moot (of 4chan) said a while back that Cloudflare is one of the main reasons 4chan is still around these days.

Maybe that changes for a few K a month?

As a practical example, you might have an image on your webserver. When it goes viral on reddit, the request for the image hits the CDN first, not your servers (that's why they call it reverse proxying), they see that they don't have a cached version of the file, or their cached version has expired, so the CDN sends a request to your server, copies the file, and then proceeds to serve that file from their cache for the next million user requests or until the cache is set to expire (usually 24 or so hours, more than long enough for the traffic hitting your image url to die down).

Basically, the CDN made it so your actual servers (and thus your host bandwidth bill) served one request. Not 1 million requests.

Now typically you will foot the bandwidth bill for the CDN as well, but Cloudflare has a tiered pricing structure that is well below the rest of the competition. See moot (owner of 4chan) talk about cost savings here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6682324

Just saying that when I contacted them, they were clear that we shouldn't use them for images or media, and their general ToS agrees.

Their enterprise pricing starts cheap so if they throw in "unlimited bandwidth for everything" then it'd be quite a good deal.

Media is the primary purpose for CDNs. The performance boost comes from a global network caching the media files so when requests are made for the resources, the end user downloads the media from the nearest CDN node instead of your server that is potentially on the other side of the world. It doesn't matter quite so much to have non-media (such as the page html) served locally because the size of an html page is generally significantly smaller than the media embedded in the page.

From the small amount of research I've done on the Cloudflare service just now, it doesn't seem very transparent how exactly it works. I've found information on 4chan and imgur using them to serve billions of CDN requests, but others saying don't rely on their CDN. So who knows, maybe it's on a case by case basis.

...Additionally, the purpose of CloudFlare's Service is to proxy web content, not store data. Using an account primarily as an online storage space, including the storage or caching of a disproportionate percentage of pictures, movies, audio files, or other non-HTML content, is prohibited...

CloudFlare is not free, nowhere near it, if you're Imgur or 4chan. moot has emphasised this before. It's expensive.

Source where moot says cloudflare's low cost keeps 4chan running https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6682324.

There used to be a domain for imgur like imgur.voxcdn.com to help people get around WebSense.

They have a lot of direct traffic to compensate for the cheap hotlinking.

I recently saw a front page post that was just a Taco Bell sign that was 20 years old. A fluff bullshit post with little discernable value. Now I don't suggest that the user paid to post it, that sort of stuff would be found out quickly, but it was up voted enough to get it into the hot\rising queue and by virtue of appearing there it made it to the front page.

We know that in the early days the admins/founders used fake accounts to simulate activity on the site and I not imagine that has changed. So they use these accounts to boost up votes and almost guarantee a front page position.

They are also happy to remove front page posts that advertisers don't like e.g sears

Of course they've must have cached thumbnails before but this seems like a giant expansion that must consume rather much resources... or maybe they did this before and just didn't expose the functionality, but it seems tied to their new mobile webpage

Contrary to popular belief Reddit is not some grass-roots operations.

Sure, they are off-leash now, and have been for years. And that may even be the long-term intent. But if someone owns you, they can always change the status quo.

Tell that to Myspace. A property as expensive as reddit has to have a clear road to profitability or it's going to get the axe. Conde Nast isn't running a charity.

Also it's pretty easy for any website that wants to track you, to track you using something other than cookies.

No it's not. At least for Firefox, the cookie preferences feature has been neglected for years. It's hidden beyond an increasing number of clicks and has long standing bugs (for instance, my whitelist of sites I allow cookies from is wiped each time Firefox upgrades)

> Also it's pretty easy for any website that wants to track you, to track you using something other than cookies.

The specific law (details are slightly different in each European country) I'm familiar with concerns storing and processing identifying information. For various reasons, everybody focused exclusively on HTTP cookies, but tracking using, say, ETAGs would fall under the same requirement of notifying the users as far as I know.

I think the fact that they're actually making it harder with each new UI revision - and trying to make it go away in some sense - is a sign that their interests are not aligned with those of their users' desire for privacy. It's not so surprising, really, as their revenue largely comes from an ad-supported search engine, and so they would not want to be defeating ad-networks' tracking by making cookie management/blocking easier...

As much as I hate the idea of protecting people from themselves, there's some merit to this.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/ghostery/

It's completely unenforceable.

weird, I don't have that problem? (Firefox 38 Linux)

I'm not picking on you, but it's amazing how quickly Americans (not saying you're from the US) forget economic events that happened only a few years back.

