Tell HN: HN was down

dang · 2025-12-17T18:09:25 1765994965

Yes, sorry! We're investigating, but my current theory is we got overloaded because I relaxed some of our anti-crawler protections a few days ago.

(The reason I did that is that the anti-crawler protections also unfortunately hit some legit users, and we don't want to block legit users. However, it seems that I turned the knobs down too far.)

In this case, though, we had a secondary failure: PagerDuty woke me up at 5:24am, I checked HN and it seemed fine, so I told PagerDuty the problem was resolved. But the problem wasn't resolved - at that point I was just sleeping through it.

I'll add more as we find out more, but it probably won't be till later this afternoon PST.

shlomo_z · 2025-12-17T18:38:06 1765996686

Crazy that Dang literally manages HN in his sleep!

We all knew that but I haven't seen any confirmation before this.

easterncalculus · 2025-12-18T00:40:25 1766018425

I like hacker news but I don't think this site is worth getting paged over lol

archon810 · 2025-12-18T06:01:17 1766037677

You might be underestimating HN's popularity.

locknitpicker · 2025-12-18T06:29:44 1766039384

> 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.

bayindirh · 2025-12-18T08:11:46 1766045506

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.

locknitpicker · 2025-12-18T08:55:33 1766048133

> If you like the thing you're managing, then its health is critical for you, not your users.

Get a grip and go touch some grass. Even FANGs understand the concept of business hours SEV.

dang · 2025-12-17T18:53:02 1765997582

failing to manage HN in my sleep is more like it

jonny_eh · 2025-12-17T19:51:33 1766001093

Your sleep is more important than our work distraction.

seemaze · 2025-12-18T00:23:04 1766017384

I was curiously productive this morning..

koakuma-chan · 2025-12-18T01:28:19 1766021299

I took a shower for the first time in one week

bigbuppo · 2025-12-18T07:24:37 1766042677

Bet that felt great.

fouc · 2025-12-18T04:18:59 1766031539

looks like a redditor snuck into HN

arnavpraneet · 2025-12-18T05:41:20 1766036480

came back just in time for me to spend the first hour of my work

zenoprax · 2025-12-17T20:24:00 1766003040

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).

wkat4242 · 2025-12-18T00:30:47 1766017847

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.

dang · 2025-12-18T06:00:48 1766037648

Thanks, I'll take it! except for the single-handedly part - gotta share the love with https://news.ycombinator.com/posts?id=tomhow.

franciscop · 2025-12-17T20:17:35 1766002655

No worries, please take care of your sleep and thanks for all your hard work

dijit · 2025-12-17T18:58:15 1765997895

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.)

giancarlostoro · 2025-12-17T19:55:45 1766001345

Yeah we don't exactly pay to be on HN, not much to complain about. I appreciate everyone who works on HN.

jacquesm · 2025-12-18T01:07:25 1766020045

We pay with content and with the fact that we attract the talent that eventually ends up powering ycombinator investment rounds.

phantasmish · 2025-12-18T01:50:42 1766022642

It’s ad-supported. Any post with comments disabled is definitely an ad. Probably a lot of the others are, too.

abustamam · 2025-12-18T05:45:04 1766036704

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 :)

mysterydip · 2025-12-18T03:41:00 1766029260

I assumed the main purpose was to show off the ycombinator batches when they launch.

scottlamb · 2025-12-17T19:39:44 1766000384

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.)

notachatbot123 · 2025-12-17T19:01:18 1765998078

And that is a good thing. Sleep tight!

sizzle · 2025-12-18T03:39:18 1766029158

Time to train an AI agent on your moderation activity and get some well deserved sleep!

dang · 2025-12-18T05:59:26 1766037566

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.

nubinetwork · 2025-12-18T00:48:20 1766018900

I was starting to think you never slept, I remember that one time I emailed you at 1am. :)

commandersaki · 2025-12-17T18:58:05 1765997885

Do you have nightmares of failing to manage HN when you sleep too?

djmips · 2025-12-17T23:34:08 1766014448

I appreciate what you do. Hope you got some rest when it was all over.

feczeri_c · 2025-12-18T00:18:34 1766017114

You deserve a lot of rest!

sailfast · 2025-12-17T20:00:50 1766001650

Yeah, I mean how dare you?! I pay good money for high uptime SLAs! :)

qingcharles · 2025-12-17T20:18:54 1766002734

I was today years old when I found out Dan sleeps.

gaudystead · 2025-12-17T21:47:02 1766008022

I was today years old when I found out that dang's first name is Dan

anonymous908213 · 2025-12-17T22:16:56 1766009816

You'll never guess what letter dang's last name starts with.

smolder · 2025-12-17T22:31:19 1766010679

A as in Ang, clearly.

qingcharles · 2025-12-17T22:38:03 1766011083

No, he's Asian. The n is doing double-duty. His last name is Ng :p

fragmede · 2025-12-18T02:14:19 1766024059

That's exactly what a French person with the last name of Les would say!

sizzle · 2025-12-18T03:38:22 1766029102

What if Dang made an AI agent of himself for when he sleeps?

utopcell · 2025-12-18T02:28:07 1766024887

By demonstration he didn't.

xandrius · 2025-12-17T21:44:25 1766007865

Hey dang, don't worry. It's just a site for reading articles and reacting to them.

