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Comment by tomw1808 | Hacker News Reader

Things can go wrong, but really, its been a lot and we're normalizing that to an unhealthy degree...

I wonder if it was down that much, if users would get credits the way we pay when we use the services - its kind of ridiculous for a critical service to be down that much and all we do is "ah okay, its just github". Like, as if that was normal to be down that much...

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I think the authors of SMTP had a healthy attitude towards server uptimes:

   Retries continue until the message is transmitted or the sender gives
   up; the give-up time generally needs to be at least 4-5 days.

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5321#section-4.5.4....

At the time, most email was either local to the host (big mainframe in the basement) or transferred once a day through scheduled dial-up connections during off-peak phone hours

Which is a good fit to a distributed, offline first version control system, if you use it like that.

I saw an application once about 25 years ago that was built on SMTP for communication. I think it was an inter library loan system, but can't remember for sure. I was a pretty smart way of not having to worry much about redundancy in the communications.

I don't think it's been "normalized". Github uptime is literally a joke in the tech community. They have first mover advantage and a behemoth behind them so they're not going away, but everyone knows how shit it's uptime is. It takes time for organizations to move away from services like this but I would bet anything that many are starting to try to move away, as well as new companies knowing they shouldn't use the service.

I agree. I think it is the kind of situation that goes “gradually and then suddenly”, to quote Hemingway.

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