Show HN: A New, Clean Geolocation API

Post by jonathan-kosgei » Fri, Dec 08, 2017, 10:41 PM UTC

orf wrote: post #129

kelnos wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calling 'print' from within a library is pretty bad form too... responses and errors should always be returned as data that can be inspected programmatically. In this case it's even worse, as the code will just return None on error, and you don't know why.

^ This. Never call print from a library, what if I'm using a script to pipe stdout somewhere. Just throw a custom GeolocationException or something, with some useful data about what went wrong. In this specific case though, just don't bother catching the exception. It's not useful and it indicates something is terribly wrong.

Post by mirimir » Fri, Dec 08, 2017, 10:53 PM UTC

qwerty456127 wrote: post #112

mirimir wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more than that, for some countries.

Usually right because people from these countries are trying to evade location-based discrimination and privacy infringement

    Indonesia -- 47%
    Thailand -- 39%
    Brazil -- 36%
    Turkey -- 36%
    UAE -- 36%
    Viet Nam -- 35%
    Saudi Arabia -- 34%
    India -- 32%
    Malaysia -- 32%
    ...
    UK -- 14%
    US -- 14%

Post by mtpn » Fri, Dec 08, 2017, 11:59 PM UTC

schlipity wrote: post #134

jjeaff wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment reminds me of the couple of people on HN that complain everytime someone shows off a new product and it doesn't work well in their text only lynx browser. It's such an extreme edge case that it doesn't really matter. (unless you are of course targeting that type of market). In other words, IP address gives a general location in a huge number of cases.

It's fine as long as you're willing to accept that it's going to be wrong an unknown amount of the time.

Post by chatmasta » Sat, Dec 09, 2017, 12:24 AM UTC

ddorian43 wrote: post #87

chatmasta wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just cache the responses so that only the first time a new IP connects it needs to be looked up (until cache fills) Integrating maxmind is a bit of a pain and it’s a massive database. Not well suited to use cases like single purpose or ephemeral containers. You’ll probably end up storing the maxmind db in a separate node on your local network, anyway. So you still have a latency issue (although lower, obviously). Mor…

It's a 100mb db. You load it in-memory (mmap) on every webserver.

Post by ddorian43 » Sat, Dec 09, 2017, 12:34 AM UTC

chatmasta wrote: post #137

ddorian43 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a 100mb db. You load it in-memory (mmap) on every webserver.

I consider 100mb to be quite large. That could easily double memory consumption of an application. Most http services are light but widely replicated. Adding 100mb of memory usage to each replica is certainly a tradeoff.