Ask HN: How Did the Outage Affect You Personally? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How Did the Outage Affect You Personally?

19 pointscenhyperion39 comments

If a website outage affects your life in any significant manner then I'm sorry but your life is non existent.

Unless it's StackOverflow, I can't imagine StackOverflow going down.

I think I would be very upset if Soundcloud went down for a week. But you know, we'd all get by. :)

Unless its healthcare.gov and you know you get sick or something.

So you are saying that sysadmins don't have a life, since an outage of any public-facing sites _that they are responsible for_ usually has a significant impact on their lives.

I got a ton done on the side project I have been hacking together. It started as a blog post but will end a short book on the Meteor framework. Hopefully finished by the weeks end! I got about 3000 words in while we were down! :)

Edit: It will be totally free and open source, and is being written on a collaborative platform ala git where anyone can add a branch for edits/extra content/suggestions. I don't want to plug it shamelessly, but if you're really interested email me and I will send you a link. It's in my profile.

I went outside. It's bright out there. There were strange creatures walking and making noises.

Shakes and tremors. I no longer have fingernails and I chewed through an entire box of pencils.

Sounds like a possible psychological issue. This might lead to a problem for society. We might want to get you some preventive treatment for that before you have a chance of harming someone. Do you think prison might work well here?

I advocate medical treatment for addiction, though of course I am joking here.

I assume we were discussing this yesterday, after the last HN restore point?

Yes, discussing yesterday, exactly. I missed that discussion when it was gone.

The point is the same whether you were joking about addiction or not. Preemptive forced action based on subjective reason like labeling makes for unwarranted control of human beings by other human beings or systems. I can just imagine a set of RAS checkboxes similar to stop and frisk for mental illness and homelessness. None of these are ok and the fact that we are supporting systems like this means we are headed backwards instead of forwards.

Harming others is a separate issue and is always a problem.

It gave me a chance to really compare the opportunity cost of readership versus the amount of personably actionable material I find here.

As a result I've decided to drastically restrict the time I spend here. (And that's me done for today)

I realized how compulsively I click on HN. All in all it is not a healthy habit. I ought to give it up or cut down. Before it used to be The Register, Ars Technica and Wired.

rant

I switched to Feedly when Google Reader closed, so it made me a bit depressed because I figured Feedly would be fucked like it was last time HN went down. I had to unsubscribe and resubscribe to get it to start showing new items.

And indeed it is.

I want to get my feed from news.ycombinator.com/rss. That's what I had in Google. That works in Digg Reader. It works in NewsFire. Not at Feedly. Feedly insists that there is no RSS feed there.

Last time, I was able to find something that was close among the feeds that Feedly offered. That was http://feeds.feedburner.com/hacker-news-feed?format=xml. (I got that from Feedly's exported OPML).

So this time, I unsubscribed and resubscribed, but it was unclear which feed was right from the 9 that Feedly says are available for news.ycombinator.com. Adding all and looking at the OPML, it looks like the one that corresponds to what I was using (http://feeds.feedburner.com/hacker-news-feed?format=xml) is now http://feeds.feedburner.com/feedsapi/BwPx.

But I'm not sure. It doesn't seem to match news.ycombinator.com/rss as well as the old one did--but maybe there is some delay because Feedly apparently is going through feedburner, so I'm not actually sure whether or not I've found the right thing.

This isn't the middle ages. This crap [1] should not be happening.

/rant

[1] "This crap" solely refers to Feedly, not to HN going down. Sites go down on occasion, so I have no complaint about HN in this regard.

Figured out why Feedly would not let me get the feeds directly from HN. It was an http vs https issue.

I learned to code, finally.

I visited Hatena Bookmark (somewhere between HN and Reddit in terms of content type and quality, for Japanese links) much more frequently and discovered how much worse (for me) the curation there is (because it's more mainstream than HN).

I got work done yadda yadda, but I was also pretty bored when I needed a break. In the long term, if HN disappears, I'll probably find something else. So get your shit together HN and don't die on us again.

Or maybe you'll just get more work done ;)

I went to Slashdot for the first time in about a year or two. It still sucks.

No, it sucks worse.

Their new layout is all Weboblag 3.0.

I'm not sure that matters. For all that I care, a site like HN or Slashdot might as well look as if it came straight from 1997.

What killed Slashdot was the abysmal quality/delay/editing of posted stories.

I felt something I do daily is missing out and I kept refreshing the site.

I think I speak for everyone when I say significantly more work got done!

It didn't.

I had planned on writing up an email gleaned from some HN comment insight, and citing the comment.

"I'll just do that tomorrow" I thought. But, as we found out, there was no tomorrow.

I regressed from man to beast, communicating in grunts and fueled by primal instinct. My time was taken up with hitting the ground with femurs and painting on cave walls with mud.

Ah, so back to your day job with PHP I see?

Was there a black monolith nearby?

In my desperation I turned to /. and VentureBeat, because I can't browse 4chan at work.

And I don't have a membership to lobste.rs :(

So, instead, I read about unit testing with Karma.

I went outside in what felt like -34F in Chicago to blow soap bubbles in the air and watch them land at the consistency of plastic bags.

It was awful, don't let it happen again.

Jesus. Is this an actual question?

Increased productivity.

I couldn't get my fix man!!!

I wondered if HN had been NSLed.

I was highly productive today.

Life in general was better. :)

It didn't

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

I kept checking and checking HN over and over again. When I couldn't take it anymore I started to do some actual work.

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