Hacker News Reader

Just noticed an interesting design decision on that page. An 'everything OK' message once a day. One way to push previous downtime below the fold of the page.

Notice the change in the favicon.

It's also a way to show "yes, this status check is still reliably doing its job, it hasn't crashed".

OK I could take that as a reason.

Rightfully so; humans are notoriously bad at interpreting sparse data on a linear scale.

> 11:54 UTC We've finished emergency maintenance and are monitoring closely.

it's back

Along with the switch to the Octocat "We're down for maintenance" message.