7 ms·

Aaaand it's down. lingscars.com will never understood why a scary DDoS from a "Hacker site" hit them..

by dualogy 13y ago

harel 13y ago
This made me laugh out loud for real. Like in 1995.
pdeuchler 13y ago
https://twitter.com/LINGsCARS/status/344424290189455360 https://twitter.com/LINGsCARS/status/344424290189455360
babby 13y ago
Part of me thought this was a practical joke. So many sites back in the day just wouldn't load...
laumars 13y ago
Sadly Lin is now blaming Hacker News for hacking her site with the intention of taking it offline - which is just retarded as: a) we're legitimate curious visitors (albeit not maybe not customers - but who's to say that some of us wouldn't be converted from window shoppers to buyers - that's kind of the point of websites after all) and b) her webserver set up to only allow for 500 concurrent connections. Which is just pathetic - particularly given the amount of crap she serves (and thus the countless number of additional server connections each visitor makes to download said content). I used to think that her site was a mark of a genius; where she deliberately made her site to look amateurish to push the site viral and thus give her huge exposure that most other rentals could only dream of. But then I read her rage tweets[1] and realised that she's just another idiot with an internet connection. Needless to say I'm very disappointed - I liked Lin and her site better when I thought it was designed ironically. [1] https://twitter.com/LINGsCARS https://twitter.com/LINGsCARS
- vacri 13y ago
  Her site is fun. I remember a while ago, you could go to the site map and it'd been laid out like a concentration camp. The visitors at various pages/camp locations would be little humanoids with the relevant browser logo for the head. She sells cars for a living; she's not an elite hacker, just a curious one. Also, being a speaker of British English, she would never design her site 'ironically', because irony in British English precludes intention.
  - laumars 13y ago
    > Her site is fun. I remember a while ago, you could go to the site map and it'd been laid out like a concentration camp. The visitors at various pages/camp locations would be little humanoids with the relevant browser logo for the head. "Fun" and "concentration camp" are two words that should never be used in the same context. > She sells cars for a living; she's not an elite hacker, just a curious one. Well obviously. I wasn't complaining about her abilities as a hacker though. I was commenting about how I preferred her site when I thought it was a deliberate ploy to go viral. > Also, being a speaker of British English, she would never design her site 'ironically', because irony in British English precludes intention. I'm British English too - and few people here know the correct term for "ironic" let alone use it accurately. We've truly adopted Americanised term there. However if you follow "The King's English", then the term simply refers to stating the contrary to what is meant. Since I was referring to her site looking like it was meant to be amaturish but in fact being deliberate, that could be argued as being "ironic". But regardless of it's usage, you're just arguing semantics and thus missing my point entirely.
    - vacri 13y ago
      "Fun" and "concentration camp" are two words that should never be used in the same context. Not everyone is deathly afraid of dark humour. Stand-up comedy in particular is full of it, yet people still seem to think of it as 'fun'. The arguing semantics thing was just that, which is why it was marked as an addendum with the 'also'.
      - laumars 13y ago
- mattmanser 13y ago
  To be fair, the trouble with a name like Hacker News is that the uninitiated don't know it's for programmers and entrepreneurs. And I never get people having a go about stuff like concurrent connections at amateurs, that's completely our fault. Why can't web servers stop acting like babies that need constant attention with some sort of mystical knowledge to stop them falling over when something new happens? Why is our software so brittle?
  - laumars 13y ago
    Because hardware varies significantly. What's optimal on some systems is sub-par on others. Thus it takes a sysadmin to set up the server optimally. Also, most web farms these days are built with multiple nodes that serve ~500 concurrent requests (even multiple VMs performs better than one instance of Linux on the same hardware running bare metal) and load distributed across each node. So a 500 concurrent default is entirely reasonable. However all of the above is moot because she's running Apache on Debian - which does not default to 500 concurrent connections. That is a setting she's applied herself (or paid someone to set up). And for the record, I'm all for amateurs rolling their own web servers - I'm certainly not elitist in that regard. But the fact remains that some of this stuff is rather technical, so complaining that it isn't easy is like saying cars should be self-servicing and that we shouldn't need garages and engineers.
    - vidarh 13y ago
      But a lot of these limits could default to automatically adjust. Serving much more than 500 concurrent requests for static content is rather trivial on most remotely modern hardware if the software is designed for it. And reasonable queuing behaviour for sites have been possible for well over a decade. E.g. Eddie is 14 years old (http://eddie.sourceforge.net/txt/WP_1.0.html http://eddie.sourceforge.net/txt/WP_1.0.html - see the "Quality of Service" section in particular - while Eddie is intended for clustered setups, there are many situations where this approach is amenable even to single server setups) and provides a solution (amongst others) where if the system can't handle the incoming traffic, rather than serving up the main page and choking on assets and failing miserably in serving up anything to anyone, you can serve up a small light "queue" page and grant access to the full site as and when capacity allows. There are certainly plenty of things that truly does require a lot of technical skill to sort out, but a lot of software have poor defaults and lacks relatively straightforward features that would make the out of the box experience tremendously much better for less technical users.
- nahreally 13y ago
  What makes you think the site is "serious" now? She just doesn't know what Hacker News is, and can't be blamed for that. She just knows that some self-proclaimed "hackers" brought her site down with lots of traffic. The ASCII art in the source code is awesome, BTW.
  - laumars 13y ago
    Oh I'm sure it's not meant to be taken completely serious. But the question is whether it was designed to be so bad that it goes viral. ie is it accidentally badly designed but meant to be lighthearted, or badly designed with the intention of becoming it's own publicity stunt? The ASCII art is actually pretty impressive - which now has me wondering if I was wrong to dismiss her. I guess this site is proof that there's often a fine line between genius and insanity. edit: though there's always the 3rd option; she could just be a successful troll.
annnnd 13y ago
I'm not down!!! Oh, wait, I misread. :)
kephra 13y ago
"WAH! My site is under heavy load! I am working very hard to bring it back soon!" thats a progress to the prior cookie and redirect hell.
dolphenstein 13y ago
Viewable through archive.org: http://web.archive.org/web/20130607102023/http://www.lingscars.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20130607102023/http://www.lingsca...
- pja 13y ago
  Ow, my eyes!
- rajahafify 13y ago
  The earlier version looks more modern
menubar 13y ago
For some reason I just got a nostalgic warm-fuzzy over this. Not only the site's 1990s look, but that this kind of "misunderstanding" still happens.
marquis 13y ago
Don't assume that: "tried to cache the website? >> I've been chasing it around all day, can't cache it. Too fast for me." (her twitter today).

