Hacker News Reader

Comment by rapnie | Hacker News Reader

@dang I saw a number of 'github is down' posts being flagged almost immediately (including this one). Is there a guideline against posting these kinds of messages?

View on HN

It's hard to see how they are "interesting" in the sense of the guidelines. a post-mortem about what broke might be, but the pure fact that a service is down again? This one here at least has some analysis on what's going on.

I agree with you (though I have to admit I just posted one myself). But then maybe it should be mentioned more explicitly in the guidelines.

I only posted this because I had some immediate insight into the nature of the issue - i.e. one of Github's two DNS providers seems to be having issues. Someone less familiar with DNS could learn a little by running the commands I put in the original post and seeing how the results differ. It might also be interesting to see how the reality of the issue translates into their eventual status page update.

In general though, I absolutely agree that generic 'X is down' messages with no further information are pointless.

I support it, to be honest.

Those threads always devolve into low quality arguments and spam. With occasional marketing effort for other services.

I made one of those posts and it got flagged almost immediately, and I honestly just wanted to know if the issue is on my end or not, GitHub's status page shows that all services are up.

That's also why I came here, and I didn't flag your submission.

But I understand why it happens.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com