Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why HN was down

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 303 posts

Re: Why HN was down

#151

Post by mpweiher »

luser001 wrote: post #27
swah wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The kind of assertion he needed though, could only be ensured by the database, not application code (my impression).

Agreed, infinite loops are a little hard to protect using asserts. When I hit the first infinite loop bug on a code path, I frequently add code to assert that the number of calls is less than $A_LARGE_NUMBER to catch future occurrences of the same root cause.

I dimly remember a language that just hard-limited loops. I thought it was John Pane's HANDS system, but I can't seem to find a reference in the thesis...can anybody refresh my memory?

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~pane/research.html

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~pane/thesis/

Pretty cool work regardless, I really like the way it deals with aggregates, for example.

Re: Why HN was down

#152

Post by gknoy »

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?

His time. Maybe the core and HD are Very Nice ones, too, of course.

Re: Why HN was down

#153

Post by scotty79 »

sehugg wrote: post #104

Great postmortem and good lessons to learn here: * Don't manually modify database without a well-tested procedure and another pair of eyes * Don't leave persistent problems (e.g. memory problems) uninvestigated so that you miss new problems with similar symptoms * Don't push new code to production while operational problem is ongoing (unless it addresses the operational problem) I'm pretty sure I've repeated this exa…

* while you are displaying a tree keep track of the items you already displayed so you can detect a cycle

Re: Why HN was down

#154

Post by w_t_payne »

That sort of thing is fine for a startup in it's first year or two of life, but HN has been around for a while now ... surely you must have some sort of process by now?

Re: Why HN was down

#155

Post by JonM »

sehugg wrote: post #104

Great postmortem and good lessons to learn here: * Don't manually modify database without a well-tested procedure and another pair of eyes * Don't leave persistent problems (e.g. memory problems) uninvestigated so that you miss new problems with similar symptoms * Don't push new code to production while operational problem is ongoing (unless it addresses the operational problem) I'm pretty sure I've repeated this exa…

* Don't push new code to production while operational problem is ongoing (unless it addresses the operational problem) ^^ absolutely!

Re: Why HN was down

#157

Post by roryokane »

tolmasky wrote: post #106

Why do "self posts" like this show up in the same light gray as posts with negative vote counts? My eyes aren't great and I find it hard to read

I don’t know pg’s reasons for making self-posts light gray, but you can fix problems like that with the bookmarklet Zap Colors: https://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/zap.html

Re: Why HN was down

#158

Post by joeycfan »

Dude - your career will never go anywhere what with your fessing up to stuff like that. Let me fix that for you.

---

Why HN was down

Yesterday, while toiling long into the night to make Hacker News better for you, our readers, I was assaulted by Ninjas.

While defending myself with the swift yet lethal Kung Fu that I picked up during my spell with the SAS, I was distracted long enough for them to sabotage the HN server.

Mission accomplished, they then immediately withdrew, the wounded dragging the dead with them.

After Herculean efforts, HN was brought back online a few hours ago, after a prolonged outage.

Rest assure, our readers, that every precaution will be taken to make sure this doesn't happen again.

Re: Why HN was down

#159

Post by scotty79 »

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…

If you don't deviate from what you usually do you don't learn.

Obviously don't deviate from routine (or rather prescribed procedure) when you are running nuclear power plant or airplane maintenance. But when tinkering with the site that gives you no money and won't cost any lives you can loosen up a bit.

Re: Why HN was down

#160

Post by ryen »

mvzink wrote: post #118
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

This is also why pair programming is so great.

Not easy on a Sunday while at home.
Post reply on HN