32 ms·

Ask HN: Is HN having problem keeping up today?

371 points by suyash 5y ago

Hacker News (this site) seems to be going down today just like facebook. Is there a massive DDOS attack occurring or just a co-incidence?

jzellis 5y ago
That's what happens when you run your entire site off a VM running as a WhatsApp chat bot.
- aspenmayer 5y ago
  I know you’re joking, but do you have some links to such projects for future reference?
iainctduncan 5y ago
It's facebook outage rubber necking. Everyone who has been involved with keeping services online is like "oh heads are going to fucking roll today, let's go see what folks are saying happened". haha
H8crilA 5y ago
This post was sponsored by the liar's paradox and written by Bertrand Russel himself. (meaning if HN is down you can't post about that, and if it's not down you won't post it; proving that you can never have a post "HN is down" on HN)
exikyut 5y ago
For what it's worth, my own desire to see if I can help out somehow has definitely only increased over the past few months as I've noticed the messages at the tops of threads about pagination. I don't have any particular skills that would make me a hand-in-glove fit (eg, I'd need to learn Arc...), but surely there are tons of little boring things I could usefully do that would take the heat off. If I'm thinking this way, surely there are (many?) others...? For example, something tiny that I'd love to fix is to split vote() in half and move the UI update logic into an Image.onload handler, so that the UI only changes if the upvote absolutely committed. I'm OCD about this because I actually use voting as bookmarking, and recently realized that some unknown percentage of my upvotes/bookmarks have sadly been lost because the auth= value had expired (eg in the case of a weeks-old tab) or because I was on bad 4G on my phone, but the UI state has no bearing on the network response. Something else that I'd be very happy to put effort into, after being told how to approach the problem :), would be to make the site screen-reader-accessible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1r55efei5c&t=386s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1r55efei5c&t=386s (size-XL volume warning - unfortunately the speaker volume is like 5% of the screen reader volume). A longer-term project that I also think would also be very useful would be to implement OAuth2, so that users would be able to safely attach external logins to their accounts without needing to supply their actual user passwords (which thankfully none of the alternate UIs have tried to do AFAIK). This could support fine-grained scopes like "can see own comment votes", "can vote", "can post replies", etc. IMHO the best way to do this would be to have a central pool of manually-approved app registrations; this is definitely the most complicated approach :/, but it means the entire system would depend on a human who could go "...that OAuth2 app in particular is behaving weird. [pause]" which would be very tricky to achieve with an autonomous system (where everyone independently creates their own tokens that have no semantic value). This sort of thing utterly fails at large scale (see also: Google, YouTube, etc), but I think it would be perfect for HN. While implementing this it would also make sense to support 2FA using TOTP. A while back I read that one of the reasons the site was closed was to keep the voting logic private. The chances are there are probably a bunch of other things (like maybe the spam detection/handling systems, and maybe the moderation tools) would be similarly classified as (for want of a better word) "sensitive". Well... it could be very, very interesting to split the codebase in half, with all the sensitive stuff in one corner, and the remainder of the codebase capable of running locally without it. Maybe you've already considered this, and consider it nonviable :( (NB. The reason for the Rube Goldberg OAuth2 architecture I suggested was precisely to make it that much harder for people to register throwaway/bot accounts etc, keeping in mind the voting logic thing. Couldn't figure out how to reword the above two paragraphs to resolve the info dependency :) so put this here instead. lol) IIUC, there are a very small pool of enthusiasts around the K programming language (https://kx.com https://kx.com) that privately study the source code to Kdb, and I understand that Arthur Whitney et al. are actually open to newcomers taking an interest in the project. (I'm sure I saw a comment mentioning as such a while back, possibly by geocar, but don't seem to be able to find it. I might've read as such elsewhere.) At some point I hope to go down that rabbithole, which looks genuinely interesting, but learning that it *was* actually accessible left a bit of an impression given that (http://archive.vector.org.uk/art10501320 http://archive.vector.org.uk/art10501320): > Whitney demonstrated his “research K interpreter” at the Iverson College meeting[5] in Cambridge in 2011. We had visitors from Microsoft Research. The performance was impressive as always. The tiny language, mostly familiar-looking to the APL, J and q programmers participating, must have impressed the visitors. Perhaps conscious that with the occasional wrong result from an expression, the interpreter could be mistaken for a post-doctoral project, Whitney commented brightly, “Well, we sold ten million dollars of K3 and a hundred million of K4, so I guess we’ll sell a billion dollars worth of this.” > Someone asked about the code base. “Currently it’s 247 lines of C.” Some expressions of incredulity. Whitney displayed the source, divided between five text files so each would fit entirely on his monitor. “Hate scrolling,” he mumbled.