[HN Gopher] Tell HN: GitHub is down again
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Tell HN: GitHub is down again
        
       Yet somehow https://www.githubstatus.com is ALL GREEN! smh
        
       Author : pupdogg
       Score  : 358 points
       Date   : 2021-11-27 20:40 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
       | spapas82 wrote:
       | Can't they at least fix their status page?
       | https://www.githubstatus.com/ It returns `All Systems
       | Operational`. I mean what's the point of having a status page if
       | it returns wrong info?
        
         | ranklord wrote:
         | It's updated already. Relatively fast... :/
        
         | res0nat0r wrote:
         | These things don't/can't get updated instantly. I was doing
         | some work as of ~5 minutes ago and it was working fine, and is
         | unavailable now. If it is a major outage it will likely be
         | updated shortly.
        
           | MrStonedOne wrote:
           | My status page for an open source multiplayer game updates
           | the status page for each server on a minute by minute bases.
           | 
           | They can do better, they just don't want to.
        
             | derefr wrote:
             | No, I don't think they can. An MMO is a very simple system,
             | in that there's only one Service Level Indicator (SLI) that
             | devs, shareholders, and players all agree on. That SLI is
             | "can a player connect to the server, and perform regular
             | gameplay actions, without a ridiculous amount of per-action
             | latency."
             | 
             | GitHub, meanwhile, is a million different things to a
             | hundred million different people. Users of e.g. Homebrew,
             | with its big monolithic ports system hosted as a github
             | repo, have a very different SLI for Github than do users of
             | some language-ecosystem package manager that allows you to
             | pull deps directly from Github; than do people who depend
             | on GitHub Actions to CI their builds on push; than do
             | people doing code-review to others' PRs; than do people
             | using Github mostly for its Wiki, or Issues, or downloading
             | Releases, or Github Pages, or even just reading single-
             | page-with-a-README repos, ala the various $FOO-awesome
             | projects.
             | 
             | For many of these use-cases, Github _isn 't_ degraded right
             | now. For others, it is.
             | 
             | If you ask for Github (or any service with this many
             | different use-cases and stakeholders) to measure by the
             | _union_ of all these SLIs, then the service would literally
             | never be not-degraded. In systems of sufficient scale,
             | there 's likely no point where every single component and
             | feature and endpoint of the system is _all_ working and
             | robust and fast, all at once. Never has been, never will
             | be.
             | 
             | And anything less than just going for the union of all
             | those SLIs, is asking Github to exercise human judgement
             | over which kinds of service degradation qualify as part of
             | their own SLOs. Which is exactly what they're doing.
             | 
             | Certainly, internal to services like this, there are all
             | sorts of alerting systems constantly going off to tell SREs
             | what things need fixing. But not all of those things
             | immediately, or even quickly, or even _ever_ , translate to
             | SLO violations. There are some outlier users whose use-
             | cases just break the system's semantics, where those use-
             | cases just aren't "in scope" for the SLO. As long as those
             | users are only breaking the system for _themselves_ , the
             | degradation they experience won't ever translate to an SLO
             | breakage.
        
               | thih9 wrote:
               | You seem to be applying different rules to MMOs and
               | Github, and I don't understand why. I'd say that there
               | are many ways of looking at this; there exist complex
               | MMOs; and one could look at Github from the point of view
               | of an average user.
               | 
               | E.g., a bit tongue in cheek:
               | 
               | > An MMO is a very simple system, in that there's only
               | one Service Level Indicator (SLI) that devs,
               | shareholders, and players all agree on. That SLI is "can
               | a player connect to the server, and perform regular
               | gameplay actions, without a ridiculous amount of per-
               | action latency."
               | 
               | Wouldn't you say that in an MMO of sufficient scale
               | there's likely no point where every single component and
               | feature and endpoint of the system is all working and
               | robust and fast, all at once?
               | 
               | > In systems of sufficient scale, there's likely no point
               | where every single component and feature and endpoint of
               | the system is all working and robust and fast, all at
               | once. Never has been, never will be.
               | 
               | Couldn't we redefine SLIs as "can the user connect to the
               | server and perform regular user actions without a
               | ridiculous amount of per-action latency"?
        
             | res0nat0r wrote:
             | Large orgs (like Github) don't want or use automated status
             | updates. There is usually always some service having issues
             | in complex systems and immediately updating a public status
             | page does more harm than good, including false alarms which
             | may not affect anything public facing.
        
               | Dylan16807 wrote:
               | If you don't want to report sufficiently small issues,
               | you can put that into the code, can't you?
               | 
               | Besides that, how are you going to cause "more harm than
               | good"?
        
