HN is up again | Hacker News Reader

HN is up again

1,010 pointstpmx366 comments

I don't think I had ever fully internalized how often I open this site throughout the day. Finish a task? HN. Got frustrated/stuck on a problem? HN break. Waiting for something to install/upload/compile/etc? HN.

Needless to say I opened a new tab, typed "n", and hit enter countless times today before my brain caught up with my muscle memory.

Yep. Same. It says a lot about the quality of HN, I think. Also, I can't remember the last time it was down. For a while, I thought there must be something wrong with my internet connection or DNS config or something.

Habitual usage doesn't necessarily correlate to quality, I'd say. People who use Facebook/Twitter also have this sort of muscle reflex developed over time.

That said, HN does have quality content and the signal/noise is way better than sites designed specifically to keep you addicted.

It might not correlate to quality, but if the information found at a website wasn't valued we wouldn't be constantly pulling the site up, just like facebook users do.

I'd argue that this site has a good signal/noise ratio by design and specifically to keep you addicted (where "addicted" means using and constantly returning to the site). This site is just designed to attract people who are put off by the kinds of tricks employed elsewhere

I think they meant quality from a hardware and ops perspective.

Indeed. I find that it's so reliable and fast that I use it to check my internet connection. If I can't hit HN, then something's wrong on my end.

I assumed at first there was a problem with my mobile data connection, before I realized it was actually HN :)

Same here. I thought the my internet was down or I was too far from the router. HN being down was my last thought.

I use example.com for that purpose :p

Might have tried to curl it from a production system just to make sure it wasn't my internet.

I understood this reference.

> For a while, I thought there must be something wrong with my internet connection or DNS config or something.

Definitely thought the same. Then I realized that I'm browsing trough work VPN and had a second thought: what if our admins decided to fight procrastination?

Haha. A building of ours in Canada lost internet at the same time.

When I saw hn was down, I double-checked the news to see if a major part of the internet had gone down.

I bet thousands of people checked their network and DNS settings today. hn is what I use to make sure I have a connection

Same here, it used to be google but at some point it still just starting loading with no internet connection.

Me too! I was, shamefully, in the middle of work so had a mini panic thinking my 5 min HN scroll was gonna become an hour long battle with my connection!

> Needless to say I opened a new tab, typed "n", and hit enter countless times today before my brain caught up with my muscle memory.

I do this too, and it's because this site is an addictive slot machine just like every other social networking site. I actually really hate this website, but I'm here almost every day, because I can't seem to break the habit. Neat. It's probably because I have a common impulse control / executive functioning disorder, and the way the front page works exploits some bug in my brain.

Reddit does this to me too. I also hate Reddit.

If it helps, I wouldn't say it's a disorder since it appears that basically everyone has a habit like this. It's probably a byproduct of some kind of adaptive advantage, but I don't have it in me to speculate exactly what at the moment. The only variable is what exactly you do automatically. Nowadays, everyone has their app or web page. Before smartphones and the internet being available everywhere, I remember my mentor talking about quitting cigarettes. This was shortly after the non-smoking section of the restaurant became the whole restaurant. She said that part of why it was so hard to quit was that even when she meant to cut back, she'd still find herself a third of the way through a cigarette before she realized that she'd lit one. I tear at the skin next to my fingernails in addition to opening HN (which was what I switched to when it became painfully obvious that Reddit was both bad for me and run by bad people). I moved my ebook app to the first screen on my phone and moved this app to a spot where I wasn't used to finding it. I figured it might get me to read more. What actually happened is that I started absent-mindedly swiping to the second screen and opening up the app.

It's a pretty universal issue. Companies are just getting better at using it to their advantage.

Try turning on noprocrast in your hn settings

I really love HN but I too feel like it's an addiction/slot machine.

My solution: a 3-hour focus mode browser extension.

1. Install the BlockSite chrome extension [1]. 2. In BlockSite settings, add HN, Twitter, and any other distracting sites to the Focus Mode list and set Focus Mode time to 3 hours. 3. Ensure you uninstall all social media apps from your phone 4. When I find myself opening a new tab and typing "n" to get a dopamine hit, I then turn on my 3-hour focus mode.

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/blocksite-block-we...

Others have mentioned browser add-ons / DNS providers who can limit/blacklist sites. Maybe try one of those? The thing that's worked best for me though is leaving my phone in another room for a while or taking a walk without it.

i got addiction problems and this is the only website that's healthy for me. there's no endless scroll if you just visit the "news" and don't go to the "newest" page. i like how it's intentional to go to the next page. i usually only click through like ~5 pages at most, and once i've visited ~10-20 times in a day, most all the content is stale. it's also been helpful for me to set the procrastination limits. so many times i'll visit and can't scroll and just move on.

with that said, the comments are the most addictive part of this site.

