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How did IRC ping timeouts end up in a lawsuit?

https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/73777.html
1•dvaun•2m ago•0 comments

Tool search is dead, long live skills

https://nicolaygerold.com/posts/tool-search-is-dead-long-live-skills
1•the_mitsuhiko•2m ago•0 comments

GitHub is going to start charging you for using your own hardware

https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/17/github_charge_dev_own_hardware/
1•jjgreen•2m ago•0 comments

Top Open Source licenses in 2025

https://opensource.org/blog/top-open-source-licenses-in-2025
1•TangerineDream•3m ago•0 comments

Looking for a Remote Job in Python/Django/Flask

1•hanslett12•4m ago•0 comments

Tool search should not be search but discovery

https://nicolaygerold.com/posts/tool-search-should-not-be-just-search-but-discovery
1•the_mitsuhiko•4m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Get an Amazon Giftcard to Test Premium Features on Remotelygood.us

https://remotelygood.us
1•Theresa_i_a•5m ago•0 comments

Show HN: A Full-Control Cloud That Puts You in Charge of Your Deployments

https://hubfly.space/blog/demo-launch
1•octave12•7m ago•0 comments

Mass hacking of IP cameras leave Koreans feeling vulnerable in homes, businesses

https://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/news/2025-12-17/national/socialAffairs/Mass-hacking-of-IP-ca...
1•giuliomagnifico•7m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Hopeless – Removing API Bloat Before It Reaches Your LLM on Legacy API

https://www.hopelessapi.com
1•Ugyen_Tech•7m ago•0 comments

Show HN: MCPShark Viewer (VS Code/Cursor extension)- view MCP traffic in-editor

11•mywork-dev•8m ago•0 comments

Unemboldening

https://www.gpxz.io/blog/unemboldening
1•bckygldstn•9m ago•0 comments

Please, Stop Talking About "Tradeoffs"

https://pushtoprod.substack.com/p/stop-saying-tradeoffs
1•mooreds•11m ago•0 comments

Cheese Mites and Sludge Worms: The Origins of Grossout Cinema

https://worldhistory.substack.com/p/cheese-mites-and-sludge-worms-the
1•crescit_eundo•12m ago•0 comments

How SQLite Is Tested

https://sqlite.org/testing.html
2•whatisabcdefgh•12m ago•1 comments

Indiana Attorney General sues porn sites for failing to block VPNs

https://reason.com/2025/12/17/porn-sites-must-block-vpns-to-comply-with-indianas-age-verification...
1•delichon•12m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Planes.fyi – 3D aircraft and airport visualizations

https://planes.fyi
3•ryry•13m ago•0 comments

FCC chair suggests agency isn't independent, word cut from mission statement

https://www.axios.com/2025/12/17/brendan-carr-fcc-independent-senate-testimony-website
8•jmsflknr•13m ago•0 comments

What Is an Incident, Anyway?

https://jensrantil.github.io/posts/what-is-an-incident/
1•mooreds•16m ago•0 comments

Strategic CISO: Timing Your Security Assessment for Executive Impact

https://www.adversis.io/blogs/timing-your-security-assessment-for-executive-impact
1•mooreds•16m ago•0 comments

Decompiling the Synergy: Human–LLM Teaming in Reverse Engineering [pdf]

https://www.zionbasque.com/files/papers/dec-synergy-study.pdf
1•matt_d•17m ago•0 comments

I think Substrate is a $1B Fraud: Part 1

https://foxchapelresearch.substack.com/p/i-think-substrate-is-fraudulent-part
1•agrocrag•17m ago•0 comments

Billionaire real estate developer is waving a red flag over data centers

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/17/billionaire-real-estate-developer-red-flag-data-centers.html
2•thelastgallon•20m ago•0 comments

