Top all-time · #193
pingdom.com
Company blog · royal.pingdom.com/blogsystemsweb
pingdom.com is the company blog at royal.pingdom.com, writing about systems and web. Since 2007, 234 different Hacker News readers have linked it 302 times, most often “The world’s most super-designed data center – fit for a James Bond villain”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-04-14, and you can follow it by feed.
Rarely recommended · 0 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN commenters cite Pingdom's statistics posts as data sources, mostly on web page size, CDN and jQuery speed, browser upgrade rates, IRC usage, and Google revenue per employee.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- The world’s most super-designed data center – fit for a James Bond villain7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2008-11-14
- IRC is dead, long live IRC5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2012-04-24
- Hacker News is 44% 18-24 year olds, 77% male5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2012-08-23
- Profit per employee for some large tech companies5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2009-05-15
- Map of all Google data center locations3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2009-05-30
- Chrome at 20% market share, IE9 less than IE73 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2011-06-18
- Study: Ages of social network users3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2010-02-21
- Graphs of money made by Microsoft, Apple, and Google from 1985 till today3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2010-04-11
- /2010/05/11/cdn-performance-downloading-jquery-from-google-microsoft-and-edgecast-cdns/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2010-09-22
- Exploring the software behind Facebook, the world’s largest site2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2010-06-20
What Hacker News says?
The map on page 6 is interesting. Server locations of note: Moscow, Russia Caracas, Venezuela Tripoli, Libya Hubei Province, China Burma Lagos, Nigeria Saudi Arabia Iran (and geograhically surrounding Iran) Ukraine Based on page 13, I wonder if Google have any servers at these locations? Oh, what a surprise: http://royal.pingdom.com/2008/04/11/map-of-all-google-data-c... Does that look familiar?
Comment linking /2008/04/11/map-of-all-google-data-center-locations/
on “XKeyscore: NSA program collects 'nearly everything a user does on the internet'”Submitted Nginx, the little Russian web server taking on the giants as a story · 318 points
HN discussion"Amazon has found that every 100 ms of latency costs them 1% in sales." "Google has found that an extra 500 ms in search page generation time made traffic drop by 20%." http://royal.pingdom.com/2008/09/23/latency-costs-sales-and-... I don't think Google plans to bring this level of high-speed internet to everyone in the US, but they're certainly trying to spur the competition on. If people use the internet more, Goo…
Comment linking /2008/09/23/latency-costs-sales-and-drives-visitors-away/
on “Google Fiber Plans & Pricing”Submitted IRC is dead, long live IRC as a story · 175 points
HN discussionWe covered software-induced disasters in my CS courses. This isn’t standard, which explains a lot about our profession. My two favorite examples were: The Therac-25 — it’s just frontend GUI code. Why test it? What could go wrong? The Siberian gas pipeline explosion of ‘82 — not technically an accident, but it shows the problem with testing untrustworthy code to correctness. It was also the biggest non-nuclear man-ma…
Comment linking /10-historical-software-bugs-with-extreme-consequences/
on “New slats make the Golden Gate Bridge sound like a David Lynch movie”Submitted Hacker News is 44% 18-24 year olds, 77% male as a story · 134 points
HN discussion> Number of users? That's not even sure As far as I can tell, Slack has an order of magnitude more users. They were at 8m DAU back in May: https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/08/slack-hits-8-million-daily... IRC was in long-term decline even before Slack: https://royal.pingdom.com/2012/04/24/irc-is-dead-long-live-i... So my best guess is that Slack has at least an order of magnitude more users. But users is not exactly t…
Comment linking /2012/04/24/irc-is-dead-long-live-irc/
on “Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada”Submitted Chrome at 20% market share, IE9 less than IE7 as a story · 105 points
HN discussionIRC usage stats are really bad. Steady decline from 1 million users in 2003 to 400k in 2012. In a time where we're talking about communication apps with hundreds of millions of users, not even having a million is pretty telling to me. http://royal.pingdom.com/2012/04/24/irc-is-dead-long-live-ir...
