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Comment by ravenstine | Hacker News Reader

I'm getting a 500 internal server error.

It's kind of funny how these contemporary webpages crash under the load of HN, but the few times we link to sites from 1996 they somehow manage to remain online. The other day I remember people trying to link to the pages with the oldest images they could find and I'm pretty sure none of the pages suffered from the hug of death.

View on HN

The original term was the Slashdot Effect, and they were crumpling websites like old paper cups by 1999.

I guess this is easier to hug to death since it's stateful and (based on other comments) opens a websocket per user

> oldest images they could find

Sounds like survivorship bias (as with most "they don't make 'em like they used to" plaints).

Aren't the old 1996 websites behind CDN's or beefy webservers nowadays? I'm sure a modern nginx instance can easily deal with tens of thousands of plain http requests per second.

Nginx can, most backends can‘t. ;-)

> I'm getting a 500 internal server error.

Or are you? >:)

I've seen plenty of old websites crumbling when HN linked to them.

You're getting tricked by bias. If (made up numbers) 1% of links crash under HN load, and 1% of links are to websites from before 2005, then 1% of 1% will be 15+ year old websites crashing. And given that I've said I've seen several i think the real number is a lot higher.

You missed the joke. It's trying to be exclusive, so it gives a 500 error to all visitors the first time they come. Refresh, and you'll... almost get in.

I... I didn't get a 500 the first try. Unintentional joke?

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