Enjoy your deserved sleep and if for a couple of hours it's down, so be it.

Thanks for your continued service!

powvans · 2025-12-17T22:00:21 1766008821

100%

Though I will say, HN is a pretty great source of information about major outages like the recent AWS and Cloudflare issues. I had a moment this morning where I thought, oh, is there a larger issue and then, oh, HN is down, huh, the next option is so far down my list that it's going to take me a moment to think of it.

I hope that serves as a testament to how great this site and the community is. Thanks for all your hard work keeping it that way!

derrida · 2025-12-17T23:27:19 1766014039

> huh, the next option is so far down my list that it's going to take me a moment to think of it.

Option 4: take your grab bag with the tcp over IP shortwave radio, sextant and head for pre-cached month supply of food in the hills.

Imustaskforhelp · 2025-12-17T20:11:01 1766002261

I was personally worried if there was some major outage of the whole world or something the first time hackernews didnt work because I didnt expect hackernews to go down but rather, something even more catastrophic than aws going down must happen (because we see major cloud outage posts)

https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/hacker-news

This website had many instances of reports, the last I saw were 52 reports in only a short frame of time, the maximum reports on this are 118 it seems.

> In this case, though, we had a secondary failure: PagerDuty woke me up at 5:24am, I checked HN and it seemed fine, so I told PagerDuty the problem was resolved. But the problem wasn't resolved - at that point I was just sleeping through it.

Its okay I suppose, have you figured out who is crawling hackernews so much tho, was it a ddos attack or an AI company trying to get data, doesn't hackernews support an api and I am sure that there are datasets for it too so Its interesting why they might crawl but we all know the reasons why as they have been discussed here.

neilv · 2025-12-17T19:19:28 1765999168

Maybe it would be fine if ops alerts were silenced during normal US sleeping hours?

HN is important, but unlikely much harm could be done before morning.

(Source: Lost a lot of sleep at one place, enough to realize that sleep interruption and deficit has significant costs.)

Rooster61 · 2025-12-17T18:32:20 1765996340

No apology needed. We all needed to stop procrastinating anyways :)

tsoukase · 2025-12-17T19:43:14 1766000594

During the last week my IP was banned for unknown reason. Glad to hear it might not be a problem from my side.

dang · 2025-12-17T22:28:44 1766010524

Yes, sorry! This is the problem - we don't want to block legit users, but if we loosen the bolts, we get flooded.

If you browse HN while logged in, that should immunize you against this happening. Also, if it does happen again, you can unban your IP as described at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html. But you have to do that from a different IP address, of course.

If those things don't work, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll get it sorted.

tsoukase · 2025-12-18T08:29:05 1766046545

Thanks. It is so easy to change the IP using mobile that the unbanning is little hassle.

andy_ppp · 2025-12-17T19:28:29 1765999709

I’d love to know more about what running a site like HN involves, would be great to get a write up of what it’s like running something like this at this scale (and what kind of traffic you guys get)!

alwa · 2025-12-17T19:43:31 1766000611

I can’t put my finger on anything within the last decade, but I seem to recall it running in something close to its current form on a single core on a single server for a long time:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5229522

Re: traffic, dang said (2022):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33454140

I took it as a good reminder that the hard part is the human part: that high-overhead features and UI fripperies are nice but not necessary (or sufficient) to keep a community healthy and vibrant over the decades.

(And on the subject of the human side, if you didn’t catch Anna Wiener’s 2019 profile, it’s here:

https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th... )

ilamont · 2025-12-17T20:09:34 1766002174

From dang's 2022 comment about traffic:

The most interesting number is the 1300 submissions because that hasn't grown since 2011 - it just fluctuates. Everything else has been growing more or less linearly for a long time, which is how we like it.

I find that surprising, as 2011-2022 covers an exponential rise in SEO spam and "growth hackers" attempting to drive traffic and links.

Or was 1,300 the number of non-flagged submissions?

tempest_ · 2025-12-17T20:07:50 1766002070

The other reality is that as much as this industry is up its ass about scalability you can run a very very busy site on a single machine now a days.

A lot of people out here designing their blogs like its 1989.

giancarlostoro · 2025-12-17T19:54:54 1766001294

The transparency is deeply appreciated by me and others. We don't pay to keep HN on, so we cannot complain. Thank you and the rest of the team for all you do to give us a corner of the internet that is quite 'different' from the rest of the wild west that is the web.

maxloh · 2025-12-17T20:49:53 1766004593

Frankly, I don't understand why someone would even try to crawl Hacker News.

There is an official dump which doesn't even require parsing HTML at all: https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/details/y-combi...

dang · 2025-12-17T22:14:50 1766009690

These are not, er, experienced crawlers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sbpl3ywNlpA#t=56s

mmooss · 2025-12-17T20:56:18 1766004978

In a situation like this one, good crisis leadership is essential. dang, HN will help you with tips from vast collected experience (please chip in):

1. Blame: The first thing to do is to point the finger. That doesn't mean analysing the technical issue, which can delay this step and limit your options, but figuring out who is politically easiest to blame. Often, that's the new guy, but outside contractors and vendors without good connections are also a common solution. Even if you are technically responsible for hiring them, you can always push them under the bus with a little skill. This small sacrifice helps unify, focus, and motivate the rest of the team.

