samcrawford

I switched from Spotify to Amazon Music about 9 months ago, and cancelled Spotify Premium as a result (due to price, not bugs). Amazon Music is so much worse.

1. If you have no connectivity, the app will frequently get stuck in the offline state, playing the spinner indefinitely, even after connectivity has returned. I had similar issues on Spotify, but Amazon Music is so much worse. 2. I had Amazon Music eat my entire cellular plan's data monthly allowance in a day, after it seemingly got stuck in a loop trying to download the same podcast again and again. The podcast is unplayable when it gets in this state, even on perfect Wi-Fi, it just never starts playback. This has happened twice now (incidentally on the same podcast, but different episodes), even after deleting and reinstalling the app entirely.

The second bug is a deal breaker, so I've gone back to Spotify.

This is indeed sad. We are/were a customer, and one of the earliest edge computing customers. For a long time they've been the only provider truly offering the ability to run native code at the edge. But they've not really taken advantage of their early lead, so others have caught up. Also, reliability and capacity problems have become very commonplace in the past year or so. Hope the team has a safe landing elsewhere.

Not included with Prime in the UK

Great write-up! One question I had was around the use of keepalives. There's no mention in the article of whether keepalives were used between the client and reverse proxy, and no mention of whether it was used between the reverse proxy and backend.

I know Nginx doesn't use keepalives to backends by default (and I see it wasn't setup in the optimised Nginx proxy config), but it looks like Caddy does have keepalives enabled by default.

Perhaps that could explain the delta in failure rates, at least for one case?

That 15Mb/s figure for 4K is out of date by a couple of years. They previously targeted a fixed average bitrate of 15.6Mb/s. They now target a quality level, as scored by VMAF. This makes their average bitrate for 4K variable, but they say it has an upper bound of about 8Mb/s. See https://netflixtechblog.com/optimized-shot-based-encodes-for...

The same author has been reporting diligently on Pollen, and has said he will do a write-up on the collapse there. I will be very interested to read that.

I'm not so sure. If I load a saved map in Google Maps (e.g. someone has saved a route with markers and shared it with me), and then I go offline whilst viewing it, Google Maps on Android will show an error after a while and I'll lose the route and markers entirely. This occurs even if I've marked the area as an offline map. I guess it's just a case that they treat the saved routes in a different way. But it's really annoying for my use case (which is finding crewing points for long distance running events in the middle of nowhere with no mobile coverage).

An amusing side effect of this is that even if I search for the exact title on Spotify, their search does not find the podcast.

I eventually found it on Spotify by searching for Berlin airport.

To save others from Spotify's search: https://open.spotify.com/show/1dcDdTZgwicbxkb7OgNLo2?si=tGB6...

There isn't an "official data source" for RDOF evaluation. ISPs are required to carry out measurements in the markets where they've accepted funds. Measurements are carried out on a sampled subset of their customers, and a large set of frequent measurements has to be produced from each customer. Measurements have to be conducted to servers in specific locations (you can't just test to a server two miles down the road inside the ISP's network). The requirements are pretty rigorous and not straightforward to meet (e.g. if a customer switches their router off for a day, then that can disqualify their measurements entirely - you need a sample every hour, every day for at least a week in the quarter). They need to submit these measurements to USAC at the end of the quarter, to demonstrate that at least X% of measurements met the target of Y (it varies by metric).

Generally speaking, crowdsourced measurements (whereby you have loads of users but each running very few tests) aren't well suited to these requirements.

I'm oversimplifying things here, but more details on the requirements can be found at https://www.usac.org/high-cost/annual-requirements/performan...

Source: I work in this space

My experience with Paypal is the opposite. On multiple occasions I've had someone send me money on Paypal, but then it gets held up in checks and verification for 2-4 weeks, during which time I cannot access it. Sometimes it is instant though. There seems to be no pattern to it. This lack of certainty discourages me from using Paypal to receive payments in the future as I now consider it as a risky, slow, last-resort option.

I'd second Mosyle Business. We pay for about 40 licences. It costs us very little and they provide quick support.

I've been using Gen1 eeros since they were first released in around 2016. They're still getting software updates and they're still rock solid.

I'll be first in line to purchase a new set if they offer a model that supports PoE here in Europe.

Disclaimer: I've done a bunch of work with the Eero team from 2015/2016 til present day. Their team has an extremely high concentration of very smart and talented people, they are great to work with.

For what it's worth, we run "edge compute" with two separate mid-sized CDNs and pay about $0.005 per GB. This required a bit of negotiation, but has no minimum commitment and is on a monthly term. Yes, even lower fees can be had if you build your own infrastructure and pay for bandwidth on a CDR, but this is a fairly apples-for-apples case where we are not doing that.

