Tell HN: DNS record "hn.algolia.com" was gone | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: DNS record "hn.algolia.com" was gone

nslookup.io

263 pointsgslin97 comments

DNS is reverted and should be back up based on your local TTLs/caching.

Sorry about that, everyone!

Algolian here -- We were rolling out a new version of the HN search but accidentally swapped over the DNS before we were ready.

I've got a group of folks over here working to restore the search. Sorry for the downtime, but it's nice to know the search is useful to so many!

Thanks for being on top of this. I just came to the site to search for something and noticed no DNS found, then saw this post on the front page!

Out of curiosity, what functionality is forthcoming with the new version?

It's mostly a tech-stack update, but it resolves some longstanding edge cases in the search UI as well. I'll try to get a changelog when we have it up and running.

thanks for the answer, there are some here that seem to have problems with questions, about why, the update.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37822329

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37822423

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37822897

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37823190

I would guess it's not that people have "problems with questions", but are downvoting you for one or both of a) using multiple comments to ask the same question, and b) coming across as using a badgering tone, sounding entitled and complaining when you're talking to people who provide a free service to you, and acting like they owe you a comment reply rather than waiting for the change log they've said will be released when they're ready.

thanks for the answer. there seem to be assumptions

>>coming across as using a badgering tone, sounding entitled and complaining when you're talking to people who provide a free service to you<<

but your answer is genuinely more informative, and intellectually mature than a DV based on assumption of bad faith

+ it probably would have been usefull to let HN know that a maintainence cycle was incipient, this entire submission would probably not exist, and no left field attributions made.

hugops engaged, thanks for your efforts running that for us!

Surprised to see from your LinkedIn that you are US based. I thought from browsing Algolia's hiring page the other day that they're strictly European.

Are they nixing all US-based roles now to cut costs?

https://www.algolia.com/careers/

He doesn't need to answer that question

I never said he did. Everyone is welcome to answer or not answer any question posed to them by strangers over the internet. I'm just curious and probably won't have a better opportunity to ask. It wasn't intended to be hostile

Nope -- we're global. Paris, Sydney, SF, London, Austin, NYC, Belarus -- and lots of remote rolls. Send me a resume if you're looking!

I use it all the time :)

One of the best features of the site. Thanks for your service.

what does algolia search do now that it didnt do before; what does it no longer do; and how does this version change influence UX on HN ?

How does this stand to benefit algolia ?

i for one, was having no problems with the search, what made this nessecary ?

The HN search is a demo/advertisement of Algolia search engine that they run for free. They can update it even if you didn't need any updates.

so what i want to know in basic language is, why was the update nessecary?

security holes?

new features?

new shiny version, is better by default?

previous version was deficient with respect to 'modern' tech?

You are erroneously assuming that the update was for reasons visible to end users like you.

I am sure that Hacker News commenters are a vast mine of "Well, one day we were updating to the new machine to finally get rid of the one with the knackered RAID controller …" type anecdotes illustrating not only the other reasons that upgrades happen but also what can occur when they are performed.

>>You are erroneously assuming that the update was for reasons visible to end users like you.<<

asking about something, is not assuming it is true.

asking is about receiving information to clarify murk.

there are a lot of others comments, that are accusations of bad faith, and seem to be doing well.

> it's nice to know the search is useful to so many!

I use it every few days. It's exceptionally useful. Thank you for providing it.

Thanks for providing the search functionality. I always use it before submitting something, in case someone else has already posted it recently.

@dang It would be great if this duplicate search functionality was embedded in the HN submission form ;-)

It actually is, for exact URL matches: if you try to submit a URL that has a recent exact match, it will just redirect you to that submission instead of creating a new one.

Does it do any URL cleaning, removing fragments, maybe normalizing shortlinks?

No idea, I haven't ever intentionally tried to break it, I've just noticed it redirect me sometimes. I always clean my own links before attempting to submit.

Except when it doesn't and people submit the same link several times a week

It's ALWAYS dns :D

That's how I learned about Algolia!

> "it's nice to know the search is useful to so many!"

Well, this is basically how I do all my reading (books) now. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37761636

I also search here before I start learning something new. Resources recommended on HN are almost always great!

tell me more about your searching process here

It is very useful, I use it at least once a week.