               | derefr wrote:
               | More harm than good to the company's own long-term
               | reputation.
               | 
               | A status page is a kind of PR. Think of it like a policy
               | for a flight attendant to come out into the cabin to tell
               | everyone what's going on when the plane encounters
               | turbulence. That policy is Public Relations -driven. You
               | only do it if you expect that it's _positive_ PR,
               | compared to not doing it -- i.e. if telling people what
               | 's going on is _boosting_ your reputation compared to
               | saying nothing at all.
               | 
               | If a status page just makes your stakeholders think your
               | service is crappy, such that you'd be better off with no
               | status page at all... then why have a status page? It's
               | not doing its job as a PR tool.
        
               | mjw1007 wrote:
               | It seems to me you are now agreeing with the original <<
               | They can do better, they just don't want to. >>
        
               | derefr wrote:
               | I read the line specifically as " _The employees_ can do
               | better; they just don 't want to _try_. "
               | 
               | But that's not true. The _company_ could do better. But
               | the individual employees cannot. The individual employees
               | are constrained by the profit motive of the company. They
               | _are not allowed by corporate policy_ to set up automatic
               | status updates, for about the same reason they 're not
               | allowed to post their corporate log-in credentials: that
               | the result would very likely be disastrous to the
               | company's bottom line.
               | 
               | (Though, really, the corporations in most verticals are
               | in a race-to-the-bottom in most respects. Even if you
               | treat GitHub as a single entity capable of coherent
               | desires, it probably doesn't _desire_ to avoid automatic
               | status updates. It _needs_ to avoid them, to survive in a
               | competitive market where everyone else is also avoiding
               | them. People -- and corporations -- do lots of things
               | they don 't _want_ to do, to survive.)
        
         | qwertox wrote:
         | They have a banner "Investigating - We are investigating
         | reports of degraded performance for GitHub Actions. -- Nov 27,
         | 20:43 UTC" which should suffice for a start.
        
           | spapas82 wrote:
           | Yes now it has been properly updated. However it was down for
           | 10-15 minutes before their status page was updated...
        
         | drdaeman wrote:
         | There is a point. Even two.
         | 
         | 1. It clearly indicates that automatic systems are failing to
         | detect the outage. 2. It also indicates that no one is aware
         | about the incident to manually signal the outage (or that there
         | is no manual override).
         | 
         | Basically, it makes a difference between "yeah, shit happened,
         | we know (and maybe working on it)" and "hah, they don't even
         | know themselves".
        
           | res0nat0r wrote:
           | Most of these over arching status pages are manually run,
           | intentionally by design.
        
           | the_duke wrote:
           | Almost no one has automatic status pages anymore.
           | 
           | Partially because these large systems have some kind of
           | ongoing issue at any given time, so it's challenging to
           | provide a meaningful live status that isn't a bit misleading
           | and could cause misdirected panic.
           | 
           | Partially because you don't want to give potential attackers
           | (eg ddos) any insight if/how their methods are affecting your
           | systems.
           | 
           | Partially because there are SLAs and reputation at risk, and
           | you don't want to admit to any more downtime than you
           | absolutely have to.
        
             | toshk wrote:
             | Yeah it seems company status page lost its infancy stage
             | where companies were actually honest about their outages.
             | Bit similar what happened to online reviews.
        
             | derefr wrote:
             | If you had a _really_ robust system, it 'd be fun to just
             | slap a read-only mirror of your internal metrics dashboard
             | onto the public Internet for anyone to browse and slice as
             | they please. It'd be a brag, kinda.
             | 
             | Of course, in the real world, I don't think there's a
             | single IT admin who didn't just start nervously sweating
             | and pulling at their collar after reading the above,
             | imagining it as something their CEO said and encouraging
             | them to target it. Nobody can really do this -- and that in
             | turn says something important about how those metrics
             | really look in most systems.
        
               | MartijnBraam wrote:
               | Sourcehut does
               | 
               | https://metrics.sr.ht/graph?g0.expr=&g0.tab=1&g0.stacked=
               | 0&g...
        
               | Erethon wrote:
               | Wikimedia does this https://grafana.wikimedia.org/
        
               | Jweb_Guru wrote:
               | FWIW, I've worked on systems that have internal SLAs
               | orders of magnitude higher than what they promise to the
               | public. I think it's more just that there's no advantage
               | to doing something like this as long as none of your
               | competitors are. The status quo is that people's systems
               | are really opaque and vastly underpromise what they
               | should be capable of, and in exchange you get to absorb
               | some unplanned downtime due to issues with underlying
               | systems that you have little control over.
        
         | random_thoughts wrote:
         | They are currently updating it one by one
        
           | cube00 wrote:
           | ...and firing off automated tweets per product.
        
         | hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
         | The only status pages that make sense are the ones maintained
         | by a third party, not the owner. Also for technical reasons.
        
           | cyberge99 wrote:
           | And legal reasons.
        
         | ImprovedSilence wrote:
         | lolol. Clearly it's just degraded service. It seems The
         | Management hasn't approved declaring it an outage, that would
         | just ruin uptime metrics!
        