* The above, combined with the project's niche accessibility (I understand that one does have to be genuinely interested) speaks to me of business and engineering focal points in perfect calibration and harmony with each other. (Hnng. :P) It also gives evidence that it is in fact possible in the first place to achieve and sustain this kind of calibration in contexts and situations that make use of niche technology. The (meta-?)question (to me), then, is how the same sort of niche accessibility context might be applicable/applied to news.arc (et al) to varying degrees. I also wanted to incidentally mention that I've long had mixed feelings about using GitHub (in a sharing capacity). There's a bit of "but I don't have anything interesting enough!" in there, but it's mostly hesitancy about dumping stuff underneath The Giant Spotlight Of Doom, Inc™. This isn't GitHub's fault; it's more that the consumer end of open-source has something of a demand/non-empathy problem toward the higher end of the long tail, that GitHub is the biggest platform, that everything not-GitHub correlates with an exponential drop-off in terms of visibility... and the intrinsic lack of any nice middle ground in the resulting mess. Applying these considerations to HN's crazy popularity, I think that using GitHub could be great for "pop culture accessibility", if you will - but at great potential cost to behind-the-scenes logistics (maintaining CI that merges closed-source modules, explaining Arc for the 5,287th time, etc), and a noteworthily increased maintenance burden. While there are a variety of "alternative" Git hosting platforms, I think LuaJIT's approach is most interesting (https://luajit.org/download.html https://luajit.org/download.html): the Git repo is only available over HTTPS as a firewall convenience, and there's no browser-accessible repository viewer. Thus everyone needs Git installed. You could also for example require everyone's Git client to provide an HTTPS client certificate, for example. Such speedbumps would enable a scalable form of "proof of interest" (there's also the fact that everyone has to go learn Arc once they do finally get at the code...) and naturally rate-limit this new dimension to something hopefully maintainable. Lastly, and as a bit of a continuation of the last point, regarding the question of licensing ("oh no"), I'd actually be in favor of something custom. Both because all the opportunity (read: $$$ xD, but also Bay Area) is available to properly figure that option out, and also because virtually all existing licenses (and their wide use) bring a sort of reification to the table that makes politicking/taking sides ("ooooh! XYZ does ABC! that puts it in the same group as DEF!") all too easy, which may potentially threaten HN's pragmatic ethos somewhat. A unique license has no reference points and thus less potential impact to cohesion, and also makes solving niche cases extremely easy; you just work backwards from whatever end state you want (which you've almost certainly had years to think about, or at least subconsciously gather context for). One concrete example (working with the limited context I have) might be disallowing mirroring or copying of the code, which would close the loop on the Git setup described above. I'm not sure what bits of the above are interesting and what bits ultimately amount to excited bikeshedding :) - but I definitely want to convey that I, and probably (many) others, would be genuinely interested in helping out. Also, I realize stuff does actually get fixed, like * vs \*, which I am very appreciative of :D.
- exikyut 5y ago
  Hmm. This is currently at -1. I've obviously misstepped or misread the situation/context somehow. *Sigh* I'm sometimes really bad at this, sadly, despite my best efforts to the contrary. Sorry. If someone would like to point out where I went wrong I'd greatly appreciate it. Edit: I've realized that maybe my comment was interesting, but not as a reply to the specific comment I replied to. As my comment grew I thought at a couple different points that maybe it wasn't a good fit for subthread I was replying to, but barreled onwards because this happened to be dang's most recent reply to the whole thread at the time. Maybe this amounted to a spot of tone deafness - and if this is indeed the case, I do actively/explicitly request that my reply be detached from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28756111 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28756111.
  - krapp 5y ago
    If you want to contribute to an Arc based forum, the open source Anarki fork[0] is always open. It won't effect the original Arc distribution or HN but several other forums do use it. [0]https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki
    - exikyut 5y ago
      Huh, TIL that there are forks of Arc! My only point of hesitancy with diving into something like this is my strong suspicion/fear that HN has diverged sufficiently enough from Arc that almost all improvements I made to news.arc et al would need manual/refactoring before they would be useful - and this would need to be done every time I tweaked something on my end. My interest in Arc is motivated solely by the fact that it's what runs HN, and while part of my motivation to dive into HN from a technical standpoint is because I just like doing that :) the rest is just wanting to help the site get out of users' ways, while retaining a pragmatic focus.
  - elendee 5y ago
    I think you’re well intentioned obviously, but in your offer to help, the first thing you do is ask he take 5 minutes to digest your ideas, when he hasn’t really indicated he’s looking for help. Thats a very long time for an internet browser. So yes I think they’re downvoting the context not the content. They are interesting ideas though.
raimille1 5y ago
Noticing the same here
detaro 5y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28749476 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28749476
throwawaysea 5y ago
It also looks like the buttons to add comments changed in appearance. Maybe there is some kind of site upgrade going on?
- lkbm 5y ago
  Looks the same to me. I'm guessing the css just didn't load for you.