I even use it for more organic product research. “What have people on HN said about _____ over the years?”

> Algolian here

Is that just a way to identify you are affiliated with it or do you guys actually call yourselves algolians inside the company? Nonetheless, good work on the update and fixing it.

Yes we call ourselves Algolians within the company.

The search box at the bottom of HN still links to this subdomain which means that HN searches are currently broken. So, hopefully this is just a temporary glitch or oversight.

Or just use Google or DDG or whatever your favorite search engine is, and restrict it to HN with: site:news.ycombinator.com

Missing the feature to filter by amount of comments or score and sorting by date. But works well enough in a "emergency" I suppose :)

I was just about to reply that you can sort by date but it’s usually hidden in a menu somewhere, but just checked and it’s actually gone on both. WTF, I could have sworn this used to be available somewhere, just usually buried.

Wait… how long has that search been there?!

Edit: Wow. One of those occurrences where something has always been there and I just never really noticed.

I don't know exactly, but it's been a pretty long time. Probably at least 10 years?

https://www.algolia.com/blog/customers/hacker-news-search-al...

January 2014

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7126301 ("Last Friday, we have released the new HN Search (http://hn.algolia.com)")

(Found by plugging "hn.algolia.com" into hn.algolia.com and bisecting by date).

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=hn.algolia.com

HN also have domain search built-in, sorted by date. Here is the first submissions about hn.algolia.com https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=hn.algolia.com&next=7... (click the domain name next to the submission title)

My best guess is that someone migrated DNS providers (or some engineer playing with infrastructure as code…) and it’s just an unintentional missing DNS record, oops.

The Hacker News API is still up: https://github.com/HackerNews/API https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/topstories.json?print=...

To @dang or whoever is reading at Algolia: you can set up continuous monitoring for problems at the DNS/TCP/TLS/HTTP layers from just your URL at https://heiioncall.com/ and we’d definitely alert you if the DNS record disappears or it’s otherwise unreachable for more than X minutes. (Email me if you need help getting it set up.)

Any chance you are going to implement non http(s) Outbound probes? Not everything is http so a generic TCP connection check would be great.

edit: Is it possible to add services in an automated fashion with an API?

Hmm, both are "possible but not implemented yet". The engineering approach that some of our users do is running their own custom monitoring script (checking TCP connections, checking against a dynamic list) on their own infrastructure, and then just use Heii On-Call to monitor (via Inbound Liveness heartbeats / checkins) and alert on (via Manual trigger type) that custom monitoring script. Feel free to email us at support-at-domain so we can try to understand the use case better.

If you already run infra, and you aren't scared to roll your own here, check out mon. It's pretty good, albeit not a full SaaS solution.

Oh no, I used that place on the regular. I hope it comes back, it's the only way I even heard of Algolia.

EDIT: Nevermind! Just a DNS glitch.

Ditto. I use it daily.

Either someone forgot about the special algolia account for HN, or cost cutting, which idk why they would need to cut costs this much as they charge a lot of $$$$$ for their product.

There is no cost too small or inconvenience for others too great that a controller cannot get a bonus by cutting the cost. ;)

And while that happens often enough, it is not what happened here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37822259

I assume it was an error. I would also assume algolia provides search “for free” because it’s great marketing for them — the search works very well imo, and I only knew about it because of HN.

Also great for YC, Algolia is W14 batch

It is very likely HN doesn't pay them and algolia did this for marketing.

Good catch. I use hn.algolia.com regularly, hope it is not permanent.

Algolia is also a fairly great product for those who don't want to muck around building their own search. I hope this isn't them cutting off HN, as that would be a bad sign.

Algolia is also very pricey, especially for startups.

TypeSense offers almost matching capabilities and you can self-host its open source product in a pinch if you don’t want to spend time to build your own search.

Algolia cut SO many reasonably priced features and put them into much more costly price buckets - we're actively looking to move away from them if anyone has suggestions.

I've been liking Meilisearch for a self hosted option - https://www.meilisearch.com

Algolia quoted one of my clients $250k/year. I spun up an ElasticSearch cluster and wrote a lambda that synchronises their DynamoDB into ES.

Their customers barely noticed a difference in search quality, and my client got a more scalable solution for 1/5th the cost.

If you like your penny take a look at Typesense https://typesense.org/ - nothing to complain here. Especially nothing complain about pricing.

