its a good practice. This week, our town had a algae based toxin problem with their water. They sent out emergency alerts via text, email, the school district callouts, etc. I got texts forwarded from 8 friends/family.

Everyone referred you to the city's home page. The site buckled under the load, and was completely unresponsive for hours. If it was a more urgent emergency, the lack of information could have led to people being harmed.

I was hoping they would switch to a less dynamic site for alert pages, perhaps use a CDN or edge proxy like cloudflare, etc. But no, it appears demand just died off, and they are still doing the same thing. They just put out info on where you can go to national guard filling stations to fill up water bottles, and their home made .net based website is back to taking 10 seconds to render the home page.

On 9/11 I heard some very strange news on my bedroom clock radio. "Americans falling from the sky...". Tried various websites... all down. Only way I could get news was slashdot.org and they had switched to a very light weight text only format.

Oh hey, good to see someone else from my neck of the woods! The whole thing was overblown IMO, but it would have been nice to know a week ago when the test results came through and we hadn't been drinking the tap water all week. Normally it's fantastic.

The best part was the emergency phone alert they pushed out several hours late that didn't even have any information about what the emergency was, which resulted in 911 being flooded. Some jokes were made about the new hire from Hawaii...

We had a water problem and I didnt know about it until days later.

No local TV and not reading the paper + no facebook= living somewhere else?

I knew all about HN, but no clue that we couldnt use water.

This is where Twitter excels. It's the best way I have found to get local breaking news. Don't bother following any media outlets either, it's counterintuitive but their feeds are mostly marketing garbage with extra click tracking/redirects and excessive dupes. Pick a few local journos whose articles or reporting you like and follow them instead. Those, plus random friends and other local people will give you all the news you need almost instantly. I don't even turn the TV on when something big happens any more, I just check Twitter.

That assumes you live somewhere that has local journos to speak of. I only live about 40 miles outside of a major US city. But there's no real local news source. I'd only find out about an emergency because of a auto-call from the local emergency services or because it was such big news that it was covered in the Boston Globe.

This is where another HN front page item (neighbourly.google.com)[1] might help soon, nextdoor.com might help right now, and facebook with some local contacts probably would have sufficed.

I can't stand Facebook, but it was better than nothing during the Northern California wildfires this last year, so I logged in and used it. The groups created by residents to track info were wonderful at first, but quickly descended into somewhat low utility after a day or tow as people regurgitated old information and misinformation every few hours, each time one level removed from the source and thus a bit harder for people to confirm or deny.

My wide uses nextdoor.com, and I've long thought I should take a look, but never gotten around to it. It would be interesting to see if Google can leverage their brand name to get enough people to sign up such that you could easily switch between multiple levels of locality, and also allow local news to leverage that in a way that preserves local reporting. If I could easily toggle between neighborhood, school district, city, state and region to find relevant information, and discussions, I would be pleasantly surprised.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17209127

Serverless FTW!

There are actually servers running your "serverless" crap, you know. And they are AWS servers, because that's the whole point: To get people locked back into AWS as a provider.

Interesting how you read lambda in my comment

Hah! Hey, well, you're right... It seems I'm also not immune to AWS propaganda. Regardless, my original point stands: Serverless doesn't mean infinitely-scalable. There are machines somewhere running those containers, and if your traffic spike was sufficient to be notable on a global scale, there are going to be limits like with any other technology. Outsourcing the containers and everything underneath doesn't automatically give your application more capacity to scale. Just to use the example of Lambda, at some point, you will hit a capacity whereafter AWS will be spinning up EC2 instances to accommodate their containers that run your functions, and those take some minutes to spin up. Now, all that being said, I don't pretend to have any special insight into the way AWS builds their reserve infrastructure, though I'd be very interested to have that insight. Just through a layer of abstraction and barring any special preparation of reserve capacity, serverless won't automatically give you more capacity to scale than running your own containers or EC2 instances or bare metal somewhere.

I used to live a mile from a nuclear power plant. Every time they sent their emergency process flyers around town many people freaked out. They should have been happy that there was a plan to deal with emergencies (which could deal with other things as well)

-I would expect the authorities to prepare for such an eventuality; however, I can also understand the need to keep this low-key - way too many would take the fact that the government prepared for such an event would mean either that they feared one was imminent or more sinister still - planned one.

Much better to just keep quiet about it.

Which interestingly means that although we all agree we should pretty much panic and react accordingly in the event of such an emergency, it's best for people not to anticipate such panic until absolutely necessary. And this implies we ought to trust others to come up with contingency plan for us, since we ourselves shouldn't think about it for now.