[TheFlyingFish]

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.

[atonse]

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.

It just seemed so tone deaf.