Tell HN: HN was down | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: HN was down

599 pointsuyzstvqs327 comments

- HN errored on all authenticated requests with 502 Bad Gateway. It did still respond to a limited amount of unauthenticated requests with presumably cached pages, which did not get updated. The last post on /newest claimed "0 minutes ago", but was actually much older (1:32:57 PM GMT) and not the newest post.

- This status page actually identified the outage: https://hackernews.onlineornot.com/ - Pages by Hund and Statuspal did not show the outage.

- The last post before the outage was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46301823 (1:39:59 PM GMT). The last comment was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46301848 (1:41:54 PM GMT).

- There was an average of ~4 seconds per comment just prior to the outage. Based on this, HN likely went down at 1:41:58 PM GMT.

View on HN

Yes, sorry! We're investigating, but my current theory is we got overloaded because I relaxed some of our anti-crawler protections a few days ago.

(The reason I did that is that the anti-crawler protections also unfortunately hit some legit users, and we don't want to block legit users. However, it seems that I turned the knobs down too far.)

In this case, we also had a secondary failure: PagerDuty woke me up at 5:24am, I checked HN and it seemed fine, so I told PagerDuty the problem was resolved. But the problem wasn't resolved - at that point I was just sleeping through it.

I'll add more as we find out more, but it probably won't be till later this afternoon PST.

Edit: later than I expected, but for those still following, the main things I've learned are (1) pkill wasn't able to kill SBCL this time - we have a script that does that when HN stops responding, but it didn't work, so we'll revise the script; and (2) how to get PagerDuty not to let you go back to sleep if your site is actually still down.

Crazy that Dang literally manages HN in his sleep!

We all knew that but I haven't seen any confirmation before this.

I like hacker news but I don't think this site is worth getting paged over lol

You might be underestimating HN's popularity.

> You might be underestimating HN's popularity.

I think you're confusing popularity with criticality. I'm sure everyone in here can withstand a few hours without browsing the page.

If you like the thing you're managing, then its health is critical for you, not your users.

It's dang's baby at this point, and this is a good thing, as long as HN doesn't affect his life in ways he doesn't want.

[flagged]

failing to manage HN in my sleep is more like it

Your sleep is more important than our work distraction.

I was curiously productive this morning..

I took a shower for the first time in one week

came back just in time for me to spend the first hour of my work

Which is fine! I don't mind if it's down for a few hours. It reminds me that it's just a place to stop by for a bit before moving on. Like a digital coffee shop that sometimes has a leaky pipe and isn't open right at 7am.

I hope it doesn't change (much).

You're still a miracle worker. Single-handedly managing a well-known fully user-contributed site not just technically but moderation in contentious times like these and still keeping it working well and encouraging a positive user community can't be an easy task.

Thanks, I'll take it! except for the single-handedly part - gotta share the love with https://news.ycombinator.com/posts?id=tomhow.

No worries, please take care of your sleep and thanks for all your hard work

We all have our moments, and I personally consider HN to be “best effort”, almost like a volunteer project. I’m not certain I’m correct: but thats the optics I have so my expectations are adjusted to that.

So don’t beat yourself up please.

When I worked for “SaaS unicorn” we typically had multiple levels of escalation, and acknowledging would have done nothing because the alarm would continue firing until fixed. Not sure what’s changed in 15 years of ops, I had assumed it would be better now- I can’t imagine silencing an alert totally by acknowledging it- if its still occurring.

I’m totally fine with how you handled it, if anything I am thankful. But that seems to be a system I would improve if I had the time.

“mute” is different than “resolve” to me, and both should exist. (Where mute is an acknowledgement of an issue as ongoing.)

Yeah we don't exactly pay to be on HN, not much to complain about. I appreciate everyone who works on HN.

We pay with content and with the fact that we attract the talent that eventually ends up powering ycombinator investment rounds.

This. If it were a business-critical money fountain, I'd expect follow-the-sun SRE coverage. I don't think it is, so I can probably accept drinking my morning coffee without scrolling HN once in a while. There's only so much one can beat oneself up about a slow/incorrect response when the on-call is handled by what, just one person? maybe two people in the same time zone?

(Might be wise though to have PagerDuty configured to re-alert if the outage persists.)

And that is a good thing. Sleep tight!

I was starting to think you never slept, I remember that one time I emailed you at 1am. :)

Time to train an AI agent on your moderation activity and get some well deserved sleep!

We're working on it! well, some of it.

I'm pretty happy with how it's developing—the trendline is promising—but not ready to rely on it in prod yet.

Do you have nightmares of failing to manage HN when you sleep too?

I appreciate what you do. Hope you got some rest when it was all over.

You deserve a lot of rest!

Yeah, I mean how dare you?! I pay good money for high uptime SLAs! :)

I was today years old when I found out Dan sleeps.

I was today years old when I found out that dang's first name is Dan

You'll never guess what letter dang's last name starts with.

A as in Ang, clearly.

What if Dang made an AI agent of himself for when he sleeps?

By demonstration he didn't.

Hey dang, don't worry. It's just a site for reading articles and reacting to them.

