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Comment by johnbatch | Hacker News Reader

I just discover that https://analytics.usa.gov exists to show the number of users on the site and other participating .gov sites in real time.

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That's so cool! It really feels like tech best practices have made lots of headway in the past 5 years within the U.S. government. Looks like this analytics frontend was brought to us by 18F, with the codebase even hosted on GitHub[0]. Other governments in the US also seem to be using this like the city of Los Angeles[1].

0. https://github.com/18F/analytics.usa.gov

1. http://analyticsdash-46.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com

Other sites reusing the code are listed in this README: https://github.com/18F/analytics.usa.gov#readme

Next step is directing attention of society to these systems and education as to why they're important.

Boy, a look at that site and you see why this was hosted by USPS - almost 200M hits to USPS properties in the last 7 days. I’d been tangentially aware of USPS’s pretty solid improvements to their digital architecture/offerings, but I didn’t realize they’d grown that much.

Given that essentially every American in the country interacts with USPS tangentially every day except Sundays, it seems reasonable. I get an email every day with an image of all mail coming to my mailbox, that probably counts when I open up the mail.

This is a wonderful service. I did it when I moved and set up forwarding, but continue see it every morning.

USPS Informed Delivery / Daily Digest is awesome and underappreciated

And is one of the few remaining [government] things that fails (for me, at least) to auto-verify for those of us who have an apostrophe (or suffix) in our name. I keep meaning to get signed up but, like the TSA quick-pass programs, it's always low on my list and I never get around to going in to "verify my identity". The auto-verify fails with any/all cards I've tried tried to use all the auto methods they provide (and address is owned & occupied single-family home/very 'standard').

Anyone that works on this -- please try to recognize those of us with "unusual" characters or a suffix as our given name! =D

Meanwhile, chilling effect - government knows who sends you mail and can actively build a list of whom sends you mail and whom you send mail too.

The government has known this as part of the covers program ever since the 2000s (or before). Informed delivery is just letting people do something useful with that information, which is a welcome change from other nasty surveillance programs.

We’ve gotten USPS mail on Sundays for awhile now. Why? I don’t know.

There used to be half a dozen or so cities that did Sunday mail in lieu of Saturday, typically in areas with a high Seventh Day Adventist population. However I think most of them have since moved to do Saturday delivery instead

It's mostly people tracking their online shopping. Most small, lightweight packages that aren't delivered by Amazon are delivered by USPS. Lots of stores/receipts will link directly to the package's tracking page on USPS's site.

Why's the #3 most active city in the US listed as Graceville, a Florida village with a population of 2,153? Is that a VPN exit point for some large provider? Google isn't helpful.

I assume Ashburn traffic (#8) comes from AWS us-east-1.

edit: And another interesting thing, there are no EU countries in the geolocation table.

According to their documentation, DAP is built on-top of Google Analytics, and also IP Anonymization is enabled by default. As a Google Analytics power-user, I happen to know two relevants facts: 1) Geography is inferred from IP Address 2) IP Anonymization happens before geo look-ups.

So, what's probably happening is that some IP address in Graceville happens to end in the octect 0. And a bunch of other high-volume addresses, when you drop their last octect because of IP Anonymization, look like the IP address from Graceville.

As a more general note, the accuracy of geography reports in GA are suspect to begin with (Amazon and Google only agree at the state level about 75% of the time), and with IP Anonymization enabled it takes a substantial nosedive.

I was wondering the same thing. The town has a total population of like 2200. I can’t find any data centers near there. Maybe it’s just a flaw in their metrics.

I’ve worked on systems in the past that had different levels of ip geolocation data precision. When the precision was low, they would pick the midpoint of the known area (maybe a whole state) to “fill in” more precise data (ex: the city). Since even “nowhere” is typically part of some town limits, we’d see otherwise tiny towns show up way too frequently.

My guess is that’s what’s happening here.

Case in point: https://theweek.com/articles/624040/how-internet-mapping-gli...

Graceville isn't really the midpoint of anywhere so I'd still be curious how it ended up being picked as the location.

I was looking at this yesterday too. Using USPS as the back end for COVIDtests.gov was particularly apt because (a) USPS is typically the US government website with the highest traffic and (b) verifying and storing addresses is their bread and butter.

And I think (hope) they will ship it.

Any guesses as to why Graceville, FL (with a population under 3,000) ranks under Washington and above Chicago for traffic?

I'm guessing some shady entrepreneur that has somehow compiled a bunch of unique shipping names and addresses to stockpile covid tests and try to sell them.

Its also the top 3 on other non covid website like the DEP of commerce -

https://analytics.usa.gov/commerce/

You can get a JSON of the data also and see they have “ZZ” and “not set” as two cities excluded from the front dashboard. https://analytics.usa.gov/data/live/top-cities-realtime.json

No doubt this is happening to some extent. But it does appear that the USPS requires valid residential addresses in order to send a mask. The USPS does have a database of actual addresses that they validate against. You can't simply send to something that looks valid.

Perhaps some good citizen hacker created a bot that automatically submitted a request for every address in town.

a minor correction just in case anyone's confused: this site is for ordering free covid tests to be delivered to your home; the free masks will be distributed starting next week at locations like pharmacies and health clinics

Most likely a similar reason as to why Potwin got so much attention: https://theweek.com/articles/624040/how-internet-mapping-gli...

Backend for that seems to be Google Analytics, I wish the government didn't have to add such trackers shared with third-parties.

Omg it’s so snappy

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