Npmjs.org moderated one of my comments regarding their outage today

[seldo]

Hi! CTO of npm here. I haven't been reading HN today because we were trying to fix the SSL thing, so I was genuinely taken aback to see this article.

We didn't censor any comments; we did no moderation of any kind today. I have no idea what happened to his comment, but nobody at npm did anything to it.

[tbranyen]

Tough to give benefit of the doubt, but we're talking about Disqus here and I've had this sort of thing happen to me in the past. Willing to believe it could be an honest mistake. At least you know now to tread lightly if you were ever thinking of doing something like this.

[evv]

Nobody is really talking about this massive betrayal of trust by the npm maintainers.

Make a mistake and deploy a backwards-incompatible change? Thats negligent. However, mistakes happen and I understand that. (An apology would be nice.)

But deleting the most important and insightful comment is damn-near unforgivable. Especially when such a note was so reasonable, even-tempered and had such empathy for the npm maintainers.

As of today, I don't really trust npm, and trust is considerably important for package managers. If they expect to earn any of my respect back, it would take a sincere apology.

[1stop]

Apology here:

http://blog.npmjs.org/post/78165272245/more-help-with-self-s...

Your outrage seems rather misplaced. They screwed up their certificates, which caused a problem for people running the non-latest-stable nodejs.

They then posted how to fix this, and apologised for the problem.

Note to the wary: if you are running software that is version 0.10.25 in production, and complaining that things aren't "Ready for enterprise" then all I have to say is "no shit, look at the version number!"

If you aren't ready/willing to deal with a fast moving deploy target, then stick to Ruby/Python or better still JVM/.Net!

[sync]

Off topic: Author is seeking employment & could use some life guidance... https://twitter.com/robcolbert

[untog]

For those reading this later (he's posted many tweets since), he appears to have quit his job one week ago:

https://twitter.com/robcolbert/status/436928505498976256

and today has no money:

https://twitter.com/robcolbert/status/439507016709853184

but doesn't want to work for another "shop beholden to the weakness of its internal IT":

https://twitter.com/robcolbert/status/439505080992034816

It's difficult to have a ton of sympathy, but it's still just an overall sad situation.

[rdtsc]

> Author is seeking employment & could use some life guidance... https://twitter.com/robcolbert

Hmm...Life guidance. I don't know.

Sometimes a technology's biggest detractors are its most fervent adherents. The drama, fuss, immaturity and irrationality is just off-putting and screams to everyone else "Do you enjoy drama? Do you want to be in the middle of trolling wars on Twitter? Please join us, just Node.js it all comes with it as part of the package!".

This is isn't the only thing. The drama with Joyent fake firing that person who didn't want to accept some doc updates. Is that all, I maybe wrong, but there is just no end to immaturity and drama. The people and culture associated with this technology is off-putting to me. Maybe others love it, good for them.

[rubiquity]

I'm curious as to why he is celebrating a single Node process handling 135 concurrent connections.

[reeses]

Then leave it out or make a new post. This is not somethingawful or 4chan. We should be above doxxing people because they have opinions.

[geraldcombs]

Perhaps npm, Inc should hire him instead of deleting his posts.

[danso]

Thanks for reaffirming my commitment to not read up about an author/user/submitter other than in regards to the opinion/assertion made at hand...

https://twitter.com/robcolbert/status/436928505498976256

> I decided not to fight for changing something for the better today and quit. Why do companies lie? Why do ppl fear change?

I am not wise enough to be called a source of wisdom...but if you are in IT, and your company is not actively poisoning children or criminally violating you, do not quit out of professional principle without a backup plan.

[Encosia]

Stefan_kendall, your last several comments are dead. You seem to be hellbanned, FYI.

[chrisbolt]

Seems to be very slow, text can also be found here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7321609

More context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7320833

[Cless]

From the author:

Oh, boy. A DSL line isn't sufficient to handle 150 people accessing the site right now. It may be slow, but it's not going to go down. It's powered by Node, the nodejs process is only using 56MB of RAM and about 40% CPU. I'm fine. My bandwidth is simply depleted. Have patience, and thank you for visiting. I need some bandwidth and a budget. Wow.