Go 1.26 Release Candidate 1 is released

https://go.dev/doc/go1.26
3•typical182•20m ago•0 comments

The $140K Question: Cost Changes over Time

https://thezvi.substack.com/p/the-140k-question-cost-changes-over
1•paulpauper•20m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Qqqlang – a syntax-free language for image synthesis

https://qqqlang.com
1•fagerhult•22m ago•0 comments

Why outcome-billing makes sense for AI Agents

https://www.valmi.io/blog/an-imperative-for-ai-agents-outcome-billing-with-valmi/
4•rajvarkala•25m ago•1 comments

A Comprehensive and Precise Spec

https://www.commitstrip.com/en/2016/08/25/a-very-comprehensive-and-precise-spec/
1•kklisura•25m ago•0 comments

The Pledge

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-pledge
3•feross•26m ago•1 comments

GDP Still Wins

https://www.economicforces.xyz/p/gdp-still-wins
3•paulpauper•26m ago•0 comments
Open in hackernews

Tell HN: HN was down

213•uyzstvqs•1h ago
- HN errored on all authenticated requests with 502 Bad Gateway. It did still respond to a limited amount of unauthenticated requests with presumably cached pages, which did not get updated. The last post on /newest claimed "0 minutes ago", but was actually much older (1:32:57 PM GMT) and not the newest post.

- This status page actually identified the outage: https://hackernews.onlineornot.com/ - Pages by Hund and Statuspal did not show the outage.

- The last post before the outage was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46301823 (1:39:59 PM GMT). The last comment was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46301848 (1:41:54 PM GMT).

- There was an average of ~4 seconds per comment just prior to the outage. Based on this, HN likely went down at 1:41:58 PM GMT.

Comments

markus_zhang•1h ago
Yes was down for me. Ontario, Canada.
spooneybarger•1h ago
Yes
ortusdux•1h ago
Looks like 3 hrs

https://hackernews.onlineornot.com/incidents/yaz-eOJeARBL

https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/hacker-news

Strangely, nothing from the statuspal, which is the first google result

https://hacker-news.statuspal.io/

rozenmd•1h ago
Interestingly it stayed up if you weren't logged in.
jedberg•1h ago
If you aren't logged in you get a cached version from the CDN/cache. Reddit works the same way.
davnicwil•1h ago
that'll be because it's served from cache when you're not logged in
smallerize•1h ago
That only worked for a while, eventually I couldn't load comment pages even logged out.
bryanrasmussen•1h ago
also went down if you went to login, and people's individual pages were also down. So as far as I saw the front page was up as long as you were not logged in, however I'm not sure if that wasn't just luck of the draw, I had one experience where it looked like maybe the front page was sometimes down for not logged in users as well.

on edit: ok others pointed out it was cached pages I saw. explains it.

Izkata•1h ago
Not completely, I'm not logged in on my work laptop and it was only working some of the time (and not like some pages were cached and some weren't, I was refreshing the same page and sometimes it worked and sometimes not).
cess11•1h ago
That's how I concluded that it wasn't a ban on my account but rather more serious.
zelphirkalt•1h ago
Yep "having trouble serving my request" or so.
sltr•1h ago
Yeah I couldn't log in for a bit this morning. It's concerning how often and how many times I tried. Glad it's resolved.
imiric•1h ago
Next time try not to beat a dead horse expecting it to resurrect. :)
mlhpdx•52m ago
So now we call the refresh button CPR?
manbitesdog•1h ago
TIL I have a "open Hacker News" hand reflex
kevin061•1h ago
I did not know how addicted I was to HN until today lol
thesurlydev•1h ago
Same! Right there with "every day must begin with coffee"
AndrewKemendo•1h ago
It just reinforces for me that addiction is a human problem not a problem with technology

I know dang basically works tirelessly to not change the format in order to not induce those addictive patterns

but yet here we all are

chistev•1h ago
It's a website with the smartest people in the world. The level of conversations here are unrivaled in internet communities.

It's understandable to be addicted. Lol.

I visit this place multiple times a day.

fwip•1h ago
It's really not 'the smartest people.' It's people interested in tech, and often in making-a-lot-of-money-in-tech. It does have a lot of people with significant industry experience, which is cool.
worksonmine•1h ago
> It's really not 'the smartest people.'

