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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)

#31

It is ironic that HN has not yet been monetized like metafilter was.

My guess is that to some extent, YC benefits from having this around in a form people actually want to use - they are able to surface the projects they have funded on it and that can help drive engagement to those projects. If they attempted to monetize the platform itself, it would likely drive away many of the users that would otherwise be interested in or be possible hires for the companies they fund.

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

#32
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…

"Yet HN has more uptime than these behemoths, and way more uptime than e.g. Slack."

That's because HN does a lot less, and is a lot simpler.

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

#34
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…

I honestly wonder sometimes how it’s physically possible to do what dang does, it seems like such an enormous and Sisyphean task. Sad to see twitter replies complaining about the moderation, because if it wasn’t for the moderation the quality here would be much lower, the moderation is the whole reason those people are attracted to participating here. Respect and many thanks indeed.

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

#35
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

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

#37

'sillysaurusx -- I respect your opinions. I know that I respect your opinions because you're able to use HackerNews as a bully pulpit to reach a very wide audience and I personally both enjoy and look forward to seeing your participation. I've often wished I had better opportunities to learn from you and always silently wish you well on your personal journey. I also see from your Twitter reply that you feel HN hasn't…

Context that I had to look up: sillysaurusx on HN is theshawwn on Twitter, whose replies to the submitted tweet this is a response to. (What makes that relative clause so hard to parse?)

Meta: Is that an apostrophe as a username sigil? Where did it come from? Another instance: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17681886

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

#38
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…

I like to think he's some kind of monk, a zen master of human forums, and a genuinely good person. At least any exchange I had with him or observed with all kinds of people have been full of humanity, while firm in his mission. I don't know how he does it, and I wish we'd celebrate him and people like him far more.

I posted a link elsewhere in this thread to this article [1] - The lonely work of moderating Hacker News (2019) - and you might like its author's insights/views, plus there are plentiful quotes from Dang and his colleague, Scott Bell. [edit to add: a comment in reply to this says that Scott no longer works at HN. Surely Dang can't be doing this solo nowadays?]

[1] https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th...

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

#39
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope he gets to invest in the fund!

Yeah, really... HN has been instrumental in generating good publicity for YC.

> HN has been instrumental in generating good publicity for YC

This is literally why it exists.

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