- brundolf 5y ago
  The recent iOS update changed the default appearance of buttons in Safari, and not many sites use the raw button appearance, but HN does. So that could be what you're seeing
  - satchlj 5y ago
    very likely - I'm noticing that too
agustif 5y ago
Yes. Started loading slower pages and then throwed some can´t respond to your request right now! Seems fb down is making people go other places meanwhile maybe_
lifeisgood99 5y ago
Getting the "We're having some trouble serving your request. Sorry!" page a lot.
- kurthr 5y ago
  Can't tell, but logging out to get the cached pages did seem to help... so maybe it's a lot of people all logged in hitting the same database each click? Normally, very fast for me.
- satchlj 5y ago
  yup me too lol, it's serving the the 502 bad gateway error to be precise
nicoburns 5y ago
I rather suspect that it's because of the Facebook outage, but indirectly. HN is always slow when major tech services (Facebook, Google, AWS, Github, Slack, Fastly, Cloudflare, etc) services are down. The HN community seems to congregate here for updates causing higher than usual traffic.
- asddubs 5y ago
  plus HN has been a bit spotty as of late anyway
- suyash 5y ago
  or it could be a malicious attack? I doubt most facebook users even know what HN is.
  - shadowgovt 5y ago
    Most Facebook users don't know what HN is, but most HN users have Facebook accounts and will migrate here for the dopamine-inducing refresh clicks (don't let them try to claim otherwise ;) ). If most Facebook users knew what HN was and congregated here when FB was down, the site would be utterly crushed.
  - djmips 5y ago
    It doesn't have to be 'most' facebook users.
  - rplnt 5y ago
    But all HN users know what Facebook is. And outage of this scale is rare and interesting.
    - tuke 5y ago
      What is Facebook?
      - ed_elliott_asc 5y ago
i_like_apis 5y ago
It' just heavy traffic from people who would otherwise be on facebook.
polote 5y ago
This is normal, it happens everytime a big communication platform is down. Slack, Teams, Zoom, Google, FB ... If you want to read HN, logout, or use the private mode
lucasverra 5y ago
Indeed from Paris France, most probably MZ is checking it a lot
robocat 5y ago
Edit: way faster if you click logout. Running in anonymous mode (clear browser cache) makes it responsive, but read-only. Edit: I suggest using a private tab or two browsers or two profiles, one where you are logged out to read comments for speed, and if you wish to comment or vote then paste a comment url over to the other. Side effect: you improve responsiveness for everyone!
- manojlds 5y ago
  Stack Overflow does this well by automatically making it read only mode when they are having issues.
  - htrp 5y ago
    to be fair... the stackoverflow tech team requires stackoverflow to restart the company (along with the rest of the world)
    - prirai 5y ago
      Hehe, true. Good that it isn't down. FB got a place to resort to.
- celsoazevedo 5y ago
  On Firefox you can use containers. Two tabs, one logged in, one logged out.
- templeosenjoyer 5y ago
  Do you have any idea why it's so much more responsive?
  - jraph 5y ago
    Anonymous pages are cached.
  - progval 5y ago
    Probably because it can be cached instead of serving customized pages
huhtenberg 5y ago
... but only if you are logged in :-?
- nrmitchi 5y ago
  If you're not logged in it's likely static served from cache.
- kreetx 5y ago
  This appears to be the case. Unlike one of the other comments, hn is slow relatively rarely (perhaps a few times a year).
- Kenji 5y ago
  Yes, that's normal. If you're not logged in, HN serves you a cached version that is a couple dozen seconds old. That's super fast. If you're logged in, HN has to generate the page based on the previous actions and properties of your account (e.g. upvotes, favourites, etc.) with every HTTP request.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
bevacqua 5y ago
It's just people flocking to HN for reliable news on the insane outage affecting global Facebook services, and refreshing far more than they usually would. Data point of one
- iainctduncan 5y ago
  make that two! ha
- 1001101 5y ago
  "People look for alternatives and want to know more or discuss what’s going on. When Facebook became unreachable, we started seeing increased DNS queries to Twitter, Signal and other messaging and social media platforms." from Cloudflare via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28752131 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28752131
BatteryMountain 5y ago
For me it lags when scrolling. Very odd.
- jraph 5y ago
  Have you tried to load it on a computer that is 30 years old or younger?
  - Y_Y 5y ago
    Yes.
    - jraph 5y ago
      You might want to clean your mouse wheel.
CivBase 5y ago
> General tip: If HN is being laggy and you're determined you want to waste some time here, open it in a private window. HN works extremely quickly if it doesn't know who you are. Saw this from a user by the name of bentcorner in the "Facebook-owned sites are down" thread[0]. Figured I'd repost it here. It works because HN can cache pages more efficiently when it doesn't have to include user data. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28750513 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28750513
immnn 5y ago
It actually feels like a periodical DNS outage. On Friday some of my servers weren’t responding like they should. Half an hour later everything was fine again. However, some VMs running in Azure Cloud were still having problems. Today this huge FB/WA/Instagram. I bet we will read more about this anytime soon in the news.
pshc 5y ago
It was my perception 10 years ago that HN was powered by a single threaded process with the entire post history loaded into memory (not sure how accurate this perception was). I am curious how much it has changed. edit: found this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16076041 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16076041