There are many places in the US where housing prices haven't come close to the peak in 2007. I knew several folks who lost a ton of money ($100K+) on real estate back then. It seems like all of those concerns have evaporated in the last 8 years.

And Milwaukee is not, by a long shot, Detroit— it's still barely below its peak population. Wages have declined, however— an average young person when my parents were young would make the same amount of money as in San Francisco: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/02/for-grea...

(All of these numbers are nominal dollars— the house has significantly declined in real value.)

what makes you think this is the case?

for all the singularity and robot economy talk on here, if give those things have even a small chance of occurring, over 30 years that adds significant risk to real estate values across the United States

that's essentially like the factory in town going out of business across most of the country

----------------------------

  a=>b<=7
  a>=b<=7

Maybe I'm just getting old!

    a => { return b <= 7; }

All of the examples that look confusing are artificially simple and doing things you wouldn't normally try to do.

If you're going to write it out, you might as well just add the `function` keyword for clarity because you're not saving a ton of keystrokes.

    function(a) { return b <= 7; }

    var self = this;
    foo(function(x) {
      return x + self.y;
    });

    foo(x => x + this.y)

If you miswrite "function" as "fnuction", you'll easily, quickly find out.

If you miswrite => as >= it might take ages to track it down.

If the function `foo` is defined as taking a function as its first argument (or even more precisely, a function which takes a number and returns a number), and you try to give it a boolean, then the static type checker will yell at you, and you'll just as easily find out as that fnuction typo.

People aren't kidding when they say Perl looks like line noise, but you get used to it and can find your way through even a dizzying regular expression with relative ease over time.

Yes, $s=~s+s+S+s+$s is valid Perl.

Suggesting that things like => are "too confusing" for JavaScript is to suggest that people that write JavaScript are too dumb to handle it. Is that what you're implying here?

Some programmers write in one language, but many write in several. Having the same shorthand available in JavaScript as in C# is a big deal, it makes things feel better. Being able to apply what you've learned in one domain directly to another is more efficient than having some ridiculously quirky JavaScript-only way of doing something.

That some people will abuse it or be confused is a problem that can be overcome with a little bit of learning. It's not a big deal.

EDIT: Now I got your point - you could accidentally assign a boolean value to a variable when you intended to create a function. One word - compile time type checking. Okay, four, Übersetzungszeittypprüfung in German.

    list.map(function(x) { return x * 2; });

    list.map(x => x * 2);

That's not even touching on the this-binding element, which is also incredibly useful in common Javascript code.

And anyone competent with any language implementing map can easily read:

    users.map(user => user.name);

Further, you have to be intimately familiar with Javascript to understand why this is necessary:

    function fetchUserData(){
        var self = this;
        userService.fetchAllUsers()
                   .then(function(fetchedUsers){ self.users = fetchedUsers; });
    }

    function fetchUserData(){
        userService.fetchAllUsers()
                   .then(function(fetchedUsers){ this.users = fetchedUsers; }.bind(this));
    }

    function fetchUserData(){
        userService.fetchAllUsers()
                   .then(fetchedUsers => this.users = fetchedUsers);
    }

  someObject.foo = function() {
    someObject.bar = 123;
  }

  function Foo() {
    var Foo = this;
    Foo.bar = 456;
  }

Of course any syntax can be abused in such a way to create ugly code. But if I compare

    [1, 2, 3].map( a => a * a );  // [1, 4, 9]

    [1, 2, 3].map(function(a) { return a * a; });

That doesn't mean one can't write horrible code with the arrow form. Of course you can. Furthermore, it's not necessarily something you should use all the time, because it's not completely analogous to a normal `function` because it binds `this` lexically. Which means `function` isn't going away any time soon, especially if you need to bind them dynamically.

In short: use the best (syntactic) tool for the job. There are use cases where the arrow makes sense semantically, and there are cases where it doesn't. Use as appropriate, as one should always do.

The lambda function is a foundational construct in computer science (1936), and it is often written using an arrow. Hipster fluff it is not.

Also, your tone is bad.

I think a better argument would have been that adding something that appears to just be a shorthand for writing functions is a potential footgun to language newcomers, but I think that argument is still relatively weak.

At point have stop called . Just you represent same by more doesn't that not to an on of to cognitive , otherwise all programming switches.