Enjoy your deserved sleep and if for a couple of hours it's down, so be it.

Thanks for your continued service!

100%

Though I will say, HN is a pretty great source of information about major outages like the recent AWS and Cloudflare issues. I had a moment this morning where I thought, oh, is there a larger issue and then, oh, HN is down, huh, the next option is so far down my list that it's going to take me a moment to think of it.

I hope that serves as a testament to how great this site and the community is. Thanks for all your hard work keeping it that way!

> huh, the next option is so far down my list that it's going to take me a moment to think of it.

Option 4: take your grab bag with the tcp over IP shortwave radio, sextant and head for pre-cached month supply of food in the hills.

Maybe it would be fine if ops alerts were silenced during normal US sleeping hours?

HN is important, but unlikely much harm could be done before morning.

(Source: Lost a lot of sleep at one place, enough to realize that sleep interruption and deficit has significant costs.)

I was personally worried if there was some major outage of the whole world or something the first time hackernews didnt work because I didnt expect hackernews to go down but rather, something even more catastrophic than aws going down must happen (because we see major cloud outage posts)

https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/hacker-news

This website had many instances of reports, the last I saw were 52 reports in only a short frame of time, the maximum reports on this are 118 it seems.

> In this case, though, we had a secondary failure: PagerDuty woke me up at 5:24am, I checked HN and it seemed fine, so I told PagerDuty the problem was resolved. But the problem wasn't resolved - at that point I was just sleeping through it.

Its okay I suppose, have you figured out who is crawling hackernews so much tho, was it a ddos attack or an AI company trying to get data, doesn't hackernews support an api and I am sure that there are datasets for it too so Its interesting why they might crawl but we all know the reasons why as they have been discussed here.

No apology needed. We all needed to stop procrastinating anyways :)

During the last week my IP was banned for unknown reason. Glad to hear it might not be a problem from my side.

Yes, sorry! This is the problem - we don't want to block legit users, but if we loosen the bolts, we get flooded.

If you browse HN while logged in, that should immunize you against this happening. Also, if it does happen again, you can unban your IP as described at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html. But you have to do that from a different IP address, of course.

If those things don't work, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll get it sorted.

Thanks. It is so easy to change the IP using mobile that the unbanning is little hassle.

I’d love to know more about what running a site like HN involves, would be great to get a write up of what it’s like running something like this at this scale (and what kind of traffic you guys get)!

I can’t put my finger on anything within the last decade, but I seem to recall it running in something close to its current form on a single core on a single server for a long time:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5229522

Re: traffic, dang said (2022):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33454140

I took it as a good reminder that the hard part is the human part: that high-overhead features and UI fripperies are nice but not necessary (or sufficient) to keep a community healthy and vibrant over the decades.

(And on the subject of the human side, if you didn’t catch Anna Wiener’s 2019 profile, it’s here:

https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th... )

From dang's 2022 comment about traffic:

The most interesting number is the 1300 submissions because that hasn't grown since 2011 - it just fluctuates. Everything else has been growing more or less linearly for a long time, which is how we like it.

I find that surprising, as 2011-2022 covers an exponential rise in SEO spam and "growth hackers" attempting to drive traffic and links.

Or was 1,300 the number of non-flagged submissions?

Nope, total submissions. And it's still very much within that same window!

The other reality is that as much as this industry is up its ass about scalability you can run a very very busy site on a single machine now a days.

A lot of people out here designing their blogs like its 1989.

This is completely wrong, everyone knows you should rewrite everything in microservices immediately :-D

The transparency is deeply appreciated by me and others. We don't pay to keep HN on, so we cannot complain. Thank you and the rest of the team for all you do to give us a corner of the internet that is quite 'different' from the rest of the wild west that is the web.

> The reason I did that is that the anti-crawler protections also unfortunately hit some legit users, and we don't want to block legit users.

it is a shame that it needs to be this way. as a lurker who doesn't stay logged in nor use incognito mode, i have seen "Sorry" page way too often, even when opening the "past" page from the homepage.

truly hope you find a solution that reduces friction for all. personally, it is back to "Sorry" situation for now.

PS: for others facing a similar situation, it all disappears after logging in, which has been the most reliable solution thus far.

Yes, and I'm sorry. We do our best but it's both a hard problem and a moving target.

In a situation like this one, good crisis leadership is essential. dang, HN will help you with tips from vast collected experience (please chip in):

1. Blame: The first thing to do is to point the finger. That doesn't mean analysing the technical issue, which can delay this step and limit your options, but figuring out who is politically easiest to blame. Often, that's the new guy, but outside contractors and vendors without good connections are also a common solution. Even if you are technically responsible for hiring them, you can always push them under the bus with a little skill. This small sacrifice helps unify, focus, and motivate the rest of the team.

2. Emotion: Inject your emotion into the situation and make that the implicit, but indisputable priority. Particularly, outrage and anger - This is completely _____. These people are utterly _____ (I'd use all caps, but that's not allowed on HN). Make sure everyone's attention is over their shoulder, on your emotion, and infect the team with it. Threats are an effective tool here - this is a crisis, and anyone who is calm is not emotionally engaged. Otherwise, they won't care enough about this problem - without you driving them, they probably wouldn't care much at all. Anyway, you don't have time for niceties like empathy or even basic respect.