- suyash 5y ago
  my perception is a server located in YC's office under PG's desk ;)
- winrid 5y ago
  My understandind is pretty much everything for HN requires IO to disk. The Era of NVME SSDs...
  - dang 5y ago
    We also have RAM. Edit: but we can't GC it fast enough. On a day like today I wonder if always going to disk mightn't be better.
    - csdreamer7 5y ago
      Hi dang, thank you for what you do. Do you (or anyone else) have an article on HN's infrastructure? Would like to read more about this. Tried to Google it but was filled with links to other people's infra on HN.
      - inside65 5y ago
        The original comment in the thread has that information, and it's nothing to write home about. Maybe it has improved since, but it's not like they're running a network of supercomputers.
- hedvig 5y ago
  And the glyph rendering is offloaded to the gpu, which as any good development team should know, is much faster.
zanethomas 5y ago
possibly because of the huge number of commenters laughing about facebook being down
varjag 5y ago
No, just the sixty thousand Facebook engineers flock here simultaneously in search for technical clues.
- prirai 5y ago
  XD! Best comment.
- prox 5y ago
  Did you try turning it off and on again?
mxuribe 5y ago
So...maybe HN has dependencies on FB (such as tracking pixel, etc.)...and with their outage, timeouts kill things for HN? Not blaming HN, just wondering if second order diminished experiences start happening because of FB's heavy gravitational pull?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
0des 5y ago
I can't load user profiles at the moment, and some pageloads are just spinning wheels. Not sure if that is related to network issues or if just a lot of us are rushing to HN to check/comment EDIT: We're having some trouble serving your request. Sorry!
indianpianist 5y ago
Yeah, it's loading slower than usual today. One time I even got the "We're having some trouble serving your request. Sorry!" page.
grensley 5y ago
I've always found it interesting that this fairly influential site rarely changes and hasn't kept up with modern internet standards. I get that it's an ambiguously useful project for a venture capital firm and all, but you would think that they would throw it a bone or two given the level of influence it has. It also seems like they're trying to make some kind of point about dead simple web design and running a web server off of old laptops or something. I'm not sure, but there's definitely some combination of neglect and hubris going on with this site.
- bobbylarrybobby 5y ago
  > kept up with modern internet standards Like increasingly long page load times, pervasive use of JS for even the simplest things, and throwing up a million banners before you can read anything? I, for one, am very happy that HN is, for the most part, just plain old HTML that loads instantly and just works 100% of the time (when the servers can handle the load, that is).
  - nmstoker 5y ago
    I'm 90% with you, but I'd love them to do something to stop it being so easy to "fat finger" the hide link directly above main links when on mobile - just a tiny bit more space would work wonders.
- laumars 5y ago
  The design is perfect. It’s information dense while being really clear and easy to use. There is absolutely nothing wrong with the design.
  - nrb 5y ago
    > The design is perfect. It’s information dense while being really clear and easy to use. There is absolutely nothing wrong with the design. I’d argue that unformatted quotes is a pretty clear design opportunity, especially when code blocks are misused enough that mobile use is regularly impacted by it.
notyourday 5y ago
I am honestly shocked HN is not using a CDN
- dang 5y ago
  If you log out you get the equivalent of a CDN, and CDNs can't serve logged-in users anyway.
  - notyourday 5y ago
    Eh, ever since the CDNs like fastly introduced cache-busting in milliseconds, caching logged in users became a not a big deal especially as most of logged in user content of HN is not different between the logged in users.
collegeburner 5y ago
My guess is with facebook properties down people are procrastinating here. Also news.yc temds to be a good place to find timely updates by smart people on outages like this.
dang 5y ago
It seems to be a side-effect of Facebook being down, attracting so much attention to HN that it might as well be a DDoS attack. Sorry everyone—there are performance improvements in the works which I hope will make a big difference, but it's not something we can roll out today. p.s. You can read HN in read-only mode if you log out. Should be way faster.
- steveyklabanik 5y ago
  Have you tried rewriting in Rust?
- invisible 5y ago
  You're awesome dang! Thanks for all you do. That things are up as much as they are is pretty great. I, and probably a bunch of others, would be pretty interested in a write up of the challenges and how you solved them if you could find time after things settle.
- a-dub 5y ago
  lol, it's not dns (fb dns is back), it's not coincidence, it's not people coming to hn specifically to read about fb being down. it's the digital equivalent of the consumer goods shortages resulting from changed behavior during the lockdowns of 2020. the whole consumer/attention-economy internet is creaking under the load and it's kinda hilarious. https://downdetector.com/ https://downdetector.com/
  - dang 5y ago
    I think it really is people coming to hn specifically to read about fb being down. What kills me is that we'd be humming just fine if the software I've been working on for so-long-I'm-embarrassed-to-tell-you had been rolled out by now. At this point the only solutions are non-technical. A la the Serenity Prayer, and waiting till tomorrow. Edit: it does seem to be better for community if things break occasionally, though. People can relate to sheepish devs under excessive load. Nobody relates to a perfectly oiled machine.
    - 5y ago

