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HN is up again

1010 points| tpmx | 3 years ago | reply

366 comments

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[+] joshstrange|3 years ago|reply
I don't think I had ever fully internalized how often I open this site throughout the day. Finish a task? HN. Got frustrated/stuck on a problem? HN break. Waiting for something to install/upload/compile/etc? HN.

Needless to say I opened a new tab, typed "n", and hit enter countless times today before my brain caught up with my muscle memory.

[+] christophilus|3 years ago|reply
Yep. Same. It says a lot about the quality of HN, I think. Also, I can't remember the last time it was down. For a while, I thought there must be something wrong with my internet connection or DNS config or something.
[+] cheesewhizemacs|3 years ago|reply
> Needless to say I opened a new tab, typed "n", and hit enter countless times today before my brain caught up with my muscle memory.

I do this too, and it's because this site is an addictive slot machine just like every other social networking site. I actually really hate this website, but I'm here almost every day, because I can't seem to break the habit. Neat. It's probably because I have a common impulse control / executive functioning disorder, and the way the front page works exploits some bug in my brain.

Reddit does this to me too. I also hate Reddit.

[+] Mixtape|3 years ago|reply
I was in almost the exact same position all day. What made it worse though was the fact that this happened right in the middle of my attempts at curbing my browsing habits. Once my app timers for Reddit is Fun, Instagram, and Twitter were up, it was time for HN... except there was no HN. What that meant is that I was reaching for a stimulus and then not getting it, the same way that an alcoholic wouldn't feel satisfied by, say, a can of soda. It was weird to experience, but very enlightening. It both made me realize how subconsciously my addiction is reinforced and reaffirmed to me that it is, in fact, an addiction. I'm not going to stop using HN of course, but I'm definitely going to be more aware of how I use it (e.g. passively vs. intentionally) from now on.
[+] m4tthumphrey|3 years ago|reply
I realised this today too. I imagine pretty much all of us are the same!
[+] chrisshroba|3 years ago|reply
I legitimately thought my internet was down for thirty minutes until I decided to try google.
[+] xoa|3 years ago|reply
I reference back to it for a lot of info too, which I guess I should probably load more of into my own notes database. But still today there were a bunch of saved comments I wanted to re-read as reference multiple times, definitely noticeable to miss it. Or alternatively if I'd grabbed the URLs for everything I'm assuming the wayback machine probably archives this pretty well. Perils of depending on the HNcloud service :).
[+] pmoleri|3 years ago|reply
That used to happen to me with Slashdot too. I'm so happy that today I didn't even realize HN was down, I think I tried once, it didn't load and went do something else, I assumed it was some local DNS or internet issue.
[+] beckingz|3 years ago|reply
Makes you appreciate the noprocrast mode feature.
[+] smcl|3 years ago|reply
This happened last couple of times I switched laptops - my old habit to visit "guardian.co.uk" by typing "guar" and hitting enter no longer works because I've now accidentally searched too many times for "guar" :D
[+] agnos|3 years ago|reply
Wow, I've never realized just how often I do this. There's some sort of a reward pathway in my brain connecting my right index finger to seeing that orange bar and lines of text.
[+] LoveMortuus|3 years ago|reply
Ohh... I thought my phone was just being weird because I use an AdBlock that works through VPN and it sometimes breaks stuff...
[+] Overtonwindow|3 years ago|reply
HN is where I get the bulk of my news and information about current thinking. I visit maybe several dozen times a day.
[+] taylodl|3 years ago|reply
Yeah. HN has become an important part of my workflow. Glad to know I'm not the only one!
[+] teeceetime2|3 years ago|reply
went out of my way to leave lurk mode and log in just so I could say "100% same experience for me"
[+] bragr|3 years ago|reply
noprocrast exists for a reason :)
[+] function_seven|3 years ago|reply
Everyone, you're welcome. My last F5 must've jogged it loose finally.
[+] haswell|3 years ago|reply
This downtime made me realize (again) how much I appreciate the kind of interesting topics that show up here, the depth of discussion, and a general attitude of good faith that (most) engage with here.

I realized how little of this I find elsewhere in my life - whether through Reddit or even my IRL friend circles.

This realization saddens me - I feel like I shouldn’t have to rely on HN so much to scratch this particular itch.

Perhaps I need to get out more.

[+] Johnny555|3 years ago|reply
Will you be posting a postmortem?

Not that I deserve or expect one from a free service, but because I enjoy reading postmortems from failures where both the primary and backup systems failed, I like to see what holes I might have in my own failover setup.

[+] Jcampuzano2|3 years ago|reply
My routine is usually to check HN first thing in the morning when sitting down at my computer before work.

