WARP is here - <AUTHOR> https://blog.cloudflare.com/announcing-warp-plus/ <comment><USER3> I was openly critical of Cloudflare when they announced Warp the first time. My accusations were over-reaching, and I ultimately retracted them. But I'm still skeptical, and I still won't use Warp.

Here's what still bothers me: Cloudflare is a single company with points of presence all over the world, handling traffic for websites all over the world (including some big ones), and now trying to attract consumers worldwide to proxy their traffic through its network. That's a _lot_ of power, and we all know the saying about power and corruption. It doesn't matter how conscientious the leadership are. I'd prefer that the temptation to abuse that power was just not there at all.

My idea of a better Internet is a return to the way the Internet _was_ \-- a large number of small providers, communicating with each other over open standard protocols. So, yes, I should switch to something other than Comcast here in my apartment. So far, I've been afraid that doing that would leave me with a truly abysmal quality of service. (I'm in Bellevue, Washington.) But at least I can avoid adding Cloudflare, with its terrifying power, to the mix.

Granted, I mostly use the Internet on a stationary computer with a cable connection at home. About the only thing I do on my phone away from a WiFi connection is request an Uber ride. And I do need that to work reliably. But it _is_ working just fine without Warp. So, maybe Warp is just not for me. Still, for the people that _would_ benefit, I'm afraid of how much more power they're going to be giving Cloudflare when they tap that "on" button.

<comment><USER4> Early on in Cloudflare's history when we were asked who our competition was we said Facebook. The concern was that the challenges of being online would get so hard that individual websites would give up and just move to run Facebook pages. We saw our role as providing the security and performance needed to compete without making you give in to use an all-consuming platform.

We haven't said that in a long time, but I was reminded of it while we were on our IPO Road Show. One investor we met with said:

"Here's how I think of you: Cloudflare is to Facebook as Shopify is to Amazon."

That resonated to me and reminded me of our earliest days and why we started the company.

So I appreciate the concern but hope there will always be more independent web because we exist than there would be if we didn't.

<comment><USER3> Thank you for taking time to share your perspective. However, I remain skeptical.

It's true that a website using Cloudflare is more independent than a Facebook page, in that in the former case, the company can take their domain to another provider. But my idea of an independent Web is a large number of websites depending on a large number of high-quality hosting providers. The latter number will inevitably be smaller, but shouldn't be single-digit. That would lead to too much potential for abuse of power.

Also, the more sites are using a single provider with its black-box algorithms and heuristics, the more potential there is for bad consequences for innocent users when those things misfire. That's what worries me about the bot-fighting feature you launched on Monday.

To respond specifically to part of what you said:

> The concern was that the challenges of being online would get so hard that > individual websites would give up and just move to run Facebook pages.

I don't think I understand how Cloudflare actually helps here. I think the average bar, karaoke DJ (I love karaoke), spa, or other small business that might just use a Facebook page would be served just as well by the kind of hosting provider that gives your website a single IP address pointing to a single machine. Are DDoS attacks and bots really that big of a problem? If so, I haven't run into them in the 16 years that I was the programmer and sysadmin for a small company (admittedly, online services are that company's business). Maybe we just didn't make the right enemies? Now, maybe small web hosting providers could make it even easier to set up a new website, but Cloudflare doesn't do anything about that problem anyway. If the concern is performance, maybe we need better alternatives to WordPress and Drupal, and more local hosting providers, so the website for small businesses can be closer to their mostly-local customers without using a CDN.

<comment><USER5> I ran a small web service in the video game industry for several years, and CloudFlare was essential to our survival, as the DDoS attacks would repeat every few weeks, and at times last 6 to 12 hours at a time. CloudFlare simply ate that up, and our customers were not impacted. Today, at a different company, different industry, we use CloudFlare for similar needs, but within physical area security networks. It's essential.

<comment><USER6> I would not be surprised to find out that companies that have significant exposure to video game users have much higher DDOS risks.

<comment><USER7> They do, and CloudFlare has historically been part of the reason _why_ they have such high DDoS risks. There's a bunch of "booter" sites out there which effectively sell botnet-as-a-service DDoS attacks to gamers, and those sites have relied on CloudFlare to stay online. Without that protection their competitors would DDoS their websites offline most of the time. Also, most reputable hosting and CDN services don't allow booters because they're both highly illegal and disruptive to the entire internet. CloudFlare, on the other hand, openly permits them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Exciting! We're a tiny company and have sponsored WireGuard two years in a row; you can see us on the WireGuard home page. Cloudflare is a gigantic company who just used the WireGuard design work to fork the project. Has Cloudflare given a cent to WireGuard? Why isn't their logo on the site?

<comment><USER9> And why should they? WireGuard is free† so it seems (to me) a bit futile trying to shame them on a niche site like HN and expect them to change their behavior and support the community that they draw from. Mind you, this problem is not limited to Wireguard/Cloudflare. The NTP servers, curl, libssl prior to Heartbleed, the list of important open source software in need of funding goes on. It's fighting also a basic refusal or desire to pay. When was the last time someone you know paid Redhat for CentOS or Canonical for Ubuntu on principal?

What/how can we do more to encourage corporate sponsorship (either time or money) of code that's critical to a company? There are various ways the community has tried to enable this, in different ways. Librapay and platforms like it try to make it easier (Think Patreon but less commercial). The Linux Foundation takes large corporate donations and distributes it out to a large number of projects they support. Stick a paypal email address or bitcoin address in the Readme.md as a "serverless" way to receive money.

However at the end of the day, that seems to not work. Curl is used in billions of devices but the majority of the work on it has been done by one person for 20 years.

Something is not working as we hoped.

†) specifically Open Source under the GPLv2 license ‡) [https://www.linuxfoundation.org/projects/](https://www.linuxfoundation.org/projects/)

<comment><USER10> > And why should they?

Because that's a sensible thing to do when someone's open source project is at the very core of your commercial product?

> When was the last time someone you know paid Redhat for CentOS or Canonical > for Ubuntu on principal?

Netflix and Tarsnap have donated to FreeBSD Foundation multiple times[1], and Jan Koum has donated over $1 million after selling WhatsApp[2].

Also, look at how many companies are sponsoring LetsEncrypt[3] – including Akamai and Fastly – but not Cloudflare.

[1] [https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donors/](https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donors/)

[2] [https://www.freebsdnews.com/2016/12/02/jan-koum-founder- what...](https://www.freebsdnews.com/2016/12/02/jan-koum-founder-whatsapp- donates-freebsd-foundation/)

[3] [https://letsencrypt.org/sponsors/](https://letsencrypt.org/sponsors/)

<comment> t-writescode Sensible isn't really the right word here. It's sensible to buy a support contract. It's charitable and good PR to give them money.

<comment><USER10> > It's sensible to buy a support contract. It's charitable and good PR to give > them money.

If the development of an open-source project significantly affects your commercial product, there is nothing charitable in supporting it: because you are the one who needs that project to survive.

<comment> t-writescode Not really, it's open source. You could just start putting resources into it yourself. If you back up to a local copy, it's not like that source code is just going to disappear.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The article mentions that WARP is exposing the end user's IP to websites they visit. I'd be interested in how they do that, especially with HTTPS websites where they can't MITM and inject headers.

> WARP is not designed to allow you to access geo-restricted content when > you're traveling. It will not hide your IP address from the websites you > visit.

<comment><USER12> Great eye! We haven't figured out how to expose them yet for sites not using Cloudflare. We do have some experience solving this problem for Spectrum [1] we're hoping to lean on. The most important thing to us is users don't expect us to keep their IP private, as that is not the intent of WARP.

1- [https://blog.cloudflare.com/mmproxy-creative-way-of- preservi...](https://blog.cloudflare.com/mmproxy-creative-way-of-preserving- client-ips-in-spectrum/)

<comment><USER13> Are you going out of your way to forward the original IP to the end recipient? What's the point of that?

Is it to support IP authenticated logins or similar?

<comment><USER14> Most likely so the receivers of abusive traffic can contact the original ISP rather than Cloudflare having to deal with abuse reports.

<comment><USER15> analytics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Just going to throw this out there for anyone who is hesitant using a vpn managed by another service. You can set up your own easily using the ansible scripts provided by trailofbits, which supports both IPSEC and wireguard.

[https://github.com/trailofbits/algo](https://github.com/trailofbits/algo)

a small DO (Digital Ocean) instance is only $5 a month and comes with 1TB outbound bandwidth (last I checked), which ends up being cheaper than most commercial offerings.

<comment><USER17> Or host it for free in one of Oracle's cloud 'always free' tier VMs.

Disclaimer: I'm an employee

<comment><USER18> Does it have public IP?

<comment><USER17> It does

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Cloudflare WARP is an easy-to-use free VPN which protects your IP address from businesses who haven't paid Cloudflare yet.

Companies like InfoUSA can convert 95% of US IP addresses to physical addresses and household resident names. By inserting themselves in the network between users and websites, Cloudflare will soon be able to get a chunk of InfoUSA's advertising profits.

Remember, if you aren't paying for it then you are the product.

Stay away from Cloudflare WARP and use a real VPN.

<comment><USER20> FTA:

> What WARP Is Not

> From a technical perspective, WARP is a VPN. But it is designed for a very > different audience than a traditional VPN. WARP is not designed to allow you > to access geo-restricted content when you're traveling. It will not hide > your IP address from the websites you visit. If you're looking for that kind > of high-security protection then a traditional VPN or a service like Tor are > likely better choices for you.

<comment><USER21> Then what does it do?

> WARP, instead, is built for the average consumer. It's built to ensure that > your data is secured while it's in transit. So the networks between you and > the applications you're using can't spy on you.

Isn't that what ssl does already lol? What a load of sham.

<comment><USER22> SSL/TLS encrypts your traffic between you and a server but by itself doesn't prevent your ISP from snooping some information about your encrypted connection. If you aren't using Secure DNS & DNSSEC, they may be able to see and intercept your DNS queries. If you don't use TLS 1.3, they can see the SSL certificate of the website you are connecting to. If you don't encrypt your Server Name Indication (SNI), they can see the hostname of the server you are connecting to.

