3 ms·
failing to manage HN in my sleep is more like it
by dang 11mo ago
failing to manage HN in my sleep is more like it
- jonny_eh 11mo agoYour sleep is more important than our work distraction.
- seemaze 11mo agoI was curiously productive this morning..
- koakuma-chan 11mo agoI took a shower for the first time in one week
- arnavpraneet 11mo agocame back just in time for me to spend the first hour of my work
- commandersaki 11mo agoDo you have nightmares of failing to manage HN when you sleep too?
- dijit 11mo agoWe all have our moments, and I personally consider HN to be “best effort”, almost like a volunteer project. I’m not certain I’m correct: but thats the optics I have so my expectations are adjusted to that. So don’t beat yourself up please. When I worked for “SaaS unicorn” we typically had multiple levels of escalation, and acknowledging would have done nothing because the alarm would continue firing until fixed. Not sure what’s changed in 15 years of ops, I had assumed it would be better now- I can’t imagine silencing an alert totally by acknowledging it- if its still occurring. I’m totally fine with how you handled it, if anything I am thankful. But that seems to be a system I would improve if I had the time. “mute” is different than “resolve” to me, and both should exist. (Where mute is an acknowledgement of an issue as ongoing.)
- scottlamb 11mo agoThis. If it were a business-critical money fountain, I'd expect follow-the-sun SRE coverage. I don't think it is, so I can probably accept drinking my morning coffee without scrolling HN once in a while. There's only so much one can beat oneself up about a slow/incorrect response when the on-call is handled by what, just one person? maybe two people in the same time zone? (Might be wise though to have PagerDuty configured to re-alert if the outage persists.)
- giancarlostoro 11mo agoYeah we don't exactly pay to be on HN, not much to complain about. I appreciate everyone who works on HN.
- jacquesm 11mo agoWe pay with content and with the fact that we attract the talent that eventually ends up powering ycombinator investment rounds.
- phantasmish 11mo agoIt’s ad-supported. Any post with comments disabled is definitely an ad. Probably a lot of the others are, too.
- mysterydip 11mo agoI assumed the main purpose was to show off the ycombinator batches when they launch.
- abustamam 11mo agoYour comment makes me realize that I consume HN differently than many others, because I've never seen a post with comments disabled and I've been around here for at least ten years. It's not that I don't think they don't exist — they obviously do because you're mentioning them. I've just never encountered one, primarily because I don't casually browse HN, ever. I subscribe to a pushbullet channel that notifies me when a post hits 500 up votes. That's it. The list of submissions on the home page (even on reddit) is just overwhelming to me so I use the pushbullet channel as a sort of community curated "best of" or "trending" signal. Not to say that I don't procrastinate or waste time doing other nonsense. I can definitely spend a lot of time reading HN comments, as I'm doing right now. Anyway,anyone who finds themselves with a problem with HN should try that out :)
- notachatbot123 11mo agoAnd that is a good thing. Sleep tight!
- sailfast 11mo agoYeah, I mean how dare you?! I pay good money for high uptime SLAs! :)
- franciscop 11mo agoNo worries, please take care of your sleep and thanks for all your hard work
- zenoprax 11mo agoWhich is fine! I don't mind if it's down for a few hours. It reminds me that it's just a place to stop by for a bit before moving on. Like a digital coffee shop that sometimes has a leaky pipe and isn't open right at 7am. I hope it doesn't change (much).
- djmips 11mo agoI appreciate what you do. Hope you got some rest when it was all over.
- feczeri_c 11mo agoYou deserve a lot of rest!
- wkat4242 11mo agoYou're still a miracle worker. Single-handedly managing a well-known fully user-contributed site not just technically but moderation in contentious times like these and still keeping it working well and encouraging a positive user community can't be an easy task.
- dang 11mo agoThanks, I'll take it! except for the single-handedly part - gotta share the love with https://news.ycombinator.com/posts?id=tomhow https://news.ycombinator.com/posts?id=tomhow.
- nubinetwork 11mo agoI was starting to think you never slept, I remember that one time I emailed you at 1am. :)
- sizzle 11mo agoTime to train an AI agent on your moderation activity and get some well deserved sleep!
- dang 11mo agoWe're working on it! well, some of it. I'm pretty happy with how it's developing—the trendline is promising—but not ready to rely on it in prod yet.