2. Emotion: Inject your emotion into the situation and make that the implicit, but indisputable priority. Particularly, outrage and anger - This is completely _____. These people are utterly _____ (I'd use all caps, but that's not allowed on HN). Make sure everyone's attention is over their shoulder, on your emotion, and infect the team with it. Threats are an effective tool here - this is a crisis, and anyone who is calm is not emotionally engaged. Otherwise, they won't care enough about this problem - without you driving them, they probably wouldn't care much at all. Anyway, you don't have time for niceties like empathy or even basic respect.

3. Speed: Respnsiveness to stakeholders is very important. People need answers now. Give them answers they want to hear, outcomes they will be comfortable with. Don't worry if different groups hear different things. Your team will find a way to make it all work - that's their job.

4. Communication: Good communication is essential. Make sure you clearly tell your team what they should be doing; repeat it several times to prevent misunderstanding. Especially people with experience can have minds of their own; keep them on track. The situation is a crisis so you can't take any risks; stay on top of them and everything they do, and give input if you're not certain they are doing exactly what you would be doing.

5. Victimhood: Find a way to turn the tables: Make it about you, and how you're the victim here, and feed the fire with more outrage. With this and outrage, nobody will undermine the team by challenging your ideas or authority, which is the most essential component of a successful outcome. Remember, without you this all falls apart.

Have I missed anything?

yearolinuxdsktp · 2025-12-18T01:34:44 1766021684

Engagement: make sure that every member of the team is either on the incident bridge or has dropped what they are doing to watch you diagnose the problem. The more eyes on the problem, the more awareness of the pain will be absorbed by all. If members need to leave to get food or put children to bed, tell them to order delivery and to ask their spouse to do their job. Demonstrate human touch by allowing them to turn off camera while they are eating.

Comprehensiveness: propose extreme, sweeping solutions, such as a lights-out restart of all services, shutting down all incoming requests, and restoring everything to yesterday's backup. This demonstrates that you are ready to address the problem in a maximally comprehensive way. If someone suggests a config change rollback, or a roll-forward patch, ask them why are gambling company time with localized changes, and ask them why are they willing to gamble company time on technical analysis?

Root Cause Analysis Meeting: spend the entire meeting time rehashing the events, pointing fingers and assigning blame. Be sure to mention how the incident could've been over sooner if you just restarted and rolled back every single thing. Be sure to demonstrate out-of-the-box thinking by discussing unrealistic grandiose solutions. When the time is up, run the meeting over by 30 minutes and force all to stay while realistic solution ideas are finally discussed in overtime. This makes it clear to the team that nothing is more important than this incident's RCA--their time surely is not. If someone asks to tap out to pick their kids up after school, remind them that they are making enough money to call them an Uber.

Alerting: be sure to identify anything remotely resembling leading indicators, and add Critical-level wake-you-up alerts with sensitive thresholds for those indicator. Database exceeding 50% CPU? Critical! Filesystem queue length exceeding 5? Critical! Heap usage over 50%? Critical! 100 errors in one minute on a 100000 requests per minute service? Critical! Single log line indicating DNS resolution failure anywhere in the system? Critical! (What if AWS's DNS is down again?) Service requests rate 10% higher than typical peak? Critical! If anyone objects to such critical alerts, ask them why do they want to be responsible for not preventing the next incident?

showcaseearth · 2025-12-17T19:51:28 1766001088

Short lived and driven by good intentions– all's good. Thanks again for keeping this thing going!

bicepjai · 2025-12-17T19:02:02 1765998122

Even after providing firebase endpoint, crawlers come to the site ?

Bender · 2025-12-17T19:42:07 1766000527

Most crawlers have no concept of what that is. They will follow links to this site and then follow links out of this site even after being told not to [1]. The majority of crawlers follow zero rules, RFC's, etc... The few platforms that do follow standards and rules are akin to a law abiding citizen in Mos Eisley.

[1] - rel="nofollow"

dang · 2025-12-17T22:08:13 1766009293

Oh my god. It's the crawlpocalypse.

busymom0 · 2025-12-17T19:38:06 1766000286

Unfortunately, the firebase API is very bad as they even acknowledge that in their github page.

8cvor6j844qw_d6 · 2025-12-17T21:22:56 1766006576

> anti-crawler protections

Sometimes I could not open the comment section, receiving a blank page with "... We're sorry" or something along these lines when opening from new private window. It works when opening normally.

Logging in on the private window seems to resolve the issue. Can you take a look on this if possible?

dang · 2025-12-17T22:10:07 1766009407

Best to email your IP address to hn@ycombinator.com so we can see if it's blocked.

nottorp · 2025-12-17T19:11:23 1765998683

Can't speak for others, but I'm sure i'll be pretty fine if no one gets woken up if HN is down...

Of course, they'd better restore service after they wake up naturally, because I need my HN dose. But it's not worth losing sleep over it.