> I actually really hate this website

Why hate this site? Because it contains interesting/useful content often enough to make you come back? That'd be a weird reason to hate the site. I too have a common impulse control/executive functioning disorder, but I don't hate the things that it makes me vulnerable to. If I were feeling resentful, I'd have to put the blame on my condition.

I don't have to ask why you hate reddit, the valid reasons for hating reddit are myriad

I ended up just DNS blocking it on my work computer. Now I just spend a lot more time on my phone though :/

I was in almost the exact same position all day. What made it worse though was the fact that this happened right in the middle of my attempts at curbing my browsing habits. Once my app timers for Reddit is Fun, Instagram, and Twitter were up, it was time for HN... except there was no HN. What that meant is that I was reaching for a stimulus and then not getting it, the same way that an alcoholic wouldn't feel satisfied by, say, a can of soda. It was weird to experience, but very enlightening. It both made me realize how subconsciously my addiction is reinforced and reaffirmed to me that it is, in fact, an addiction. I'm not going to stop using HN of course, but I'm definitely going to be more aware of how I use it (e.g. passively vs. intentionally) from now on.

As far as addictions go, I find HN actually one that delivers actual knowledge. Literally every day I read something I didn't know before. Unlike on Facebook that just tries to serve me with more of the stuff I have already seen.

I like wasting time on HN because it's time not actually wasted :)

And don't get me started on Twitter... Sure there are some gems on twitter but I have to wade through 1000s of tweets of pure nonsense to see them. No thanks. If it's something really great someone will post a link on HN anyway :)

I find it valuable in moderation but some days I spend way too much time on it; past the point of diminishing returns. There's also an opportunity cost of what I could be doing with a lot of the time, which often would leave me feeling better than mindless HN reading.

I picked a bad day to stop using Twitter.

I realised this today too. I imagine pretty much all of us are the same!

I legitimately thought my internet was down for thirty minutes until I decided to try google.

Same. HN is how I check my internet connection is working. Took me a while to realize the problem wasn't my connection...

I reference back to it for a lot of info too, which I guess I should probably load more of into my own notes database. But still today there were a bunch of saved comments I wanted to re-read as reference multiple times, definitely noticeable to miss it. Or alternatively if I'd grabbed the URLs for everything I'm assuming the wayback machine probably archives this pretty well. Perils of depending on the HNcloud service :).

That used to happen to me with Slashdot too. I'm so happy that today I didn't even realize HN was down, I think I tried once, it didn't load and went do something else, I assumed it was some local DNS or internet issue.

Makes you appreciate the noprocrast mode feature.

Tried it once, never again!

I've been meaning to try that feature. Will probably check it out next week.

I set the delay to 1 minute: Short enough that I can wait if I really need to read a thread, but long enough to nudge me back to my primary task if I’m just browsing.

Yeah the delirium tremens are rough.

CTRL-SHIFT-n (or -p) -> n -> ENTER

Ah the elusive PorN method

Doesn't help users who are usually not logged in.

... I might have been more productive than usual today.

This happened last couple of times I switched laptops - my old habit to visit "guardian.co.uk" by typing "guar" and hitting enter no longer works because I've now accidentally searched too many times for "guar" :D

You can make the omnibox forget about URLs and search terms you've used a lot by selecting them with the down key then pressing Shift+Delete (https://superuser.com/a/189334).

Note that that doesn’t seem to work if you have a bookmark with that content (as it seems to find the bookmark, which is reasonable behavior but caught me out when I was trying to change the URL to an internal tool and didn’t realize why it wasn’t working to delete the auto-complete).

Nice, doesn't seem to work on firefox though, guess it's chrome only?

Wow, I've never realized just how often I do this. There's some sort of a reward pathway in my brain connecting my right index finger to seeing that orange bar and lines of text.

Ohh... I thought my phone was just being weird because I use an AdBlock that works through VPN and it sometimes breaks stuff...

HN is where I get the bulk of my news and information about current thinking. I visit maybe several dozen times a day.

Yeah. HN has become an important part of my workflow. Glad to know I'm not the only one!

went out of my way to leave lurk mode and log in just so I could say "100% same experience for me"

Same experience through out the day.

noprocrast exists for a reason :)

Does it work even when you're logged out?

Even if it did. Second browser will help with the urge. But it can help anyway. Some people just need the reminder.

Amen.

HN was down because the failover server also failed: https://twitter.com/HNStatus/status/1545409429113229312

Double disk failure is improbable but not impossible.

