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.
-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.
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 :\
So I agree with the "if it's less than 5 minutes, don't report it" sentiment, but I do like it when larger outages are reported.
In other words, if you're waiting for [service] to come up in order to get something done, there's not much better to do.
> if you're waiting for [service] to come up in order
> to get something done, there's not much better to do.
It would be useful to me if someone could explain how their workflow requires github to be available, because it would seem that they are using facilities or features of which I am unaware.
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.
You shouldn't need git to deploy, build a system package and deploy that.
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?
But...if you're a big company, who's doing serious work, then take advantage of the fact that git is a DVCS and have something as a failover measure. GitHub is great and has lots of great features, but there's nothing stopping people from having a mirror synced without all the sugar but to keep productivity going.
"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)it would be nice if HN was at least divided into tech & political-tech
I agree with you, OP, but it seems there were a lot of people jumping on that bandwagon.
Of course, HN is a great place for people to discuss how to avoid a productivity disruption when such services go down.
Or just look at
Thanks. Github, Gmail, Google Docs, anything: more often than not, the moment I click the link they're working perfectly.
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.
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.