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YC Library

ycombinator.com

92 pointsalexzeitler24 comments

It hurt itself in confusion! Here's an archived version:

https://web.archive.org/web/2/https://www.ycombinator.com/li...

It’s poetic that the only content which survived the archiving process was the text. (The videos seem dead, though I didn’t try many.)

hah!

We got the hug of death, thanks HN! Working on improving load times :)

I once took down HN by submitting /topcolors. The moment it reached the front page, HN ground to a halt. I quickly fired off an email to sctb who cleared it up within a minute or two (by wiping it off the front page, not by fixing the caching, which is totally valid), otherwise it could have taken much longer to figure out what had happened.

Caching is a hard thing to get right. I try to use “vegeta attack” to load test pages as I make them, but the measurement is the problem. Unless you already have a profiling pipeline set up, it’s a bit hard to fix the issue quickly.

One trick is to comment out half the site in a binary fashion until it suddenly loads, then keep bisecting until it stops loading. It’s crude but only takes log(n) steps and can be done quickly. You’d have to do it in production, but it might be easier than guessing.

A self DDoS! Neat!

ycombinator.com giving itself the hug of death =)

Edit: it's loading now. Great resource!

DDoS, the D stands for DDoS

How come Hacker News rarely is down although the traffic seems to be huge?

Because HN serves only text(html & css) with no javascript. (edit: a tiny amount of efficient js)

Frontpage right now = 35.67KB

This page is currently 18.34KB.

It's one of the only interesting sites left on the web that is 100% usable on 2G (EDGE) mobile data.

I assure you, this isn’t the reason. And I’m saying that as someone who once put all their effort into maintaining a clone of HN, mostly out of curiosity.

HN is the most responsive message board in the world. And by responsive I mean you feel the effect of upvotes and downvotes instantly. There is caching, but almost none of it is at the expense of the feel of the site. This is unlike Reddit, where although votes do have a quick effect, the algorithm is much simpler and less sensitive to sudden shifts in public opinion. On HN you can win and lose debates in a matter of minutes, and it’s thanks to the responsiveness that large websites seem not to have.

HN is usable without JS, but is served with JS scripts by default.

Oh wow, I could have swore... thanks.

Still though, just 4 pages of js. I guess what I was thinking is typical insane tracking framework and tracking stuff.

https://news.ycombinator.com/hn.js

If only people would stop underestimating how hard those four pages of js are. If you study it carefully you’ll notice some real time reloading type stuff for /newest, because it’s so important for finding good stories when you’re wading through hundreds. You can just click hide and see the next story instead of having to go from one page to the next.

The smallness is evidence of skill, not (merely) simplicity.

I was not trying to say it is simple, just that is very lightweight.

Sorry, I didn’t mean it quite so pointedly. :) I just hope the world appreciates lightweight again someday.

No offense taken :)

Another lightweight site I came across is Tildes. [0] it was created by Reddit’s 10th hire after he left. I think it was a response to the Reddit redesign.

Do you have any favorites?

[0] https://tildes.net

https://gitlab.com/tildes

Thank you! I didn’t realize tildes was open source. That’s really cool.

One of my all time favorite examples of simple systems is Lumen, which was written by Scott Bell: https://github.com/sctb/lumen

It took years of study to understand just how large the ratio was of functionality vs size.

Because the team is absurdly talented. Dan once wrote his own Node debugger for emacs, and some features were way nicer than even Chrome devtools provides today.

https://github.com/gruseom/numen

There are also very few moving parts. In arc you have access to the entire stack from http request to http response, at the raw text level. The goal is simply to generate the text as quickly as possible. And racket turned out to be a good long term bet; people underestimate how optimized it is.

It's probably as close to optimized as it can get for web.

I've seen this claim of huge hn traffic but I'm suspicious. Often time there is video posted, it has few thousand views, when I visit video few days later, it jumps 1500 or so. Is few thousands enough to bring server down?