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Tell HN: HN was down

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Re: Tell HN: HN was down

#261

Post by dang »

8cvor6j844qw_d6 wrote: post #245
dang wrote: post #144

Yes, 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…

> anti-crawler protections Sometimes I could not open the comment section, receiving a blank page with "... We're sorry" or something along these lines when opening from new private window. It works when opening normally. Logging in on the private window seems to resolve the issue. Can you take a look on this if possible?

Best to email your IP address to hn@ycombinator.com so we can see if it's blocked.

Re: Tell HN: HN was down

#262

Post by krapp »

chistev wrote: post #58
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #39

Earlier 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.

Any professional forum or technical subreddit with good moderation and gatekeeping blows Hacker News out of the water any day of the week.

Re: Tell HN: HN was down

#263

Post by dang »

maxloh wrote: post #235
dang wrote: post #144

Yes, 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…

Frankly, I don't understand why someone would even try to crawl Hacker News. There is an official dump which doesn't even require parsing HTML at all: https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/details/y-combi...

These are not, er, experienced crawlers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sbpl3ywNlpA#t=56s

Re: Tell HN: HN was down

#264

Post by wiredpancake »

dylan604 wrote: post #93
liampulles wrote: post #86

Smart. Have to use that error budget before year end...

I always hated the late use-it-or-loose-it at the end of the year where you end up buying the things that were denied requests from earlier in the year. You just cost me half a year of using the damn thing.

This problem is really bad at my work.

We commonly run into finance issues about half way through the year. We get to the point where 10x HDMI cables get declined from Finance and we get reprimanded for not tracking where each HDMI or Ethernet Cable go. Near to the end of the year, the budget refreshes and finance (without consultation to us) ends up buying a bunch of random stuff.

"Guys, we brought 11 iPad Minis that need to be setup"

Oh so we can also get the HDMI cables now?

"No sorry, we just spent all the remaining money, have you audited the cables recently?"

Re: Tell HN: HN was down

#266

Post by ErroneousBosh »

kunwon1 wrote: post #225
idontwantthis wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you carry a literal pager? We use the PagerDuty app.

It may interest you to know that pagers are still a thing, Motorola still makes them, and I know that one major use case is volunteer fire departments I used to work on Motorola Minitor 5 pagers. Looks like they recently released their newest model, the Minitor 7 I wonder if pagers are still used in hospitals? I imagine so

There's a company in England called "Cascode" who make firefighter alerters. These are really basic "beeper" pagers, which you can program to have a bunch of different tones and LED patterns based on the RIC and Subcode.

I look after several thousand of these across several hundred paging sites.

They're relatively inexpensive (70 quid or so in quantity) and they last about six weeks on a commonly-available AA battery. The batteries go flat enough to trigger the "low battery" beep at about 3am, for some reason. I don't know why.

There's no messaging involved, although the encoders are capable of sending a text string. The message is "get up and get down to the fire station right now", which generally needs no further explanation. POCSAG is unencrypted, so there would be privacy concerns with sending actual incident information in the clear with it.

While we're on the subject of old tech, until BT finally cut the last of them off, we use dialup modems to control the encoders (not dialup internet, just a hundreds-of-miles serial cable) as a backup, and dot-matrix printers to print out a hardcopy message for the crews to pick up.

All very low-tech. All very fixable. All stays working if you don't mess with it.

https://cascode.co.uk/products/2ar2-and-2ar3/

Re: Tell HN: HN was down

#267

Post by Rendello »

Elfener wrote: post #74

I 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

Funny, I don't seem to need an outage to get stuck in a HN loop...

Re: Tell HN: HN was down

#268

Post by ErroneousBosh »

Elfener wrote: post #74

I 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

Not just me then?

"Shit, HN is down! Hm, I wonder if there's anything about it on HN?"

until stack overflow occurs.

Re: Tell HN: HN was down

#269

Post by darkwater »

geocrasher wrote: post #215
idontwantthis wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you carry a literal pager? We use the PagerDuty app.

My organization is, for now, using OpsGenie. My pager noise: https://www.soundjay.com/transportation/sounds/train-crossin... That will not only wake the dead, it'll wake me no matter how asleep I am.

The "for now" is very important because it will be sunset in 1 year and something. I can recommend you Incident.io or Rootly as alternatives.
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