8 ms·
Tell HN: Launch HN Test
This is dang testing something. Please carry on.
Edit: bah! you guys upvoted it and ruined my test. I think I can cancel that out.
Edit 2: I've changed the title from "Launch HN: Test" so that this thread doesn't appear on https://news.ycombinator.com/show https://news.ycombinator.com/show, where it didn't belong.
- dt3ft 6y agoNever let a good crisis go to waste: I'm launching https://20-things.com/ https://20-things.com/ :) Could use a good load test ;)
- dang 6y agoHN always likes new communities. But don't do this: New account registrations are currently either closed or very limited If you do that, the psychology goes like this: "I wonder what this is?" (click) "Ooh, a new social community! I like those!" (reads further) "What do you mean, new accounts are closed or very limited? What if I want to join? Why are you gatekeeping me? Damn you!"... except with words stronger than 'damn'. Once you're ready to let anyone sign up, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll help you out.
- dt3ft 6y agoThank you, the registrations are now open but each signup incurs a cost (for the SMS) and the budget is currently limited hence the notice. I'll get in touch asap.
- _-___________-_ 6y agoSending even tens of thousands of SMS is very cheap, just how limited is that budget? :)
- dt3ft 6y agoA few hundred people with US numbers should be able to sign up, but sending SMS overseas is much more expensive. For example, sending to Switzerland: $0.069 per SMS.
- jmiserez 6y agoThat's insane, but in line with what other (local) sms gateways charge here. But do you really need my phone number?
- dt3ft 6y agoI have experience with building a very large community where registration was based on e-mail alone. Racism & general hate don't even begin to describe the things that came along with anonymity and disposable e-mail...
- _-___________-_ 6y agoThere are plenty of services for anonymous, disposable phone numbers.
- dt3ft 6y agoTrue, but far fewer than disposable e-mail.
- kick 6y agoWhy not put a soft limit on the amount of signups-through-mail a day? After xyz signups through it, make the rest of the day's accounts require manual approval for the first few posts. You can also mitigate the disposable mail problem pretty easily by requiring whitelisting for any domain that's got more than a few accounts tied to it. That comes out way cheaper for you, and might improve the quality of conversation (because there are valid reasons for anonymity and pseudonymity). EDIT: Also, bug report: the category row at the top doesn't overflow very well; on smaller window-sizes, there are many categories out of view. Maybe make the hamburger menu come up on more than just mobile screen factors?
- omk 6y agoHow's it going back there?
- phoe-krk 6y agoError 1020 Ray ID: 57e1700a4e91b87b • 2020-04-03 08:32:11 UTC Access denied What happened? This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks. Looks like you got what you wanted...
- dt3ft 6y agoSorry about that, this was just CF Geo firewall kicking in. I disabled it as it makes no sense to use it in this day and age.
- phoe-krk 6y agoError 522 Ray ID: 57e1b052bb7bf2c8 • 2020-04-03 09:16:36 UTC Connection timed out :)
- dt3ft 6y agoWorks on my machine :D Did you try restarting your computer? Joking aside, all requests are served in milliseconds, there are no queues.
- phoe-krk 6y agoI am not kidding. The website is unreachable for me from Poland. https://i.imgur.com/aQddPrf.png https://i.imgur.com/aQddPrf.png
- dt3ft 6y agoOdd. The GEO FW rule was disabled, but I don't know how long it may take for CF to react. Are you able to connect through a proxy/vpn from another country? I'm fairly sure you've lost interest at this point, but if you got time to kill, I'd love to "debug" this and see what's up.
- phoe-krk 6y ago
- kamyarg 6y agoJust got Cloudflare Error 522, Our work is done here HN, next one please.
- dt3ft 6y agoThat can't be right though. The box is fairly strong :) I believe that CF may have a new IP range which accesses origins, and I white-listed their known ranges a few months ago. Perhaps this calls for an update to that whitelist.
- random42 6y ago> That can't be right though. Unsolicited advice, but please don't have this mindset towards system failure. More things go wrong than you anticipate.
