Hacker News: samcrawford

New comment by samcrawford in "Fastpotify"

samcrawford — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 11:46:33 +0000

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.

New comment by samcrawford in "StackPath Immediate End of Life"

samcrawford — Sat, 15 Jun 2024 13:19:40 +0000

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.

New comment by samcrawford in "How the Tour de France became a $100M business"

samcrawford — Sat, 08 Jul 2023 16:48:11 +0000

Not included with Prime in the UK

New comment by samcrawford in "35M Hot Dogs: Benchmarking Caddy vs. Nginx"

samcrawford — Fri, 16 Sep 2022 16:17:34 +0000

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?

New comment by samcrawford in "Serving Netflix Video Traffic at 800Gb/s and Beyond [pdf]"

samcrawford — Fri, 19 Aug 2022 13:23:54 +0000

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...

New comment by samcrawford in "The layoffs at Klarna"

samcrawford — Sun, 14 Aug 2022 18:51:33 +0000

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.

New comment by samcrawford in "Comcast: Simulating shitty network connections so you can build better systems"

samcrawford — Sat, 16 Jul 2022 14:54:08 +0000

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).

New comment by samcrawford in "How to fuck up an airport"

samcrawford — Sun, 03 Jul 2022 17:42:18 +0000

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...

New comment by samcrawford in "What do Starlink’s latest Ookla results mean for its RDOF winnings?"

samcrawford — Thu, 30 Jun 2022 18:24:40 +0000

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

New comment by samcrawford in "Apple Cash"

samcrawford — Mon, 23 May 2022 10:28:44 +0000

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.

New comment by samcrawford in "Apple Discontinues macOS Server"

samcrawford — Thu, 21 Apr 2022 22:57:25 +0000

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

New comment by samcrawford in "Eero Pro 6E and Eero 6 Review: Fast and Easy"

samcrawford — Sun, 10 Apr 2022 20:58:17 +0000

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.

New comment by samcrawford in "AWS lowers data transfer prices for PrivateLink, Transit Gateway, Client VPN"

samcrawford — Thu, 07 Apr 2022 20:10:35 +0000

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.

New comment by samcrawford in "Ask HN: Why do search engines not let you blacklist spam domains?"

samcrawford — Tue, 29 Mar 2022 15:30:51 +0000

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.

Teclis – Non-commercial web search

samcrawford — Wed, 23 Mar 2022 20:38:55 +0000

Article URL: http://teclis.com

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30783037

Points: 239

# Comments: 79

New comment by samcrawford in "Hetzner announcement: Price changes for servers ordered via the Server Auction"

samcrawford — Fri, 21 Jan 2022 14:21:10 +0000

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.

New comment by samcrawford in "The State of Web Scraping 2022"

samcrawford — Wed, 12 Jan 2022 22:07:20 +0000

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...)

New comment by samcrawford in "Who Contributed to PostgreSQL Development in 2020 and 2021?"

samcrawford — Wed, 12 Jan 2022 21:56:03 +0000

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

New comment by samcrawford in "In MySQL, use “utf8mb4” instead of “utf8” (2016)"

samcrawford — Wed, 12 Jan 2022 19:19:09 +0000

> 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...

New comment by samcrawford in "Why might you run your own DNS server?"

samcrawford — Wed, 05 Jan 2022 22:31:53 +0000

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.