This all allows your ISP to figure out which websites you are connecting to and this can be used to prevent you from accessing certain websites, sell your browsing history to an advertising agency, etc.

You can read more about it here: [https://www.cloudflare.com/ssl/encrypted- sni/](https://www.cloudflare.com/ssl/encrypted-sni/)

P.S. I don't work for Cloudflare.

<comment><USER21> All that to hide hostnames from your ISP? Again, what a load of sham.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I fully understand why a company would like to launch this type of service. This is the free market after all, and it would make the company insanely valuable, should it succeed.

However I do have an issue with the marketing behind it. While not said outright, there is a clear message here that due to some unspecified magic your network performance will increase. That's clearly stretching the laws of physics, at the very least. There are also nebulous privacy statements which looks conspicuously like services that shield your identity, which does not seem to be the case here.

If the real intent here is to help underprivileged Internet users escape their great firewall, onboarding some regular users might be necessary to make the service more legitimate. However even a generous reading of this announcement does not seem to support this use case. The consumer VPN business is a questionable business at best, and this does not look different.

<comment><USER24> > That's clearly stretching the laws of physics, at the very least

This is not clear to me. Few mobile users have pings to anywhere pushing up against the speed of light, and the bandwidth/loss/routing is not close to being limited by physics.

<comment><USER25> No, he's correct here, it's an extra indirection and so overall it can only hurt performance, not improve it. For example, ISPs often have caching servers from Google installed and Google is the biggest traffic generator. If you route traffic through somewhere else you are going to reach different Google's caching servers that are farther away and over more congested links.

<comment><USER26> > _No, he 's correct here, it's an extra indirection and so overall it can > only hurt performance, not improve it._

Really? The cost of an extra hop is just one of tens (hundreds?) of factors that would determine if using WARP would be faster for a particular scenario.

<comment><USER25> That's not an extra hop, but essentially two different paths with many different hops instead of a more direct one. I'm sure there will be edge cases where this can be faster due to one of those factors, but for most destinations it will be slower.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Great that it's finally launched. I've been on the waitlist for months.

That said, I'm very ambivalent about Cloudflare.

On the one hand, I love them because they're doing a lot of cool stuff (shoutout to kentonv whose sandstorm project I loved, who works there now), and even own a bit of their stock.

On the other hand, them being an infrastructure company but also wading into what travels over their pipes makes me uncomfortable. I get that 8chan was horrible (and Stormfront before that, IIRC), but it shows more discretion than I'd like that that level of the stack. They seemed to be more hands-off in the past, so I wonder if the IPO changed that at all.

A policy question: forbidding 8chan as a Cloudflare customer is one thing, but what if someone was using Warp and tried to load wherever it is they moved to? Would Warp block that?

<comment><USER28> They didn't block requests to 8chan, they simply won't provide services to the site. If you're using cloudflare for DNS lookups, 8chan resolves just like any other non-cloudflare customer.

<comment><USER29> …until someone gets the media going about it, at which point they block it. And that time, they will have a precedent.

<comment><USER30> So far it has been tried but both registrars and DNS resolvers have resisted such censorship attempts unless it has been law enforcement and even then it has been local.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> There's also a technical version of this post: [https://blog.cloudflare.com/warp-technical- challenges/](https://blog.cloudflare.com/warp-technical-challenges/)

I'm hyped to see Rust code running on so many phones.

<comment><USER32> I wonder if any popular applications for a mobile platform ship with Rust code already.

<comment><USER31> There have been some instances of this before; at least one game was implemented in Rust. But, given the length of the Warp waitlist, I'm pretty sure this is the most popular application so far. There could be things I don't know about though, at this point Rust is big enough that not everyone who uses it talks about it publicly.

<comment><USER33> Isn't Firefox using at least some Rust on the Android version?

<comment><USER31> I forget the status of that, you may be right! That'd be a large deploy too. The intention was to do that, for sure, I'm just not sure if it shipped or not.

<comment><USER34> Stylo (Rust rewrite of CSS engine) shipped for Android in Firefox 60, released in 2018. [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox/Rel...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox/Releases/60)

<comment><USER31> Awesome! Thanks for letting me know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Just wanted to say Thank You. I could only wish this was released a little sooner, but better late than Never. The Hong Kong people desperately need something like this to avoid ISP monitoring. I wonder if something similar is planned for Windows and Mac?

P.S Regarding the 10GB, have been on the waiting list since April 1st, nothing shown up yet.

<comment><USER12> We're working our way through the waitlist now, hoping to get to everyone today. If you have an up-to-date version of the 126.96.36.199 app running you'll get a push notification when we are ready for you to opt-into WARP.

<comment><USER36> I was in the waitlist on my old phone but just got a new one, is there any way I can get the 10 GB too?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> 22.214.171.124 DNS and mobile app have improved my internet experience considerably outside the US (currently in Costa Rica). I'm very excited about WARP and totally buy the "everyday user" premise.

As soon as it feels stable I'm telling my activist brother-in-law in Venezuela to install it and enable WARP. Personally I trust Cloudflare above any ISP. I see myself installing it over holidays to the rest of the family there.

I understand and celebrate HN's high level discussion about concentration of power on the internet and its effects. But at the same time I want to celebrate a geeky company, releasing something cool, with a _free_ tier – and an evident openness about its plans and how it works. Congrats on the launch!

</comment><comment><USER38> I can't really see the value proposition here.

Most use a VPN to add a layer of anonymity (hidden IP) and to circumvent geo blocking.

All this does is hide unencrypted traffic from the local network and _maybe_ give a moderate speedup, but one that will probably be restricted to non- Cloudflare properties. For other properties, especially high-traffic ones with their own fancy routing logic, this will probably be more detrimental than helpful.

Admittedly a lot of people also just use VPNs because of the countless ads telling them that the Web is terribly insecure without one. I don't see this being much of a success without big ad spending.

Might work out just fine for CF, but I will pass.

<comment><USER39> I'm in the (likely) target demographic for this (and just signed up for the paid version). I don't care about true anonymity or geo-blocking - what I care about is that Verizon/Comcast both do HEAVY traffic shaping to suit them, not me. I.e. I'm promised "720p" video quality on Netflix when streaming over LTE and yet, for some strange reason that goly gee I can't quite understand (/s) it's never very good and always slow, even with full signal.

I'd rather just encrypt all my traffic and let Cloudflare make the routing decisions - that alone is worth an extra $5/month.

<comment><USER40> I don't understand how "Warp" would help you in the long run - wouldn't we expect Verizon et. al to treat cloudflare endpoints as "suspect" or "throttle- worthy" ?

TOR endpoints are discriminated against by many endpoints and providers - <USER2> not Warp endpoints ?

<comment><USER41> Likely because Warp endpoints are the same as cloudflare endpoints, which also includes a large portion of the web.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> It's borderline unusable for me.

It takes 20 seconds for every YouTube video to load while they load instantaneous without WARP:

[https://streamable.com/9tp1k](https://streamable.com/9tp1k)

<comment><USER4> Please file a bug report.

<comment><USER43> I'm having problems recording the screen and playing back the video when reporting a bug.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Someone's already got it working on macOS: [https://twitter.com/saurik/status/1176893448445558784](https://twitter.com/saurik/status/1176893448445558784)

<comment><USER45> Fast work indeed, the meat of it:

(registering a `wg` generated public key with CF)

        api=https://api.cloudflareclient.com/v0i1909051800
        ins() { vrb=$1; shift; curl -s -H 'user-agent:' -H 'content-type: application/json' -X "${vrb}" "${api}/$@"; }
        sec() { ins "$@" -H 'authorization: Bearer '"${reg[1]}"''; }

        cfg=($(if [[ -e "${usr}" ]]; then
            reg=($(cat "${usr}"))
            test "${#reg[@]}" -eq 2
            sec GET "reg/${reg[0]}"
        else
            reg=($(ins POST "reg" -d '{"install_id":"","tos":"'"$(date -u +%FT%T.000Z)"'","key":"'"${pub}"'","fcm_token":"","type":"ios","locale":"en_US"}' |
                jq -r '.result|.id+" "+.token'))
            test "${#reg[@]}" -eq 2
            echo "${reg[@]}" >"${usr}"
            sec PATCH "reg/${reg[0]}" -d '{"warp_enabled":true}'
        fi | jq -r '.result.config|(.peers[0]|.public_key+" "+.endpoint.v4)+" "+.interface.addresses.v4'))
        test "${#cfg[@]}" -eq 3

<comment><USER46> Will this work on Linux?

<comment><USER45> I can't see why that bit wouldn't, the rest of the script has some macOS- specific network setup though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I just bought a monthly 22.214.171.124 + WARP subscription, and it's slow as hell. Maybe because I'm in Indonesia. But it works just fine with WARP disabled.

Another problem is 18.104.22.168 suddenly disconnected when I'm not browsing the internet, like watching videos or reading something on my phone.

Hope you guys fix these problems soon.

<comment><USER36> I have a 300/300 symmetric connection in Barcelona and only get 80/0.07 Mbps with Warp. The 80 is fine, but what is up with 0.07 Mbps up, and why is it so jittery?

EDIT: Anyone in Barcelona want to go axe throwing in an hour?

<comment><USER48> Same in Paris:500 down/60 up without Warp, 300 down/1.25 up with Warp

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have a different reason for being unable to use Warp: I don't want to access a "proper" DNS server, I want a DNS server that blocks ads for me in Mobile Chrome (I am aware that ad-blocking is fully integrated w/ Mobile Safari). I currently use AdGuard to get this feature, which sets the DNS server to one that blackholes ad servers.

Still, it's quite exciting that Cloudflare's finally released Warp, and that the waitlist for Warp was so long.

<comment><USER49> Rather than using the Adguard local VPN app, you can set your DNS to them.

[https://adguard.com/en/adguard- dns/overview.html](https://adguard.com/en/adguard-dns/overview.html)

Unfortunately this is only possible on wifi on iOS. On Android 9+ you can set custom DNS on both mobile and wifi.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> It sounds like an interesting product, but I'm wary of anything put out by the arbiters of the internet.

