Fastly Engineer 2: I have some very bad news...

With Reddit however, these days almost all comments are locked behind “view entire discussion” or “continue this thread”. In fact, just now I searched for something for which the most relevant discussion was on Reddit; Reddit was down so I opened the cached version, and was literally greeted by five “continue this thread”s and nothing else. What a joke.

Sync is so much better than the official app it's not even funny.

Arrange the html so that the list of comments is at the end (via css). Keep the http connection open, have the show more button send some of request, and when you receive that request send the rest of the page over the original http connection.

As usual, solve people problems via people, not tech.

Maybe css to load an image on :active or is there some better way?

① A submit button or link targeting an iframe which is visually hidden. (Or even don’t hide it. If only seamless iframes had happened, or any other way of auto-resizing an iframe: relevant spec issues are https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/555 and https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/1771.)

② A submit button or link to a URL that returns status 204 No Content.

(CSS image loading in any form is not as robust because some clients will have images disabled. background-image is probably (unverified claim!) less robust than pseudoelement content as accessibility modes (like high contrast) are more likely to strip background images, though I’m not sure if they are skipped outright or load and aren’t shown. :active is neither robust nor correct: it doesn’t respond to keyboard activation, and it’s triggered on mouse down rather than mouse up. Little tip here for a thing that people often get wrong: mouse things activate on mouseup, keyboard things on keydown.)

.button:active { background-image: url('/some-reference-thats-actually-a-tracker'); }

> As usual, solve people problems via people, not tech.

So true..

“View entire discussion” couldn’t be implemented perfectly with <details> in its present form, but you can get quite close to it with a couple of different approaches.

I think the infinite scrolling of subreddits is about the only thing that would really be lost by shedding JavaScript. Even inline replies can be implemented quite successfully with <details> if you really want.

https://old.reddit.com/robots.txt

is very different from this:

https://reddit.com/robots.txt

I guess there is a market for search engine (maybe accessed through tor) which does not care about robots.txt, DMCAs, right to be forgotten etc. Bootstrapping it should not be that hard since it can also provide better results for some queries since nobody is fighting about the position until it's widely known.

I'm not sure how far are we from being able to do full text internet search. Or rather even quote search, preferably some fuzziness options. That would be cool, Google's quotation marks were really neat back when they were working.

    User-Agent: bender
    Disallow: /my_shiny_metal_ass
    
    User-Agent: Gort
    Disallow: /earth

That’s not going to happen before Cloudflare is dethroned. See this recent thread for some perspective: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27153603

And even if there’s no Cloudflare, large sites that people want to search will always find ways to block bad bots.

The only thing I can think of that might work is using crowd-sourced data, with all the problems that come with crowdsourcing.

There is a solution for all this mess and I'm blocking HN and a few different domains until I implement at least the first step after which I can share it here.

/etc/hosts

reddit.com old.reddit.com

www.reddit.com old.reddit.com

np.reddit.com old.reddit.com

- https://github.com/NightMachinary/r_HPfanfiction

- https://github.com/NightMachinary/r_rational

  $ curl https://old.reddit.com/robots.txt
  User-Agent: *
  Disallow: /

int main() { int arr[100][200][100]; // allocate on the stack

    return 0;
}

It is an open-source software that allows you to keep and read offline static versions of websites in a specialized archive format (zim-files)

It was originally designed to allow you to read wikipedia offline, but there are also dumps of stackoverflow available on the relevant page : https://wiki.kiwix.org/wiki/Content_in_all_languages

Depends whose security. I value my security dearly and that's why i use the Tor Browser. Cloudflare has decided i cannot browse any of their websites if i care about my security (they filter out tor users and archiving bots agressively) so i'm not using any cloudflare-powered website. Is it good for security that we prevent people from using security-oriented tooling, and let a single multinational corporation decide who gets to enter a website or not? In my book creating a SPOF is already bad practice, but having them filter out entrances is even worse.

Also, are all of these CDNs and other cloud providers are solving the right problems?

If you want your service to be resilient against DDOS attacks, you don't need such huge infrastructure. I've seen WP site operators move to Cloudflare because they had no caching in place, let alone a static site.

If you want better connectivity in remote places where our optic fiber overlords haven't invested yet, P2P technology has much better guarantees than a CDN (content-addressing, no SPOF). IPFS/dat/Freenet/Bittorrent... even multicast can be used for spreading content far and wide.

Why do sysadmins want/use CDNs? Can't we find better solutions? Solutions that are more respectful to spiders and privacy-minding folks with NoScript and/or Tor Browser?

Its pretty easy: browse marked up documents, not applications. If some developer conflates the first for the second, move on.

Using Tor doesn't imply that your machine is also a Tor exit node.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13718752

Only discovered we should not forget,due to the good graces of google project zero.

A certain those of skepticism towards any technical offer out there would be advised.

To that end I've only used cloudflare and netlify. The others have too much friction to try out. I expect I would get experience on the job if necessary.