3. Speed: Respnsiveness to stakeholders is very important. People need answers now. Give them answers they want to hear, outcomes they will be comfortable with. Don't worry if different groups hear different things. Your team will find a way to make it all work - that's their job.

4. Communication: Good communication is essential. Make sure you clearly tell your team what they should be doing; repeat it several times to prevent misunderstanding. Especially people with experience can have minds of their own; keep them on track. The situation is a crisis so you can't take any risks; stay on top of them and everything they do, and give input if you're not certain they are doing exactly what you would be doing.

5. Victimhood: Find a way to turn the tables: Make it about you, and how you're the victim here, and feed the fire with more outrage. With this and outrage, nobody will undermine the team by challenging your ideas or authority, which is the most essential component of a successful outcome. Remember, without you this all falls apart.

Have I missed anything?

Engagement: make sure that every member of the team is either on the incident bridge or has dropped what they are doing to watch you diagnose the problem. The more eyes on the problem, the more awareness of the pain will be absorbed by all. If members need to leave to get food or put children to bed, tell them to order delivery and to ask their spouse to do their job. Demonstrate human touch by allowing them to turn off camera while they are eating.

Comprehensiveness: propose extreme, sweeping solutions, such as a lights-out restart of all services, shutting down all incoming requests, and restoring everything to yesterday's backup. This demonstrates that you are ready to address the problem in a maximally comprehensive way. If someone suggests a config change rollback, or a roll-forward patch, ask them why are gambling company time with localized changes, and ask them why are they willing to gamble company time on technical analysis?

Root Cause Analysis Meeting: spend the entire meeting time rehashing the events, pointing fingers and assigning blame. Be sure to mention how the incident could've been over sooner if you just restarted and rolled back every single thing. Be sure to demonstrate out-of-the-box thinking by discussing unrealistic grandiose solutions. When the time is up, run the meeting over by 30 minutes and force all to stay while realistic solution ideas are finally discussed in overtime. This makes it clear to the team that nothing is more important than this incident's RCA--their time surely is not. If someone asks to tap out to pick their kids up after school, remind them that they are making enough money to call them an Uber.

Alerting: be sure to identify anything remotely resembling leading indicators, and add Critical-level wake-you-up alerts with sensitive thresholds for those indicator. Database exceeding 50% CPU? Critical! Filesystem queue length exceeding 5? Critical! Heap usage over 50%? Critical! 100 errors in one minute on a 100000 requests per minute service? Critical! Single log line indicating DNS resolution failure anywhere in the system? Critical! (What if AWS's DNS is down again?) Service requests rate 10% higher than typical peak? Critical! If anyone objects to such critical alerts, ask them why do they want to be responsible for not preventing the next incident?

Frankly, I don't understand why someone would even try to crawl Hacker News.

There is an official dump which doesn't even require parsing HTML at all: https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/details/y-combi...

These are not, er, experienced crawlers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sbpl3ywNlpA#t=56s

Short lived and driven by good intentions– all's good. Thanks again for keeping this thing going!

Even after providing firebase endpoint, crawlers come to the site ?

Most crawlers have no concept of what that is. They will follow links to this site and then follow links out of this site even after being told not to [1]. The majority of crawlers follow zero rules, RFC's, etc... The few platforms that do follow standards and rules are akin to a law abiding citizen in Mos Eisley.

[1] - rel="nofollow"

Oh my god. It's the crawlopalypse.

Yes. It's hard to explain the experience of hosting a website since 2023.

A crazy amount of really dumb bots loading every url on the website in a full headless browser, with default Chrome user-agent string. All different ip addresses, various countries and ASNs.

These crawlers are completely automated and simply crawl _everything_ and don't care at all if there's value in what they're crawling or if there's duplicate content, etc.

There's no attempt at efficiency, just blindly crawl the entire internet 24/7. Every page load (1 per second or more?) is from a different ip address.

Unfortunately, the firebase API is very bad as they even acknowledge that in their github page.

> anti-crawler protections

Sometimes I could not open the comment section, receiving a blank page with "... We're sorry" or something along these lines when opening from new private window. It works when opening normally.

Logging in on the private window seems to resolve the issue. Can you take a look on this if possible?

Best to email your IP address to hn@ycombinator.com so we can see if it's blocked.

Can't speak for others, but I'm sure i'll be pretty fine if no one gets woken up if HN is down...

Of course, they'd better restore service after they wake up naturally, because I need my HN dose. But it's not worth losing sleep over it.

> the anti-crawler protections also unfortunately hit some legit users, and we don't want to block legit users

Was the blocking returning “Sorry.” instead of any page content? A couple of days ago there was a few hours where when I’d go to HN I could load the main page as a non-logged in user. But if I tried to log in I would get “Sorry.” instead. I also got the sorry message if I tried to click on user profiles of other people and a few other pages.