QuantumNomad_ · 2025-12-18T00:37:12 1766018232

> the anti-crawler protections also unfortunately hit some legit users, and we don't want to block legit users

Was the blocking returning “Sorry.” instead of any page content? A couple of days ago there was a few hours where when I’d go to HN I could load the main page as a non-logged in user. But if I tried to log in I would get “Sorry.” instead. I also got the sorry message if I tried to click on user profiles of other people and a few other pages.

I am assuming that the reason I could see the front page itself and discussions on posts on the front page is that they were in a shared cache for non-logged in users, but that when I clicked on some pages like some random user pages those were not in cache and hit the origin server and it blocked those with “Sorry.” like it did for log-in attempts.

I also tried to go to the unblock IP page, but that one also returned “Sorry.”

For a while I was scratching my head wondering if I had gotten some malware on one of my computers that was aggressively making requests to HN, and that I had become IP banned because of that. Since I think my actual request rate from browsing and commenting should be pretty average. I read HN a lot, but not that much :p

Later in the day, or the next day, things were back to normal and I could log in again. Presumably after those anti-crawler protections had been relaxed again.

irishcoffee · 2025-12-17T19:10:41 1765998641

> The reason I did that is that the anti-crawler protections also unfortunately hit some legit users

How does this happen?

Bender · 2025-12-17T19:27:43 1765999663

How does this happen?

Not the person you are asking. Bot operators have an incentive to make crawlers look as much like a human as possible so they do not get blocked. Some of them fail miserably and some nearly succeed. That makes it trivial to accidentally block a real person. I am personally fine with that given I do not pay for this site and have no SLA or contract with it.

arccy · 2025-12-17T20:09:58 1766002198

some humans also try their best to make themselves look like bots...

slater · 2025-12-17T21:05:18 1766005518

You're absolutely right!

Imustaskforhelp · 2025-12-17T20:11:41 1766002301

beep boop.

ZuoCen_Liu · 2025-12-17T23:42:42 1766014962

pjc50 · 2025-12-17T21:24:38 1766006678

Every filter process has false positives and false negatives, especially when crawlers are trying to fake their status.

ohhnoodont · 2025-12-17T20:31:47 1766003507

Last week if you are using a VPN + a browser that limits fingerprinting, you were likely to see error messages accessing HN.

shmeeed · 2025-12-17T18:11:32 1765995092

Looking forward to the post mortem. :)

michelsedgh · 2025-12-17T18:16:06 1765995366

shmeeed · 2025-12-17T20:23:12 1766002992

In my defense, I was commenting at 0 min, since then he made several updates explaining the situation.

dang · 2025-12-17T22:08:55 1766009335

Yes sorry! Normally I put in "[editing - bear with me...]" or some such.

michelsedgh · 2025-12-18T00:29:14 1766017754

I was just trolling, thanks for ur work

stmw · 2025-12-17T23:43:56 1766015036

dang - just to say, we've all done it...

walrus01 · 2025-12-17T22:41:41 1766011301

Just out of curiosity, if HN is still running on one physical system, what does a daily or weekly traffic chart look like for the switch port facing it?

echelon · 2025-12-17T18:26:29 1765995989

I didn't realize you were carrying the pager too! Kudos!

malwrar · 2025-12-17T19:04:57 1765998297

I feel such a sense of kinship for anyone who carries a pager, almost 7 years at my current role doing it. Super cool that dang is among our number :)

geocrasher · 2025-12-17T19:35:30 1766000130

Yep, have been on constant "pager duty" for 2+ years, although I have more help now and I get paged 1-3 times a week instead of per night. Still, carry my lappy everywhere I go. Bought an ARM Windows laptop to get that 20hr battery life so I could worry less during my travels. You know, fancy things like going get food or going grocery shopping.

malwrar · 2025-12-17T21:36:07 1766007367

Rough shift, my worst was every other week and my boss prior to hiring me was 24/7 just like you. I just carry a backpack with a few batteries + my work laptop, fortunately only a few really bad stories but hooooo boy me and that backpack have seen some fun times.

wkat4242 · 2025-12-18T00:35:47 1766018147

I wish I could still buy a pager where I live :'(

idontwantthis · 2025-12-17T19:53:07 1766001187

Do you carry a literal pager? We use the PagerDuty app.

geocrasher · 2025-12-17T20:08:14 1766002094

My organization is, for now, using OpsGenie.

My pager noise: https://www.soundjay.com/transportation/sounds/train-crossin...

That will not only wake the dead, it'll wake me no matter how asleep I am.

malwrar · 2025-12-17T21:29:28 1766006968

Haha I made the mistake of using the default iPhone ringtone, now when strangers get called in public my heart rate spikes. Too scared to change it.

darkwater · 2025-12-17T22:18:56 1766009936

The "for now" is very important because it will be sunset in 1 year and something. I can recommend you Incident.io or Rootly as alternatives.

kunwon1 · 2025-12-17T20:19:59 1766002799

It may interest you to know that pagers are still a thing, Motorola still makes them, and I know that one major use case is volunteer fire departments

I used to work on Motorola Minitor 5 pagers. Looks like they recently released their newest model, the Minitor 7

I wonder if pagers are still used in hospitals? I imagine so

sgerenser · 2025-12-17T20:42:08 1766004128

Doctors on call at hospitals also routinely still use pagers. There was a planet money episode on it a couple years ago: https://www.npr.org/2023/12/08/1197955913/doctors-pagers-bee...

xeonmc · 2025-12-17T23:05:22 1766012722

Do doctors in the Middle East also carry pagers?

sharpshadow · 2025-12-17T20:38:40 1766003920

The AUBMC hospital is definitely using them as well as the paramilitary in that country, at least until recently.