371 points by suyash 5y ago

Hacker News (this site) seems to be going down today just like facebook. Is there a massive DDOS attack occurring or just a co-incidence?

jzellis 5y ago

That's what happens when you run your entire site off a VM running as a WhatsApp chat bot.

aspenmayer 5y ago
I know you’re joking, but do you have some links to such projects for future reference?

iainctduncan 5y ago

It's facebook outage rubber necking. Everyone who has been involved with keeping services online is like "oh heads are going to fucking roll today, let's go see what folks are saying happened". haha

H8crilA 5y ago

This post was sponsored by the liar's paradox and written by Bertrand Russel himself. (meaning if HN is down you can't post about that, and if it's not down you won't post it; proving that you can never have a post "HN is down" on HN)

exikyut 5y ago

For what it's worth, my own desire to see if I can help out somehow has definitely only increased over the past few months as I've noticed the messages at the tops of threads about pagination. I don't have any particular skills that would make me a hand-in-glove fit (eg, I'd need to learn Arc...), but surely there are tons of little boring things I could usefully do that would take the heat off. If I'm thinking this way, surely there are (many?) others...? For example, something tiny that I'd love to fix is to split vote() in half and move the UI update logic into an Image.onload handler, so that the UI only changes if the upvote absolutely committed. I'm OCD about this because I actually use voting as bookmarking, and recently realized that some unknown percentage of my upvotes/bookmarks have sadly been lost because the auth= value had expired (eg in the case of a weeks-old tab) or because I was on bad 4G on my phone, but the UI state has no bearing on the network response. Something else that I'd be very happy to put effort into, after being told how to approach the problem :), would be to make the site screen-reader-accessible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1r55efei5c&t=386s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1r55efei5c&t=386s (size-XL volume warning - unfortunately the speaker volume is like 5% of the screen reader volume). A longer-term project that I also think would also be very useful would be to implement OAuth2, so that users would be able to safely attach external logins to their accounts without needing to supply their actual user passwords (which thankfully none of the alternate UIs have tried to do AFAIK). This could support fine-grained scopes like "can see own comment votes", "can vote", "can post replies", etc. IMHO the best way to do this would be to have a central pool of manually-approved app registrations; this is definitely the most complicated approach :/, but it means the entire system would depend on a human who could go "...that OAuth2 app in particular is behaving weird. [pause]" which would be very tricky to achieve with an autonomous system (where everyone independently creates their own tokens that have no semantic value). This sort of thing utterly fails at large scale (see also: Google, YouTube, etc), but I think it would be perfect for HN. While implementing this it would also make sense to support 2FA using TOTP. A while back I read that one of the reasons the site was closed was to keep the voting logic private. The chances are there are probably a bunch of other things (like maybe the spam detection/handling systems, and maybe the moderation tools) would be similarly classified as (for want of a better word) "sensitive". Well... it could be very, very interesting to split the codebase in half, with all the sensitive stuff in one corner, and the remainder of the codebase capable of running locally without it. Maybe you've already considered this, and consider it nonviable :( (NB. The reason for the Rube Goldberg OAuth2 architecture I suggested was precisely to make it that much harder for people to register throwaway/bot accounts etc, keeping in mind the voting logic thing. Couldn't figure out how to reword the above two paragraphs to resolve the info dependency :) so put this here instead. lol) IIUC, there are a very small pool of enthusiasts around the K programming language (https://kx.com https://kx.com) that privately study the source code to Kdb, and I understand that Arthur Whitney et al. are actually open to newcomers taking an interest in the project. (I'm sure I saw a comment mentioning as such a while back, possibly by geocar, but don't seem to be able to find it. I might've read as such elsewhere.) At some point I hope to go down that rabbithole, which looks genuinely interesting, but learning that it *was* actually accessible left a bit of an impression given that (http://archive.vector.org.uk/art10501320 http://archive.vector.org.uk/art10501320): > Whitney demonstrated his “research K interpreter” at the Iverson College meeting[5] in Cambridge in 2011. We had visitors from Microsoft Research. The performance was impressive as always. The tiny language, mostly familiar-looking to the APL, J and q programmers participating, must have impressed the visitors. Perhaps conscious that with the occasional wrong result from an expression, the interpreter could be mistaken for a post-doctoral project, Whitney commented brightly, “Well, we sold ten million dollars of K3 and a hundred million of K4, so I guess we’ll sell a billion dollars worth of this.” > Someone asked about the code base. “Currently it’s 247 lines of C.” Some expressions of incredulity. Whitney displayed the source, divided between five text files so each would fit entirely on his monitor. “Hate scrolling,” he mumbled.* The above, combined with the project's niche accessibility (I understand that one does have to be genuinely interested) speaks to me of business and engineering focal points in perfect calibration and harmony with each other. (Hnng. :P) It also gives evidence that it is in fact possible in the first place to achieve and sustain this kind of calibration in contexts and situations that make use of niche technology. The (meta-?)question (to me), then, is how the same sort of niche accessibility context might be applicable/applied to news.arc (et al) to varying degrees. I also wanted to incidentally mention that I've long had mixed feelings about using GitHub (in a sharing capacity). There's a bit of "but I don't have anything interesting enough!" in there, but it's mostly hesitancy about dumping stuff underneath The Giant Spotlight Of Doom, Inc™. This isn't GitHub's fault; it's more that the consumer end of open-source has something of a demand/non-empathy problem toward the higher end of the long tail, that GitHub is the biggest platform, that everything not-GitHub correlates with an exponential drop-off in terms of visibility... and the intrinsic lack of any nice middle ground in the resulting mess. Applying these considerations to HN's crazy popularity, I think that using GitHub could be great for "pop culture accessibility", if you will - but at great potential cost to behind-the-scenes logistics (maintaining CI that merges closed-source modules, explaining Arc for the 5,287th time, etc), and a noteworthily increased maintenance burden. While there are a variety of "alternative" Git hosting platforms, I think LuaJIT's approach is most interesting (https://luajit.org/download.html https://luajit.org/download.html): the Git repo is only available over HTTPS as a firewall convenience, and there's no browser-accessible repository viewer. Thus everyone needs Git installed. You could also for example require everyone's Git client to provide an HTTPS client certificate, for example. Such speedbumps would enable a scalable form of "proof of interest" (there's also the fact that everyone has to go learn Arc once they do finally get at the code...) and naturally rate-limit this new dimension to something hopefully maintainable. Lastly, and as a bit of a continuation of the last point, regarding the question of licensing ("oh no"), I'd actually be in favor of something custom. Both because all the opportunity (read: $$$ xD, but also Bay Area) is available to properly figure that option out, and also because virtually all existing licenses (and their wide use) bring a sort of reification to the table that makes politicking/taking sides ("ooooh! XYZ does ABC! that puts it in the same group as DEF!") all too easy, which may potentially threaten HN's pragmatic ethos somewhat. A unique license has no reference points and thus less potential impact to cohesion, and also makes solving niche cases extremely easy; you just work backwards from whatever end state you want (which you've almost certainly had years to think about, or at least subconsciously gather context for). One concrete example (working with the limited context I have) might be disallowing mirroring or copying of the code, which would close the loop on the Git setup described above. I'm not sure what bits of the above are interesting and what bits ultimately amount to excited bikeshedding :) - but I definitely want to convey that I, and probably (many) others, would be genuinely interested in helping out. Also, I realize stuff does actually get fixed, like * vs \*, which I am very appreciative of :D.

