I added a random URL string to have HN recognize this as a new entry. Perhaps it's a good idea to allow re-posting the same link for certain URLs so that "XYZ is down/having issues" type posts aren't deemed as duplicates?
Definitely sounds like a good idea. Man, there are so many improvements I wish HN would make, but everytime I see a good idea, it gets completely ignored, downvoted into oblivion, or removed by the mods.
> Perhaps it's a good idea to allow re-posting the same link for certain URLs so that "XYZ is down/having issues" type posts aren't deemed as duplicates?
It would be a much much better idea if people stopped posting "X IS DOWN!!!!" submissions.
I agree that it is not the most intellectually interesting. But HN, for better and worse, has evolved to be one of the front pages of the Internet (at least for certain demographics), and some people do come here for transient, immediate information. In that sense, I don't think it is entirely useless.
Also, sometimes "X is down" type of submissions can start conversations interesting in their own right in the comment section.
I mostly agree, but I find it vaguely interesting that a service as large and distributed can still have a "down for significant numbers of people"-type event.
How necessary are those posts though? A link to a site that is down is practically useless. A link to a blog post about the current status or a post mortem is very useful.
According to the HN guidelines[0], it seems that it would be more appropriate to write a blog entry regarding the outage and link to that, rather than to link to the site experiencing the outage at the time. Providing a link to a non-functional site is itself of no value, after all.
Also, while not stated in the guidelines, I imagine a text submission would also be appropriate for this sort of situation.
They changed their motto to "move fast with stable infrastructure" - so someone is probably getting fired. (I'm only kidding, but if someone were to get fired, making the homepage globally unavailable for 24 minutes seems like a good way to make that happen.)
That isn't the culture around there. I am pretty sure anyone worth their stripes on product engineering has probably cost the company significant downtime in the past.
As others have mentioned in this post, Facebook is used as a log in for many other websites and services. Whatever your personal feeling is about Facebook, it's an integral aspect of user interaction with websites far outside of its native social network platform. For this reason, the condescending guffaws are out of place.
thanks for the reply. I indeed had not considered the login-aspect of it. I'm not working in the website/online service business (and neither do I use facebook) so this helps me understand better.
Well for me it's my #1 way of communicating with people. More then email, more than phone. Even job related stuff I've head group message threads open where my and the people I'm working with are uploading .zips of the latest work etc.. Note this is FB's messaging feature, not their "News Feed/Status update" feature.
Sure there are alternatives but it's what I've been using.
After Facebook took down the Internet last time, they updated all of the script snippets that they have and added an "async" attribute to them. The functionality is still missing when FB goes down, but the site you're looking at still loads quickly.
I switched all of my social sharing widgets to static image buttons that bring up simple sharing windows just yesterday. My site loads so much faster and is completely unaffected by Facebook being down as a result.
Exactly. It decreases your overall footprint online, but you can still have access to it if you want it. I did a short note to our users here: http://portableapps.com/node/42106
I made a post elsewhere in this thread about it but it was downvoted. I'm thinking about packaging it up as a Drupal extension (what I run) as well as a raw package on github in the hopes that someone will be interested in doing a WordPress extension as well. There are a few posts about doing this online, but none tried to fully mimic the convenience and look of the standard buttons, so I thought folks might be interested.
That applies to their social like/share buttons, but it doesn't apply to sites that use Login with Facebook functionality whose users were unable to login for 40 minutes.
Typical this happens when I'm pushing fixes to our facebook integration app a friday evening. First I thought it was me hitting request throttling limits...
As someone who doesn't use Facebook I'm always fascinated by these threads because they show how much some people depend on Facebook (or at least addicted to it).
Some websites, unfortunately for them, decided to forgo traditional logins and rely entirely on Facebook for user logins. As a result, they've been down the last 20 minutes.
It's a business concern for a lot of us, and not only those of us using OAuth as an option for login. We use facebook pretty heavily for marketing and advertising.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 99.2 ms ] threadI added a random URL string to have HN recognize this as a new entry. Perhaps it's a good idea to allow re-posting the same link for certain URLs so that "XYZ is down/having issues" type posts aren't deemed as duplicates?
It would be a much much better idea if people stopped posting "X IS DOWN!!!!" submissions.
Also, sometimes "X is down" type of submissions can start conversations interesting in their own right in the comment section.
And isn't the interesting discussion during the post-mortem?
Also, while not stated in the guidelines, I imagine a text submission would also be appropriate for this sort of situation.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
(this is not an attempt to troll, it's a serious question)
For the rest, I added a clear note.
829 million daily active users on average in June 2014
Earth population, 7.046 billion (2012)
They have a LOT of users. Any platform supporting that traffic is interesting to see how it fails.
Sure there are alternatives but it's what I've been using.
https://developers.facebook.com/status/
I made a post elsewhere in this thread about it but it was downvoted. I'm thinking about packaging it up as a Drupal extension (what I run) as well as a raw package on github in the hopes that someone will be interested in doing a WordPress extension as well. There are a few posts about doing this online, but none tried to fully mimic the convenience and look of the standard buttons, so I thought folks might be interested.
Note: I'm in New Zealand, and I still can't access it.
Sorry about the screenshot I still haven't figured out how to share images directly via ownCloud.
I bet you also don't even own a TV.
That's true. I got rid of TV five years ago.
You're surprised that people are dependant on it?
Fascinated, not surprised.