ZuoCen_Liu · 2025-12-17T23:44:09 1766015049

Now, whenever I see a pager, I think of explosions. Haha.

ErroneousBosh · 2025-12-17T22:17:02 1766009822

There's a company in England called "Cascode" who make firefighter alerters. These are really basic "beeper" pagers, which you can program to have a bunch of different tones and LED patterns based on the RIC and Subcode.

I look after several thousand of these across several hundred paging sites.

They're relatively inexpensive (70 quid or so in quantity) and they last about six weeks on a commonly-available AA battery. The batteries go flat enough to trigger the "low battery" beep at about 3am, for some reason. I don't know why.

There's no messaging involved, although the encoders are capable of sending a text string. The message is "get up and get down to the fire station right now", which generally needs no further explanation. POCSAG is unencrypted, so there would be privacy concerns with sending actual incident information in the clear with it.

While we're on the subject of old tech, until BT finally cut the last of them off, we use dialup modems to control the encoders (not dialup internet, just a hundreds-of-miles serial cable) as a backup, and dot-matrix printers to print out a hardcopy message for the crews to pick up.

All very low-tech. All very fixable. All stays working if you don't mess with it.

https://cascode.co.uk/products/2ar2-and-2ar3/

wkat4242 · 2025-12-18T00:37:42 1766018262

Encryption is easily doable even with one way pagers. With one way you will lose the perfect forward secrecy option but that's usually ok.

malwrar · 2025-12-17T21:27:14 1766006834

Oh no, I just always hear it termed that way and it captures the “feeling” for me since it feels like a dedicated device. I just just carry a work phone w/ PagerDuty during my shift.

altairprime · 2025-12-17T18:49:15 1765997355

Decades ago I had to write a Perl script to auth to the site for proper downtime checking. Some things never change :) Good luck with the triage.

racl101 · 2025-12-17T19:54:51 1766001291

dang!

Elfener · 2025-12-17T17:09:28 1765991368

I got stuck in an infinite loop.

Try opening HN -> it's down, better check HN to see everyone talking about a major website being down -> Try opening HN -> loop

neom · 2025-12-17T17:36:58 1765993018

Yeah me too. Wake up -> HN down -> That's weird, oh well it's usually only down for a few minutes -> I should check if HN is still down -> That's weird, oh well it's usually only down for a few minutes -> I should check if HN is still down -> loop.

That was a few hours ago. I'm glad this loop is broken.

squeefers · 2025-12-17T17:56:55 1765994215

sounds very much like an evil social media dopamine feedback loop. ironic given everyone on HN is so anti social media.... its clearly only bad for kids though i should add, silly of me to exclude such a detail

bee_rider · 2025-12-17T18:31:01 1765996261

HN is obviously social media and it is silly to say otherwise. It is just social media that occasionally has interesting stuff. The SNR is just slightly higher.

ptsd_dalmatian · 2025-12-17T21:06:50 1766005610

I guese developed this addiction on Facebook and now that I don’t use it, I come for methadon shot to HN

neom · 2025-12-17T18:04:16 1765994656

I've been on this internet hit shit since the 90s lil bro, s' all good.

strbean · 2025-12-17T18:06:37 1765994797

I can stop any time I want, I just don't want!

HPsquared · 2025-12-17T18:10:02 1765995002

Sometimes I'll catch myself absentmindedly reopening the browser and checking two or three front pages, seconds after having just checked them and closed the browser.

notachatbot123 · 2025-12-17T19:02:12 1765998132

That's a sign of addiction and I highly recommend changing your behaviour towards those pages!

cheschire · 2025-12-17T20:36:34 1766003794

I feel like I need to avoid channelling Bob Saget from Half Baked when I say that is not addiction. That's a habit.

cbracketdash · 2025-12-17T21:50:48 1766008248

There is a noprocrast feature in your settings to specify how long you can stay on for a single session and the frequency at which you can view HN. Super helpful!

Rendello · 2025-12-17T22:17:51 1766009871

Funny, I don't seem to need an outage to get stuck in a HN loop...

mustak_im · 2025-12-17T18:40:17 1765996817

I woke up and was wondering if I’ve just woken up in hell!

Imustaskforhelp · 2025-12-17T20:13:04 1766002384

Yeah, I had assumed something very major must have happened for HN to go down, lmao and I even asked in some linux discord server regarding it asking if there is a major outage as hackernews is down

ErroneousBosh · 2025-12-17T22:18:45 1766009925

Not just me then?

"Shit, HN is down! Hm, I wonder if there's anything about it on HN?"

until stack overflow occurs.

RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u · 2025-12-17T19:40:25 1766000425

HN is how I discover whether other sites are down or not, so it serves a critical function, so of course I check it frequently.