<comment><USER51> Really? The arbiters of the internet? You don't think that's maybe a little melodramatic?

Cloudflare has, time and time again demonstrated openness, transparency, and insight into their technical and ethical frameworks. I trust them a whole lot more than my isp or any random vpn provider.

<comment><USER52> > The arbiters of the internet? You don't think that's maybe a little > melodramatic?

As someone who has browsed sites "powered by cloudflare" over Tor and been tossed into an infinite "are you human" loop, it certainly doesn't feel melodramatic.

They've also exercised power over websites based on moral outrage. Perhaps 99.999% of people agree with the morals behind this decision, and maybe it's even the right decision, but it's still an arbitrary decision made by Cloudflare.

They are also bound by US law, and other entities bound by US law have been forced to enable the exact same forms of record keeping that Cloudflare says they will keep turned off.

Cloudflare is not a neutral party. They don't even advertise themselves as a neutral party.

<comment><USER53> > As someone who has browsed sites "powered by cloudflare" over Tor and been > tossed into an infinite "are you human" loop, it certainly doesn't feel > melodramatic.

[https://privacypass.github.io/](https://privacypass.github.io/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> _> It will not hide your IP address from the websites you visit._

This is an interesting design choice.

I'm sure the idea here is to reduce the number of abuse complaints directed to Cloudflare, but it also seems to significantly reduce the value of the service.

I'm excited to try WARP, but without IP masking, I'll need to keep paying for a commercial VPN service. If I'm already paying for a commercial VPN, I don't see why I'd ever use WARP.

That said, I definitely trust Cloudflare more than PIA/NordVPN/etc. Some more "bulletproof" providers like Mullvad are probably even _more_ trustworthy, but I don't think Cloudflare is going to mine (or sell) my data.

At this point, I'm just not sure what use-case WARP would really fill for me.

<comment><USER55> Warp is still useful for secure web browsing on public Wi-Fi networks that aren't protected with a password.

It's not a good option for you, since you already have a VPN, but you can recommend the free version of Warp to people who want to be more secure but don't want to pay for a VPN subscription.

Warp+ is less defensible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Can someone explain the difference between warp and warp+? I've read the blog and the App Store description, both of which completely fail to identify the difference.

<comment><USER12> Hopefully I can! WARP uses a protocol called WireGuard to secure your Internet traffic. Your encrypted traffic flows over that protocol to the closest Cloudflare data center before it is released onto the public Internet.

WARP+ takes that one step further. Rather than releasing your traffic directly onto the Internet, we use all the data we have from our Argo product [1] to route your traffic to _another_ Cloudflare data center via the route over the Internet with the best possible performance. That data center will be closer to your traffic's destination, hopefully improving the performance. In effect your traffic will bypass Internet congestion and slow links with the goal of better time-to-first-byte performance.

1- [https://www.cloudflare.com/products/argo-smart- routing/](https://www.cloudflare.com/products/argo-smart-routing/)

<comment><USER55> Why should a user pay $4.99/month for Warp+ when they can pay less than that for a traditional VPN that masks their IP address? Does the performance benefit make up for the relatively weaker privacy?

<comment><USER57> For me, it's a trust issue: it's quite hard to evaluate VPN providers so many people might prefer to use a company with substantial visibility and other businesses at risk if they break their privacy guarantees.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'd perhaps consider Warp+ on a computer or the router, but on the phone it seems a bit overkill.

(Though I haven't tried it. So far I haven't received the 10gb Argo credits described, despite being on the waiting list for yonks)

<comment><USER58> Same here regarding the 10GB, and have been on the wait list since April 1st.

<comment><USER51> Yep. Same here. I assume they are working through the waitlist. I'm going to give them a couple days to get it sorted before asking customer support about it.

Edit: My 10GB came through. Looks like release day latency.

<comment><USER59> Same, just receive the notification about the 10GB.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> I switched it on this morning and switched it off again after 10 minutes. It was so slow I couldn't load web pages or send messages on WhatsApp. Maybe too many people joining in a short time.

<comment><USER12> Please be sure to file a bug report in the app if you can. Every report helps us fix issues and make WARP better.

<comment><USER60> I didn't think it was a bug. Just too much load. Will try again in a day or so.

<comment><USER61> On the contrary, filing a bug report now can help them get it sorted out before lots of other people run into the same problem.

<comment><USER62> He's saying the issue wasn't a specific bug, rather they just haven't turned on enough capacity.

<comment><USER61> Yes but this is unlikely given CF's response. If they were short on capacity they wouldn't turn on two million people in one day and then ask for bug reports.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> Speedtest showing download speeds 3X slower (around 35MBPS vs 110).

On PIA, which costs me around $3/month when I buy yearly, I get around 75MBPS, it does hide IP, and I can select the country and region I want. Also it's available on my computer and on multiple devices at once.

I don't see the value of WARP+ at $4.99/month. Less features and slower.

<comment><USER64> Netflix's fast.com speed test on my iPhone:

      * Comcast without WARP:  460 Mbps
      * Comcast with WARP:      30 Mbps
      * T-Mobile without WARP: 500 Kbps
      * T-Mobile with WARP:    600 Kbps

Regular WARP doesn't claim any performance speedups, so I'm curious to see how WARP+ compares. In the meantime, I will disable WARP for my home Wi-Fi.

<comment><USER65> fast.com speed test on iPhone:

      * Hi3G (Carrier Aggregation) without WARP+: 39 Mbps
      * Hi3G (Carrier Aggregation) with WARP+:    39 Mbps
      * Hi3G without WARP+:                       12 Mbps
      * Hi3G with WARP+:                          32 Mbps

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> Super excited about 1.1.1. Warp.

kudos @ launching, have been waiting for this

How I see it: a well operated VPN service for whenever you trust Cloudflare more than the internet connection you're currently on (coffee shop or airport wifi, co-working space, random mobile ISP when traveling or even at home, …).

Compare this to the current best alternative: difficult to evaluate VPNs ranging from paid to free & non-trivial to set up.

Not saying there are no alternatives but even for me it is not easy to tell which ones are actually better or in the same ballpark (@ trust, speed, ops- skills, …) let alone for the longtail of users who would be better off with something like Cloudflare than with a random shady VPN or nothing.

</comment><comment><USER67> Really cool service. Using warp on my phone and it surprisingly makes a big difference in locations with spotty 4G. Couple of questions :

* I read that cloudflare generates a unique id for each install and the purpose was to track referrals. Consider adding an option to opt out of the unique id tracking since some users will be concerned about it.

* Any plans to add an option to use an ip from cloudflare instead of my ip address being visible to the websites I visit, at least on the paid plan? I know this opens a can of worms dealing with abuse of the service which could lead to certain ip addresses belonging to cloudflare being blacklisted.

<comment><USER68> Cloudflare has made pretty clear in this thread that they don't plan on stopping the IP from being exposed, they also plan to expose to all sites, even the ones on non-CF networks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> Would anyone kindly elucidate on the difference between Warp vs VPN?

I recently purchased Adblock by Futuremind from AppStore, since I got really worried about my privacy. It has some features like local proxy DNS and setting up new rules. I keep my VPN on all day.

Before that, I used to use Hotspot Shield since that was free. I used to get only one server viz. USA.

I see internet speaks highly of NordVPN but that's a whopping $85 which kinda burns a hole in my pocket. They claim that PWC has done an audit on them and confirmed that they don't save users data.

Would someone here kindly guide me on the most reliable VPN out there, for iOS?

Thanks in advance for sorting me out :)

<comment><USER70> Don't ever user free VPNs and especially something like Hotspot Shield. You can check [https://thatoneprivacysite.net/](https://thatoneprivacysite.net/) for a comparison of VPN services.

I use Mullvad VPN which supports both OpenVPN and Wireguard(which is the reason I use Mullvad) and costs 5 euros per month. You can use something like Bitcoin to pay if you want anonymity.

<comment><USER69> Thanks for opening my cautioning about HotSpot Shield.

5 euros/ month sounds expensive but does it give a bigger bang for your buck?

<comment><USER70> I think it does. If you want cheaper VPNs, you should checkout Private Internet Access(PIA). If you subscribe for annual plans, you will get it cheaper there. PIA doesn't support Wireguard protocol though.

<comment><USER69> Thanks for this.

I have already bought Adblock by Futuremind from AppStore. Went through [https://thatoneprivacysite.net/](https://thatoneprivacysite.net/) didn't saw Adblock anywhere. Reckon Futuremind Adblock ain't that good :(

May I ask on what basis you judge the reliability of VPN's?

I can already see OpenVPN and WireGuard support, but apart from that, any other major parameter?

Any doc I could read to understand VPN's better?

Thanks again for taking interest in my issue.

PS - Are you talking about the VPN by Private Internet Access Developer by Anonymous VPN Service and provided by London Trust Media, Inc on AppStore?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> Installed on android. Doesn't work. Says "connection interrupted". Looks like it needs more work.

</comment><comment><USER72> I'd really like to use this on my computer. The article says it uses the WireGuard protocol, can I just take the private key from my device, put it in a configuration file and use it?

<comment><USER13> They've said elsewhere[1] that they're are working on desktop apps. No time frame yet.

If you can extract the endpoints, private and public keys, it _might_ work. It would be considered unsupported and might be considered a violation of the terms of use. Check the license agreement.

1: [https://community.cloudflare.com/t/warp- desktop/79072](https://community.cloudflare.com/t/warp-desktop/79072)

<comment><USER73> Note that while community MVPs (FD: I'm one of them) are generally good for answers, they don't represent Cloudflare or speak for them.

That answer is correct, but official word is here [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21071258](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21071258)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> Now that Cloudflare has their own VPN, will there be an increase in showing those annoying captcha/challenge pages for connections made from every other VPN/Tor?

<comment><USER40> I think it is more appropriate to say that Cloudflare has their own TOR ...

As I ask elsewhere in this comment section, I don't see why "warp" endpoints won't be discriminated against the same way TOR endpoints are.

