The post's current title is Lies, damned lies... and the article's synopsis is,
> This nonsensical conclusion provides a great example of how statistics can be used to mislead. Read on for an analysis of Cloudflare’s testing methodology, and the results of a more scientific and useful comparison.
That is definitely mud-slinging.
And Kenton himself agrees: "On a serious note, I've been saying for decades that benchmarks are almost always meaningless..."
Benchmarks can be used to mislead which CF was clearly doing and which Fastly pointed out with their "Lies, damned lies..."
My point about benchmarks in general was that unless your application is extremely similar to the one tested -- which is unlikely -- then these numbers don't really tell you much about how your own app will perform. This is a criticism I have of every benchmark that attempts to compare performance between very different technologies. I don't think it makes such benchmarks unethical, just not very useful.
But mostly importantly, kentonv's last paragraph.
At the end of the day, benchmarking for your use case is the only true north. Everything else, on all sides, is marketing fluff.
I'm not sure I see the point given how comment deleting works on HN.
You can only delete HN comments that have no responses, and that user's comment has a response tree of sufficient breadth and depth that it seems unlikely that everyone who has responded will delete their comments before the 2 hour edit/delete window passed.
The usual convention if you want to delete a comment but replies are stopping you from doing so seems to be (if the 2 hour window has not closed) to edit it to say "[deleted]" or something similar.
That still leaves your name on it, and so I don't see how having your name also mentioned in one of the replies is going to make anything worse.
Thanks for clarifying that!
To your point, maybe it is a problem.
Who knows. Life is messy, and pitching absolutes that you pretend are clear to everyone else in order to intensify criticism of a person for having any thought at all, actually only makes it harder to everyone else. (this is response to our friend here, not you)
I'm not sure why you're continuing to react strongly and personally to me. We shouldn't expect everyone to know everyone involved on a first name basis, immediately. We can't subject everyone to 21 questions about their personal and work history before responding to them, as that would also be rude. The replies in the first half hour all didn't have the context you had, and have now provided to the thread, and we universally reacted the same way. Mine more measure and polite, hence why its ranked highly and getting tons of replies now that activity has settled in.
And I'd be annoyed too, if I was working my ass off on a project, and continually seeing marketing measures being posted that I didn't think were valid.
But marketing lies (the engineering term) by figuring out when a lie isn't a lie (the legal term). It's literally their job. No news there.
The first 3 replies to Kenton, including mine, don't recognize Kenton immediately or on a first name basis just from their account name. So, we all reacted the way people react to the generic situation at hand: be careful, you're attaching your name and position to something that further commits your employer to a narrative you're trying to dispel.
I appreciate you providing this info, between that and Kenton's replies about themself (ex. about protos and cap'n proto) its clears that he has extensive experience in industry and at big companies, and certainly knows the tradeoff they're making. That's awesome, and different enough from the median situation to obviate early advice re: commenting on your employer.
Most days I wouldn't post a comment like the one above.
This was a bit of a "fuck it, just this once" moment and I'm not proud of it, but I stand behind what I said and don't feel the need to delete it.
But the title of the post validates his opinion and his claim about fastly and cold starts can literally be found anywhere in their blog and the compute@edge landing page.
I think it's a valid and valuable comment.
Sure felt like mud slinging to me. Just the whole list of complaints they had at the start of the post was hard to get through.
They could just tell us what they did differently and show the result.
This then makes your response look accusatory and helps further a broader narrative post about Cloudflare's behavior here, which it seems your goal is to dispel, given your statement on whether engineering was involved.*
A suggestion for something actionable that'll make things better in this difficult moment: email product counsel about starting the process to override your EULA and enable Compute@Edge to do benchmarking. It'll take forever and it's the only way to have an objective, evolving conversation about benchmarks, which your leads will (at least, should) want after this happened.
* intentionally vague here, in order to give you space to delete and leave no record