[gfosco]

I'll never understand this when a $5 digital ocean VPS could perform far better, and probably a lot cheaper than the extra electricity he's burning at home.

[tomphoolery]

Please, make it better. The last thing the JavaScript community as a whole needs is more fragmentation. You know JavaScript, why don't you contribute to NPM?

When that security bullshit happened with RubyGems a year ago, many members of the Ruby community pitched in and helped the RubyGems team get the site back in order, even making Chef scripts so the whole thing is repeatable. Now, RubyGems is more secure and runs faster than ever.

[LukeB_UK]

Thank you for posting this. I completely agree. We already have a package manager, there's no need to fork it and have to have 2 competing things when it's all open source and those with knowledge can contribute to make npm better.

[lucb1e]

Waiting for the page for 3 minutes, so far only the title has loaded (and probably the rest of the html but it's not showing).

> Powered by Pulsar

For various definitions of 'powered'.

[htp]

The site’s hosted on a machine in his house, and is served over a DSL connection.

He says Node and/or Pulsar are doing well enough (150 connections using ~50 MB of RAM and 40% CPU)- apparently he just doesn’t have enough bandwidth to get everything out to everyone.

[girvo]

> Try harder, or get forked.

I really like that, and fits so well for some FOSS projects.

[cdata]

Hrm, there's a lot of Noderage on HN tonight..

Incidentally, if anyone here was actually affected by this, they put up a reasonable explanation / apology / useful-resolutions blog post that no-one seems to be paying attention to: http://blog.npmjs.org/post/78165272245/more-help-with-self-s...

[Cless]

Funny. I saw this earlier on NPMjs.org and it had 22 upvotes, 0 downvotes. Does it say anywhere why, exactly, it was deleted, or do they just delete anything they don't like?

[mildtrepidation]

If you're referring to Disqus comments, they no longer display the downvote count. Which I find pretty obnoxious, but oh well.

[SideburnsOfDoom]

Is "moderated" a new euphemism for "deleted" ?

[jaredmcateer]

I think they used that term because it went from being visible to "awaiting moderation" before disappearing alogether

[troels]

Blank page for me? And view source reveals nothing useful. Apparently this is some kind of javascript application and not a web page?

[Encosia]

Same here. AngularJS, misused for a content site, strikes again...

[dchuk]

The sheer volume of tweets this guy is pumping out is pretty crazy to me. How he has time to focus on anything else I have no idea.

[fisherprice]

This guy complains about npm's scalability and architecture but is himself not able to structure a single blog post to make it readable.

[mosselman]

"I have been free riding on this piece of technology that is completely open and that I, if I were able, could help make better. Instead I'll just be condescending to the people who have spent countless hours of their personal time because something didn't work as I want/understood it to. Go me."

[dham]

The smallest font I've ever seen on a web page, period.

[danso]

Not sure why, but HN user "IsaacSchlueter", who purports to be the comment thread moderator, posted an explanation/rebuttal/apology to the OP in this comment thread an hour ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7323010

However, Isaac has been hellbanned...I'll repost just to give him the benefit of the doubt:

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=IsaacSchlueter

> We didn't moderate away anything. I am literally the only person who CAN moderate those comments, and I was at a conference all day. 100% of my online time was spent working with my team to figure out the fastest path to a fix. We didn't realize the extent until way too late, and that's bad on us. I apologize. I didn't delete your comment. I'll look at the moderation queue and see if maybe disqus is set to auto-hide after some time or something. I'm sorry for the confusion there.

[ivank]

Not hellbanned, probably just tripped up by the duplicate comment detector: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=IsaacSchlueter

[caw]

I was wondering if the rate of voting or the absolute value of the post's rating (it had a ton of upvotes) triggered a Disqus protection thinking it was a flame war, similar to flamewar protection on HN.