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tekacs

Fun seeing HN restart to switch to the Christmas theme, in three steps:

https://share.cleanshot.com/vJZv6k03 (restarting the server)

https://share.cleanshot.com/qFyM347P (online but temporarily readonly)

https://share.cleanshot.com/kW8kY7mp (back online!)

View on HN

You must have grabbed that first one awfully quickly!

You’d have more luck asking for world peace.

Dear Santa, for Christmas can we get a prefers-color-scheme: dark mode for HN, thank you and Merry Christmas

So what's the christmas theme? Unless I'm blind, it looks the same as always, except the header color seems to have changed... slightly?

Perhaps you've looked at the site so much that you're blind to the numbers at the start of each item.

Oh, indeed

No numbers in Chrome on iPhone, fyi.

I can’t tell if you’re joking, because I’m looking at the site on chrome on iPhone and there’s numbers.

The numbers next to the submissions are red/green

Japan changed its flag for Christmas…

What container is this running in?

FreeBSD

Color me confused, but what do containers add to FreeBSD beyond jails? Jails have their own IP addresses and root filesystem, plus they use the host OS's version of libc and OpenSSL/LibreSSL and all the other core utils.

Is it the convenience utilities for building and running container images?

I was joking. There is no container. (We don't use jails either.)

But alas, FreeBSD does support OCI container images! It supports Podman and has an OCI-compliant runtime:

https://freebsdfoundation.org/blog/oci-containers-on-freebsd...

However, I still can't pinpoint what the value proposition is compared to using jails. Is there anybody around here able and willing to shed some light? I know I didn't use Cunningham's Law to start the conversation like a clever netizen but maybe, just this once, a good faith response to a good faith question is possible.

The power to serve

Restart?!

ouch

HN is a pretty simple, efficient monolithic web application. Some updates might need a restart. It's OK for some web requests to fail during that time. HN isn't life critical with sixtuple nine uptime requirements.

Tbh like 99% of web apps aren’t critical - most of them are for buying something or providing infrastructure to make it easier to buy something anyway. It’s fine if your online shop is down for a few minutes (of course the business won’t see it like that but it’s true)

A sales site being down might lose you a sale. But the simplicity might save you so muh more than that loses you. And often the complexion of high availability infrastructure results in more downtime than it prevents.

For stuff like HN, I like the peek behind the scenes it provides. It's all just software written by some humans and way too often people take themselves and their shitty software way too serious.

B&H is doing fine financially and brings their webstore down for each and every Sabbath, even if that happens to be a Black Friday.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12183263

Steam, +130 million users, biggest gamming store, multi billion dolar company, is offline every week for a few minutes.

99.999999 is so overated.

It could probably be done with a simple if statement, but I'm guessing that dang enjoys the tradition of doing it manually every year.

I'd rather restart once (ok, twice) a year than keep that code around in production.

It only affects traffic for about 10 seconds.

I feel like this obsession with zero downtime has gotten a bit silly. Sure, for some things it's damn near required (though I imagine that's fewer things than most people think), but it 100% does not matter even a little bit if HN is unavailable for 10 seconds or so.

Everyone went right for “downtime” - no, that’s not an issue. I would have expected a configuration change, which wouldn’t require a restart but might indeed result in downtime.

Or even a configuration change that some control system notices and does restart the service.

It’s the manual, hands-on connotation (maybe only in my mind) of telling someone a restart is involved. Automate this stuff - don’t want the code in the server all year? Fine, have a process rebuild and relaunch on a schedule that makes sense. Might have downtime, but definitely have less hands-on.

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