The most impressive thing is that there seems to be no dataloss, almost whatsoever. Whatever the backup system is, it seems rock solid.

> Double disk failure is improbable but not impossible.

It's not even improbable if the disks are the same kind purchased at the same time.

I once had a small fleet of SSDs fail because they had some uptime counters that overflowed after 4.5 years, and that somehow persistently wrecked some internal data structures. It turned them into little, unrecoverable bricks.

It was not awesome seeing a bunch of servers go dark in just about the order we had originally powered them on. Not a fun day at all.

You are never going to guess how long the HN SSDs were in the servers... never ever... OK... I'll tell you: 4.5years. I am not even kidding.

I had a similar issue, but it was a single RAID-5 array and wear of some other manufacture defect. They were the same brand, model, and batch. When the first failed and the array got in recovery mode I ordered 3 replacements and upped the backup frequency. It was good that I did that because the two remaining drives died shortly after.

The lesson I learned is that the three replacements went to different arrays and we never again let drives from the same batch be part of the same array.

There's a principle in aviation of staggering engine maintenance on multiple-engined airplanes to avoid maintenance-induced errors leading to complete power loss.

e.g. Simultaneous Engine Maintenance Increases Operating Risks, Aviation Mechanics Bulletin, September–October 1999 https://flightsafety.org/amb/amb_sept_oct99.pdf

Yep: if you buy a pair disks together, there's a fair chance they'll both be from the same manufacturing batch, which correlates with disk defects.

Yeah just coming here to say this. Multiple disk failures are pretty probable. I've had batches of both disks and SSDs with sequential serial numbers, subjected to the same workloads, all fail within the same ~24 hour periods.

This makes total sense but I've never heard of it. Is there any literature or writing about this phenomenon?

I guess proper redundancy is having different brands of equipment also in some cases.

This is why I try to mismatch manufacturers in RAID arrays. I'm told there is a small performance hit (things run towards the speed of the slowest, separately in terms of latency and throughput) but I doubt the difference is high and I like the reduction in potential failure-during-rebuild rates. Of course I have off-machine and off-site backups as well as RAID, but having to use them to restore a large array would be a greater inconvenience than just being able to restore the array (followed by checksum verifies over the whole lot for paranoia's sake).

Eek - now I'm glad I wait a few months before buying each disk for my NAS.

Not doing it for this reason but rather financial ones :) But as I have a totally mixed bunch of sizes I have no RAID and a disk loss would be horrible.

That's why serious SAN vendors take care to provide you a mix of disks (e.g. on a brand new NetApp you can see that disks are of 2-3 different types, and with quite different serial numbers).

Or even if the power supplies were purchased around the same time. I had a batch of servers that as soon as they arrived started chewing through hard drives. It took about 10 failed drives before I realized it was a problem with the power supplies.

I learned this principle by getting a ticket for a burnt out headlight 1 week after I replaced the other one.

Anyone familiar with car repair will tell you that if one headlight burns out you should just go ahead and replace both, because of this exact phenomenon. I suppose with LEDs we may not have to worry about it anymore

Even if they're not the same, they're written at the same time and rate, meaning they have the same wear over time, subject to the same power/heat issues, etc.

Hopefully, regularly checking the disks' S.M.A.R.T status will help you stay on top of issues caused by those factors.

Also, you shouldn't wait for disks to fail to replace them. HN's disks were used for 4.5 years, which is greater than the typical disk lifetime, in my experience. They should have replaced them sooner, one by one, in anticipation of failure. This would also allow them to stagger their disk purchases to avoid similar manufacturing dates.

> Double disk failure is improbable but not impossible.

It's actually surprisingly common for failover hardware to fail shortly after the primary hardware. It's normally been exposed to similar conditions to what killed the primary and the strain of failing over pushes it over the edge.

Isn't that more for load balancing than failover?

For load balancing I would consider this very likely because both are equally loaded. But "failover" I would usually consider a scenario where a second server is purely in wait for the primary to fail, in which case it would be virtually unused. Like an active/passive scenario as someone mentioned below.

But perhaps I got my terminology mixed up. I'm not working with servers so much anymore.

If it's active/active failover then they get the same wear, if it's active/passive most of the components don't, but the storage might. Then again if it's active/passive, flaws can "hibernate" and get triggered exactly when failing over.

You know how they say to always test your backups? Always test your failover too.

>the failover server also failed

Those responsible for the sacking have also been sacked.

According to this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32024485

each server has a pair of mirrored disks, so it seems we're talking about 4 drives failing, not just 2.

On the other hand the primary seems to have gone down 6 hours before the backup server did, so the failures weren't quite simultaneous.

