Why HN is slow lately
We've had a huge spike in traffic lately, from roughly 24k daily uniques to 33k. This is a result of being mentioned on more mainstream sites. I hope this spike will subside, like past ones have. In the meantime I may temporarily hack a few things to make the site faster, like putting fewer results on threads pages.
You can help the spike subside by making HN look extra boring. For the next couple days it would be better to have posts about the innards of Erlang than women who create sites to get hired by Twitter.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 127 ms ] threadhttp://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:GOOG
33k/day doesn't sound like a lot of traffic, honestly. But also I can't imagine lisp being that slow either. Maybe add some caching?
Technically speaking, I find hacker news persistent strategy one of the most interesting things about the implementation.
I use a similar strategy for my blog and just playing with larger datasets I've certainly run into hard limits on what seems to be acceptable.
I am quite interested in the architecture, because I found this approach nice for some sites I was building. They were not very large though.
File system stores aren't that uncommon (aside from the VSAM days, even in RDBMS times+) - it's a common approach for Wiki implementations too.
Why?
I can understand not using a database if this was improving the performance.
women who create sites to get hired by Twitter Well, I thought of flagging this story, but I saw everyone is interested in discussing it!
Anyway, HN is really slow since the last week, and it's being down for 4 to 5 times daily - for me. But when I ping 67.15.104.17 , it works fine.
Maybe killing the spam automatically should help? I am not sure.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=512178
I've seen some really whacky comments the last week or so.
(NB. This is only a hypothesis, I don't know how many people sign up post a few lame comments and never return).
I tend to mostly lurk, but I did find myself in that situation a couple weeks ago.
A similar idea would a hard limit on comments for new people for the first day? 3 or 5 perhaps?
It works well, IMO.
"At what point does y = 2e^(2x) cross the line x = 2, accurate to 2 decimal points? y = __.__ x = __.__" Extremely simple for a hacker, daunting for the general public. (answer: tinyurl.com/b95cdw rounded up with x = 2.00, of course)
(I'm only partly joking)
And making it harder might also be bad. If they are too hard, you'll get people who are just signing up for the entrance test. Just think about how much press google's puzzles on their billboards got. And somebody will of course put the answers on the internet.
If we shut the door to new registrations, we definitely shouldn't make an invite only available from a member. I'm sure I would have had trouble getting an invite that way.
What might work is deciding on a growth rate that can be handled by the site and the community, and then limiting the number of sign-ups each month, or even day. We could just use a list of email addresses for new users and send out X number of invitations a day.
And we could also do more discourage those wacky comments. We could have new users do a short test, something trivial that requires them to have actually read the user guidelines. Maybe a multiple choice quiz where they have to distinguish between a trollish comment and an acceptable comment. Also we could start them out with a probationary account with stricter rules. Maybe if their account is newer than 5 days, and they have less than -8 karma, they get banned, or forced to read the site guidelines again before they posted more comments.
Though if the site does implement anything like an invite system it's going to be hard. Some people are going to accuse the site of being elitist. So it would have to be communicated that any rules are solely for all comments civil and professional, not because we are trying to exclude anyone. Hey, I like some of the pun threads on reddit, and trolls on yahoo answers, but I think this site would get ruined if even a few trollish comments were allowed.
But I wonder, isn't it a bit silly.. I mean, new people will read this post and find out your evil plans to kic.. err, gracefully lead them out :)
I wouldn't mind if, in the service of this cause, the editors killed more fluffy stories.
The 30 points limit makes sure that stories don't get killed for the wrong reasons. In fact they don't get killed at all, they just get moved down the page a little faster than they otherwise would.
First one on HN?
As much as I like being pompous and saying HN should try not to go into decline, this one I'm happy about. It was all a joke on PG, it had a terrific effect on the stories here in a way that was instantly noticeable here, and it was actually pretty funny.
Now we just make sure this fades quickly enough that a month from now nobody thinks they're "trendy" for mentioning Erlang Week.
[edit]
I come here for this sort of stuff, or for thoughts on business, not to hear what computer nerds think about macroeconomics, politics, and flirting. If I wanted that stuff, I know Reddit's address.
I found the twittershouldhireme blog a good lesson: KNOW your audience. That girl was surely noticed by Twitter execs and she did something simple that no one else in her position thought to do.
Erlang posts also belong here and politics usually does not, but don't pick on the twittershouldhireme girl. She's fantastic.
Was this reply was meant for another comment?
What I will never understand about this community:
I get negative Karma for defending an article that was clearly appreciated by some and this guy gets 10+ points for saying "what are you complaining about?" (something of zero value.)
When it comes to up-voting and down-voting... you will see all of these crazy things!
For what it's worth, I never said nor meant to imply that I thought the website of the lady who wanted a job with Twitter isn't suitable for HN, though I don't find it to be exemplary. It's a whole lot more on target than (as previously stated) articles on macroeconomics, politics, or flirting.
None of this is to say that I actually disagree with your point on the silly nature of what garners karma and what collects down-mods, but that is a topic for another time.
Many Lolz.
In the next few years we'll begin saying, "You remember when pg told us to submit Erlang stories?" "Oh yeah, good times."
Btw, I think you just got yourself an idea for April fools: accept only links about Java or Visual Basic.
I just can't think of a situation where it would be funny to say "quick everybody lets talk about Erlang."
HN should have esoteric/alternative articles like that at all times.
Thank you pg.
One thing I like doing is following the Hacker News twitter acct: http://twitter.com/newsycombinator/
It tweets popular stories and keeps me from visiting the site all that often (unless its a comment link).
Its not a fix, but if anyone out there didn't know about it you should follow. It'll keep you from visiting the site every 5 minutes to see if anything new has been posted.
I wonder how hard it would be to inspect the referrer and if an abnormally large influx of users start coming from a specific referrer, start redirecting to programming.reddit.com or stackoverflow or something.
Oh, and I actually found out about the site from Coding Horror (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001236.html), though I did read the Stack Overflow article as well (via Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8368a/the_value...).
What, submitting a post where I laboriously implemented Surreal Numbers step by step wasn't boring enough?