         | charles_f wrote:
         | It's updated now.
        
         | crecker wrote:
         | I would not be impressed if they hear about the down for a
         | trending thread on HN.
        
           | ryantgtg wrote:
           | I don't work for github, so on a personal note I was about to
           | create an issue in a repo, and it wasn't loading. My go to
           | "is my router messed up?" check is to load HN because it's so
           | reliable and fast. And lo, the top post was about github
           | being down!
        
             | crecker wrote:
             | Ha. I checked HN for the same reason, I was not able to
             | reach Github via university network and I thought that was
             | the time my university messed up with DNS.
             | 
             | HN seems to be going down for the massive amount of
             | requests!
        
           | JohnFen wrote:
           | Honestly, HN is the best status indicator on the net right
           | now.
        
         | danjac wrote:
         | There's lies, damn lies and SAAS status pages.
        
         | Flankk wrote:
         | Status page is also down and is returning a false positive. If
         | you check the status page status page it shows the status page
         | is down.
        
         | chippiewill wrote:
         | Status pages are almost never automated these days, they cause
         | more problems than they solve.
         | 
         | To be fair, redditstatus.com is quite nice with their sparkline
         | headline metrics. It at least lets you know _something_ is
         | happening even if they haven't yet declared an incident.
        
       | yellow_lead wrote:
       | Maybe companies should alert on an increased amount of traffic to
       | their status pages.
        
         | scrollaway wrote:
         | That's honestly a good idea. Does anyone do that?
        
           | gdubicki wrote:
           | My company does. :)
        
           | cranekam wrote:
           | In my last job our main "is everything okay?" monitoring
           | dashboard had RPS, latency, 500 rate etc and a line for the
           | number of user issues reported per N requests served. We
           | didn't alert on this but it was a useful way to detect issues
           | that were subtle enough not to trip up our main alerts.
        
           | hnarn wrote:
           | A telco I used to work for did this like two decades ago but
           | even better, they mapped incoming support calls (customers)
           | to stations, and if more than N came in during a certain
           | period for the same DSLAM it triggered some kind of alert.
           | 
           | Same thing happens (should happen) when you visit your ISPs
           | website and look for registered downtime -- many requests
           | from one zip code from multiple ips should trigger an alarm
           | if the isp is competent.
        
         | rozenmd wrote:
         | I'm surprised more folks don't monitor their vendors via uptime
         | checkers - worth knowing if you'll be able to get anything done
         | that day.
        
         | mlazowik wrote:
         | I've seen alerting based on the number of Twitter mentions too
        
           | colpabar wrote:
           | I think this is how downdetector works, it just looks for
           | tweets that are complaining about something not working.
        
             | PaulBGD_ wrote:
             | I'm fairly confident they just count a site as down based
             | off the popularity of the page.
        
         | kelnos wrote:
         | That might be a good idea as a last-resort measure, but if
         | you're only finding out problems because customers are telling
         | you about them (even indirectly through a signal like this),
         | your monitoring and alerting is woefully inadequate.
        
           | szundi wrote:
           | fun fact here that no matter how short the automated system
           | is set up to alert, customers are faster - no one knows how
           | is that possible
        
             | therein wrote:
             | Yup, that's another reason why it pays off having a direct
             | line of communication to at least some of your top
             | customers.
             | 
             | Can't tell you how many times I've had a customer write to
             | me, only to be receiving some automated alerts 30-40
             | seconds later.
        
               | lanstin wrote:
               | And the best customers for this are the pickiest annoying
               | ones
        
           | hnarn wrote:
           | It's not last resort, you should do both because you're
           | alerting on different things.
        
         | qubyte wrote:
         | Close that loop: Once the traffic goes above a threshold
         | transition it to red!
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | hk1337 wrote:
       | Homebrew is also not working since it relies on GitHub a lot.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | gime_tree_fiddy wrote:
       | Is it possible for GitHub to mirror the releases in multiple
       | different places(they likely do that, but I mean complete
       | isolation where an outage like this doesn't break the downloads).
       | Maybe like a proxy to object store, so it is a little more
       | reliable(a setup such as this, should have less moving and custom
       | parts).
       | 
       | So in a moment like this, you can convert
       | https://github.com/opencv/opencv/archive/4.5.3.zip to
       | https://archive.github.com/opencv/opencv/archive/4.5.3.zip. Maybe
       | an implicit agreement of somewhat stale data by add the sub-
       | domain "archive.". They'll try to maintain low sync times on a
       | "best effort basis".)
        
