I have a flakey internet connection. Because HN loads so fast, I use it to test if my internet is working/is back up after it disconnects.
WELL TODAY WAS VERY INCONVENIENT LET ME TELL YOU! :)
HN is up again
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Re: HN is up again
#202Re: HN is up again
#203Well on the plus side I got a lot done today
Re: HN is up again
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep: if you buy a pair disks together, there's a fair chance they'll both be from the same manufacturing batch, which correlates with disk defects.
This makes total sense but I've never heard of it. Is there any literature or writing about this phenomenon? I guess proper redundancy is having different brands of equipment also in some cases.
Wikipedia has a section on this. It's called "correlated failure." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID#Correlated_failures
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#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s already been around since 2007. How many decades does HN need to be around before people realize it’s an institution?
Slashdot has been around since 1997 and people still rave about its moderation system today. However, while I have high hopes for HN, it could very well go the way of digg overnight
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#206Didn't even notice
Re: HN is up again
#207HN was down because the failover server also failed: https://twitter.com/HNStatus/status/1545409429113229312 Double disk failure is improbable but not impossible. The most impressive thing is that there seems to be no dataloss, almost whatsoever. Whatever the backup system is, it seems rock solid.
According to this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32024485
each server has a pair of mirrored disks, so it seems we're talking about 4 drives failing, not just 2.
On the other hand the primary seems to have gone down 6 hours before the backup server did, so the failures weren't quite simultaneous.
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#208I 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.
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.
Me too! I was, shamefully, in the middle of work so had a mini panic thinking my 5 min HN scroll was gonna become an hour long battle with my connection!
Re: HN is up again
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
AWS also operates at a significantly larger scale. When was the last AWS outage due to two critical disks failing at the same time?
Failures due to increasing complexity are still failures.
Sure, but you're talking about all of AWS as if every customer is impacted when any part of AWS suffers a failure. But that's not the case, which makes it quite an apples/oranges comparison.
But even comparing the apples to the oranges, this HN status page someone else pointed out https://hn.hund.io/ seems to show that HN has had more than one outage in just the past month. All but today's and last night's being quite short, but still. Sometimes you need some extra complexity if you want to make it to zero downtime overall.
That's not something the HN website needs but I think AWS is doing fine even if that's your point of comparison.
Re: HN is up again
#210This 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 particu…
Quality, non-biased news sources are (surprisingly) difficult to find.