<comment><USER55> Tor masks a user's IP address, while Warp does not.

Warp endpoints will most likely not face the same kind of "discrimination". However, Warp does not provide any anonymity, which is the main reason people use Tor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> One backdoor to rule them all. They just have to be a target for NSA, the SVR, and the Third Department. How would you audit Cloudflare to find that?

<comment><USER57> The same way you audit Comcast, Verizon, Starbucks, etc. This is changing who you trust from many to a single provider but not otherwise removing the need for legal reform.

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> Super excited to give this a few month paid trial. I've seen time and time again that Cloudflare takes the value of privacy seriously. Alternative VPNs seem to be running on AWS or GCP anyways.

I spend a lot of time outside the USA and have privacy concerns a bit beyond USAs typical data collection. I've been enjoying the 22.214.171.124 app since April without issues.

I'd love to see the speed comparison examples soon!

</comment><comment><USER77> I'm confused as to the difference between Warp and Warp+. Upgrading to Warp+ says it routes all your traffic through Cloudflare's servers. So I guess regular Warp doesn't, then. Is Warp "just" DNS over HTTPS/TLS and Warp+ is a more traditional VPN?

</comment><comment><USER78> If I were to use a VPN I'd stick with providers with proven track records of responding to court orders with empty logs, not the company with a CEO who capriciously kicks sites off their platform in response to online mobs.

I'd also feel very uneasy with continuing to feed the consolidation of the internet's traffic. Giving full control of your phone's routing to Cloudflare is sold as improving performance, but what it also does is give Cloudflare a lot of flexibility to pay less in transit costs and have a stronger position for peering agreements. Today that might be good in preventing ISP shakedowns, but very bad tomorrow if ISPs have to pay Cloudflare for the privilege of accessing the majority of the internet.

<comment><USER61> This is funny to me because CF's previous reputation was that they'd do business with anyone no matter how scummy. They're notorious for selling to both sides when criminal gangs were DDoS'ing each other. But they terminate service for a grand total of two sites and suddenly they're "capricious".

<comment><USER7> As far as I know, CloudFlare are still willing to provide service to all of the DDoS services that let anyone with a few dollars knock any company which doesn't buy from CloudFlare off the internet. They just don't have the excuse that they're doing it out of some kind of belief in free speech anymore.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> Since Cloudflare have their own network, would this be useful to use in countries where they have a reliable home internet but poor (bad latency/speed) links outside of the country?

For example would remote desktop from Thailand or Philippines to Europe work more reliably?

<comment><USER80> Probably. That's the sort of thing that WARP Plus can help with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER81> This is a huge technical accomplishment if you peruse the related blog post [https://blog.cloudflare.com/warp-technical- challenges/](https://blog.cloudflare.com/warp-technical-challenges/) around network topology. If you compare CF to Fastly, Akamai, and LLNW (the other 3 publicly traded CDNs) CF is so much better staffed and managed it is mind boggling to see how the others will remain relevant over a longer timescale. CF is one of the few recent tech IPOs where I haven't rolled my eyes and groaned. I used to work at one of the others so know quite a bit about this industry and how far behind the major players are.

</comment><comment><USER82> How does the end user know if WARP is actually working? As I understand it, a regular VPN will mask your IP so you can tell very easily if you're protected by checking your externally reported IP. How would you know with WARP?

<comment><USER73> It uses "connect on demand", at least on iOS, so iOS will block all traffic that doesn't go through the VPN (other than a few iOS services iirc).

</comment></comment><comment><USER83> Damn, I thought they had switched to OS/2

<comment><USER84> Glad I'm not the only one who thought of that.

:-D

</comment></comment><comment><USER85> > WARP, instead, is built for the average consumer. It's built to ensure that > your data is secured while it's in transit. So the networks between you and > the applications you're using can't spy on you. It will help protect you > from people sniffing your data while you're at a local coffee shop. It will > also help ensure that your ISP isn't hoovering up data on your browsing > patterns to sell to advertisers.

Most of those consumers aren't aware of any of that, so if you want them to use it, you'll have to pay for marketing to bring it to their attention. Is that the plan?

<comment><USER86> They also states:

> Before today, there were approximately two million people on the waitlist to > try WARP. That demand blew us away. It also embarrassed us. The common > refrain is consumers don't care about their security and privacy, but the > attention WARP got proved to us how wrong that assumption actually is.

<comment><USER87> I feel like that misses the point though. I'd be shocked _(and happily wrong)_ if a large portion of those 2M users are none technical average people.

If anything, all I would take from that number is that the tech crowd is perhaps larger than people give it credit for. But I highly doubt that waitlist expands highly beyond the tech crowd.

Happy to be wrong, though :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> The 18.104.22.168 app's original UI was nice and simple: just a big switch. But trying to cram WARP and WARP+ into the same UI is confusing. The same switch is now used to show and control multiple states: Disconnected, Connecting, Connected to WARP, Connected to WARP+, and Paused. In addition, there is redundant UI to switch between WARP and WARP+ in the "Additional Settings" menu and to unpause on the main screen.

</comment><comment><USER88> I'll give it a go, still have 22.214.171.124 installed, though disabled/stopped using it as upon my phone it just eat up battery. Kept trying on updates every now and then, but same. Though beyond that, can't say I've bothered to dig/look into it and figured due to my phone being a 3 year old mid-range affair, now what you would call low-end - though QC 430 2GB Ram kinda works ok.

</comment><comment><USER89> Great news! I'm still 155k on the warp waitlist since April. Is there a plan to push the waitlist along?

I'd love to get my non-tech family on this.

<comment><USER12> Yes, we are running through the waitlist now. Our hope is to get everyone activated today.

<comment><USER89> Awesome, thank you :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER90> Love Warp, I was lucky enough to get into their Beta program via Testflight and it's been great and stable. many times I disabled it thinking my internet is broken because of Warp VPN and turns out to be my provider or wifi that is just down.

I wish they provided a desktop version, or at least to change all the traffic from my central MikroTik router to use Warp.

<comment><USER91> This might be interesting to you for running on desktop (its for Mac, but probably can do something similar for Windows?): [https://twitter.com/saurik/status/1176893448445558784](https://twitter.com/saurik/status/1176893448445558784)

</comment></comment><comment><USER92> Nobody mentioned IPv6 support yet. It's nice as well. There are many VPN providers out there without IPv6 support.

</comment><comment><USER57> This looks like a neat idea but I've haven't gotten it to connect on two WiFi networks or T-Mobile LTE. The one thing which could explain that is it showing me as having 0MB of WARP+ but there's no way I'm paying before I can test it and it seems pointless if it requires the network provider to enable it.

<comment><USER31> You should file a bug from within the app; you don't need WARP+ to use Warp and it shouldn't require anything from your provider.

<comment><USER57> I did, and was later able to connect using LTE so I suspect this is due to UDP being blocked on those WiFi networks but I don't have an easy way to confirm that other than seeing the timeouts in the logs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER93> One nice thing about this is that it allows accessing IPv6 sites over and IPv4-only connection.

I'll definitely be using this as I can only connect to my house via IPv6 and my mobile provider doesn't offer it. This means that I can just toggle on the VPN for when I need IPv6 connectivity.

</comment><comment><USER94> I'm confused about who sees what IP when. I'm also confused about the bandwidth limits on plus. Having essentially two products blended together, and using new technology that behaves uniquely, makes the communication lift here that much heavier.

<comment><USER73> Plus uses their priate backbone, so it costs them money to send traffic through it.

The IP discovery is currently only available for CF websites: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21070828](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21070828)

</comment></comment><comment><USER95> Works fine in Beijing, thanks!

<comment><USER96> Are u able to browse blocked sites with it on? IE Gmail, Youtube, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER97> I signed up for Cloudflare Warp last night.

Any idea why iOS apps seem to not want to update using Warp? I've noticed the same when using other VPNs (including on Android).

I disabled Warp this morning after the Apple App Store wouldn't update apps.

</comment><comment><USER98> Tried on Android 9, installed the VPN and turned on "always-on" mode and "disallow non-VPN connections". Telegram and Instagram stopped to work, so I uninstalled.

</comment><comment><USER99> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21070315](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21070315) is a related post.

</comment><comment><USER100> I love it. You _always_ have to make privacy and security tradeoffs -- and to me WARP is a promising initiative.

Question: is there an OSX version? Or am I just blind? :)

<comment><USER31> Elsewhere in this thread the folks who work on this have stated that there are plans for desktop versions in the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER101> Congratulations on launching another great feature! I've been patiently on the waitlist for a very long time now, and it's great to see it out now!

</comment><comment><USER102> I wonder if there's any chance they'll add an ad blocking feature.

I'd probably give WARP a shot but I'm not willing to give up DNS66 to switch over

</comment><comment><USER103> > days before the April 1 planned roll out. Please don't launch actual > software on April 1st.

</comment><comment><USER104> Does WARP block access to websites that Cloudflare has specifically denied a platform to their other services? It only makes sense that if they refused to do business with a website because they are "an environment that revels in violating [the spirit of anti-hate law]" that they would also prevent end- users from accessing it under the same grounds, no?

</comment><comment><USER105> Argo is really cool... and also really unaffordable and solving a problem we wouldn't have in the first place if "net neutrality" was something tier 3 ISPs took seriously and stopped routing me across the world to save a few cents because one of their upstream provider provides cheaper bandwidth on a less congested route.

</comment><comment><USER106> After they abandoned 8chan, I don't think I'll ever trust this company again.

</comment><comment><USER107> Can't connect to Warp+ and Warp on phone when connected with office Wifi Network.

</comment><comment><USER108> My upload speed is horrendous using this. Usually 15mb now 0.72?

</comment><comment><USER109> Having a hard time seeing why consumers want or need this.

</comment><comment><USER110> Can you tell me a what I am risking not using WARP?

</comment><comment><USER111> How would this work together with nextdns.io?

<comment><USER112> On Android it doesn't appear to override private DNS settings, so its working just fine for me with Adguard DNS. I think nextdns works the same way.

