HN is up again • Hacker News Board

Re: HN is up again

#231

Post by kabdib » Fri, Jul 08, 2022, 10:34 PM UTC

davedunkin wrote: post #66

sillysaurusx wrote: post #20

HN 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.

> 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.

I once had a small fleet of SSDs fail because they had some uptime counters that overflowed after 4.5 years, and that somehow persistently wrecked some internal data structures. It turned them into little, unrecoverable bricks.

It was not awesome seeing a bunch of servers go dark in just about the order we had originally powered them on. Not a fun day at all.

Re: HN is up again

#232

Post by NKosmatos » Fri, Jul 08, 2022, 10:34 PM UTC

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

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 :-)

Re: HN is up again

#233

Post by autoexec » Fri, Jul 08, 2022, 10:36 PM UTC

andrepd wrote: post #225

joncp wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. I find that it's so reliable and fast that I use it to check my internet connection. If I can't hit HN, then something's wrong on my end.

I use example.com for that purpose :p

Wow, it works, but it really seems like it shouldn't. I'd expected reserved domain names to not resolve at all let alone be pingable and point at a working webserver. Has it always had a website?

Re: HN is up again

#234

Post by GekkePrutser » Fri, Jul 08, 2022, 10:39 PM UTC

jethro_tell wrote: post #176

sillysaurusx wrote: post #129

Earlier 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?

The reason it's an institution is because it hasn't been bought by some corp trying to squeeze value out of eyeballs, which is why it hasn't really changed much. However, it takes money and time to keep it around in a not for profit way, so it will be an institution as long as it's funding is the same.

Yeah I really hope that if Ycombinator ever wants to pull out, that they don't sell it but let the community pull together to support it. I'd gladly donate to keep it running as it is.

It would be even better if they just keep doing it as they are though <3

Re: HN is up again

#235

Post by hbn » Fri, Jul 08, 2022, 10:40 PM UTC

Prove it

Re: HN is up again

#236

Post by autoexec » Fri, Jul 08, 2022, 10:41 PM UTC

butterNaN wrote: post #211

christophilus wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It might not correlate to quality, but if the information found at a website wasn't valued we wouldn't be constantly pulling the site up, just like facebook users do.

I'd argue that this site has a good signal/noise ratio by design and specifically to keep you addicted (where "addicted" means using and constantly returning to the site). This site is just designed to attract people who are put off by the kinds of tricks employed elsewhere

Re: HN is up again

#237

Post by tekacs » Fri, Jul 08, 2022, 10:42 PM UTC

humanwhosits wrote: post #55

Spent so long debugging my home network.. Couldn't possibly have been HN that was the problem haha

I always use https://isup.me (https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/) in these situations, to find out if I'm losing my mind. :)

Re: HN is up again

#238

Post by GekkePrutser » Fri, Jul 08, 2022, 10:44 PM UTC

doublerabbit wrote: post #228

bestinterest wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh that is interesting, I guess they just spun up a beefy EC2 instance. I'm noticing slower performance, I used to get about 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)

I hope it's temporary. Would hate HN to move to the "cloud" from bare metal.

This, totally.

It's great that they were able to spin it up in the cloud for recovery purposes. But it's more legendary on a real server Yes I'm old :P

Re: HN is up again

#239

Post by akomtu » Fri, Jul 08, 2022, 10:45 PM UTC

Mr. dang, can I use the opportunity to suggest to turn the tiny upvote and downvote arrows into links, separated by sufficient distance? My fingertip is 15x larger than these arrows and it takes quite a bit of precision to hit the right one. I bet, half of upvotes and downvotes are erroneous for this reason.

Re: HN is up again

#240

Post by sokoloff » Fri, Jul 08, 2022, 10:46 PM UTC

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 ).

Note that that doesn’t seem to work if you have a bookmark with that content (as it seems to find the bookmark, which is reasonable behavior but caught me out when I was trying to change the URL to an internal tool and didn’t realize why it wasn’t working to delete the auto-complete).