exikyut 5y ago
Hmm. This is currently at -1. I've obviously misstepped or misread the situation/context somehow. *Sigh* I'm sometimes really bad at this, sadly, despite my best efforts to the contrary. Sorry. If someone would like to point out where I went wrong I'd greatly appreciate it. Edit: I've realized that maybe my comment was interesting, but not as a reply to the specific comment I replied to. As my comment grew I thought at a couple different points that maybe it wasn't a good fit for subthread I was replying to, but barreled onwards because this happened to be dang's most recent reply to the whole thread at the time. Maybe this amounted to a spot of tone deafness - and if this is indeed the case, I do actively/explicitly request that my reply be detached from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28756111 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28756111.
- krapp 5y ago
  If you want to contribute to an Arc based forum, the open source Anarki fork[0] is always open. It won't effect the original Arc distribution or HN but several other forums do use it. [0]https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki
  - exikyut 5y ago
    Huh, TIL that there are forks of Arc! My only point of hesitancy with diving into something like this is my strong suspicion/fear that HN has diverged sufficiently enough from Arc that almost all improvements I made to news.arc et al would need manual/refactoring before they would be useful - and this would need to be done every time I tweaked something on my end. My interest in Arc is motivated solely by the fact that it's what runs HN, and while part of my motivation to dive into HN from a technical standpoint is because I just like doing that :) the rest is just wanting to help the site get out of users' ways, while retaining a pragmatic focus.
- elendee 5y ago
  I think you’re well intentioned obviously, but in your offer to help, the first thing you do is ask he take 5 minutes to digest your ideas, when he hasn’t really indicated he’s looking for help. Thats a very long time for an internet browser. So yes I think they’re downvoting the context not the content. They are interesting ideas though.

raimille1 5y ago

Noticing the same here

detaro 5y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28749476 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28749476

throwawaysea 5y ago

It also looks like the buttons to add comments changed in appearance. Maybe there is some kind of site upgrade going on?

lkbm 5y ago
Looks the same to me. I'm guessing the css just didn't load for you.
brundolf 5y ago
The recent iOS update changed the default appearance of buttons in Safari, and not many sites use the raw button appearance, but HN does. So that could be what you're seeing
- satchlj 5y ago
  very likely - I'm noticing that too

agustif 5y ago

Yes. Started loading slower pages and then throwed some can´t respond to your request right now! Seems fb down is making people go other places meanwhile maybe_

lifeisgood99 5y ago

Getting the "We're having some trouble serving your request. Sorry!" page a lot.