I'm surprised, but pleased that you can use WARP without 188.8.131.52 DNS. Hopefully thats not a bug.

<comment><USER111> On iOS it doesn't seem to work. It's either WARP or nextdns. A quick google search taught me all "custom" dns setups on iOS require some sort of VPN-like solution (very much like the nextdns.io iOS app does).

Back to nextdns then, has more value to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER113> Does anyone know if it breaks VoWifi?

</comment><comment><USER114> what is this exactly? proxying all your data through cloudflare or just dns traffic?

</comment><comment><USER115> Can someone here give me a layman's rundown of WARP and why I might want to use it on my Android phone?

<comment><USER51> When you use the internet, your ISP (and some others) can see where you are going. They might sell that info to advertisers, or you might be blocked from accessing some websites depending on your country.

Warp essentially shields where you are going. The only folks knowing where you go are you, your destination, and Warp.

Warp+ also gives you access to a private, faster network.

</comment></comment><comment><USER116> Nothing is free!

</comment><comment><USER117> is that a VPN? why did it take so long to implement as they stated multiple times?

I try to avoid Cloudflare if I have an option because they are getting too big.

</comment><comment><USER118> Just a reminder that Cloudflare is now a publicly traded company, and if you would have bought at the IPO at $18 you would be up 15% by now, with more expected to come.

</comment><comment><USER119> I'm sure as hell not going to trust Cloudflare with my DNS, and I'm especially not going to route all my traffic through them. That company shredded its credibility. Centralization _always_ leads to corruption.

</comment><comment><USER120> [In order to not spread bad info I'm deleting my paragraph where I misunderstand what WARP is]

Even this blog post is confusing "From a technical perspective, WARP is a VPN." Then contrasts WARP with a "traditional VPN"

<comment><USER12> This is incorrect. WARP is the VPN, WARP+ is a series of routing enhancements designed to improve performance. Sorry for the confusion, clearly we need to explain it better.

<comment><USER120> Ah. I turned on WARP, then googled "what is my ip?" and it is returning the IP address that I had before turning on WARP. Is that not the intended behavior?

edit: read your other comments and see this is (in some circumstances) intended behavior. I don't think you should claim WARP is a VPN if you aren't offering privacy from the endpoint. Perhaps the app should say "your browsing traffic is now private" rather than "your internet is private."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER121> I did a ctrl+f for "Onavo" and got nothing, so I'm going to say it loudly and publicly: There's no such thing as a free (lunch) VPN. Sure, Cloudflare has a premium product available, but the availability of a free version (not a free trial) means that, most likely, you're not the customer - You're the product. Your data, your browsing history, encrypted though they may be, are valauable to Cloudflare.</comment>


Ask HN: How would you deploy Amazon Prime Air today? - <AUTHOR>

I have no links to Amazon but am really rooting for something like this to become a reality. The few people I have spoken to have been skeptical and rightly so.
For starters, the last-mile problem is the trickiest as you get into urban sites. So in the mean time Amazon could negotiate pre-defined routes with the FAA that link the central warehouse to local depots. Drones would fly between this route and the route would be carefully chosen to mitigate disaster. The initial routes would also need to be chosen so that they have a natural advantage over the existing delivery network (say to and from an island or a mountainous location). Theft could be mitigated by doing overnight delivery where the darkness would provide some cover. It's not end-to-end delivery but it's a great start if you could just drive over to your local depot with the drone arriving at roughly the same time.
I could see that sort of pilot project get deployed tomorrow.
If you really had to make this a reality today and this was your day job, how would you go about it? <comment><USER2> I would start with a controlled deployment -- either test it for delivering supplies in various corporate office parks, or something like military bases or college campuses. Something where the bulk of the ground being covered is owned by the same organization. Then go from there.</comment>


Is The Open Source/Internet Singularity Coming? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.hashtagify.me/2011/11/02/is-the-open-sourceinternet-singularity-coming/

<comment><USER2> Ok, so if the term "singularity" already hasn't lost all of its meaning, now it officially has.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're giving me too much credit :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Question in the headline?

The answer's always, "No."</comment>


The 3DPL an open source license for 3D printing - <AUTHOR> https://blog.youmagine.com/2015/03/3dpl-released-an-open-source-license-for-3d-printed-things/

<comment><AUTHOR> We'd like feedback from entrepreneurs, makers & the 3D printing community so we can make this a broadly accepted license to engender the remix and sharing of technology.</comment>


Why So Many Americans Still Work Multiple Jobs in Strong Market - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-04/why-so-many-americans-still-work-multiple-jobs-in-strong-market <comment><USER2> Did they even answer the question or drop a bunch of stats?

"Dylan Williams, 22, a full-time student pursuing a master's degree in public health at George Washington University, earns about $475 a week before taxes from two minimum-wage jobs at a coffee shop and co-working space in the nation's capital."

then

"Also, the higher the education level, the greater the likelihood of holding more than one job, including in professional and business services, finance, insurance or real-estate, Gimbel said."

So which is it? People that cant get a job in Industry or highly educated individuals that work extra?

I did not understand this article's purpose.</comment>


Show HN: Gambe.ro, the Italian Hacker News - <AUTHOR> https://gambe.ro/ <comment><USER2> Shouldn't this rather be called the "Italian Lobsters"? :-)

<comment><USER3> Prawn (gambero) is close enough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Request an invite. Would it be possible to get a non-white background? it doesn't have to be dark but something HN-style would really help my eyes

<comment><AUTHOR> we are working on a toggable dark mode. Everybody is asking for it and we hope to deliver it soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> How can I request an invite if I don't want to publicly expose my email address on a website?

</comment><comment><USER6> In this very moment only three submissions on the frontpage are actually Italian.

<comment><USER7> To be fair, even if Italian is my main language I still have issues using while talking about software. So my natural language for that is just English.

I think would help everybody keeping like that. But that rise a question, why do we need an Italian HN? (this is not scepticism but just natural question) Which target is that platform aming to, different than HN already does?

Great initiative anyway!

<comment><AUTHOR> You can read our motivation here: [https://gambe.ro/about](https://gambe.ro/about)

I would say there's a huge target demographic that HN will never cover. HN is addressing a very narrow target. A very vocal and over-represented one, but very small in terms of absolute numbers. The IT sector is big and diverse and a single platform will never cover it.

If we think about the Italian case, this is doubly true because the whole sector in our country has a very different structure: the material conditions, the working culture, the power relationships between the programmers, the job market and the employers are completely different than in Germany or California and what is being discussed here, rarely apply to Italy. This clearly reflects also on the technical side: in a body-rental based IT sector like the one in Italy, good practices, innovation and the choice of tecnologies need to answer needs that are very different in a sector where you have mostly flexible startups or titanic companies with endless resources. That's why there's value in a dedicated community, because we can avoid the erasure of these economical, cultural and technical differences.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Finally!! So happy to see the italian transposition of HN/lobste.rs to my language. So happy :)

Thanks a lot, chobeat!

</comment><comment><USER9> How will the EU article 11 and 13 link tax affect European news aggregators like this? Very brave to launch something like this at this moment.

<comment><AUTHOR> we have no profit and we can demostrate it, so it shouldn't affect us. Also, since we don't have to pay taxes, it's not clear under which jurisdiction we are. The host is in Italy, the domain is from Romenia, the guy paying the domain is in Germany (me) and the guy handling the host is again in Italy. These articles will be received by different coutnries in different ways and until then, one cannot really know what's going to happen. Most likely nothing, they are a very poor piece of legislation even for the despicable goals they had.</comment></comment>


Out of 15M brackets, none remains to win Warren Buffet's $1B March Madness bet - <AUTHOR> https://tournament.fantasysports.yahoo.com/quickenloansbracket/group/all/standings Original title: Out of 15M brackets, only 1 remains to win Warren Buffet's $1B March Madness bet<p>http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/ncaab-the-dagger/there-are-no-longer-any-perfect-brackets-left-in-the-billion-dollar-bracket-challenge-003853949.html <comment><USER2> There are currently still 3 perfect brackets on ESPN.

      1. http://games.espn.go.com/tournament-challenge-bracket/2014/en/entry?entryID=576318
      1. http://games.espn.go.com/tournament-challenge-bracket/2014/en/entry?entryID=4155737
      1. http://games.espn.go.com/tournament-challenge-bracket/2014/en/entry?entryID=10928050

[http://games.espn.go.com/tournament-challenge- bracket/2014/e...](http://games.espn.go.com/tournament-challenge- bracket/2014/en/leaderboard)

<comment><USER3> Now they are all done. Thanks, SF Austin. I got it wrong, too.

<comment><USER4> And that's the bottom line...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> From a game design standpoint, that was one problem with this design. Since half the tournament occurs in the first round (well, not counting the wildcard round), there's no drama; everyone gets shot down immediately. In the movie version of this, it'll come down to at _least_ the Final Four before our hero gets knocked out, no matter how implausible the odds of making it that far are.

<comment><USER6> There's usually perfect brackets a couple rounds in. This year was rough. While the first round has half the games, they're usually a lot more predictable than later rounds.

This is probably my worst first round ever, anecdotally.

<comment><USER7> Not true - in ESPN leagues, only 1 bracket the past 7 years made it past the first weekend perfect.

<comment><USER6> Hmm. I'm pretty sure I've seen more than 1 perfect bracket in the last 7 years on Yahoo, but I was certainly wrong about second round. Apparently there's only one documented case ever of a second round perfect bracket.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A friend and I today discussed if you had a perfect bracket after the great 8 round, going into the Final 4, would you, and for how much, sell a stake in your bracket to hedge your money?

The numbers, though it's a "billion $" bracket, that's actually $25M over 40 years, or an optional $300M single payout. In the US, you could expect about 55% of that after taxes, so $165M. There are 3 games left at the Final 4 game.

<comment><USER8> In an interview, Warren Buffet suggested that if someone was perfect at the Final Four, he'd offer to buy them out for the EV (or even half the EV). If you aren't already rich, you'd be an idiot to not take his offer. It pays for Warren Buffet to buy someone out for their EV, because that minimizes HIS risk.

