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Tell HN: HN was down

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Re: Tell HN: HN was down

#331

Post by jrowen »

the_af wrote: post #324
jrowen wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see you're downvoted, it wasn't me. I wasn't making any claim, you're making claims and disparaging remarks that you won't substantiate.

Which disparaging remarks? I just claimed HN is ok/average, not "the smartest place on the internet", and that it's typical of online communities to consider themselves "the best". The unsubstantiated claim that "HN is the smartest place on the internet" is an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence, which wasn't provided. The downvotes only prove my point.

> Of course, by internet law, HN (or a subset of its members) considers itself to be the smartest, more thoughtful online community.

I would call that disparaging.

If we're going to be pedantic, the post you initially quoted said "it's entirely possible" and "it seems likely." That's not a claim, that's a suggestion that invites a substantive counter-argument. Just saying "uh no, it's obviously not" is not substantive.

"It goes without saying HN is not the smartest" is more of a claim.

It really should not be that difficult to actually attempt to make an argument rather than point out that someone else's is probabilistically not totally factually correct. It's just bad faith, pure negation. You're defending the lack of substance in your argument by saying someone else's argument lacked substance. Put something forth yourself.

I'm not just trying to debate here, I am genuinely curious to hear about what other communities people find "smarter and more thoughtful." If they can't even be named then yes I am going to call that empty posturing.

Re: Tell HN: HN was down

#332

Post by locknitpicker »

bayindirh wrote: post #322
locknitpicker wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I have a pretty firm grip on life and touch plenty of grass both literally and figuratively. However, when something I care about crashes and burns once in a blue moon, I make sure to put the fire out, at least to make it survive till regular hours. Things I care about can be both business and personal, and nobody bugs me for them. Maybe we shouldn't make any assumptions about people we don't personally know, while w…

> However, when something I care about crashes and burns once in a blue moon, I make sure to put the fire out, at least to make it survive till regular hours.

You are free what you choose to do with your personal life.

Meanwhile, it is pretty obvious that it's pointless to demand or expect personal sacrifice to maintain unrealistic levels of high-availability in services that are far from critical. I mean, do you honestly believe that these messages you and I are writing are so important to get out that someone must sacrifice their personal time to ensure it is served to the world in this very instant instead of, say, 3 or 6 or 13 hours? Absurd.

Re: Tell HN: HN was down

#333

Post by the_af »

jrowen wrote: post #331
the_af wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which disparaging remarks? I just claimed HN is ok/average, not "the smartest place on the internet", and that it's typical of online communities to consider themselves "the best". The unsubstantiated claim that "HN is the smartest place on the internet" is an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence, which wasn't provided. The downvotes only prove my point.

> Of course, by internet law, HN (or a subset of its members) considers itself to be the smartest, more thoughtful online community. I would call that disparaging. If we're going to be pedantic, the post you initially quoted said "it's entirely possible" and "it seems likely." That's not a claim, that's a suggestion that invites a substantive counter-argument. Just saying "uh no, it's obviously not" is not substantiv…

Well, to be fair the comment that sparked this subtree asserted (maybe in jest? I hope!):

> It's a website with the smartest people in the world. The level of conversations here are unrivaled in internet communities.

Surely that HN is without question NOT the "unrivaled" website "with the smartest people in the world" should feel neither disparaging nor a surprise to you?

By the way, you got me wrong: I'm not really making a probabilistic argument. I genuinely don't think HN is populated by the smartest people on the internet. Nothing I've read here, in many years of being a regular, has led me to believe people here are anything other than average internet nerds/hackers/entrepreneurs. Maybe slightly above average? There's certainly interesting conversation to be had here, but why would I think HN has the smartest people?

> I'm not just trying to debate here, I am genuinely curious to hear about what other communities people find "smarter and more thoughtful." If they can't even be named then yes I am going to call that empty posturing.

I've zero interest in going down the route of exchanging subjective opinions with you about what is or isn't smart, nothing good can come out of it. I will point out many "rationalist" communities do believe themselves to be smarter than HN (do I agree with them? Nope. But that's not the point, is it? The point is that most serious online communities will tend to believe themselves better, and HN is no exception).