I am assuming that the reason I could see the front page itself and discussions on posts on the front page is that they were in a shared cache for non-logged in users, but that when I clicked on some pages like some random user pages those were not in cache and hit the origin server and it blocked those with “Sorry.” like it did for log-in attempts.

I also tried to go to the unblock IP page, but that one also returned “Sorry.”

For a while I was scratching my head wondering if I had gotten some malware on one of my computers that was aggressively making requests to HN, and that I had become IP banned because of that. Since I think my actual request rate from browsing and commenting should be pretty average. I read HN a lot, but not that much :p

Later in the day, or the next day, things were back to normal and I could log in again. Presumably after those anti-crawler protections had been relaxed again.

> Was the blocking returning “Sorry.”

> Presumably after those anti-crawler protections had been relaxed again

Yup and yup. Apologies for the inconvenience! If it happens again you're welcome to email us at hn@ycombinator.com with your IP and we'll unblock it for you.

I didn't realize you were carrying the pager too! Kudos!

I feel such a sense of kinship for anyone who carries a pager, almost 7 years at my current role doing it. Super cool that dang is among our number :)

Yep, have been on constant "pager duty" for 2+ years, although I have more help now and I get paged 1-3 times a week instead of per night. Still, carry my lappy everywhere I go. Bought an ARM Windows laptop to get that 20hr battery life so I could worry less during my travels. You know, fancy things like going get food or going grocery shopping.

Rough shift, my worst was every other week and my boss prior to hiring me was 24/7 just like you. I just carry a backpack with a few batteries + my work laptop, fortunately only a few really bad stories but hooooo boy me and that backpack have seen some fun times.

Do you carry a literal pager? We use the PagerDuty app.

My organization is, for now, using OpsGenie.

My pager noise: https://www.soundjay.com/transportation/sounds/train-crossin...

That will not only wake the dead, it'll wake me no matter how asleep I am.

Haha I made the mistake of using the default iPhone ringtone, now when strangers get called in public my heart rate spikes. Too scared to change it.

The "for now" is very important because it will be sunset in 1 year and something. I can recommend you Incident.io or Rootly as alternatives.

It may interest you to know that pagers are still a thing, Motorola still makes them, and I know that one major use case is volunteer fire departments

I used to work on Motorola Minitor 5 pagers. Looks like they recently released their newest model, the Minitor 7

I wonder if pagers are still used in hospitals? I imagine so

There's a company in England called "Cascode" who make firefighter alerters. These are really basic "beeper" pagers, which you can program to have a bunch of different tones and LED patterns based on the RIC and Subcode.

I look after several thousand of these across several hundred paging sites.

They're relatively inexpensive (70 quid or so in quantity) and they last about six weeks on a commonly-available AA battery. The batteries go flat enough to trigger the "low battery" beep at about 3am, for some reason. I don't know why.

There's no messaging involved, although the encoders are capable of sending a text string. The message is "get up and get down to the fire station right now", which generally needs no further explanation. POCSAG is unencrypted, so there would be privacy concerns with sending actual incident information in the clear with it.

While we're on the subject of old tech, until BT finally cut the last of them off, we use dialup modems to control the encoders (not dialup internet, just a hundreds-of-miles serial cable) as a backup, and dot-matrix printers to print out a hardcopy message for the crews to pick up.

All very low-tech. All very fixable. All stays working if you don't mess with it.

https://cascode.co.uk/products/2ar2-and-2ar3/

Doctors on call at hospitals also routinely still use pagers. There was a planet money episode on it a couple years ago: https://www.npr.org/2023/12/08/1197955913/doctors-pagers-bee...

The AUBMC hospital is definitely using them as well as the paramilitary in that country, at least until recently.

Now, whenever I see a pager, I think of explosions. Haha.

Oh no, I just always hear it termed that way and it captures the “feeling” for me since it feels like a dedicated device. I just just carry a work phone w/ PagerDuty during my shift.

I wish I could still buy a pager where I live :'(

Just out of curiosity, if HN is still running on one physical system, what does a daily or weekly traffic chart look like for the switch port facing it?

> The reason I did that is that the anti-crawler protections also unfortunately hit some legit users

How does this happen?

How does this happen?

Not the person you are asking. Bot operators have an incentive to make crawlers look as much like a human as possible so they do not get blocked. Some of them fail miserably and some nearly succeed. That makes it trivial to accidentally block a real person. I am personally fine with that given I do not pay for this site and have no SLA or contract with it.

some humans also try their best to make themselves look like bots...

You're absolutely right!

beep boop.

lol

Last week if you are using a VPN + a browser that limits fingerprinting, you were likely to see error messages accessing HN.

Every filter process has false positives and false negatives, especially when crawlers are trying to fake their status.

Looking forward to the post mortem. :)

dang

In my defense, I was commenting at 0 min, since then he made several updates explaining the situation.

Yes sorry! Normally I put in "[editing - bear with me...]" or some such.

I was just trolling, thanks for ur work

> anti-crawler protections

what type of protections are used on HN? rate-limiting? ip range blacklist?

dang - just to say, we've all done it...

