Edit: it looks like you've been breaking the site guidelines quite a bit, unfortunately. Could you please not do that? We end up banning accounts that keep doing it and I don't want to ban you.
I have a pretty firm grip on life and touch plenty of grass both literally and figuratively.
However, when something I care about crashes and burns once in a blue moon, I make sure to put the fire out, at least to make it survive till regular hours. Things I care about can be both business and personal, and nobody bugs me for them.
Maybe we shouldn't make any assumptions about people we don't personally know, while we are at it.
Which is fine! I don't mind if it's down for a few hours. It reminds me that it's just a place to stop by for a bit before moving on. Like a digital coffee shop that sometimes has a leaky pipe and isn't open right at 7am.
You're still a miracle worker. Single-handedly managing a well-known fully user-contributed site not just technically but moderation in contentious times like these and still keeping it working well and encouraging a positive user community can't be an easy task.
We all have our moments, and I personally consider HN to be “best effort”, almost like a volunteer project. I’m not certain I’m correct: but thats the optics I have so my expectations are adjusted to that.
So don’t beat yourself up please.
When I worked for “SaaS unicorn” we typically had multiple levels of escalation, and acknowledging would have done nothing because the alarm would continue firing until fixed. Not sure what’s changed in 15 years of ops, I had assumed it would be better now- I can’t imagine silencing an alert totally by acknowledging it- if its still occurring.
I’m totally fine with how you handled it, if anything I am thankful. But that seems to be a system I would improve if I had the time.
“mute” is different than “resolve” to me, and both should exist. (Where mute is an acknowledgement of an issue as ongoing.)
Your comment makes me realize that I consume HN differently than many others, because I've never seen a post with comments disabled and I've been around here for at least ten years. It's not that I don't think they don't exist — they obviously do because you're mentioning them. I've just never encountered one, primarily because I don't casually browse HN, ever. I subscribe to a pushbullet channel that notifies me when a post hits 500 up votes. That's it. The list of submissions on the home page (even on reddit) is just overwhelming to me so I use the pushbullet channel as a sort of community curated "best of" or "trending" signal.
Not to say that I don't procrastinate or waste time doing other nonsense. I can definitely spend a lot of time reading HN comments, as I'm doing right now.
Anyway,anyone who finds themselves with a problem with HN should try that out :)
This. If it were a business-critical money fountain, I'd expect follow-the-sun SRE coverage. I don't think it is, so I can probably accept drinking my morning coffee without scrolling HN once in a while. There's only so much one can beat oneself up about a slow/incorrect response when the on-call is handled by what, just one person? maybe two people in the same time zone?
(Might be wise though to have PagerDuty configured to re-alert if the outage persists.)