       | rvz wrote:
       | Again? Oh dear.
       | 
       | I think I lost track of how many times they went down since,
       | suggesting to self-host, repeatedly. [0] So they seem to continue
       | to be very unreliable, I expected them to be up without any
       | issues for a month.
       | 
       | Anyway, going all in on GitHub once again makes no sense. So at
       | least have a (self-hosted) backup solution to this.
       | 
       | [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27366397
        
       | saltmeister wrote:
       | it's not
        
       | lol768 wrote:
       | Why does their status page have components only for issues/pull
       | requests? What about browsing e.g. repository code, downloading
       | releases etc?
       | 
       | There should be a general "web" component marked as unavailable -
       | I can't even hit the homepage.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | thebradbain wrote:
       | Right in the middle of replying with a lengthy comment on a code
       | review, too :). Guess we'll find out if the server persisted it
       | or not!
        
         | szundi wrote:
         | When it's more that 5 minutes of typing, I always select all
         | and press ctrl-c. And then submit. Saved my time several times.
        
           | brundolf wrote:
           | Usually just clicking the back button, your browser will
           | remember the form field contents
        
       | zoomablemind wrote:
       | I got greeted by the image of the frightened Octocat, saying
       | "Oops!!! 500". Thought, that I broke something.
       | 
       | ...Copilot must've been bored over the holidays, so probably went
       | on to find a way and snacked on a few freshly updated repos,
       | whichever were close by, then covered it all up as just a
       | degraded perf incident... You've gotta feed da beast!
        
       | daxfohl wrote:
       | Curious to see the postmortem here. Who makes production changes
       | on Thanksgiving weekend!?!
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | daxfohl wrote:
         | Granted, it's probably the best time of the year for github to
         | break, precisely _because_ nobody else is pushing production
         | changes....
        
         | bifrost wrote:
         | You don't want to know the answer to this question. I'm totally
         | serious too.
        
       | riksucks wrote:
       | Seems like the webhooks that populate most of the pages don't
       | work, and hence leaves you with an incomplete github page. For
       | some, no page at all
       | 
       | But it also seems like that apart from the webhooks, the APIs and
       | the pages served are slower too.
        
       | EugeneOZ wrote:
       | Dear Github developers, I brought some love and hugs for you. And
       | a hot coffee with chocolate.
       | 
       | Not everyone hates you today, don't be upset about toxic posts
       | like this one.
        
         | daptaq wrote:
         | > Not everyone hates you today, don't be upset about toxic
         | posts like this one.
         | 
         | No, do get upset. You have contributed to the centralization
         | and increasing dependence on a single entity, while
         | piggybacking of the advances that distributed version control
         | have brought about. You have blurred the difference between Git
         | and your service, to the point that people don't know about the
         | former, and routinely abuse it. You have normalized the
         | fundamentally inconvenient "pull request" workflow as the
         | default for a lot of software development (introducing the
         | artificial steps of "forking" and proposing a "pull request"),
         | to such a degree that people now complain when they are
         | confronted with anything else. This is not a one-off issue, and
         | isn't fixed when the site is operational again. You deserve all
         | the criticism, and no not coffee chocolate.
        
           | EugeneOZ wrote:
           | One day you will wonder how much you were upset about not so
           | critical things.
           | 
           | The lifespan of our civilization is just a glimpse. Do you
           | really think your toxic comment will make it brighter for a
           | moment?
           | 
           | Look at this image:
           | https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2019/hubble-
           | astronomers...
        
             | raro11 wrote:
             | Did you think yours would?
        
         | activitypea wrote:
         | Imagine letting toxic HN comments get to you lmao
        
           | Stampo00 wrote:
           | By labeling them toxic, it implies the existence of non-toxic
           | HN comments. Fringe researchers have been searching for
           | years, but mainstream scientists regard non-toxic HN comments
           | as a form of cryptid.
        
       | samuelroland wrote:
       | it seems to be up again...
        
         | culi wrote:
         | same for me but the status page doesn't say so
        
       | dgellow wrote:
       | Oh wow, EVERYTHING is red or orange in the status page. That's
       | unusual.
        
       | rglover wrote:
       | https://cheatcode.co/opinions/control-your-user-data
        
       | arendtio wrote:
       | I have a website hosted on Github pages which uses ServiceWorkers
       | to be accessible when being offline (cached). Sadly, Github
       | serves some error page currently and kills the ServiceWorker
       | functionality that way...
        
       | gray_-_wolf wrote:
       | Github.com does not work properly (borderline on "at all") in a
       | browser, and I cannot download a release of one project via curl.
       | This sucks. And is definitely not just "degraded performance for
       | GitHub Actions".
        
         | cube00 wrote:
         | It's funny seeing the description say "degraded availability"
         | but if you hover over the red icon you get "major outage"
        
           | noir_lord wrote:
           | degraded covers everything from 1 in 100,000 requests is slow
           | through to "the data centres all simultaneously caught fire".
           | 
           | It's weasel words in their purest form.
           | 
           | Right up there with "We apologise for any inconveniences you
           | may have experienced".
           | 
           | If you are apologising it's because you _know_ you
           | inconvenienced someone.
           | 
           | I'd genuinely have more respect if instead they just said "We
           | fucked up, we'll do better".
           | 
           | It's at least honest.
        
