Comment by FlyingSnake

3 days ago

HN is literally the website I open to check if I have internet connectivity. HN is truly a shining beacon in the trashy landscape of web bloat.

I usually load my blog to check internet connectivity.

I work at an e-waste recycling company. Earlier this week, I had to test a bunch of laptop docking stations, so I kept force refreshing my blog to see if the Ethernet port worked. Thing is, it loads so fast, I kept the dev tools open to see if it actually refreshed.

yep, I do exactly the same thing. If HN isn't loading, something is definitely fckd.

  • Except when HN itself is fckd.

    It does happen less than it used to, but still.

    (Edit: Btw, it's fine to say 'fucked' or other swear words on HN - we don't care about profanity and aren't Bowdlers. I add this because people sometimes misinterpret https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html that way, assuming that we want drawing-room politness.)

I find pinging localhost a bit more reliable, and faster too.

I blame HN switching to AWS. Downtime also increased after the switch.

  • When did you notice HN switching to AWS, and what changed?

    (Those are trick questions, because we haven't switched to AWS. But I genuinely would like to hear the answers.)

    (We did switch to AWS briefly when our hosting provider went down because of a bizarre SSD self-bricking incident a few years ago...but it was only for a day or two!)