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Beg HN: Please only report serious GitHub outages (1h+)
GitHub was down for 5-10 minutes today. Two people got upvoted for reporting it. That makes no sense to me. Whenever GitHub goes down for more than 30-40 minutes, then yes, it's a serious disruption, anything else pollutes people's RSS feeds unnecessarily. Please consider this next time. Thanks.
- ColinWright 13y agoWhy report it at all? Seriously. If I'm affected, I'll find out. If I'm not affected, why should you tell me? It seems that every time a well-known service goes down, for however long, for whatever reason, instantly there's a flurry of posts here making sure everyone knows something that they either already know, or won't care about. I'd really like that to stop, although perhaps I'm just a curmudgeonly old grey-beard.
- ignostic 13y ago-People notice that downtime posts end up on the front page. -Those who care about fake internet points see downtime messages as "easy karma." No thought required. -The mad rush to submit the "news" for easy karma results in votes for the first submission. -The cycle repeats. Downtime messages aren't the only thing. Sometimes things make it to the front page based on their perceived likelihood to make it to the front page.
- locofacetwice 13y agoThan why don't you just start downvoting those threads?
- presty 13y agoaka karma whoring. It has become quite (unsuprisingly) prevalent on HN. Wonder if pg has any plans on fighting this and if the high-karma enabled functionalities take into account karma whoring in their formula. You can easily spot the trend if you read HN through RSS. And it sucks :\
- olalonde 13y ago> You can easily spot the trend if you read HN through RSS. Why is it more easy to spot through RSS? (genuine question)
- ville 13y agoI would guess it's easier to spot the amount of noise when you skim through all the submissions as opposed to peeking at the highest voted stories on the front page every once in a while. The the posts that end up in the front page have been filtered, an unfiltered RSS feed has even the failed attempts to get easy points.
- rhizome 13y agoIt appears to be easier to get into the RSS feed than the front page, so if you follow RSS you see many truly terrible submissions.
- steveklabnik 13y agoYes, I too hope pg decides to fight the good fight against others gaining precious Internet Points via methods I find unsavory, even if their accumulation doesn't affect me in the least.
- eksith 13y agoSock puppets = Proliferation of guns. With karma = Availability of bullets. What doesn't affect you individually, affects all of us collectively. I.E. It diminishes the legitimacy of this forum as a whole when those very same mechanisms that are meant to cultivate genuine discussion are abused for petty reasons easily.
- dreen 13y agoHeres an idea: remove karma total - its just an epenis and nothing else. Keep points for posts so you can see if your post was good and for burying trolls but dont show the total in profile or news page. Done.
- derefr 13y agoI would guess that it's just the digital version of the internet going down at work, and everyone hanging out in the office kitchen talking about how the internet is down, until it goes back up. In other words, if you're waiting for [service] to come up in order to get something done, there's not much better to do.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- ColinWright 13y ago> if you're waiting for [service] to come up in order > to get something done, there's not much better to do. I don't understand this - it's a distributed document control system. You can continue to work on your local repo - why is it that you can get nothing done? Perhaps I just don't understand your workflow, but why is github the site essential to your progress? It would be useful to me if someone could explain how their workflow requires github to be available, because it would seem that they are using facilities or features of which I am unaware.
- wakeless 13y agoToday it went down, just as I needed our CI server to do a pass. Which is fine, grab a coffee, then I sat down and thought, I'll catch up on some code reviews. Thankfully, it wasn't long till it came back up.
- ColinWright 13y agoThanks for the reply, but if your CI[0] server does passes reasonably often, why would one of them not happening then prevent you from continuing to work? It runs in passes, so it's not really continuous, and I'd expect it to survive running slightly less often, or slightly more irregularly. Do you stop work when it runs? I don't understand your workflow that implies you have to stop while a process that runs often fails to run on one occasion. I remain confused. [0] I assume this is "Continuous Integration"
- edanm 13y agoI disagree. When Twilio went down a few weeks ago, the second place I headed to was HN, and found that it wasn't just for me. And since this is a meeting place for the kind of people I want to hear from (like Twilio's developers), reading the thread helped me a lot. So I agree with the "if it's less than 5 minutes, don't report it" sentiment, but I do like it when larger outages are reported.
- rpgmaker 13y agoAlso, when the down time starts you don't know how much time it will last. Having the problem reported is helpful.