> so it seems we're talking about 4 drives failing, not just 2.

Yes—I'm a bit unclear on what happened there, but that does seem to be the case.

If you have an active/passive HA setup and don't test it periodically (by taking the active server offline and switching them afterwards), my guess is that double disk failures will be more common than single disk failures for you.

Still, I see no reason for prioritizing that failure mode on a site like HN.

Depends on your vendor as well.

A long time ago we had a Dell server which was pre setup raid from Dell (don't ask, I didn't order it). Eventually one disk on this server died, what sucked was that the second disk in the raid array also failed only a few minutes later. We had to restore from backup which sucked but to our surprise when we opened the Dell server the two disks had sequential serial numbers. They came from the same batch at the same time. Not a good thing to do when you sell people pre configured raid systems at a mark up...

By second disk failure do they mean that the disks on both the primary and fallback servers failed? Or do they mean that two disks (of a RAID1 or similar setup) in the fallback server failed?

The latter is understandable, the former would be quite a surprise for such a popular site. That means that the machines have no disk redundancy and the server is going down immediately on disk failure. The fallback server would be the only backup.

14 hours ago HN failed over to the standby due to a disk failure on the primary. 8 hours ago the standby's disk also failed.

Primary failure: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32024036 Standby failure: https://twitter.com/HNStatus/status/1545409429113229312

The disks on both the primary and fallback servers definitely failed. Each was in a RAID setup, but those failed too in both cases.

Ouch! I'm assuming the disks were from the same batch and installed at the same time, but having at least four fail like that is just crazy unlucky.

What was the test to determine the dataloss?

Informal. My last upvote was pretty close to when HN went down, so I expected my karma to go down, but it didn't.

Also I remember the "Why we're going with Rails" story on the front page from before it went down.

I came to the same conclusion by observing that there are posts and comments from only eight hours ago.

So that means dataloss.. Probably restored from backup.

Good news for people who were banned, or for posts that didn't get enough momentum :)

edit: Was restored from backup.. so def. dataloss

I'm extremely curious about the makes & models of the failed hardware...

> Double disk failure is improbable but not impossible.

Were they connected on the same power supply? I had 4 different disks fail at the same time before, but they were all in the same PC... (lightning)

They were in two mirrors, each mirror in a different server. Each server in different racks in the same row. The servers were on different power circuits from different panels.

CP => !A

is dang pushing changes and such on his own?

sounds like it is run by one guy

I push changes on my own all the time, but the work of getting HN running again today was overwhelmingly done by my brilliant colleague mthurman.

What makes you think that? That's just a tweet from an unrelated account.

Nevermind, I thought the OP ran that twitter account

HN will be around a hundred years. I think it's more than just a forum. We've seen lots of people coordinate during disasters, for example. Dan and his team do a good job running it. (I'm not a part of it.)

EDIT: My response was based on some edits that are now removed.

You are overstimating HN way too much.

theres two people fulltime on it but dang appears to be both DBA and SRE

And Mod; hope he gets three cheques

Everyone, you're welcome. My last F5 must've jogged it loose finally.

You can't fool us, we know you're an F7.

Thank you for your service.

A refreshing take!

Thank you

007

are you wearing a cape, or are you not?

Name almost checks out

This downtime made me realize (again) how much I appreciate the kind of interesting topics that show up here, the depth of discussion, and a general attitude of good faith that (most) engage with here.

I realized how little of this I find elsewhere in my life - whether through Reddit or even my IRL friend circles.

This realization saddens me - I feel like I shouldn’t have to rely on HN so much to scratch this particular itch.

Perhaps I need to get out more.

> This realization saddens me - I feel like I shouldn’t have to rely on HN so much to scratch this particular itch.

> Perhaps I need to get out more.

Another way to look at it is that you have a particular set of interests and HN is the online outlet that serves those interests. There's nothing wrong with that, at all and you don't need to have multiple sources for it. No different than someone who likes to ride bikes owning one bike, or someone who likes to read going to the same local library every week for 10 years.

I think that’s fair. Aside from the topics though I think the key is “meaningful discourse”.

I think I’m just realizing I need to find that in more places, regardless of topic focus.

It is very different from your examples. Even if you only own one bike, there are innumerable others in existence and companies making new ones every day, if yours is destroyed or lost. Similarly, there are plenty of local libraries to choose from, even if your favorite one closes.

Whereas, if HN closes, there is no equivalent replacement available.

What I am saying is that you don't need to worry about any of that. Sure, if HN permanently shutters - you'll need to go find a replacement. But HN isn't going anywhere, as far as I am aware. You don't need redundancy for your online community/content consumption

Enjoy it while it's here. When it's gone or you have to move on, we'll miss you too and that's the meaningful part of life.

