zlacker

failing to manage HN in my sleep is more like it

>>dang+(OP)
Do you have nightmares of failing to manage HN when you sleep too?

>>dang+(OP)
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.)

>>dang+(OP)
And that is a good thing. Sleep tight!

>>dijit+91
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.)

>>dang+(OP)
Your sleep is more important than our work distraction.

>>dijit+91
Yeah we don't exactly pay to be on HN, not much to complain about. I appreciate everyone who works on HN.

>>dang+(OP)
Yeah, I mean how dare you?! I pay good money for high uptime SLAs! :)

>>dang+(OP)
No worries, please take care of your sleep and thanks for all your hard work

>>dang+(OP)
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).

>>dang+(OP)
I appreciate what you do. Hope you got some rest when it was all over.

>>dang+(OP)
You deserve a lot of rest!

>>jonny_+0d
I was curiously productive this morning..

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

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

>>seemaz+dX
I took a shower for the first time in one week

>>jacque+q21
It’s ad-supported. Any post with comments disabled is definitely an ad. Probably a lot of the others are, too.

>>dang+(OP)
Time to train an AI agent on your moderation activity and get some well deserved sleep!

>>phanta+v61
I assumed the main purpose was to show off the ycombinator batches when they launch.

>>koakum+n41
looks like a redditor snuck into HN

>>seemaz+dX
came back just in time for me to spend the first hour of my work

>>phanta+v61
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 :)

>>sizzle+Dg1
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.

>>wkat42+1Y
Thanks, I'll take it! except for the single-handedly part - gotta share the love with https://news.ycombinator.com/posts?id=tomhow.

>>koakum+n41
Bet that felt great.

>>abusta+3q1
> 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.

>>jacque+q21
Actually, I'm doing my best alienating these kind of people :p

>>phanta+x72
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

>>abusta+UH2
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.

>>spacec+kc2
Good for you!