Top all-time · #1935
Airship
Company blog · urbanairship.com/blogprogrammingsystems
Airship is the company blog at urbanairship.com, writing about programming and systems. Since 2009, 39 different Hacker News readers have linked it 68 times, most often “C500k in Action at Urban Airship (2010)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-22, and you can follow it by feed.
Rarely recommended · 0 of 32 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
Commenters cite Urban Airship's blog as a reference for high-connection-count server work, such as 500k connections with Netty and Linux kernel tuning, and its MongoDB-to-PostgreSQL move. Comments are otherwise mostly about the company as a push notification provider and its hiring.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 32 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Airship is the only mobile-first customer experience platform that delivers measurable results through AI-powered, unified cross-channel experiences.
Most-linked posts?
- /5 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2009-12-10
- C500k in Action at Urban Airship (2010)5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2011-02-28
- /3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2009-12-26
- /company/jobs/2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2011-12-01
- Building a culture that counts2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2012-02-22
- /blog/2010/09/29/linux-kernel-tuning-for-c500k/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2011-08-27
- Scaling Urban Airship Infrastructure to Light Up a Stadium in One Second2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2012-05-17
What Hacker News says?
Stackmob[1] and Urban Airship[2], depending on what you'd use it for [1] https://www.stackmob.com/ [2] http://urbanairship.com/
Comment linking /
on “Facebook buys Parse”Submitted Urban Airship to shut down SimpleGeo as a story · 74 points
HN discussionurban airship, portland, python web engineer, js web engineer, data engineer: https://www.urbanairship.com/careers
Comment linking /careers
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (March 2017)”Submitted Urban Airship raises $15.1 million as a story · 65 points
HN discussionA timeline of Google's messaging rivalry with Facebook. Original inspiration from source [23], enhanced and corrected from [33]: - 2006-02-07: Google Talk integration inside Gmail goes live [35] - 2006-09-26: Facebook opens up to everyone (not just colleges) [36] - 2007-02-14: (corrected date) Gmail opens up to everyone (not just invite-only) [37] - 2008-04-06: Facebook chat goes live [34] - 2008-07-11: iOS App Stor…
Comment linking /push-notifications-explained
on “Updates to our Google Voice apps”Submitted Exploring the Durability of IP Connections from Android Devices as a story · 60 points
HN discussionPeople have been using Netty (Java) to handle over 500K connections with NIO on one server. http://urbanairship.com/blog/2010/08/24/c500k-in-action-at-u... That's 3 years ago. I'm sure more can be handled now, with more memory and more cores. Bundled Netty with a distributed system like Hazelcast, you can easily scale out to more machines.
Comment linking /blog/2010/08/24/c500k-in-action-at-urban-airship/
on “No More Callbacks: 10,000 Actors, 10,000 Threads, 10,000 Spaceships”Submitted Urban Airship Revenge: 8-bit April Fools' gaming goodness as a story · 40 points
HN discussionSan Francisco / Portland, OR Urban Airship has tons of engineering and other positions open: http://urbanairship.com/careers/ We help mobile app owners manage their users. Customers drop our SDK into their app (iOS, Android, Windows, etc.), then they can go to our elegant web interface to send push notifications, setup triggered events, segment their audience, create a pass/offer for Passbook, and more. There are ov…
Comment linking /careers/
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2013)”Submitted Inside Urban Airship Engineering: Achieving Massive Scale and Value as a story · 21 points
HN discussionUrban Airship is hiring full time senior software engineers in San Francisco and Portland. We're looking for people to join our back end team (which is primarily Java, hbase, cassandra, high volume RPC services), and our web team (JavaScript, python/django, d3, etc...) Our San Francisco location is a small, engineering and operations-focused office in SOMA. We have the feel of a much smaller company, but we operate…
Comment linking /careers
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2014)”Submitted Free Friday: Investing in People and Ideas as a story · 11 points
HN discussionhttp://urbanairship.com has turned into an 8-bit working game.