- dt3ft 6y agoThank you for your advice, I appreciate it. I did examine everything that came to mind and the only thing at this point that may be happening is cloudflare -> origin connectivity for some users. I am using a keyword based monitoring since day one and so far no issues with reachability have been detected. This could be related to CF Geo firewall (disabled, but perhaps caching on CF side need to expire?). The only way I can verify CF<->Origin connectivity is by paying for CF a Pro account with Origin health check feature. If you have any ideas/suggestions how to troubleshoot this, I would be happy to hear them. Thanks!
- samizdis 6y ago20-Things feedback (unsolicited ;-) - no probs registering from the UK - the site refers to a "20-Things Mascot", but I see none - when logged in, my user name isn't displayed to remind me of who I am; sad to say this is useful for me nowadays - in the "about" section, it says, "...specifically designed with our users limited free time in mind." I'd have preferred "... users' limited free time ...". - er, that's it, with thanks and encouragement :-)
- dt3ft 6y agoThank you, much appreciated! There is a mascot, but I did not use it anywhere on the site just yet, I will modify the wording for now. The rest makes sense as well, I will get right on it and thank you for the encouragement! :)
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- neokya 6y agoIt works ;)
- pmiller2 6y agohttps://i.imgur.com/ofCsS2O.png https://i.imgur.com/ofCsS2O.png
- dang 6y agoOk, since this is getting attention, I'll explain. Launch HN posts for YC startups are one of three formal things that HN does for YC (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20launch&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). The others are job ads for YC startups, and orange usernames for YC alumni—but only when displayed to other YC alumni, which always generates "why is my username not orange" emails. But I digress. Launch HNs are like job ads in that they get an initial front-page placement, usually somewhere between #8 and #10. (I think job ads start a little higher). Then they fall down the page. Unlike job ads, though, launch posts can be upvoted and commented on. Once they've gotten their initial placement they function like regular stories. Occasionally the community finds one particularly interesting and it gets upvoted higher. This recent one spent quite a while at #1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22616857 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22616857 (http://hnrankings.info/22616857/ http://hnrankings.info/22616857/). We started doing the Launch HNs three years ago. I was worried that the community would hate them because we were taking additional front page space for YC. (Our intention was to make it so that a launch post and a job ad wouldn't appear at the same time, but I never ended up writing that code, so sometimes they do.) But that hasn't ever come up. I think it's because launch threads are intrinsically more interesting than job ads (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22767319 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22767319 downthread for more on that). All this time, the initial front-page placement of launch posts, unlike job ads, has been done manually. That is, founders have had to email us and we've manually jigged the post onto the front page. The problem with that is that you have to be awake to do it. I don't want to be awake to do it, especially because startup founders tend to be businessy, bustling types who are all bright-and-early, while my schedule drifts ever deeper into the darkness as the few moorings I had remaining to the rest of society dissolve in this time of social distancing and self-isolation, which were basically my bread and butter to begin with (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUlBWNDW72E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUlBWNDW72E). Until now, I've told founders to post at Pacific 10am and email us, because that's roughly when I get going in the morning. Tomorrow, though, there are two. One is a fintech startup in Latin America who want to post at 9am. And the other is Peter Roberts, who's going to do another immigration AMA (https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=proberts https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=proberts). Peter is on the east coast, and wants to get going at 8am Pacific, which is late for him and (ungodly) early for me. So tonight I got frustrated enough to write some code to deal with it. Frustration reaching a tipping point and boiling over is my gateway into the code these days. My goal is for startups to be able to post their launches, and occasionally for pre-scheduled submissions like Peter's (which are rare), to end up on the front page independently of whenever I went to sleep the night before. This code turned out to be a lot more complicated than I anticipated. The patch ended up adding a hundred lines of Arc. A hundred lines of Arc! Do you have any idea how many lines of Arc that is? I just looked through the history and the last commit that added that many lines of code was over two years ago when we got Arc to compile to JS. Obviously this change needs to be thoroughly tested, so after testing it on my laptop I deployed it to production and decided to do a couple of sanity checks live. One was to post a test Launch HN using my old account gruseom, which is the founder account for Skysheet, the spreadsheet startup that Scott and I had 10 years ago (and which I still think about every day, but I should avoid digressing again). The code I wrote has some logic in it for cofounder accounts. One thing it's supposed to do is email all the cofounders when a Launch HN post has made it to HN's front page, so they will be ready to engage with commenters. Anyhow, this test post was the OP. The good news: it got placed on the front page in the way that I intended. The bad news: none of the emails were received. God fucking shit fucking goddamnit I knew those emails wouldn't work...I mean, dang. (Edit: actually that's not what happened. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22772667 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22772667) My intention was for this thread to remain obscure, then get placed briefly on the front page by the new code, at which point I'd get the emails and immediately delete it. I didn't think it was very likely to get noticed in the middle of the night here, especially when posted by what ought by now to be an obscure account, but oh well. I think that covers everything. Hopefully you all will see those two auto-placed posts on the front page tomorrow morning because I do not intend to be awake 5 hours from now. (Edit: it worked!)
