Ok, so this is Hacker News, it's in the name, and most of us are aware that HN is also a research/hobby project. It's not made to be an rock-stable enterprise system doing bank transactions or what not, so I think what pg did was prefectly excusable. People make mistakes. Nobody will die without HN for a day or two, and it won't affect the site's popularity one bit.
No that's right, but I worry about apache2 being down for potentially one or two users or bots that visit/crawl my website during a one-minute reboot. Meanwhile the big boys are down for 16 hours because they do things that any other person would have gotten a decent scolding for. Just look at the points per hour this thread is getting, if I had posted this about my website on my website people would have said I was stupid.
You are right though, making mistakes is human as they say, and nobody dies because of this. In fact, less popularity might be good for the site's content quality. I'm just surprised by how much they care about thousands of hourly users, that what I would dream of having.
I'd say this is a pretty important lesson: you don't need flawless technology and zero downtime to be popular and/or profitable. You need content worth viewing. People are more than willing to put up with technical errors if it's something they want/need.
Focus on providing people what they want/need, and don't worry so much about having flawless technology until you can employ a horde of PHDs.
Patrick McKenzie had a great horror story on his blog a couple of years back. He runs a service that provides appointment reminders to businesses' clients (e.g. "Don't forget, you have an appointment to get your hair colored at Best Little Hair House tomorrow at 3"). Long story short, an attempt to manually correct a hangup in the live system resulted in his product spamming his customers' clients (that's right — not just his customers, but their customers) with up to 40 phone calls back-to-back.
So, how many customers do you think he lost because of this? The answer is two, and one of them signed back up because they were impressed by the great job he did in handling the fiasco.
Moral of the story: As long as you really are making your best effort, you might be surprised how willing people are to deal with human error. Yes, they might be be mad, but a mistake is (usually) not the end of the world.
Ok, so this is Hacker News, it's in the name, and most of us are aware that HN is also a research/hobby project. It's not made to be an rock-stable enterprise system doing bank transactions or what not, so I think what pg did was prefectly excusable. People make mistakes. Nobody will die without HN for a day or two, and it won't affect the site's popularity one bit.