Comment linking /
on “Collect HN: Aprils Fools”Submitted Building Python Packages with Maven as a story · 10 points
HN discussionSan Francisco or Portland, OR - Full Time @ Urban Airship - http://urbanairship.com/company/jobs/ Server Developer (3 openings) Engineer in Test Client Developer (3 openings) Ops Engineer (2 openings) Support Engineer Strategic Platform Sales Director Account Manager Account Development Representative
Comment linking /company/jobs/
on “Ask HN: Who is Hiring? (December 2011)”Submitted Scaling Urban Airship Infrastructure to Light Up a Stadium in One Second as a story · 7 points
HN discussionSan Francisco, CA or Portland, OR - Engineers and business people Urban Airship is hiring all kinds of engineers and business people in San Francisco and Portland. We have a travel program between the cities, so you'd get to know 2 badass cities. Urban Airship helps mobile developers send push notifications at high volumes across iOS, Android, Blackberry, WP7, Kindle, etc. - 10 billion push notifications sent. We're…
Comment linking /company/jobs/
on “Ask HN: Who is Hiring? (February 2012)”Submitted Urban Airship In-App Purchase Coming to Android (Beta invite) as a story · 6 points
HN discussionSan Francisco, CA or Portland, OR - FULLTIME or INTERN - Engineers and business people Urban Airship is hiring all kinds of engineers and business people in San Francisco and Portland. We have a travel program between the cities, so you'd get to know 2 badass cities. Urban Airship helps mobile developers send push notifications at high volumes across iOS, Android, Blackberry, WP7, Kindle, etc. - 10 billion push noti…
Comment linking /company/jobs/
on “Ask HN: Who is Hiring? (March 2012)”Submitted Introducing frock: Easy fake services for a microservices environment as a story · 5 points
HN discussionUrban Airship! SF & Portland - Funded by Intel, Salesforce, Verizon Do you want to work on a product that reaches hundreds of millions of users a year? http://urbanairship.com/company/jobs/
Comment linking /company/jobs/
on “Ask HN: Who is Hiring? (March 2012)”Submitted Urban Airship acquires SimpleGeo as a story · 5 points
HN discussionUrban Airship has a similar service (even priced similarly): http://urbanairship.com/ Their focus is specifically mobile apps, & they have nice sample code for iPhone/Android/Blackberry. Gets spendy faster than Amazon, but I've used it for personal stuff and it's really easy. Ex.: I do a lot of database work recently, so when I kick off a 90min query, at the end I ping them with some JSON and my phone meows. (Meow!…
Comment linking /
on “Amazon introduces new service: Simple Notification Service”Submitted Introducing Tessera, a Graphite Frontend as a story · 4 points
HN discussionUrban Airship in Portland, Oregon. http://urbanairship.com/jobs
Comment linking /jobs
on “Ask HN: Who Is Hiring? (October 2010 Edition)”Submitted UrbanAirship update iOS libraries with subscription support as a story · 4 points
HN discussionTechnical details would be interesting. Until then, here's Urban Airship's post from last year on 500k connections on Linux: http://urbanairship.com/blog/2010/09/29/linux-kernel-tuning-...
Comment linking /blog/2010/09/29/linux-kernel-tuning-for-c500k/
on “One Million Concurrent TCP connections”Submitted C500k in Action at Urban Airship (2010) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionHorizontal scaling is key. If we had more faith in auto-sharding in MongoDB 1.6, that may have worked (however horizontal scaling wasn't our only issue with MongoDB). With PostgreSQL we manually partition the data (luckily we have a really nice key to partition on). PostgreSQL 9's streaming replication has been adequate so far. We've only been using it in production for a few months and recently moved off of AWS* wh…
Comment linking /blog/2011/06/01/hybrid-cloud-were-up/
on “Scaling with MongoDB (or how Urban Airship abandoned it for PostgreSQL)”Submitted Push Notifications: With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility as a story · 3 points
HN discussion
