I'm a big fan of HN and YC in general, we host of other YC alum, and I have taken a few things through YC Startup School. During this incident, I spoke to YC personally when they called this morning.
We are in the process of slowly moving to a distributed system (distributed DB) that is going to make fallover easier. However, that kind of setup is orders of magnitudes more complex than the current (manual fallover) setup. I really wonder if the planned design is going to be more reliable in practice. Complexity is almost always a bad idea, in my experience. Distributed systems are just fundamentally very complicated.
Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/VwFtgQh.png
https://www.onegraph.com/docs/subscriptions.html (it'll load in at the top of the page)
(As an aside, I keep HN at 150% and old reddit at 120% - those are the only 2 sites I have permanently zoomed)
But, if said destination resource is very slow to hit TTFB, you switch to a different tab, then back to the loading tab, you'll see the current page at the destination page's zoom settings.
My guess is that the interstitial system that injects error pages, Safe Browsing warnings, etc, doesn't hit the code path that says "we loaded a new (regular) page, go find its zoom settings".
Demo/PoC:
1. Run $anything that will serve a webpage on an arbitrary port - even an error page or directory listing. eg, python3 -m http.server, php -S 0:8000, etc.
2. Open the resource you just set up in a new tab, zoom in or out as preferred (eg, to a crazy level), copy the URL (for convenience), then close the tab.
3. Stop the server in (1), then run `nc -lp 8000` (or netcat, ncat, or $anything that will listen but never respond).
4. Open a new tab, navigate to a valid website (eg here :), example.com, etc), then once it's loaded, paste the URL you copied. With the page spinning and waiting for netcat (et al), navigate away from the tab, then back to it again.
Think I noticed this for the first time a couple years ago. Seems harmless enough.
Granted, I am probably importing old thoughts of it being a sort of user provided style sheet.
You could say that Chrome is designed to tie the zoom level to the viewport but I wouldn't count on this behavior springing up from an underlying design and implementation rather than it being a design choice for the user experience.
That's what the GP comment said happened: the zoom level was the one associated with what they previously had set on HN, and they expected it to be the opposite, the default zoom level for the browser.
Judging from the responses, this is actually a lot more popular than I assumed.
Which begs the question: Does anyone feel the default font is just perfect and wouldn't want it to be bigger even by a tiny bit?
I think it's perfect. What is your screen DPI (or rather angular pixel size from your normal viewing position) and is your browser set up to do any scaling based on that? Maybe it should be.
I really dislike the trend of giant fonts and whitespace.
I'm targeting WCAG 2.0. Keep an eye out for the "Show HN" coming soon!
(And pretty much all browsers have a zoom function for exactly this, it feels like a totally separate frontend would be more hassle to use than just ctrl + scroll wheel once)
HN is readable - just - but it's definitely on the small side.
The complete lack of some sort of horizontal constraint doesn't help either. 200 character lines are no bueno for reading.
It worked much better to just tell it to output 1080p and let my television scale it... less graphics memory too. I still need to scale HN up relative to other sites in order to read it though.
If I compare the text of your comment to the text of an article on npr.org it seems like about the same as the difference between 9pt and 12pt, and they are using a serif font that seems to be a lot easier to read.
It's a style choice I guess? It seems like it would work best on a large 1080p display, so maybe that's just what the person who designed the layout was using.
Zoom doesn't fix line lengths of 1500 characters and terrible color contrast.
The link to the site guidelines is 7pt with a contrast that fails WCAG 2.0. No wonder no one reads them.
EDIT: People who disagree, care to explain? I zoomed in, so why would I expect it to zoom out just because its a different page? What am I missing?
http://status.m5hosting.com/pages/incident/5407b8e2b00244251...
edit: Unrelated to the Azure outage.
Don't take my word for it. Test it for yourself:
printf 'GET / HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: news.ycombinator.com\r\nConnection: close\r\n\r\n' \
|openssl s_client -connect cloudflare.com:443 -ign_eof -servername news.ycombinator.comThis actually got me thinking. Do we really need CDN? This is one of those thing we take and use without actually thinking whether we could do without it.
Interesting thought experiment.
Static websites will get the best speed boost from locally served assets (much reduced latency from the local POP) because the page itself can be cached (presuming headers on origin site are correctly set). Especially for page requests from international users.
There may need to be read replicas, but maybe not even that is needed.
But we get around 6M requests a day now.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18496344
(Anyone know if that's still the case?)
- Reddit (my main source of addiction)
- HackerNews (the second source of addiction)
- Cookie Clicker (a rather recent addition that I'm slightly embarassed of)
At a point in time I also had facebook, but I've since stopped going there (maybe once a week).
Also, check out universal paperclips if you haven't already. it has a definite end. You likely won't play more than maybe 10-20 hours.
I always recommend Universal Paperclips to people who don't like cookie clicker games, because I fell in love with it the first time I tried it (heard of it from the Hello Internet podcast)
Once you've played a fair and truly exponential clicker through a few times you can't tolerate the forced linearity of a pay-to-win clicker app.
Long covid sucks.
You could utilise the noprocrast option in your HN settings.
Mee too!
> This made me realize how much I'm addicted to HN
I sought that my IP was shadow-banned by HN...
A bit of a mindfuck trying to assess my actual internet connectivity via a site that was also down : )_
(Other comments suggest it was a network outage at M5 where HN is hosted.)
Huge rabbit hole
Is there any way to put the HN homepage on an edge cache so at least the homepage shows up? Or am I admitting that I'm addicted to checking HN too many times a day?
That got me to thinking about 'first letter advantages.' If a site has a first letter not currently in use, I'm much more likely to visit it more often(mostly out of boredom, sure).
V and X are still available if anyone is wondering. Zillow got Z!
/s
Would love an updated post on what the current hardware / software stack that’s running HN.
It’s been years since I’ve seen a post/comment on this topic.
Are you still running FreeBSD, on a few high frequency cores (iirc)?
(I don't have any relationship to HN)
https://twitter.com/HNStatus/status/1371525940656803848?s=20
Needless to say, this site is my own personal StackOverflow, and I think there's something about ingratitude bouncing around in my mind somewhere.
My guess is around 99.9% ... but maybe that's too optimistic?
Probably closer to 4 9s.
With this outage of ~2 hours, we are at ~99.97% for this year. (I am not aware of any other downtime during 2021)
Rule of thumb (I strongly prefer minutes/year instead of 9s, to get an immediate sense of how good the availability is):
99.9% : down for 525 minutes / year, or roughly ~10 hours
99.99% : down for 52 minutes / year, or roughly ~1 hour
99.999% : down for 5 minutes / year
tl;dr 1 server x 2 providers, different regions, replicate content