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Few people grasp the amount of effort Daniel Gackle expends running HN (2020)

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Re: Few people grasp the amount of effort Daniel Gackle expends running HN (2020)

#21

Post by civilized »

nimbius wrote: post #17

I just find it comically ironic that the same community infamous for sleuthing and demanding the full root cause of failure from their favourite faang darlings and various digital feudal estates has been so quiet, forgiving, and reflective about the HN outage and its cause. am I missing something? does anyone know what caused the failure?

HN isn't Amazon or Facebook. It's not a for-profit operation relied on by millions for their business. It doesn't have a blog where its engineers document the latest way they squeezed a few percent more performance. It appears to be a shoestring operation run in a frugal fashion.

Why anyone would expect people to have the same attitude towards that as Facebook is beyond me.

Re: Few people grasp the amount of effort Daniel Gackle expends running HN (2020)

#22

Post by hoofhearted »

nimbius wrote: post #17

I just find it comically ironic that the same community infamous for sleuthing and demanding the full root cause of failure from their favourite faang darlings and various digital feudal estates has been so quiet, forgiving, and reflective about the HN outage and its cause. am I missing something? does anyone know what caused the failure?

They have been super transparent about the HN stack and both outages. A disk failed in their collocated server. They migrated to their backup server, and lost a disk in that server in the same manner.

They temporarily stood up an AWS instance from a backup, and are working on a permanent fix.

Re: Few people grasp the amount of effort Daniel Gackle expends running HN (2020)

#23

Post by [deleted] »

nimbius wrote: post #17

I just find it comically ironic that the same community infamous for sleuthing and demanding the full root cause of failure from their favourite faang darlings and various digital feudal estates has been so quiet, forgiving, and reflective about the HN outage and its cause. am I missing something? does anyone know what caused the failure?

[deleted]

Re: Few people grasp the amount of effort Daniel Gackle expends running HN (2020)

#24

Post by arkitaip »

nimbius wrote: post #17

I just find it comically ironic that the same community infamous for sleuthing and demanding the full root cause of failure from their favourite faang darlings and various digital feudal estates has been so quiet, forgiving, and reflective about the HN outage and its cause. am I missing something? does anyone know what caused the failure?

> quiet, forgiving, and reflective about the HN outage and its cause.

If Cloudflare, AWS or Google goes down, it affects millions of people directly and often financially. If HN goes down, we simply find another way to waste time.

Re: Few people grasp the amount of effort Daniel Gackle expends running HN (2020)

#25

Post by formerkrogemp »

Well dang. I've certainly enjoyed the site over the years. I know you're compensated for your work. But, I don't think you're quite well-compensated for your work. I would like to offer a humble thanks from those in the community that I've learned from over the years and for dang and company's moderation.

Re: Few people grasp the amount of effort Daniel Gackle expends running HN (2020)

#26

Post by pmoriarty »

nimbius wrote: post #17

I just find it comically ironic that the same community infamous for sleuthing and demanding the full root cause of failure from their favourite faang darlings and various digital feudal estates has been so quiet, forgiving, and reflective about the HN outage and its cause. am I missing something? does anyone know what caused the failure?

We weren't quiet. There were lots of questions about the cause of the outage... along with detailed answers, and discussions of those answers: [1][2][3]

You just missed them.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32026571

[2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32030400

[3] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32032235

Re: Few people grasp the amount of effort Daniel Gackle expends running HN (2020)

#28

Post by armchairhacker »

nimbius wrote: post #17

I just find it comically ironic that the same community infamous for sleuthing and demanding the full root cause of failure from their favourite faang darlings and various digital feudal estates has been so quiet, forgiving, and reflective about the HN outage and its cause. am I missing something? does anyone know what caused the failure?

here’s the deal:

HN is a tiny forum which basically runs on a single machine with a single backup. There are surely only a few people monitoring it. It’s used by about ~1 million people a day, and nobody really “relies” on HN.

GitHub, Facebook, Google, AWS etc. are massive clusters of over 1000 servers spread across continents, with multiple failure modes and run by many DevOps. Many people and services rely on them being up. They’re used by billions each day.

Yet HN has more uptime than these behemoths, and way more uptime than e.g. Slack. It’s also faster, even though it’s only one server. HN went down for 2 (?) hours. HN also promptly posts why it went down. In this case because both the main and backup server failed.

Of course HN is definitely more reliable because it’s only one server. But it’s still impressive and shows that you can reach a large audience with a simple setup and few resources. Maybe if Google, Facebook, AWS, etc. found more straightforward solutions they too could have more uptime.

Re: Few people grasp the amount of effort Daniel Gackle expends running HN (2020)

#29

Post by [deleted] »

samizdis wrote: post #5

I'd like to think that more than a few people grasp this. He's some kind of machine - in the best, complimentary way. His replies to emails are succinct, helpful, educational, and still personable. No idea how he retains his equanimity across hundreds/thousands of interactions, mostly with strangers. IMO it's a worthwhile lesson (and a free one) to peruse his comment history: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=d…

[deleted]
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