This was especially obvious during Covid, I even stopped visiting because the comment section was so crazy.

the_af•1h ago
> It's a website with the smartest people in the world.

Nice joke!

At least, I hope it was a joke...

phantasmish•47m ago
99% of social science or political topics and 50% of technical topics here do not… read as smart, and you’d be much better off spending the same time reading the first chapter of a relevant 101-level college textbook.
seizethecheese•36m ago
It's entirely possible that this is the smartest place on the internet, but also often dumb. In fact, it seems likely. More of an indictment of the rest of the places on the internet.
squeefers•25m ago
> It's entirely possible that this is the smartest place on the internet,

i cant find the link, but there was a post about how to "be nice" and it was a revelation to a worrying amount of "geniuses" on here. bare in mind the sum total of the advice was "be nice, dont be rude"

linhns•24m ago
Also the level of flak is unrivaled.
steve_adams_86•16m ago
> the smartest people in the world

But also, people like me. Be careful what you choose to believe on this website

dzink•1h ago
This one is at least healthy-ish for the mind. I’d much rather hacker news than any other news. Social Media is an emotional rage-bait cesspool these days. If it’s not for Hacker News those of us who abstain from the rest would be living in the dark.
PurpleRamen•1h ago
But, would the addiction become worse if HN changed, or would there be a point where they could cure it?
jstummbillig•1h ago
I say. Vibe coded 4 apps once I got past that, on my way to half a billion in ARR already.
ChrisMarshallNY•1h ago
So do I, but it was such a shock that I just passed out, and when I woke up, it was back up.
ectospheno•1h ago
I learn more reading the comments here than anywhere else. Thanks everyone for my addiction.
wincy•1h ago
I’ve turned on no procrast mode and set it to ten minutes per hour. Helped me a lot!
HanClinto•43m ago
What are you using to control this?
1shooner•1h ago
If you're looking to put the brakes on that, I've used LeechBlock to add a 5-second timer to opening a new HN window (along with other block schedules). The timer even fails if it loses focus, so it really helps slow you down.

https://www.proginosko.com/leechblock/

squeefers•30m ago
so youve got the willpower to do something about it but not enough to just stop doing it?
dwedge•25m ago
Have you never suffered from habitual reflexes? I blocked twitter for a while in my hosts file and a dozen times over those first few days I instinctively opened a new tab and typed twitter in
1shooner•11m ago
Yes.
selectnull•43m ago
I already knew that. :)
numpad0•37m ago
obligatory: https://xkcd.com/477/
lysace•21m ago
⌘-T, N, <RET>

Did it like 5 times during that 1h-ish outage. :(

sosodev•1h ago
Yes, and I'm a little ashamed to admit my morning routine wasn't the same without it.
fedreg•1h ago
This was more impactful to my day than the last AWS and CloudFlare outages...
messe•1h ago
At least during those outages I could procrastinate on HN.
the_arun•26m ago
I felt like changing HN down page to show top 30 posts from this week before or after the generic message.
busymom0•1h ago
I run the app called HACK and received user emails that the HN website was down.
maverwa•1h ago
Thank you for HACK. I love it!
silverpiranha•1h ago
Yes, was down for me too this morning
rzerowan•1h ago
Yes
voxleone•1h ago
Yes, it' been out for me too, southern hemisphere, GMT -03
FergusArgyll•1h ago
Yeah & chatgpt was trying to gaslight me - claiming it was my fault. Happy to put that bum in its place...
chistev•1h ago
You use ChatGPT to know it a site is down?
wavemode•1h ago
When it was down my thought was "damnit, I'll actually have a productive workday now."
dwa3592•1h ago
hahaha
tzs•1h ago
Next time you can avoid that fate by opening HN in a private browsing (or whatever your browser calls its equivalent) window. This outage, like the vast majority of HN outages, only affected logged in requests.

