[HN Gopher] FlightRadar24 crashes due to surge in users tracking...
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FlightRadar24 crashes due to surge in users tracking SPAR19
Author : jeswin
Score : 183 points
Date : 2022-08-02 14:10 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| yrcyrc wrote:
| Update: She's just landed in Taipei
| whatever1 wrote:
| Showdown!
| rvz wrote:
| The beginning of China's _' special military operation'_ on
| Taiwan and the start of WW3. (Hope not).
|
| Maybe after she leaves it may happen. Let's see what happens
| next.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| The CCP is embarrassing themselves, making threats they're to
| scared to carry through with, hoping the threat alone will be
| enough. Nancy Pelosi is flaunting those threats, showing the
| world that Xi Jinping has no clothes.
| squarefoot wrote:
| It seems to me that everyone involved is taking a chance
| offered by other events, like China knowing that the US is
| helping Ukraine with weapons and would never want to be
| involved in two (indirect but potentially real) wars on
| multiple fronts, Russia knowing that the US is already
| committed to help Taiwan but don't want to piss off their
| allies China too much to avoid a direct military conflict,
| and the US knowing that Russia is in the worst possible
| economic shape and couldn't sustain an attrition war for
| much longer without risking either its collapse or
| resorting to nuclear.
| thedudeabides5 wrote:
| They go to Kinmen next, watch. Not today, but wheels in
| motion.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| More threats. If the CCP weren't so chickenshit they
| would have shot her down, but they don't dare.
| dekhn wrote:
| In what world would it make sense for CCP to shoot down
| Nancy Pelosi's plane? What does it achieve?
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| They don't gain much (and can lose a lot) by shooting
| down an American politician, when what they care about is
| Taiwan itself if anything.
| colpabar wrote:
| what a great use of our tax dollars!
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| > _what a great use of our tax dollars!_
|
| Correct. It shows the world where the real balance of
| power lays and gives confidence to American allies that
| America is not a fair-weather friend that can be bullied
| out of its commitments by loudmouthed tyrants like Xi
| Jinping. This is excellent for American global interests.
| woweoe wrote:
| This is unrealistic from an Asian perspective. The US has
| actually lost three proxy wars with China on the other
| side (Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan) and what is happening
| in Ukraine is a total mess that no Asian country wants to
| be in. The US also did not manage to unite the world
| (including most of the Asian continent) against Russia.
|
| The idea that the US will be willing defend Taiwan
| fiercely when the US did not do the same for Ukraine,
| against a foe that is much mightier than Russia, is
| silly. No country in the world wants to descend to the
| levels that Ukraine had gone.
| nradov wrote:
| The US is not an ally of Ukraine. We never had any kind
| of commitment to defend them. We give them weapons and
| other support as a way of knocking Russia down and
| preventing them from threatening our actual allies.
|
| The situation with Taiwan is completely different due to
| the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, and official policy
| statements by multiple presidential administrations since
| then. The US would absolutely defend Taiwan against a
| major attack. The question is how far that commitment
| goes? If China uses tactical nuclear weapons at sea,
| would the US escalate or back off? No one knows what
| would really happen in that scenario...
| aerostable_slug wrote:
| It's also worth pointing out that United States spent a
| significant amount of effort to prevent Taiwan's
| indigenous nuclear weapons program from reaching
| fruition.
|
| https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/nuclear-
| vault/2019-0...
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chang_Hsien-yi
| kcb wrote:
| China did many things during the Korean War but win is
| definetly not one of them.
| klpost wrote:
| The aggressive diplomacy strategy has backfired
| spectacularly in Ukraine, yet people market it as a
| success.
|
| With a quieter backroom strategy perhaps there would not
| be a war now.
|
| But the U.S. can sell LPG gas to Europe now, so perhaps
| it is a success for them.
| nradov wrote:
| Sure if the Ukrainians had quietly made a backroom deal
| to be annexed by Russia then there would not be a war
| now. And then next year it would be Estonia, and so on.
| Would that be preferable?
|
| The Europeans (mainly Germans) wouldn't have to buy so
| much LPG from the US if they had invested in other energy
| sources and avoided becoming dependent on Russian fossil
| fuels. Presidents Obama and Trump specifically warned
| them about this strategic risk but they didn't listen.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| The invasion of Ukraine is purely the result of Russia
| wanting to invade
| foverzar wrote:
| > This is excellent for American global interests.
|
| Of course it is. It is a very typical pattern of the US
| external politics. Decompensate some frozen conflict or a
| status quo situation somewhere beyond the ocean and then
| enjoy being a safe haven when the rest of the world is
| burning.
| hackinthebochs wrote:
| Nancy Pelosi wasn't elected to engage in foreign policy.
| She should not be doing actions abroad that have
| implications for U.S. foreign policy.
| Kon-Peki wrote:
| As a junior congresswoman, she walked right into
| Tiananmen Square and held up a banner that memorialized
| those that died. Right in front of the Beijing police!
| She's never stopped poking at China. The fact that she
| keeps getting re-elected, over and over again, is pretty
| good proof that she has indeed been elected to engage in
| foreign policy ;)
| throwaway654329 wrote:
| I agree that her history of activity really does play a
| part in being re-elected.
|
| I find the parent comment a bit shocking. It seems
| unreasonable to claim an elected U.S. representative is
| somehow not allowed to engage in foreign policy discourse
| by _visiting_ a country or by suggesting that they aren't
| representing their constituent's views because they do
| political work outside of the (U.S.) country?
|
| Shall we hazard a guess about unelected Americans? Are
| those people allowed to exercise their right to freedom
| of movement and freedom of speech? Obviously yes and yes,
| but partisan polarization makes all of these norms,
| rights even, a point of contention.
|
| The Department of State is not the only group of American
| bureaucrats who are allowed to travel and engage in
| public actions that are considered political. America
| isn't a dictatorship where only specific party members
| are allowed to engage in foreign policy discussions. When
| any American is threatened by members of an actual
| dictatorship (of the proletariat, literally), it might be
| worth considering that these issues transcend party
| politics.
|
| The parent comment strongly implies that there isn't a
| long history of elected American officials visiting other
| countries, often with controversial media coverage and/or
| overt political threats from less than liberal societies.
| That history also extends to normal Americans speaking in
| foreign parliaments and speaking in public squares. It is
| a good thing that everyone has these rights, even if
| everything said isn't always good.
|
| With that said, Pelosi might be provoking world war
| three, but the reason to argue against her actions isn't
| because she doesn't have the right to travel or speak or
| engage in politics abroad.
|
| As a side note: Taiwan probably should be defended by
| people who support democracy, though I understand this
| might not be seen as defense but as unnecessary
| provocation.
|
| Related though and on display in this thread is a kind of
| cynicism against America doing positive political actions
| abroad. This is part of a larger trend perceived from
| inside and certainly outside of America about some
| Americans: the light of liberty is going out in America,
| and most of the world has noticed. It isn't particularly
| partisan and has really accelerated since 9/11 under both
| parties in different ways. It is really sad. America
| should be a light of liberty in the world, we should
| bring hope to democracies under threat from illiberal
| societies. I understand that this is now controversial in
| America in some political circles and it is really
| terrible. As polarization increases, all sides will find
| friends in exile or worse - peaceful resolution requires
| political discourse regardless of geographical location.
