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Moving the NYT Games Platform to Google Cloud With Zero Downtime

open.nytimes.com

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Re: Moving the NYT Games Platform to Google Cloud With Zero Downtime

#41

Post by untog »

natural219 wrote: post #37
untog wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're over-thinking this. There isn't a huge crossover audience for engineer blog posts and general NYT audience, and I imagine the engineering blog posts do not go through the same editorial process content on nytimes.com does. That alone makes the case for using a different domain.

I'm being a cheeky detractor of NYT here. I think "candid, engineering-style blogposts" are the future of news, and ancient vehicles like New York Times are long dead. I think the "general NYT audience" is participating in #FakeNews, and they should radically reconsider their information diet. As vivid example of this, compare James Birdle breaking the "Youtube exploitative kid videos" story way before, and in greate…

Hmm. I'm going to disagree with that! I think "candid, engineering-style blogposts" are and will continue to be great for an engineering audience, but I'm very skeptical that they will be great for a wide audience. For instance, I read and was fascinated by the YouTube kids post, but I do not know anyone outside of the tech industry that read it. And you're wrong to say he reported it way before, the NYT published this two days previous:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/04/business/media/youtube-ki...

and Birdle's post itself links to reporting by New York Magazine from 2016. I don't dispute that his post goes into more detail, I just dispute that longer automatically equals better. Someone with domain knowledge reporting a story in great depth and a major publication reporting a simplified version for mass consumption is certainly not a new model.

I'd also strongly disagree that NYT is an ageing institution unable to adapt to this modern tech reality. John Herrman writes some of the most perceptive pieces about the state of tech out there:

https://www.nytimes.com/by/john-herrman

(and a minor quibble: I don't think the post linked here and the Youtube Kids post are in any way comparable. The engineering writeup is not news in any way, shape or form, it's just a guide to how NYT implemented something)

Re: Moving the NYT Games Platform to Google Cloud With Zero Downtime

#43

Post by kuschku »

jedmeyers wrote: post #28
kuschku wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Flights API they just killed? Custom searches, which many websites paid for, which they killed? Google has a habit of killing things, no matter if you pay for it and your business relies on it, or not.

If I remember correctly, they were required to keep that API up for a specified amount of time after the acquisition and they have kept it longer than that.

And that’s an excuse how?

Many of their cloud APIs are also acquisitions. The entire Firebase product line, and the Fabric.io product line are acquisitions.

Should we expect those to also disappear suddenly?

Re: Moving the NYT Games Platform to Google Cloud With Zero Downtime

#44

Post by froindt »

jdavis703 wrote: post #30
sgolestane wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a paid subscriber to NYT (so it's not free) but I'm still to prone to this issue

If you're a paid subscriber then I think it's morally OK to use an ad blocker on them. You're paying for what you're consuming, and in all likelihood you're only earning them a few cents to maybe a dollar from ads anyways. What you spend on your subscription drives way more value.

Something I haven't though of before - with paper newspapers, there is no way to opt out of ads, and those are also subscription based. Why is the internet different? There is no opt-out for newspapers. Presumably they are getting less revenue than the customer agreed upon if the ads aren't displayed or aren't clicked on. Is using an ad blocker effectively stealing?

Note: I use an ad blocker primarily as a means against malware.

Re: Moving the NYT Games Platform to Google Cloud With Zero Downtime

#45

Post by iamthirsty »

tgb wrote: post #40
freeone3000 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not free. NYT relies on a subscription model.

The mini-crossword is free as well as some of their full crosswords.

Some. I actually cancelled my subscription with them because of the horrendously large Google Home ads on all the paid crosswords. When I asked them about it I got about four non-answers — it's ridiculous that even if you pay they still serve you ads.

Re: Moving the NYT Games Platform to Google Cloud With Zero Downtime

#46

Post by natural219 »

untog wrote: post #41
natural219 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm being a cheeky detractor of NYT here. I think "candid, engineering-style blogposts" are the future of news, and ancient vehicles like New York Times are long dead. I think the "general NYT audience" is participating in #FakeNews, and they should radically reconsider their information diet. As vivid example of this, compare James Birdle breaking the "Youtube exploitative kid videos" story way before, and in greate…

Hmm. I'm going to disagree with that! I think "candid, engineering-style blogposts" are and will continue to be great for an engineering audience, but I'm very skeptical that they will be great for a wide audience. For instance, I read and was fascinated by the YouTube kids post, but I do not know anyone outside of the tech industry that read it. And you're wrong to say he reported it way before, the NYT published th…

Thank you for this good response. I didn't notice the NYT covering this story before, because I have cut NYT out from my life due to their malicious, partisan reporting. So maybe I should be less bold about my evaluations of them and just continue to enjoy my personally-curated, high-information-dense feed.

Re: Moving the NYT Games Platform to Google Cloud With Zero Downtime

#47

Post by vkou »

froindt wrote: post #44
jdavis703 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're a paid subscriber then I think it's morally OK to use an ad blocker on them. You're paying for what you're consuming, and in all likelihood you're only earning them a few cents to maybe a dollar from ads anyways. What you spend on your subscription drives way more value.

Something I haven't though of before - with paper newspapers, there is no way to opt out of ads, and those are also subscription based. Why is the internet different? There is no opt-out for newspapers. Presumably they are getting less revenue than the customer agreed upon if the ads aren't displayed or aren't clicked on. Is using an ad blocker effectively stealing? Note: I use an ad blocker primarily as a means agai…

If internet ads were as unobtrusive as newspaper print ads (I'm not talking about the shitty free tabloids), a lot fewer people would be using ad-blockers.

Re: Moving the NYT Games Platform to Google Cloud With Zero Downtime

#48

Post by benp84 »

chatmasta wrote: post #17

> We found that some web customers were unable to access the puzzle, and found the cause of the problem to be App Engine’s limit on the size of outbound request headers (16KB). Users with a large amount of third-party cookies had their identity stripped from the proxied request. We made a quick fix to proxy only the headers and cookies we needed and we were back in action. That’s pretty funny. Users of NYT are sendin…

Try a Cracked.com article. I left one open for 10 minutes and had 50,000 requests and 80MB transfered.

Re: Moving the NYT Games Platform to Google Cloud With Zero Downtime

#49

Post by azurezyq »

marksomnian wrote: post #2

Doesn't this lead to vendor lock-in? All these Google proprietary services seem like they would be a big issue if they decide for whatever reason to migrate away from GCP.

It's a trade-off between time to market and risk of vender lock in. Also, typical tech stack got fully or partially rewritten every a couple of years.

Re: Moving the NYT Games Platform to Google Cloud With Zero Downtime

#50

Post by dragonwriter »

iamthirsty wrote: post #45
tgb wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mini-crossword is free as well as some of their full crosswords.

Some . I actually cancelled my subscription with them because of the horrendously large Google Home ads on all the paid crosswords. When I asked them about it I got about four non-answers — it's ridiculous that even if you pay they still serve you ads.

Newspapers have always included ads even if you pay; not sure why anyone would expect “on the internet” to change that.
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