
Beg HN: Please only report serious GitHub outages (1h+) - Toshio
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&#x27;s a serious disruption, anything else pollutes people&#x27;s RSS feeds unnecessarily. Please consider this next time. Thanks.
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ColinWright
Why 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
-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.

~~~
presty
aka 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
> You can easily spot the trend if you read HN through RSS.

Why is it more easy to spot through RSS? (genuine question)

~~~
ville
I 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.

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benatkin
This 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
Lighten 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
I 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.

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bryanh
We 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/)

~~~
jaredsohn
Add a discussion board to each API (or maybe to each downtime event). Then the
discussions that happen here and elsewhere might migrate over to there.

~~~
bryanh
Great suggestion!

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ignostic
Based 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.

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StavrosK
Correction: Please stop upvoting outage posts.

~~~
shocks
And, where possible, flag them. :)

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martin-adams
I 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.

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apidoc
I 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/)

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shocks
Beg HN: Please flag non-serious GitHub/Bitbucket/etc outages (1h+)

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kitgar
Dear god, this. At least 10 occasions in the last 48 hours for extremely minor
outages. Switch to self-hosted!!

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soheil
I 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
What 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
I 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.

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bdcravens
Is this that much more of an issue than every NSA story rehash, most of which
doesn't offer any new info?

~~~
rschmitty
Just 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

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kidmenot
I 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.

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CmonDev
With all the git-hype around any kind of downtime is inexcusable.

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dregin
A 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.

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ses
Not 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.

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casca
I 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
Agree. As a sysadmin, outages of major services are interesting and IMO
newsworthy, even at 5m.

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mlopes
Come 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.

~~~
PommeDeTerre
It'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).

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medwezys
I 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

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atalreja
Agreed, 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!!

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avalaunch
I 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.

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ekianjo
This BegHN seems like easy karma as well!

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DonaldDerek
Perhaps this is to make the big companies kinda afraid from their people ;)

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capex
Thanks for introducing the new HN verb, 'beg'. Really amused.

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scottydelta
why not go for Gitlab when working in an organization?

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marknadal
I'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
rofl, 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
shut up