|
| Put another way: Ensure your political "enemies" have
| basic rights or you too might find that you are without
| rights, if and likely when, other people run the show...
| k_sze wrote:
| The US is literally interfering in the internal affairs
| of China. Taiwan is legally part of China. They never
| declared independence. Even the Joint Communique between
| PRC and USA explicitly says recognizes that Taiwan is
| part of China.
| colpabar wrote:
| [deleted]
| smcl wrote:
| I don't think it reveals anything new about the balance
| of power. We know the USA is currently still the largest
| economy and we know China is in the ascendancy and is on
| course to dominate the coming decades. As for giving
| confidence to allies - East Asia in particular is all to
| aware of how far the USA is willing to go to advance its
| interests and ideology in the region, having fought (and
| lost) two conflicts there since WW2.
|
| You seem to be brimming with pride at this gesture, I
| think this pride is misplaced. I hope nothing bad comes
| of this, but I cannot fathom the idea that increasing the
| chance of conflict with China being good let alone
| excellent.
| nradov wrote:
| The conflict is probably inevitable anyway. Appeasing the
| Chinese Communist Party by acquiescing to their demands
| won't bring us peace in the long run. Better to do
| everything we can (short of violence) to humiliate,
| undermine, and disrespect them. This demonstrates firm
| resolve and helps to maintain confidence among our
| regional allies.
| okasaki wrote:
| > The conflict is probably inevitable anyway. Appeasing
| the Chinese Communist Party by acquiescing to their
| demands won't bring us peace in the long run.
|
| Sure it would, but peace was never the goal of the US
| empire.
|
| > Better to do everything we can (short of violence) to
| humiliate, undermine, and disrespect them. This
| demonstrates firm resolve and helps to maintain
| confidence among our regional allies.
|
| I wish it was against the HN rules to advocate for public
| policies that wouldn't be acceptable on HN. For example,
| if I called you a stupid moron, an amoral cretin who
| should be thrown in a cell and left to die, dang might
| have a problem with that. And yet your equivalent
| suggested policy will pass without concern.
| nradov wrote:
| Well if peace is your only goal then sure we can allow
| China to take over Taiwan plus the rest of the first
| island chain, and dominate the entire Asia-Pacific
| region. Is that what you would prefer? Fortunately the
| adults in the room have realized that appeasing
| expansionist dictators like Xi Jinping never ends well.
|
| The social conventions of being kind and polite hardly
| apply to existential conflicts between superpowers. To
| pretend otherwise is dangerously naive. I would be quite
| happy if every single member of the Chinese Communist
| Party was thrown in a cell and left to die. Call that
| amoral if you like, but it would make the world a better
| place.
| coding123 wrote:
| But the words "humiliate, undermine, and disrespect them"
| in the context of Taiwan is to visit them.
| pseudo0 wrote:
| It seems rather irresponsible to poke China in the eye like
| this, they are definitely going to scale up air, naval, and
| cyber intrusions in response. Very likely nothing
| significant will happen, but these heightened tensions
| increase the likelihood of accidentally sparking a real
| crisis.
| stefan_ wrote:
| Yes, it's the fault of the person visiting an independent
| island, it's not the delusional, raging dictatorship next
| to it.
| ghostwriter wrote:
| Unless there's something being done to the raging
| dictatorship, the event makes the dictatorship more
| determined to spread and demonstrate its influence over
| the region. And the US does nothing, it actually is
| unable to do anything to CCP at this point, but it shows
| the audience meaningless posturing that don't lessen
| dictatorship's influence.
| stefan_ wrote:
| Maybe you can shortcut with the grandparent, it seems the
| two of you are in disagreement what course of action is
| emboldening the dictatorship.
| ghostwriter wrote:
| we are in agreement with at least one, but very important
| point - offering the dictatorship to escalate
| confrontation is counter-productive at this point (maybe
| not so much some time in the future under different
| circumstances), because the US will not be able to afford
| itself to save Taiwan if CCP decides to escalate it
| further this time.
| smcl wrote:
| This isn't a random person who happens to want a little
| trip to an island, swooning with shock at the idea that
| it could provoke some kind of response. It's one of the
| most senior politicians in the dominant global power
| deliberately doing something they know will provoke a
| response in an ascendant global power. It's an act of
| defiance which you can agree or disagree with (personally
| I think nothing good can come of this) but let's not kid
| ourselves that it's a sweet old lady on holiday.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| Or is it one of the most senior politicians in the
| dominant global power deliberately demonstrating that
| they recognize and support Taiwan and is willing to do so
| in spite of Chinese military threats and they need to
| back the fuck up?
| pseudo0 wrote:
| Messing with the carefully managed status quo is foolish.
| China cares a lot more about Taiwan than the US does, if
| we goad them into action on this issue it's going to be a
| repeat of Ukraine. We will send them some donations and
| put Taiwanese flags on social media, but they would get
| devastated and occupied.
| elteto wrote:
| Are you sure China cares more about Taiwan than the US?
|
| Taiwan is a global, single point of failure for advanced
| CPU manufacturing. My guess is that the US will never
| allow this to fall in Chinese hands.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| AFAIK The confederate states of the US during the civil
| war thought that Europe would come to their aid to keep
| the price of cotton down. Cotton traders ended up making
| more money with the shortages so there was no incentive
| to do so.
|
| Expensive chips for a while is probably cheaper than
| WWIII.
| selectodude wrote:
| Time to go long INTC.
| elteto wrote:
| Eh, I don't think that anecdote is relevant. The
| production pipeline for cotton is extremely simple in
| comparison: add lots of manual labor plus land fertile
| for cotton and you get cotton. Many places on Earth would
| have fit that bill in those times.
|
| The US government can't allow the Chinese to have
| absolute power and control over the technology that the
| _world_ runs on. It's an existential threat.
|
| Can you imagine, at the height of the Cold War, the US
| outsourcing nuke construction to the Soviet Union?
