Tell HN: Sorry I broke the server

11 years ago

Experimenting with some code this evening and got so into it, I didn't notice that I broke story submission for two hours. Argh!

Sorry everyone.

Edit: While you're here... you can now view the comments you've upvoted by clicking on "saved comments" in your profile. It works like "saved stories". Thanks to porker for the suggestion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9050374.

70 comments

dang

Reply
jacquesm  11 years ago

Where there's people working there are bound to be mistakes. Don't sweat it, this is a free service after all and the service level for a non-advertising supported free service is absolutely incredible. I'd be more than happy to pay for HN as it is, you guys are doing a better job than most paid services when it comes to customer support, uptime and courtesy combined.

  • switz  11 years ago

    Hacker News is most definitely supported by ads. Perhaps you just don't realize it.

    https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs

    • logicallee  11 years ago

      Sure, and Harvard is supported by ads, you just don't realize it.

      (sell an education->create wealthy people->ask them to contribute->get endowment whose returns account for the largest source of its operating revenue[1])

      but I find your semantics frankly ridiculous. yes hacker news belongs to ycombinator. but you can't just use the word ad however you want. No, not everything's an ad, and in particular you can't 'buy' a job ad on HN. It's not a good description of the situation.

      [1] http://www.harvard.edu/about-harvard/harvard-glance/endowmen... "The endowment remains the largest source of revenue supporting the University budget."

  • mintplant  11 years ago

    Seriously. I use HN as my "am I connected to the internet?" check, as it always loads instantly even when Google takes a while.

    • iamwithnail  11 years ago

      Hah, glad it's not just me. It's also the thing I hit if I'm trying to think of what I was doing/am idle for a moment... typing 'news.' just seems to flow from my fingers if they're unoccupied.

      8 replies →

    • bpodgursky  11 years ago

      I use HN because I can never trust whether anymore whether Google is really loading from a remote source or is just doing some aggressive caching magic (or whether Chrome just has the Google homepage baked in now).

    • logn  11 years ago

      In terms of uptime, HN has been hosted on a single server (until recently... I saw mention of a failover server). If you are just looking for a lightweight site to load, example.com is great.

    • dredmorbius  11 years ago

      Might want to spread that out over a few sites. Any one can go down.

      Alexa's top 10 sites is usually a pretty good set.

colinramsay  11 years ago

That's ok - you did it while I was asleep :)

I seem to remember that last year there was talk of re-doing the markup for HN so that it would be more mobile-friendly. What came of that idea?

kogir  11 years ago

And I missed it in code review and testing. Sorry!

  • kogir  11 years ago

    And now I'm doubling down. HN is once again running an entirely new HTTP pipeline.

    Please let us know if you run into any issues, especially related to cookies and logging in/out.

deanclatworthy  11 years ago

When is the responsive style sheet coming :)?

  • aw3c2  11 years ago

    Oh lord, I hope it will not force some annoyingly huge text on us. I am perfectly happy with the site as it is, works well with text-reflow.

    • dang  11 years ago

      As a fierce advocate for information density on Hacker News I can pretty well guarantee you it will never have annoyingly huge text.

      1 reply →

    • partisan  11 years ago

      Agreed. I am free to zoom around and scroll through as much as I want right now and makes it very easy for me to use the site. Just take a look at Craigslist to see how terrible it cn be to have no ability to view all content.

walterbell  11 years ago

"Saved Comments" is valuable and long wished-for, thanks for adding the feature!

Will it be possible to extract these as JSON, e.g. via the API?

  • dang  11 years ago

    Good idea. The API doesn't support all the lists (edit: and logged-in state) properly yet, and when we fix that, it should be natural to include both variants of /saved.

philsnow  11 years ago

"Stories submitted per time" seems like one of the five-ish metrics that you should always keep an eye on while making any changes in production, coming back to your desk after a coffee break, or coming in to the office in the morning.

If it is not trivial to look at these metrics (ideally you just glance up to a dashboard monitor), it would probably be a good idea to throw that together.

All of this is to say nothing of proper alerting to go with monitoring, but I mention the above because its by far easier to set up and you get a lot of bang for the buck.

All of _that_ said, thanks to dang any anybody else working on making HN better.

andrea_s  11 years ago

Ah, you clearly need a proper review process!

Just joking - thanks for the work you guys put in, this is definitely one of the most interesting place on the web :)

jwatte  11 years ago

If only there was some way to quickly get told when production hiccups... And if only there was some way to prove each feature works automatically... :-)

ugh123  11 years ago

You were experimenting with code on the production server? If not, do you have automated tests?

dkarapetyan  11 years ago

I noticed saved stories but why are comments showing up twice on the account page.

  • dang  11 years ago

    It's the comments you've upvoted, as opposed to those you've posted. I just changed the label to make that clearer.

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9050374

    • oneeyedpigeon  11 years ago

      It'll be interesting to see whether this has an effect on the nature of upvoting. If saved comments were slightly more structured, rather than just one big list, I could imagine them comprising some sort of 'personal knowledgebase'. In turn, that might decrease the amount of 'I agree with that' opinion upvoting, in favour of 'that's useful information'. Whether that's to be encouraged is, of course, a personal opinion.

      2 replies →