

Tell HN: Planned Maintenance Jan 23 1-5 AM PST - kogir

During the maintenance window the site will be intermittently available, with varying degrees of responsiveness.<p>Tweaking our storage configuration a bit.
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tptacek
Whoah, new noticeboard feature. I like it! It harmonizes with my topcolor.

I object to labeling "Tweaking our storage configuration a bit" as "details",
though. ;)

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makmanalp
I don't know if that's a noticeboard feature or someone just stuck the notice
in the html template for now :P

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brandonhsiao
How would you propose implementing a noticeboard feature?

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nostrademons
Sites that do user notices on a regular basis often create a system where
small bits of text go into a DB along with start & end times for display, the
admin who posted it (for auditing purposes), countries where it's visible,
etc. There's an ACL for who's authorized to post new notices. Then the main
site template has a section that's shown only when there's an active notice
and automatically disappears when the notice is stale.

All this is probably overkill for a site like HN. However, think about things
like tsunami warnings on the Google homepage. These get shown only in a
certain geographical location, they need to be approved by multiple people,
and they need to get pushed out to tens of thousands of servers, all within
minutes of the alert coming in. There's a lot of complexity that can go into
even a simple feature.

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jbrooksuk
GitLab has this feature, but it's called Broadcast.

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kogir
I promise to do a post-mortem (with details), but from my perspective the
issues that began on Jan 6th are ongoing. It's all I've been working on since
then.

Once I get a break I'll write a blog post about it, and try the
Matasano/Square and Stripe CTFs :)

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k0mplex
While you're tweaking things, mind increasing the font size? I typically zoom
in, but then the up arrows get pixelated. Such problems!

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sjwright
As do I. In fact, one of my favourite Firefox add-ons is called NoSquint,
which remembers your zoom setting on a per-site basis. For me, Hacker News is
constantly at 150%, and wikipedia is 180%.

As for the arrows being pixelated, rather than having higher resolution
images, shouldn't the images be replaced with unicode?

▲ &#9650;

▼ &#9660;

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erichurkman
Doesn't Firefox remember your zoom settings on a per-site basis out of the
box?

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mintplant
Yep: [https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/font-size-and-zoom-
incr...](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/font-size-and-zoom-increase-
size-of-web-pages)

NoSquint only seems to be useful if you want to adjust the global zoom level.

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erichurkman
After playing with the extension for a moment, there's one key feature that'll
probably make me keep it installed: per-site configuration of text-zoom vs.
full browser-zoom. Firefox's "Zoom Text Only" is a global setting, but the
extension permits it on a per-site basis.

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sjwright
It also puts the current zoom level in the status bar, which I find useful.

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lucb1e
So what's PST? Why can't we all use UTC/GMT+/-x so we all understand?

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alextingle
Furthermore, those "timezone" labels are inherently ambiguous. Either use the
UTC offset (UTC-8) or the zoneinfo name (America/Los_Angeles).

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lucb1e
> or the zoneinfo name (America/Los_Angeles).

Although it'd usually give me some idea, I wouldn't know what the offset of LA
is.

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mcintyre1994
It does seem to be a standard format though:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tz_database_time_zones](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tz_database_time_zones)

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lucb1e
I'm sure you can find PST in a standard somewhere too, but the point is that
by using UTC+x everyone can instantly determine their local time.

Okay quick quiz: What time is it currently in Europe/Zaporozhye? ... Time up!
Alright next question. What time is it currently in UTC-3? ... Time up! Final
question: What time is it currently in the GST timezone? ... Time up!

All of them used standard formats. Which one was the easiest?

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beefsack
For easy conversion to your own local time:
[http://localtime.io/#?d=Jan%2023%201-5%20AM%20PST](http://localtime.io/#?d=Jan%2023%201-5%20AM%20PST)

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hglaser
Thank you for spending so much time on this. We appreciate it.

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cmelbye
How much karma do we need to change the color of the announcements bar?

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frozenport
What kind of storage requirements does HN have? I would expect everything to
fit snuggly in 32GB of ram.

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alttab
What, no zero downtime DB deployments?

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tsm
HN doesn't have a DB.

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dragonwriter
It clearly has a DB, even if it is a simple filesystem store. DB != RDBMS.

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jrockway
pg actually just types the text of the page in when you request it. This
system increases the average page generation time, but also increases
civility.

This "planned maintenance" is just a cover for a quick nap.

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eropple
Joke's on him. Hundreds of people have him enclosed.

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TrainedMonkey
Are these redesigned backup or improving recovery speed related changes by any
chance?

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jmathai
I can't believe they're finally fixing the pagination bugs! Super excited.

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bane
Good luck!

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sgt
And may the Source be with you.

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henrygrew
good luck, it's a commendable thing that you're doing.

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krishnakarki
good luck

