Edit: it looks like you've been breaking the site guidelines quite a bit, unfortunately. Could you please not do that? We end up banning accounts that keep doing it and I don't want to ban you.
I have a pretty firm grip on life and touch plenty of grass both literally and figuratively.
However, when something I care about crashes and burns once in a blue moon, I make sure to put the fire out, at least to make it survive till regular hours. Things I care about can be both business and personal, and nobody bugs me for them.
Maybe we shouldn't make any assumptions about people we don't personally know, while we are at it.
> However, when something I care about crashes and burns once in a blue moon, I make sure to put the fire out, at least to make it survive till regular hours.
You are free what you choose to do with your personal life.
Meanwhile, it is pretty obvious that it's pointless to demand or expect personal sacrifice to maintain unrealistic levels of high-availability in services that are far from critical. I mean, do you honestly believe that these messages you and I are writing are so important to get out that someone must sacrifice their personal time to ensure it is served to the world in this very instant instead of, say, 3 or 6 or 13 hours? Absurd.
It looks like I failed to convey what I've tried to say in the first comment. Let me reiterate one more time.
- I believe dang sees HN as his baby, so *voluntarily* monitors it as a critical infrastructure *for him*.
- I personally like this kind of commitment from people who like their job, however *I don't expect or demand it in any way*.
- I also hope that attention doesn't affect his life. *Especially negatively and/or in a crippling way*.
I don't care whether this site is down for 6 seconds or 6 hours. I just wanted to commend him for liking what he's doing this much. I demand nothing from any service provider I use. Let it be a small, one person operation or dang or Amazon/Google.
I also keep servers up in my daily job, and some are more important than others, but none of them requires me to wake up 5AM to solve a problem (by design). So I don't demand anything from others something which I won't do.
As long as nobody is dying, nobody should stop, drop, and work on something else regardless of time, date and location.
Which 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.
You'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.
We 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.)
Your 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 :)
> Anyway,anyone who finds themselves with a problem with HN should try that out :)
To be clear, I wasn’t complaining. Just pointing it out. Aside from any more speculative benefit to YC for running the site, the site does run outright ads.
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply you had a problem with ads. By "problem" I meant "if you find yourself procrastinating a lot" (not you specifically, but the reader in general)
On, no issue here, no apology needed at all. I didn’t take it as any kind of dig, or even necessarily aimed at me (and if it was—still not offensive in any way). I’d almost edited my original comment right after posting because it occurred to me the tenseness might allow it to be interpreted as a complaint, and was just using your post as a jumping-off point to finally clarify that, is all.
I did miss exactly what you meant by “problem” in that passage, but get it now, so thanks for that.
This. 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.)
I like hacker news but I don't think this site is worth getting paged over lol
You might be underestimating HN's popularity.
> You might be underestimating HN's popularity.
I think you're confusing popularity with criticality. I'm sure everyone in here can withstand a few hours without browsing the page.
If you like the thing you're managing, then its health is critical for you, not your users.
It's dang's baby at this point, and this is a good thing, as long as HN doesn't affect his life in ways he doesn't want.
[flagged]
Aw, please don't cross into personal attack. You can make your substantive points without that.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: it looks like you've been breaking the site guidelines quite a bit, unfortunately. Could you please not do that? We end up banning accounts that keep doing it and I don't want to ban you.
I have a pretty firm grip on life and touch plenty of grass both literally and figuratively.
However, when something I care about crashes and burns once in a blue moon, I make sure to put the fire out, at least to make it survive till regular hours. Things I care about can be both business and personal, and nobody bugs me for them.
Maybe we shouldn't make any assumptions about people we don't personally know, while we are at it.
> However, when something I care about crashes and burns once in a blue moon, I make sure to put the fire out, at least to make it survive till regular hours.
You are free what you choose to do with your personal life.
Meanwhile, it is pretty obvious that it's pointless to demand or expect personal sacrifice to maintain unrealistic levels of high-availability in services that are far from critical. I mean, do you honestly believe that these messages you and I are writing are so important to get out that someone must sacrifice their personal time to ensure it is served to the world in this very instant instead of, say, 3 or 6 or 13 hours? Absurd.
It looks like I failed to convey what I've tried to say in the first comment. Let me reiterate one more time.
I don't care whether this site is down for 6 seconds or 6 hours. I just wanted to commend him for liking what he's doing this much. I demand nothing from any service provider I use. Let it be a small, one person operation or dang or Amazon/Google.I also keep servers up in my daily job, and some are more important than others, but none of them requires me to wake up 5AM to solve a problem (by design). So I don't demand anything from others something which I won't do.
As long as nobody is dying, nobody should stop, drop, and work on something else regardless of time, date and location.
failing to manage HN in my sleep is more like it
Your sleep is more important than our work distraction.
I was curiously productive this morning..
I took a shower for the first time in one week
looks like a redditor snuck into HN
Bet that felt great.
came back just in time for me to spend the first hour of my work
Which 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).
You'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.
Thanks, I'll take it! except for the single-handedly part - gotta share the love with https://news.ycombinator.com/posts?id=tomhow.
No worries, please take care of your sleep and thanks for all your hard work
We 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.)
Yeah we don't exactly pay to be on HN, not much to complain about. I appreciate everyone who works on HN.
We pay with content and with the fact that we attract the talent that eventually ends up powering ycombinator investment rounds.
It’s ad-supported. Any post with comments disabled is definitely an ad. Probably a lot of the others are, too.
Your 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 :)
> Anyway,anyone who finds themselves with a problem with HN should try that out :)
To be clear, I wasn’t complaining. Just pointing it out. Aside from any more speculative benefit to YC for running the site, the site does run outright ads.
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply you had a problem with ads. By "problem" I meant "if you find yourself procrastinating a lot" (not you specifically, but the reader in general)
Apologies for the misunderstanding
On, no issue here, no apology needed at all. I didn’t take it as any kind of dig, or even necessarily aimed at me (and if it was—still not offensive in any way). I’d almost edited my original comment right after posting because it occurred to me the tenseness might allow it to be interpreted as a complaint, and was just using your post as a jumping-off point to finally clarify that, is all.
I did miss exactly what you meant by “problem” in that passage, but get it now, so thanks for that.
I assumed the main purpose was to show off the ycombinator batches when they launch.
Actually, I'm doing my best alienating these kind of people :p
Good for you!
This. 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.)
And that is a good thing. Sleep tight!
Time to train an AI agent on your moderation activity and get some well deserved sleep!
We'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.
I was starting to think you never slept, I remember that one time I emailed you at 1am. :)
Do you have nightmares of failing to manage HN when you sleep too?
I appreciate what you do. Hope you got some rest when it was all over.
You deserve a lot of rest!
Yeah, I mean how dare you?! I pay good money for high uptime SLAs! :)
I was today years old when I found out Dan sleeps.
I was today years old when I found out that dang's first name is Dan
You'll never guess what letter dang's last name starts with.
A as in Ang, clearly.
No, he's Asian. The n is doing double-duty. His last name is Ng :p
That's exactly what a French person with the last name of Les would say!
What if Dang made an AI agent of himself for when he sleeps?
By demonstration he didn't.