Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

I mentioned I just started working on it. To try for yourself you'd need to clone and tweak the servers list to find an optimal arrangement for you. The problem as I see it is that jumping continents occurs really artificial delays which skews the result significantly, so it first needs to identify your relative whereabouts, then decide on an optimal set of servers. If you clone and tweak the servers to place yourself inside the polygon you'd see it does locate you. Vercel is doing a reverse geoip lookup, so your location is preconfigured in some database based on your ip.



At least they are current ;-)


I hope you can come back in a day or so, and re-read this conversation. You're not being very nice, or fair, and it doesn't portray you in a good light.


I probably will. It may have come across harsh, but wasn't intended as such. IMO i outlined the reasons why sufficiently in my post and edit.


Maybe you misunderstood what the tool is doing. It is not doing geoip, it is using the latency of pings between your client and some selected servers with known locations, then calculates the center based on those timings and these known locations. Very simple, you can look at the code and see what it's doing. It's not factoring in any kind of real latency, such as the speed of light, hop delays, etc. Unfortunately, as others pointed out, this method works poorly, especially in such long distances. In my tests you can only find a certain window that performs well for your location, still within a radius of hundreds or thousands of kms, which makes it pretty unusable as you point out. Knowing what _doesn't_ work is also valuable information.


I understood that. Let me replay it from my mind, how i percieved it. There is the dark map with white contours. And yellow points on it, which represent the triangualiton servers, i guess? Even clickable, at least the RED point which represents my assumed location sometimes moved. Most notably when i clicked on London, then it hopped to Odessa. Otherwise, it was mostly in the northeast region of the Black Sea. In the light of the recent IPv4-space acquisition of my ISP, which i wrote about containing addresses formerly used in the Ukraine, Russia, Irak and Iran, causing "funny" issues...what would you have thought?


edit: btw. tested in latest Firefox with uBlock Origin on/off. and Iridium Browser (Chromium derivative), retested in Iridium only after 24h dyn-ip renewal. Same results.

Anyways, time to sleep. Sun's getting too bright.




Consider applying for YC's Spring batch! Applications are open till Feb 11.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: