HN no longer supporting SPDY | Hacker News Reader

HN no longer supporting SPDY

spdycheck.org

55 pointsMojah62 comments

> SPDY (pronounced speedy)

I wish people would stop naming products like this (nginx and imgur are other examples that spring to mind) because it's a complete nightmare for dyslexics like myself.

We have problems enough with spelling and pronunciation due to the vast and contradicting rules in the English language, but at least acronyms stand for something meaningful (eg I can remember KVM because it's a Kernel-based Virtual Machine). But names like SPDY are a nightmare because I have to remember which letters are dropped; and an even bigger nightmare to read as I need to memorize how it's intended to be pronounced rather than simply sounding out the letters like any other sane word would.

What's more, I'm an English native. So I can't imagine how much harder names like this are non-English speakers too (and let's be honest, most of the worlds populous didn't learn English as their first language).

So please, if you're in charge of naming a new product, think about the fact that not everyone in the world is as gifted at English as yourself; and that not everyone wants to learn a separate additional verbal and written rule for each and every proper-noun just because it's seemingly now 'cool' to use TXT SPK in names.

</rant>

The process (for SPDY and nginx) is called disemvowelment[1], and I always thought it mostly had to do with securing short domain names. Scvngr comes to mind as an example of this. S-C-A-V-E-N-G-E-R.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disemvoweling

It is mostly about securing short domain names. If I'm honest, I started getting sidetracked with my rant at that point.

Though, to be fair, even the domain name argument is increasingly becoming moot as more and more TLD's are become available (eg .io). And personally I'd rather not have product names dictated by what URL looks prettier in someone's tweet (if they're that bothered, then why not have speedy.io and a Twitter friendly one that redirects)

    > ... increasingly becoming moot as more and 
    > more TLD's are become available (eg .io)

"Becoming available"?

Most TLDs don't have any second-level requirements, and AFAIK .io has never had any.

I'm wasn't talking about second level domains (though you're right that -where available- second level domains do widen the scope for TLD usage). But what I meant was that ICANN periodically releases new gTLDs for public use and even offers a program for companies to sponsor new gTLDs.

With regards to .io, technically that's a country code (ccTLD) that's been re-purposed as a gTLD by many organisations in recent years.

> It is mostly about securing short domain names.

Slightly off topic observation: do we really care about domain names anymore? I mean, is it so important for a web start-up called "yourbooks" to own "yourbooks.com"?

It seems to me that decisions as important as selecting a product name are often being made on the availability of domain names. I think this doesn't make sense - most people will use Google if they're looking you up on the web, and apps are the dominate delivery channel, so who cares?

Focus on your business idea, not some arbitrary domain name issue... the world does not need another urbkly.com or another $100k ransom for a domain name.

Interesting point, and eventually things may move that way. It may become as transparent to the users as changing channels on the radio. But for now we're still at the stage where there isn't enough device cross-talk to afford us the luxury to do away with meaningful / memorable domain names (much like how many new radios still need to be tuned in to our preferred stations). We print website addresses and place a great significant on the address bar - so it makes sense that a domain name should fit the product.

While QR codes, mobile apps and search engines are mitigating the need for domain names - I don't think we're quite there yet.

I'm not sure it's so much about short domain names as it is available domain names. Think of securing scvngr.com vs scavenger.com. Plus, is a short domain really that valuable if so many people have trouble spelling it?

I first heard this called "vowel decimation" which IMO sounds better :) but I've only seen it called this in one product: Zoom Player[1]. It is used to shorten the length of media file tags (song titles etc) to fit available UI space while keeping them readable. It is very effective and I haven't seen any other media player use this.

[1] http://www.inmatrix.com/zplayer/options_interfacedisplay.sht...

Every time I read SPDY, my head reads it as 'Spidey' as in short for Spiderman and related to the Web.

This is a valid point and earned my upvote, but soon being guilty of this naming trick myself, I have to name one advantage that speaks against the minority of dyslexics: the limited pool of available names.