Comment linking /2012/04/24/irc-is-dead-long-live-irc/
on “Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects”Submitted Linux now on 42% of consumer computing devices as a story · 99 points
HN discussionAlso make sure to hire someone who has done it before if you want to go that route. "Racking" is an art-form in itself and the cabling alone can turn into a real problem[1] down the road if you take it too lightly for too long. You also want to plan for redundancy, power density etc. from the start. Sorting out messy cabling or adding redundancy to a badly managed rack on live hardware is not fun. [1] http://www.vib…
Comment linking /2008/01/24/when-data-center-cabling-becomes-art/
on “The Five Stages of Hosting”Submitted REST in peace, SOAP as a story · 97 points
HN discussionGitS was very straightforward and understandable while introducing lot's of new concepts to many people. That's harder than you might think. IMO, it suffers from the Seinfeld effect where you can't watch it in context, because you have seen so many derivative things. PS: Even 2001 was late as it was released in 1995 when only around 40 million people world wide had been on the internet. http://royal.pingdom.com/2011…
Comment linking /2011/03/31/internet-1995/
on “Ghost in the Shell remains our most challenging film about technology”Submitted Google's new data center in Finland as a story · 92 points
HN discussionWikipedia in French, and Wikipedia in German are very good. They have each of them the third of the articles of the English Wikipedia (in 2012, source: http://royal.pingdom.com/2012/06/13/the-biggest-and-busiest-... ). Note also that the German Wikipedia had as many edits as the English ones, with fewer articles, which could be a good indicator of the (good) quality of the German Wikipedia. More generally, there are…
Comment linking /2012/06/13/the-biggest-and-busiest-languages-on-wikipedia/
on “A cool way to use natural language in JavaScript”Submitted Google Chrome’s amazing growth spurt. The top web browser by June 2012? as a story · 86 points
HN discussionThere's Lynx--the text web-browser. [1] Someone wrote up their experience using Lynx on the web around 2012. [2] Conclusion: "Not all the sites are usable with Lynx, but many of them offer at least basic functionality using the text-only web browser." As long as there's HTML output, a more humane web browser could allow better customization of the information; it could infer the usual human organizational methods; l…
Comment linking /2012/06/25/using-web-browser-lynx-visit-top-websites/
on “After fifteen years of downtime, the MetaFilter gopher server is back”Submitted Why Android devs are losing money, and it’s not due to piracy as a story · 85 points
HN discussionI don't know artsy.net, it's probably image heavy. But an average webpage size of over 1.5MB is not acceptable onmobile, imo: http://www.websiteoptimization.com/speed/tweak/average-web-p... Also: http://royal.pingdom.com/2011/11/21/web-pages-getting-bloate... It's far more then it should be. Graphics can be size optimized, SVG or jpg. A JS framework doesn't need to be 100k where most webpages are probably only using…
Comment linking /2011/11/21/web-pages-getting-bloated-here-is-why/
on “Ember.js 2.0 Released”Submitted Graphs of money made by Microsoft, Apple, and Google from 1985 till today as a story · 82 points
HN discussion> even relatively remote locations become "accessible" for 100 Gbps+ fiber or microwave connectivity, and _very_ remote locations for tens of Gbps. I’m guessing: 1. You’ve never priced out said circuits before 2. Never seen the lead times and minimum contract periods on them 3. Don’t realize in general how hard it is to actually max out circuits like that. Shipping / freight company is generally still a preferred so…
Comment linking /fedex-still-faster-than-the-internet/
on “AWS Ground Station”Submitted Pingdom is joining SolarWinds as a story · 75 points
HN discussionAccording to this (dated) study, Facebook has a fair share of Gen X'ers. http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/02/16/study-ages-of-social-net...
Comment linking /2010/02/16/study-ages-of-social-network-users/
on “Stallman: "Facebook is an international parasitism project."”Submitted Profit per employee for some large tech companies as a story · 71 points
HN discussionBut the most popular WebKit browser keeps itself up-to-date with unprecedented efficiency: http://royal.pingdom.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/111206-c... Full article: http://royal.pingdom.com/2011/12/06/comparing-chrome-and-fir...
Comment linking /2011/12/06/comparing-chrome-and-firefox-automated-updates-study/
on “Show HN: Heap is a new approach to analytics. Just capture everything”Submitted The world’s most super-designed data center – fit for a James Bond villain as a story · 63 points
HN discussionOn threads such as this one it is easy --and even popular-- to dump on those, such as myself, who come down on the "nay" side, even when this is firmly based on experience and having made plenty of mistakes in the field. The linked article does NOT talk about a one-semester school project or a quick-and-simple learning OS. No, the article talks about a web developer with no real experience writing low-level code not…
Comment linking /2012/04/16/linux-kernel-development-numbers/
on “I’m writing my own OS”Submitted Gallery of Early Computers (1940s – 1960s) as a story · 53 points
HN discussionThere's nothing trivial about it. Following a book while being taught at a University over a semester is vastly different from what the OP is talking about. For example, he is talking about writing his own PCIe, SATA and USB drivers as well as, well, everything. He is not talking about starting with MINIX and a well-digested book that guides you through the process. In fact, your suggestion is exactly on point: The…
Comment linking /2012/04/16/linux-kernel-development-numbers/
on “I’m writing my own OS”Submitted Google facts and figures as a story · 52 points
HN discussion