I suppose you could also just clear your HN cookies in regular browsing window, but then when they fix it you'd have to log in again.

neom•49m ago
Is it my imagination or did they used to automatically serve you a logged out page when it was down?
dpoloncsak•19m ago
Huh. Dunno why, but when it failed on Firefox I tried Chrome, and it worked. I wrote it off as a Mozilla issue, but this would better explain that I think
ashf023•1h ago
Yes, and on one request I saw a message like "Restarting server - this won't take long", and soon after it's back up.
wek•1h ago
Yes, it was down for a few hours
zzixp•1h ago
First AWS/Azure/Cloudflare and now HN?!?
imiric•1h ago
We can live without the former, but not HN!
gjsman-1000•1h ago
You won't be employed without the former.
philipwhiuk•1h ago
Time to update the meme: https://preview.redd.it/cloudflare-had-a-rough-day-today-and...
fatty_patty89•1h ago
I got irrationally angry when it refused to load the website
DonHopkins•1h ago
You handle your irrational anger much better than whatevermrfukz who keeps pooping his pants.
fatty_patty89•1h ago
Interesting that you mention that, how do you keep track of his comments? Some sort of plugin/scraper?
Jtsummers•1h ago
> how do you keep track of his comments?

You can just look at them, turn on showdead in your profile and you'll see a bunch of flag-killed comments in this discussion by whatevermrfukz. No need for a plugin or scraper.

fatty_patty89•1h ago
thank you
imvetri•1h ago
you could refuse to be angry to mock it
pedro380085•1h ago
Yes, I got an error message, but I cleared my cookies and was able to access.
gjsman-1000•1h ago
Just a month ago, I got downvoted to -2 for saying HN for being self-hosted hasn't shown up as more reliable than something behind Cloudflare. My point is made.

Edit: Now it happens again. Knee jerk defenses all the way down.

null_deref•1h ago
Could this be a self-inflicted bug? In that case, the broader point still stands: cloud providers can cause outages that are outside your direct realm of responsibility.
gjsman-1000•1h ago
Your VPS server and your data center and the ISP your data center uses and the AS system your ISP uses all can cause outages outside your direct realm of responsibility.
DonHopkins•1h ago
It's absolutely irresistible downvoting people who preemptively complain about being downvoted like you do. It really made my day. Post another complaint so I can do it again please! It's not knee jerk when you explicitly ask for it, by leading with a complaint about downvoting, instead of just making your point and letting it fall or rise on its own merits. You're the one who put the idea of downvoting you into my head in the first place.
abujazar•1h ago
Unless the downtime was caused by something Cloudflare would've prevented, this downtime would've happened regardless of being behind Cloudflare. Cloudflare adds another single point of failure.
Jtsummers•1h ago
Complaining about downvotes usually gets you more downvotes, so the response here isn't really that surprising.
Aachen•34m ago
Keep in mind that votes aren't supposed to be about whether you agree or disagree, but whether a comment adds substance to the thread. A good question that makes a wrong assumption can be worth upvoting; a correct but fairly irrelevant statement about politics not (to give a relatively obvious example)

Being "voted to -2" doesn't necessarily mean you were wrong (it often correlates though). People might just think it wasn't relevant in whatever context you posted it in

I often find it hard to tell what makes people think something I write is not helpful (or sometimes also a comment someone else made) and thus appreciate comments that clarify constructively. It can also help to ask for clarification if you're particularly surprised about the votes on a given post

Jeremy1026•15m ago
You're probably being downvoted today for your "I was smarter than you" tone.
ProofHouse•1h ago
I wake up, and look at HackerNews lol. This morning sucked hahaha
bennydog224•1h ago
Yes, I had to touch grass this morning.
stevenjgarner•1h ago
https://www.stevenjgarner.com/HN-Down-2025-12-17-07-48-UTC-0...
numpad0•1h ago
Could have been accidental flagging of sorts. Didn't work on PC for few minutes while showing fine on phone.
chistev•1h ago
It was the first time since I started using this website (August last year) that it was down.

I'm still impressed nonetheless.

