
This data collection project has a name: "Project Honey Pot" (and had excellent relations with FBI), look closely the story that led to Cloudflare.

https://www.projecthoneypot.org/cloudflare_beta.html
Or CF had already decided to kick them off the platform and tried to get some money before they did so.
That's just one of many components of what you pay them in total, though.
> Not sure it's really in their best interest to self-police in the end, as they could lose their DMCA safe harbor provision ?

This.

That said, we're seeing this across so many platforms, from datacenters to social network sites.

They blew their safe harbor provisions years ago and yet remain untouched despite this.
If you don't know exactly how someone made money you can make up any happy story you want.
Isn't that close to what instruct-tuned LLMs do when they are adviced to first think out aloud before jumping to answering? They are generating their own output to their scratchpad, the attended context, to support their thinking.
Talkd/dialog open source project has been selected for 2024 GitHub Accelerator
More general than the toss keyword even. If you're interested in concrete examples, you might have a look at the koka documentation
Or they had already decided to kick them out and tried to get some money out of them first.
In this case "the service" would be to look the other way on illegal activities for $10k/mo.

I'm not saying cloudflare can't do it, I'm just saying it's wrong.
The post mentions BYOIP. I assume Cloudflare wanted OP on BYOIP to mitigate risk, and Cloudflare wanted them to pay for the privilege.
People seem to have a very laissez faire take on egress which I’ve never understood given the really impressive markups the cloud providers charge on it. But yeah, it seems like the attitude is that as long as you’re using “cloud-native” services (AKA locked-in proprietary offerings) then cost is low and doesn’t matter anyway because it’s opex, not capex.

I spend a lot of time wondering if the Emperor is wearing any clothes.
Notable, their Enterprise plan quote included BYOIP. I think that's the kicker. Cloudflare likely got a few of their anycast load balancing IPs blocked in one country, causing a huge disruption, because this customer that makes them no money wasn't in full compliance with local laws.
> They didn't cite any sources

They are a news source, not a published journal. The NYT does not publish sources or citations either.

Also, I absolutely would NOT want to be cited when I chat with journalists from a competitive standpoint (I've given a signal to my portfolio's competitors who I'm targeting), conflict of interest standpoint (the owner of the publication I'm talking to might have a financial interest in a competitor or my products), and a journalistic standpoint (anonymity of sources allows us to speak honestly).

> it's a short article that doesn't answer its own question that it poses ("Why isn't this getting fixed?")

It literally did - "Few want to make it harder or costlier for data to flow from their network into others."

Margins are low in the telecom industry (11.4%) [0] versus Software's 80-90% margins due to the massive capital expenditures needed to build out a 5G backbone and deprecate older 2/3G infrastructure.

Adding traffic filtering (basically a SSE style Deep Packet Inspection functionality) is legitimately expensive because building this functionality in house is a multi-million venture which is difficult to justify with such low margins, and the vendors like ZScaler, Fortinet, Cato, Cisco, etc in this space all know they can arm-twist telcos while keep the price below that to build in-house.

> is it directed at me, or who

Yes, but a lot of other HN commenters like you. I used to be a SWE as well before I went into product/sales and later finance, and I hate it how a subset of SWEs like you assume us "non-techies" don't know jack.

Journalism is built on top of sources and experts who want to remain anonymous. Trust it or don't.

And writers at The Economist absolutely do interact with experts in the fields they write articles about. A lot of us just don't want to be named for the reasons I mentioned above.

[0] - https://www.mtn-c.com/product/telcos-pay-5g-price-higher-deb...
It's very common to track how many different axioms are needed for some result, and consider results with lower requirements to be more fundamental. "Less complex", probably not so much, but the issue is something that a number of people care about.
It'll provide evidence that they've studied it internally?

I don't think so.
It only works until most people do it
I have been hearing stories from developers/entrepeneurs about Cloudflare being very weird to deal with:

"We'd like to talk to you about an enterprise plan."

"No thanks, I'm fine with the free plan."

"Based on your traffic, we'd like to talk to you about an enteprrise plan."

"Is there a traffic limit on the free plan?"

