Seems like everyone going on HN now. The site is so slow

Interesting cascade effect of sites going down! I wonder where people will go next to check if HN is down?

Also wondering if this is perhaps the fastest upvoted HN post ever? 8 mins -> ~350 votes, 15 mins -> ~750 votes. I wonder if @dang could chime in with some stats?

Update: looks like it hit 1000 upvotes in ~25 mins!

Update: 1500 in ~40 mins

Update: 2000 in ~1 hour 20 mins (used the HN API for the timestamp)

The recent youtube-dl takedown had a similar number of votes but still slightly slower, I think. I think it was >500 in 30min and >1000 in 60min if I remember correctly.

Some politics topics have shot up pretty quickly in the past but user and/or mod flags send them back to page 2 about as quickly.

Funny this post is already #7. Are we seeing many reports again?

Stats right now: 1985 points | 1 hour ago | 597 comments

Maybe, could have just seen a dropoff in upvotes once the issue was resolved also

reddit, nanog, 4chan, twitter — pick your poison

"poison" is a particularly apt description for all of the above

> I wonder where people will go next to check if HN is down?

Probably: https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/

HN was having problem showing anything for the past 10 min or so. I was going to ask if HN was down, then I saw this.

HN uses Firebase, maybe that is the reason.

Does this site also use Firebase, or do they only feed Firebase's Database so that other developers can build upon it?

Any source for that? Last information I have is that it's written in Arc Lisp and uses files rather than a database for storage.

There is a public API on Firebase, but AFAIR it's just a mirror rather than the main storage.

TIL. What for?

The very least public APIs are exposed via firebase.

https://github.com/HackerNews/API

Accessing the site anonymously fixes it (logged sessions are not chaced)

I, and probably many others here are like a status page for friends and family too... I had my wife thinking that the internet was broken, and tried tethering to phone and things and still didn't work, then showed me and I saw the status code errors and was like "it's actually parts of Google that are down".

I love (and am deeply scared by) the dependence of Google and the confusion of it with the entire internet.

It gets even worse: https://twitter.com/joemfbrown/status/1338452107419148290

>I’m sitting here in the dark in my toddler’s room because the light is controlled by @Google Home. Rethinking... a lot right now.

Some people are compiling more relevant events: https://twitter.com/internetofshit

I still like my physical switch on the wall to turn the light on and off very much.. for me it's hard to beat. I can even turn it on/off semi-remotely with e.g. a tennis ball.

If my Alexa fails, then I can also just turn the light off with the switch and when flipped back "on" again, then it will be on.

Fallback to 'classical mode' works for me.

If your home automation system requires a network connection to work then something is very wrong.

Right? Home automation is perfectly fine and mught even expose a secure authenticated API to the internet so you can say check and adjust the temperature remotely, but it shoukd never ever go down for lical use if the Internet connectivity or the remote service backend goes down.

Home Assistant rulez with non-cloud sensors. I never by sensors, cameras, switches which require connection to an external host. But I'm sure that most people will do it even with such outages too.

For many others it seems: https://i.ibb.co/ns8DgGq/Screenshot-2020-12-14-at-12-10-17.p...

Google should write an AI application that checks on HN if their systems are working and display the result live on their status page. That would be more reliable than the current system they have in place (which is obviously not working at all).

It would probably just end up banning Googles own account and leave them with no human escalation option.

won't help when the ai service itself is down.

There are other sites that can check for you