I'd like to know what caused the outage and how it could have been prevented, for learning purposes.

esafak•1h ago
A lot of the outage indicators failed. Someone needs to create an outage indicator reliability dashboard.
Nextgrid•1h ago
A lot of them got fooled by the caching; pages for signed-out users are cached heavily and those kept returning successful responses even if the actual backend server was down.
dizhn•1h ago
This site also got it right: https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/hacker-news

I believe it's because they accept user reports.

esafak•1h ago
Yes! Now we see what a difference it makes.
chistev•1h ago
And an outage reliability indicator for that outage reliability indicator.
willis936•40m ago
We apologize again for the fault in the fault indicator. Those responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked have been sacked.
arionmiles•1h ago
So a downdetectorsdowndetector.com but for Hacker News?
al_borland•1h ago
Is this still a valid account for HN status? It says it’s the official one, but with the changes at Twitter to no longer show chronological feeds (at least for users that aren’t logged in), it’s rather useless. The top 5 listed post (for me) are seemingly random from 2014 - 2022.

https://x.com/HNStatus

Is there a better place to check, beyond a basic down detector that may provide more insight or signal that the outage is acknowledged?

zipy124•1h ago
https://hn.hund.io/ Is a status page, no idea if official or not, but it didn't register here for some reason.

I didn't read the post text, it's identified there haha, my bad! I wish the text post text wasn't grey, I gloss over it too easily.

lagniappe•1h ago
This site said HN was fine and green the entire time it was down.
laCour•36m ago
This was monitoring the unauthenticated news page, which is why it didn't catch it. It now monitors authentication as well. It is not official, and was made by a co-founder years ago.
eddyg•7m ago
Thanks! I checked that page and wondered why it stayed green. I resorted to checking https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/hacker-news
FuriouslyAdrift•1h ago
Only way I have figured out how to to change the "Following" sort order back to chronological is from the mobile app: click the down arrow on the "Following" tab. Change the sort from "popular" to "most recent."

Seems to reset it on the web view, too.

rob•1h ago
Maybe PG is more involved now and hired the "10,000 lines of AI code a day" person who made a deployment mistake?

https://x.com/paulg/status/1953289830982664236?s=46

dhruv3006•1h ago
I was quiet surprised really. HN almost never goes down.
Aachen•50m ago
You don't visit enough my friend :)

It's down about 8.4 minutes per week. On 26% of days it doesn't work at least once, and on 12% of days it has more than one consecutive failed check. The longest uptime streak was 24 days

I've been keeping track since exactly 2 years (to the day!) because I was surprised that it seemed briefly down for me on a daily basis. Was I getting unlucky and hitting it every time, or was it just down very often? Nobody posted anything so I started answering the question for myself :p

I've been meaning to post the tracker to HN but there's a pesky bug I want to fix: the "is it currently down" stat. I don't know how this is beyond me but something in the code bugs out. So this is my first time posting about it

thatgerhard•1h ago
Thought for a second I got banned for something lol
elxr•58m ago
I thought I was being rate-limited for opening posts too fast, which has happened before.

After more than an hour I thought, "wow this is pretty harsh" and "so much of my exposure to learning things is directly tied to HN posts". I was lost lol.

Aachen•40m ago
Your comment history doesn't sound IP-ban-worthy. Is there an alt that has you worried? :P
verzali•29m ago
Me too and I was wondering what I did!
khaledh•1h ago
It was down if you tried to access it while authenticated (i.e. you have a cookie). It was loading fine for unauthenticated sessions (e.g. incognito).
Elfener•1h ago
I got stuck in an infinite loop.

Try opening HN -> it's down, better check HN to see everyone talking about a major website being down -> Try opening HN -> loop

neom•50m ago
Yeah me too. Wake up -> HN down -> That's weird, oh well it's usually only down for a few minutes -> I should check if HN is still down -> That's weird, oh well it's usually only down for a few minutes -> I should check if HN is still down -> loop.

