Crazy that Dang literally manages HN in his sleep!
We all knew that but I haven't seen any confirmation before this.
We all knew that but I haven't seen any confirmation before this.
I think you're confusing popularity with criticality. I'm sure everyone in here can withstand a few hours without browsing the page.
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.
However, when something I care about crashes and burns once in a blue moon, I make sure to put the fire out, at least to make it survive till regular hours. Things I care about can be both business and personal, and nobody bugs me for them.
Maybe we shouldn't make any assumptions about people we don't personally know, while we are at it.
You are free what you choose to do with your personal life.
Meanwhile, it is pretty obvious that it's pointless to demand or expect personal sacrifice to maintain unrealistic levels of high-availability in services that are far from critical. I mean, do you honestly believe that these messages you and I are writing are so important to get out that someone must sacrifice their personal time to ensure it is served to the world in this very instant instead of, say, 3 or 6 or 13 hours? Absurd.
- I believe dang sees HN as his baby, so *voluntarily* monitors it as a critical infrastructure *for him*.
- I personally like this kind of commitment from people who like their job, however *I don't expect or demand it in any way*.
- I also hope that attention doesn't affect his life. *Especially negatively and/or in a crippling way*.
I also keep servers up in my daily job, and some are more important than others, but none of them requires me to wake up 5AM to solve a problem (by design). So I don't demand anything from others something which I won't do.
As long as nobody is dying, nobody should stop, drop, and work on something else regardless of time, date and location.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: it looks like you've been breaking the site guidelines quite a bit, unfortunately. Could you please not do that? We end up banning accounts that keep doing it and I don't want to ban you.
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.)
(Might be wise though to have PagerDuty configured to re-alert if the outage persists.)
Not to say that I don't procrastinate or waste time doing other nonsense. I can definitely spend a lot of time reading HN comments, as I'm doing right now.
Anyway,anyone who finds themselves with a problem with HN should try that out :)
To be clear, I wasn’t complaining. Just pointing it out. Aside from any more speculative benefit to YC for running the site, the site does run outright ads.
Apologies for the misunderstanding
I did miss exactly what you meant by “problem” in that passage, but get it now, so thanks for that.
I hope it doesn't change (much).
I'm pretty happy with how it's developing—the trendline is promising—but not ready to rely on it in prod yet.