Hacker News Reader

Just accepted a pull request to make this way cleaner.

Just merged in a pull request from @templaedhel on GitHub—take a look now. Thanks for the feedback!

We're always looking for ways to keep this optimized; since Firebase intelligently and efficiently only sends deltas after the initial load, it should be minor. Give it a try with the any of the demo apps on GitHub-- we'd love to hear what people are seeing with different devices and carriers.

vikrumon Netty and the JVM meet OpenSSL to speed up connections

We did use stud for a short time but have recently moved back to this approach for a couple of reasons:

+ Currently out SSL connections need to be pinned to a specific server, so we wound up running the terminator on the same box. We then ran into a problem of having more than 65k connections (src ip/port <-> dest ip/port) on loopback, which introduced a bit more complexity in our deployment (either have stud use 127.0.0.2, 127.0.0.3, etc or have stud point to a different port.)

+ The memory consumption also goes up across the board since we are on the same box (2x the connections per actual connection). stud uses an additional ~200k per connection and on some of our boxes that have 100k+ connections, this is something north of 18GB. This was the biggest driver for the change.

vikrumon Netty and the JVM meet OpenSSL to speed up connections

I put this blog post together in the hopes that someone can benefit from the niche optimization that we undertook. Finding anything relating to "java", "ssl", and "optimizations" on a search engine along this vein is difficult to say the least.

vikrumon Show HN: Identifying the DNS server used to fulfill a HTTP request

Nope. See the second footnote at the end of the blog post. I just couldn't get the right mix of search terms to bubble up the relevant sites (like the one in your comment!) If it wasn't a hit on a web-interface to nslookup it was a hit about showing your local DNS settings on Windows or Mac.

I get the feeling that there are many incarnations of this same tool being re-invented every so often. What would you use to search for something like this?

vikrumon Shedding some light on "dark social"

It looks like the intermediate 301's referer is being passed thru (For example, all links on Twitter get wrapped as a t.co link, and that's what shows up on the server). I'd imagine that analytics being mined are intelligent enough to collapse twitter.com and t.co as the same social origin.

Give it a try yourself: https://twitter.com/vikrum5000/status/256898972478763008 Note the protocol.

vikrumon Shedding some light on "dark social"

The most peculiar thing is that links off of https://mail.google.com/ essentially mimics the copy & pasted links (i.e. null header.) However, https://plus.google.com, https://twitter.com, and https://facebook.com all present a referer header to the server.

There's probably room here to do some investigation as to what Google is doing to make outbound links from mail.google.com completely drop the referer. (Also, what about other web based mail clients? Yahoo? MSN? Aol? Corporate Outlook?)

vikrumon Shedding some light on "dark social"

Do you imagine 1, 6, and 7 being something the mass market would be using? Or, do you suppose that it is all of these little cuts that becomes that nearly 70% of traffic being without a header?

vikrumon Shedding some light on "dark social"

With the Facebook and Twitter apps (and iOS apps, in general), they have complete control over how the network call is being made — and the referer makes it to the server (for the post part.) One would imagine Pinterest would want to maximize this number.

I'll try posting the referer detector to some more native apps and see what happens.

vikrumon Shedding some light on "dark social"

Thanks! It's not from a template; it's super basic HTML I wrote up by hand with simple CSS behind it. Take a look at the source for http://5f5.org/ruminations/ — I copy and paste that into a new file and use that as a template for new posts.

The pondering section is where I keep notes to my self for future topics. There's a file in that directory that has a bunch of sentence fragments and ideas for other, not yet formed ideas.

I like the idea of suggesting new topics :)

vikrumon Shedding some light on "dark social"

This is a pretty cursory look into some other possiblities of refererless traffic. Given an ordinary browsing session or interaction from an end user, what else could be leading to HTTP requests without the referer header?

vikrumon Programming isn't fun — it's much more than that

Previous discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4324755

vikrumon Programming isn't fun — it's much more than that

True, indeed!

When writing this post, I kept coming up empty when trying to find something to compare it to (I explored other things like writing a book, creating music, painting, etc. but they never really matched up in the same way.)...

vikrumon Programming isn't fun — it's much more than that

Calling out ownership as a distinct trait from the creation and subsequent usage is interesting. I think I touched on the incidental rewards associated with ownership (seeing your product used, feeling compelled to fix bugs, pride associated with the result, etc) but hadn't thought of it in particular.

