Ask HN: Where did you hang out while HN was down? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Where did you hang out while HN was down?

53 pointsyesplorer67 comments

I'm (and probably others, hopefully) will be interested in knowing where you spent your online surfing time in place of HN. As a person learning programming for the first time, I spent most of the time on r/learnprogramming, r/learnpython, r/ python and Google Groups for the Python mailing list.

What of you?

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It was tough, but in the end I got by with a combination of work and spending time with friends & family

Likewise. With a 3 month old baby, I didn't even realise it was down until just before I went to bed and checked it on my phone.

I was hoping your comment was going to end with "I didn't even realize I had a baby until it was down"

I spent the whole time on HN pressing F5

Me too, until a day later I realised I should probably try Ctrl+F5, worked like a charm.

Me too, followed the HNStatus on twitter too

So apparently I have a natural pressure gauge that makes me click my HN bookmark to let off some steam after some minutes of intense concentration. I found it incredibly bizarre that being unable to access the site prevented me from letting off steam so that I was clicking the bookmark compulsively every 30 seconds before remembering that it was down.

There's a list of other communities at a spoof site I made a while back: http://hn4hn4x.herokuapp.com

I ended up being productive - Started a new book (https://leanpub.com/jsoddities) and wrote some 20% of it while HN was down. Far more effective than my noprocrast

20% in a day - sounds more like a pamphlet to me :)

5000+ words a day isn't too difficult, really. Plus JS Oddities isn't going to be a very big book - about 20+ examples of rather crazy JS code and explanations

JS The Good Parts is a little pamphlet. But JS oddities sounds like a huge bible.

That's great. the book looks pretty interesting and the cover is kinda awesome. Did you do that within the same time frame too?

Yeah. I already had the vector of the lady from when I was working on Fork the Cookbook. The rest is all GIMP default

The latest really disastrous LessWrong thread:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/jfr/link_why_im_not_on_the_rationali...

It turns out that if you provide a safe space for "Human Biodiversity" advocates, this can put some people off your site entirely.

I ended up spending most of my time productively, writing code. However, I did spend a significant amount of time in IRC channels, Lobste.rs, /r/netsec, /r/python, /r/crypto, and /r/malware.

Isn't IRC dead yet? What are some of the IRC channels you would recommend to HN users?

IRC is just a protocol, like HTTP.

So is gopher.

... and protocols never truly die? Like Gopher?

What? Gopher isn't dead, buddy. There are over 160 servers.

Forgive me if I don't hold my breath waiting for Gopher to come back in-style though. ;-)

One of them serving legitimate files, even!

(Only on waning gibbous moons.)

I still go to freenode, but being a protocol doesn't mean it can't die, i.e. gopher is practically dead.

#startups on freenode has the biggest HN user concentration

I spent a short amount of time there and it seemed to be rather spoilt by a contingent of insane and simply unpleasant people. Perhaps I just chose the wrong day.

No, it's always like that, unfortunately.

IRC is great. Need help with an advanced math problem (or a basic one)? Try #math on freenode. Need help with an esoteric Python problem (or a basic one)? Try #python on freenode. Need help with ${anything_else}? Try #${anything_else} on freenode. Etc. (If there isn't a freenode channel for your topic, then Googling for "topic IRC channel" will usually turn up something on some other IRC network.)

I can't think of any other tool which solves the same problem as IRC, so it seems doubtful that IRC will be joining the ranks of the dearly departed anytime soon.

Not at all, I love IRC. I hang out on Freenode, consistently in #rit-foss (I'm an RIT student) and I jump around other channels.

Whatever you're interested in, there's most likely a channel on some server which focuses on it, whether it's math, literature, jailbreaks, python programmming, security, torrenting, etc. Here's a list of EFnet channels[0].

[0]: http://www.efnet.org/?module=channels

I tinkered around with a project and started Google's python course: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKTZoB2Vjuk

I released http://twittersearch.algolia.io/ :)

Looks cool, and I added my handle, but doesn't twitter already have this feature?

Thanks. Sure it has, I explain what (and how) I improved here: http://blog.algolia.com/improving-ranking-twitter-handles-se...

I spent more time hanging out in cesspools of villainy, like /b and the PhantasyTour Phish forum (http://phantasytour.com//phish/boards.cgi). But yeah, I'm really happy HN is back.

Nice, didn't expect to see any PTers on here

As most of it was Sunday for me, I spent some time working on my IOCCC 2014 entry after reading carefully through the 2013 entries for inspiration.

That and r/wtf which is slightly addictive if not completely wrong.

I honestly didn't realize how much time I spend on here until yesterday. It was more than a little disconcerting.

I spent a lot of my time reading up on Julia, and a little time working on a website.

/r/learnprogramming and /r/programming

I was looking at news.ycombinator.com instead of news.ycombinator.com/news (which yields "Sorry for the downtime. We hope to be back soon.") so I thought it was still down until I saw hckrnews.com had new entries and I started thinking "New entries? I thought it was down." Backtracked and figured out what URL I should have bookmarked for HN.

And then I saw below - Ctrl-F5... ugh.

ISRO scientists were doing an AMA on r/india

I spent most of the time finishing my backlog on the multireddits I have made. To list down some of the sub-reddits, /r/dailyprogrammer, /r/cscareerquestions, /r/algorithms etc. This, in the time I would have been surfing HN instead, obviously. I also had a bookmarks folder of links from HN that I hadn't gone through.

Seriously? Can we stay a day without constantly checking hackernews and the internet? And then posting about it to show how much YC fanboi they are?

Maybe be productive instead and actually code your startup instead of posting on hackernews.

Seriously.

Sry, I saw this discussion was all humane, so I thought it was time for token snarky comment guy. :P

Did you see that? Developer productivity in North America just increased for one day. Its back down now.

Honestly, while HN was down, I didn't feel the need to hunt down other news. In fact, I got a good start on the Coursera crypto course, as well as got some real work done.

Took a peek back at http://www.reddit.com/r/startups and http://growthhackers.com

I searched google for "hacker news similar sites" and ended up on "http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/"

I rediscovered lobste.rs - which seems to be picking up a little since I last looked. Quite a few duplicates from HN but some alternative stuff too...

(Shameless, but I'm still looking for an invite if anyone's got one....)

beside working, I spent time lurking on reddit, lobste.rs and /g/

Reddit /Jailbreak :D

Reading a book (the origin of species, to be precise).

On the phone to my lawyer discussing whom to sue for emotional distress and whether the $Million figure should be in double or triple digits.

I was hanging out at Reddit and https://devcharm.com/.

I was using techmeme to get the latest tech news. To be honest, my work breaks got a lot more boring.

Saw it was down, tried the next day. I have too much work and family stuff to spend all day on HN.

/g/ & StackExchange. Still waiting for my account to be accepted at lobste.rs

(˘､˘)

re-reading nodeweekly, jsweekly and pycoders weekly. oh and statuscode

Reading TechCrunch, BBC News, and flipping through Flipboard.

I couldnt hang out anywhere, I wall polling HN with F5

In the datacentre, troubleshooting.

I hardly noticed.

Fark, mostly.

Went back to Slashdot for a day.

I actually got some work done...

i was... working. such a shame.

I spent time reading Medium.

I did my work.

twitter. lots and lots of twitter.

Slashdot.org

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