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oh boy I wrote one of these many years ago for HN. Within like an hour or two pg emailed me asking me to stop. I didn't know it at the time, but HN was being r
by geuis 1y ago
oh boy I wrote one of these many years ago for HN.
Within like an hour or two pg emailed me asking me to stop. I didn't know it at the time, but HN was being run on a rusty potato and scraping the homepage every 5 or 10 seconds was causing significant load.
- wizzwizz4 1y agoAfaict, HN is still running on a rusty potato. The software's written well, so it doesn't need to run on more than that. (What's going to happen to it? Someone links to it from HN?)
- gregsadetsky 1y agoless rusty as of ~sep 2024 :-) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44099006 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44099006
- wizzwizz4 1y agoThey've upgraded to a multi-eye potato‽ Truly the wonders of modern technology have no bound.
- consumer451 1y agoI mean, I love what it says about the insanity of some of the tech stacks that we run these days. The potato with multiple eyes works to serve one of the more important and trafficked properties on the Internet.
- pinkmuffinere 1y ago> one of the more important and trafficked properties on the Internet. I like HN, but it's really only important within a very niche subset of the Internet, and it also doesn't have much traffic. There's like a single post submitted every two minutes. That's not much.
- youniverse 1y agoI wonder what % of users submit posts and browse new submissions on here and on reddit.
- consumer451 1y agoI think it’s single digit percentages that have an account.
- fragmede 1y ago90-9-1 principal is considered the truth, though I've not seen any rigorous studies to back that up. https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/s2dvr4/the_9091_principle_10_of_reddit_users_decide_on/ https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/s2dvr4/the_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)
- pinkmuffinere 1y agoAt the very least I'm confident it's a power-law distribution. 90-9-1 seems like a reasonable first-order estimate (but I've also seen no data)
- airstrike 1y agoGiven how often a link that makes it to the front page struggles to serve the incoming traffic from HN, it's fair to say HN is quite efficient
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- pinkmuffinere 1y agoI think [being unable to handle peak load] does not imply efficiency. Unless perhaps this is a joke that I’m misunderstanding? Nonetheless, i suspect that HN probably is quite efficient, just based on what I know about dang. Even so, the parent claim was that it was popular and important, not that it was efficient
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y agoA LISPy potato, right?
- jerbear4328 1y agoHaha, my version makes a websocket connection to the official Firebase that the HN servers already send everything to, so it is zero extra load on HN
- lxgr 1y agoThat sounds interesting, are there any public details on this? Is it https://github.com/HackerNews/API https://github.com/HackerNews/API ?
- rahimnathwani 1y agoYou can stream the ID of the most recent item with something like this: curl -N -H "Accept: text/event-stream" "https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/maxitem.json" Then you will need to iterate through the new item IDs and fetch them, e.g. https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/45534174.json https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/45534174.json
- geuis 1y agoYours is the MUCH better approach. When I did it, no api!