Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by jqm | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

jqm

Did anyone else pause when they read the title line...

"Usage of web servers broken down by ranking".

I'm picturing a graph of the most commonly broken web servers for half a second.

View on HN

I'll take the downvotes as a "no we didn't, and we think you are trying to be funny".

But, I actually did read that for a half a second and think the phrase "broken down" can be done without. It doesn't add anything in my opinion, I know it is broken down (its a graph), the phrase is unnecessary, and it caused me at least to stumble mentally for half an instant.

Hypothetically, a company like Hyperspin could create a chart of webservers that were offline (most likely to break) in the past X days. I think the results would be interesting. Example: Out of 1,234 servers that were offline for > 1 hour in the last month, 40% Microsoft, 30% Apache, 20% NginX, etc.

I assume the too-shy-to-reply downvoter thinks downtime is not a direct correlation to a problem with the webserver. While that's true, I was hoping to argue that the stack chosen is indicative of deeper problems such as stack complexity. A too-complex stack is more prone to break, which is part of the appeal of NginX, its simplicity. You could also prove Microsoft stacks are more or less likely to fail. For example .01% of Microsoft servers were offline last month, .009% of Apache servers were offline (> 1 hour) last month, etc. PS: If it wasn't obvious, I made up hypothetical percentages.

some people are a bit too free with downvotes.

I can only imagine what these people are like in real life. I suppose aggression is necessary part of the human condition and that saddens me. But... hey, if it makes one feel powerful to down vote, go ahead. Personally I find it cowardly unless the person can take a second to explain why but whatever.... (Exceptions made for blatant cases of trolling and drop dead stupid comments of which yours was not one... and I appreciate the support. Thanks. PS. fellow UF alum! Looks like I graduated the year you started.).

Go Gators ;-) As long as we're off on a tangent, this made me realize downvotes here are (pretty much) anonymous, but comments are not. I think it would be interesting if anonymous notes could be attached to downvotes. It would also be interesting if those anonymous notes were either public or private. So hypothetically, if you had 10 downvotes, you could hover that and read why people downvoted. Another approach (I like this idea better) the downvote could trigger a menu of tags like [Nonsense] [Rude] [Grammar] etc. Anonymous or not, constructive criticism is a good thing, in my opinion.

That's a good idea. Anonymous notes on a downvote. Hope to keep seeing you post on here. Gainesville seems like a million years ago and it was a great time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com