- mothsonasloth 6y agoHi dang This was a good test but it failed some key characteristics to make it an excellent test message. You didn't put foo or bar anywhere in the test message. There was no Cthulhu phrases. Plus there was no pi or the numerical answer to the universe and everything. I trust you will take this onboard for the next test.
- battery_cowboy 6y agoAlso, how does he know that number-containing strings will work if the title isn't "Test123"??
- _-___________-_ 6y ago"0123Test" is a better number-containing string for testing, to catch out things that try to interpret the string as a number first and then as a string if that fails. For example, JS's insane parseInt function will give you 123 for "0123Test".
- battery_cowboy 6y agoWow, I learned something in here and I was just "trolling" in the test thread! Thanks!
- yread 6y ago> parseInt("0123Test") 123 > 0123 83 parseInt is actually the adult in the room
- moneytide1 6y agoIs dang an acronym or does it represent the word we say when disappointed with a certain outcome?
- dang 6y agoI picked it because (1) it's my first name plus surname initial; (2) it was my email address at my first job; and (3) it's what you say when you make a mistake—so yup, you guessed it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7494093 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7494093 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18513120 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18513120
- DonHopkins 6y agoI always imagined you looked like the weirdo in the window seat with different sized eyeballs, who he was addressing as "Dang". https://i.pinimg.com/564x/f8/74/40/f8744035e15d69eb8fd4c70dea17c2e0.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/564x/f8/74/40/f8744035e15d69eb8fd4c70de...
- gargs 6y agoWhoa! I love the second link! Is there an orchestrated horizontally-scaled secure decentralized web service I could use to bookmark all the dang cartoons?!
- DonHopkins 6y agoThe best one I remembered from being taped to my mom's fridge, but I just couldn't dig up, was of a big dejected bird standing in front of the open refrigerator, saying: "Dang! Somebody ate the middle out of the daddy longlegs."
- Hitton 6y agoI'll use this as an opportunity to ask something. Are there any stats how many active users does HN have, on how many servers it runs, on which database etc.? Because I have recently wanted to look at my older saved/upvoted posts/comments on reddit and found out that you can look only at last 1000 posts and it does various other things to save resources. HN doesn't seem to do things like that and still feels much snappier than reddit (yes reddit has much more users, but still impressive imho).
- dang 6y agoReddit is 100x bigger. It's not just that we aren't in their league...our league is not in their league. So the comparison is a little embarrassing. It's hard to count active users because you have to define them in order to count them, and we make a point of not tracking people that much. We can count accounts and unique IPs, and that's about it. But it's basically about 5M readers a month, give or take, as far as we can tell. It grows linearly, with large swings. If you step back 10 feet from the graphs and squint, it's basically a straight line for the last 10 years. We like it that way; we wouldn't want to go full Haskell and avoid success at all costs, but we don't want hockey-stick growth either. HN is not a startup! It runs on one server. Actually the app server (written in Arc) runs on one core. But we have some caching in front of that for logged-out users.
- thatguyagain 6y agoSounds like the size of a large sub reddit.
- dang 6y agoWe could also compare them this way: these days, HN averages 1500 submissions and 10000 comments (or so) per day. Does anyone with Reddit datamining fu know what percentile that would be for a subreddit? How many such subreddits are there? What are some examples? Of course there are assumptions involved in mapping that to userbase size or whatever, but it would still be interesting.
- astatine 6y agoIs this a Launch? No, this is a Test. Did it work? It should. Dang! What? The one thing that can ruin the test - it happened. Upvotes. Quite gruseom. Sorry - time hangs heavy some days.
