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Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

If you had an auto scaling kubernetes cluster with multiple redundancies using rust and 3 JS frameworks this wouldn't happen. ;)

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That being said, is the actual production infra archi for HN described somewhere ? Curious how simple it can afford to be.

We laugh at people piling layers and layers and artifacts on their sites, all in the hope of adding redundancy, handle "webscale" load, and avoid an outage (ironically increasing the chances that _something_ will break).

However, if a single hard drive crashing somewhere can cause your site to be down for minutes or hours, some non-tech people (managers, shareholders, customers) will wonder if the site is "professionnal" enough - and I can sympathize with them.

From 2018: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16076041>

> We’re recently running two machines (master and standby) at M5 Hosting. All of HN runs on a single box, nothing exotic: CPU: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2637 v4 @ 3.50GHz (3500.07-MHz K8-class CPU) FreeBSD/SMP: 2 package(s) x 4 core(s) x 2 hardware threads Mirrored SSDs for data, mirrored magnetic for logs (UFS) We get around 4M requests a day.

> FreeBSD/SMP

Good choice. :)

"Why are they using a freeware OS?" (: /s

> If you had an auto scaling kubernetes cluster with multiple redundancies using rust and 3 JS frameworks outages like this wouldn't surprise your users anymore.

FTFY

Irony aside, what's the point? In theory, yes, it could work better. In practice though, HN with its two baremetal boxes has better uptime than 99,99% of the Web, including the biggest ones - just because complexity has its price.

Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those!!111!!eleven!!1!

Or a simple RAID array (but of course the controller should keep working).

Personally I haven't seen a server without a RAID since time immemorial[0]. Of course HN has it, too, as explained here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32024989

[0] early 90s, that is

... but many other horrible things might

Three.js on HN? Interesting thought.

It could be like SGI's fsn[0] file manager but for tech news.

"It's a Unix system, I know this."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn_(file_manager)

Raymarched SDF pyramids implemented with GLSL shaders for the voting arrows! They could be so shiny!

(It's a wonder that anyone lets me near the frontend of their websites really.)

It wouldn't surprise me if someone managed to implement a 3d voting arrow in less than the 407B transfer size of the existing .gif

huh, all this time I thought the arrow was just a unicode character

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