4 ms·

> So what do you do to avoid this in the future? It's HN... there's no SLA, there's no postmortems, there's no doing things better in the future. pg just runs

by badgar 14y ago

> So what do you do to avoid this in the future? It's HN... there's no SLA, there's no postmortems, there's no doing things better in the future. pg just runs this site out of the good of his heart, we should be lucky the volunteers run it for us at all.

benatkin 14y ago
> It's HN... there's no SLA, there's no postmortems I didn't mean to imply that there were. I was just curious. > there's no doing things better in the future. pg just runs this site out of the good of his heart, we should be lucky the volunteers run it for us at all. Since there are multiple volunteers, I think that the site always feels important to at least one of them. I imagine that some of them have gone more than a week without giving a shit about HN, but not all of them at once. So I think there is doing things better in the future. In fact, HN keeps getting improvements behind the scenes, to keep it running, keep it interesting, and keep it from getting overrun with trolls.
martinced 14y ago
I don't think parent did mean that he had a "right" to expect some level of quality or anything. It's just that we, as programmers, tend to take measures so that silly bugs do not happen anymore or that, at least, we leave big clues as to what went wrong. In a project I had a similar issue: I was wrapping lists inside immutable lists but, due to a silly bug, I kept wrapping immutable lists inside immutable lists at every save made. So saved files would grow bigger and bigger. And I did fix the bug and also added a big fat warning logs in case too many nested lists were detected. pg might just as well have now added something preventing infinite recursion inside the comment tree or some WARN logging telling when a generate page is getting too big, etc. I'd still find it very interesting to know what pg did, if any, to dodge / minimize / make it easier to determine if such an issue happens in the future.
jlgreco 14y ago
> there's no postmortems 1. Press [Home] key. 2. Read postmortem. 3. ???
oh_sigh 14y ago
> pg just runs this site out of the good of his heart Hilarious. I would have believed you if you appended "and his wallet"
- badgar 14y ago
  One core. One HD. Bandwidth is trivial with no images. How much do you think this site costs to run?
  - jlgreco 14y ago
    He means that PG runs the sight because it makes business sense, not out of charity.
  - benatkin 14y ago
    How much do you think the time of YC partners is worth?
  - gknoy 14y ago
    His time. Maybe the core and HD are Very Nice ones, too, of course.
  - oh_sigh 14y ago
    You didn't understand what I said. I was implying that this site is a money-maker for pg, not that it costs him money.
larrys 14y ago
"pg just runs this site out of the good of his heart" Don't think it's a "good of his heart situation". HN provides a benefit to YC and YC companies and attracts people to YC. As another example Fred Wilson has a very popular blog AVC and has said many times that he considers it "his secret weapon" (or something like that) because the value it provides over his competition.

by badgar 14y ago

benatkin 14y ago

> It's HN... there's no SLA, there's no postmortems I didn't mean to imply that there were. I was just curious. > there's no doing things better in the future. pg just runs this site out of the good of his heart, we should be lucky the volunteers run it for us at all. Since there are multiple volunteers, I think that the site always feels important to at least one of them. I imagine that some of them have gone more than a week without giving a shit about HN, but not all of them at once. So I think there is doing things better in the future. In fact, HN keeps getting improvements behind the scenes, to keep it running, keep it interesting, and keep it from getting overrun with trolls.

martinced 14y ago

I don't think parent did mean that he had a "right" to expect some level of quality or anything. It's just that we, as programmers, tend to take measures so that silly bugs do not happen anymore or that, at least, we leave big clues as to what went wrong. In a project I had a similar issue: I was wrapping lists inside immutable lists but, due to a silly bug, I kept wrapping immutable lists inside immutable lists at every save made. So saved files would grow bigger and bigger. And I did fix the bug and also added a big fat warning logs in case too many nested lists were detected. pg might just as well have now added something preventing infinite recursion inside the comment tree or some WARN logging telling when a generate page is getting too big, etc. I'd still find it very interesting to know what pg did, if any, to dodge / minimize / make it easier to determine if such an issue happens in the future.

jlgreco 14y ago

> there's no postmortems 1. Press [Home] key. 2. Read postmortem. 3. ???

oh_sigh 14y ago

> pg just runs this site out of the good of his heart Hilarious. I would have believed you if you appended "and his wallet"

badgar 14y ago
One core. One HD. Bandwidth is trivial with no images. How much do you think this site costs to run?
- jlgreco 14y ago
  He means that PG runs the sight because it makes business sense, not out of charity.
- benatkin 14y ago
  How much do you think the time of YC partners is worth?
- gknoy 14y ago
  His time. Maybe the core and HD are Very Nice ones, too, of course.
- oh_sigh 14y ago
  You didn't understand what I said. I was implying that this site is a money-maker for pg, not that it costs him money.

larrys 14y ago

"pg just runs this site out of the good of his heart" Don't think it's a "good of his heart situation". HN provides a benefit to YC and YC companies and attracts people to YC. As another example Fred Wilson has a very popular blog AVC and has said many times that he considers it "his secret weapon" (or something like that) because the value it provides over his competition.