SPDY and nginx are short and memorable and carry a notion its authors wanted them to associate with (either speed or "being an engine".)

As an anecdotal data point, I must say I'm not a native English speaker but understood both names the first time.

From an accessibility standpoint though, I wish we could do better.

What does nginx stand for? Engine X?

That is correct if memory serves.

I am a native English speaker and had no idea that nginx was supposed to be a cutesy spelling of "engine-x" until now. I've always imagined it pronounced like the speaker had a mouthful of pebbles, something like 'n-g'n-ecks.

Until about three weeks ago I had no idea one of the engineers on our team was even talking about the web server/engine component when he was talking about "Engine X" and as far as I could tell we were using something called "N Jinx".

A lot of cross-purpose conversations were had. I assumed he had written some component of his own called engine X.

Likewise. I've always just spelled it out when I read it in my head.

Now I need to figure out imgur, since it's apparently more clever than "image-ur". im-gur? image-ur... imager? Is it supposed to be "imager"? I'm clueless.

I always though nginx was some variant of Vogon. It /never/ occured to me to pronounce it "Engine X". I've heard other people mention Engine X and never made the connection.

I just mispronounce them in my head. Then I mispronounce them in person. Then I don't care when people get their knickers in a twist. Because to me, I'm the one pronouncing them correctly and they should just deal with it. At least the "sql is pronounced sequel" people have died out.

> At least the "sql is pronounced sequel" people have died out.

No we haven't. :)

(But I don't correct others)

I still say "sequel" out loud because it's less of a mouthful than spelling out Ess Cue El.

I've always called it SQL since old school days, and still do.

I would call it Speedy as well, not EsPeeDeeWhy, that's another given.

Here in France, I've never heard anyone say "sequel". Or "engine-x" for nginx (which we usually pronunce as "n-ginx").

SPDY is a bit of a problem because saying "speedy" sounds silly, and the name of "Y" is really awkward in an acronym in French (it's two syllables, "i grec"). Not that it's really a problem since nobody uses it.

I wish people would stop using Y in acronyms or pseudo-acronyms. And W too. I don't even know how English-speaking people say "www".

Not far from "double you dubl dub you" :)

For what it's worth, "dub dub dub" as a pronounciation makes my skin crawl.

> which we usually pronunce as "n-ginx"

Is that like "en jinks"?

On behalf of people that are more interested in the communication than in the pronunciation, thank you. You could pronounce SPDY as "super dimension fortress" and SQL and "purple monkey dishwasher" and I wouldn't care as long as I knew what you were talking about.

My next project is getting named "Purple Monkey Dishwasher"

Make that PuMD. ;-)

Odd, nearly everyone I know pronounces it "sequel" (including "my sequel" and "sequel server". The only people I interact with who spell it out are people who don't really know what it is, so it's kind of a warning flag when someone says it that way.

Is this wishful thinking on your part or a regional (Boston) thing?

Are they predominantly Microsoft people?

Spelling SQL as an acronym is very common here in Brazil (and I guess other non-english speaking countries). Saying sequel would be very weird because the closest sounding word for that means "trauma"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequela

The people who think SCSI should be pronounced SEXY will never die out. NEVER.

I have never heard a tech person pronounce it "sexy" and I have never heard a marketing person /not/ pronounce it "sexy".

Tech people who've had to suffer with terminator resistors call it "scuzzy" for a reason.

I always think "spidey" as in "Spiderman." It's not so much that I am dyslexic as apathetic.

Well bloody hell.

I just looked up Imgur on Wikipedia because of your comment, and found out that it's supposed to be pronounced "imager"!

Not only did I not know this all this while, I've also been referring to it as "im-goor" in all my conversations. Partly because I really really couldn't care less, and partly because said conversations have flowed just well even with my so-called mispronunciation, I'm just going to continue calling it "im-goor".

