Tailscale are _the_ company pushing the state of the art in VPN's, and they write great, detailed technical articles and whitepapers about it. As someone who has worked on a different, more traditional, enterprise VPN product, this is extremely interesting to me. Most other companies have neither the cool tech (most haven't even switched from IPsec), nor the ability to put out anything other than marketing fluff, nor the focus to actually keep working on the core VPN tech instead of trying to check all boxes (monitoring/firewalling/device management/...) but not innovating anywhere. Tailscale also scales down to individual, private users, has a free plan, some open source code and an open source reimplementation, all of which appeals to the HN audience.
This article in particular is interesting because Tailscale inserting malicious nodes is the #1 concern I had around their product, and their solution (tailnet locks) is interesting and probably better than the solution I would have come up with (using Wireguard's support for additional symmetric secrets).
Obviously "every single day" is hyperbole, but I agree with you that a much higher proportion of Tailscale blog posts end up on the front page than most corporate blogs.
Finally I think it comes down to this: Tailscale is full of the same kind of people who tend to hang out on Hackernews. HN loves Tailscale because Tailscale is HN's ingroup.
Fly.io is in a similar situation, and similarly sees a higher-than-average fraction of their blog posts getting traction on HN.
For an interesting counterexample, look at warp.dev. They have a lot of the same markers - tackling an interesting problem that affects many HNers daily (the limitations of the terminal), building things from the ground up in Rust, and writing highly technical blog posts about it - but at the same time, it's clear that as an organization, they don't quite get it. They can't understand, for instance, why putting telemetry in their terminal emulator is absolute suicide as far as HN is concerned, or why "moving the terminal to the cloud" is a phrase that will never make HN happy. Unlike Tailscale and Fly, they are not "of the race that knows Joseph", as it were.
That's not to say that there aren't individuals at Warp who are members of the HN ingroup. But at the organizational level, Warp just isn't quite it.
Excellent counterexample. I think they made a huge mistake by not only sticking to their guns on telemetry, but also building a terminal client that you need to log in to even to use it.
I remember opening it, seeing a GitHub login page and instantly closing it.
As a (typical?) HNer, there are many reasons. (a) TailScale was founded and is populated by people I followed online before, during, and after my and their tenures at Google, or just followed online already if they're not Xooglers (b) their product is extremely useful, and almost every non-enterprisey new feature they add is immediately or potentially useful to me, and I'm only running a couple of Raspberry Pis and a Minecraft server (c) I like Go, and they use Go extensively, often improving Go in the process, or at least documenting interesting performance characteristics and application design architectures (d) they have managed to find an interesting and rare balance point, to applying commercially viable product funding to a whole host of open source improvements and contributions, and (e) the basic components of their product (Wireguard, networking details, Kernel integration, etc.) are extremely in my areas of interest even independent of the product itself.
They're not. It's just roughly when the post a new blog entry, which is... usually about once a week? Sometimes it's about new features, sometimes it's about internals which might be helpful for other people to know about (like the previous entry was about internals of the TUN/TAP, and how they managed to speed it up a bunch).
Because someone submits them, and others upvote them. It's really not complicated. There's no deep conspiracy to promote Tailscale here. They're not even a YC company.
This article in particular is interesting because Tailscale inserting malicious nodes is the #1 concern I had around their product, and their solution (tailnet locks) is interesting and probably better than the solution I would have come up with (using Wireguard's support for additional symmetric secrets).