         | staticassertion wrote:
         | Yeah I noticed because I'm trying to pull down a protobuf
         | release binary.
        
       | veltas wrote:
       | Reminder that git is distributed(TM)
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | revskill wrote:
       | Rails is hard to scale.
        
         | activitypea wrote:
         | onejoke.png
        
       | robertwt7 wrote:
       | omg it is still down!
        
       | bredren wrote:
       | There goes my docs PR for `drf-turbo`.
       | 
       | Guess I'll work on my stuff.
        
       | albeebe1 wrote:
       | Here i am on a Saturday afternoon learning how to programatically
       | interact with GitHub using go-git, banging my head on my desk
       | because the code should work, but im getting cryptic errors. I'm
       | searching stackoverflow, nobody seems to have encountered the
       | errors i'm getting (that typically means i'm doing something
       | wrong)...... oh GitHub is down. To GitHubs credit, they've been
       | very reliable for me over the years, it didn't even cross my mind
       | that they could be down.
        
         | busymom0 wrote:
         | Ah! I am brand new to learning flutter and was trying to change
         | the Flutter channel with the command:
         | 
         | flutter channel master
         | 
         | And it kept failing with:
         | 
         | ------
         | 
         | git: remote: Internal Server Error.
         | 
         | git: remote:
         | 
         | git: fatal: unable to access
         | 'https://github.com/flutter/flutter.git/': The requested URL
         | returned error: 500
         | 
         | Switching channels failed with error code 128.
         | 
         | ------
         | 
         | thought I was doing something wrong and spent some time
         | troubleshooting.
        
         | vanusa wrote:
         | _It didn 't even cross my mind that they would be down._
         | 
         | As soon as you start banking on "the cloud" to get useful work
         | done, the very first thing that should enter your mind is:
         | 
         | "Any of these nifty services can just turn into a pumpkin at
         | any time"
        
           | dlsa wrote:
           | The real kicker is that they're still other people's
           | computers. There's definite benefits as well as costs.
           | Ignoring either is not a good idea.
           | 
           | Centralisation into just a few large providers is another bad
           | idea we're heading towards or have already arrived at.
        
             | NaturalPhallacy wrote:
             | "The cloud is just other people's computers." is the most
             | succinct way I've heard it.
        
           | mindcrime wrote:
           | Much like we have the "Fallacies of Distributed
           | Computing"[1], we probably need (if somebody hasn't already
           | created) a "Fallacies of The Cloud".
           | 
           | Fallacy #1 - The cloud is reliable
           | 
           | [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies_of_distributed_c
           | ompu...
        
       | chrisco255 wrote:
       | Can't access Vercel because I used Github for authentication. I
       | guess I'm done with using centralized authentication services.
        
         | incognito_mode wrote:
         | Try logging in via email. It'll send you a code to cross-check.
         | Voila!
        
         | dmitshur wrote:
         | In case you find it interesting, I've had luck removing an
         | authentication SPOF1 by using IndieAuth on my personal site2. I
         | wish it were an option on more of the sites where I need to
         | sign in.
         | 
         | 1 https://twitter.com/dmitshur/status/1223304521767669761
         | 
         | 2
         | https://github.com/shurcooL/home/commit/bb504a4ef0d7c552d363...
        
       | aliswe wrote:
       | The error message for me, when trying to push, was "Make sure you
       | have the correct permissions" and also something about repo not
       | found ...
        
       | hk1337 wrote:
       | At least CodeSpaces is working
       | 
       | https://i.imgur.com/x4IFTwY.png
       | 
       | *EDIT* Now CodeSpaces is gone
        
       | sidarape wrote:
       | All red now.
        
       | ejanus wrote:
       | Not only GitHub from my side. I can't access Telegram from
       | browser.
        
       | ronyfadel wrote:
       | Explains why I had less app downloads today.
       | 
       | (My app binaries are hosted on Github; not sure if it's the way
       | to go but hey it works).
        
         | Stampo00 wrote:
         | Not today it doesn't. ;-)
        
       | brw wrote:
       | At least this outage allowed me to discover this cute pixel art
       | octocat loading icon on the activity feed. Never noticed it
       | before because I believe it always loads near instantaneously, or
       | maybe I just never paid enough attention to it.
       | 
       | https://i.imgur.com/6Uwlwh7.gif
        
       | 13415 wrote:
       | Of course it's down. That is the _one and only_ time I wanted to
       | check something on it on Saturday evening.
        
         | tisryno wrote:
         | This is exactly what's happened to me also, oh well, back to
         | procrastinating
        
       | rlucas wrote:
       | I also had intermittency on 2021-11-27 between 1-2 PM PT. Would
       | work one minute, not the next, retry and it works. Feels round-
       | robin-y kind of Heisenbug.
        