Even if the person refused the offer, Warren Buffet could go to Vegas and bet on the last couple of games, as a hedge.

Even if you're perfect at the sweet 16 (which has never happened), with 15 games left (assuming each is a coinflip), your EV is 1/2^15 ~ 1 in 32000, so your bracket is only worth $300M/32000 ~ $9k.

<comment><USER9> There is no way to hedge $100M+ on sports bets. Nobody will take that kind of action, even if he spread it around to every single book.

I personally think if I was offered $10M as a settlement, I'd take it.

<comment><USER8> He can start hedging in the Sweet 16 (assuming only 1 perfect bracket exists), where he only has to bet $20k-$100k on each game.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Some background: Warren Buffett Offers $1 Billion For Perfect March Madness Bracket

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyphillipserb/2014/01/21/warr...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyphillipserb/2014/01/21/warren- buffett-offers-1-billion-for-perfect-march-madness-bracket/)

</comment><comment><USER10> From a "get people to play with numbers" perspective, this was actually a pretty cool challenge on Warren Buffet's part. Most people are going to spray- and-pray (my facebook feed is full of facetious "shit, there goes my billion dollars") but I would be surprised if there weren't a large number of people who put more effort than they otherwise would have into trying to figure out statistical models for who wins basketball games.

</comment><comment><USER11> There is still one bracket left as of 11:27p EDT. [https://tournament.fantasysports.yahoo.com/quickenloansbrack...](https://tournament.fantasysports.yahoo.com/quickenloansbracket/2030973)

<comment><USER12> I saw this too. Am I missing something or is the headline here wrong?

<comment><USER13> Notice how he's not entered into the Quicken Loans Bracket Pool? They also sent out an email to all the participants stating that nobody was left perfect, so I'm going to guess that he either filled out his bracket post- Round of 64 or was unlucky enough to not actually enter it into the Billion Dollar Challenge.

<comment><USER11> How is he not in the Quicken Loans bracket? He's at the top of it: [https://tournament.fantasysports.yahoo.com/quickenloansbrack...](https://tournament.fantasysports.yahoo.com/quickenloansbracket/group/all/standings) or is that not the right standings list?

<comment><USER13> I think he simply entered it into Yahoo Sports, but didn't actually submit it to the Quicken Billion Dollar Competition. If he were in the Quicken competition, the bracket page would have it listed under "Pools" \- which its not. But I'm not 100% sure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's not in the article but my guess would be that none of Warren Buffet's money was ever actually on the line. The last time Pepsi had a contest for $1 Billion, they bought insurance against someone meeting the conditions to win the prize. Who'd they buy that insurance from? Berkshire Hathaway.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepsi_Billion_Dollar_Sweepstake...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepsi_Billion_Dollar_Sweepstakes#Insurance)

<comment><USER15> Right, same deal this time as I remember reading about it. It is funny that Buffet gets most of the PR when Buffett's company is just making a fortune insuring against a very unlikely outcome. Normally the crazy people marketing the potential $1B payout (that buy insurance from some boring insurance company) would get the PR.

<comment><USER16> I doubt it's a fortune. After all, given the astronomical odds, I think you'd be able to argue an insignificant premium was appropriate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Assuming you could pick game winners with 80% probability, your odds of selecting a perfect 63 game bracket are less than 1 in a million. I.e.

       >>> .8 ** 63
       7.846377169233378e-07

Even at 90%, your odds are little better than 1 in a thousand:

       >>> .9 ** 63
       0.0013100205086376223

Needless to say, I didn't even bother entering.

<comment><USER18> What? You didn't take 1 in a million odds because? The challenge was _free_. I took the challenge (and lost). To dismiss the challenge because of the long odds is silly. You left a free lunch on the table.

<comment><USER17> Elsewhere in this discussion someone posted this link [1] which claims that

       Odds are that Buffett's bracket isn't worth your time,
       however. Having a 1-in-7.4 billion chance of winning a
       billion dollars is worth the equivalent of 14 cents.
       That's before accounting for taxes

I understand why you entered. It's for the same reason people play the lottery. People value a large payoff much more highly than a small one, even if the odds are worse for the big payoff.

I.e. for many people it's not worth betting $2 for a 1:2 chance of winning $4. That won't be a life changing event. But people are willing to bet $2 for a 1:175,223,510 chance of winning perhaps $100,000,000, even though those odds are much worse. That's how Powerball makes money. BTW I do bet on Powerball once in a while.

In my case I figured it wasn't worth betting $0.14 (because I knew it would take more than that of my time) to win $1,000,000,000.

[1] [http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/we- have-a-1-in-6001225228...](http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/we- have-a-1-in-6001225228-chance-of-winning-buffetts-billion/)

<comment><USER19> > In my case I figured it wasn't worth betting $0.14 (because I knew it would > take more than that of my time) to win $1,000,000,000.

People in work say this and it amuses me - as they then go on to say how they enjoyed an evening-in watching two films back-to-back.

In other words: your time should only be equated to money if you don't enjoy the task.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> LOL, this is hilarious. I was talking to my Girlfriend and all of my friends and I told them: You have a better probability, after being born, of becoming a billionaire just because you're alive versus you wining Warren Buffet's money. Then they countered, with: But if we play, we at least have some chance. I just laughed and got back to programming.

</comment><comment><USER21> It's actually none now. They sent out an email and push notification.

<comment><AUTHOR> Looks like I can no longer edit the title, but you're right.

[http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/ncaab-the-dagger/there-are- no-...](http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/ncaab-the-dagger/there-are-no-longer- any-perfect-brackets-left-in-the-billion-dollar-bracket- challenge-003853949.html)

<comment><USER22> Looks like the final perfect bracket (even though it's ineligible for the Billion Dollar Challenge) is about to be busted anyway with VCU on the verge of beating S.F. Austin.

edit: March Madness.

<comment><USER23> S.F. Austin had a 4-point play with 3.6 seconds left in the game to tie. Then they won in overtime. That guy is still perfect!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Buffet said he calculated what he thought the odds were of a perfect bracket and took a premium on top of that. I wonder what return he got on his $1B bet.

</comment><comment><USER25> There's still one perfect bracket after BOTH days (though not in the Buffet challenge): [http://bleacherreport.com/articles/2001973-this-is-the- only-...](http://bleacherreport.com/articles/2001973-this-is-the-only-perfect- ncaa-tournament-bracket- left?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=programming- national)

</comment><comment><USER26> Actually down to just 1 at the time of 10 PM EST on Friday

</comment><comment><USER27> Upsets are common. However so many of them appeared I'm completely unsurprised the money is already safe. Watching brackets in my company pool crumble left and right had been crazy.

With weighted results, I wonder what the odds of this set of outcomes happening even was (note, some of the "upsets" by seed weren't really, like the CU vs Pitt game where Pitt ran them over).

</comment><comment><USER28> What am I missing...? The top bracket is still perfect, currently 30/30 and their pick is leading in the other two games

<comment><USER29> From what I can tell, the still-perfect bracket is not in the Billion Dollar Bracket Challenge, but just at the top of the overall leaderboard among all brackets/pools on Yahoo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> They should have put more emphasis on the top 20 non-perfects winning 100k. That's still pretty good! But I suppose the goal was harvesting information for quicken loans so mission accomplished.

</comment><comment><USER31> So I have absolutely no idea how this works, but I've seen it around a lot.

So I assume that you can enter once, how many unique entries would there need to be to actually get a combination that would win?

<comment><USER32> If you assume knowledge about basketball is useful, billions:

[http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/we- have-a-1-in-6001225228...](http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/we- have-a-1-in-6001225228-chance-of-winning-buffetts-billion/)

It goes way up from there if you treat it like coin flips.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Well, duh. At 63 games this has an expected value of $1e-10.

[https://www.google.com/search?q=1000000000%2F2%5E63](https://www.google.com/search?q=1000000000%2F2%5E63)

<comment><USER34> That would be the case if each of the games were played between truly equal teams. In fact, many of the games are much easier to predict than 50/50 since one team is better than another. So the expected value is actually higher, (though presumably still quite small, of course!)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> We have a better chance winning the Mega Millions jackpot

</comment><comment><USER36> This shows you the power of statistics

</comment><comment><USER37> This stunt actually makes me angry. Not a good PR move imo.

"I have enough money that I can risk giving up a billion $. And I may just give it to you if you can beat the odds that's harder than getting hit by lighting multiples times in 1 year."

How about offering pot of 100 million to top (aka sweep) 16 instead...

But never mind, it's their money...

<comment><USER38> This does seem silly. According to the article, the odds of picking the correct bracket are less than 1 in 128 billion, so there is practically zero risk.

<comment><USER39> ...drum roll...

Accurately assessing financial risk is the reason Buffet has stacked so much paper.</comment></comment></comment>


Please review my new programmer screening app - <AUTHOR> http://codeboff.in

<comment><USER2> Here is a bunch of feedback:

There doesn't appear to be any opportunity for TDD (or any kind of testing or iteration), even for something simple like checking syntax (I submitted one with a missing ';'). As a result, it does not come close enough to a real- world programming task.

Once I had looked around, and failed to find a "run" button, I decided that I'd try just pressing submit, and I got to the "we'll email you" screen. I'm sure I'm not alone. This would account for the very low pass rates.

In the real world, this would be like having all your programmers working with a plain text editor and no compiler, and having them commit untested code, in feature-sized chunks, to trunk for the CI server to build and test.

Obviously, under the right circumstances, I could do the work on my own computer, and paste the code into your form, but that sort of defeats the purpose of having it online.

Following the doctrine that programs are written for humans first, computers second, a human still needs to read the code to work out whether or not it was well written. I don't know if you make this available to screeners.

You could try applying some other metrics (e.g. max/mean function length), to give more than a pass-fail.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback!

\- You're right, I think a lot of people expect to be able to check their code first. When I was planning this, I figured if I were the candidate, I'd use my local IDE to compile and test the code first. So this was a bad assumption which I need to fix.