Decades ago I had to write a Perl script to auth to the site for proper downtime checking. Some things never change :) Good luck with the triage.

dang!

I got stuck in an infinite loop.

Try opening HN -> it's down, better check HN to see everyone talking about a major website being down -> Try opening HN -> loop

Yeah me too. Wake up -> HN down -> That's weird, oh well it's usually only down for a few minutes -> I should check if HN is still down -> That's weird, oh well it's usually only down for a few minutes -> I should check if HN is still down -> loop.

That was a few hours ago. I'm glad this loop is broken.

sounds very much like an evil social media dopamine feedback loop. ironic given everyone on HN is so anti social media.... its clearly only bad for kids though i should add, silly of me to exclude such a detail

HN is obviously social media and it is silly to say otherwise. It is just social media that occasionally has interesting stuff. The SNR is just slightly higher.

I guese developed this addiction on Facebook and now that I don’t use it, I come for methadon shot to HN

I've been on this internet hit shit since the 90s lil bro, s' all good.

I can stop any time I want, I just don't want!

Sometimes I'll catch myself absentmindedly reopening the browser and checking two or three front pages, seconds after having just checked them and closed the browser.

That's a sign of addiction and I highly recommend changing your behaviour towards those pages!

I feel like I need to avoid channelling Bob Saget from Half Baked when I say that is not addiction. That's a habit.

There is a noprocrast feature in your settings to specify how long you can stay on for a single session and the frequency at which you can view HN. Super helpful!

oh interesting (honestly!), how is that it distinguished?

Don’t let me distract from this learning opportunity with my armchair expertise. There are a lot of articles out there for this exact topic, but here’s one that’s pretty good.

https://relevancerecovery.com/habit-vs-addiction/

Funny, I don't seem to need an outage to get stuck in a HN loop...

I woke up and was wondering if I’ve just woken up in hell!

Not just me then?

"Shit, HN is down! Hm, I wonder if there's anything about it on HN?"

until stack overflow occurs.

Yeah, I had assumed something very major must have happened for HN to go down, lmao and I even asked in some linux discord server regarding it asking if there is a major outage as hackernews is down

HN is how I discover whether other sites are down or not, so it serves a critical function, so of course I check it frequently.

TIL I have a "open Hacker News" hand reflex

I learn more reading the comments here than anywhere else. Thanks everyone for my addiction.

It just reinforces for me that addiction is a human problem not a problem with technology

I know dang basically works tirelessly to not change the format in order to not induce those addictive patterns

but yet here we all are

It's a website with the smartest people in the world. The level of conversations here are unrivaled in internet communities.

It's understandable to be addicted. Lol.

I visit this place multiple times a day.

99% of social science or political topics and 50% of technical topics here do not… read as smart, and you’d be much better off spending the same time reading the first chapter of a relevant 101-level college textbook.

It's entirely possible that this is the smartest place on the internet, but also often dumb. In fact, it seems likely. More of an indictment of the rest of the places on the internet.

> It's entirely possible that this is the smartest place on the internet,

i cant find the link, but there was a post about how to "be nice" and it was a revelation to a worrying amount of "geniuses" on here. bare in mind the sum total of the advice was "be nice, dont be rude"

Intelligence has many dimensions.

> It's entirely possible that this is the smartest place on the internet, but also often dumb. In fact, it seems likely. More of an indictment of the rest of the places on the internet.

Almost every (non-troll) online community that is relatively peaceful and has some semblance of moderation to remove flamewars thinks of itself as "the best community". Usually as compared to reddit, though if it's on reddit they will compare themselves to some other (hated) sub.

It's a fact of the internet. Every online community thinks of itself as the smartest, more thoughtful, more civilized. HN is no exception.

It goes without saying HN is not the smartest or more thoughtful online community. It's just... ok. Not the worst, not the best. Certainly NOT the place with the smartest people, though some smart people frequent it. As a regular, you can soon figure out HN's unspoken rules, blindspots, and areas where the group opinion is more likely to be accurate.

It's really not 'the smartest people.' It's people interested in tech, and often in making-a-lot-of-money-in-tech. It does have a lot of people with significant industry experience, which is cool.

> It's really not 'the smartest people.'

This was especially obvious during Covid, I even stopped visiting because the comment section was so crazy.

> the smartest people in the world

But also, people like me. Be careful what you choose to believe on this website

> It's a website with the smartest people in the world.

Nice joke!

At least, I hope it was a joke...

Any professional forum or technical subreddit with good moderation and gatekeeping blows Hacker News out of the water any day of the week.

Also the level of flak is unrivaled.

Poe's Law for a parody of the self-important sv techbro

It's a testament to Poe's Law that I genuinely cannot tell if the OP was being funny or not.

There's a reason why HN of all places has such a terrible record of handling actual sarcasm and telling it apart from genuine belief and that reason is NOT that "HN is really smart" lol

This one is at least healthy-ish for the mind. I’d much rather hacker news than any other news. Social Media is an emotional rage-bait cesspool these days. If it’s not for Hacker News those of us who abstain from the rest would be living in the dark.