- level09 13y agoUsually there is a technical discussion on why this service went down, on the other hand sometimes someone comes back with an explanation of what happened and how to deal/prevent it, which is kind of helpful.
- themstheones 13y agoI don't think age or beard colour affect curmudgeonness. The grumpiest guy at my office has a beige beard and he's not old.
- ignostic 13y agoBased on the speed with which the post received votes, I suspect most of the "votes" came from people trying to submit the news that had already been submitted. I agree with you, OP, but it seems there were a lot of people jumping on that bandwagon.
- bdcravens 13y agoIs this that much more of an issue than every NSA story rehash, most of which doesn't offer any new info?
- rschmitty 13y agoJust when that all the aaron swatz stories started to fade nsa/snowden popup it would be nice if HN was at least divided into tech & political-tech
- dregin 13y agoA billion times this! Twice in the last 4 days, 2 stories to hit the front page in a row have been "ZONOES GITHUB DOWN!!!" when it's been a small blip.
- benatkin 13y agoThis post is worse than what it derides, of course. It fits well within the category of things that pollute people's RSS feeds unnecessarily. This is hacker news, and many of the hackers here use GitHub so when it goes down they might be spinning their wheels. If it is down for less than three minutes it probably won't make it off the new page. I think your arbitrary 30-40 minutes isn't better than what became the norm based on user behavior on HN. Why do you, Toshio, think you know with a high level of precision, how long GitHub needs to be down for it to be relevant to HN?
- dasil003 13y agoLighten up, he just posted a suggestion and request that maybe Github being down isn't something that people need to rush here to post the minute a web request times out. If he succeeds in lowering the rate of people posting this useless information than it's a net win.
- benatkin 13y agoI don't think it would be a net win, though. Neither you nor OP has established that 30-40 minutes is a better threshold for when a story is made about GitHub being down than what it currently is (apparently 5-10 minutes when there aren't a lot of other good stories to compete with on HN). You and OP might prefer it, but you're just a couple of data points.
- jeswin 13y agoTake it easy. It's a perfectly valid suggestion. Nobody's work suffers due to a ten minute outage, since it's "git"-hub.
- darxius 13y agoSome people host websites/projects on Github pages. They definitely suffer when Github is out cold and might want to move to fallback.
- 13y ago
- kitgar 13y agoDear god, this. At least 10 occasions in the last 48 hours for extremely minor outages. Switch to self-hosted!!
- kidmenot 13y agoI wish I could upvote you more than once. Actually, I was about to post something really similar. Thanks. Github, Gmail, Google Docs, anything: more often than not, the moment I click the link they're working perfectly.
- StavrosK 13y agoCorrection: Please stop upvoting outage posts.
- shocks 13y agoAnd, where possible, flag them. :)
- bryanh 13y agoWe launched our status board for exactly this reason, to get notified of random disruptions (specifically API disruptions). You can even chose your flavor, we support email, SMS, IM, webhooks, etc... It sure beats relying on HN or random failures for disruption notification. https://zapier.com/status/ https://zapier.com/status/
- soheil 13y agoI thought it was pretty serious. Github is no longer a tiny company and when so many people rely on you for everything a 5 min outage becomes significant. E.g. I was not able to deploy to my server a few mins ago due to this outage. This makes me question the decision to use github going forward.
- ColinWright 13y agoWhat value does it add to HN to have outages like this reported? As far as I can see, and as I said elsewhere, if you're affected you'll already know, and if you're not affected it won't matter. I concede that it was important to you, as no doubt it was important to many. The question is, why should it be posted to HN? There might be value in a longer post with real analysis of outage statistics and patterns, but this isn't it.
- soheil 13y agoI don't think the point is to merely be aware of the outage (as most who rely on github so heavily would most likely already have checks in place to notify them), but rather start a conversation, no matter how un-actionable, on whether the next guy should be using github.
- dalore 13y agoSurely you have a local git repo? You shouldn't need git to deploy, build a system package and deploy that.
- soheil 13y agoThere is a local git repo for local env. But I don't see why it's wrong to use git to deploy to staging/prod using different branches. Surely there is a more perfect solution but who said anything had to be perfect, we're hackers.
- dalore 13y agoNot wrong, and what I view as an intermediate step of the evolution of a project. But the crux of your argument, also invalidates it :) as a hacker you should be able to hack around github being dead.