I'm sorry you feel this is "empty posturing". Maybe I just don't fit with the smartest people on the internet :(

Re: Tell HN: HN was down

#334

Post by bayindirh »

locknitpicker wrote: post #332
bayindirh wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a pretty firm grip on life and touch plenty of grass both literally and figuratively. However, when something I care about crashes and burns once in a blue moon, I make sure to put the fire out, at least to make it survive till regular hours. Things I care about can be both business and personal, and nobody bugs me for them. Maybe we shouldn't make any assumptions about people we don't personally know, while w…

> However, when something I care about crashes and burns once in a blue moon, I make sure to put the fire out, at least to make it survive till regular hours. You are free what you choose to do with your personal life. Meanwhile, it is pretty obvious that it's pointless to demand or expect personal sacrifice to maintain unrealistic levels of high-availability in services that are far from critical. I mean, do you hon…

It looks like I failed to convey what I've tried to say in the first comment. Let me reiterate one more time.

    - I believe dang sees HN as his baby, so *voluntarily* monitors it as a critical infrastructure *for him*.
    - I personally like this kind of commitment from people who like their job, however *I don't expect or demand it in any way*.
    - I also hope that attention doesn't affect his life. *Especially negatively and/or in a crippling way*.
I don't care whether this site is down for 6 seconds or 6 hours. I just wanted to commend him for liking what he's doing this much. I demand nothing from any service provider I use. Let it be a small, one person operation or dang or Amazon/Google.

I also keep servers up in my daily job, and some are more important than others, but none of them requires me to wake up 5AM to solve a problem (by design). So I don't demand anything from others something which I won't do.

As long as nobody is dying, nobody should stop, drop, and work on something else regardless of time, date and location.

Re: Tell HN: HN was down

#335

Post by collinmanderson »

dang wrote: post #259
bicepjai wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even after providing firebase endpoint, crawlers come to the site ?

Oh my god. It's the crawlopalypse.

Yes. It's hard to explain the experience of hosting a website since 2023.

A crazy amount of really dumb bots loading every url on the website in a full headless browser, with default Chrome user-agent string. All different ip addresses, various countries and ASNs.

These crawlers are completely automated and simply crawl _everything_ and don't care at all if there's value in what they're crawling or if there's duplicate content, etc.

There's no attempt at efficiency, just blindly crawl the entire internet 24/7. Every page load (1 per second or more?) is from a different ip address.

Re: Tell HN: HN was down

#337

Post by mgarciaisaia »

1shooner wrote: post #103
manbitesdog wrote: post #7

TIL I have a "open Hacker News" hand reflex

If you're looking to put the brakes on that, I've used LeechBlock to add a 5-second timer to opening a new HN window (along with other block schedules). The timer even fails if it loses focus, so it really helps slow you down. https://www.proginosko.com/leechblock/

I've made https://deja.de.hueve.ar/hn so it snapshots the frontpage once per day - that way, I now there won't be new updates during the rest of the day, and the dopamine addiction goes down.

Re: Tell HN: HN was down

#338

Post by dang »

locknitpicker wrote: post #317
bayindirh wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you like the thing you're managing, then its health is critical for you , not your users. It's dang's baby at this point, and this is a good thing, as long as HN doesn't affect his life in ways he doesn't want.

[flagged]

Aw, please don't cross into personal attack. You can make your substantive points without that.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: it looks like you've been breaking the site guidelines quite a bit, unfortunately. Could you please not do that? We end up banning accounts that keep doing it and I don't want to ban you.

Re: Tell HN: HN was down

#339

Post by dang »

ilamont wrote: post #216
alwa wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can’t put my finger on anything within the last decade, but I seem to recall it running in something close to its current form on a single core on a single server for a long time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5229522 Re: traffic, dang said (2022): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33454140 I took it as a good reminder that the hard part is the human part: that high-overhead features and UI fripperies are…

From dang's 2022 comment about traffic: The most interesting number is the 1300 submissions because that hasn't grown since 2011 - it just fluctuates. Everything else has been growing more or less linearly for a long time, which is how we like it. I find that surprising, as 2011-2022 covers an exponential rise in SEO spam and "growth hackers" attempting to drive traffic and links. Or was 1,300 the number of non-flagg…

Nope, total submissions. And it's still very much within that same window!

Re: Tell HN: HN was down

#340

Post by dang »

rldjbpin wrote: post #320
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…

> 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. it is a shame that it needs to be this way. as a lurker who doesn't stay logged in nor use incognito mode, i have seen "Sorry" page way too often, even when opening the "past" page from the homepage. truly hope you find a solution that reduces friction for all. personally, it i…

Yes, and I'm sorry. We do our best but it's both a hard problem and a moving target.
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