The beautiful part of the internet is that it provides space for people to share incredibly niche interests. For all of its problems and complications, that beauty still exists.

I don't know about this "going out", but a few other useful websites like this one would be nice. It really does seem bad to not have a couple alternatives on hand.

I've been wanting to create something similar but for cryptocurrencies. A place with no scam/bullshit posts and only deeply technical discussions about the latest trends in zero-knowledge proofs, consensus protocols, scalability challenges, etc.

But I'm too lazy to write the application. I wish there was some SDK I could spin up, like PHPBB back in the days, to have something exactly like HN.

Quality, non-biased news sources are (surprisingly) difficult to find.

Danger: that is decidedly not what HN is, at all.

Thank you Dang!!

____________

https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th...

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dang

Will you be posting a postmortem?

Not that I deserve or expect one from a free service, but because I enjoy reading postmortems from failures where both the primary and backup systems failed, I like to see what holes I might have in my own failover setup.

The postmortem is sort of dissolved into the bloodstream of these threads:

Tell HN: HN Moved from M5 to AWS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32030400 - July 2022 (116 comments)

Ask HN: What'd you do while HN was down? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32026639 - July 2022 (218 comments)

HN is up again - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32026571 - July 2022 (314 comments)

I'd particularly look here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32026606 and here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32031025.

If you scroll through my comments from today via https://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=dang&next=32039936, there are additional details. (Sorry for recommending my own comments.)

If you (or anyone) skim through that stuff and have a question that isn't answered there, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.

Appears HN is currently on AWS:

https://check-host.net/ip-info?host=https://news.ycombinator...

http://50.112.136.166/

https://search.arin.net/rdap/?query=50.112.136.166

Note: HN has been on M5 hosting for years and they were still there as of 16-hours ago per Dang:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32024105

During the outage, listed places to check HN related systems, posted them here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32029014

My routine is usually to check HN first thing in the morning when sitting down at my computer before work.

I definitely spent a non-reasonable amount of time thinking my internet had a problem trying to open HN since it's always just been so constant.

While the naysayers will say, "Why isn't this in the cloud?," I think the response times and uptime of hackernews is really impressive. If anyone has a write-up of the infrastructure that runs HN, I would be interested. Maybe startups really can be run off of a rasberry pi

AWS has had more outages than HN in recent times

Brief AWS outages were limited to us-east-1 where they appear to deploy canary builds and I think they quickly learned from those missteps. OTOH I receive almost weekly emails on my oracle cloud instance connectivity being down. I don’t even understand who their customers are that can tolerate frequent outage

Edit - HN is on AWS now. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32026571

AWS also operates at a significantly larger scale. When was the last AWS outage due to two critical disks failing at the same time?

Failures due to increasing complexity are still failures.

Sure, but you're talking about all of AWS as if every customer is impacted when any part of AWS suffers a failure. But that's not the case, which makes it quite an apples/oranges comparison.

But even comparing the apples to the oranges, this HN status page someone else pointed out https://hn.hund.io/ seems to show that HN has had more than one outage in just the past month. All but today's and last night's being quite short, but still. Sometimes you need some extra complexity if you want to make it to zero downtime overall.

That's not something the HN website needs but I think AWS is doing fine even if that's your point of comparison.

Agree. Same with places like github.

It seems like it is in the cloud (AWS) now. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32027091.

I made the comment that some of our web portals could run off of a raspberry pi perfectly fine, and I wasn’t necessarily suggesting we go do that, but merely trying to get the point across that we don’t need 700 interweaved AWS systems to do what a single host with Apache + Postgres has been doing fine for years.

If I was (re)designing this, I would keep the existing bare metal server but I would also put in place double (or triple) cloud redundancy/failover. We all love HN so much that it should have zero downtime :-)

HN was down for hours, no website hosted properly using cloud providers is down for more than a few minutes a year. It's trivial to set up multiple providers, multiple regions. Rather than having a few servers with some admin guy swapping out disks, really embarrassing for a so called tech site.

Hope you get a refund

I’d love to learn more about HN hardware & software stack.

I know old posts indicate it’s running on a low core count but high frequency Intel CPUs on FreeBSD and no database (just flat files).

I wonder if it’s still the same.

Ah, that's easy.

HN is running on an old laptop from Viaweb.

Arc is running under the pg user and it's used as the process supervisor.

The actual web server is a VB app running on Linux through Wine.

The flat files have been migrated to an MS Access DB, also running through Wine.

My employer is taking notes.

Even IBM is leaving Notes.