Aaaand it's down. lingscars.com will never understood why a scary DDoS from a "Hacker site" hit them..

by dualogy 13y ago

Aaaand it's down. lingscars.com will never understood why a scary DDoS from a "Hacker site" hit them..

harel 13y ago

This made me laugh out loud for real. Like in 1995.

pdeuchler 13y ago

https://twitter.com/LINGsCARS/status/344424290189455360 https://twitter.com/LINGsCARS/status/344424290189455360

babby 13y ago

Part of me thought this was a practical joke. So many sites back in the day just wouldn't load...

laumars 13y ago

Sadly Lin is now blaming Hacker News for hacking her site with the intention of taking it offline - which is just retarded as: a) we're legitimate curious visitors (albeit not maybe not customers - but who's to say that some of us wouldn't be converted from window shoppers to buyers - that's kind of the point of websites after all) and b) her webserver set up to only allow for 500 concurrent connections. Which is just pathetic - particularly given the amount of crap she serves (and thus the countless number of additional server connections each visitor makes to download said content). I used to think that her site was a mark of a genius; where she deliberately made her site to look amateurish to push the site viral and thus give her huge exposure that most other rentals could only dream of. But then I read her rage tweets[1] and realised that she's just another idiot with an internet connection. Needless to say I'm very disappointed - I liked Lin and her site better when I thought it was designed ironically. [1] https://twitter.com/LINGsCARS https://twitter.com/LINGsCARS

