As a long time reader of HackerNews, (first time poster), I am truly worried for it’s future.
Lately I have been seeing a lot of posts, seemingly giving good advice on a whole range of topics, start-ups being foremost. However, at the end of each of these articles, while interesting and well written, I am left with the feeling “who the hell are they to tell people how to do <insert advice here>”. Posters are habitually giving advice, generally with no credentials or basis for what makes their advice relative. And it becomes hearsay and opinion rather than solid advice based on facts.
I am really partial to the ‘real’ stories about people’s successes and failures that give good background and relate facts and experiences. These are the articles that I learn from. Not the “Doing x and y for business success, by nobody in particular”. The difference is we have credentials and background on the poster. The other types of posts remind me a little of pop culture radio DJs who have a whole lot to say about nothing and they end up talking over the songs (or good posts in our case).
So pull your pants up HN. Write and vote for the real stuff. If you’re going to give advice or an opinion, back it up with facts and evidence.
Given the URL, error and speed of the crash, I'm guessing you're running WordPress on Apache+MySQL. There's no reason that stack can't handle HN-level traffic for a blog (especially at 3AM Pacific).
Activate a caching plugin WordPress to remove the database bottleneck.
Lower the MaxSpareServers/ServerLimit/MaxClients variables so that Apache can never start more processes than your system has RAM. Turn off KeepAlive or set the timeout very low so that those few processes you can handle running aren't tied up on people that have already loaded the post.
That should prevent the kind of crash that just happened.
Even if the article itself is arbitrary advice, i still think it makes for a good discussion point. If the author is spewing trash, constructively call them out on it. If the author has a good point or brings up an issue, talk about it.
here is the artcle:
Help save HackerNews! Posted on April 1, 2012
As a long time reader of HackerNews, (first time poster), I am truly worried for it’s future.
Lately I have been seeing a lot of posts, seemingly giving good advice on a whole range of topics, start-ups being foremost. However, at the end of each of these articles, while interesting and well written, I am left with the feeling “who the hell are they to tell people how to do <insert advice here>”. Posters are habitually giving advice, generally with no credentials or basis for what makes their advice relative. And it becomes hearsay and opinion rather than solid advice based on facts.
I am really partial to the ‘real’ stories about people’s successes and failures that give good background and relate facts and experiences. These are the articles that I learn from. Not the “Doing x and y for business success, by nobody in particular”. The difference is we have credentials and background on the poster. The other types of posts remind me a little of pop culture radio DJs who have a whole lot to say about nothing and they end up talking over the songs (or good posts in our case).
So pull your pants up HN. Write and vote for the real stuff. If you’re going to give advice or an opinion, back it up with facts and evidence.