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HN is up again

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Re: HN is up again

#211

Post by butterNaN »

christophilus wrote: post #122
joshstrange wrote: post #34

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.

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.

Habitual usage doesn't necessarily correlate to quality, I'd say. People who use Facebook/Twitter also have this sort of muscle reflex developed over time.

That said, HN does have quality content and the signal/noise is way better than sites designed specifically to keep you addicted.

Re: HN is up again

#212

Post by fartcannon »

oblio wrote: post #182
alberth wrote: post #36

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.

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.

My employer is taking notes.

Re: HN is up again

#213

Post by cheesewhizemacs »

joshstrange wrote: post #34

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.

> 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.

Re: HN is up again

#214

Post by tpmx »

olingern wrote: post #84

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

It seems like it is in the cloud (AWS) now. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32027091.

Re: HN is up again

#215

Post by TameAntelope »

adamredwoods wrote: post #210
haswell wrote: post #35

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 particu…

Quality, non-biased news sources are (surprisingly) difficult to find.

Danger: that is decidedly not what HN is, at all.

Re: HN is up again

#217

Post by fartcannon »

pyb wrote: post #94
olingern wrote: post #84

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

AWS has had more outages than HN in recent times

Agree. Same with places like github.

Re: HN is up again

#218

Post by GekkePrutser »

Mixtape wrote: post #104
joshstrange wrote: post #34

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.

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 satisfi…

As far as addictions go, I find HN actually one that delivers actual knowledge. Literally every day I read something I didn't know before. Unlike on Facebook that just tries to serve me with more of the stuff I have already seen.

I like wasting time on HN because it's time not actually wasted :)

And don't get me started on Twitter... Sure there are some gems on twitter but I have to wade through 1000s of tweets of pure nonsense to see them. No thanks. If it's something really great someone will post a link on HN anyway :)

Re: HN is up again

#219

Post by GekkePrutser »

johnnymellor wrote: post #200
smcl wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You can make the omnibox forget about URLs and search terms you've used a lot by selecting them with the down key then pressing Shift+Delete ( https://superuser.com/a/189334 ).

Nice, doesn't seem to work on firefox though, guess it's chrome only?

Re: HN is up again

#220

Post by GekkePrutser »

spiffytech wrote: post #119
davedunkin wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Double disk failure is improbable but not impossible. It's not even improbable if the disks are the same kind purchased at the same time.

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.

Eek - now I'm glad I wait a few months before buying each disk for my NAS.

Not doing it for this reason but rather financial ones :) But as I have a totally mixed bunch of sizes I have no RAID and a disk loss would be horrible.

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