My point is, removing "function" and "return" from the syntax, won't necessary easy cognitive load, at least not for senior JavaScript coders. It will save bandwidth though! :P

It's like when languages make threads easy to create - and then programmers go away and use threads for everything!

Maybe some verbosity is a good thing because it makes programmers think about whether they really want to do something a few thousand times.

  let sqr = x => Math.pow(x, 2)

  let property = name => obj => obj[name]

  let distance = p1 => p2 => Math.sqrt(sqr(p2.x - p1.x) + sqr(p2.y - p1.y))

  let byComparing = f => (x, y) => {
    let fx = f(x), fy = f(y)
    fx < fy ? -1 : fx > fy ? 1 : 0
  }
  
  let points = [{x: 1, y: 2}, ...]
  
  let byX = points.slice().sort(byComparing(property('x'))
  
  let byStartDistance = points.slice().sort(byComparing(distance({x: 0, y: 0}))

    let sqr = x => Math.pow(x, 2)

    let distance = (p1, p2) => Math.sqrt(sqr(p2.x - p1.x) + sqr(p2.y - p1.y))

    const zero = Object.freeze({x: 0, y: 0})

    let byX = points.slice().sort((p1, p2) => p1.x - p2.x)

    let byStartDistance = points.slice
        .sort((p1, p2) => distance(p1, zero) - distance(p2, zero))

That said, the arrow function is a massive win in both examples. I've been using it for a while and never had any issue mistaking it with <= or >=. The linter would probably catch it anyway.

function(arg) {statement;}.bind(this)

    setTimeout(() => this.someMethod(), 1000);

With a conventional taxi company, if something bad happens, you deal with the taxi company, get compensation, etc etc

With Uber, they wash their hands of it and say it's all the individual drivers fault. So now the drivers have to deal with any bad stuff, and their insurance companies as well.

This is Uber, pushing the risk onto drivers, so it can make more money.

In many places, if something bad happens with your taxi ride, you're still dealing with just the taxi driver. They are independent contractors in many places.

I'm not sure what the makeup is of employees vs. independent contractors, but they are definitely out there in significant numbers. In NYC, for example, most are independent contractors, and this has resulted in a whole mess of problems ( http://nypost.com/2015/01/22/1-5m-in-taxi-drivers-money-held... )

Most of it is just superfluous fluff that doesn't actually do anything but change the syntax to something they perceive as fundamentally better, when it's just a matter of taste and fashion.

Let's say I make a new language called javascript++.

Instead of having `function` be a keyword, I chose `functioooooooooooooooooooooooooooon`. Based on their syntaxes, do you find one fundamentally better?

This means I'm pretty invested in it right now, but god damn they just totally fucked up the desktop interface too with a material redesign. Everytime you open it, you have to click the burger icon just to see the menu. You can no longer view your present playlist in a permanent window, only in a popup. I add a lot of artists to my thumbs up playlist on a whim and then listen to it on shuffle, so like to see what I just listened to/is coming up. And now it's loads of clicking instead of an alt-tab. All the artist photos are now inexplicably circles making it hard to distinguish them by scanning.

Google cannot design anything. They keep getting worse, even as they employ designers. Everything they touch recently they make the UX worse in their quest to turn everything into a tablet interface, aka material.

The physical menu button on the device DOES NOTHING in these apps. It's stupid - why not map menu to the hamburger menu? Or are they confused about whether menu should open the hamburger or the side navigation?

When I bought my TMobile G1 (yes, classic eh) it had menu, home, and back. Then, they introduced a "search" button on the HTC Desire and it lasted until the Motorola Atrix I had. Yet in that time, it stopped doing anything in certain apps.

After that, they completely binned it.

Now the buttons are being made even more redundant. I wish they would make their mind up and not rewrite the UI guidelines every Google I/O. It's STUPID.

I think this Samsung is the last Google device I will buy - now that iOS does split screen, I may jump ship (but I will miss this stylus). At least things run smoothly (Google Maps in 3D on a Samsung quad core is jerky and SLOW; it's worse on the 8 core).

Blame Samsung for still keeping a button layout that doesn't apply to android since the original 4.0 came out.

Last Samsung I buy I think.

And, the good news is that as paid-for-streaming starts to take off, it creates an ongoing revenue model for artists, ensuring that the labels/artists have incentives to create great new music.

And, between Pandora, Spotify, Tidal, Beats/Apple Music, Rhapsody, Rdio, google Music, Apple Radio Stations, Beats 1, iheartradio (ironically, my favorite) - lots of competition.