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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

There are around 20 people working full or part time for YC now, including 5 of us doing what I used to do alone in the old days. There are 47 startups in the current batch, which works out to less than 10 apiece. So things are actually pretty easy right now.

Last night's server troubles took more out of me than anything I've had to deal with in YC proper.

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A different way to frame the question: "what keeps you up at night?" (beyond the very uncommon event of HN being down)

Massive quantity of emails? YC startups that aren't the rare runaway success? YC startups that are the rare runaway success? Meta issues around YC? Something unrelated to YC? Pressure to live up to the pg legend irl? Not being disciplined about avoiding overworking? Something in your private life that's not appropriate to share? Anything?

Well, pg actually said he went to sleep while it was down, so that didn't keep him up.

After Elon Musk mentioned his sleeping patterns on a couple of recent interviews (answer: 6 hours a night), I've been curious to learn about the sleeping patterns, diets and work habits of exceptionally productive people.

I wish biographies on the world's most influential people discussed this (or at least I would like to read scientific studies on this)... Warren Buffet and Bill Gates are famously fond of burgers so I'd expect unfortunately diet habits have more to do with where you live than what you accomplish :(

When I was at college I read that Margaret Thatcher slept just 4 hours per night, and I was so envious, wishing I had that extra time every day. Three years ago my wife and I had twin girls and that meant very little sleep at night for me (night shifts were my responsibility as my wife still kept her paid job). In the last year the kids sleep fine, which means I get to sleep better, but strangely I still wake up after four hours without any need to. A few months ago I learned that Thatcher had twins as well :-)

The cynic might say having only four hours of sleep didn't do her any favors, based on some the decisions she made in her time as PM.

Bill Gates recently said he reads before bed and sleeps at least 7 hours a night. He said if he doesn't get at least that much his "IQ begins to drop". [CBS Interview]

Sick children.

People maltreating startups we've funded.

Any sort of deal involving third parties that might let us down. E.g. fundraising, when we were a fund.

It's interesting that you'd say the downtime was relatively overwhelming. From an outsider's view HN seems like it must be a relatively low stress site to maintain. If it goes down, YC suffers very little. Its community views the site as a public service. If anything, a few hours or even days of downtime just serves to remind the community how valued that service is (and by extension how positive our feelings towards YC are).

Is there a hidden downside to the downtime I'm missing? Worried it brings into question YC's technical chops?

Aside from the obvious HN and YC app services, I believe the office hours scheduling and probably any other internal YC service are all part of the same codebase running on the same server. Sounds like it could be a major problem for them.

I think almost any programmer running a service used by hundreds of thousands of people would hate the idea of it being down. It's part of building things to want them to work properly.

Is there anything you believe could have helped avoid HN being down in the way it did?

(Sorry to hijack this post; I doubt you'd see this question in the proper HN downtime post.)

Quote from pg: "For some reason I didn't check the comments after the surgery to see if they were in the right place. I must have been distracted by something."

Short answer to your question: Test the fix after deploying it on production :)

I certainly sympathize with the stress, I've been there. But programmers are much more effective at resolving downtime in low stress situations, so the best strategy is neutralizing those high-stress moments and just accepting that "downtime happens".

Your hard work is appreciated. Thanks.

Thanks for responding!

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