"No, there is no limit. But based on your traffic, we require you to get an enteprirse plan."

[Gives up and gets an enterprise plan]

[6 months later]

"Based on your traffic, we'd like to talk to you about up'ing your enteprise plan to a new monthly pay."

"Is there a cap to traffic in our current plan? I don't see that in our terms."

"No, there is no cap to traffic in cloudflare plans, but based on your traffic, we're going to require you to pay more per month than you are currently paying."

"OK, can you tell me the traffic limit in our current or new plan? So I know what I'm paying for and when I'm approaching it?"

"No. But you need to pay more."

[Wash, rinse, repeat, every 6-12 months]

It seems like while cloudflare technically does not charge for egress, in fact for large egress it's just a game of chicken between the customer and a salesperson every 6-12 months, with the salesperson trying to figure out the most they can manage to get without losing the customer? I mean, I guess that is standard for enteprise sales, but I think usually you at least have some terms to know what you've got for how long without a renegotiation?
To me it's pretty clear: Trust & Safety (NOT engineering; they don't appear to be involved) likely raised an alarm saying "Customer X is breaking TOS - no immediate resolution available, but something might be possible given extensive legal & engineering review. Recommend switching to enterprise so we can study how to make it work."

In that light you can see why Sales would be sent as the messenger. But I agree they shouldn't have been involved. Sending a T&S representative would have been better. But then again it looks like from screenshot #2 that they kind of did that? They just didn't have a direct call with T&S.
But OP's comment also says

>Back then, most registers didn’t print receipts.
2K will develop the next FIFA game, leaker claims
It’s just growing pains.

Electric cars are trivial to charge at home because they get hours to charge every day. However on a road trip people want to dump as much energy as quickly as possible which has meant a rapid evolution of what cars/cabling/chargers/grid can handle and what chargers can supply. In 20 years this will all be boring infrastructure just like gas stations, until then it’s going to be a bumpy ride.
Make it clear in the interview you are ready to be a good office drone. Say you "respect the chain of command". Managers love that.

Make it clear you are not a primadona.

You are hire-able. Just wipe away any preconceived judgements.
This is the nail on the coffin, but make no mistake, Cloudflare has been a liability. It's a massive Man In the Middle decrypting all traffic, including OkCupid and 4chan for example. Imagine all those 4channers learning they aren't actually anon.
Using localized versions of your services to comply with regional laws and enhance user experiences (i.e. make money) is SOP for practically every international $bigco. Online gambling is regulated and legal in ~50%-70% of the world; without actual evidence to the contrary, it’s completely reasonable to assume that this is a legitimate business. I’m really struggling to agree with the “two sides to every story” replies being left here about how there’s likely shady activity going on behind the scenes, when to me the post read as candid and transparent about the nature of the nature of the business, the admitted legitimacy of CF’s TOS violation claims against them, and the content of the communications with CF.

My 2c: It’s scummy that CF did this. It looks like they were disingenuous about the severity of the violations and used it as an excuse to get more $$$ from an already paying customer to make the manufactured problem go away.
Maybe even dependency ejection.
Pretty sure the real issue is safety. Obviously you want to avoid exposed hot contacts and arcing, but also thermal safety is a pretty big deal. Addressing that increases cost, so companies don't want to do it unless there's enough proven demand at that location to pay it back quickly. Same problem as internet access or mail delivery to rural areas, and the same solution suggests itself.
Depends on your scale. I would probably know the traffic for the project I looked at last, but the whole account? No way. Half of it I've never touched and would have to talk to different teams. I'd only look at that when discussing the contract again. Or if their TAM flags us crossing some threshold.

It would be completely different for a small project of course, but once you're counting in TBs... it's less important.
This actually seems reasonable, and a potential part of the narrative the original poster would be likely to leave out.
Do we know of any alternative services providing at least the basics of what Cloudflare does?

Such as:

- Unmetered DDoS protection (i.e. no absurd base fee for it existing)

- Unmetered rate limiting (protection against cost attacks on the next)

- Reasonably priced object storage (i.e. not more expensive than numbers listed here https://blog.cloudflare.com/aws-egregious-egress)
Is that easier than buying another device to use as a server?