Rtm has lined up a new, faster server for us. He currently plans to switch over to it at 6 am EST on Saturday. He says the site will be down for around 10 minutes, but you know how these things go...
And yet..... all I can think of is to stay up all night creating a "replacement HN" just for Saturday morning. I just started using Django and it would be perfect for this. Must. Resist. Must. Live. Real. Life.
whois -h whois.arin.net 174.132.225.106
NetRange: 174.132.0.0 - 174.133.255.255 CIDR: 174.132.0.0/15
Name: 6a.e1.84ae.static.theplanet.com
Address: 174.132.225.106
OriginAS: AS36420, AS30315, AS13749, AS21844
NetName: NETBLK-THEPLANET-BLK-15
NetHandle: NET-174-132-0-0-1
Parent: NET-174-0-0-0-0
NetType: Direct Allocation
RegDate: 2008-06-17
Updated: 2012-02-24
Also, it'll be 3am on the West Coast, so some people will still be enjoying their Friday night.
Edit: Wow. 3.5 years on HN and my first down-voted post. I guess I should have added a sarcasm tag or stick with keeping comments "safe".
- Zero administration
- Only configuration setting is the directory
- Trivial to test
- Trivial to examine with existing tools, backup, modify etc
- Works with any operating system, language, platform, libraries etc
- Good performance characteristics and well tuned by the operating system
- Easy for any developer to understand
- No dependencies
- Security model is trivial to understand and is a base part of operating system
- Data is not externally accessible
Many existing databases have attributes that aren't desirable. For example they tend to care about data integrity and durability, at the expense of other things (eg increased administration, performance). For a use case like HN, losing 1 out of every 1,000 comments wouldn't be that big a deal - it isn't a bank.
Consider the development, deployment and administrative differences between doing "hello world" with a filesystem versus an existing database. Of course this doesn't always mean filesystems should be used. Developers should be practical and prudent.
TLDR: YAGNI, KISS, DTSTTCPW
"Also, a traffic update: HN now gets over 120k unique ips on a weekday, and serves over 1.3 million page views."
http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html
Additionally:
That's generally how long I need to break an addiction
I'd love to see my median karma on my profile. Much more robust to outliers than average.
I doubt it would be improved by using something more "proper".
- Has average latency over 500ms when not under load - Performs quite poorly under load (I hate to bring it up, but the most recent example was Aaron Swartz's passing. Anyone who used HN then to get news knows how poorly HN performs under load) - Is restarted every week or two because it leaks memory - Keeps XSRF tokens in memory and loses them across restarts - Doesn't have a full markup language
HN is quite poorly-featured compared to typical commenting sites. People use HN because pg is here. He could remove half the features on the site (bold & italics... what features are there even to remove beside nested commenting?) and retain 90% of the audience.
Nothing personal against pg - but I'm here more because of everyone else - the caliber of the discussion, for a news/tech site is quite high, IMHO - and that's due to everyone, not just pg.
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2010/11/10/softl...
In any case they never got the block changed at arin. We switched providers at one point within the last 6 mos. and the old colo already changed the arin block.
I'm sorry, but 10 minutes on a saturday morning does nothing for me.
Using a files system as a database is a little different as file systems are databases in their own right.
The question to ask is "is the data I want to store in my 'database' enough like the data stored in a filesystem that I can just use the filesystem as my database?"
With regards to the commenting site itself, I can think of no more viscerally enjoyable a forum I've ever participated in, with the possible exception of *Forum on MTS. There is nothing whatsoever that I would change about it, with the one possible exception of tweaking the markup so you could add fixed-width text/lists that wrapped over multiple lines. It's the only additional feature I've ever wanted out of HN. There is beauty in it's simplicity. [Edit: Okay, I would also move the upvote/downvote arrows a bit for mobile usage. It's almost impossible to hit the right one without a lot of zooming]
And, with rare exception of a MSM hit, the performance is more than adequate for an environ that should be encouraging reading, digesting, and composing.
If I were specing a machine for HN, naively, it would be a competition between a Xeon "enterprise" CPU with huge cache and memory bandwidth (interleaved up) and a gaming/desktop CPU with maxed-out single-core performance. Xeons can do single-core turboboost now, so E5-2690 which goes up to 3.8GHz is probably the best bet, but a desktop i7-3970X 4.0GHz might be an option if you don't need ECC (which also gets you slight speed improvement on memory).
http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/vs-bendix-g15.jpg
[one of the first computer models I ever wrote for - a three address machine: first a source operand, second destination, third address of next instruction. The memory was a rotating drum]
(Funny surprise: the one for this comment box expired before I submitted this comment.)
P.S. I see that abstractbill beat me to it, both in stating here and in originally acquiring this information:
Sorry, just hit a nerve. Like doing some OS updates (Windows) and then needing to reboot to "complete the installation". I'm sorry. That totally sucks.
Happy to have been of assistance; please send the $250 to GiveWell. ;-)
And I agree with you on the windows issue -- except that ten plus years ago I did in fact reboot and/or shut down my computer.
How many ads do you see on HN? What's the ad revenue? What are the operating costs?
Honest? Then, if I were you, I'd try to be a bit less consensual from time to time. I got plenty of downvotes. I would hope even pg get his share, that would show sane critical thinking.
I use a VPS for my site, and on a VPS, the only thing you're allocated that you can depend on always being available is RAM. The processor cores might be shared with a busy user, and you can't always depend on high disk I/O speeds.
1. We don't matter to pg because we don't generate profit and are instead a slow drain on resources
2. Therefore this site must be a relic of the 90s written in an ad-hoc collection of mzscheme macros
It lets you limit the number of minutes you can read sites (and importantly links from thoses sites). I give myself 10 minutes per day until 9pm at night.
I would have thought getting to the root cause of your “HN addiction” would probably be a better alternative.
New server: one Xeon E5-2690 chip, 2.9 GHz, 8 cores total, 32 GB RAM.