/s

manbitesdog · 2025-12-17T16:51:43 1765990303

TIL I have a "open Hacker News" hand reflex

ectospheno · 2025-12-17T17:21:27 1765992087

I learn more reading the comments here than anywhere else. Thanks everyone for my addiction.

directmusic · 2025-12-17T18:32:13 1765996333

I'm glad I'm not the only one. If I type 'n' into any browser it autocompletes to HN.

embedding-shape · 2025-12-17T18:51:20 1765997480

Save typing hundreds of letters per day, and replace about:newtab with news.ycombinator.com, now you can just do CTRL+T :)

tom1337 · 2025-12-17T19:35:17 1766000117

at that moment my productivity would drop to zero

Imustaskforhelp · 2025-12-17T20:14:41 1766002481

mine already has and I dont even have hackernews as my new tab :)

On all fairness though, mine is same for the original comment where just pressing n autocompletes it to https://news.ycombinator.com/

geocrasher · 2025-12-17T19:45:55 1766000755

I had the same thing for Slashdot.org for many, many years. Both the reflex and the browser autocomplete. I still miss the old /. It was like HN + Hackaday + Usenet.

neom · 2025-12-18T00:11:53 1766016713

digg too, till they ruined it...still can't believe they ruined digg.

1shooner · 2025-12-17T17:26:30 1765992390

If you're looking to put the brakes on that, I've used LeechBlock to add a 5-second timer to opening a new HN window (along with other block schedules). The timer even fails if it loses focus, so it really helps slow you down.

https://www.proginosko.com/leechblock/

embedding-shape · 2025-12-17T18:53:21 1765997601

    echo '127.0.0.1 news.ycombinator.com' | sudo tee -a /etc/hosts

Does the trick as well :) For bonus points (and so you can't workaround it with your phone), do it on your router/switch instead.

You'll still open new tabs and go to HN, but you'll be reminded quickly, and every day can be downtime day \o/ (for you, personally)

squeefers · 2025-12-17T17:57:44 1765994264

so youve got the willpower to do something about it but not enough to just stop doing it?

MikeTheGreat · 2025-12-17T18:59:35 1765997975

To be fair, making a change (particularly changing a habit) takes time. Having something there to remind and nudge you helps make this easier, especially when you're tired, stressed, 'just looking for a short break', etc, etc.

It's like they say: "Your demons will comfort you when no one else will. That's why it's so hard to get rid of them"

1shooner · 2025-12-17T18:16:27 1765995387

dwedge · 2025-12-17T18:02:21 1765994541

Have you never suffered from habitual reflexes? I blocked twitter for a while in my hosts file and a dozen times over those first few days I instinctively opened a new tab and typed twitter in

sunrunner · 2025-12-17T18:51:42 1765997502

I deleted the YouTube mobile app a few months ago and I still reflexively reach for the app icon every now and then. Thanks YouTube Shorts.

squeefers · 2025-12-17T18:31:40 1765996300

> I blocked twitter for a while in my hosts file and a dozen times over those first few days I instinctively opened a new tab and typed twitter in?

youd go through that effort when you could have just stopped though.

frikk · 2025-12-17T18:46:07 1765997167

We all admire your absolute mastery of your own habitual reflexes and mind. For the rest of us, there is a daily battle of wits, desires, weakness, and habit.

If I could snap my fingers and break toxic habits and patterns, I would have done so decades ago :)

jstummbillig · 2025-12-17T17:08:43 1765991323

I say. Vibe coded 4 apps once I got past that, on my way to half a billion in ARR already.

wincy · 2025-12-17T17:23:25 1765992205

I’ve turned on no procrast mode and set it to ten minutes per hour. Helped me a lot!

HanClinto · 2025-12-17T17:44:12 1765993452

What are you using to control this?

bee_rider · 2025-12-17T18:32:21 1765996341

It is on your profile, the “noprocrast” dropdown.

randallsquared · 2025-12-17T18:31:10 1765996270

It's a setting available on the page you get from clicking on your own username.

HanClinto · 2025-12-17T18:50:27 1765997427

Whoa. A website that cares about its users enough to _easily support limiting access to itself_?

That's so refreshing in terms of being a user-focused feature, and yet it stands in sharp contrast against today's engagement-hyperfocused climate. I never would have thought to look on a website's own settings page to limit my access to that same website.

I love it, thank you for pointing me to this!

locknitpicker · 2025-12-18T07:07:01 1766041621

> TIL I have a "open Hacker News" hand reflex

You mean it's not your homepage?

thesurlydev · 2025-12-17T17:00:13 1765990813

Same! Right there with "every day must begin with coffee"

yigithan · 2025-12-18T04:55:54 1766033754

I stopped using google.com for Internet access check, I now use HN.

AndrewKemendo · 2025-12-17T17:02:03 1765990923

It just reinforces for me that addiction is a human problem not a problem with technology

I know dang basically works tirelessly to not change the format in order to not induce those addictive patterns

but yet here we all are

chistev · 2025-12-17T17:04:31 1765991071

It's a website with the smartest people in the world. The level of conversations here are unrivaled in internet communities.

It's understandable to be addicted. Lol.