       | axiom92 wrote:
       | Looks like it's up now.
        
       | zapf wrote:
       | Wish we could stop using such msft run nonsense, and build a p2p
       | decentralised PR system. What's the challenges we need to address
       | to make it happen?
        
         | pshc wrote:
         | That would be great. But Github is a massive coordination point
         | with network effects and free tiers so it's not so easy to
         | compete. Some other challenges:
         | 
         | - despite being decentralized, you still need moderation and
         | access control
         | 
         | - open source projects typically aren't great at frontend UI/UX
         | 
         | It would be neat if I could publish git repos on IPFS and
         | receive patches from people. It's just hard to compete with a
         | centralized, CDN'd service where you can click and get a result
         | in 100ms.
         | 
         | edit: cribbing from sibling comment, it looks like Radicle has
         | thought hard about decentralized git:
         | https://radicle.xyz/blog/radicle-link.html
        
         | vimda wrote:
         | > p2p decentralised pr system
         | 
         | You mean Git? The Linux Kernel for e.g. does this just fine.
        
         | dataflow wrote:
         | > What's the challenges we need to address to make it happen?
         | 
         | I imagine the ability to resist $billion offers when you're
         | successful would be one.
        
         | gnubison wrote:
         | Hmm, great idea. We could build on Git as a storage medium, and
         | we'd need a durable and reliable way to exchange patches.
         | Something like ...email?                   $ man -k patches
         | git-am(1) - Apply a series of patches from a mailbox
         | git-format-patch(1) - Prepare patches for e-mail submission
         | git-imap-send(1) - Send a collection of patches from stdin to
         | an IMAP folder         git-send-email(1) - Send a collection of
         | patches as emails
         | 
         | Ironic that you're pondering Git as a solution to Github's
         | self-created centralization problem.
        
           | pshc wrote:
           | I think they're talking more about the Pull Request interface
           | with nice diffs, comments, automated tests and builders,
           | status checks and so on...
           | 
           | You totally could develop in the kernel workflow, everything
           | done over email, but are you willing to?
        
             | gnubison wrote:
             | Yes :)
        
         | sodality2 wrote:
         | > p2p decentralised PR system
         | 
         | My first thought was https://radicle.xyz/.
         | 
         | What a cruel twist of fate. Their downloads page is hosted on
         | Github Pages, which is down right now!
         | https://radicle.xyz/downloads.html
         | 
         | In any other situation I'd recommend it since it really was the
         | tool of choice for decentralized git repos with lots of cool
         | features. (Despite the "Empowering developers with DeFi
         | building blocks like NFTs, token streams, and more" mentioned
         | on the home page which throws me off)
         | 
         | Edit: It seems like the download page is up and working now.
        
       | slmjkdbtl wrote:
       | HN for the most time is a better status page for big sites like
       | Github.
        
       | jerbearito wrote:
       | Thankfully command line / desktop app still work
        
         | minedwiz wrote:
         | Thanks for pointing that out. I needed to clone a new repo.
         | 
         | EDIT: nope, command line is down, too.
        
           | jerbearito wrote:
           | Odd, sorry. I'm able to push and pull from one of my private
           | repos. [Edit: no longer accurate. everything has stopped
           | working]
        
       | Gsydvdndh12876 wrote:
       | Would be interesting to know PRE-MS and POST-MS acquisition
       | statistics on downtime...
        
       | deeblering4 wrote:
       | The tone of this post could be improved by describing the problem
       | objectively, and there is no need to say "down again"
        
         | dylan604 wrote:
         | Is saying "down again" inaccurate?
        
           | colejohnson66 wrote:
           | It's _technically_ correct, but, at least for me, it has the
           | connotation of it being a common enough thing, such as
           | something that happens every week. For something with over
           | 99.9% (99.99?) uptime, it 's just another fluke occurrence.
        
             | noir_lord wrote:
             | I vividly remember the last time they really went down, I
             | was in the middle of an important deploy and since "we" (it
             | predates me) didn't consider "github been on fire" a
             | critical dependency it all went a bit sideways.
        
         | julianlam wrote:
         | Not to mention the vitriol over a manually updated status page
         | not updated the instant a service is down.
         | 
         | I mean, the moment it went down I'm sure Github's SREs were
         | paged. Give them a minute to process it first, jeez.
        
           | MrStonedOne wrote:
           | I have a status page that is automatically _and_ manually
           | updated and it costs 10 bucks a month to run, updates within
           | 2 minutes of a downtime.
           | 
           | Github has no excuse.
           | 
           | We can and will hold them accountable for their decision to
           | hide information from their paying customers and any other
           | case they prioritize their ego over their users.
        
           | Dylan16807 wrote:
           | Mockery, not vitriol. Nobody asked them to make it manual.
        