But, would the addiction become worse if HN changed, or would there be a point where they could cure it?

Perhaps this is the role of HN - at least it still allows us to reflect.

I'm glad I'm not the only one. If I type 'n' into any browser it autocompletes to HN.

Save typing hundreds of letters per day, and replace about:newtab with news.ycombinator.com, now you can just do CTRL+T :)

at that moment my productivity would drop to zero

mine already has and I dont even have hackernews as my new tab :)

On all fairness though, mine is same for the original comment where just pressing n autocompletes it to https://news.ycombinator.com/

I had the same thing for Slashdot.org for many, many years. Both the reflex and the browser autocomplete. I still miss the old /. It was like HN + Hackaday + Usenet.

digg too, till they ruined it...still can't believe they ruined digg.

If you're looking to put the brakes on that, I've used LeechBlock to add a 5-second timer to opening a new HN window (along with other block schedules). The timer even fails if it loses focus, so it really helps slow you down.

https://www.proginosko.com/leechblock/

    echo '127.0.0.1 news.ycombinator.com' | sudo tee -a /etc/hosts

Does the trick as well :) For bonus points (and so you can't workaround it with your phone), do it on your router/switch instead.

You'll still open new tabs and go to HN, but you'll be reminded quickly, and every day can be downtime day \o/ (for you, personally)

I've made https://deja.de.hueve.ar/hn so it snapshots the frontpage once per day - that way, I now there won't be new updates during the rest of the day, and the dopamine addiction goes down.

so youve got the willpower to do something about it but not enough to just stop doing it?

To be fair, making a change (particularly changing a habit) takes time. Having something there to remind and nudge you helps make this easier, especially when you're tired, stressed, 'just looking for a short break', etc, etc.

It's like they say: "Your demons will comfort you when no one else will. That's why it's so hard to get rid of them"

Yes.

Have you never suffered from habitual reflexes? I blocked twitter for a while in my hosts file and a dozen times over those first few days I instinctively opened a new tab and typed twitter in

I deleted the YouTube mobile app a few months ago and I still reflexively reach for the app icon every now and then. Thanks YouTube Shorts.

> I blocked twitter for a while in my hosts file and a dozen times over those first few days I instinctively opened a new tab and typed twitter in?

youd go through that effort when you could have just stopped though.

We all admire your absolute mastery of your own habitual reflexes and mind. For the rest of us, there is a daily battle of wits, desires, weakness, and habit.

If I could snap my fingers and break toxic habits and patterns, I would have done so decades ago :)

I say. Vibe coded 4 apps once I got past that, on my way to half a billion in ARR already.

I’ve turned on no procrast mode and set it to ten minutes per hour. Helped me a lot!

What are you using to control this?

It is on your profile, the “noprocrast” dropdown.

It's a setting available on the page you get from clicking on your own username.

Whoa. A website that cares about its users enough to _easily support limiting access to itself_?

That's so refreshing in terms of being a user-focused feature, and yet it stands in sharp contrast against today's engagement-hyperfocused climate. I never would have thought to look on a website's own settings page to limit my access to that same website.

I love it, thank you for pointing me to this!

Same! Right there with "every day must begin with coffee"

⌘-T, N, <RET>

Did it like 5 times during that 1h-ish outage. :(

There is a noprocrast feature in your settings to specify how long you can stay on for a single session and the frequency at which you can view HN. Super helpful!

So do I, but it was such a shock that I just passed out, and when I woke up, it was back up.

Admirable~

> TIL I have a "open Hacker News" hand reflex

You mean it's not your homepage?

I stopped using google.com for Internet access check, I now use HN.

Do you log into things and reflexively type "ls", too?

I did not know how addicted I was to HN until today lol

What? You mean you ... close the HN tab?

I already knew that. :)

obligatory: https://xkcd.com/477/

Yes, and I'm a little ashamed to admit my morning routine wasn't the same without it.

This was more impactful to my day than the last AWS and CloudFlare outages...

At least during those outages I could procrastinate on HN.

I felt like changing HN down page to show top 30 posts from this week before or after the generic message.

Is this still a valid account for HN status? It says it’s the official one, but with the changes at Twitter to no longer show chronological feeds (at least for users that aren’t logged in), it’s rather useless. The top 5 listed post (for me) are seemingly random from 2014 - 2022.

https://x.com/HNStatus

Is there a better place to check, beyond a basic down detector that may provide more insight or signal that the outage is acknowledged?

https://xcancel.com/HNStatus only uses chronological ordering (after any pinned tweets) and that has the last message 12 Dec 2023.

(Basically whenever you see an x.com link just change it to xcancel.com and avoid the nonsense.)

We post there when we know we're down and it may take more than a few minutes. But in this case we didn't know! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46303196

Only way I have figured out how to to change the "Following" sort order back to chronological is from the mobile app: click the down arrow on the "Following" tab. Change the sort from "popular" to "most recent."

Seems to reset it on the web view, too.

It sounds like this would only work for logged in users.

https://hn.hund.io/ Is a status page, no idea if official or not, but it didn't register here for some reason.