So far, I haven't heard anyone pronounce it as "spuddy," which is how I thought it would be pronounced.

Words without vowels are a disaster.

Anyone know where the push for SPDY is coming from? I thought it wasn't much faster (<5%) than http/https.

It's lower overhead for the server, too.

Do you know how much lower overhead?

Well, it's not just the front end; it's the load balancer and whatever other infrastructure, since it packs things into a single connection more effectively. For hn, not an issue (since it's a single nginx in front of a single threaded arc process).

http://www.chromium.org/spdy/spdy-best-practices seems legit.

Have you measured your gains?

Tried to find where you pulled this number. This study seems in-line with your hypothesis (it states a gain over HTTPS, and a loss over HTTP): http://www.guypo.com/technical/not-as-spdy-as-you-thought/

I believe it has been Google all along, I guess when you do things at their scale this matters, but indeed I can't see any average dev rushing to support it.

It depends. I have a site with a lot of assets (about 70 images) and using SPDY made it 30% faster than plain HTTP thanks to better pipelining.

I believe some pron sites use it. The benefit increases with pages which have a lot of assets, which applies particularly well to typical pron sites with their multitude of images per page.

This has been like this for some time, it was already so when the nginx vulnerability hit last week.

Why would HN need it? Look at what assets the HN pages include and where they are sourced. There's no real benefit to be gained for the user. It would be faster and more efficient for the user if he could pipeline multiple HN pages (1,2,3,...) but that's exactly what pg stops you from doing with his fnid scheme.

HTTP pipelining a la the HTTP/1.1 spec works fine. No additional software from Google is needed. You don't need SPDY to get speed gains. What you need to get the benefits of pipelining are sites that have decent Max-Results settings (100 is quite common) and that have many assets you want all served from the same IP. There are lots of those sites, but HN is not one of them.

I'd be interested to know what kind of speed gains HN got from SPDY. I'd guess very low as there aren't many requests (per page load) to multiplex.

spdycheck.org should also check the other assets on page to see if spdy is supported.

In a lot of cases, it makes sense to only switch the asset/cdn server to spdy. Maybe there should be something like partial support, which should indicate what fraction of requests (by count and by size) support spdy.

The extension was never lighting up for me withing hours of the posting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5663692

(and it still doesn't light up)

I posted this 7 days ago... 2 upvotes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5666846

HN is not a competition or a game. Be glad that the story you thought was interesting has made it on to HN.

HN is not a competition, but it's as much of a game as each poster wants it to be. Karma is a feedback mechanism that acts as a proxy for what the community thinks of your contributions. Treat it as a game and it is one; for the most part ignore it, and you can still use and participate in HN.

Then why do you get points for interacting?

To keep the noise down. You can upvote, or comment "I agree". The latter is not scalable.

It encourages good content from people.

Not really. You should upvote if you think the comment provides value, even if you disagree. You should downvote if the comment is wrong/invalid/offensive (as I did now, since I think your comment is wrong), not if you disagree.

If downvoting keeps someone from posting an argumentative reply to express their disagreement, HN is better for it.

If upvoting a snarky comment keeps someone from posting a mean reply HN is better for that, too.

People can vote however they damn well please without anyone shoulding upon them. Votes are an expression of something, whatever that something is is properly in the hands of the voter.

I've always thought of it as "useful" / "not useful".

(What's the difference between thinking a comment is "wrong" and disagreeing with it?)

(I meant "factually wrong".)

That is your opinion.

Quite right. But this situation (which is very common, in my experience) shows just how much of a crapshoot the HN front page is nowadays. Not enough people go through /newest often enough for it to be entirely merit based nowadays which is a bit of a shame and a lot of excellent links and stories never make it (good for me though since I get to include them in my newsletters and look fresh ;-)).

I wonder if a way to mark items as related (and share some karma that way) was ever considered? For example you could mark is as related (pending approval of several others) and then get some portion of the points attributed to the second poster that made it to the front page?

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