Fastly's free offering gives you "$50 worth of traffic" whereas Cloudflare has a perpetually free option. And for Akamai you have to apply for a free trial.

So if it would go down, it would cripple vast amount of internet.

Fastly error: unknown domain: www.fastly.com.

Details: cache-syd10161-SYD

According to the status page.

  Error 503 Service Unavailable
  Service Unavailable
  
  Guru *Mediation*:
  Details: cache-lon4236-LON 1623146049 854282175
  
  Varnish cache server

Maybe a good way to work out which versions are being used.

Sorry I couldn't help myself...it's too funny to misspell "right" in a thread about spelling mistakes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27433139

I think it's an intentional alteration of the original, given the context.

It could be a typo or an attempt to be clever.

Fastly error: unknown domain: numpy.org.

Details: cache-pdk17841-PDK

I think Varnish uses mediation intentionally though, it was this way 7 years ago when I last used Varnish.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guru_Meditation

Or did one of you already edit the Wikipedia page to reflect this discussion on hn?

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Guru_Meditation&d...

And it seems to be incorrect, since this "spelling variation" is only used by Fastly and not part of Varnish?...

edit: 12:05 up again for me, no images or custom fonts loading though ... and down again 1 minute later

edit: 13:01 reliably up again for me

So it is a "performance" issue when all pages give a 503.

https://www.streamingmediablog.com/2020/05/fastly-amazon-hom...

    nslookup m.media-amazon.com
    
    Name:  media.amazon.map.fastly.net

Amazon is also known to use Akamai. Sure, Amazon relies heavily on AWS, but why should it surprise anyone that a retail website obsessed with instant loading of pages decides to use non-AWS CDNs if the performance is better.

Even if CloudFront became the default, I'm certain amazon.com would keep contracts with fastly and akamai just so they can weight traffic away from CloudFront in an outage.

  $ host m.media-amazon.com
  m.media-amazon.com is an alias for c.media-amazon.com.
  c.media-amazon.com has address 99.86.119.84

https://status.aws.amazon.com

Fastly error: unknown domain: dashboard.heroku.com.

> Statuspage Automation updated third-party component Spreedly Core from Operational to Major Outage.

> Statuspage Automation updated third-party component Filestack API from Operational to Degraded Performance.

Oh, right. :-D

Don't get me wrong, I love the proliferation of APIs and easily-integrated services over the past 20 years. We're all one interdependent family, for better and for worse.

EDIT: Most sites seem fixed now here in Canada. Tested stackoverflow, reddit, GitHub, PayPal, gov.UK and all worked fine.

edit: PayPal looks be back up at least in US East but when I turn off my VPN and access from Asia I get "Fastly error: unknown domain: www.paypal.com."

Now I'm seeing a 503

Looks to be working again my end.

1: https://blog.emojipedia.org/content/images/2018/04/microsoft...

Twitter is a media between people. Removing emoji representation differences on user devices is a way to hopefully reduce misunderstandings between users.

Edit: You are right. It got rid of the emoji after Test.

"A number of leading media websites are currently not working, including the Guardian, Financial Times, Independent and the New York Times."

Probably going to short the hell out of $FSLY.

They proudly stated this from their own website to their customers:

> "Fastly’s network has built-in redundancies and automatic failover routing to ensure optimal performance and uptime."

If that isn't one huge lie, I don't know what is.

It's normal to have downtimes but they are usually scheduled and quick (think <10 minutes per month for rebooting and/or hardware parts replacement). I'm pretty sure most non-profit hosts like disroot.org or globenet.org have similar or better 9's than all these fancy cloud services.

Can always improve the process for the next outage.

Quite a few Fastly customers have more than vanilla requirements though, and may have a lot of business logic performed within the CDN itself. That Fastly is "just Varnish" and you can perform powerful traffic manipulation is one of it's main selling points.

With a standard TCP/UDP session, it mostly just works or doesn't and you can get a proper traceroute to know what's up. With these fancy CDNs, there's a whole new can of worms to deal with and from a client's perspective you have no clue what's happening because it's all taking place in their private network space where we have no "looking glass".

Fuck the cloud, i want real Internet.

edit: My whole Twitter timeline is full of posts saying "Twitter outage? what outage?". Same on Reddit and Twitch chat, feels like for a short time I was invited into some exclusive circle lmao. StackOverflow and other StackExchange sites also work so I can look stuff up for you.

>At the core of Fastly is Varnish, an open source web accelerator that’s designed for high-performance content delivery. Varnish is the key to being able to accelerate dynamic content, APIs, and logic at the edge.

Just checked, thank god the NHS vaccine site is still available - vaccines just got rolled out for under 30s today.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BIcAZxFfrc

I must admit, it has been strange seeing my US peers getting the vaccine months before I can in the UK, but I guess I take comfort knowing that both countries are still doing pretty well!

https://ig.ft.com/coronavirus-vaccine-tracker for reference.

What's important is important to share vaccines with all nations, and non-nations.