I didn't read the post text, it's identified there haha, my bad! I wish the text post text wasn't grey, I gloss over it too easily.

This was monitoring the unauthenticated news page, which is why it didn't catch it. It now monitors authentication as well. It is not official, and was made by a co-founder years ago.

Thanks! I checked that page and wondered why it stayed green. I resorted to checking https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/hacker-news

This site said HN was fine and green the entire time it was down.

Smart. Have to use that error budget before year end...

I always hated the late use-it-or-loose-it at the end of the year where you end up buying the things that were denied requests from earlier in the year. You just cost me half a year of using the damn thing.

This problem is really bad at my work.

We commonly run into finance issues about half way through the year. We get to the point where 10x HDMI cables get declined from Finance and we get reprimanded for not tracking where each HDMI or Ethernet Cable go. Near to the end of the year, the budget refreshes and finance (without consultation to us) ends up buying a bunch of random stuff.

"Guys, we brought 11 iPad Minis that need to be setup"

Oh so we can also get the HDMI cables now?

"No sorry, we just spent all the remaining money, have you audited the cables recently?"

When it was down my thought was "damnit, I'll actually have a productive workday now."

Next time you can avoid that fate by opening HN in a private browsing (or whatever your browser calls its equivalent) window. This outage, like the vast majority of HN outages, only affected logged in requests.

I suppose you could also just clear your HN cookies in regular browsing window, but then when they fix it you'd have to log in again.

Huh. Dunno why, but when it failed on Firefox I tried Chrome, and it worked. I wrote it off as a Mozilla issue, but this would better explain that I think

Is it my imagination or did they used to automatically serve you a logged out page when it was down?

I couldn't access it in private or regular.

hahaha

Looks like 3 hrs

https://hackernews.onlineornot.com/incidents/yaz-eOJeARBL

https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/hacker-news

Strangely, nothing from the statuspal, which is the first google result

https://hacker-news.statuspal.io/

Interestingly it stayed up if you weren't logged in.

If you aren't logged in you get a cached version from the CDN/cache. Reddit works the same way.

Not completely, I'm not logged in on my work laptop and it was only working some of the time (and not like some pages were cached and some weren't, I was refreshing the same page and sometimes it worked and sometimes not).

That's how I concluded that it wasn't a ban on my account but rather more serious.

also went down if you went to login, and people's individual pages were also down. So as far as I saw the front page was up as long as you were not logged in, however I'm not sure if that wasn't just luck of the draw, I had one experience where it looked like maybe the front page was sometimes down for not logged in users as well.

on edit: ok others pointed out it was cached pages I saw. explains it.

That only worked for a while, eventually I couldn't load comment pages even logged out.

that'll be because it's served from cache when you're not logged in

Maybe PG is more involved now and hired the "10,000 lines of AI code a day" person who made a deployment mistake?

https://x.com/paulg/status/1953289830982664236?s=46

A lot of the outage indicators failed. Someone needs to create an outage indicator reliability dashboard.

A lot of them got fooled by the caching; pages for signed-out users are cached heavily and those kept returning successful responses even if the actual backend server was down.

This site also got it right: https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/hacker-news

I believe it's because they accept user reports.

Yes! Now we see what a difference it makes.

And an outage reliability indicator for that outage reliability indicator.

We apologize again for the fault in the fault indicator. Those responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked have been sacked.

So a downdetectorsdowndetector.com but for Hacker News?

I was fortunate enough to get to watch a bunch of kids racing and bouncing in bouncy castles in our school gym during HN's downtime.

It's not that much different from HN, come to think of it.

(ha, ha)

Yes, and on one request I saw a message like "Restarting server - this won't take long", and soon after it's back up.

Yeah I couldn't log in for a bit this morning. It's concerning how often and how many times I tried. Glad it's resolved.

Next time try not to beat a dead horse expecting it to resurrect. :)

So now we call the refresh button CPR?

I was quiet surprised really. HN almost never goes down.

You don't visit enough my friend :)

It's down about 8.4 minutes per week. On 26% of days it doesn't work at least once, and on 12% of days it has more than one consecutive failed check. The longest uptime streak was 24 days

I've been keeping track since exactly 2 years (to the day!) because I was surprised that it seemed briefly down for me on a daily basis. Was I getting unlucky and hitting it every time, or was it just down very often? Nobody posted anything so I started answering the question for myself :p

I've been meaning to post the tracker to HN but there's a pesky bug I want to fix: the "is it currently down" stat. I don't know how this is beyond me but something in the code bugs out. So this is my first time posting about it

Would love to see it when you do get round to posting it :)

As soon as I noticed it was down I came to hacker news to post about it, but...

PSA - if you delete your cookies, HN gets it easier. Or just test it in a private window.

It did work without being logged on. The auth service appeared to be down as the log in attempt (just showing the page) failed.

Now it makes sense. I was puzzled about why it was working on the phone browser and not on my system. I'm logged into HN on my system.

It would be a nice feature if hackernews had a simple news.ycombinator.com/status page that I could trust. I don't like loading those some-sketchy-domain/status-right-now sites.