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| I'm pretty sure the Taiwanese factories are rigged to go,
| or at least those factories will be destroyed in the
| event of an invasion. Plus it'll be easy to sanction
| China and prevent them from acquiring new fab tech to
| rebuild the factories.
|
| I'm pretty sure the US is ok with the world being set
| backwards a bit in tech if they get to reacquire chip
| leadership. A more cynical person could suggest that the
| US is agitating for a war in order to precipitate this
| very outcome.
| elteto wrote:
| How long do you think it will take, in this scenario, for
| local US fabs to reach parity with TSMC? Intel has been
| trying for a decade. AMD is a TSMC customer.
|
| Your scenario only makes sense if the US was almost on
| the verge of achieving technological parity with TSMC,
| say within months or maybe a couple of years. But that is
| not the case. Heck, building a fab from scratch takes
| longer than that. What happens in the interim? And what
| happens to the rest of the world? The disruption on a
| global scale would make the pandemic look mild.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| The main problem with building the factories in the US is
| doing it cheaply enough to remain competitive. When the
| competition is destroyed that is no longer a problem.
|
| The rest of us will just have to get used to paying more
| for less.
|
| Just because something is incredibly destructive doesn't
| mean politicians won't do it. I'm sure many people would
| like to punish TSMC customers for not buying American in
| the first place.
| stefan_ wrote:
| Chip manufacturing is probably the most value added
| industry in the world, while simultaneously being
| absurdly automated. If you can't make them in the US
| because of _costs_ there is nothing you can make in the
| US.
| tuxoko wrote:
| Did you completely ignore all the things China has done
| in the region to mess with the status quo? Keep appeasing
| to China will only make things worse until it's too late.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| That is an absolutely gross misread of U.S. foreign
| policy with respect to Taiwan. Have you read anything at
| all about this subject matter?
|
| The U.S. had a mutual defense treaty with Taiwan until
| 1980 for heaven's sake; this is nothing like the
| situation in Ukraine.
| pseudo0 wrote:
| The Sino-American Mutual Defense Treaty was nullified
| over 40 years ago. The US policy with respect to Taiwan
| since then has been strategic ambiguity, and we can see
| how well that worked out for Ukraine! They were in the
| same situation as Taiwan, being strung along by US
| assurances without a firm commitment. The parallels are
| obvious, and if I were a Taiwanese policymaker, I
| certainly wouldn't be counting on US military
| intervention.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| Thank you for reading the Wikipedia page:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-
| American_Mutual_Defense_T...
|
| Go read this one next:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan_Relations_Act ...
| which is still in force.
|
| Also refer to multiple occasions this year where Biden
| has said that the U.S. commitment to Taiwan was similar
| to NATO Article 5, or otherwise that the U.S. would
| militarily defend Taiwan:
|
| https://www.fpri.org/article/2022/05/believe-biden-when-
| he-s...
|
| Compare that with ... nothing at all of any similar kind
| of legislative or executive message w.r.t to Ukraine.
| There is no strategic ambiguity about the U.S. defending
| Ukraine military; the U.S. is absolutely not committed to
| that course of action and has never been - the strongest
| language on this point being a non-binding memorandum
| from 1994.
| pseudo0 wrote:
| I'm familiar with the Taiwan Relations Act, which means I
| know that it provides absolutely no guarantee of military
| intervention. What exactly is the relevance of the Taiwan
| Relations Act to the question of whether the US has
| guaranteed military intervention if China invades Taiwan?
| You are citing an irrelevant current law, and a treaty
| that expired 40 years ago, which doesn't inspire much
| confidence in your subject matter expertise.
|
| All Biden's statements prove is that he struggles to
| function without a teleprompter. The White House has
| repeatedly had to walk back his unscripted statements on
| Taiwan: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/biden-walks-
| back-taiwan-com...
|
| With respect to Ukraine, Ukraine hosted US and NATO
| training missions, did joint naval drills with NATO, and
| in December Biden was still promising Ukraine a path to
| NATO membership:
| https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/ukrainian-president-
| zel...
|
| As with Taiwan, with respect to Ukraine the US did not
| guarantee military intervention, but reserved the option
| to intervene and made statements to that effect. In
| recent months, they did clarify that they would not send
| US troops to intervene directly, but I expect we would
| see similar statements from the White House if China
| started preparing for an imminent invasion.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| > _All Biden 's statements prove is that he struggles to
| function without a teleprompter._
|
| ... and then a Fox News article; OK; I mean, you choose
| you own sources ... I'm going with my source from the
| Foreign Policy Research Institute.
| pseudo0 wrote:
| The opinion piece that you linked spends the first three
| paragraphs explaining why people should believe that
| Biden's statement wasn't a gaffe. That opinion piece was
| published on May 25. The Fox News story describes how
| Biden walked the statement back on May 24. Apparently the
| author either didn't bother to follow the story for 24
| hours, or just hit publish with out of date info. Either
| way, rather embarrassing.
|
| You clearly aren't here to engage in good faith
| discussion, so I'm done.
| codyb wrote:
| I don't think this is an accurate assessment of the
| situation.
|
| China's an export based economy that's going through a
| slowdown and still struggling with pandemic lockdowns.
| War would shut down the Taiwanese straight for shipping
| and it's one of their busiest export lanes in the world.
| It's not helping that their housing market is in pretty
| dire straights. So the CCP's not in super great water
| popularity wise (although sometimes wars can bring people
| together, I'm not sure that's as true with acts of
| aggression as it is with acts of defense).
|
| China and the US are both heavily dependent on Taiwan for
| semiconductor manufacturing, especially for state of the
| art chips. War would shut China off from that tap. Those
| labs are incredibly advanced and not easy to rebuild. And
| the US dependence on those chips give the US a strong
| reason to defend Taiwan. Both countries are ramping up
| their own chip production in order to make this less of
| an issue but it's certainly the case at the moment.
|
| An invasion across the Taiwanese straight _would not be a
| cakewalk_. China's military is certainly much stronger
| than it used to be, but at some point you need to move
| troops across that straight in greater numbers than
| jumping out of the back of bomber planes can provide. A
| mass landing is likely to result in huge casualties and
| may not be successful. The US has been arming Taiwan for
| decades now and it's certain they're planning for that
| cross channel invasion.
|
| Anti-China sentiment in the US is fairly strong at the
| moment and the current US President has said the US would
| defend Taiwan. China will invade when the US is divided
| on the issue and thus more likely not to step up to the
| plate. Similarly, where the US goes it'll have help from
| its partners.
|
| China's not in a great position at the moment, at the end
| of the day, despite a lot of rolling around on the ground
| trying to scratch for fleas the United States is still a
| pretty big dog in this world. And going toe to toe with
| it in something that's not a proxy war probably isn't
| something any regime has much appetite for.
|
| That's my assessment at the moment.
| pseudo0 wrote:
| I think China would much rather take Taiwan in 10 or 20
| years than today, and it would take some serious goading
| to spark an actual conflict. Could they pull it off
| today? I'd give them decent odds, but as you describe,
| even the best case would be painful and expensive.
| Opposed amphibious landings are extremely hard to pull
| off.
|
| In terms of public opinion, I think you underestimate the
| extent to which Chinese people believe that Taiwan is a
| rightful part of China. Their domestic audience would not
| view it as invading another nation, but rather the
| rightful culmination of a long effort to reunify
| territory lost during the century of humiliation (eg.
| Hong Kong, Macau).
|
| Biden's statement that the US would defend Taiwan was an
| unscripted gaffe in response to a question that the White
| House walked back within hours. In reality, the US has no
| legal obligation or treaty compelling it to defend
| Taiwan. Again, there are pretty clear parallels to
| Ukraine, where the US provides materiel and support, but
| isn't willing to actually guarantee military
| intervention.