         | MrStonedOne wrote:
         | Are you paying pupdogg? Because you have no right to demand
         | somebody be perfect and professional about something you aren't
         | paying them to do.
        
           | [deleted]
        
       | midasuni wrote:
       | They should run it in the cloud /s
       | 
       | (My self hosted gitlab is working fine)
        
         | Longwelwind wrote:
         | I would wager that your self-hosted GitLab has less uptime than
         | GitHub (or the quality of the deployment). We typically
         | underestimate the downtime of the software we deploy ourselves,
         | probably because we're attached to it, or because we're busy
         | fixing it, instead of having to wait.
         | 
         | I'd take the occasional downtimes of cloud solutions, if it
         | means not having to use some of the self-hosted software I had
         | to to use at work.
        
           | raro11 wrote:
           | Nope. Been self-hosting for four years without any issues.
           | 
           | We only do security upgrades or wait for x.1 upgrades. Never
           | x.0
           | 
           | The hosted .com however I wouldn't recommend.
        
           | js4ever wrote:
           | I'm managing a Gitlab instance for 10k users since 3 years,
           | we had zero unplanned downtime in the last 3 years, I just
           | had to apply the upgrade every 3 months and it's running
           | smoothly ever since
        
         | belltaco wrote:
         | I'm sure the remote masters are keeping the uptime high.
         | https://therecord.media/gitlab-servers-are-being-exploited-i...
        
       | gime_tree_fiddy wrote:
       | This seems to be a big one. Even the pulls are failing. I just
       | discovered there isn't not Github mirror for OpenCV code.
        
       | lordnacho wrote:
       | It's not that hard to push to multiple remotes. Perhaps more
       | projects ought to have multiple GitHub/Bitbucket/GitLab/etc
       | repos. Then it wouldn't matter if one of them went down now and
       | again.
        
       | axiom92 wrote:
       | Hmm explains why the following line is suddenly causing my jobs
       | to crash:
       | 
       | > nltk.download("punkt")
       | 
       | Apparently NLTK uses Github for hosting their sentence
       | tokenization models.
        
       | egberts1 wrote:
       | That's why I have a THREE-tier GIT repository.
       | 
       | - Github
       | 
       | - My Git server
       | 
       | - My local git
       | 
       | No need to worry about failures. :-)
        
       | seirl wrote:
       | If you urgently need to retrieve a piece of software, it's likely
       | archived in Software Heritage:
       | http://archive.softwareheritage.org/
        
         | davegauer wrote:
         | This is fantastic! It also has some projects I thought had been
         | lost to the mists of time when Bitbucket stopped hosting
         | Mercurial repos.
        
         | withinboredom wrote:
         | I ended up here because automated cluster deployments failed
         | trying to download releases from GitHub... I wonder if that
         | software is served there and I can update the URLs before
         | GitHub fixes their issues :)
        
       | eugenhotaj wrote:
       | Let me guess, someone pushed a bad config.
        
       | xfbs wrote:
       | It's amazing how much stuff breaks when GitHub goes down. I'm
       | doing some Rust coding right now, the rust-s3 crate tells me that
       | to look up what feature I need to enable (tokio + rustls), I need
       | to look into the Cargo.toml. Well, the repo won't load, and nor
       | can I clone it. Well okay, fuck that I can use the default
       | dependencies. But no wait I can't, I can't even do a cargo build
       | because cargo uses a github repository as the source of truth for
       | all crates. No more Rust for me today :(
        
         | kleiba wrote:
         | _It 's amazing how much stuff breaks when GitHub goes down._
         | 
         | That's right. Someone should really come up with a
         | decentralized VCS. /scnr
        
           | catskul2 wrote:
           | IMO Git is decentralization-ready but the rest of the
           | infrastructure necessary to make it practical is not widely
           | available/in use. The necessary peer-to-peer and networks of
           | trust are still not a solved problem, or if they are they've
           | for some reason are not popular enough to be in wide use.
        
             | PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
             | It's widely available and widely used, just not as widely
             | used as github.
             | 
             | Setting up your own git server is not hard, but it's not as
             | easy as just getting github or gitlab to run it for you.
             | Way too many people take the easier path, even though the
             | harder path is not actually that hard.
             | 
             | There are also multiple solutions.
        
           | lostmsu wrote:
           | You probably meant distributed decentralized VCS.
        
         | birktj wrote:
         | You can view the source of a crate on docs.rs (see [1] for the
         | Cargo.toml of rust-s3). Also I am pretty sure cargo only
         | depends on GitHub for authentication for uploading crates and
         | not for the actual contents. Trying to build an empty crate
         | with rust-s3 as a dependency right now seems to work fine.
         | 
         | [1]: https://docs.rs/crate/rust-s3/0.28.0/source/Cargo.toml
        
           | ATsch wrote:
           | As I understand it, the crates themselves are not stored on
           | github, but the crate index is, as it uses a git repo to get
           | "free" delta compression and auditing.
        
