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Comment by Eliezer | Hacker News Reader

AAAAAHHHHHHH there's pictures of kittens at the top of HackerNews!

About time, too. For the last few hours it's been nothing but a kitten-themed link to an HTTP timeout.

Would the developer like to help us stay on topic by telling us how the kittens were brought back to life using HIGH TECHNOLOGY? ;)

Traffic was unexpected, I was expecting the site to travel within a small group of friends and colleagues who were in on the joke. I uploaded the site to a mediatemple (dv) server, on which Apache's MaxClients is set to a paltry 20. Whilst the server appears to be fine, Apache is unable to satisfy the requests, and I am unwilling to up the MaxClients because normally (mt) automatically disable the server.

It appears that most of the requests were being made to the ~8 images on the homepage, so I've moved these to an S3 bucket and the site is now responsive again. Hardly HIGH TECHNOLOGY, but any port works in a storm (and AWS is typically my 'any port').

I've also repointed nameservers to run via a https://www.cloudflare.com/ free account which should provide a reverse caching proxy for the homepage at the least, but will take some time to kick in.

The lesson to learn — one that I would expect most would not need to learn — is that launching a website (even in jest) in a 5 minute break in-between real work with real deadlines is not advisable.

And to second the parent post, I don't feel comfortable with this being posted to HN at all, and certainly not with it ranking #1/#2. I fear someone may have timed it perfectly to start Eternal February.

I dunno man. I need placeholders, but there was something missing... But I love kittens even more, so the choice was obvious. This just made my site mid-design look exponentially cuter (meow).

There is nothing wrong with your HIGH TECHNOLOGY. Yes, it is S3, and it is kind of boring because from the customer's perspective it just magically works, but you know what they say about things that are indistinguishable from magic... ;)

There is also nothing wrong with your flock of kittens on HN. Into each life there must inevitably come some kittens. We all know the first rule of HN: When kittens appear on the top ten, the Apocolypse is nigh. Unfortunately, the second rule of HN is that too many of us, when presented with a button clearly marked APOCALYPSE, cannot always resist the urge to press it just once just to see what happens next:

http://xkcd.com/242/

And besides, at least the kittens aren't discussing politics.

Are you the famfamfam guy from the Silk icon set? If so, let me say thank you, you did a huge service to the community by releasing those high-quality icons at a time where there were no decent free icon set available for web apps.

Keep up the good work. I love kittens, too :)

They've also essentially became the official icons of web 2.0 so many sites used them, there should be some sort of lifetime achievement award.

Some of the cropping is surprisingly excellent.

For instance:

http://placekitten.com/g/128/1024

worked so much better than I hoped.

http://placekitten.com/g/1024/128

Isn't half bad either.

Did you deliberately crop like this?

I just wanted to clear something up. A lot of our customers increase MaxClients settings, and we don't usually disable their servers for doing so. You can actually go into our community wiki to see how to do it. Other than that, good luck with S3!

Couple that with the other article about Linus going to the Oscars and HN is one drunk celebrity article from becoming TMZ.

If ever there was proof needed to show just how far HN has fallen...

Perhaps time for me to move on.

I know it's easy to be negative about kittens because of the whole lol cats thing, but a service which provides free, sizable, placeholder images that are more than just gray boxes is actually pretty useful. Remember the days when people used to use "blah blah blah" for all of their text before the copy was in? Now we use Lorem Ipsum. These kittens may well be what we do for photographs in the future.

Agreed. This is something someone might find useful in a project they're working on. Unlike any Techcrunch or Gruber post.

If HN were my personal pet project, that would be my link litmus test. "Is this something that might be useful info for making something, and not just 'news' to jabber on about?"

Might be too restrictive at first blush, but that is what I come here for, not to read "news" stories that are posted everywhere else too.

I agree. This (or a similar tool) is set to become a genuinely useful part of my web development toolkit.

If it used random CC images from flickr, rather than kittens, I wonder if there would be so much objection.

If you let the /b/tards' love of kittens forever bond the "kitten" symbol in your brain indelibly to the "idiocy" symbol, you are letting the /b/tards win. They are just mammals. (Kittens, not /b/tards.)

However, it probably doesn't warrant the #1 spot.

I was about to post the exact same thing. It would be cool if there was a service that pulled CC licensed photos from Flickr for this purpose and scaled them according to the user's wishes, pulling from an archive of photos based on aspect ratio, size, etc.

I would most definitely use a version of this that pulled random photos from Flickr. That's a brilliant idea. Would also give clients a much better view of a mockup than just the gray boxes, by seeing what a mixture of different coloured photos look like.

There are a couple of other services which are more "client-suitable" and have a few more options:

* http://dummyimage.com/ * http://placehold.it/

The most useful thing to come out of this post for me is the knowledge of dummyimages.com, and specifically the aliases for the IAB standard ad sizes such as http://dummyimage.com/leaderboard/E/C. Great work by Russell Heimlich on that site, and the source code is MIT too if you want to run it locally.

Thanks I'm glad you like the ad sizes. My goal was to make it pretty hard to get a 404 while sticking to a format that's natural and easy to use. Originally dummyimage.com only had size parameters then peopel clamored for color and custom text thanks to another Hacker News post.

I've jotted down the brief history of how dummyimage.com got started for anyone interested as well http://www.russellheimlich.com/blog/the-history-of-dummyimag...

I think that it is correct to question whether this should be the top submission though.

I completely agree. I've been asking around recently for a decent source of imagery for placeholders, it's a stupid thing to spend time on every time I build a site where visuals are essential. This service is an interesting way of tackling the problem, and I think it's technologically interesting - and the image selection looks very high quality and professional compared to the random Flickr rips I was doing before.

The advantage of Lorem Ipsum is that it has zero intrinsic appeal. It looks right, but doesn't distract from the overall.

Unless you're a bloody dog lover, you're going to be distracted by the rather cute kittens. The client is going to think, at first: "Ha ha. That's funny and cute." and then they're going to think, "What am I not seeing?"

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