Tell HN: HN was down • Hacker News Board

Re: Tell HN: HN was down

#341

Post by dang » Fri, Dec 19, 2025, 4:27 AM UTC

QuantumNomad_ wrote: post #289

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 anti-crawler protections also unfortunately hit some legit users, and we don't want to block legit users Was the blocking returning “Sorry.” instead of any page content? A couple of days ago there was a few hours where when I’d go to HN I could load the main page as a non-logged in user. But if I tried to log in I would get “Sorry.” instead. I also got the sorry message if I tried to click on user profiles of o…

> Was the blocking returning “Sorry.”

> Presumably after those anti-crawler protections had been relaxed again

Yup and yup. Apologies for the inconvenience! If it happens again you're welcome to email us at hn@ycombinator.com with your IP and we'll unblock it for you.

Re: Tell HN: HN was down

#342

Post by andy_ppp » Fri, Dec 19, 2025, 5:55 AM UTC

tempest_ wrote: post #214

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…

The other reality is that as much as this industry is up its ass about scalability you can run a very very busy site on a single machine now a days. A lot of people out here designing their blogs like its 1989.

This is completely wrong, everyone knows you should rewrite everything in microservices immediately :-D

Re: Tell HN: HN was down

#343

Post by jacquesm » Sat, Dec 20, 2025, 4:13 AM UTC

spacechild1 wrote: post #326

jacquesm wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We pay with content and with the fact that we attract the talent that eventually ends up powering ycombinator investment rounds.

Actually, I'm doing my best alienating these kind of people :p

Good for you!