I rewrote a C project in Rust some years ago, and in the Rust version I included many optimizations that I probably wouldn't have in C code, thanks to the ability to do them "fearlessly". The end result was so much more performant I had to double check I didn't leave something out!

For scraping HN directly, in my experience you have to go extremely slow, like 1 minute between fetching items. And if you get blocked, it may be better to wait a long time (minutes) before trying again rather than exponential backoff, in order to get out of the penalty box. You'll need a cache for sure.

Not requiring client auth certainly makes things simple. It can even work for private data if the topics are sufficiently unguessable.

Fastly Pub/Sub makes it easy to send messages in real-time to browsers and other devices, using SSE or MQTT. It is built on top of Fanout, our global connection management & message routing infrastructure, which means it works at mega scale across all of Fastly's 100+ regions (POPs). We hope folks find it to be a compelling alternative to other "real-time pub/sub" SaaS offerings.

Also, we are shipping this product in a novel way: as an open source app for Fastly Compute. You can run it on Fastly as-is or fork it if you'd like. It runs serverlessly and there is nothing to manage. It's free to try since all the components it depends on have free tiers/trials, and the app itself has no cost of its own. The costs of using it are simply the costs of Compute & dependencies.

There's a demo here: https://pubsub-test.glitch.me/

With the demo you can play around with sending messages between browser windows and with curl.

Announcement & setup guide here: https://dev.to/fastly/announcing-the-pubsub-compute-app-35ki

Let us know what you think!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43196060

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

This is kind of like how trench coats are associated with detectives, because they were regular clothing for anyone around the time of early detective films.

> What problem is this envisioned as solving?

Its core mission is to legitimize all candidates on the ballot. This is something caucuses and ranked-choice voting can do, but since our general elections don't work this way, I wonder if the voting experience could be augmented from the private sector. (Of course, efforts to change how our actual elections work is still worthwhile and can be pursued in parallel).

Basically, if enough people (millions) were to use an app like this to meta-vote before committing to a single actual vote, we could simulate alternative voting processes without government involvement.

Maybe in 2028 this could be a real thing, regardless of where it is running. An edge cloud does seem ideal for national live events though.

WAF could be nice though.

It does! Can be served at the edge or passed through to origin.

This is an experiment with low-friction, "fearless", Internet-based polling. There is no authentication, only a captcha and restriction to US IP addresses. Congressional district is detected automatically. Selections can be changed at any time until the poll closes, kind of like a presidential caucus. Just tap to select. Tap again to change.

I built this after pondering about how polling (or even voting) could be improved through technology. Yes, digital voting is a tough space with trust issues. Maybe there are practical, partial solutions.

This is my third post. Earlier submissions didn't perform well, probably because politics is a sensitive subject. However, this project is not political. It is about tech and process. I believe it's an appropriate submission for HN and it ought to be interesting no matter your political leaning. Hopefully with this better framing there can be better discussion.

Another way of looking at it: if the poll results bother you, think about how improving polling/voting generally might help your cause.

Here are some topics to guide constructive discussion:

* Internet-based polling. Can we make this a routine thing? Would it be worthwhile? Abuse prevention?

* Internet-based voting. About time or never gonna happen?

* Augmenting the voting experience. We don't have ranked choice voting, but maybe it could be simulated in advance of an election. Maybe an organization could act as a delivery agent for mail-in votes.

* The tech stack. This project uses a combination of boring (Django+Postgres) and shiny (Fastly edge pub/sub, captcha, etc). The database ought to be able to handle a few million participants. To get to a few hundred million I'd probably add more PG nodes and shard. Curious what others think about the database options for accurate+fast counting.

* Have fun with it! This isn't a real election. If you want to VPN to an empty state to claim a bunch of electoral votes, go for it. I hope with enough participants the results would be mostly representative, though.

The poll will run every Monday afternoon/evening until Election Day. It's designed to withstand a good bit of traffic so feel free to share it.

Earlier posts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41630976 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41555752

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41768232

Points: 4

# Comments: 8

And old age isn’t needed to figure this out. Even middle age will do. When I reflect on my life, I almost never think about past work.

(Yet, I remain mostly working.)

Then again, since this is only polling and not real voting, there's not much to lose anyway.

I made a live presidential polling website with real-time electoral results. Votes can be changed at any time until the poll closes. Only visitors from the USA can participate. Congressional district is detected automatically.

The idea is to enable a coordinated voting process, where selections are non-binding and negotiable rather than blindly cast once. Kind of like a presidential caucus, but national and over the Internet.

The infra is Fastly & DigitalOcean. Backend is a Django service running on DO App Platform with Postgres. Fastly is used for edge logic, captcha, geo location, and pushing updates to the page (Fanout). In theory it should be able to handle millions of participants.

Note: since my previous post, I've added a way to close the poll after a time period. I realized that without some kind of time boxing it was unclear what the point is or how long to participate.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41630976

Points: 9

# Comments: 21