\- Screeners do have access to the code a candidate submits. It goes in a mail to them along with the pass/fail rating and is also accessible in their accounts.

\- Pass/fail is definitely on the crude side, but I was going for an 80% solution first.

<comment><USER2> I forgot the positive part of my feedback - It does look good, and you've certainly hit the 80% solution. nice work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I really like the idea of this site, but it needs some polish.

1\. As everybody has said, more languages.

2\. One of the aims is to have the candidate as calm as possible. Seeing that 90% of people can't write a C program that reverses a linked list makes me nervous about the strictness of the test.

3\. Rather than giving just a subset of the environment how about you make each test have to produce a binary. Then tell candidates that the test is for `gcc -o reverse reverce.c && ./reverse 1 2 3 4` to output "4 3 2 1". I presume you are running them in a sandboxed VM? That will help people run and debug the program on their own machines.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

\- With the 'open' tests, encouraging experimentation was the intent. It definitely needs an interactive syntax check as others have suggested.

\- Each test does produce a binary, which runs in a sandbox (or rather a few nested sandboxing mechanisms). Your suggestion is interesting but I don't think I fully understand it. For one it might restrict us to solutions expressible as strings, and the formatting requirements might make the task stricter.

<comment><USER3> I guess I didn't explain myself well enough. Give candidates the entire file and tell them how it will be run. Then it's trivial for them to develop on their local machine.

I'm positive most of the failures you'll get are syntax related. Let people check their own! If you want to check their syntax for them, that is going to be a lot of work and make it harder to add new languages. Include the unit tests with what you give the candidate so you are not just limited to string output if you want, but you could give just them the formatter too. Keep up the good work though, it was actually quite fun doing a couple of the tests :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the encouragement, it's very heartening!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a good idea. It needs more features and polish, but I see no good reason why someone would NOT use this for hiring. I think the especially important points will be:

1\. Support for all reasonable languages.

2\. LOTS of different tests--the more unique, the less likely the solutions can be copied and pasted from either someplace online, or a friend who applied and took the same test.

It would also be awesome if you told the candidate "program in this window because the employer will be able to watch you code". Then show the employer a fast-forward view of the programming process. Does this person guess and check their way to a solution? Do they plan out the whole algorithm first? What kind of mistakes did they make?

If you had all that stuff, I think this would do a reasonable job of at least filtering for raw programming ability.

<comment><USER5> >This is a good idea. It needs more features and polish, but I see no good reason why someone would NOT use this for hiring

Other than, as Joel pointed out a long time ago - the best people wouldn't put up with it because they can always get a job elsewhere.

>It would also be awesome if you told the candidate "program in this window because the employer will be able to watch you code". Then show the employer a fast-forward view of the programming process. Does this person guess and check their way to a solution? Do they plan out the whole algorithm first? What kind of mistakes did they make?

Absolutely not - I program in a real editor, and I won't be judged by some wannabe textbox.

<comment><USER4> > the best people wouldn't put up with it because they can always get a job > elsewhere.

How are you supposed to know that someone is one of the "best people"? Presumably by word of mouth and recommendations. I'm not saying that all applicants should be forced to use this system--if you know that someone is great, no need to test them. This is designed to filter out all the REST of the applicants, the ones who may be good, but don't have many references (straight out of college, etc)

> Absolutely not - I program in a real editor, and I won't be judged by some > wannabe textbox.

Fair enough (I enjoy using a decent editor too), but: 1\. These are not supposed to be hundred line solutions. You can live with a crappy editor for 30 minutes. 2\. Maybe applicants could submit a video instead if they wanted. 3\. It's not strictly necessary, it's just another nice data point.

<comment><USER5> About your second point, sure I can program is a textbox but I am going to make mistakes that I would not normally do and I don't want a potential employer to see that, because he will subconsciously think that it is bad even though he should know (and properly does) that that sort of things happen.

And at a job interview I am not going to let something like that count against me. Same reason I am going to go there in appropriate clothing, even though it shouldn't make any difference it does.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I like this idea a lot. We routinely screen people with a really simple programming task to just make sure they aren't completely lying (which happens more than I can believe).

1\. I took a test, implemented reverseWords (which is a test we often give candidates), and was rather shocked to discover that in your estimation, I failed. Yet, pasting the code into vim, and the unit test you say I failed ... I didn't fail. The fact you failed me when I should have passed, isn't great. :) More info on the failure would be helpful.

2\. If I were using this on a real candidate, I would like to know how long it took them to do the test.

I think it's a great idea; I'd consider using it for pre-screening once the kinks are worked out.

<comment><AUTHOR> Could you paste your code here or email it to me at email@example.com? I'd love to find out what happened.

In my experience code that runs on OS X often fails on linux, because gcc on OS X seems to initialize newly malloc'd memory to zero, when gcc on linux doesn't (and it shouldn't, according to malloc's man page).

Thanks!

<comment><USER7> Shouldn't? malloc doesn't make any guarantees that the memory is initialised or not. In the Linux malloc man page it specifically says it is not cleared, on Mac OS X it doesn't specifically mention that it is initialised. On FreeBSD it says it is initialised

Yes, programmers should make sure that memory is indeed cleared, preferably by using calloc or memset.

I just ran a test on my FreeBSD laptop, allocating 256 MB of ram (on a 64 MB physical ram laptop), and then walking through it, and with just malloc I got all 0's. I then had the program write random out to those 256 MB, free it, re- run the program, still no garbage values. Same on Mac OS X. I don't currently have access to a Linux machine so it is not possible for me to run the test there.

So apparently that way may run on Mac OS X and FreeBSD could fail on Linux.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As an applicant, what do I get out of using your service? Why shouldn't I just skip ahead to the next job posting, if some would be employer demanded that I used your service _?

_ if you are Google this does not apply, but otherwise the first problem you have is to answer "why would I ever work for that company", since most large companies are the same anyway.

<comment><AUTHOR> Personally, from the other side, I've seen literally hundreds of people apply to jobs with only one or two open positions.

Most of those candidates turn out to be just noise, but the few that are not don't always get a fair chance because screeners/interviewers are just too swamped. A tool like this can take a large chunk of that load off, and any candidate who invests time in taking this kind of test will know that they are ahead of the 'unwashed masses' without having left the comfort of home.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The service looks nice and the idea is definitely a good one. One questions - you guys look very similar to <http://codility.com> . AFAIK they have been around for a while (see discussion here <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1039140>), have more programming tasks, support TDD and more languages. It's unclear to me whether you just want to compete in the same space or are you anyhow different from them?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Essentially we'd be in the same space. The ways this will differ is:

1) cheaper, one-time pricing, 2) opening up over-played questions to free, public use, 3) less complexity for test-assigners (at least I'd guess so, I haven't really used Codility to assign tests to candidates in real life).

Give it time, it's just getting warmed up. Personally I think this space will (and should) see a lot more competition. Single founder here.

<comment><AUTHOR> Whoops: I meant pay-per-use pricing, not one-time. So it's for companies with a one-time hiring need and, for instance, individuals looking to screen outsourcing partners.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> 1\. I think that it would be more interesting instead of just testing if a applicant can do a specific task, let them try and fix it if they failed. After all, it isn't such a problem in real life if someone doesn't get something right.

2\. What about having them refactor some messy code?

3\. Exercises where they write tests for untested code.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

1\. I am going to add an interactive syntax check feature as a lot of people here have recommended. (As a side-benefit, I can skip asking for an email and present the results immediately after the test).

2\. Funny enough, this was my original vision for the project, but according to feedback on a blog article I wrote to test the hypothesis, people preferred to write their own code from scratch rather than fix the nearly-working test problem code.

Please see: \- [http://blog.codeboff.in/2010/07/03/will-the-real- programmers...](http://blog.codeboff.in/2010/07/03/will-the-real-programmers- please-stand-up-automated-edition/) \- [http://blog.codeboff.in/2010/07/19/bug-fixing-test- problems-...](http://blog.codeboff.in/2010/07/19/bug-fixing-test-problems-are- out/)

3\. Might not be important enough to take time up in a test. As I understand, everyone hates long tests.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It would be fantastic if the candidate could just click a "run" button at any time, and (provided with some input string), see the output.

Of course this would make the pass rate a lot higher... but, assuming you tracked each iteration, would give the recruiter a chance to look at how the candidate goes about identifying their mistakes.

<comment><AUTHOR> I will add the interactive syntax feature seeing that everyone wants it.

Now about tracking iterations, from a candidate's POV, I'd be worried about how my work was coming across, at a stage when I might not be ready to show it yet. I think it's respectful of people's privacy to let them show only the final code that they want to show, and not track their every move on the test. If someone did it to me, I'd be unhappy.

<comment><USER10> You could just take the code snapshot when they choose to run it. Warn them of this, so they only end up showing the recruiter code they think will either work or is suitable for iterative development.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the suggestion! This goes in my notes.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


A quick message queue benchmark: ActiveMQ, RabbitMQ, HornetQ, QPID, Apollo - <AUTHOR> http://x-aeon.com/wp/2013/04/10/a-quick-message-queue-benchmark-activemq-rabbitmq-hornetq-qpid-apollo/ <comment><USER2> I suspect this benchmark is actually just testing the difference between STOMP and AMQP. RabbitMQ with STOMP is in the same regime as ActiveMQ / Apollo while RabbitMQ with AMQP is always 3x-5x faster than _itself_ and others with STOMP.

QPID is the only other AMQP competitor and it seems to have performance issues with persistence but the transient performance is always in the same regime as AMQP RabbitMQ.

STOMP is a UTF-8 text protocol while AMQP is a binary protocol. This means that every message you send using STOMP requires encoding it in a safe-for- text format (e.g. base64 encoding or similar. I'm not intimately familiar with STOMP).

Going on the hypothesis that a STOMP message parser is much slower than an AMQP parser, this would explain why RabbitMQ AMQP does not perform well in the 200 message case while it trounces in the 20k and 200k message case. In the 20k/200k message case the benchmark is mostly looking at time to decode 200k text messages versus 200k binary messages.

