Ask HN: Is the HN front page having technical issues?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8015140

by siavosh • 12 years ago

35 11 12 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

It seems like everything on the homepage is at least 11 hours old.

danso• 12 years ago

Thanks for asking this...I was wondering the same thing. not everything is that old (the Oculus Rift story with 4 upvotes in the last hour is near the top), but HN overall seems very stale, as if I was reading the /best list, except with many non-best things included.

The /new list seems unusually inactive..even at 4AM, even links less than 15 minutes old can accrue a few upvotes. I just checked the /new list and nothing has more than the initial upvote (except for the Source Sans link, which I just upvoted to test)...

http://imgur.com/w4PamQC

siavosh• 12 years ago

Yeah something definitely feels off. The only 'recent' item on the frontpage is an internal HN job posting which works outside of the upvote/downvote algorithm. My guess is that a cron job that updates/counts the up/down votes and refreshes the homepage hasn't run in 10 hours. Just a guess :)

brudgers• 12 years ago

Over the years, I've noticed from time to time what appear to be substantial moderations that clean out 'lesser' stories. It often corresponds with about the time offices are opening up on the West coast.

It could be algorithmic. It could be a group of users whose first action on the site is to flag weak submissions. It could be an individual with moderation powers. It could be each of them at different times.

Over the years it's been particularly noticeable on Ask, but not uncommon on the front page. But more recently it has been more noticeable on the front page. Personally, I'm all for it. Algorithms can only go so far before they are subject to gaming.

If it is algorithmic, perhaps it is triggered based on trends with new submissions - e.g. such as when few are gaining meaningful adjusting the gravity curve to favor older more popular submissions. This would maintain the quality of the front page and perhaps encourage more effort toward finding quality submissions or bring the focus to discussions.

001sky• 12 years ago

Looks that way...? And not just p.1, for the first ~60 stories there is not much newer than the 18 hours give or take.

bryanlarsen• 12 years ago

http://hckrnews.com/ makes the problems much more obvious: a lot of stories have been killed (turn on showdead for hckrnews.com), and very few new stories have shown up today. OTOH, this one hasn't made hckrnews.com yet, either.

DanielStraight• 12 years ago

Yeah, it looks like 7 consecutive stories hit front page and then were killed. Seems very strange.

..... and this was just killed. I'm going to email dang about it.

chevreuil• 12 years ago

This one for example : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8013773

The title was "The Tech Industry vs. San Francisco " : http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/07/07/140707fa_fact_...

dang• 12 years ago

I'm going to email dang about it.

Thank you very much for doing so. We often read the emails much sooner than we have time to reply to them, especially if there's an urgent action to be taken, so please don't assume that your message has had no effect if you don't hear back right away.

kogir• 12 years ago

We're debugging an issue with ranking. Last night we rolled out new code that appeared to work, but apparently didn't update the rank of items.

Since it's now fixed, when anyone votes on an old article it will be re-ranked to its correct position. Since they've not been re-ranked for hours, most of the moves will be pretty drastic.

Update: We're now discovering that a side effect of this was the automatic killing of a number of submissions that should not have been killed. We're going through logs and addressing those.

Update: Improperly killed submissions have been restored.

Final Update: Turns out it was actually an issue with voting. We were correctly recording all votes (so you saw the arrows disappear), but not correctly counting them. If you're wondering how that's possible, you can thank denormalization.

We've now identified the bug and deployed the updated and fixed code.

lazyant• 12 years ago

I T237nk the@#$s som3 prob@#$ wi%! 4*e encodi13ng

contingencies• 12 years ago

I've also seen lots of CloudFlare errors for a few weeks here in Asia.

Ask HN: Is the HN front page having technical issues?

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