Thanks for all the daily work in running and keeping up the site, which we too easily take for granted, even those of us with similar jobs.

Even accounting for this outage, most other SAAS platforms still can't compete with HN's non-existent SLA.

Thank you to everyone who keeps this thing running.

> Even accounting for this outage, most other SAAS platforms still can't compete with HN's non-existent SLA.

8 hours of downtime in a given year is 99.9%, so only three nines. The major SaaS platforms all are basically at least as resilient as this, and most have more stringent SLAs.

Most SaaS platforms don't really measure it. They just "do their best".

Plus, it's hard to quantify many cases because there is hard-down and soft-down (partial interruptions).

The last post[1] before this one was posted at 12:45:10 UTC. This current post was made at 20:30:55 UTC, so that's a gap of 7 hours 45 minutes and 45 seconds.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32026548

There's this comment which is newer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32026565. There's also comments on some test submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32026568 that itself got deleted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32026567

HN is so reliable that I distrusted my wife first.

"Did you unplug the router?"

Whenever I get frustrated by cloud complexity I wonder if its all worth it, as HN, stackoverflow, camelx3 etc are still on real servers. Maybe it is worth it after all.

I've wondered about this a lot recently as I've spent a lot of time recently fighting with Terraform, Atlantis, CircleCI, github and AWS. The first half of my career was deploying code to various UNIX machines. When there was a problem I could login to that machine and use various (common) tools to diagnose the issue. I may not have had root but I was at least able to gain insight into what was likely the culprit. The interface was immediate and allowed quick iteration to test out a solution.

It feels like we've lost a lot of that observability and immediacy with the cloud. It's not as easy to quickly understand the larger picture. You can understand the state of various services with the web console or command line tools but tracing a path through those services is much less obvious and efficient.

I'm kind of nervous to even discuss this as I wonder if it's just my age showing, especially since I see very people mention this as one of the downsides of various cloud solutions. Maybe I'm just jaded?

Oh my goodness yes. I had the "great" idea to use Azure Functions to do a task at work. It's **ing insane how difficult it is to specify an Azure Function all in code with reasonable CI/CD, AD permissions, logging, and dev/prod instances. I wrote about what it takes at https://www.bbkane.com/blog/azure-functions-with-terraform/ but the experience really soured me on cloud services.

Is this... a deliberate attempt at constructing a Rube Goldberg machine?

In all seriousness, at least 2/3rds of the complexity is because of your choice of tools and approach. Terraform alone makes things significantly more complex. If you just want to trigger a deployment, then a Template Spec made from a Bicep file could be banged out in like... an hour.[1]

When in Rome, do as the Romans do. You basically took a Microsoft product and tried to automate it with a bunch of Linux-native tools. Why would you think this would be smooth and efficient?

Have you ever tried automating Linux with VB Script? This is almost the same thing.

[1] Someone had a similar example here using Logic Apps and a Template Spec: https://cloudjourney.medium.com/azure-template-spec-and-logi...

> Is this... a deliberate attempt at constructing a Rube Goldberg machine?

> I normally bill for cloud automation advice, but the gist is

Can you please omit supercilious swipes from your comments here? Everybody knows different things. If you know more than someone else about $thing, that's great—but please don't put them down for it. That's not in the spirit of kindness and curious conversation that we're hoping for here.

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

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

jiggawatts, this is an honest attempt. I'd LOVE it if there's an easier way I somehow missed.

And talk is cheap. I dare you to write a blog post or make a public GitHub repo doing the equivalent work (see Goals section) with your own tools. If you can, I'll be super impressed (not that my admiration is worth anything ).

One thing you'll run into is that AD roles and other authn aren't accessible via ARM templates/Bicep

Lol, same boat. Not sure if I'm the old wise guy who really knows his sh*t about what's important, or the old useless guy rambling and moaning in the corner.

Interesting though, HN is now hosted on AWS and no longer on bare metal (m5 hosting).

% host news.ycombinator.com

news.ycombinator.com has address 50.112.136.166

and also interesting: DNS TTL is set to 1 (one).

Oh that is interesting, I guess they just spun up a beefy EC2 instance. I'm noticing slower performance, I used to get about <200ms for front page. Now it's 500ms-1s? Or is this placebo with my bias to thinking AWS is slow?

    NetRange:       50.112.0.0 - 50.112.255.255
    CIDR:           50.112.0.0/16
    NetName:        AMAZON-EC2-USWESTOR
    NetHandle:      NET-50-112-0-0-1
    Parent:         NET50 (NET-50-0-0-0-0)
    NetType:        Direct Allocation
    OriginAS:       AS14618
    Organization:   Amazon.com, Inc. (AMAZO-47)

I hope it's temporary. Would hate HN to move to the "cloud" from bare metal.

