Unicorns at GitHub | Hacker News Reader

Unicorns at GitHub

status.github.com

28 pointslukashed28 comments

This always seems to come at the least convenient time for me, which is indicative of GitHub being a single point of failure in my workflow. Not good.

It's a distributed VCS, so distribute your repos?

Obviously dependence on a hosted issue tracker has its pluses and minuses...

I've been telling them for years, they need Git-backed issues.

this.

i asked about this < 2 weeks ago, so here goes again:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6401411

A great deal of the novelty associated with HN is that the distractions here (80% of the "content") are good idle reading, seem like they could be vaguely related to work, and tend to offer a community of self-validation, catharsis, and commisery.

If you enjoy the valuable content here on HN, it would be wise for you to learn how to recognize the idle reading and ignore those threads entirely, when possible. I know it's harder of late, as the S/N ratio is slowly approaching zero, but you can't really fight against the tide - there are many more people here on HN that don't share your view (myself excluded).

Sorry.

i'd be inclined to agree with you had the 'idle reading' content been interesting. but it is NOT interesting. github goes down every week, nothing to see here. why is it on the front page? and who exactly is it there for?

it's like someone is just out to name-and-shame. competitors maybe?

Idle reading is generally not interesting. Consider your average magazine, even one targeted to your interests - there are probably at most 2 stories that you really want to read in the magazine, and maybe another 5 that you would actually be interested in reading, should you be stuck in the doctor's office or something, but there are probably a further 15 or 20 that you simply have no interest in, and are clearly there to fill space.

When you have user generated content, it is much easier to fill any vacuum with content that is not content (this post) than it is to actually create content (very rare) or post or repost the content of others (very common).

The people who post these outages are looking for something to talk about. The people who upvote these outages are part of the "culture" of github. The people who participate in the meager discussions are just bored, and nothing more.

You should expect to be interested in no more than 20-30% of the content you see on HN on any given day. I anticipate that that number will go down with time.

the problem is that these 'filler' posts are manually curated to the front page. HN is plenty interesting and active without this noise. why should i 'live with' quality degradation over time, especially in a curated medium?

Unsure what unicorns have to do with anything here.

Github repository web pages when down show an angry unicorn. If it's still down, here's an example: https://github.com/github/linguist

Nothing as far as I can tell. This works just as well:

https://status.github.com/?teapots

https://status.github.com/messages 17:31 UTC

Unicorn is an HTTP server for Ruby that they use

https://github.com/blog/517-unicorn

[EDIT] downvotes? really?

We set up hubot with a github status message. I just wish GH could push the information out, instead of us having to go get it.

What's your hubot script for this? Can you share a link to the GitHub rep-oh wait. That's not gonna work.

But seriously, I want this for my HipChat.

http://paste2.org/4OyDJknK -- we've got it in our private github repo, but here's the source as well.

https://status.github.com/api/last-message.json

thats a useful link to watch, thanks!

This does sound very useful. I'd strongly consider open sourcing it. The failure has caught me right in the middle of switching gears from one project to another, and I'm basically twiddling my thumbs in the company IRC waiting for it to come back up so I can pull down the requirements.

Using github as your oauth provider for logins is turning out to be a really bad idea for me.

Its time for a distributed oauth with different provider.

https://login.persona.org/ is always there for you

Persona is what I'm looking at in this space.

I absolutely adore Persona. It's a great protocol, and very easy to implement. If anyone here has a web app, please add Persona to it.

(I'm not affiliated with Persona/Mozilla at all, etc).

The reign of unicorns just ended a minute ago or so. Back up as of 11:33am PST

this is not interesting news

if there were talk of how and why github is down, that would be interesting.

11% of page build failure is really high. I suppose this has a lot to do with timeout?

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