I definitely spent a non-reasonable amount of time thinking my internet had a problem trying to open HN since it's always just been so constant.

[+] olingern|3 years ago|reply
While the naysayers will say, "Why isn't this in the cloud?," I think the response times and uptime of hackernews is really impressive. If anyone has a write-up of the infrastructure that runs HN, I would be interested. Maybe startups really can be run off of a rasberry pi
[+] pyb|3 years ago|reply
AWS has had more outages than HN in recent times
[+] clepto|3 years ago|reply
I made the comment that some of our web portals could run off of a raspberry pi perfectly fine, and I wasn’t necessarily suggesting we go do that, but merely trying to get the point across that we don’t need 700 interweaved AWS systems to do what a single host with Apache + Postgres has been doing fine for years.
[+] NKosmatos|3 years ago|reply
If I was (re)designing this, I would keep the existing bare metal server but I would also put in place double (or triple) cloud redundancy/failover. We all love HN so much that it should have zero downtime :-)
[+] lambda_dn|3 years ago|reply
HN was down for hours, no website hosted properly using cloud providers is down for more than a few minutes a year. It's trivial to set up multiple providers, multiple regions. Rather than having a few servers with some admin guy swapping out disks, really embarrassing for a so called tech site.
[+] alberth|3 years ago|reply
I’d love to learn more about HN hardware & software stack.

I know old posts indicate it’s running on a low core count but high frequency Intel CPUs on FreeBSD and no database (just flat files).

I wonder if it’s still the same.

[+] oblio|3 years ago|reply
Ah, that's easy.

HN is running on an old laptop from Viaweb.

Arc is running under the pg user and it's used as the process supervisor.

The actual web server is a VB app running on Linux through Wine.

The flat files have been migrated to an MS Access DB, also running through Wine.

[+] gruturo|3 years ago|reply
Thanks for all the daily work in running and keeping up the site, which we too easily take for granted, even those of us with similar jobs.
[+] bob1029|3 years ago|reply
Even accounting for this outage, most other SAAS platforms still can't compete with HN's non-existent SLA.

Thank you to everyone who keeps this thing running.

[+] edgartaor|3 years ago|reply
HN is so reliable that I distrusted my wife first.

"Did you unplug the router?"

[+] rr808|3 years ago|reply
Whenever I get frustrated by cloud complexity I wonder if its all worth it, as HN, stackoverflow, camelx3 etc are still on real servers. Maybe it is worth it after all.
[+] Amfy|3 years ago|reply
Interesting though, HN is now hosted on AWS and no longer on bare metal (m5 hosting).

% host news.ycombinator.com

news.ycombinator.com has address 50.112.136.166

and also interesting: DNS TTL is set to 1 (one).

[+] bestinterest|3 years ago|reply
Oh that is interesting, I guess they just spun up a beefy EC2 instance. I'm noticing slower performance, I used to get about <200ms for front page. Now it's 500ms-1s? Or is this placebo with my bias to thinking AWS is slow?

    NetRange:       50.112.0.0 - 50.112.255.255
    CIDR:           50.112.0.0/16
    NetName:        AMAZON-EC2-USWESTOR
    NetHandle:      NET-50-112-0-0-1
    Parent:         NET50 (NET-50-0-0-0-0)
    NetType:        Direct Allocation
    OriginAS:       AS14618
    Organization:   Amazon.com, Inc. (AMAZO-47)
[+] TIPSIO|3 years ago|reply
Went to Reddit instead today more than I should (not proud).

Anyone been on Slashdot lately? Checked it out too was really nice.

[+] autoexec|3 years ago|reply
I used to spend a lot of time there in the 2000s, but when they changed the site's layout and it suddenly needed a bunch of JS I stopped going. Maybe I'll give it a shot again though... the outage made me think I need more options.
[+] doublerabbit|3 years ago|reply
Slashdot is a slurry of Reddit and HN. My goto when bored with reddit and hn...
[+] jacquesm|3 years ago|reply
And all those poor project managers at the end of 2022 wondering what on earth they did right on the 8th of July that caused productivity to reach previously unthinkable heights.
[+] humanwhosits|3 years ago|reply
Spent so long debugging my home network..

Couldn't possibly have been HN that was the problem haha

[+] pbhjpbhj|3 years ago|reply
Same, I ended up updating my pihole which was long overdue. Just finished, loaded up HN and it worked - "huh, wonder what the problem was with my pihole" I thought ... well it needed doing anyway.
[+] D-Coder|3 years ago|reply
All sites broke on my machine this morning.

I reset the router... and HN was still down.

<sniff>