TIL I have a "open Hacker News" hand reflex
⌘-T, N,
Did it like 5 times during that 1h-ish outage. :(
Tell HN: HN was down
141–150 of 343 posts
Re: Tell HN: HN was down
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
sounds very much like an evil social media dopamine feedback loop. ironic given everyone on HN is so anti social media.... its clearly only bad for kids though i should add, silly of me to exclude such a detail
I've been on this internet hit shit since the 90s lil bro, s' all good.
I can stop any time I want, I just don't want!
Re: Tell HN: HN was down
#143When it was down my thought was "damnit, I'll actually have a productive workday now."
Next time you can avoid that fate by opening HN in a private browsing (or whatever your browser calls its equivalent) window. This outage, like the vast majority of HN outages, only affected logged in requests. I suppose you could also just clear your HN cookies in regular browsing window, but then when they fix it you'd have to log in again.
Huh. Dunno why, but when it failed on Firefox I tried Chrome, and it worked. I wrote it off as a Mozilla issue, but this would better explain that I think
Re: Tell HN: HN was down
#144Yes, sorry! We're investigating, but my current theory is we got overloaded because I relaxed some of our anti-crawler protections a few days ago.
(The reason I did that is that the anti-crawler protections also unfortunately hit some legit users, and we don't want to block legit users. However, it seems that I turned the knobs down too far.)
In this case, we also had a secondary failure: PagerDuty woke me up at 5:24am, I checked HN and it seemed fine, so I told PagerDuty the problem was resolved. But the problem wasn't resolved - at that point I was just sleeping through it.
I'll add more as we find out more, but it probably won't be till later this afternoon PST.
Edit: later than I expected, but for those still following, the main things I've learned are (1) pkill wasn't able to kill SBCL this time - we have a script that does that when HN stops responding, but it didn't work, so we'll revise the script; and (2) how to get PagerDuty not to let you go back to sleep if your site is actually still down.
Re: Tell HN: HN was down
#145I got stuck in an infinite loop. Try opening HN -> it's down, better check HN to see everyone talking about a major website being down -> Try opening HN -> loop
Sometimes I'll catch myself absentmindedly reopening the browser and checking two or three front pages, seconds after having just checked them and closed the browser.
Re: Tell HN: HN was down
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
It just reinforces for me that addiction is a human problem not a problem with technology I know dang basically works tirelessly to not change the format in order to not induce those addictive patterns but yet here we all are
It's a website with the smartest people in the world. The level of conversations here are unrivaled in internet communities. It's understandable to be addicted. Lol. I visit this place multiple times a day.
> the smartest people in the world
But also, people like me. Be careful what you choose to believe on this website
Re: Tell HN: HN was down
#147Yes, sorry! We're investigating, but my current theory is we got overloaded because I relaxed some of our anti-crawler protections a few days ago. (The reason I did that is that the anti-crawler protections also unfortunately hit some legit users, and we don't want to block legit users. However, it seems that I turned the knobs down too far.) In this case, we also had a secondary failure: PagerDuty woke me up at 5:24…
Looking forward to the post mortem. :)
Re: Tell HN: HN was down
#148[flagged]
You're probably being downvoted today for your "I was smarter than you" tone.
Re: Tell HN: HN was down
#149PSA - if you delete your cookies, HN gets it easier. Or just test it in a private window. It did work without being logged on. The auth service appeared to be down as the log in attempt (just showing the page) failed.
Now it makes sense. I was puzzled about why it was working on the phone browser and not on my system. I'm logged into HN on my system.
Re: Tell HN: HN was down
#150I was fortunate enough to get to watch a bunch of kids racing and bouncing in bouncy castles in our school gym during HN's downtime.
It's not that much different from HN, come to think of it.
(ha, ha)