- ghego1 6y agoGood times
- bryanrasmussen 6y agomaybe the test should have been flagged. Did we fail by upvoting?
- oliv__ 6y agoI'd been waiting for this!
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- boosthelp 6y agoOk, before the party is over, checkout another test launch [0]. We really hope to grow a truly helpful community and will appreciate any feedback about the messaging on our website too! [1] [0] https://www.patreon.com/boosthelp https://www.patreon.com/boosthelp [1] https://boost.help https://boost.help
- dang 6y agoI don't begrudge people trying to take advantage of this thread, which was an ill-defined mess to begin with, but you've done a couple things here which I should comment on. First, please don't delete and repost the same comment. It gives the impression of trying to pump it up in the rankings, which would not be a nice community behavior. Second, something I tell people all the time by email: on HN it's an antipattern to have your username be that of your company or project. It creates a feeling of using the site for promotion rather than participating as a person. The community reacts better when your username represents you as a human. You don't have to use your real name, just something to communicate that you're there as a person, not a brand. If you'd like to change your username, we can do that for you via hn@ycombinator.com.
- boosthelp 6y agoThanks for the kind note. The comment was removed and re-posted here as this thread seemed more appropriate for such comment (i.e. in a mood similar to this[0] comment). EDIT: And thanks for taking time to repeat yourself. Just few hours ago I've been thinking that most of us (unfortunately) will have to actually make some well-known mistakes to learn from them, even if we've been warned about such misdeeds beforehand repeatedly ;-) [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22767218 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22767218
- etherio 6y agoSince apparently someone else posted their launch here, I guess I will too lol. This thread is really interesting :). I'm launching www.devol.io -> a social community for coders. The user base is quite small but I hope we can build it and grow it into something cool!
- exikyut 6y agoUnsure why this has not been clarified yet: HN now has its own https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/92dd8/test_post_please_ignore/ https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/92dd8/test_post_pleas... ! Yay. Really. :D
- ilaksh 6y agoWere the emails normally being sent manually through some provider, but now going from a mail program on the server? If so, you might consider using SendGrid or something like that with their API. https://sendgrid.com/docs/API_Reference/Web_API_v3/Mail/index.html https://sendgrid.com/docs/API_Reference/Web_API_v3/Mail/inde... If not using a service, would be interested to hear what configuration (DKIM or whatever) was necessary to add to your existing mail setup to get it to work. Although I am just totally speculating on what you were talking about.
- dang 6y agoI realized sheepishly this morning why the emails didn't go through: because the placement code never actually executed. Or rather, it did, but it turned into a no-op because the post was already ranking higher, due to user upvotes, than the rank (#10) where the code would have placed it. I forgot that I'd added that check. So my complaint turned out to be nonsense, partly because it was 3am or whatever, and partly because "wtf? swear, profanity, curse...oh wait" is my normal debugging process. Just not usually in public.
- davidajackson 6y agoVery cool, how is this product different than https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/02/20/samsung-galaxy-find-my-mobile-1-notification/ https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/02/20/samsung-galaxy-find...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- moneytide1 6y agoIs there a way to delete my profile and all its content?
- moneytide1 6y agoPermanent Record
- moneytide1 6y agoReplies are locked after one fortnight? I'm keeping this one alive because it is directly above the "Space Engineers" comment.
- moneytide1 6y agoI have this dilemma, where I am reluctant to pursue creating this "virtual" experience on SE. Years ago I spent a few months familiarizing myself with the engine and the programmable block limitations. It took me dozens of hours just to create the simplest of scripts. Learning curve, I know, but eventually I just did not think that I was adding that much value to society by spending hours of my own time and money trying to make a video game more engaging. I still think about it often, the possibilities of the game engine, and perhaps it is because now it is spring time in my hemisphere and I feel guilty grinding away on a computer with some artificial goal, while the sun is beaming down all around me at a higher angle in the sky - constantly improving conditions for planting and growing lifeforms. Either space engineers is such a long term endeavor and I am being impatient, or I am wavering in ability focus and commit. Now this update every two weeks will be permanent and carry more weight, forcing me to dedicate more consideration to its position amidst my comment history "story".
- moneytide1 6y agoHaven't touched the game in weeks. But today at my factory I finally had a conversation I've been waiting to have for years ("Lagrangian point 1 will be where we build the space port")