Hacker News Reader

alpbon Serving Netflix Video Traffic at 800Gb/s and Beyond [pdf]

What's the benefit of going from 100Gb/s to 800Gb/s through kernel/hardware optimizations as opposed to adding more machines to meet the same throughput in this case? I'd be curious at what point returns on the engineering effort is diminishing in this problem.

alpbon Raft Consensus Animated (2014)

Unsolicited feedback: use fewer text-appear animations, and allow people to skip through stuff. I've spent a full minute clicking next next and still haven't seen a visualization aside from text slides loading slowly with animations. It's like a long YouTube ad that you cannot skip.

alpbon Show HN: A VNC viewer for eInk devices capable of 30 FPS when writing text

Is the notable delay between keyboard sounds and video rendering due to the SSH/software?

alpbon How Google got to rolling Linux releases for Desktops

Likely because these are not end-user machines but developer machines. Most Google engineers don't checkout/write/build/test/run code on their machines (they either do these tasks through a browser or SSH to another machine).

I believe gLinux can be installed on trusted machines that you connect over SSH as well as client laptops (where you can't checkout code etc).

That said many engineers/non-engineers at Google use ChromeOS on their client laptops (same with macOS).

alpbon SSD will fail at 40k power-on hours (2021)

Saying that and usernames like "DoneWithAllThat" and "hn_throwaway", yeah, it checks out.

alpbon SMS phishing is way too easy

>> Companies should stop sending URLs over SMS.

Doesn't make any sense. Companies can stop sending, but that doesn't prevent scammers from sending it. If anything, Apple or Google can run an in-device ML model to understand if a link is scammy/phishy vs genuine. They do it all the time on your browser.

alpbon Gitsign

The "verified" checkmark in GitHub UI is not really a big reassurance. Someone can steal your private key, continue to use it and still be verified until you or someone else notices and revokes the key.

GitHub, for example, has their own GPG key as verified for commits you author on their UI. In this case, you're trusting GitHub –and GitHub can also mark sigstore certificates as verified as well (they should), as they're actually verifiable using a transparency log.

What sigstore really brings to the picture is the attestation of "whoever signed this commit was actually signed into the github account @foo –or google account bar@google.com at the time, and here's the proof in a transparency log" –and those accounts can be secured by 2FA. It also takes you out of GPG key management business which I personally despise.

alpbon Show HN: VideoMentions – Search YouTube based on the spoken words in videos

FWIW Google already shows videos by their transcripts if the video has automatic captions or CC enabled in the Google search results. Try searching for a very specific phrase/sentence in quotes and it's likely you'll get the video in Google Search result page.

alpbon Software Engineering at Google (2020) [pdf]

This is inherently contradictory with the trunk-based development model.

I get the feeling you need to pin to v1.4 but ideally by being on the trunk head at all times, you force everyone (especially the library owners, and yourself, by writing tests around your wrapper) to do things properly such as having enough tests in place. Otherwise, you find yourself digging a grave for yourself when the time comes to migrate from v1.4 to v1.7, and it becomes grunt work that nobody wants to take on.

alpbon Ask HN: Has anyone successfully renegotiated an AWS non-compete?

If it helps: Amazon, Google etc are using these non-compete agreements almost exclusively against the executives who jump ship. Here's are some cases of AWS→ Google Cloud:

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/11/aws-case-against-worker-who-...

https://www.brodyandassociates.com/blog/even-amazon-trouble-...

I personally as an individual contributor (IC) who's not a distinguished engineer would not worry much about Amazon chasing me down to my next job. Not a legal advice obviously.

alpbon Automate Public Certificates Lifecycle Management via RFC 8555 (ACME)

One major problem with Google’s L7 load balancers is that the config changes take 5-20 mins to take effect. So google trying to set up an ACME challenge on a LB, solving it, and setting the managed TLS cert on it can take non-negligible time (15-30 mins?). I hope this gets fixed someday.

alpbon Ask HN: Share your personal site

https://ahmet.im/ It's a blog with static HTML (Hugo) hosted on a Google Cloud Storage bucket (3 cents/mo) with a Cloudflare CDN for caching/TLS termination. I'm not good at frontend tech so it's just text with bootstrap.css.