That was a few hours ago. I'm glad this loop is broken.

squeefers•30m ago
sounds very much like an evil social media dopamine feedback loop. ironic given everyone on HN is so anti social media.... its clearly only bad for kids though i should add, silly of me to exclude such a detail
neom•23m ago
I've been on this internet hit shit since the 90s lil bro, s' all good.
strbean•21m ago
I can stop any time I want, I just don't want!
HPsquared•17m ago
Sometimes I'll catch myself absentmindedly reopening the browser and checking two or three front pages, seconds after having just checked them and closed the browser.
neurolesudiste•1h ago
Yup, France here , Paris 1809.

HN was down about an hour ago.

Glad to see it back !

Cheers.

sangeeth96•1h ago
Thought it had something to do with some model updates, like Gemini Flash 3 for a moment.
neurolesudiste•1h ago
Hi, Got an error an hour ago on phone, not loged.

Anyway, glad to see you back.

Paris 1812.

Cheers from France.

gaigalas•1h ago
I got confused by the "minutes ago" thing.

Working with full dates in the HTML and doing a tiny JavaScript that calculates the "minutes ago" would actually be a neat improvement.

liampulles•1h ago
Smart. Have to use that error budget before year end...
dylan604•1h ago
I always hated the late use-it-or-loose-it at the end of the year where you end up buying the things that were denied requests from earlier in the year. You just cost me half a year of using the damn thing.
arbirk•1h ago
We need a serious post mortem for this
rustaceanU32•1h ago
I'll admit this ruined my morning
ajdude•1h ago
I was able to view the site without being signed in (i.e. private window) but any browser I was logged into wouldn't load.

I'm sure it's a coincidence but it started working again shortly after emailing hn@ycombinator.com

agumonkey•1h ago
hn applied ycombinator too strictly
russellbeattie•1h ago
HN being down makes you start wondering about the differences between routine, addiction, compulsion, and habit.
PurpleRamen•1h ago
In other words, productivity in tech skyrocketed for hours..though it seems some work was flavoured with irrational anger.
gepiti•56m ago
Athens, Greece yes it was down.
SilverElfin•55m ago
I tried to refresh an embarrassing amount of times
Kim_Bruning•53m ago
In with the rest, yes, and my first thought is always "I have an internet outage" when HN is down. :-P
danielfalbo•49m ago
As soon as I noticed it was down I came to hacker news to post about it, but...
dvaun•41m ago
Will we get a post mortem?
laCour•38m ago
I'm with Hund. Our hn.hund.io page did not catch this because it was requesting the cached, unauthenticated page. It now monitors authentication as well.
jonahx•36m ago
Is this a mistake by hund, or the configuration of hund by HN?
laCour•34m ago
Mistake on our part (Hund) for not monitoring authentication. This page is unofficial and was made by a co-founder several years ago.
joncrane•36m ago
Thank you. I was thinking myself or my corporate IP was shadowbanned
arm32•33m ago
The "site status" apps are all smoke and mirrors, how unreliable.
oidar•31m ago
What was the longest that HN has been down? I feel like this is up there.
xxs•22m ago
PSA - if you delete your cookies, HN gets it easier. Or just test it in a private window.

It did work without being logged on. The auth service appeared to be down as the log in attempt (just showing the page) failed.

scottydelta•13m ago
Now it makes sense. I was puzzled about why it was working on the phone browser and not on my system. I'm logged into HN on my system.
dang•18m ago
Yes, sorry! We're investigating, but my current theory is we got overloaded because I relaxed some of our anti-crawler protections a few days ago.

(The reason I did that is that the anti-crawler protections also unfortunately hit some legit users, and we don't want to block legit users. However, it seems that I turned the knobs down too far.)

In this case, though, we had a secondary failure: PagerDuty woke me up at 5:24am, I checked HN and it seemed fine, so I told PagerDuty the problem was resolved. But the problem wasn't resolved - I was just sleeping through it.

I'll add more as we find out more, but it probably won't be till later this afternoon PST.

shmeeed•16m ago
Looking forward to the post mortem. :)
michelsedgh•11m ago
dang
steve_adams_86•12m ago
I was fortunate enough to get to watch a bunch of kids racing and bouncing in bouncy castles in our school gym during HN's downtime.

It's not that much different from HN, come to think of it.

(ha, ha)