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What are they now, if not an engineering company?



[flagged]


Their CTO restores vintage laptops, still runs a Minitel, tests prime numbers for fun, programmed a KIM-1 with a hex keypad as a kid, and fixes hard drives with woodworking tools:

Restoration of an IBM Thinkpad 701C Butterfly-keyboard laptop - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39128387 - Jan 2024 (42 comments)

Using my Minitel 1B over the phone network in 2023 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38291493 - Nov 2023 (0 comments)

My primality testing code is faster than Sir Roger Penrose's - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38274642 - Nov 2023 (25 comments)

My 1976 KIM-1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38161617 - Nov 2023 (31 comments)

Retrieving 1TB of data from a faulty drive with the help of woodworking tools - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37160783 - Aug 2023 (186 comments)

... and that's just a recent random sample!

There's a reason why his site has been posted to Hacker News over 600 times. I don't know if you could pick a worse example.


> a vessel of shareholder value, nothing more.

This is my general opinion of publicly traded companies, i.e. the primary product is their stock, but I personally haven't seen anything out of the ordinary with Cloudflare compared to other big tech companies.

I wouldn't say they aren't engineering companies though. There's plenty of engineering that goes on there, its just no longer the top priority once the company has gone public (same to some extent with VC investors).




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