Because it's not good enough that the site is back, we need to pile on and complain too...
I wasn't complaining, however. :)
Edit: clarification on motivation.
Speaking of which, I think you got the wrong impression here about the motivation of your fellow HNers who are simply curious. Your doubling down by snapping at people is really not the solution either.
Take a step back and look at this thread again. I think you misinterpreted the situation. Nobody's upset because of the outage. Isn't it understandable that people are giddy to find out what happened, though?
Had your criticism been that lukeqsee is behaving lame and trollish, you might have been received much better. Personally, I couldn't care less who gets the stupid points for actually asking the question - I believe getting points for posting stories is a bug anyway.
And the question itself is so simple and minimal, it doesn't really make sense to think of it in terms of being nice or not. It seems appropriate to me to just assume by default that it is being asked nicely and leave it at that.
(I would hope nobody misunderstands, but I am entirely serious.)
Edit: Udo edited his post, so I replied.
> lame and trollish
I partially agree. On one hand, it is both. On the other hand, like I said above, someone would post the question.
> I believe getting points for posting stories is a bug anyway.
I completely agree. Actually encouraging conversation and actively adding to the conversation is much better for the community. Perhaps 25% or 50% points for posts would level the field.
I'm curious - if you don't mind my asking: what are you thanking me for?
nhangen falsely critiqued my actions as complaining and then turned my own admission against me; you fairly accessed that (IMO). You also added to the conversation with your own assessment of the broad trend, i.e., posts are worth points.
I think all of those actions are worthy of thanking.
That's not at all what you initially commented on. Even if that was your intent, you simply said something completely different and unrelated. You were judged by what you actually said and when people challenged you about it you got aggressive. I'm really sorry to go on about this, but that's honestly what it looks like from here.
One of the reasons why I chose to comment on this is that it's a mistake I made as well once or twice (getting motivations of fellow users wrong and snapping at them), and I had the good fortune of people pointing that out to me.
1) We also have to keep our site and services running. Learning from other people's (bad) experiences is always welcome.
2) After an outage of this magnitude on our site and services, a post-mortem would be expected as part of the clean-up. It's not an extra demand, it's normal.
it's not about blame and anger; it's about learning and preventing.
There's no doubt that the whole time it was down, these questions were being asked -- both by PG and co. as well as the end users.
Not that we expect immediate and concrete answers, but it's certainly expected that the question will come up.
And it's pretty common for services to post a quick update stating the issue, cause, and postmortem at a high level, once service has been restored.
I know I try to do this every time my site goes down for even a couple minutes, let alone ~24 hours, and it has nowhere near the activity of HN.
Several HNers have the same question, thus the reason it is the top-voted new post.
I know it was on my mind, just out of curiosity, and was one of the first topics I looked for when I found service had been restored.
Your post might have done better if you had gone at it this way:
"Hey guys, PG and his minions are probably flat out on a couch somewhere, breathing many sighs if relief, and slinging back a well earned Scotch (might be a cider). Could be a while until we hear form them."