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Comment by PhantomGremlin | Hacker News Reader

Since "dribbble.com" appears to be "taking a timeout for maintenance" I can't at a glance determine what, exactly, they do. So maybe they're a bunch of hobbyists. But if not ...

I don't understand how a "real" company, even in todays overheated environment of soon-to-fail hipster startups, doesn't do (at least) one of these two things: a) have competent employees on staff that are intimately familiar with their critical infrastructure and how to support it or b) pay, yes, gasp, pay some other company for professional support services. A glance at the Wikipedia entry for Postgres shows some possible companies that do that. Or, as already mentioned, there are mailing lists.

But twitter? Really? That's support? For someone other than a hobbyist running a website in their spare time?

Go ahead, flame me. But my first impression is "amateur hour". My apologies if dribbble.com really is an amateur effort.

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Even people intimately familiar with a pieces of infrastructure - hardware or software - can't possibly know all failure modes. Asking on twitter about an obscure error that you've never seen doesn't cost anything and may be very well just one way of finding a fix. It's akin to asking on IRC or writing a mail to a mailing list - something which you seem to condone. I fail to see how it's any less professional.

>It's akin to asking on IRC or writing a mail to a mailing list

No it isn't. It is akin to shouting at random people on the street "help I don't know what to do!". Asking on IRC on a mailing list is going to a group of people who are there specifically to help people with problems on that subject.

If I had the reasonable expectation to find somebody qualified willing to help on the street with practically no effort I'd go that route as well. It's just very time consuming to do so, so that's why I usually don't.

That's precisely the point though, it isn't a reasonable expectation. The odds of a postgresql expert just happening to follow them on twitter are poor. The odds of multiple postgresql experts being on the postgresql mailing list is quite high.

Sure, the chances of finding an expert are low, but you'd be surprised how well it works. See, the tweet was posted to HN by someone and the chances of finding a Postgres expert here are significantly higher. More important is that the costs are low, even lower than writing to a ML. So why not try?

Plenty of big sites use Twitter to inform users of down time, I prefer that, do you expect me to go hunting down their status page or just have it come up conveniently in my newsfeed...

Just google "reddit status" and check the first result.

It's the asking for help on Twitter he's criticizing, not the fact that they notify about the down time on Twitter.

Who's to say they aren't? Spending 10 seconds asking on Twitter, and getting an 'oh yeah, I had that and fixed it with x, y and z' in response sure beats staying up until 2am fixing it.

Also, posts error without Postgres version, operating system, or any other relevant details which could help the community diagnose the issue quicker.

https://twitter.com/samuelfine/status/334499315949133825

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