kurthr 5y ago
Can't tell, but logging out to get the cached pages did seem to help... so maybe it's a lot of people all logged in hitting the same database each click? Normally, very fast for me.
satchlj 5y ago
yup me too lol, it's serving the the 502 bad gateway error to be precise

nicoburns 5y ago

I rather suspect that it's because of the Facebook outage, but indirectly. HN is always slow when major tech services (Facebook, Google, AWS, Github, Slack, Fastly, Cloudflare, etc) services are down. The HN community seems to congregate here for updates causing higher than usual traffic.

asddubs 5y ago
plus HN has been a bit spotty as of late anyway
suyash 5y ago
or it could be a malicious attack? I doubt most facebook users even know what HN is.
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  Most Facebook users don't know what HN is, but most HN users have Facebook accounts and will migrate here for the dopamine-inducing refresh clicks (don't let them try to claim otherwise ;) ). If most Facebook users knew what HN was and congregated here when FB was down, the site would be utterly crushed.
- djmips 5y ago
  It doesn't have to be 'most' facebook users.
- rplnt 5y ago
  But all HN users know what Facebook is. And outage of this scale is rare and interesting.
  - tuke 5y ago
    What is Facebook?
    - ed_elliott_asc 5y ago

i_like_apis 5y ago

It' just heavy traffic from people who would otherwise be on facebook.

polote 5y ago

This is normal, it happens everytime a big communication platform is down. Slack, Teams, Zoom, Google, FB ... If you want to read HN, logout, or use the private mode

lucasverra 5y ago

Indeed from Paris France, most probably MZ is checking it a lot

robocat 5y ago

Edit: way faster if you click logout. Running in anonymous mode (clear browser cache) makes it responsive, but read-only. Edit: I suggest using a private tab or two browsers or two profiles, one where you are logged out to read comments for speed, and if you wish to comment or vote then paste a comment url over to the other. Side effect: you improve responsiveness for everyone!

manojlds 5y ago
Stack Overflow does this well by automatically making it read only mode when they are having issues.
- htrp 5y ago
  to be fair... the stackoverflow tech team requires stackoverflow to restart the company (along with the rest of the world)
  - prirai 5y ago
    Hehe, true. Good that it isn't down. FB got a place to resort to.
celsoazevedo 5y ago
On Firefox you can use containers. Two tabs, one logged in, one logged out.
templeosenjoyer 5y ago
Do you have any idea why it's so much more responsive?
- jraph 5y ago
  Anonymous pages are cached.
- progval 5y ago
  Probably because it can be cached instead of serving customized pages

huhtenberg 5y ago

... but only if you are logged in :-?

nrmitchi 5y ago
If you're not logged in it's likely static served from cache.
kreetx 5y ago
This appears to be the case. Unlike one of the other comments, hn is slow relatively rarely (perhaps a few times a year).
Kenji 5y ago
Yes, that's normal. If you're not logged in, HN serves you a cached version that is a couple dozen seconds old. That's super fast. If you're logged in, HN has to generate the page based on the previous actions and properties of your account (e.g. upvotes, favourites, etc.) with every HTTP request.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

bevacqua 5y ago

It's just people flocking to HN for reliable news on the insane outage affecting global Facebook services, and refreshing far more than they usually would. Data point of one

iainctduncan 5y ago
make that two! ha
1001101 5y ago
"People look for alternatives and want to know more or discuss what’s going on. When Facebook became unreachable, we started seeing increased DNS queries to Twitter, Signal and other messaging and social media platforms." from Cloudflare via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28752131 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28752131

BatteryMountain 5y ago

For me it lags when scrolling. Very odd.

jraph 5y ago
Have you tried to load it on a computer that is 30 years old or younger?
- Y_Y 5y ago
  Yes.
  - jraph 5y ago
    You might want to clean your mouse wheel.

CivBase 5y ago

> General tip: If HN is being laggy and you're determined you want to waste some time here, open it in a private window. HN works extremely quickly if it doesn't know who you are. Saw this from a user by the name of bentcorner in the "Facebook-owned sites are down" thread[0]. Figured I'd repost it here. It works because HN can cache pages more efficiently when it doesn't have to include user data. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28750513 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28750513

immnn 5y ago

It actually feels like a periodical DNS outage. On Friday some of my servers weren’t responding like they should. Half an hour later everything was fine again. However, some VMs running in Azure Cloud were still having problems. Today this huge FB/WA/Instagram. I bet we will read more about this anytime soon in the news.

