Hacker News Reader

Comment by taubek | Hacker News Reader

Is this the reason for access issues to Hacker News at the moment?

I think it's just too many Reddit refugees at once.

PSA: if you browse HN in logged-out mode (e.g. a private tab), you can receive cached versions of HN threads that load much faster. The logged-in experience is currently worse than the logged-out: dynamic content generation for user-account stuff seems to be hitting a slow path on the server.

This isn’t the exact same, but there’s a similarity in order-of-magnitude differences and flow rates: Most professional pilots work for the airlines. When you remove military, it’s a huge majority. Most pilot jobs flow into the airlines. It’s a pretty cohesive labor market.

So, whatever market forces are going on for pilot labor in your little niche job are completely dominated by the airlines. Like you’d think banner towing jobs would be mostly affected by advertising trends, but they’re not. Passenger travel trends are way more important. (This is for the job market, not the business market)

Similarly, the flow from a way bigger site can overwhelm whatever you have going on.

Probably not, at least not directly. HN is hosted on M5 Computer Security at the moment and it's DNS is AWS. The load issues usually happen when a few popular threads have a really high comment count and dang usually has to enable pagination or other things to compensate.

> HN is hosted on M5 Computer Security

Do we know if it is just like, one tall MySQL instance and a few RubyOnRails API instances? Not sure what would be used for "caching" as well.

> The load issues usually happen when a few popular threads have a really high comment count and dang usually has to enable pagination or other things to compensate.

Why not auto-turn it on at like 500 comments or so?

Do we know if it is just like, one tall MySQL instance and a few RubyOnRails API instances?

Two servers, one active and one standby. Both running Arc on BSD. No MySQL or Ruby.

Why not auto-turn it on at like 500 comments or so?

Best to ask dang directly on that one hn@ycombinator.com as I have never seen the code and responsible adults don't let me near their code.

It always surprises me that a VC that has backed multiple tech unicorns can't run a scalable web site.

I always felt like scalability and growth aren't goals here, which is something I like to be honest.

This must be a major funnel for them. The fact they can't even run a robust text-only website ought to be an embarrassment, but here we are. Every time there's a major tech story the site grinds to a halt until one guy jumps onto a server and ninjas it or whatever. Unprofessional to say the least.

It's actually pretty impressive that they are running this from one server in their own programming language

Sure. Maybe they do the same as VCs. Use limited crappy resources in their own non-standard way to cripple growth.

What kind of reaction is that?

It's not like they can go grab employees from one of their funded companies to go work on HN, and they've clearly been happy with the results of their level of engineering investment in HN.

(Besides, as Reddit is showing, do you want your discussion site run like a tech unicorn? Arguably things were better for users in the skeleton crew days)

Considering all the trash that comes with heading in that direction (as has been repeatedly demonstrated by social media which has started off similarly to HN, only to turn around and shit on the people that helped them get going), I'm perfectly fine with a site that slows down a bit in special circumstances.

HN is written in Arc, an experimental lisp dialect created by Paul Graham. I believe it runs on a single instance? Not sure though.

I believe pagination does turn on automatically at 500 comments.

Looks like it is AWS. Given the fact that both Reddit and HN (and Apple, which is also experiencing issues) are on AWS, it looks suspicious.

Also, new account creation in HN is broken at the moment.

I don't know about Reddit, but I'm fairly sure HN isn't hosted at Amazon.

It was for a really short time last year when there was a bad hardware failure.

I think that is pretty unlikely. HN doesn't use Cloudflare at all as far as I know, and not to downplay the scope of the outage, but Cloudflare's core CDN Offering is fine. Other core services such as Cloudflare Pages/Workers/KV are also fine. This is mostly addon/developer products, the biggest of which (imo) being R2. If you log out, it loads a lot faster (at least the main/cached pages)

The advice in such cases: "logout". Hacker News has a lot easier time when service 'static' content.

...and I had to login just to say this...

HN's slowness is probably knock-on result of Reddit's outage. It's where a lot of people to go to discuss the Reddit shit-tornado.

I am getting 504 errors trying to load hacker news in Germany, I think it's possible it has to do with the cloudflare outage.

Why do you think that? Because of increased load from people visiting HN to discuss it?

No, because 504 means "Gateway Error" which means the original server is not at fault but some gateway in between (like a CDN)

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