It seems that every time a well-known service goes down, for however long, for whatever reason, instantly there's a flurry of posts here making sure everyone knows something that they either already know, or won't care about.
I'd really like that to stop, although perhaps I'm just a curmudgeonly old grey-beard.
-Those who care about fake internet points see downtime messages as "easy karma." No thought required.
-The mad rush to submit the "news" for easy karma results in votes for the first submission.
-The cycle repeats.
Downtime messages aren't the only thing. Sometimes things make it to the front page based on their perceived likelihood to make it to the front page.
It has become quite (unsuprisingly) prevalent on HN. Wonder if pg has any plans on fighting this and if the high-karma enabled functionalities take into account karma whoring in their formula.
You can easily spot the trend if you read HN through RSS. And it sucks :\
Why is it more easy to spot through RSS? (genuine question)
The the posts that end up in the front page have been filtered, an unfiltered RSS feed has even the failed attempts to get easy points.
What doesn't affect you individually, affects all of us collectively. I.E. It diminishes the legitimacy of this forum as a whole when those very same mechanisms that are meant to cultivate genuine discussion are abused for petty reasons easily.
In other words, if you're waiting for [service] to come up in order to get something done, there's not much better to do.
> if you're waiting for [service] to come up in order
> to get something done, there's not much better to do.
It would be useful to me if someone could explain how their workflow requires github to be available, because it would seem that they are using facilities or features of which I am unaware.
Thankfully, it wasn't long till it came back up.
Do you stop work when it runs? I don't understand your workflow that implies you have to stop while a process that runs often fails to run on one occasion.
I remain confused.
[0] I assume this is "Continuous Integration"
What I think I'm repeatedly asking, and what I think I'm not being told, is what there is in their workflow that requires github to be up at a given moment.
Here I am, working on some code, or working on some documentation. I'm using my local repo, and I decide that it would be a good idea to push to the shared repo on github.
Oh, it's down.
Never mind, I'll carry on with the next bug-to-fix/feature-to-add.
What is it that people are doing that requires github to be up, otherwise at that moment they can't work and have to wait?
I feel like I'm asking a question that makes sense to me, and yet people are staring back blankly, unable to comprehend the question. Perhaps my understanding of people's use of github is so radically wrong that my question is based on total misconceptions of everything.
I don't know. I'm trying to find out. I'm getting downvoted.
Pretty soon I'll go away without having learned something from the people who clearly have the knowledge, but can't understand my ignorance.
I wonder if this is born of the fact that I always arrange my workflow so as not to require any external services at any specific time. In part, this is a result of getting into computing at a time when remote services were inherently unstable. Perhaps times have changed enough that people assume remote services will always be up, and then when they aren't, everything has to stop, because their workflow is predicated on availability.
This is like programming an API querying system that just assumes the remote server won't hang. Enough of the time it's true to make it not worth worrying about. I wonder if I'm just from a culture that's so foreign, no one knows where to being in explaining the modern world to me.
Or, to be less charitable, and to assume some incompetence on someone's part (though not necessarily the developer doing the work)--what if you're trying to use bundle/npm install to set up a working environment for one of your codebases, but one of the dependencies is listed as a git ref of a repo hosted on Github?
And honestly, this is all assuming you would "just move on to the next [whatever]." Most people will take any excuse to procrastinate. :)
This was a genuine question. I have no doubt that my usage is different from yours, and I appreciate the opportunity to learn. Perhaps I can do things better, and you can be the one to teach me.
I don't care about the downvote(s), but I do care about missing an opportunity to do things better, or more effectively, or more efficiently, or something. Clearly people here use github differently from me, and I'd appreciate the opportunity to learn.
I was speaking more generally than just Github's case with my original comment, though; for example, it's really obvious that people talk about Reddit being down on HN because when Reddit is down, they're A. bored, and B. want to talk about Reddit being down. They'd do that on Reddit if they could ...but it's down.
So I agree with the "if it's less than 5 minutes, don't report it" sentiment, but I do like it when larger outages are reported.
This is hacker news, and many of the hackers here use GitHub so when it goes down they might be spinning their wheels. If it is down for less than three minutes it probably won't make it off the new page. I think your arbitrary 30-40 minutes isn't better than what became the norm based on user behavior on HN. Why do you, Toshio, think you know with a high level of precision, how long GitHub needs to be down for it to be relevant to HN?
Nobody's work suffers due to a ten minute outage, since it's "git"-hub.
I agree with you, OP, but it seems there were a lot of people jumping on that bandwagon.
Of course, HN is a great place for people to discuss how to avoid a productivity disruption when such services go down.
Or just look at
I concede that it was important to you, as no doubt it was important to many. The question is, why should it be posted to HN? There might be value in a longer post with real analysis of outage statistics and patterns, but this isn't it.
You shouldn't need git to deploy, build a system package and deploy that.
But the crux of your argument, also invalidates it :) as a hacker you should be able to hack around github being dead.
it would be nice if HN was at least divided into tech & political-tech
Thanks. Github, Gmail, Google Docs, anything: more often than not, the moment I click the link they're working perfectly.
Twice in the last 4 days, 2 stories to hit the front page in a row have been "ZONOES GITHUB DOWN!!!" when it's been a small blip.
But...if you're a big company, who's doing serious work, then take advantage of the fact that git is a DVCS and have something as a failover measure. GitHub is great and has lots of great features, but there's nothing stopping people from having a mirror synced without all the sugar but to keep productivity going.
But to play devil's advocate, in aggregate, the reports of the outages, even the small ones, could be useful to someone deciding whether or not to use GitHub.
"Beg HN: Please only beg about serious issues (250upvotes+)"
Now upvote me for making clever comments about infinite-regressions, which all hackers are obviously interested in; or downvote me because I failed to add "</sarcasm>" to my comment - but wait, I just did, which would then cause an alligator paradox! (woohoo, now you'll want to upvote me because I mentioned paradoxes - but wait isn't that a paradox to upvote me for... nevermind)
But obviously you now want to downvote me because it is apparent I'm procrastinating and wasting time on HN and have nothing better to do. But wait, oh snap - now you want to upvote me because I'm writing satire about people who write about infinite regressions... which, wait, hold on, would mean that I'm not -- nope, nevermind. I'm shutting up here, because I'm sure you could figure out what my next 100 paragraphs will be, which means I don't even need to write it.
But gasp, I just did write th -- this author was shot dead* (then who wrote that he was shot dead? Obviously it was only a flesh woun -- this author was `Rabbit of Caerbannog`ed)