If anyone needs an alternative, we host a HN search at https://hn.curiosity.ai

It seems to search only stories, not comments?

Really nice interface, good work with this.

FYI, Algolia close sourced their documentation scraper about 1.5 years ago.

https://docsearch.algolia.com/docs/migrating-from-legacy/

Correct. We run it as a managed service now -- it's free for technical blogs and documentation sites.

Nicolas, Bernadette, and Algolia -- assuming this was unintentional. This was an exceptionally useful for research for the entire dev/founder community and me personally. Would be very sad to see this sunsetted.

Not sure if related, but today, HN comments don't load in Harmonic app on my Android phone. Stories work fine.

You’d think they’d tell someone if they were intentionally shutting it down otherwise it would hurt the brand name.

Interesting, I just used the search about 4 hours ago to find a comment.

Algolia is YC backed, and HN is run by YC.

Algolia ex-CEO is now a partner at YC.

So the connection between the two is pretty strong, this will be resolved before the end of the day.

Yes right, and who doesn't like free publicity amongst their TG

hn.algolia.com used to return a pair of cloudflare IPs: 104.16.46.55 and 104.16.45.55. Requesting hn.algolia.com from these IPs now results in an "Origin DNS error" from Cloudflare.

I interpret this to mean that there is another record missing, as well: whatever the origin was set to.

It is back up

Everybody has to save money

True, CEO's yacht doesn't pay by itself.

I doubt it comes close to a yacht payment, but it will pay for plenty of avocado to spread on toast

I'm guessing the reason no one has linked the discussion from the other day when this broke is because no one can search to find the post!

Time to move to Meilisearch

hn.algolia.com was a ZIRP phenomenon

What do you think the P stands for?

Policy?

I always assumed it stood for “policy”

For those who didn’t know (myself included):

ZIRP = Zero Interest-Rate Policy

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/031815/what-...

Associating with this site and YC is an actual image problem nowadays, so maybe they changed their mind.

Curious, so giving in to the bait: why is this exactly?

Going to assume some YC affiliated person has been declared 'problematic'/'cancelled' on Twitter, and parent commenter thinks it's a bigger deal than it is in reality.

Gary Tan has been getting into politics lately. https://sfstandard.com/2023/09/27/garry-tan-y-combinator-dec...

Indeed, according to some leftists Garry Tan is now a white supremacist (???)

What group holds a negative opinion of Hacker News?

Whenever I hear others mention this site, the sentiment is generally positive with some lamenting a moderate decline in discussion quality because of more mainstream participation, but still putting it above other discussion forums.

Asahi Linux https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/110503331622393719

I was curious about this one. Seems like Asahi linux has some beef with HN. They initially included a banner on the top of the page. Then that changed to a redirect to google. Looks like some other site did something similar but redirected to something less innocent. In response dang had those on a list that added norefferer, which that mutated into adding it to all links.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36230649 which includes a reply from dang.

Some people have strong opinions about HN. There was a blog post which reached the front page on HN <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34446704>, and the blog post author immediately added a large box on top of the blog post:

<https://web.archive.org/web/20230120013024/https://cohost.or...>

They have now deleted the blog post entirely, citing being on HN as the reason:

<https://web.archive.org/web/20230403204702/https://cohost.or...>

Jamie Zawinski is another; whose WWW site, if redirected from Hacker News, returned an obscene image at one point.

Mostly white sf techbros lol. Pretty ironic

You can find a few of the negative comments by searching for "the orange site" which is the term the detractors of HackerNews use for the website. They are not completely wrong in my opinion. I've seen comment threads get so derailed here and end up defending truly awful things. For example, a couple of years ago there was a thread about a new custom genetic therapy for children with a certain genetic condition that causes their bodies to eventually shut down (forgot the name, but it's a condition that disproportionally affects a certain group of Jewish people). It didn't take long for a significant part of the thread to become people advocating for eugenics.

Just to clarify: I still participate here because I believe this website and the discussions within it are valuable, but I do recognise that it can be quite problematic sometimes and moderation is not always sufficient (you can make the case for this being the case for all public discourse platforms).

there are a lot of groups, and individuals, that attempt to cause chaos and disenchantment with sites that differ from thier worldview, even going as far as stalking individual users with malignant actions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com