|
| My takeaway is that this visit will ratchet up tensions
| and has a very small probability of escalating into a
| serious crisis, for no appreciable foreign policy
| benefit. It just looks like a cynical attempt to shore up
| foreign policy weakness before the midterms, after the
| mess in Afghanistan and Ukraine.
| ghostwriter wrote:
| Even without a hot active phase, potential escalation and
| the prospect of export issues with the US at this point
| would just fuel China's trade with Russia, as sanctions
| would become an unavoidable event, hence CCP wouldn't
| have a reason to think twice before maximising trade with
| all other sanctioned states. And the trade wouldn't
| happen in US dollars/western financial infrastructure
| either.
| k_sze wrote:
| 1. Taiwan never declared independence. 2. Mainland
| China is not a dictatorship. There *are* democratic
| processes:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_China. You
| just basically never hear about them in Western media.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| > _2. Mainland China is not a dictatorship._
|
| ... in practical terms, it 's legally a one-party state
| in an authoritarian system of government - this is
| broadly recognized as the "one-party dictatorship" model.
| josephcsible wrote:
| Nominally having elections doesn't make you not a
| dictatorship. China's elections are a sham. It's a
| foregone conclusion who's going to win them all.
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| For an extreme example, the _Democratic_ People 's
| Republic of Korea (commonly known as North Korea) also
| has elections, but everyone with a brain knows they're a
| sham.
| bokchoi wrote:
| Like it or not, Taiwan is functionally independent. They
| have their own currency, passports, military, elections.
| humanistbot wrote:
| > Mainland China is not a dictatorship. There _are_
| democratic processes
|
| Get this propaganda out of here. When there is only a
| single political party allowed and all candidates for
| that party have to be approved by the party leadership,
| you don't have a democracy.
|
| From the wiki article you yourself cited: "the CCP
| tightly controls the nomination and election processes at
| every level in the people's congress system... the
| tiered, indirect electoral mechanism in the People's
| Congress system ensures that deputies at the highest
| levels face no semblance of electoral accountability to
| the Chinese citizenry."
| somehnguy wrote:
| What's the alternative, just bend over backwards when
| China makes absurd demands?
| foverzar wrote:
| somehnguy wrote:
| I don't understand what your reply is trying to
| communicate.
|
| She scheduled a trip to Taiwan. China gets big mad as
| usual and says 'don't do that or else'. And you think not
| bending over backwards for the unreasonable and silly
| demand of their pathetic dictator is just 'swinging your
| dick around'..? Makes zero sense to me.
| filoleg wrote:
| Swinging your dick with no consequences would be
| something a bit more than just "i am going on a scheduled
| trip to an allied state".
|
| Xi is the one swinging his dick (the metaphorical version
| of which we are about to verify as rather impotent),
| threatening with some vague aggressive messages towards
| the US just to prevent a planned trip.
| a1369209993 wrote:
| That would be "flouting", actually; "flaunting" means
| showing off (as in "Nancy Pelosi is flaunting her disregard
| for those threats").
| humanistbot wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China%27s_final_warning
| throwaway4good wrote:
| I guess that's funny in Russian. However the Soviet union
| is no more so who's laughing now.
| mikestew wrote:
| Considering that the warnings were issued to the U. S., I
| imagine the ones laughing would be...the U. S.? I have no
| idea why you'd bring the Soviets into it.
| ge96 wrote:
| Wiki link mentions proverb from SU
| phantomathkg wrote:
| Before this "special operation", China out of the bleu
| announce suspension from important thousand of food from
| Taiwan.
|
| https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/International-
| relations/US-...
| _joel wrote:
| > Previous job roles posted by the company suggest that it runs a
| mixed system infrastructure "based on a modern virtualized data
| center environment as well as AWS and Azure cloud services" --
| with the SRE role suggesting that it was building a "future
| private cloud based on open technologies like OpenStack, Ceph,
| and KVM." [1]
|
| Sounds like they needed a monolith, single server ;) (tongue in
| cheek, I know it's not that simple)
|
| [1] https://thestack.technology/air-traffic-tracking-site-
| flight...
| owenfi wrote:
| Flight...CRASHES...SPAR19.
|
| I'm sure it wasn't intentional but this word in a high profile
| airline headline is a bit jarring.
| dvh wrote:
| I also couldn't connect so I just searched "spar19 live" on
| YouTube and there were 5 livestreams so I watched that.
| nell wrote:
| In an era of unlimited scaling infrastructure, it's a shame
| they're struggling to capitalize on an exclusive superbowl scale
| marketing event. It was predictable days in advance.
| falcolas wrote:
| Bank accounts ultimately put a hard cap on scaling
| infrastructure. Considering most folks use this service for
| free, I can't imagine they'd want to let those free users DDOS
| their bank account into bankruptcy.
|
| Cloud infrastructure is _expensive_.
| sdfgdfghj wrote:
| A single employee live-streaming on Twitch would do the trick.
| :) Flithradar24 can pay me later for the tip.
| seydor wrote:
| Do they really want lots of traffic? It's a very specialized
| website, it's not like the traffic will stick. The people who
| want to pay for their services are already customers. I doubt
| they care about random Joe
| polio wrote:
| This is exactly it. It's likely a better business decision to
| just crash in this scenario.
| alldayeveryday wrote:
| Days is not enough advance notice, if for example they don't
| have a way to monetize the traffic. Unlimited scale = unlimited
| cost. Potentially the site crashing was the financially
| appropriate outcome.
| nnx wrote:
| Days in advance would have been enough to prepare a static
| page for SPAR19 alone, updated minutely or something... would
| cost practically nothing, especially if served from CDN
| edges.
| tshaddox wrote:
| I would be surprised if that's not already the architecture
| of a website like this, especially if keeping
| infrastructure costs low is a significant requirement for
| the business.
| woweoe wrote:
| The website is a sort-of voluntary enthusiast thing where
| subscription fees cover the costs of everything.
| tpmx wrote:
| Their 2021 revenue was $25M.
| Aachen wrote:
| Somebody pays for that bandwidth though?
| cosmolev wrote:
| They surely do know how to monetize the traffic. Banners are
| all over the website.
| BbzzbB wrote:
| Will people coming in from Twitter and co specifically to
| check in on Pelosi's plane have any interest in converting
| to a subscriber for general flight tracking? I'd suspect
| the conversion rates would be (/are) extremely low with
| this kind of inorganic traffic.
| kragen wrote:
| It's not unlimited scale, it was just over 700_000 people
| according to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32320697.
| If your web page is 100 kilobytes, which seems like the
| maximum that would be reasonable, that's 70 gigabytes of
| traffic. AWS charges US$0.09 per GB so this is US$7. If you
| eliminate the cloud premium it's closer to US$1.
|
| In fact loading their home page takes 3.1 MB for me over two
| minutes. Searching for a flight (AAL301 in this case since
| SPAR19 has already landed) brings this to 3.8 MB. At this
| size it would be 266 gigabytes, US$27. Reloading the page, I
| see that this was about 180 HTTP hits, though a lot of those
| were ads (I guess they have a way to monetize the traffic)
| which were blocked by uBlock Origin.