I visit this place multiple times a day.

phantasmish · 2025-12-17T17:40:39 1765993239

99% of social science or political topics and 50% of technical topics here do not… read as smart, and you’d be much better off spending the same time reading the first chapter of a relevant 101-level college textbook.

seizethecheese · 2025-12-17T17:51:17 1765993877

It's entirely possible that this is the smartest place on the internet, but also often dumb. In fact, it seems likely. More of an indictment of the rest of the places on the internet.

squeefers · 2025-12-17T18:01:49 1765994509

> It's entirely possible that this is the smartest place on the internet,

i cant find the link, but there was a post about how to "be nice" and it was a revelation to a worrying amount of "geniuses" on here. bare in mind the sum total of the advice was "be nice, dont be rude"

seizethecheese · 2025-12-17T21:12:29 1766005949

1. niceness and genius are orthogonal

2. your characterization of the article sounds uncharitable

3. my point isn't exactly that this is necessarily the smartest place

ssdspoimdsjvv · 2025-12-17T18:44:41 1765997081

Intelligence has many dimensions.

the_af · 2025-12-17T19:59:15 1766001555

> It's entirely possible that this is the smartest place on the internet, but also often dumb. In fact, it seems likely. More of an indictment of the rest of the places on the internet.

Almost every (non-troll) online community that is relatively peaceful and has some semblance of moderation to remove flamewars thinks of itself as "the best community". Usually as compared to reddit, though if it's on reddit they will compare themselves to some other (hated) sub.

It's a fact of the internet. Every online community thinks of itself as the smartest, more thoughtful, more civilized. HN is no exception.

It goes without saying HN is not the smartest or more thoughtful online community. It's just... ok. Not the worst, not the best. Certainly NOT the place with the smartest people, though some smart people frequent it. As a regular, you can soon figure out HN's unspoken rules, blindspots, and areas where the group opinion is more likely to be accurate.

jrowen · 2025-12-17T20:58:46 1766005126

> It goes without saying HN is not the smartest or more thoughtful online community.

How does that go without saying? Name some others then, compare and contrast. As-is your argument is just posturing.

the_af · 2025-12-17T21:26:45 1766006805

> Name some others then, compare and contrast.

No need, because whether an online community is more thoughtful or smarter than another is very subjective. Almost by definition, HN is not it. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and all that. Of course, by internet law, HN (or a subset of its members) considers itself to be the smartest, more thoughtful online community.

There are communities I like better, which are smarter and more thoughtful, but I've no desire to argue with you.

> As-is your argument is just posturing

Nah. Hard pass. Nice try though!

jrowen · 2025-12-18T07:52:32 1766044352

I see you're downvoted, it wasn't me. I wasn't making any claim, you're making claims and disparaging remarks that you won't substantiate.

steve_adams_86 · 2025-12-17T18:10:46 1765995046

> the smartest people in the world

But also, people like me. Be careful what you choose to believe on this website

fwip · 2025-12-17T17:09:39 1765991379

It's really not 'the smartest people.' It's people interested in tech, and often in making-a-lot-of-money-in-tech. It does have a lot of people with significant industry experience, which is cool.

worksonmine · 2025-12-17T17:23:41 1765992221

> It's really not 'the smartest people.'

This was especially obvious during Covid, I even stopped visiting because the comment section was so crazy.

the_af · 2025-12-17T17:22:42 1765992162

> It's a website with the smartest people in the world.

Nice joke!

At least, I hope it was a joke...

linhns · 2025-12-17T18:02:47 1765994567

Also the level of flak is unrivaled.

krapp · 2025-12-17T22:10:36 1766009436

Any professional forum or technical subreddit with good moderation and gatekeeping blows Hacker News out of the water any day of the week.

andrepd · 2025-12-17T18:39:17 1765996757

Poe's Law for a parody of the self-important sv techbro

the_af · 2025-12-17T20:02:46 1766001766

It's a testament to Poe's Law that I genuinely cannot tell if the OP was being funny or not.

mrguyorama · 2025-12-17T21:18:51 1766006331

There's a reason why HN of all places has such a terrible record of handling actual sarcasm and telling it apart from genuine belief and that reason is NOT that "HN is really smart" lol

the_af · 2025-12-17T21:28:45 1766006925

Agreed! I think HN is average, and its userbase think themselves smarter than they really are.

... but I still cannot tell if the original commenter was sarcastic or not! ;)

dzink · 2025-12-17T17:14:13 1765991653

This one is at least healthy-ish for the mind. I’d much rather hacker news than any other news. Social Media is an emotional rage-bait cesspool these days. If it’s not for Hacker News those of us who abstain from the rest would be living in the dark.

PurpleRamen · 2025-12-17T17:16:24 1765991784

But, would the addiction become worse if HN changed, or would there be a point where they could cure it?

ZuoCen_Liu · 2025-12-17T23:50:39 1766015439

Perhaps this is the role of HN - at least it still allows us to reflect.

cbracketdash · 2025-12-17T21:51:13 1766008273

There is a noprocrast feature in your settings to specify how long you can stay on for a single session and the frequency at which you can view HN. Super helpful!

lysace · 2025-12-17T18:06:36 1765994796

⌘-T, N, <RET>

Did it like 5 times during that 1h-ish outage. :(

ChrisMarshallNY · 2025-12-17T17:16:32 1765991792

So do I, but it was such a shock that I just passed out, and when I woke up, it was back up.

