Top all-time · #5815
Don MacAskill
Personal blog · don.blogs.smugmug.comstartupsbusiness
Don MacAskill's personal blog at don.blogs.smugmug.com covers startups and business. Since 2010, 13 different Hacker News readers have linked it 19 times. The last post was in 2012, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (10) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Don MacAskill's SmugMug engineering posts on running a photo service on Amazon S3 and EC2, covering S3 outages, hot and cold storage, and infrastructure choices. Most comments cite them as examples.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 10 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
SmugMug's Co-Founder, CEO & Chief Geek
Most-linked posts?
- /2010/07/15/great-idea-google-should-open-their-index/2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2011-05-26
What Hacker News says?
It's also possible they have a huge amount of content that is sparsely accessed by a large number of users. But in general I agree. Edit: SmugMug seems to fall into this category: http://don.blogs.smugmug.com/2010/07/15/great-idea-google-sh... Also interesting: And if you think about it, the robots are much harder to optimize for – they’re crawling the long tail, which totally annihilates your caching layers. Humans…
Comment linking /2010/07/15/great-idea-google-should-open-their-index/
on “Google Exec Says It's A Good Idea: Open The Index And Speed Up The Internet”Submitted How SmugMug survived the Amazonpocalypse as a story · 115 points
HN discussionThey'll allow that kind of content only in non-public galleries that are also password protected. It's possible to slip some things through the cracks, but if and when they're found they'll delist the photos. There's no value for me in paying money for a service which requires I lock up my photographs like Fort Knox merely because they contain skin. Your friend's mileage may vary. (this is the relevant section from…
Comment linking /2007/01/31/the-dark-side-of-the-flickr-acquisition/
on “Yahoo Lays Off Flickr Support Staff”Submitted ZFS & MySQL/InnoDB Compression Update as a story · 10 points
HN discussionAs another example of handling cloud services going offline, consider this case by SmugMug: http://don.blogs.smugmug.com/2007/01/30/amazon-s3-outages-sl... """So what are we doing differently? Simple. Amazon serves as “cold storage” where everyone’s valuable photos go to live in safety. Our own storage clusters are now “hot storage” for photos that need to be served up fast and furious to the millions of unique visi…
Comment linking /2007/01/30/amazon-s3-outages-slowdowns-and-problems/
on “Why no company that values their data should ever "Go Google" ”Submitted Why ‘Be Passionate’ is Awesome Advice as a story · 8 points
HN discussionA little bit of information on their configuration in the past; http://don.blogs.smugmug.com/2008/06/03/skynet-lives-aka-ec2...
Comment linking /2008/06/03/skynet-lives-aka-ec2-smugmug/
on “How SmugMug survived the Amazonpocalypse”Submitted My love affair with StackExchange (and a plea for help) as a story · 5 points
HN discussionYes, I'm seriously overdue on a blog entry about current state-of-the-art for DBs at SmugMug. :( You can watch my keynote from the MySQL conference two years ago to see what we used to do, but things have progressed since then. http://don.blogs.smugmug.com/2010/04/15/my-mysql-keynote-sli...
Comment linking /2010/04/15/my-mysql-keynote-slides-and-video/
on “How SmugMug survived the Amazonpocalypse”Submitted Apple’s new policy is good for you, me, and the web as a story · 1 points
HN discussionIt's a common complaint: here's a blogpost from 2007 called "Where's the Mac?" http://don.blogs.smugmug.com/2007/08/08/wheres-the-mac/ . Midrange desktops are probably still where the buyers are most price/performance-conscious, and where design/engineering effort makes the least difference: Apple probably wants to avoid competing on that kind of terrain. They may also be worried about people who would opt for a mid…
Comment linking /2007/08/08/wheres-the-mac/
on “The Mac Pro from an audio pros perspective”Wrong. Proof: http://don.blogs.smugmug.com/2010/11/10/why-be-passionate-is...
Comment linking /2010/11/10/why-be-passionate-is-awesome-advice/
on “Why 'Be Passionate' Is Awful Advice”The SmugMug team were the first people I remember seeing use S3 for more than a 'hello world' project. This blog entry from 2006[1] is only 13 years old, but feels like it should be older. Back then, putting that much data for a publicly accessible site was considered pretty insane. [1] https://don.blogs.smugmug.com/2006/08/12/amazon-s3-the-holy-...
Comment linking /2006/08/12/amazon-s3-the-holy-grail/
on “SmugMug emails subscribers with request to find more paying users”You should read Smugmug about it : http://don.blogs.smugmug.com/2006/11/10/amazon-s3-show-me-th...
Comment linking /2006/11/10/amazon-s3-show-me-the-money/
on “Big Just Got Bigger - 5 Terabyte Object Support in Amazon S3”Sorry if I'm not being clear ... SmugMug uses S3 for its storage [1]. DropBox also uses S3 for its storage [2]. They are, in essence, both layers/services built on top of S3 (albeit different types of services). So why support one but not the other? [1] http://don.blogs.smugmug.com/2006/08/12/amazon-s3-the-holy-g... [2] http://www.dropbox.com/help/7
Comment linking /2006/08/12/amazon-s3-the-holy-grail/
on “OpenPhoto, a photo service for your S3 or Dropbox account”I estimated >50% of our traffic was from search engine crawlers specifically (billions of requests per month) way back in 2010. It's only gotten worse since then. http://don.blogs.smugmug.com/2010/07/15/great-idea-google-sh...
Comment linking /2010/07/15/great-idea-google-should-open-their-index/
on “61.5% of Web Traffic Is Not Human”This is a particularly big issue for us because we spend more than 50% of our resources on serving robots (not humans!). I wrote about this back in July of 2010, and the problem has only gotten worse: http://don.blogs.smugmug.com/2010/07/15/great-idea-google-sh... It's a crazy problem to have, but we haven't found a solution. We can't just disappear from all the various indexes and collections that these robots repr…
Comment linking /2010/07/15/great-idea-google-should-open-their-index/
on “Using PhantomJS at scale”FYI - I loved reading your blog posts ~20 years ago about how you were building your server infrastructure (hardware, dedicated, onprem, etc). If any more recent post exist on similar topics, I’d be fascinated to read more. https://don.blogs.smugmug.com/
Comment linking /
on “Flickr: The First and Last Great Photo Platform”It seems like when something does break, ebs failures cascade to other services (RDS) and you're pretty much hosed... Ever since the first big us-east-1 ebs outage I've tried to avoid ebs, but I am using it for root volumes on most of my instances which makes me nervous -- so many instance types don't have instance storage, I guess I need to look at c5d instances again. I thought this writeup my smugmug was pretty g…
Comment linking /2011/04/24/how-smugmug-survived-the-amazonpocalypse/
on “AWS Summary of the EC2, EBS, and RDS Service Event in the EU West Region”
