This post is worse than what it derides, of course. It fits well within the category of things that pollute people's RSS feeds unnecessarily.
This is hacker news, and many of the hackers here use GitHub so when it goes down they might be spinning their wheels. If it is down for less than three minutes it probably won't make it off the new page. I think your arbitrary 30-40 minutes isn't better than what became the norm based on user behavior on HN. Why do you, Toshio, think you know with a high level of precision, how long GitHub needs to be down for it to be relevant to HN?
Lighten up, he just posted a suggestion and request that maybe Github being down isn't something that people need to rush here to post the minute a web request times out. If he succeeds in lowering the rate of people posting this useless information than it's a net win.
I don't think it would be a net win, though. Neither you nor OP has established that 30-40 minutes is a better threshold for when a story is made about GitHub being down than what it currently is (apparently 5-10 minutes when there aren't a lot of other good stories to compete with on HN). You and OP might prefer it, but you're just a couple of data points.
I was reminded of someone who emails a list of thousands of people and this is the first Reply to All saying, "Can you please take me off this list?". Then there are many more such requests and then they will be followed by emails desperately asking people to, "STOP REPLYING TO ALL!!!!"
There are many automated systems that'll detect outages, and take some sort of an action in response. There's no need for this site to be involved in any way.
Comments
This post is worse than what it derides, of course. It fits well within the category of things that pollute people's RSS feeds unnecessarily.
This is hacker news, and many of the hackers here use GitHub so when it goes down they might be spinning their wheels. If it is down for less than three minutes it probably won't make it off the new page. I think your arbitrary 30-40 minutes isn't better than what became the norm based on user behavior on HN. Why do you, Toshio, think you know with a high level of precision, how long GitHub needs to be down for it to be relevant to HN?
Lighten up, he just posted a suggestion and request that maybe Github being down isn't something that people need to rush here to post the minute a web request times out. If he succeeds in lowering the rate of people posting this useless information than it's a net win.
I don't think it would be a net win, though. Neither you nor OP has established that 30-40 minutes is a better threshold for when a story is made about GitHub being down than what it currently is (apparently 5-10 minutes when there aren't a lot of other good stories to compete with on HN). You and OP might prefer it, but you're just a couple of data points.
I was reminded of someone who emails a list of thousands of people and this is the first Reply to All saying, "Can you please take me off this list?". Then there are many more such requests and then they will be followed by emails desperately asking people to, "STOP REPLYING TO ALL!!!!"
Take it easy. It's a perfectly valid suggestion.
Nobody's work suffers due to a ten minute outage, since it's "git"-hub.
Some people host websites/projects on Github pages. They definitely suffer when Github is out cold and might want to move to fallback.
There are many automated systems that'll detect outages, and take some sort of an action in response. There's no need for this site to be involved in any way.