So yes, AWS, GCP, Azure bandwidth pricing is very high. Oracle is, amazingly, the outlier with lower bandwidth pricing.

Filtering out the spam results is only half the problem. In my experience, a legitimate site's content is cloned by a spam site, and that one appears in a Google search and the legitimate one does not. The example that keeps hitting me is GitHub Issues.

Filtering out the spam only removes the clones; it doesn't get the good results back in.

I also haven't received one. Checked spam too. My server is a 61 EUR/mo, and is a Xeon E5-1650v3 with 256GB RAM. It was only provisioned a few weeks ago.

Enjoyed reading your bio on your website. Sub 24 hour at Leadville is super impressive! (Coming from someone who has not managed 24 hours at Western States... Yet...)

I hadn't heard of Tom Lane before. But his prolificness in contributing led me to search for him. And wow. He has quite a history. Co-author or the PNG spec. Major contributor to JPEG's success. Not to mention postgres. At 66 years old and still so actively involved! Very impressive

> I would still rather work with Postgres AND have to juggle a connection pooler

Is this comment relating to the overhead of idle connections, which has historically necessitated the use of a pooler in front of PG? If so, I believe this is resolved in postgres 14

https://pganalyze.com/blog/postgres-14-performance-monitorin...

We use the excellent gdnsd (https://github.com/gdnsd/gdnsd), mainly for its geo-DNS configurability. Have been using it for probably 5-6 years now, handling hundreds of millions of queries per day, and never had an issue with it.

Also check out https://www.webhostingtalk.com/forumdisplay.php?f=36 . That has plenty of US hosts at around that price range too

Kagi.com does this. In closed beta at the moment, but you can email and request access.

Hetzner's offering is competitive too. 58 EUR/mo at https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-apple

https://www.mkdocs.org/. Probably not the latest or greatest, but it produces nice looking documentation from markdown. Serves my purposes well.

After I did a Show HN about my OSM-powered project (https://trailrouter.com), I saw first hand a little of the positive impact of large corporate involvement in OSM. Two of the very large companies mentioned in the article got in touch with me to find out what what could be done to improve the state of data in OSM useful for pedestrian routing. They were conscious that a disproportionate amount of effort went into supporting motorised vehicles, and wanted to improve the situation.

Of course, they were doing so out of self interest too, and openly acknowledged this. But they openly shared their own datasets and offered resources/advice too.

The OSM data is so powerful (and I don't mean the map - I'm referring to the tags, which are a hidden gem). I'm all for anything that continues to improve this data.

In fact, he quite recently sold corp.com for a healthy sum: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2020/04/microsoft-buys-corp-com-...

I note the author said: "Note: the servers are oversized for the load we’re currently seeing. The reason for that is that we tried to solve a production issue by increasing the server specs. It didn’t solve the problem, and now we can’t down-size the servers without re-provisioning them"

One small advantage I've noticed with Linode over DigitalOcean is that you _can_ perform these down-sizing actions (without some messy rsync scripts or snapshot-and-recreate approach that DigitalOcean suggest). You first need to resize the disk down to the lower Linode's limits, and then you can down-size to a smaller instance.

An amusing anecdote from someone on the other side of this story...

A friend of mine has first@fullname.co.uk, and he's forever getting email intended for first@fullname.com (who is someone entirely different, also in the UK, and works in the military).

One day my friend books a flight and accidentally uses first@fullname.com. He doesn't realise anything is wrong as the flight still shows up in the app. However, the owner of first@fullname.com also sees the flight confirmation and thinks there's some identity fraud going on, so phones it in to the police. So my friend gets to the airport and scans his passport at the boarding gate, but is met with a big red exclamation mark. Next thing he knows, he's flanked by two armed officers who take him away for questioning for an hour!

After working out the mix-up, my friend sent a note to first@fullname.com thanking them for the welcome committee.

Received a lot of discussion 3 days ago here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24222045

It's harder, perhaps, but not impossible, and would certainly still hold up in court. When tracking a user behind CGNAT you need to capture not just their source IP, but also their source port. If you have timestamp, source IP and source port, that's enough for the ISP to resolve it back to the subscriber.

There's no easy way to see it at the moment, other than looking at the waypoint list (the box at the top left). One idea I'm looking at is putting arrows on the line - so in this case you'd see arrows going both ways on the line.

And yes, the numbers do not represent km, they represent the numbered waypoints listed in the top left box. Any usability suggestions are very much welcome!