I have posts in my blog dated as back as 2005. I migrated from my own DIY blog CMS in VBScript (classic ASP) –there was no WordPress back in the day– which I migrated to WordPress, and finally settled on static HTML compiled from Markdown.

alpbon You can do a lot with an empty file

> Does this mean the smallest /bin/true is actually an empty file?

Yes. It used to be. Here's the history from Rob Pike https://twitter.com/rob_pike/status/966896123548872705

alpbon A project with a single 11,000-line code file

Obligatory "Do not try to simplify this code" reference here https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/blob/ec2e767e593953... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18772873) from Kubernetes persistent volume manager code.

alpbon Can Grafana run Doom?

Could've waited another day and roll this out as April Fools. What a lost opportunity.

alpbon Spotify and Google Announce User Choice Billing

Smaller companies who partner with large companies like Google or Microsoft see these large co's as single entities and not through their sub-divisions. Spotify probably partners with Google in Ads, Android, Cloud areas at minimum. Spotify is already a publicly-known large GCP user. So they might be just playing their chips.

alpbon Diagrams: Open-Source Alternative to Lucidchart

Isn't this the well known https://draw.io rebranded?

alpbon f.lux

I don't know if it's fixed but "Flux developer says Apple’s new competitive macOS Night Shift feature falls short" https://9to5mac.com/2017/03/28/flux-developer-says-apples-ne...

alpbon Deepfakes, can you spot them?

Mildly surprised the quality of this project coming out of MIT. Not only the UI was quite hard to use, I could not get beyond 10 samples. They were annoyingly obvious. Why would they not choose to not to make this as tricky as possible?

alpbon Heroku was Down

All it takes is a load balancer misconfiguration on a core service to take a large scale service down.

alpbon Why do we round corners?

One major reason that seems unattributed is that with the Web 2.0 movement around late 2000s we started to round most elements (buttons, div containers, input boxes...) in web design.

alpbon Show HN: Redirect your customers from your marketing page to your app

Looking at you, Cloudflare. https://www.cloudflare.com/ vs https://dash.cloudflare.com/

alpbon Why I won’t use Let’s Encrypt

> So in conclusion: [...] LE is definitely a NOBUS.

This sounds a lot like a conspiracy theory and I don't see in the article any explanation how that's relevant or possible.

LE doesn't force you to add CAA DNS records. Furthermore, you have CAs in your browser/machine that are far more sketchy than LE in the first place.

I think the article suffers from a clear point that I can put my finger on and say "oh yeah this is why LE is bad", in fact I don't see any points supporting that in a solid way. The article could be 1/5th the length and still achieve the same result.

alpbon Roblox October Outage Postmortem

I still don't understand how the elevated Consul latency ended up bringing all of the fleet to halt, fail health checks and drop user traffic. I guess use cases calling consul directly (e.g. service discovery) or indirectly (e.g. vault) could not tolerate having stale reads or sticking with what they've read? If anyone can shed a light on this, I appreciate.

alpbon Examining the covidtests.gov architecture

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

alpbon Michigan DOT Snowplow Names

Soo there's no "Salt Bae". I see. https://mobile.twitter.com/401_da_sarpanch/status/1339235481...

alpbon Italian Courts Find Open Source Software Terms Enforceable

The site has failed under the load from HN. Here's a mirror http://web.archive.org/web/20211224205455/http://ifthisbetre...

alpbon All the giant companies used ffmpeg (2020)

Not mentioned in the thread but YouTube encoding is also built upon ffmpeg:

https://streaminglearningcenter.com/blogs/youtube-uses-ffmpe... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2831292

alpbon The Google home page is 500K

> People will tolerate sub-optimal experiences

Implying the Google Search homepage loading experience is sub-optimal? Chrome starts loading it before you finish typing google.com on your keyboard.