I'm glad you brought up the leap you made into other things you might enjoy doing as well. I'm sure I'll use that insight when starting on new endeavors!

vikrumon My first year as employee #1 of a YC company

Or it's a homage to this year's XXX Olympics.

vikrumon My first year as employee #1 of a YC company

Yes, quite.

    ಠ_ರೃ

vikrumon My first year as employee #1 of a YC company

To quote a wise man:

    It's not porn. xxx does not always mean porn. Sometimes it means Vin Diesel.

vikrumon My first year as employee #1 of a YC company

I too am intrigued by this. It almost seems predictable that this would be the thing the folks would fixate on. HN commenters would be a great sample set to do social experiments on. :)

vikrumon My first year as employee #1 of a YC company

No problem, David! The success of the launch wouldn't have been a reality without everyone's help during the event.

vikrumon My first year as employee #1 of a YC company

Thanks, Anand!

Yeah, absolutely: James and Andrew did everything they could to make the experience as an early employee as inclusive as possible. I was kept in the loop at every step of the way. One of our company values is that we are all entrepreneurs, and it's great to have a culture that all early employees have a founder's mentality.

vikrumon My first year as employee #1 of a YC company

My bad. Try this http://198.101.225.92/ or http://3328565596/ It's backed by my roflscale http-to-gopher cloud cluster blogging platform, so it's legit.

vikrumon My first year as employee #1 of a YC company

I picked it kind of on a whim and as a hack (are they still allowing porn under .com?). I like the aesthetic symmetry of the domain and TLD, in general. There was a funny potential bug in our code several months ago which almost led to the comment

    // XXX TODO FIXME nop is doing too much

Perhaps that link back to development/tech might have been too much of a stretch :)

vikrumon Making the Switch from Amazon Cloudfront to Fastly

Yep, that was precisely our problem :) We wound up using a custom origin with Fastly. We made the switch off of Cloudfront since they don't support custom SSL domains and the Cloudfront dashboard left a lot to be desired.

vikrumon Making the Switch from Amazon Cloudfront to Fastly

That sounds like an interesting approach. We push out breaking changes to our server and client libraries several times a week. Since we invalidate our CDN on each deploy and set headers indicate as such, we can quickly and seamlessly migrate our end users without having them modify their <script> include.

At present, our library is unlike other mature javascript libraries that can make use of a very high cache timeout. How would the 1yr cache timeout work for the library that is changing several times a week?

vikrumon Making the Switch from Amazon Cloudfront to Fastly

The main reason we can't easily use hashes to bust the cache is that the includes for our static assets (the Firebase JS lib) are happening inside our customer's websites. We could hypothetically insert a shim that pulls the include down the hash appended resource, but could still have the same problem with the shim itself.

The custom origin has alleviated many of our pains but wouldn't have taken us all the way. As people have begun to use Firebase to power Facebook apps (mandatory SSL for the canvas) and other SSL only environments, we needed the CDN to support it. We had a stop gap for some of our user (using Amazon's domains) but it would've added too much friction in the docs to explain the domain swaps for justify keeping this hack in place.

vikrumon Show HN: We built real MMO Asteroids

Hah! Yeah, we left the debug console open so you can play with it. It's a graphical debugger that shows the data updates for the game in realtime. Have fun: http://mmoa0.firebase.com/mmoaleaderboard0

vikrumon Show HN: We built real MMO Asteroids

Good feedback; just bumped up the split between users and games. Should ease up a bit. As traffic ebbs and flows we'll try to keep it balanced. It doesn't assign users in any intelligent way right now..

vikrumon Show HN: We built real MMO Asteroids

After feeling the heartbreak of seeing MMOAsteroids last week turn out to be an April Fools' joke, I decided to take things into my own hands. This afternoon hack project I threw together yesterday using Firebase.

I adapted a simple single-player asteroids game off github (https://github.com/dmcinnes/HTML5-Asteroids) and made it fully multi-player with Firebase.

It's set up to spread out users across a bunch of games to avoid having 500 HN'ers on the same page. Login with Twitter so other people see your picture...

vikrumon How I name my apps

  $ aspell dump master |sed -n $(echo $(($RANDOM % `aspell dump master|wc -l`)))p