> news.ycombinator.com/status page

That's not so useful when news.ycombinator.com is having problems.

True. how about https://ycombinator-status.com or https://status.ycombinator.com. They can drop that link on their official ycombinator.com site just so it is easy to tell that it is legit when they are not down. They can maintain the status for all of their official sites there. Well, with the exception of ycombinator-status.com of course. I guess they can post that status on some-sketchy-domain/status-right-now - LOL!

Maybe ycombinator does have an official status page somewhere, but it is not easy to find if that is the case.

I got confused by the "minutes ago" thing.

Working with full dates in the HTML and doing a tiny JavaScript that calculates the "minutes ago" would actually be a neat improvement.

First AWS/Azure/Cloudflare and now HN?!?

Time to update the meme: https://preview.redd.it/cloudflare-had-a-rough-day-today-and...

We can live without the former, but not HN!

You won't be employed without the former.

I thought HN traffic got blocked on my work's network for a second, phew! My lunch breaks would've gotten a lot more dull.

In other words, productivity in tech skyrocketed for hours..though it seems some work was flavoured with irrational anger.

During that time I couldn't load HN web page, but my HN CLI tool could connect to HN: https://github.com/Aperocky/hnterminal, but only read.

I was able to view the site without being signed in (i.e. private window) but any browser I was logged into wouldn't load.

I'm sure it's a coincidence but it started working again shortly after emailing hn@ycombinator.com

It was the first time since I started using this website (August last year) that it was down.

I'm still impressed nonetheless.

I'd like to know what caused the outage and how it could have been prevented, for learning purposes.

https://www.stevenjgarner.com/HN-Down-2025-12-17-07-48-UTC-0...

I Still found it funny that we have downdetector, downdetectordowndetector, downdetectordowndetectordowndetector,... (I lost count) but downdetector doesn't detect HN's status.

I got irrationally angry when it refused to load the website

You handle your irrational anger much better than whatevermrfukz who keeps pooping his pants.

Interesting that you mention that, how do you keep track of his comments? Some sort of plugin/scraper?

> how do you keep track of his comments?

You can just look at them, turn on showdead in your profile and you'll see a bunch of flag-killed comments in this discussion by whatevermrfukz. No need for a plugin or scraper.

thank you

you could refuse to be angry to mock it

Yep "having trouble serving my request" or so.

It was down if you tried to access it while authenticated (i.e. you have a cookie). It was loading fine for unauthenticated sessions (e.g. incognito).

Could have been accidental flagging of sorts. Didn't work on PC for few minutes while showing fine on phone.

In with the rest, yes, and my first thought is always "I have an internet outage" when HN is down. :-P

HN being down makes you start wondering about the differences between routine, addiction, compulsion, and habit.

Man if I had a coin every time I email the mods and this thing goes down, I'd strangely have two coins.

Thought it had something to do with some model updates, like Gemini Flash 3 for a moment.

when I realised the api still worked I put this together https://hackernewsx.com just to realise it will just work if I cleared my site data.

I run the app called HACK and received user emails that the HN website was down.

Thank you for HACK. I love it!

Yes, I got an error message, but I cleared my cookies and was able to access.

The "site status" apps are all smoke and mirrors, how unreliable.

What was the longest that HN has been down? I feel like this is up there.

Will we get a post mortem?

Yes, it' been out for me too, southern hemisphere, GMT -03

Hi, Got an error an hour ago on phone, not loged.

Anyway, glad to see you back.

Paris 1812.

Cheers from France.

I tried to refresh an embarrassing amount of times

I have never before seen this website down.

I'll admit this ruined my morning

We need a serious post mortem for this

Yup, France here , Paris 1809.

HN was down about an hour ago.

Glad to see it back !

Cheers.

Yes, was down for me too this morning

Yes was down for me. Ontario, Canada.

Yes, it was down for a few hours

Athens, Greece yes it was down.

Thought for a second I got banned for something lol

I thought I was being rate-limited for opening posts too fast, which has happened before.

After more than an hour I thought, "wow this is pretty harsh" and "so much of my exposure to learning things is directly tied to HN posts". I was lost lol.

Me too and I was wondering what I did!

Your comment history doesn't sound IP-ban-worthy. Is there an alt that has you worried? :P

hn applied ycombinator too strictly

Yes

I wake up, and look at HackerNews lol. This morning sucked hahaha

Yes, I had to touch grass this morning.

Yeah & chatgpt was trying to gaslight me - claiming it was my fault. Happy to put that bum in its place...

You use ChatGPT to know if a site is down?

I'm with Hund. Our hn.hund.io page did not catch this because it was requesting the cached, unauthenticated page. It now monitors authentication as well.

Thank you. I was thinking myself or my corporate IP was shadowbanned

Is this a mistake by hund, or the configuration of hund by HN?

Mistake on our part (Hund) for not monitoring authentication. This page is unofficial and was made by a co-founder several years ago.

You should add a graph of visitors per-minute for the status page for the past 24 hours or so. Would really help for situations like this

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