|
| But doesn't it take a lot of CPU and RAM to serve 700_000
| page views, especially at 180 hits per page view? That's 126
| million hits, after all! Well, of course you can write your
| code arbitrarily inefficiently. According to
| https://crozdesk.com/software/fastly/pricing Fastly charges
| US$0.0075 per ten thousand hits, so if you could serve all
| those hits from Fastly it would cost you just under US$100.
| And probably if you're getting 700_000 people looking at the
| same thing you should figure out how to make all those hits
| cacheable either in Fastly or in something slower but
| cheaper. This probably isn't the first popular flight on
| FlightRadar24, even if it's the first one that's _this_
| popular.
|
| (Also though you probably don't need 180 hits to serve up a
| single page. One for HTML, one for JS, one for CSS, one for
| an icon sprite sheet, and maybe half a dozen map tiles. The
| cause of death was a self-inflicted wound.)
|
| What if we want to know the minimal _CPU_ cost to serve up
| 126 million hits rather than the minimal _dollar_ cost for
| someone else to serve them up for you? Well, one weekend a
| few years ago I wrote a static file HTTP web server called
| httpdito-386: http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/server.s
| (docs in http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/httpdito-
| readme). It's 710 lines of code and can handle 20_000-30_000
| hits per second on my ten-year-old laptop (8 cores) and push
| about 1.8 gigabits per second of traffic. It's not the most
| efficient web server (it forks a new process for every
| connection and drops the connection after handling the first
| request) but it's probably adequate to get a ballpark figure.
|
| Serving up 126 million hits with httpdito would take 84
| minutes on my ten-year-old laptop, so probably you'd have
| needed 2-5 server machines, or one machine that wasn't ten
| years old. Serving up 70 gigabytes in a smaller number of
| hits would have taken 5 minutes.
|
| Of course, the whole point of FlightRadar24 is that it's
| giving you dynamically updated Comet information about where
| flights are, not just serving up precomputed files from the
| filesystem. You could implement this kind of functionality by
| polling, but using Comet would probably be more efficient.
| Maintaining 700_000 open connections is easily within the
| capacity of a single server today; we were doing several
| thousand on our Comet server at KnowNow in 02000, using what
| we called RUTH (Robert's Ugly Thttpd Hack), using select() on
| a 32-bit machine with a gigabyte of RAM and a gigahertz.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32319147 says, "Use one
| big server." The associated article
| https://specbranch.com/posts/one-big-server/ profiles the
| servers they use at Azure: two 64-core CPUs with a 2-2.5 GHz
| clock, 4-6 instructions per clock, 256 MiB (MB?) of L3 cache,
| and 1 TiB (TB?) of RAM. From the cloud pricing they're
| citing, buying one probably costs about US$15k, roughly the
| cost of one programmer-week. According to
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32321406,
| FlightRadar24's revenue in 02021 was US$25M, so this would be
| a little less than 6 hours of their revenue.
|
| There's no excuse.
| alldayeveryday wrote:
| Serving the website html, js, css, images, etc is only a
| small part of their overall hosting costs. Do they maintain
| backend services? API gateway? Waf? Logging? Analytics?
| State/database? Cache? Load balancers? etc etc.
|
| Your walltext paints an incredibly incomplete picture of
| their overall hosting expenditure. They aren't running a
| wordpress site lol.
| kragen wrote:
| Well, as I said, you can complicate things to an
| arbitrary extent and make them arbitrarily inefficient,
| and they clearly have done so because their site went
| down under the load of less than a million pageviews. But
| the essential part of the service is delivering some
| HTML, JS, CSS, and images, and updating the client
| webpages with new flight status information, and that
| doesn't require 3.1 megabytes, 180 hits, a WAF, an API
| gateway, etc.
|
| There's no reason FlightRadar24 has to require as much
| horsepower as running a WordPress site, which involves
| interpreting PHP (inherently inefficient, throws away 95%
| of your CPU power in exchange for flexibility and easy
| end-user programmability) and accepting user comments
| from a substantial fraction of users. It does require
| maintaining hundreds of thousands of open connections for
| Comet, which WordPress doesn't, but that's a manageable
| problem ever since kqueue landed in FreeBSD and epoll
| landed in Linux. It's not 01999 anymore.
|
| Let's do an estimate of database size. 100_000 flights a
| day means about 32768 flights at any given time. You
| might get an update on each of these flights once a
| minute, so maybe 720 updates per flight, maybe 16
| kilobytes per flight. That's 512 megabytes for the entire
| database. Not only can you fit that in RAM _now_ ; you
| can fit that in RAM _on a 286 from 01987_.
|
| If the way you're accustomed to building websites results
| in websites that crash under light load, maybe you should
| consider doing it a different way rather than criticizing
| people who tell you there's a better way to do it.
|
| Though I guess you missed it, I did talk about caches in
| my comment (edge caches with instant invalidation is the
| service Fastly provides), which was 626 words, less than
| three minutes of reading. Calling it a "walltext" makes
| me think you'd die of a heart attack if you ever saw a
| _book_.
| alldayeveryday wrote:
| Again, you are taking massive simplifications. Flight
| information is only one dataset they manage. They also
| manage data on planes, their users' subscriptions,
| perhaps site analytics, etc. The cost of the storage goes
| beyond the disc size - you also need redundancy, you
| might have offline ETL jobs to enrich the data, etc.
| Quoting estimates of disc size and per GB storage costs
| is not sufficient to summarize their costs.
|
| Further to the point, your reply (to my comment) is not
| addressing my reply at all.
|
| > unlimited traffic = unlimited cost
|
| To support additional traffic does not come free. Sure,
| the traffic:cost ratio is not linear, but I don't think
| you are making the point that supporting the additional
| traffic does not have a cost associated to it? Exactly
| how are you refuting my comment, if you are at all?
| Dma54rhs wrote:
| Indeed. I serve 200k visitors per minute static stuff on
| 4 eur vps with free cloudflare in front.
|
| Somehow I'm skeptical the systems theses flight trackers
| use are that simple. Caching gets you only so far.
| petethepig wrote:
| I'd argue they got more coverage because they went down.
| nell wrote:
| Their infrastructure might very well be setup in a way that
| can't scale.
|
| They don't need unlimited scaling for the entire site, just
| enough to scale for one particular plane.
|
| They make money from ads and subscriptions. Any such business
| pays for user acquisition and a % of users convert to
| subscriptions.
|
| Even if all this is spiky traffic, their site probably has now
| had millions of first-time users. When traffic dies down, they
| will settle back at a higher than previous usual levels.
| tjpnz wrote:
| Having used it for many years I cannot recall a time when it's
| been fast.
| [deleted]
| Scoundreller wrote:
| > Your estimated wait time is more than 16 hours...
|
| Hrmmm
| dylan604 wrote:
| They have to wait for the person on the plane to disembark and
| find a pay phone to call back to the home office to let some
| one know they landed safely.