vacri 13y ago
Her site is fun. I remember a while ago, you could go to the site map and it'd been laid out like a concentration camp. The visitors at various pages/camp locations would be little humanoids with the relevant browser logo for the head. She sells cars for a living; she's not an elite hacker, just a curious one. Also, being a speaker of British English, she would never design her site 'ironically', because irony in British English precludes intention.
- laumars 13y ago
  > Her site is fun. I remember a while ago, you could go to the site map and it'd been laid out like a concentration camp. The visitors at various pages/camp locations would be little humanoids with the relevant browser logo for the head. "Fun" and "concentration camp" are two words that should never be used in the same context. > She sells cars for a living; she's not an elite hacker, just a curious one. Well obviously. I wasn't complaining about her abilities as a hacker though. I was commenting about how I preferred her site when I thought it was a deliberate ploy to go viral. > Also, being a speaker of British English, she would never design her site 'ironically', because irony in British English precludes intention. I'm British English too - and few people here know the correct term for "ironic" let alone use it accurately. We've truly adopted Americanised term there. However if you follow "The King's English", then the term simply refers to stating the contrary to what is meant. Since I was referring to her site looking like it was meant to be amaturish but in fact being deliberate, that could be argued as being "ironic". But regardless of it's usage, you're just arguing semantics and thus missing my point entirely.
  - vacri 13y ago
    "Fun" and "concentration camp" are two words that should never be used in the same context. Not everyone is deathly afraid of dark humour. Stand-up comedy in particular is full of it, yet people still seem to think of it as 'fun'. The arguing semantics thing was just that, which is why it was marked as an addendum with the 'also'.
    - laumars 13y ago
mattmanser 13y ago
To be fair, the trouble with a name like Hacker News is that the uninitiated don't know it's for programmers and entrepreneurs. And I never get people having a go about stuff like concurrent connections at amateurs, that's completely our fault. Why can't web servers stop acting like babies that need constant attention with some sort of mystical knowledge to stop them falling over when something new happens? Why is our software so brittle?
- laumars 13y ago
  Because hardware varies significantly. What's optimal on some systems is sub-par on others. Thus it takes a sysadmin to set up the server optimally. Also, most web farms these days are built with multiple nodes that serve ~500 concurrent requests (even multiple VMs performs better than one instance of Linux on the same hardware running bare metal) and load distributed across each node. So a 500 concurrent default is entirely reasonable. However all of the above is moot because she's running Apache on Debian - which does not default to 500 concurrent connections. That is a setting she's applied herself (or paid someone to set up). And for the record, I'm all for amateurs rolling their own web servers - I'm certainly not elitist in that regard. But the fact remains that some of this stuff is rather technical, so complaining that it isn't easy is like saying cars should be self-servicing and that we shouldn't need garages and engineers.
  - vidarh 13y ago
    But a lot of these limits could default to automatically adjust. Serving much more than 500 concurrent requests for static content is rather trivial on most remotely modern hardware if the software is designed for it. And reasonable queuing behaviour for sites have been possible for well over a decade. E.g. Eddie is 14 years old (http://eddie.sourceforge.net/txt/WP_1.0.html http://eddie.sourceforge.net/txt/WP_1.0.html - see the "Quality of Service" section in particular - while Eddie is intended for clustered setups, there are many situations where this approach is amenable even to single server setups) and provides a solution (amongst others) where if the system can't handle the incoming traffic, rather than serving up the main page and choking on assets and failing miserably in serving up anything to anyone, you can serve up a small light "queue" page and grant access to the full site as and when capacity allows. There are certainly plenty of things that truly does require a lot of technical skill to sort out, but a lot of software have poor defaults and lacks relatively straightforward features that would make the out of the box experience tremendously much better for less technical users.
nahreally 13y ago
What makes you think the site is "serious" now? She just doesn't know what Hacker News is, and can't be blamed for that. She just knows that some self-proclaimed "hackers" brought her site down with lots of traffic. The ASCII art in the source code is awesome, BTW.
- laumars 13y ago
  Oh I'm sure it's not meant to be taken completely serious. But the question is whether it was designed to be so bad that it goes viral. ie is it accidentally badly designed but meant to be lighthearted, or badly designed with the intention of becoming it's own publicity stunt? The ASCII art is actually pretty impressive - which now has me wondering if I was wrong to dismiss her. I guess this site is proof that there's often a fine line between genius and insanity. edit: though there's always the 3rd option; she could just be a successful troll.

annnnd 13y ago

I'm not down!!! Oh, wait, I misread. :)

kephra 13y ago

"WAH! My site is under heavy load! I am working very hard to bring it back soon!" thats a progress to the prior cookie and redirect hell.

dolphenstein 13y ago

Viewable through archive.org: http://web.archive.org/web/20130607102023/http://www.lingscars.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20130607102023/http://www.lingsca...

pja 13y ago
Ow, my eyes!
rajahafify 13y ago
The earlier version looks more modern

menubar 13y ago

For some reason I just got a nostalgic warm-fuzzy over this. Not only the site's 1990s look, but that this kind of "misunderstanding" still happens.

marquis 13y ago

Don't assume that: "tried to cache the website? >> I've been chasing it around all day, can't cache it. Too fast for me." (her twitter today).