Hacker News Reader

Comment by scary-size | Hacker News Reader

Seems low tech, but it just works for every user.

Exactly. It's "good enough" engineering. HTTP polling is guaranteed to work for every client, all of the time.

While the other solutions mentioned offer improved performance with regard to latency and bandwidth, neither of those are going to noticeably improve the user experience. And having to deal with stuff like bloated libraries, broken websocket connections or browser incompatibility mean the proposed alternative solutions have a very real possibility of degrading the user experience.

I get it, the author sells real-time solutions, but in this very specific use case, I think HTTP polling was actually the correct choice.

This. Especially because their main service is search and not live scores. I would expect that these are shown quite rarely.

Pair that was demand forecasting for this relatively obscure feature, they probably made the call that simple polling was good enough for now.

That's the really important thing - we use websockets pretty heavily here, and users can have bizarre issues with them. With this, it does just work. It's not the best or the shiniest, but it's the easiest and the most compatible.

Sure, but long polling and XHR streaming work for all browsers too. The article was not saying you should use Websockets, it was meant to say HTTP polling is the least efficient way possible to do this :)

Sounds like an excuse. If I can find a way to make something like this gracefully degrade, I'm sure Google also could...

You might say it's over-engineering, but in aggregate terms this could make a big difference in power and network usage. I'm talking more about the users (usually mobiles). So I would call it just... engineering.

How long does the average user stare at the scores on the search result page? It doesn't seem like something people would leave open. Over a short period of time, say 30 seconds, the difference in bandwidth & user experience is inconsequential between the different methods.

Engineering also includes scoping resources for maximum impact, after all. Building a fancy, ultra-efficient live score system would be fun, but it's not going to be good engineering if the usage metrics don't justify it.

Sure, but that was not the point of the article. It works, but badly, and even long polling would have been a significant improvement and work for every user.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com