- capex 13y agoThanks for introducing the new HN verb, 'beg'. Really amused.
- CmonDev 13y agoWith all the git-hype around any kind of downtime is inexcusable.
- ekianjo 13y agoThis BegHN seems like easy karma as well!
- martin-adams 13y agoI find twitter a much better forum for finding if a service has gone down. We experienced Lovefilm going down the other night and could easily confirm it was a server issue via twitter. Of course, HN is a great place for people to discuss how to avoid a productivity disruption when such services go down.
- mlopes 13y agoCome on, GitHub is used for serious work for several big companies. One hour downtime is an eternity, I'm quite happy with reporting 10 minute downtimes, as most of my workflow involves github, every step of the development process (ticketing system, dev vm's, CI server, capistrano, etc...) all at some point connect with GitHub.
- nicholassmith 13y agoI agree that it's an important tool and should be discussed. But...if you're a big company, who's doing serious work, then take advantage of the fact that git is a DVCS and have something as a failover measure. GitHub is great and has lots of great features, but there's nothing stopping people from having a mirror synced without all the sugar but to keep productivity going.
- PommeDeTerre 13y agoIt's quite odd how so may Git advocates relentlessly stress the importance of decentralized source control, yet they turn around and centralize so heavily on GitHub (including source control).
- marknadal 13y agoI'm going to be that snarky fellow who submits a post and turns this thread into an ultimate meta-inception: "Beg HN: Please only beg about serious issues (250upvotes+)" Now upvote me for making clever comments about infinite-regressions, which all hackers are obviously interested in; or downvote me because I failed to add "</sarcasm>" to my comment - but wait, I just did, which would then cause an alligator paradox! (woohoo, now you'll want to upvote me because I mentioned paradoxes - but wait isn't that a paradox to upvote me for... nevermind) But obviously you now want to downvote me because it is apparent I'm procrastinating and wasting time on HN and have nothing better to do. But wait, oh snap - now you want to upvote me because I'm writing satire about people who write about infinite regressions... which, wait, hold on, would mean that I'm not -- nope, nevermind. I'm shutting up here, because I'm sure you could figure out what my next 100 paragraphs will be, which means I don't even need to write it. But gasp, I just did write th -- this author was shot dead* (then who wrote that he was shot dead? Obviously it was only a flesh woun -- this author was `Rabbit of Caerbannog`ed)
- marknadal 13y agorofl, I can't tell if the person who downvoted me is actually making a satirical statement about downvoting... which ironically would just be validating my initial satire! ;)
- Dylan16807 13y agoshut up
- apidoc 13y agoI dont know why so many people always post it. Please use Twitter for that. Or just look at https://status.github.com/ https://status.github.com/
- avalaunch 13y agoI agree. But to play devil's advocate, in aggregate, the reports of the outages, even the small ones, could be useful to someone deciding whether or not to use GitHub.
- shocks 13y agoBeg HN: Please flag non-serious GitHub/Bitbucket/etc outages (1h+)
- ses 13y agoNot sure HN is the best place to report it, however working at a company that extensively uses github on a large scale, for the business I think even an outage of 5-10 minutes counts as serious. I'm amazed that people seem to find downtime of 'cloudy' services more acceptable somehow. We have similar issues when JIRA goes down that has a significant impact on overall productivity.
- medwezys 13y agoI recommend monitoring third-party services automatically all the time, e.g. we do it using https://github.com/alphasights/open_nut https://github.com/alphasights/open_nut. I do agree reporting outages on HN is totally irrelevant
- casca 13y agoI would respectfully disagree. One of the ways that I assess whether to use a service is based on its reliability. There is not a great way to look at historical records for when a particular service was down to understand how this might impact me. Searching HN has been very useful to assess other people's experiences with services, so why not for uptime too?
- fuscata 13y agoAgree. As a sysadmin, outages of major services are interesting and IMO newsworthy, even at 5m.
- DonaldDerek 13y agoPerhaps this is to make the big companies kinda afraid from their people ;)
- scottydelta 13y agowhy not go for Gitlab when working in an organization?
- atalreja 13y agoAgreed, this just pollutes the eco-system around. If someone needs to know and gets impacted - they can check the status page themselves. Wasted 5 mins reading it!!