| valevk wrote:
| What's SPAR19 all about?
| boardwaalk wrote:
| The plane carrying Nancy Pelosi around Asia and possibly to
| Taiwan I presume.
| scanny wrote:
| Nancy Pelosi is about to land in Taiwan on that flight, China
| has been threatening some sort of action
| (military/economic/angry words) if it were to happen.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| xnorswap wrote:
| What's SPAR19 and why are so many interested?
|
| Also flightradar24 feels something that should benefit heavily
| from caching especially in an instance where lots of people are
| all tracking the same thing.
|
| Heavier caching for non-logged in users is a basic of keeping
| sites up against unexpected influx because the vast majority of
| "new" (i.e. spikey) traffic won't have accounts, and won't be as
| fuzzy about seeing cached data, and are harder to monetize than
| logged in accounts.
| belter wrote:
| ojbyrne wrote:
| Will Nancy Pelosi visit Taiwan?
| https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/02/politics/pelosi-taiwan-risks-...
| wobblyasp wrote:
| Pelosi's flight into Taiwan
| dboreham wrote:
| Seems like a significant security risk that it is publicly
| trackable?
|
| I've seen AF1 land at the airport here (Bozeman) -- it flew
| in to the area at high altitude then circled tightly reducing
| altitude until final approach. I assumed to reduce the chance
| of a stinger hit from mountain-men.
| throw827474737 wrote:
| Cannot judge if this is a joke or serious theory?
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| What's the risk of a plane flying over the Sea above the
| reach of "simple" weapons is being tracked?
|
| A military-level attack against the third highest
| representative of the United States is a quite certain way
| to launch a war, maybe even nuclear retaliation, based on
| how quickly and well "prove" for attribution is unveiled.
|
| However getting attention is a key purpose of that trip.
| dekhn wrote:
| As you noticed from AF1, the people who manage the flights
| of nation-level VIPs are extremely cautious and have a
| rich, well-informed risk model. You can imagine these
| airplanes have many countermeasures (SPAR19 is a C-40C,
| which is a military version of a 737). For all we know it
| was a decoy plane.
| hugh-avherald wrote:
| It would be a lot more dangerous for Pelosi if it weren't.
| VortexLain wrote:
| Tracking the plane is probably very trivial for the Chinese
| army so hiding the plane from public wouldn't help
| input_sh wrote:
| > What's SPAR19 and why are so many interested?
|
| Nancy Pelosi visiting Taiwan, which China is opposed to.
| 2143 wrote:
| vorpalhex wrote:
| The House is one of two chambers that make up Congress. The
| House is a representational chamber by population, whereas
| it's counterpart the Senate is fixed at 2 members per
| state.
|
| The House is often where bills originate, and the Senate is
| the latter half of the process.
| falcor84 wrote:
| >The House is often where bills originate, and the Senate
| is the latter half of the process.
|
| Yup, seems like the Senate is where bills perish.
| tomschlick wrote:
| The Senate was designed from the beginning to be an
| obstacle. If you can't get both a majority of people, and
| a majority of states to agree then it should stay a law
| at the state level instead of the federal.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > The House is often where bills originate,
|
| As is the Senate. (Bills for raising revenue must
| originate in the House, but otherwise they can and do go
| in any order.)
| cronix wrote:
| More politically important, The Speaker is 3rd in line to
| become president if something happens to the president and
| vice president.
| humanistbot wrote:
| > I don't know what House of Representatives is, but as the
| name suggests it must be where elected representatives come
| together to run the country.
|
| I'm choosing to interpret this as a sarcastic jab at HN's
| US-centric tendencies, because this kind of willful
| ignorance is hilarious. It would take two seconds to look
| this up.
|
| Edit: I would say the same thing if they posted the same
| message hypothesizing about what a parliament is.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| I don't know what Parliament is, but as the name suggests
| it must have something to do with shelf stable dairy
| products.
| [deleted]
| 2143 wrote:
| Parliament disambiguation page on Wikipedia.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliament_(disambiguatio
| n)
| vel0city wrote:
| No, Parliament is a brand of cigarettes.
| krallja wrote:
| You're thinking of Winston. Parliament is a funk band.
| isk517 wrote:
| Parliament are the people who live in the Parliament
| House and make HP Sauce.
| 2143 wrote:
| > I'm choosing to interpret this as a sarcastic jab at
| HN's US-centric tendencies
|
| It wasn't a sarcastic jab.
|
| > willful ignorance
|
| Do you expect everybody in the world to know how the US
| government works?
|
| > It would take two seconds to look this up.
|
| I looked it up immediately after looking up Nancy Pelosi
| on Google. This is what I got (Wikipedia):
|
| "The United States House of Representatives, usually
| referred to as the House, is the lower chamber of the
| United States Congress, with the Senate being the upper
| chamber."
|
| Right. Now I have to look up "US congress", "US senate",
| "US upper and lower chamber"... Didn't want to bother
| with it.
|
| So I typed in a simple explanation.
|
| This is the honest truth. Believe it if you want to.
|
| (I actually got a better understanding of what US House
| of Representatives is by reading other comments here.)
| toomanyrichies wrote:
| FWIW, there's also "simple.wikipedia.org", which has
| plain-English definitions for many of the most popular
| entries in regular Wikipedia. Here[1] is the entry for
| "House of Representatives".
|
| > Didn't want to bother with it.
|
| I suspect this is the root cause of the problem. I could
| see why you'd post such a question here if you had tried
| Googling, found no relevant results, and ran out of
| options for doing the work yourself. But that doesn't
| sound like what happened. Instead, it sounds like you had
| the ability to continue Googling, but decided to let
| others do your research for you. That's like saying your
| time is more valuable than other people's time. Do you
| see the problem there?
|
| 1. https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Representat
| ives
| selectodude wrote:
| The fastest way to get an accurate answer is to post the
| wrong answer on a forum with a bunch of nerds :)
| 2143 wrote:
| > Here[1] is the entry for "House of Representatives".
|
| Thank you for taking the time. Much appreciated.
|
| > Instead, it sounds like you had the ability to continue
| Googling, but decided to let others do your research for
| you.
|
| No. I did not decide to let others do the research.
|
| I simply stopped doing the research. Didn't want to find
| out more, because deep knowlege of the House of
| Representatives does not add much value to my life. And
| neither is it a topic I'm interested in (like, I have
| spent hours reading and learning about comets because
| that's something I'm interested in, even though it too
| doesn't provide much tangible value to my life).
|
| > That's like saying your time is more valuable than
| other people's time.
|
| Wrong. It's like saying I don't want to spend too much
| time on this.
|
| I never asked anybody else to do anything on my behalf.
| Frankly I never expected this to upset people.
| krzyk wrote:
| Yeah, but it would also cause all other non US readers to
| do the same. It is nice to have explanation here.
| tshaddox wrote:
| > Right. Now I have to look up "US congress", "US
| senate", "US upper and lower chamber"... Didn't want to
| bother with it.