This, totally.

It's great that they were able to spin it up in the cloud for recovery purposes. But it's more legendary on a real server <3

Yes I'm old :P

Us too.

Went to Reddit instead today more than I should (not proud).

Anyone been on Slashdot lately? Checked it out too was really nice.

I used to spend a lot of time there in the 2000s, but when they changed the site's layout and it suddenly needed a bunch of JS I stopped going. Maybe I'll give it a shot again though... the outage made me think I need more options.

Slashdot is a slurry of Reddit and HN. My goto when bored with reddit and hn...

And all those poor project managers at the end of 2022 wondering what on earth they did right on the 8th of July that caused productivity to reach previously unthinkable heights.

Previous post on the HN status twitter account is from June 2021.

Over a year with no issues. Impressive.

https://twitter.com/HNStatus

Twitter doesn't bother with minor issues, but there were some for sure.

This logs lesser ones: https://hn.hund.io/

Spent so long debugging my home network..

Couldn't possibly have been HN that was the problem haha

I always use https://isup.me (https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/) in these situations, to find out if I'm losing my mind. :)

Same, I ended up updating my pihole which was long overdue. Just finished, loaded up HN and it worked - "huh, wonder what the problem was with my pihole" I thought ... well it needed doing anyway.

All sites broke on my machine this morning.

I reset the router... and HN was still down.

<sniff>

I was wondering if HN was running on Rogers

Same here. HN is from Canada? Who knew?

Thank you HN admins for bringing the site back online with everything restored from backup. Thank you also for the 99.99% of the time that HN just runs and runs without issue.

That was a rough 6 hours

I went for a long walk. When I came back, HN was still down. :(

It really was.

Yeah, I had to _actually work_ for once. Glad that I can finally distract myself again :)

Someone suggested lobste.rs, which I hadn't come across before. It needs an invite though so read-only today for me.

Echoing lots of comments here, HN being down is a real bummer to my day. I feel less informed, less engaged, and frankly bored without it in my life.

True appreciation to the team who works to keep it up, high-quality, and impactful.

Just installed a new router and was trying to browse HN to check if my internet connection was working properly, lol

How many times did people refresh to check this today? I did at least four times. I might have a bit of a problem.

What? I refreshed way more than 4 times before I believed it was offline.

At the early 00's, when Google went offline I wouldn't believe it, and go check my connection (even if I was fetching other sites at the same time). Looks like nowadays HN is in that place.

like 40 times. Probably more.

My RSS app refreshes every hour.

Ong i couldnt stand being that productive so relieved

Clearly a correlation between 2 hard drives failing at HN [1] and the Canadian Rogers network outage [2].

[1] https://twitter.com/HNStatus

[2] https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/rogers-commun...

I did some work. Please don't let this happen again.

I wonder if things like double disk failures and restores from backup make HNers of the "bare metal 4ever" tribe revisit their cloud hatred.

No.

I finally started to have a social life... it didn't last.

This was a rough one. I actually opened slashdot at one point.

Same

Early on /. was amazing! Remember Cmdrtaco it all out, often taking us for the ride?

Good times, frequently good discussion.

HN has been better for years now, was better at inception, for the most part.

/. has improved a bit. Good to see, or I caught it on a good day.

Life felt so meaningless. Don't ever do this to me again.

I read an article recently on avoiding fallback in distributed systems.[0]

Is it more appropriate to call the strategy in this case fallback, or failover? Since the secondary server wasn't running in production until the first one failed, it sounds like fallback?

Perhaps higher reliability strategies would have been instead of having a secondary server, just have more mirrored disks on the main server, to reduce the likelihood of the array being compromised?

Alternatively, to run both the primary and secondary servers in production all the time. But that would presumably merely move the single point of failure to the proxy?

[0] https://aws.amazon.com/builders-library/avoiding-fallback-in...

I think I found the last one before the outage:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32026565

The ones after it are hours later and usually deleted, until this post (...71).

My first thought was “oh sh*t, they finally added this to the list of time-wasting social media blocked sites” :( It was only when I saw it also didn’t work on my phone, that I realized HN itself was actually down

Things learned today: HN is not listed on DD ... https://downdetector.com/search/?q=hacker+news

https://twitter.com/HNStatus

Problem with HN being down is can't check HN for whether HN is down.

I have a flakey internet connection. Because HN loads so fast, I use it to test if my internet is working/is back up after it disconnects.

WELL TODAY WAS VERY INCONVENIENT LET ME TELL YOU! :)

My first thought was that my own Internet was down. My second was that HN was somehow dependent on Rogers. Hard to go through a Friday afternoon without HN!

