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Why HN was down

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Why HN was down

#131

Post by badgar »

oh_sigh wrote: post #94
badgar wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So what do you do to avoid this in the future? It's HN... there's no SLA, there's no postmortems, there's no doing things better in the future. pg just runs this site out of the good of his heart, we should be lucky the volunteers run it for us at all.

> pg just runs this site out of the good of his heart Hilarious. I would have believed you if you appended "and his wallet"

One core. One HD. Bandwidth is trivial with no images. How much do you think this site costs to run?

Re: Why HN was down

#132

Post by mhurron »

furyofantares wrote: post #46
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #7

Amazing that such a large percentage of debugging involves determining exactly what you are debugging. The definition of the problem, many times, is the solution. Might be a good time to mention Rubber Duck Debuggging. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging

There is a line from Futurama that perfectly applies ton a lot of debugging. Farnsworth: My God, is it really possible? Fry: It must be possible, it's happening. Fry: By the way, what's happening?

Extremely appropriate as Fry is his own grandfather and the site software can't handle that relationship.

Re: Why HN was down

#133

Post by prawks »

larrys wrote: post #33

"But then I decided to just fix it for him by doing some surgery in the repl." I've always found it's a good idea to not deviate. Whether it be running, parking or anything else once you deviate from some regular behavior you run into potential problems that you hadn't anticipated. "For some reason I didn't check the comments after the surgery to see if they were in the right place. " More or less my point. If this w…

> I've always found it's a good idea to not deviate.

> you run into potential problems that you hadn't anticipated.

The second statement is no reason to live by the first. In fact, I think you'd be doing yourself a disservice by staying so comfortable. Being comfortable with the unanticipated, however, is a powerful quality to have.

Re: Why HN was down

#134

Post by beagle3 »

ricardobeat wrote: post #38

Related question: what is the timing for the 'Reply' link to show up? I might be fantasizing but sometimes it takes 5, sometimes 10 minutes to appear, leading people to reply as a sibling instead.

The deeper it is, the longer it takes to appear (I think at depth 7 or 8 it starts counting in hours, and at some point it just won't appear at all).

Just like too many nested if(x) { if (y) { if (z) ... }} constructs, too deep a discussion nesting is also unreadable.

Re: Why HN was down

#135

Post by znowi »

I wonder what exactly did distract you :) When I do surgery on a production server, I triple-check making sure everything works properly.

I have two assumptions: 1. HN has a low priority in the overall scheme of things, 2. Self-confidence overflow :)

Re: Why HN was down

#137

Post by bobsoap »

After breaking many things myself due to similar, seemingly miniscule edits, I have implemented an ABC routine: Always Be Checking. Even if it was "just" something like moving a piece of code or something equally tiny, I always check after the fix.

So far, it has been working great.

Re: Why HN was down

#138

Post by badgar »

timothya wrote: post #36
luser001 wrote: post #12

I use assertions to protect against things like this. I liberally sprinkle my code with assertions (CS theory calls them pre-conditions and post-conditions, iirc) to crash early if the system is an invalid state. One my pet peeves is that few programmers seem to love assertions like I do. Would love to see to comments on this.

What assertion would you have used in this case? For every comment you'd have to iterate through all it's parents to check if there is a cycle, which seems pretty inefficient to do for something that should never happen (there are other ways that you could check for this problem as you go, but the only other ways that I can think of require holding extra state just in order to perform the assertion). I'm for assertio…

>iterate through all it's parents to check if there is a cycle,which seems pretty inefficient to do for something that should never happen

The number of parents is almost always under 3 or 4 and never over 100. Writes occur a few times a second at peak. You are prematurely optimizing.

Re: Why HN was down

#139

Post by timothya »

petercooper wrote: post #65
timothya wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What assertion would you have used in this case? For every comment you'd have to iterate through all it's parents to check if there is a cycle, which seems pretty inefficient to do for something that should never happen (there are other ways that you could check for this problem as you go, but the only other ways that I can think of require holding extra state just in order to perform the assertion). I'm for assertio…

You could assert a limit on depth, perhaps. Then the cycle would still exist but after X number of comments, the rendering ends.

This is a reasonable solution. While it will (almost) never provide the correct result (it might print out a cycle of comments until X is reached, or it might cut off a very long but legitimate comment thread), it would provide a reasonable guarantee on this sort of problem not generating infinite pages.

Re: Why HN was down

#140

Post by jlgreco »

badgar wrote: post #131
oh_sigh wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> pg just runs this site out of the good of his heart Hilarious. I would have believed you if you appended "and his wallet"

One core. One HD. Bandwidth is trivial with no images. How much do you think this site costs to run?

He means that PG runs the sight because it makes business sense, not out of charity.
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