|
| I mean yeah, this does look a lot like what I would call
| "willful ignorance." Of course there's nothing wrong with
| needing to look up words, especially in one's non-native
| language, but anyone could feign needing to exhaustively
| depth-first search words in the dictionary to understand
| any concept regardless of how basic it is. Consider that
| for any explanation someone gives you in an HN comment
| you could also just as easily say "now I need to look up
| every word in that comment, and every word in the
| definition of each of those words, and every word in each
| of _those_ definitions, etc.
| 2143 wrote:
| > I mean yeah, this does look a lot like what I would
| call "willful ignorance."
|
| The meaning I came up with in my original comment wasn't
| wrong, was it?
|
| My goal was to find out who Nancy Pelosi is. Finding out
| what's House of Representatives wasn't the top priority.
|
| I don't understand why you're upset with me not digging
| deeper into what the House of Representatives is.
|
| > Consider that for any explanation someone gives you in
| an HN comment you could also just as easily say "now I
| need to look up every word in that comment, and every
| word in the definition of each of those words, and every
| word in each of those definitions, etc.
|
| Slippery slope fallacy.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope
| tshaddox wrote:
| It's not the slippery slope fallacy, because I'm not
| saying anything about incremental steps inevitably
| leading towards anything. You complained that looking
| something up doesn't work because you then need to look
| up all the words you encounter in the definition. I
| pointed out that the same could be true for any
| explanation regardless of its source (and likely would be
| true, because words like "congress" would almost
| certainly feature in anyone's explanation).
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Well, Congress _is_ a term used by a number of countries,
| not just the US, for their legislative bodies. The main
| difference between a Congress and a Parliament as far as
| I recall is that Parliament has a combined legislative
| and executive role, where Congress is solely legislative.
|
| Senate and the nuance of our bicameral legislature is
| going to be more bespoke, like me having to look up the
| House of Commons vs. House of Lords in the UK.
| rjh29 wrote:
| She's also second in line to the presidency, after Vice
| President Mike Pence.
| bakul wrote:
| after VP Kamala Harris. Pence has been dispensed.
| DangerousPie wrote:
| Dispenced.
| revlolz wrote:
| He's no longer in the running.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| One might say he was in the offing for a while towards
| the end.
|
| No need, I'll get the door myself.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Pence got really lucky that day, as did the United
| States. That could have gone entirely different if not
| for a few people keeping a clear head.
| Spoom wrote:
| One of which, to his credit, appears to have been Pence
| himself.
| alistairSH wrote:
| Sort of... I didn't get the impression he stayed at the
| Capitol because he thought it was the right thing for the
| country, but instead because he felt staying was the
| better option for his own power and legacy. I mean, I'll
| take it, but I'd prefer our leaders were slightly more
| principled than that.
| jacquesm wrote:
| _Much_ better than the alternative.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Yes, absolutely. I'm not a fan, to put it mildly, but on
| that day he did the United States a great service.
| BudaDude wrote:
| You mean Kamala Harris
| tialaramex wrote:
| The United States of America has a bicameral legislature.
| This means two separate elected bodies (the House and
| Senate) have to agree on the country's laws.
|
| But they don't actually run the country. The US also has a
| separate elected Executive for that. Oh, and the rules
| those two huge groups have to agree to, there's a whole
| separate partisan body, the "Supreme Court" which gets to
| just arbitrarily reinterpret or toss out the laws anyway.
|
| Don't worry though, the Americans did economize in one
| place, they decided that their Head of State (who is just a
| living symbol) and the Executive Leader (whose moment by
| moment decisions are crucial) should be the same person.
| You know, like when you are looking for a product that
| would taste good on breakfast cereal but is also an
| effective roof insulation. I'm sure whatever compromises
| result are fine...
| [deleted]
| systemvoltage wrote:
| This kind of a take is ready for flames.
| michaelnoguera wrote:
| > a product that would taste good on breakfast cereal but
| is also an effective roof insulation
|
| I'm curious- do you have something particular in mind?
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| What's your point? That you disapprove of the concept of
| separation of powers? That you disapprove of the idea of
| the executive president?
|
| Neither of these are exactly unusual or extreme positions
| w.r.t systems of government.
|
| Or is this just a whine about the U.S.?
| PhantomBKB wrote:
| It's just that when a majority of the American people
| want certain changes in policy, they are not able to get
| them passed even though the country is a democracy.
|
| The parent comment just gave reasons for that (among
| other things).
| na85 wrote:
| The United States is not, strictly speaking, a democracy.
| The people don't make decisions. They elect people who
| make decisions, thus it is a republic.
| uni_rule wrote:
| A representative democracy is still a democracy.
| woweoe wrote:
| In France you have a strong president that combines the
| role of a monarch and prime minister, but the role of
| "constitutional gatekeeper" is shared by the
| Constitutional Council, Supreme Court and Administrative
| Court. The latter three are actually entities that use
| their power.
|
| The idea of having two houses of parliament is common in
| most large countries, and it is also common for those
| houses to be segregated from the executive (EU etc...).
|
| The US is a political and cultural mess, but a lot of
| those issues aren't inherently due to the political
| system involved.
| krallja wrote:
| Don't forget that the President and Senate are both
| elected on the basis of land, rather than population. And
| the presidential allotment is winner-takes-all for most
| of those land areas. Definitely doesn't disenfranchise
| large population centers, it's fine.
| pookha wrote:
| "Basis of land"? LOL. Are you referring to the 50
| individual state governments that make up the United
| States of America? Most Europeans don't know this, but
| the first government in the world to ban slavery was the
| U.S (Vermont). The US isn't one homogeneous zone. There
| are 50 individual governments that write their own
| legislation, have their own taxation systems and have
| military's (state guards). California is free to create
| their abortion access legislation as is Texas. Many
| states in the US legalized Weed despite the fact that the
| federal government has some bizarre policy in place
| (which isn't constitutional).
| labster wrote:
| I hate to burst your bubble but Pope Zachary ended
| slavery in Rome in the 740s, banning the slave trade and
| manumitting all slaves already present by purchase of the
| church & state.
| djbusby wrote:
| I think they were making a jab at the Electoral College
| system in USA.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| The patches to the constitution aren't as deeply thought
| out as the original one. The Senate wasn't even an
| elected institution until 100 years ago, whether that is
| _better_ or _worse_ than an appointed system is mostly a
| false dilemma as there are more than two options.
| Pointing out that our constitution isn 't really geared
| for the current process is a first step of getting more
| inspiration on how it could function.
|
| When you patch one aspect it throws the other aspects out
| of whack.
| tomohawk wrote:
| Nancy Pelosi is the Speaker of the US House of
| Representatives. She is 2 heartbeats away from being
| President (she would become president if both the President
| and Vice President became incapacitated).
|
| The House is similar to the UK Parliament. She is elected to
| her position by the members of the House.
|
| Since Democracts control the House this term, they elected
| Nancy Pelosi as Speaker for this term.
|
| The President has primary responsibility for foreign affairs.
