Tell HN: HN was down

We all knew that but I haven't seen any confirmation before this.

Enjoy your deserved sleep and if for a couple of hours it's down, so be it.

Thanks for your continued service!

https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/hacker-news

This website had many instances of reports, the last I saw were 52 reports in only a short frame of time, the maximum reports on this are 118 it seems.

> In this case, though, we had a secondary failure: PagerDuty woke me up at 5:24am, I checked HN and it seemed fine, so I told PagerDuty the problem was resolved. But the problem wasn't resolved - at that point I was just sleeping through it.

Its okay I suppose, have you figured out who is crawling hackernews so much tho, was it a ddos attack or an AI company trying to get data, doesn't hackernews support an api and I am sure that there are datasets for it too so Its interesting why they might crawl but we all know the reasons why as they have been discussed here.

HN is important, but unlikely much harm could be done before morning.

(Source: Lost a lot of sleep at one place, enough to realize that sleep interruption and deficit has significant costs.)

There is an official dump which doesn't even require parsing HTML at all: https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/details/y-combi...

1. Blame: The first thing to do is to point the finger. That doesn't mean analysing the technical issue, which can delay this step and limit your options, but figuring out who is politically easiest to blame. Often, that's the new guy, but outside contractors and vendors without good connections are also a common solution. Even if you are technically responsible for hiring them, you can always push them under the bus with a little skill. This small sacrifice helps unify, focus, and motivate the rest of the team.

2. Emotion: Inject your emotion into the situation and make that the implicit, but indisputable priority. Particularly, outrage and anger - This is completely _____. These people are utterly _____ (I'd use all caps, but that's not allowed on HN). Make sure everyone's attention is over their shoulder, on your emotion, and infect the team with it. Threats are an effective tool here - this is a crisis, and anyone who is calm is not emotionally engaged. Otherwise, they won't care enough about this problem - without you driving them, they probably wouldn't care much at all. Anyway, you don't have time for niceties like empathy or even basic respect.

3. Speed: Respnsiveness to stakeholders is very important. People need answers now. Give them answers they want to hear, outcomes they will be comfortable with. Don't worry if different groups hear different things. Your team will find a way to make it all work - that's their job.

4. Communication: Good communication is essential. Make sure you clearly tell your team what they should be doing; repeat it several times to prevent misunderstanding. Especially people with experience can have minds of their own; keep them on track. The situation is a crisis so you can't take any risks; stay on top of them and everything they do, and give input if you're not certain they are doing exactly what you would be doing.

5. Victimhood: Find a way to turn the tables: Make it about you, and how you're the victim here, and feed the fire with more outrage. With this and outrage, nobody will undermine the team by challenging your ideas or authority, which is the most essential component of a successful outcome. Remember, without you this all falls apart.

Have I missed anything?

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?

Of course, they'd better restore service after they wake up naturally, because I need my HN dose. But it's not worth losing sleep over it.

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 other people and a few other pages.

I am assuming that the reason I could see the front page itself and discussions on posts on the front page is that they were in a shared cache for non-logged in users, but that when I clicked on some pages like some random user pages those were not in cache and hit the origin server and it blocked those with “Sorry.” like it did for log-in attempts.

I also tried to go to the unblock IP page, but that one also returned “Sorry.”

For a while I was scratching my head wondering if I had gotten some malware on one of my computers that was aggressively making requests to HN, and that I had become IP banned because of that. Since I think my actual request rate from browsing and commenting should be pretty average. I read HN a lot, but not that much :p

Later in the day, or the next day, things were back to normal and I could log in again. Presumably after those anti-crawler protections had been relaxed again.

How does this happen?

That was a few hours ago. I'm glad this loop is broken.

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

until stack overflow occurs.

/s

https://www.proginosko.com/leechblock/

You mean it's not your homepage?

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

Did it like 5 times during that 1h-ish outage. :(

(Basically whenever you see an x.com link just change it to xcancel.com and avoid the nonsense.)

Seems to reset it on the web view, too.

I didn't read the post text, it's identified there haha, my bad! I wish the text post text wasn't grey, I gloss over it too easily.

I suppose you could also just clear your HN cookies in regular browsing window, but then when they fix it you'd have to log in again.

It's down about 8.4 minutes per week. On 26% of days it doesn't work at least once, and on 12% of days it has more than one consecutive failed check. The longest uptime streak was 24 days

I've been keeping track since exactly 2 years (to the day!) because I was surprised that it seemed briefly down for me on a daily basis. Was I getting unlucky and hitting it every time, or was it just down very often? Nobody posted anything so I started answering the question for myself :p

I've been meaning to post the tracker to HN but there's a pesky bug I want to fix: the "is it currently down" stat. I don't know how this is beyond me but something in the code bugs out. So this is my first time posting about it

That's not so useful when news.ycombinator.com is having problems.

After more than an hour I thought, "wow this is pretty harsh" and "so much of my exposure to learning things is directly tied to HN posts". I was lost lol.

Being "voted to -2" doesn't necessarily mean you were wrong (it often correlates though). People might just think it wasn't relevant in whatever context you posted it in

I often find it hard to tell what makes people think something I write is not helpful (or sometimes also a comment someone else made) and thus appreciate comments that clarify constructively. It can also help to ask for clarification if you're particularly surprised about the votes on a given post