They'd stay on until someone turned them off, we don't have timers on them.
Oh, you didn't mean the actual building lights ...
Ask HN: If everyone at your company vanished how long would the lights stay on?
11–20 of 31 posts
Re: Ask HN: If everyone at your company vanished how long would the lights stay on?
#12Our landlord is pretty lax, so maybe 3-4 months. If our users get creative and work together they could probably keep the thing running indefinitely. Our website will work for 10 years, but it's just static and informational.
Re: Ask HN: If everyone at your company vanished how long would the lights stay on?
#13Forever, or at least until the credit cards expire and our hosting/domain payment fails.
Re: Ask HN: If everyone at your company vanished how long would the lights stay on?
#14Our users are all internal, so I expect it'd last a long while given no inbound requests.
The data sources we use do change format from time to time, so I assume one of those would break eventually.
Re: Ask HN: If everyone at your company vanished how long would the lights stay on?
#15Lights? Where we're going we don't need lights... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lights_out_(manufacturing)
> FANUC, a Japanese robotics company, has been operating as a lights-out factory since 2001. Robots are building other robots at a rate of about 50 per 24-hour shift and can run unsupervised for as long as 30 days at a time. "Not only is it lights-out," says Fanuc vice president Gary Zywiol, "we turn off the air conditioning and heat too."
Enslave them, treat them badly and leave them alone for weeks at a time with the express intent of increasing their own numbers. What could possibly go wrong.
Re: Ask HN: If everyone at your company vanished how long would the lights stay on?
#16The big thing would be disk failures followed by cert expiration. A handful of months, tops
Re: Ask HN: If everyone at your company vanished how long would the lights stay on?
#17Lights? Where we're going we don't need lights... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lights_out_(manufacturing)
> FANUC, a Japanese robotics company, has been operating as a lights-out factory since 2001. Robots are building other robots at a rate of about 50 per 24-hour shift and can run unsupervised for as long as 30 days at a time. "Not only is it lights-out," says Fanuc vice president Gary Zywiol, "we turn off the air conditioning and heat too." Enslave them, treat them badly and leave them alone for weeks at a time with t…
Meanwhile, the temperature controls inside a data center are ridiculously extreme compared to the heating/cooling system in use at my house. Those computers' environment is taken care of way better than the inside of my apartment is.
Re: Ask HN: If everyone at your company vanished how long would the lights stay on?
#18I'm the only one here, and it's a simple content website.
The domain has just been renewed for 5 years. The VPS is paid by credit card, and is set to auto-renew. This should last until the card expires in early 2027. There's money in that bank account so it should be fine.
Then Cloudflare will serve the website for a bit longer, probably a month or two.
After that, only archive.org copies of the website will remain, but at least the pages are self-contained (by design) and will run just fine when served from an archive.
So until about 2027.
There would be issues though. Information would grow outdated, links would break, mailboxes would get filled, etc.
The tax office would probably cause problems if I stop doing bookkeeping though. My tax advisor could delay their wrath, but eventually they'd freeze my account and payments to the web host would stop. I give it a few months, tops.
Re: Ask HN: If everyone at your company vanished how long would the lights stay on?
#19Lights? Where we're going we don't need lights... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lights_out_(manufacturing)
And now I want to watch Event Horizon
Re: Ask HN: If everyone at your company vanished how long would the lights stay on?
#20It's a radioluminescent paint company, so about six and a half thousand years.