| The Speaker taking this action could be interpretted as
| stepping on the toes of the President, or could have tacit
| approval of the President as a kind of stalking horse.
| politelemon wrote:
| Thanks for this explanation, the other comments were
| baffling me, so it was probably self evident to many who
| this Nancy fella was.
| [deleted]
| popotamonga wrote:
| Couldn't they just write all locations say to a public s3 file,
| maybe separated by geo squares depending on your viewport? client
| would just keep polling the s3 file(s). Unlimited bandwidth (at a
| cost yes..)
| jjoonathan wrote:
| The core infrastructure might have calcified long before s3
| even existed, but yeah, these days that's a pretty good
| approach.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| Back when S3 and EC2 were brand spanking new services, and
| EC2 didn't have persistent disks, I got to see a quite well
| designed analytics pipeline. The inbound tracking http
| requests went into a pool that aggregated them locally in
| mysql, then wrote out the database files to S3. A separate
| pool would pull down these files and merge them into a local
| mysql databases for the web app UI. So kindof like a very
| simplistic map reduce atop s3 using mysql ISAM files.
|
| It was impressively simple to keep running, and they easily
| scaled it to handle massive spikes related to sports events
| and such. The only real downside is the delay in new data
| hitting the UI layer, but this was built out while a lot of
| people still had webtrends installs kicking around, so it was
| perfectly acceptable for their customers.
| 4cao wrote:
| ADS-B Exchange works fine:
| https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?icao=ae503d
|
| Edit: FR24 link for comparison:
| https://www.flightradar24.com/SPAR19/2ce4f83f
| jollyllama wrote:
| Flightaware is also working
| https://flightaware.com/live/flight/SPAR19 brought to you by
| the TCL coding language.
| nyanpasu64 wrote:
| I like ADS-B Exchange and all for being a (purportedly
| unfiltered) data stream based off community volunteers
| uploading data from SDR stations (I even briefly ran a data
| source), but it's missing data for the middle of the flight.
| implements wrote:
| Yep, it doesn't filter military flights (which has been
| interesting recently - toggle by clicking the "U" UI button)
| closetohome wrote:
| I like to bring this up whenever FlightRadar24 is mentioned.
|
| They heavily censor their feed. Not only for military
| aircraft, but they also have a service where you can pay to
| have your aircraft hidden by the system.
|
| Personally my beef with them is that they started as a paid
| app, then transitioned to a subscription model and left
| everyone who bought the app hanging.
| 4cao wrote:
| Yeah, seems they don't have much coverage in Indonesia and
| the Philippines. I wonder if FR24 (which was showing the
| flight path correctly all along) depends on private uploaders
| there, or do they have other data sources to fill the gaps.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| I think they have some satellite-based connection points,
| and those feeds understandably cost $, but maybe with
| cubesats we'll fill in some gaps at an affordable price
| (possibly delayed).
| touisteur wrote:
| Might also fill in with actual ATC radars (either
| interrogating in Mode S or listening to ads-b) or just
| national infra ads-b/multilateration output. These
| usually cost $$$.
| lostfocus wrote:
| I think in the past they sent out "free" receivers to areas
| with low coverage:
| https://www.flightradar24.com/blog/making-the-
| flightradar24-... while the other tracking sites tend to be
| enthusiasts with their own hardware only.
| mh- wrote:
| Unless disabled, it'll also use extrapolated paths when a
| plane exits FR24's coverage area.
|
| It's called "Estimations", and is in the Visibility tab of
| Settings. By default it will show up to 4 hours of
| estimated positions.
|
| I can't say whether that's what was shown for this flight
| or not, as it won't show historical data for SPAR19.
| high_5 wrote:
| Technically speaking we only know the plane landed through this
| information. But will Pelosi set foot on Taiwanese soil?
| sct202 wrote:
| She got off the plane. Taiwan livestreamed the landing and
| greeting when everyone got off
| https://youtu.be/VfzTZyZTv5I?t=1701
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| Am amused at the baby blue and pink colored suits the two
| people are wearing.
| paxys wrote:
| I imagine she didn't go there just because she loves long plane
| rides.
| kklisura wrote:
| > With 708,000 people tracking the aircraft upon landing in
| Taipei, SPAR19 is Flightradar24's most tracked live flight of all
| time. [1]
|
| [1] https://twitter.com/flightradar24/status/1554501909893062656
| prescriptivist wrote:
| Before I clicked on the link I assumed this was Taylor Swifts
| plane.
| hammock wrote:
| I flew on this one time. Yes, they play Tswift when you embark
| and disembark.
|
| https://www.yesterdaysairlines.com/airline-history-blog/shak...
| baybal2 wrote:
| BTW, Nancy has just landed in the Republic of China
| pdabbadabba wrote:
| For the confused: "Republic of China" is Taiwan's official
| name. Yes, this makes the other China -- the People's Republic
| of China -- quite angry.
| kmonsen wrote:
| Actually no, not calling it republic of China would make the
| other China angry. Taiwan would like to call itself Taiwan.
| pdabbadabba wrote:
| In fact, I believe they now do both. Starting in 2005,
| Taiwan has started using the name "Republic of China
| (Taiwan)."
|
| Not that it really matters, but I wonder which would
| actually bothers the PRC more. I would have thought that
| the real source of irritation with, "Republic of China," is
| that it references the name used by mainland China up until
| the revolution of 1949, thus manifesting Taiwan's
| historical claim to be the legitimate Chinese government in
| exile.
| kmonsen wrote:
| CCP wants Taiwan to claim to be China as then it is seen
| as an internal struggle between two Chinese factions. So
| the CCP takeover of the island becomes reunification. If
| Taiwan calls itself Taiwan and develops a separate
| identity at some point it becomes a struggle between two
| separate identities and it would not be a unification but
| a hostile takeover.
|
| To sum it up, most important for CCP is that Taiwan is
| considered Chinese. I know CCP likes to play the long
| game, but at some point Taiwanese cultural identity will
| have shifted too far for this to work. I think it is
| close that that point, and that in another generation it
| will most likely be there.
| pdabbadabba wrote:
| Good answer! Thanks.
| kmonsen wrote:
| This is a decent video explaining the US position which
| is (by design) very confusing:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cA8VoY3dUFU
| [deleted]
| tjpnz wrote:
| Any theories on the protracted flightpath? Was the proximity to
| bases in Okinawa a factor?
| phantomathkg wrote:
| Hypothesis would be to avoid South China Sea, instead choose a
| detour to get covered by all US arm presence in the the Pacific
| and Okinawa.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_disputes_in_the_So...
|
| This is more likely to be about not overflying China/PRC's
| disputed territorial claims in the South China Sea - the flight
| certainly has to overfly part of that claim (because it in
| includes Taiwan/ROC), but it doesn't have to fly over all of it
| ... seems like some kind of carefully calibrated diplomatic
| message / inside baseball.
| water8 wrote:
| We're not going to Taiwan we're going to China... what aren't
| they going to be there? ;)
| water8 wrote:
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