Hacker News Reader

Comment by gnicholas | Hacker News Reader

Hugged to death?

https://web.archive.org/web/20230126220339/https://www.fathe...

Redesigned the FDIC's online deposit insurance calculator to be 100% client side just before WAMU fell over and the crash that followed.

Before the three-step one pager it was a UX that only a mother could love on payday. The bigger problem was every time it would end up on somewhere like Yahoo finance (don't laugh, this was 2007 and earlier) it would fall over like this database. The key to scaling it seems pretty obvious today, write all the searchable data out to a single JSON file and have the browser poll that. It was doing multiple millions of user sessions a day I was told and couldn't have been deployed at a better time.

Some projects you get lucky with I suppose. I check it out every once in a while and the UX is basically still the same.

Sounds like you're in a good position to make a lot of people's dreams come true: could you make the TreasuryDirect webapp not so terrible to use? :-)

My prayers were answered when they removed the infernal virtual password keyboard.

I can’t remember if I’ve ever encountered a UI that annoyed me as much as that virtual password entry.

I ended up getting locked out of my account due to some issue trying to enter what my password manager generated for me and eventually just gave up on ever converting the one small paper bond I was given as a kid to a digital one.

If the goal was to frustrate people away from converting paper bonds, they certainly succeeded.

That was infernal indeed, but the rest of it still needs a ton of work. Accidentally double-click on a link? Goodbye, session!

Verified as gov site.

You know someone said that there will never be more than 100 requests per second in a meeting

Next meeting: "our page went down because of a hacker attack!!"

“Well, Sir, they do call themselves Hacker News.”

Yup and you know what? That's exactly the kind of detail I don't need a government IT worker sweating over. They should just pay the premium to cloud providers and move on to more important things

% host -t a fatherhood.gov fatherhood.gov has address 15.197.252.44 fatherhood.gov has address 3.33.237.102

% host -t ptr 44.252.197.15.in-addr.arpa 44.252.197.15.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer a05e7be9b6fd75377.awsglobalaccelerator.com.

% host -t ptr 102.237.33.3.in-addr.arpa 102.237.33.3.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer a05e7be9b6fd75377.awsglobalaccelerator.com.

It is on AWS.

Isn't AWS Global Accelerator just the edge CDN (like Cloudflare) here? When the actual web server went down it will not able to cover it, looks like AWS Global Accelerator lacks the Cloudflare feature of showing you the last cached result.

Global accelerator is an anycast solution that routes your traffic to an specific AWS region (an EC2 instance or load balancer) via AWS's backbone network. It improves latency mostly, but can also be used for cases where a static IP is required (zero-rated billing, customers using egress firewall rules, etc)

CloudFront is the AWS CDN offering.

I could not disagree more. Government already suffers a huge stigma of waste and overspending, no need to add to that stigma by overspending on checks notes a list of dad jokes.

That's not to say I'm not glad this exists - I am! But I don't think it deserves a large budget.

Just toss the page into a pool that should be served to the public. No need to advance SOTA on a government budget to serve content.

If it's running on some faas type thing, it's about free when not being used, so hardly a waste.

They certainly shouldnt be spending to scale a ton on dad jokes, in case it's very popular for a day

You can think that but dont tell your dad.

Or more than 100 families with a Dad around.

Ya you can tell a govt site when it falls over from a finger flick

Nah, the US govt is actually usually pretty good these days about solid infrastructure, website designs, security practices, etc.

It is unknown why this particular website (if it ever existed?) got hugged to death, but much of the Government uses AWS govcloud and similar solutions.

Seconded. At this particular point in my career “govcloud” sounds like a normal word. Our project has an overbuilt but robust cloud native architecture (even if I’m not a cloud services evangelist myself) that I think would surprise many folks in the private sector regarding its sophistication.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s still a lot of waste, inefficiency, and BS in government contracting. But some aspects of it are getting better. In our case, we were explicitly told by our “customer” to allocate more resources to scaling than we may in the private sector so that our application would not get hugged to death.

eh i disagree, I've been in govt IT for 16 years working as a group that supports all agencies. I would definitely not say "much of the Government uses aws govcloud and similar solutions" but thats just my experience

FedRAMP vetted sites and vendors still get hacked too tho

Certified DHHS

Actually a feature designed to prevent depletion of the strategic pun reserve.

After clicking through a few, its kind of timely to go with today's other post about how random is random.

I was curious just how much traffic a front-page HN post generates and found this excellent post: https://blog.royalsloth.eu/posts/how-much-traffic-comes-from... In their case traffic peaked just under 10000 requests per hour.

(RoyalSloth's blog survived the hug while hosted on Hetzner's smallest 1 vCPU instance.)

I was on the cheapest plan Heroku offers when my startup hit #1. Things got sluggish so I had to spin up another dyno, but it was fine after that. Of course things depend heavily on time of day and day of week. Since it's currently the holidays in much of the world, things could be slower than normal.

I got a 504

Would that this area code was associated with responsible fatherhood.

what a missed opportunity to utilize http status code 418

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