It's so exceedingly hard to do a benchmark and measure the thing you think you are measuring.

Also, I agree with others that the minimal difference between persistent and transient setups is very non-intuitive. The author left out an important detail of whether he was using an SSD or not. Otherwise, I suspect an error in the measurement setup.

</comment><comment><USER3> Please keep in mind:

\- All these products have _a lot_ of knobs to set. Performance depends on these knobs. It depends on whether you do batch sends(which some can do), whether you do transactions, whether you chose at-least-once, at-most-once etc. delivery, queue prefetch sizes, I/O worker size, and numerous other settings.

It'd also be interresting to see qpid-cpp in there as well, not just the Java version.

<comment><USER4> This is a test of the default configurations of various brokers, NOT the brokers themselves.

 _Apart from declaring the testing queues in some brokers' configuration and the persistence settings, all brokers were running with their default configuration out of the box (no tuning made)._

He also casually mentions that ZeroMQ is using an in-memory configuration.

 _A home-made ZeroMQ 2.2.0 broker, working in memory only (no persistence)._

The default configuration of AMQ persists messages to journal on disk. So apples to oranges?

Why do people keep writing "benchmark" blog posts like this?

<comment><USER5> My thoughts exactly, this is useless. Benchmarking is something everyone can do, so people do it, but it doesn't provide any real value unless you put an insane amount of time into it, and even then you'll get a lot of hate mail :)

For example, look at the "Yahoo! Cloud System Benchmark" AKA YCSB paper. Those researchers spent a lot of time designing the benchmarks and properly configuring each database that they were testing. They even dedicated a researcher per database to sit down with the developers to review the configurations and the test runs. I was part of this process for the Apache HBase as a dev. In the end, everyone was still critical of the results once they saw the graphs comparing the DBs.

But, I'm still glad they did it as I use YCSB as one of my tools to benchmark HBase.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interesting results! In my testing, I came to a different conclusion.

Background: PHP and STOMP, with loads of several million messages per hour, ranging in size from 2-20Kb. Multiple processes enqueuing, and many more dequeuing. Tests performed about this time last year.

Out of ActiveMQ, RabbitMQ and Apollo:

ActiveMQ crashed _constantly_ under load.

RabbitMQ could not enqueue/dequeue fast enough.

Apollo blew them all out of the water _and_ , long-term, has proven extremely stable.

I must admit that haven't spent hours performance tuning. The results shown here, however, make me think I should go back and re-evaluate.

<comment><USER7> > ActiveMQ crashed constantly under load.

That has been my experience as well, to this day I have an ActiveMQ broker for which the JVM just stops responding, its not the broker that goes unresponsive, its the entire JVM, with no error, no log, no nothing, it just stops replying to the service wrapper and sits at 100% cpu usage. The wrapper kills that JVM and restarts it once every couple days because this happens.

Oh and this was fun: yesterday I went to check on the broker as it was running a bit slow, the DLQ had ~50,000 messages in it that were not there last week, all were timestamped to the same second in ~July 2012...9 months ago...

I'll likely never use ActiveMQ again.

<comment><USER4> AMQ is sensitive to proper memory configuration. Typically what will happen is the memory configuration in the activemq.xml doesn't line up with the JVM heap and this causes garbage collection thrashing. It reaches a point where the CPU spikes and the monitor process zaps the JVM process, which causes a restart.

If everything is tuned and lined up properly this won't happen. I've used AMQ in high-volume production systems for years without this problem.

<comment><USER7> I've played with this and am not getting anywhere near the -Xmx set for the JVM and producer flow control isn't kicking it. Load on this broker isn't very high either, 5k to 10k messages/day, all messages << 1KB.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Sidebar --- anyone interested in running tests with RabbitMQ should check out these posts as a starting point.

[http://www.rabbitmq.com/blog/2012/04/17/rabbitmq- performance...](http://www.rabbitmq.com/blog/2012/04/17/rabbitmq-performance- measurements-part-1/)

[http://www.rabbitmq.com/blog/2012/04/25/rabbitmq- performance...](http://www.rabbitmq.com/blog/2012/04/25/rabbitmq-performance- measurements-part-2/)

Please note that:

1\. the results are from last year, and so not 100% representative of RabbitMQ 3.x which was released after these blogs were posted

2\. what actually matters with message queue performance is stability and scalability over time .. testing this is extremely hard without making over- specific assumptions

</comment><comment><USER9> I appreciate that some effort went into coding this benchmark but I don't understand no time was spent trying to optimise each MQ. You could even email the developers and ask for help since you're going to be publishing this as a comparative benchmark.

</comment><comment><USER10> I really dislike graphs that leave labels off. When presenting results its nice to have a clear understanding of whats being displayed, the missing Y axis on these graphs is not helping.

<comment><USER11> "And now, the results (processing time measured in seconds: the lower the better)."

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Anyone here use NSQ in production (<https://github.com/bitly/nsq>). If so what are your thoughts in comparison to the article?

<comment> mh- we do; rather happy with it. do you have any specific questions about it? the article's approach is.. strange, so I'm not sure how I can meaningfully contrast from a high-level.

 _(disclosure: i've contributed to nsq, after we began using it in production)_

<comment><USER13> Any gotchas moving from RabbitMQ to nsq?

Also, are you missing any features in nsq?

<comment> mh- didn't run into any gotchas, but I tested things very thoroughly before going into production.

to the contrary- deploying static binaries (instead of the erlang environment) simplified things nicely, in my opinion. to be fair, i (personally) don't have the requisite experience tuning BEAM which probably biases my preference.

while relatively high volume, our usage of RabbitMQ was straightforward and covered by the functionality offered in NSQ.

like most, we were using AMQP.. so the switch to NSQ's concise wire protocol (and the associated reduction in pkt/s) saved us a lot of pain given the highly-variable performance we see in the EC2 network.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm interested to see ZMQ being compared to the traditional brokers as I've been considering swapping from ActiveMQ. Although not surprised at it's results. It very much re-enforces the ideal of keeping software simple and barebones, rather than bloating it with stuff most people never use.

Mainly because I'm finding the latency from ActiveMQ is starting to affect my overall system latency. RabbitMQ was the next broker on my list to test, but ZMQ makes more sense (if you don't mind writing the broker part).

Background; I'm currently running a system which at peak runs with about 15 million messages per hour using ActiveMQ, with several producers and consumers on the same topic. Apart from speed, not had any issues with it.

<comment><USER15> I would not use ZeroMQ for anything but the most non-critical queues. ZeroMQ is not persistent: if your server crashes you lose all your queue contents.

My current favorite is RabbitMQ. It has improved steadily over the years, performs pretty well and very easy to setup.

<comment><USER16> ZeroMQ is a messaging library only.

There is nothing stopping you from using ZeroMQ to build a daemon that implements a persistent queue— in fact, I have, several times. It's very simple.

<comment><USER15> And then you've made your own broker. At that point why not use an existing, more mature broker?

<comment><USER16> The zero in ZeroMQ is because brokerlessness is a strength in some aspects.

A broker can be an SPOF, for instance. 0MQ makes it easy to do shared-nothing.

<comment><USER15> I know what ZeroMQ does. But you argue that a one can easily write a broker on top of ZeroMQ that provides persistency, but that invalidates your biggest reason of using ZeroMQ, namely brokerlessness.

Besides SPOF is not an argument. All serious brokers have supported clustering and failover for quite a while, _and_ they support persistency. I don't see a good reason why you may want to write a ZeroMQ-based broker instead of just using RabbitMQ.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> >>"Except for big messages, RabbitMQ seems to be the best bet as it outperforms others by a factor of 3."

RabbitMQ? Does the OP mean to say ZeroMQ?

ZeroMQ leads every benchmark in the blog.

<comment><USER18> True, but it's in-memory only (there was no persistence with ZeroMQ in the given setup).

<comment><USER17> Then why even test ZeroMQ then?

If you plan to setup a benchmark test, and then decide to throw out the results (winner/ZeroMQ) because it doesn't produce the desired outcome you wanted ... then this benchmark is a joke to begin with.

<comment><USER19> He did say _ZeroMQ broker outperforms all others. This means that unless you have a need for complex broker features, ZeroMQ is a perfect message dispatcher among processes._

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I don't understand the point of making benchmark of these message brokers in the default configuration (usually tailored for ease of development, not performance). Who is using message brokers in the default configuration in real deployments?

</comment><comment><USER21> I would like to see Kestrel (and Darner) in this benchmark. My personal experience with Darner is that it handles extreme loads. Granted, the MQ is not distributed and it is difficult to do "topics" in the JMS sense.

</comment><comment><USER22> When is a message queue required? And when is a pub/sub setup with Redis good enough? I'm sure it's apples to oranges, but there must be a few places with ActiveMQ installed where it wasn't really needed.

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm a bit sceptical of this, as RabbitMQ performance is very similar between transient and persistent. In my own tests, they were up to an order of magnitude different, even on an SSD.

</comment><comment><USER24> I would rather see number of processes varied.

</comment><comment><USER25> What, no ZeroMQ? (Page won't load)</comment>


GameDev Tycoon G'yaaaarrrrrrr version - <AUTHOR> What happens when pirates play a game development simulator and then go bankrupt because of piracy? Greenheart Games seeded a unique Pirates version of the game through torrent channels. On this version you feel the impact of people downloading cracked versions and your company eventually goes bankrupt. It's a really interesting experience, especially when the pirates go and complain on the official forums that they have no way to avoid piracy within the game. Son of a biscuit eater, eh?!<p>http://www.greenheartgames.com/2013/04/29/what-happens-when-pirates-play-a-game-development-simulator-and-then-go-bankrupt-because-of-piracy/ <comment><USER2> (2013)

</comment><comment><USER3> Most of the times, pirated games would not have been purchased (same as movies,..). So they don't have any financial consequence on the company

<comment><USER3> For those who down voted, please read this: [https://cdn.netzpolitik.org/wp- upload/2017/09/displacement_s...](https://cdn.netzpolitik.org/wp- upload/2017/09/displacement_study.pdf)</comment></comment>