It's very useful, and I've referred to this site many times over the years (probably bc a couple sites I've worked on are in the top 50!).
For those people wanting other awesome and informative govt sites, take a look at https://www.usaspending.gov/, which has all government contracts data easily searchable (and bookmarkable).
https://18f.gsa.gov/2015/03/19/how-we-built-analytics-usa-go...
Mostly off-topic, but the GSA is one of those federal agencies that is really under-appreciated.
When I was a reporter in the days before the commercial internet (yes, my tools were pencil, typewriter, and teletype), the GSA would publish lists of what government reports were coming out each month, helping you find all kinds of incredibly useful data. If you needed help, you just picked up a phone and they would point you in the right direction. I always looked forward to getting their big blue envelopes in the mail at work because I knew I could find something meaningful in there that I could localize for my audience. And the information was always presented in a manner that was both professional, and easy to understand.
The GSA is one of those agencies that is best left alone to do its work in obscurity. Every once in a long while, a politician will stick his nose in there, but usually only to get a name put on a building.
See also: The Congressional Budget Office.
If you've ever seen the "question mark vest guy" (Matthew Lesko, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Lesko), who offers book on federal programs available and how to take advantage of them... He's been criticized as a charlatan or misleading people, or encouraging people to "freeload," but here's the thing... He's really quite sincere. He believes the US government bureaucracy has failed in its duty of public information and education and is full of under-utilized programs that, as a result, become tools for the informed to siphon resources from those the programs were intended to help. He thinks that's unfair. The "Free Money Now" book covers and TV advertisements are employed because his target audience is assumed to not be savvy enough to do the research themselves, so he's trying to reach them with noise and spectacle where quiet black-and-white announcements buried in the back pages of local newspapers have already failed (and the fact that he started his work in the era where the easiest way to reach his target audience was still books because the sorts of people who didn't know about benefits programs they were eligible for were strongly correlated with lack of Internet access, not surprisingly).
If you want a fascinating rabbit hole: https://18f.gsa.gov/2014/12/18/a-complete-list-of-gov-domain...
> IP mapping isn’t an exact science and so MaxMind assigns a default address when it can’t identify its true location. That address just happened to be the Arnolds’ property, a remote farm that is located slap-bang in the middle of America.
> More than 600 million IP addresses are associated with their farm and more than 5,000 companies are drawing information from MaxMind’s database.
I hope they don't die, but this looks really bad for them.
yes.
Rust was their opportunity to escape that, now they just threw it away and now they are back to where they started.
Firefox is in decline. Nothing has changed.
This is from someone who uses Firefox
The DX for firefox just isn't that great when compared to Chrome.
Hmm I wonder if just parsing the HTML still works like it did 8 years ago when I had to scrape the USPS: https://github.com/NavinF/USPS-scraper/blob/master/USPS_scra... As long as the USPS only allows API requests from browsers (as opposed to the much more common situation where you need to update the status of every tracking number in a database), people still have to scrape their website pretending to be a browser.
My pattern matching experience from real life tells me that this is unlikely....
The following is for people logging into government services, it is a better source for metrics on browsers/OS usage.
I agree that it is skewed in a number of ways. I just wanted to estimate a lower bound.
Thank you for pointing out a better source of data for my use case.
I have a bulky work laptop and a big desktop PC. The niche left over maps to a nice slim, fanless device for casual usage very well in the Chromebook space. Maybe preaching to the choir here, but my keyboard will need to be pried from my cold, dead hands and the tablet + detachable options all seemed way too delicate.
Sign of the times?
NIST? Definitely
LLNL MPI tutorials? Obviously.
But NSF… never?
Why are there (personal?) email addresses in there as well? Who sets that as their user agent?
Might be some programming exercise. It's a common network programming exercise to build a HTTP client using bare sockets. But they don't look like student email addresses.
Also, India having a large number of English speakers, probably has a significant percent of the population that prefers getting COVID-19 info from the CDC.
By device type:
Mobile 53.7%
Desktop 44.1%
Tablet 1.9%
By browser:
Chrome 48%
Safari 36.2%
Edge 6.4%
Firefox 2.8%
My personal conclusions:
Tablets remain a niche product, Firefox is dead, and Edge will be dead in a few years if it can't eat more market share, which it won't.
iPads don't show themselves to be iPads. They read as full computers.
It's an anti-profiling feature Apple added a few years ago.
And you can see the code and development lifecycle on github: https://github.com/18F/analytics.usa.gov
Pretty lightweight for what it is.
I noticed that San Jose makes the list, as does LA and Seattle right now, but no San Francisco. I suspect that SF traffic goes through San Jose and thus most of the bay area appears as San Jose in their numbers. Not a big leap to imagine this happens in other places too.
Clearly a HN hug!
it would be most amusing to watch the EU commission attempt to enforce its extraterritorial !bad, bad cookies! law against the US federal government on its own website