
Ask HN: Is the HN front page having technical issues? - siavosh
It seems like everything on the homepage is at least 11 hours old.
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kogir
We're debugging an issue with ranking. Last night we rolled out new code that
appeared to work, but apparently didn't update the rank of items.

Since it's now fixed, when anyone votes on an old article it will be re-ranked
to its correct position. Since they've not been re-ranked for hours, most of
the moves will be pretty drastic.

Update: We're now discovering that a side effect of this was the automatic
killing of a number of submissions that should not have been killed. We're
going through logs and addressing those.

Update: Improperly killed submissions have been restored.

Final Update: Turns out it was actually an issue with voting. We were
correctly recording all votes (so you saw the arrows disappear), but not
correctly counting them. If you're wondering how that's possible, you can
thank denormalization.

We've now identified the bug and deployed the updated and fixed code.

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bryanlarsen
[http://hckrnews.com/](http://hckrnews.com/) makes the problems much more
obvious: a lot of stories have been killed (turn on showdead for
hckrnews.com), and very few new stories have shown up today. OTOH, this one
hasn't made hckrnews.com yet, either.

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DanielStraight
Yeah, it looks like 7 consecutive stories hit front page and then were killed.
Seems very strange.

..... and this was just killed. I'm going to email dang about it.

~~~
dang
> I'm going to email dang about it.

Thank you very much for doing so. We often read the emails much sooner than we
have time to reply to them, especially if there's an urgent action to be
taken, so please don't assume that your message has had no effect if you don't
hear back right away.

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danso
Thanks for asking this...I was wondering the same thing. not everything is
that old (the Oculus Rift story with 4 upvotes in the last hour is near the
top), but HN overall seems very stale, as if I was reading the /best list,
except with many non-best things included.

The /new list seems unusually inactive..even at 4AM, even links less than 15
minutes old can accrue a few upvotes. I just checked the /new list and nothing
has more than the initial upvote (except for the Source Sans link, which I
just upvoted to test)...

[http://imgur.com/w4PamQC](http://imgur.com/w4PamQC)

~~~
siavosh
Yeah something definitely feels off. The only 'recent' item on the frontpage
is an internal HN job posting which works outside of the upvote/downvote
algorithm. My guess is that a cron job that updates/counts the up/down votes
and refreshes the homepage hasn't run in 10 hours. Just a guess :)

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brudgers
Over the years, I've noticed from time to time what appear to be substantial
moderations that clean out 'lesser' stories. It often corresponds with about
the time offices are opening up on the West coast.

It could be algorithmic. It could be a group of users whose first action on
the site is to flag weak submissions. It could be an individual with
moderation powers. It could be each of them at different times.

Over the years it's been particularly noticeable on _Ask_ , but not uncommon
on the front page. But more recently it has been more noticeable on the front
page. Personally, I'm all for it. Algorithms can only go so far before they
are subject to gaming.

If it is algorithmic, perhaps it is triggered based on trends with new
submissions - e.g. such as when few are gaining meaningful adjusting the
gravity curve to favor older more popular submissions. This would maintain the
quality of the front page and perhaps encourage more effort toward finding
quality submissions or bring the focus to discussions.

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001sky
Looks that way...? And not just p.1, for the first ~60 stories there is not
much newer than the 18 hours give or take.

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contingencies
I've also seen lots of CloudFlare errors for a few weeks here in Asia.

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lazyant
I T237nk the@#$s som3 prob@#$ wi%! 4*e encodi13ng