pshc 5y ago

It was my perception 10 years ago that HN was powered by a single threaded process with the entire post history loaded into memory (not sure how accurate this perception was). I am curious how much it has changed. edit: found this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16076041 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16076041

suyash 5y ago
my perception is a server located in YC's office under PG's desk ;)
winrid 5y ago
My understandind is pretty much everything for HN requires IO to disk. The Era of NVME SSDs...
- dang 5y ago
  We also have RAM. Edit: but we can't GC it fast enough. On a day like today I wonder if always going to disk mightn't be better.
  - csdreamer7 5y ago
    Hi dang, thank you for what you do. Do you (or anyone else) have an article on HN's infrastructure? Would like to read more about this. Tried to Google it but was filled with links to other people's infra on HN.
    - inside65 5y ago
      The original comment in the thread has that information, and it's nothing to write home about. Maybe it has improved since, but it's not like they're running a network of supercomputers.
hedvig 5y ago
And the glyph rendering is offloaded to the gpu, which as any good development team should know, is much faster.

zanethomas 5y ago

possibly because of the huge number of commenters laughing about facebook being down

varjag 5y ago

No, just the sixty thousand Facebook engineers flock here simultaneously in search for technical clues.

prirai 5y ago
XD! Best comment.
prox 5y ago
Did you try turning it off and on again?

mxuribe 5y ago

So...maybe HN has dependencies on FB (such as tracking pixel, etc.)...and with their outage, timeouts kill things for HN? Not blaming HN, just wondering if second order diminished experiences start happening because of FB's heavy gravitational pull?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

0des 5y ago

I can't load user profiles at the moment, and some pageloads are just spinning wheels. Not sure if that is related to network issues or if just a lot of us are rushing to HN to check/comment EDIT: We're having some trouble serving your request. Sorry!

indianpianist 5y ago

Yeah, it's loading slower than usual today. One time I even got the "We're having some trouble serving your request. Sorry!" page.

grensley 5y ago

I've always found it interesting that this fairly influential site rarely changes and hasn't kept up with modern internet standards. I get that it's an ambiguously useful project for a venture capital firm and all, but you would think that they would throw it a bone or two given the level of influence it has. It also seems like they're trying to make some kind of point about dead simple web design and running a web server off of old laptops or something. I'm not sure, but there's definitely some combination of neglect and hubris going on with this site.

bobbylarrybobby 5y ago
> kept up with modern internet standards Like increasingly long page load times, pervasive use of JS for even the simplest things, and throwing up a million banners before you can read anything? I, for one, am very happy that HN is, for the most part, just plain old HTML that loads instantly and just works 100% of the time (when the servers can handle the load, that is).
- nmstoker 5y ago
  I'm 90% with you, but I'd love them to do something to stop it being so easy to "fat finger" the hide link directly above main links when on mobile - just a tiny bit more space would work wonders.
laumars 5y ago
The design is perfect. It’s information dense while being really clear and easy to use. There is absolutely nothing wrong with the design.
- nrb 5y ago
  > The design is perfect. It’s information dense while being really clear and easy to use. There is absolutely nothing wrong with the design. I’d argue that unformatted quotes is a pretty clear design opportunity, especially when code blocks are misused enough that mobile use is regularly impacted by it.

notyourday 5y ago

I am honestly shocked HN is not using a CDN

dang 5y ago
If you log out you get the equivalent of a CDN, and CDNs can't serve logged-in users anyway.
- notyourday 5y ago
  Eh, ever since the CDNs like fastly introduced cache-busting in milliseconds, caching logged in users became a not a big deal especially as most of logged in user content of HN is not different between the logged in users.

collegeburner 5y ago

My guess is with facebook properties down people are procrastinating here. Also news.yc temds to be a good place to find timely updates by smart people on outages like this.

dang 5y ago

It seems to be a side-effect of Facebook being down, attracting so much attention to HN that it might as well be a DDoS attack. Sorry everyone—there are performance improvements in the works which I hope will make a big difference, but it's not something we can roll out today. p.s. You can read HN in read-only mode if you log out. Should be way faster.

steveyklabanik 5y ago
Have you tried rewriting in Rust?
invisible 5y ago
You're awesome dang! Thanks for all you do. That things are up as much as they are is pretty great. I, and probably a bunch of others, would be pretty interested in a write up of the challenges and how you solved them if you could find time after things settle.
a-dub 5y ago
lol, it's not dns (fb dns is back), it's not coincidence, it's not people coming to hn specifically to read about fb being down. it's the digital equivalent of the consumer goods shortages resulting from changed behavior during the lockdowns of 2020. the whole consumer/attention-economy internet is creaking under the load and it's kinda hilarious. https://downdetector.com/ https://downdetector.com/
- dang 5y ago
  I think it really is people coming to hn specifically to read about fb being down. What kills me is that we'd be humming just fine if the software I've been working on for so-long-I'm-embarrassed-to-tell-you had been rolled out by now. At this point the only solutions are non-technical. A la the Serenity Prayer, and waiting till tomorrow. Edit: it does seem to be better for community if things break occasionally, though. People can relate to sheepish devs under excessive load. Nobody relates to a perfectly oiled machine.
  - 5y ago