Ask HN: Has HN had an upgrade? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Has HN had an upgrade?

26 pointsxupybd35 comments

I've noticed a couple of stories with a huge number of comments and the site is running fine. In the past I've had to logout when the comment count gets too high. What has changed?

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Following on from the main question, it would be neat to know what the current state of play with HN's architecture and hardware is as of 2023. We've heard lots of bits and pieces from over the years but, well, curiosity always has the better of me.

On the contrary, I’ve had more problems with the site in the last week than ever before.

Maybe it was the threads you were talking about. Maybe it was said upgrade process.

It was probably coincidence. Personally I doubt anything has changed.

What are you considering a lot of comments? The largest I’ve seen since I’ve been here was the Roe v. Wade overturn post, and it was around 1000. The site’s acting no different for me now than it did then.

I've noticed the same. Never seen it get overloaded before, but it's happened several times over the past week.

I thought that's a soft-lockout that's supposed to tell you to stop trying to comment on a topic. If you're persistent and really want to, you can after a minute or two, but if it's not that important, you go "meh, I guess not" and go on your merry way.

If my understanding is correct, they disable the “reply” to limit more comments. On every comment beyond a certain depth, reply is disabled for some time immediately following the comment.

Logout because of too many comments? What browser and OS are you using?

In the past it's sometimes been requested by dang on particularly popular threads so they can serve the page from cache. Here's one example [0], it's from 2016 but is just an illustration. I'm not sure I've seen it suggested for some time though.

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12909752#12911870

HN backend sometimes is laggy preparing user-specific view of threads.

User-specific? Why isn't the page excluding the header part cached separately, or am I missing something?

Presumably basic stuff like showing whether or not you've upvoted a comment and showing your own comments differently to other people's.

It would be cheaper to render those afterwards client-side given a list of comment ids that the logged-in user has upvoted.

That would require users to run client-side scripts for basic site functionality.

Upvoting is a client-side script already.

Are you sure? With JS disabled, the vote arrows are simple links for me that work as expected.

It's both! :-)

That's a perfect example of graceful degradation / progressive enhancement.

A JS event on the html element cancels clicks on those links and handles them in JS with AJAX so the page is not reloaded.

Render server-side (or on the edge) for those who don't run client-side scripts.

Can that be detected by the site? (in a non-hacky way)

Yes, by including code that if run, alters what happens. For example, you can add JavaScript code that handles the "comments" links on the front page in the new way (fetch the data and render it). For those browsers that don't run the code, everything will continue to work in the old way (links will cause a request to the server, which will render the comments).

Maybe they upgraded from Samsung Galaxy A52 to A53. :D

Joking aside, even if the site has a massive number of users, it seems pretty efficient to me and I don't think it needs a ton of resources.

dang probably moved HN off AWS back to M5 hosting.

Off topic, but I’d love for HN to have larger buttons on mobile. Particularly the up/down vote buttons. I have to zoom in to press which makes it the only site I regularly interact with that requires this.

I literally just did exactly this to your comment. Bigger button or touch area for mobile would be fantastic.

Yes! And the button hit-area is a little strange, even zoomed in. Half the time I'm not even sure I hit the right arrow.

I'm a contrarian by Nature so I will play devil's advocate and point out that having a little obstacle to your vote is a step in the direction of making sure you really mean it.

I say that after zooming in to give you an upvote of course

Oh wow I thought everyone used third party client apps on mobile..! My experience with Octal on iOS has been really nice. The lack of a dark reader extension on iOS makes the regular site even harder to stomach but perhaps I should give it another chance.

I've noticed buggy behaviour too, my comments are being flagged

> In the past I've had to logout when the comment count gets too high.

Never experienced this in years.

Everything seems same as always. Still unreadable flagged/downvoted comments, still too small font, stil Downvote button, still Flag button without requiring public reason.

Your account is 78 days old.

People switch accounts you know, I had to switch account after people set up downvote bots on my account when I had downvoted comments within minute from posting.

> account after people set up downvote bots on my account

What's the motivation behind such thing? Why bother setting up bots for downvoting accounts?

(FWIW I often get upvoted within seconds of posting)

silent the views you disagree with by making them unreadable and it's rather trivial to set up for folks here

this stopped happening immediately after I created new account, if HN would be transparent and showing who flagged or downvoted your comment and everyone would need to provide publicly visible reason for doing it we wouldn't have this discussion

I’ve had multiple accounts going back to at least 2013. People make new accounts all the time.

You need high karma to have access to the down-vote button.

I know you need karma above 500 for downvote button (I have it), I am complaining about existence of this button, it should be removed for everyone, it doesn't really help anything besides silenting opposing views/opinions going against HN hivemind.

But if the downvote was removed we wouldn’t be able to disagree with the thought of removing it.

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