Its weird how I saw this headline, thought to myself "Oh good! It's back!" before realizing that I was using HN to see this very headline...

Whew!

Thanks Dang and company.

I appreciate you all.

@my HN peers:

Have a great weekend and thank you all for being you. I learn a ton here and enjoy the perspectives often found on these pages. It is all high value.

When HN went down I was reading the stuff that was up before it went down on https://remix.hnclone.win

GitHub page for that project: https://github.com/clintonwoo/hackernews-remix-react

Did global productivity go up today, or were we all hopelessly clicking refresh to see if HN was back up?

Rogers engineers too busy refreshing ;)

Thought my RSS reader was broken because I came to the site and saw it was up, then saw this headline.

Did you turn it off and on again ?

It was really funny to read advices to move HN to cloud from all those "experts".

I assume this post will be flagged as off topic, but I actually just went to visit moments before it came back up. I didn't figure out that it wasn't an issue with my internet connection until I saw this post.

Phewwwwwww, I seriously haven't been this worried since What.CD disappeared.

This was traumatic :). Felt like I had lost a part of me lol. Glad to be back.

I've been noticing internet problems here and there all week, and was getting a little sketched out (is the heat waves, Russia, or alien attack:) so this really got me worried.

Must admit it was really hard to find out what was going on. I stumbled upon a twitter link somewhere deep down a list of search results. Doe HN have a status page of any kind?

I believe this is the official twitter account: https://twitter.com/HNStatus

HN is my default 'is the internet working' site and that genuinely threw me for a loop across multiple devices today dealing with hotspots while our power was out.

I've been so used to using hn as my "is internet working" page that for a while I thought my internet was just down and tried to troubleshoot it haha.

I'm traveling, so I just assumed my internet had died instead and didn't refresh all day. I literally just found out HN was down by this post.

Maybe I'm missing something, but what's the point of posting this here? Anyone will already know it's back up before they see this post.

Great! Just in time for the Friday evening to kick in as well.

I was worried that I may actually have to go out and do things instead of lurking here this weekend..

It might just be my devices (iPhone, iPad), but the fonts for stories and comments have changed since the restore. Anyone else noticing this?

What a ride. HN should shut down once a month on purpose on a random working day just to allow us to recalibrate our inner compass a bit.

Hurray! Is this the longest downtime ever for HN? I don't remember it being down for this long in the past, anyone know?

Hypothesis: a link from HN hit the front-page of HN and inception ensued. In short, HN got HN'd.

I just figured my internet wasn't working! It's a testament to how well this site works!

I was hoping they just screwed up dns for a short time while launching hacker news ipv6 support!

Worst couple of hours of my life.

The muscle memory that kept opening HN was strong today. Thank you for bringing it back.

So, why and what lessons were learnt? We get to post about others having that problems

Mr. dang, can I use the opportunity to suggest to turn the tiny upvote and downvote arrows into links, separated by sufficient distance? My fingertip is 15x larger than these arrows and it takes quite a bit of precision to hit the right one. I bet, half of upvotes and downvotes are erroneous for this reason.

The "undown" or "unvote" link that appears tells you which one you hit. I appreciate how little space they take up. If you're doing it with touch just zoom in.

I nearly died... of boredom...

I've realized that I check if my internet works by opening HN...

A huge thank you to everyone who keeps this amazing site running :)

For me, HN is one of the default pages when browser's open.

Had to take a bunch of Xanex to get through the data without HN.

I slept through the downtime on the other side of the planet.

Just when I was starting to get some work done. Thank you!

I thought HN is immortal.

Visiting a HN is everyday morning ritual to me.

Feels snappier. :)

Thanks for fixing the site! Keep up the good work.

Yay. Thank you HN.

Most productive day I’ve had in a while (I kid).

HN just lost 10% of it's users. Being down for hours is unforgivable in this day and age with cloud providers. Please get with the times, your a tech site for god sake!!!

Cloud providers mostly suck. Not that I deserve to feel that, I feel proud that HN was/is run from bare metal

> Being down for hours is unforgivable in this day and age with cloud providers.

Wasn't cloud flare down for a few hours recently... Cloud providers don't magically fix outages...

Oh noes, now my productivity is in the toilet.

   127.0.0.1   news.ycombinator.com   # REQUIRED for meaningful productivity

Well on the plus side I got a lot done today

What happened? wasn't resolving at all.

No news reports, press coverage or the majority of world caring about this 'site' going down for longer than usual.

Does that mean nothing of value was lost?

This downtime is a wakeup call for many

a call to go back to sleep for others