ZuoCen_Liu · 2025-12-17T23:52:18 1766015538

Admirable~

ErroneousBosh · 2025-12-17T22:19:19 1766009959

Do you log into things and reflexively type "ls", too?

kevin061 · 2025-12-17T16:56:33 1765990593

I did not know how addicted I was to HN until today lol

nottorp · 2025-12-17T19:12:14 1765998734

What? You mean you ... close the HN tab?

selectnull · 2025-12-17T17:44:02 1765993442

I already knew that. :)

numpad0 · 2025-12-17T17:50:03 1765993803

obligatory: https://xkcd.com/477/

sosodev · 2025-12-17T16:52:05 1765990325

Yes, and I'm a little ashamed to admit my morning routine wasn't the same without it.

fedreg · 2025-12-17T17:02:10 1765990930

This was more impactful to my day than the last AWS and CloudFlare outages...

messe · 2025-12-17T17:05:36 1765991136

At least during those outages I could procrastinate on HN.

the_arun · 2025-12-17T18:01:43 1765994503

I felt like changing HN down page to show top 30 posts from this week before or after the generic message.

al_borland · 2025-12-17T17:03:32 1765991012

Is this still a valid account for HN status? It says it’s the official one, but with the changes at Twitter to no longer show chronological feeds (at least for users that aren’t logged in), it’s rather useless. The top 5 listed post (for me) are seemingly random from 2014 - 2022.

https://x.com/HNStatus

Is there a better place to check, beyond a basic down detector that may provide more insight or signal that the outage is acknowledged?

dang · 2025-12-17T22:04:14 1766009054

We post there when we know we're down and it may take more than a few minutes. But in this case we didn't know! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46303196

alexfoo · 2025-12-17T20:24:00 1766003040

https://xcancel.com/HNStatus only uses chronological ordering (after any pinned tweets) and that has the last message 12 Dec 2023.

(Basically whenever you see an x.com link just change it to xcancel.com and avoid the nonsense.)

FuriouslyAdrift · 2025-12-17T17:27:42 1765992462

Only way I have figured out how to to change the "Following" sort order back to chronological is from the mobile app: click the down arrow on the "Following" tab. Change the sort from "popular" to "most recent."

Seems to reset it on the web view, too.

al_borland · 2025-12-17T18:27:17 1765996037

It sounds like this would only work for logged in users.

zipy124 · 2025-12-17T17:05:41 1765991141

https://hn.hund.io/ Is a status page, no idea if official or not, but it didn't register here for some reason.

I didn't read the post text, it's identified there haha, my bad! I wish the text post text wasn't grey, I gloss over it too easily.

laCour · 2025-12-17T17:51:44 1765993904

This was monitoring the unauthenticated news page, which is why it didn't catch it. It now monitors authentication as well. It is not official, and was made by a co-founder years ago.

eddyg · 2025-12-17T18:20:22 1765995622

Thanks! I checked that page and wondered why it stayed green. I resorted to checking https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/hacker-news

lagniappe · 2025-12-17T17:12:47 1765991567

This site said HN was fine and green the entire time it was down.

liampulles · 2025-12-17T17:16:10 1765991770

Smart. Have to use that error budget before year end...

dylan604 · 2025-12-17T17:19:36 1765991976

I always hated the late use-it-or-loose-it at the end of the year where you end up buying the things that were denied requests from earlier in the year. You just cost me half a year of using the damn thing.

ortusdux · 2025-12-17T16:50:12 1765990212

Looks like 3 hrs

https://hackernews.onlineornot.com/incidents/yaz-eOJeARBL

https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/hacker-news

Strangely, nothing from the statuspal, which is the first google result

https://hacker-news.statuspal.io/

rozenmd · 2025-12-17T16:52:19 1765990339

Interestingly it stayed up if you weren't logged in.

Izkata · 2025-12-17T17:19:31 1765991971

Not completely, I'm not logged in on my work laptop and it was only working some of the time (and not like some pages were cached and some weren't, I was refreshing the same page and sometimes it worked and sometimes not).

cess11 · 2025-12-17T17:21:13 1765992073

That's how I concluded that it wasn't a ban on my account but rather more serious.

jedberg · 2025-12-17T16:59:13 1765990753

If you aren't logged in you get a cached version from the CDN/cache. Reddit works the same way.

bryanrasmussen · 2025-12-17T17:09:18 1765991358

also went down if you went to login, and people's individual pages were also down. So as far as I saw the front page was up as long as you were not logged in, however I'm not sure if that wasn't just luck of the draw, I had one experience where it looked like maybe the front page was sometimes down for not logged in users as well.

on edit: ok others pointed out it was cached pages I saw. explains it.

smallerize · 2025-12-17T17:04:06 1765991046

That only worked for a while, eventually I couldn't load comment pages even logged out.

davnicwil · 2025-12-17T16:59:13 1765990753

that'll be because it's served from cache when you're not logged in