         | anothernewdude wrote:
         | I can't stand builds that just reach out to the internet for
         | things.
        
           | lanstin wrote:
           | Yeah seems like basic hygiene especially given the supply
           | chain attacks but also a lost cause. No one has the skills to
           | do builds without the internet. Even forcing teams to use an
           | allow list for the internet involving fighting a lot of angry
           | people.
        
             | contingencies wrote:
             | One of the few decent uses for containers is to enforce
             | proxied internet so build process artifacts can be auto-
             | stored for subsequent builds.
             | 
             | For the worst offender I am aware of, try building a
             | _flutter_ project... it silent internet gets artifacts from
             | _at least three_ different packaging systems (node,
             | cocoapods, android packages), all of which have caused
             | hard-to-debug failures.
        
         | etra0 wrote:
         | Beside the `--offline`, you can also use `--vendor` to include
         | all the dependencies in a folder to be committed alongside your
         | project. Useful when you don't want to rely on external fetch
         | every time!
        
           | jiggawatts wrote:
           | Both should be the default.
           | 
           | Rust has a robust memory model, but everything else about it
           | insists on copying the fragility of the NPM ecosystem.
           | 
           | The recent hoopla around a bunch of Rust mods quitting
           | revealed that my suspicions are precisely true -- key Rust
           | staff also sit on the NPM board!
        
         | dom96 wrote:
         | Should be fairly easy for Cargo to solve this: why doesn't it
         | already mirror its source of truth to GitLab and other Git
         | hosters?
        
         | revskill wrote:
         | I guess same story for Go!
        
           | krasin wrote:
           | In Go, it's customary to use 'go mod vendor' to put your
           | dependencies into the main repository. While it's not
           | universally recognized as a good technique, it saves the
           | adopters of this approach from the downtime today.
        
             | jen20 wrote:
             | I'm not sure this is customary at all - I rarely encounter
             | a vendor directory anymore.
             | 
             | Note you also need to build differently if you go this
             | route: `-mod=vendor`, otherwise the directory will be
             | ignored in modern Go.
        
               | krasin wrote:
               | With more outages of our amazing, but overly centralized
               | development ecosystem, the popularity of this approach
               | will likely surge. It helps that Go supports the
               | vendoring workflow as it makes the choice practical.
               | 
               | As for building with a flag: true, but very minor, as
               | it's rare to execute 'go build' directly. In most
               | projects I've seen, it's either Bazel, or some kind of
               | "build.sh".
        
               | travisd wrote:
               | I've never had to use -mod=vendor, so I just looked it
               | up:                       -mod mode
               | module download mode to use: readonly, vendor, or mod.
               | By default, if a vendor directory is present and the go
               | version in go.mod                     is 1.14 or higher,
               | the go command acts as if -mod=vendor were set.
               | Otherwise, the go command acts as if -mod=readonly were
               | set.                     See
               | https://golang.org/ref/mod#build-commands for details.
               | 
               | If there's a vendor directory, it's used by default. As
               | for my two cents, I use it frequently when building
               | Docker images so that I don't have to pass secrets into
               | the image to clone private modules (but I don't check the
               | vendor directory into Git).
        
               | shoo wrote:
               | Maybe the key point is to choose consciously and pick the
               | option that gives the best combinations of tradeoffs for
               | your situation vs just doing what is easy or copying what
               | other people are doing without understanding you're
               | making a decision with various tradeoffs and
               | consequences. Tradeoffs that are a good fit in other
               | contexts may be a poor fit for your situation.
               | 
               | If one of the goals of your build process is to be able
               | to guarantee reproducible builds for software you've
               | shipped to customers, and you depend on open source
               | libraries from third parties you don't control, hosted on
               | external services you don't control, then you probably
               | need your own copies of those dependencies. Maybe
               | vendored into version control, maybe sitting in your
               | server of mirrored dependencies which you back up in case
               | the upstream project permanently vanishes from the
               | internet. But setting up and maintaining it takes time
               | and effort and maybe it's not worth paying that cost if
               | the context where your software is used doesn't value
               | reproducible builds.
        
               | avl999 wrote:
               | Google takes care of storing copies of any go dependency
               | you use on their proxy, there is very little reason for
               | you to maintain your own via vendoring. Maybe if you are
               | a big enough organization you run your own proxy as an
               | extra layer of safety above google but still I don't see
               | the value of vendoring these days.
        
             | avl999 wrote:
             | These days with go mod and the go team maintaining their
             | proxy there is very little benefit to vendoring and any
             | benefit is not worth blowingup up the size of your repos
             | and messing up code reviews on PRs that introduce new
             | dependencies.
        
           | jlouis wrote:
           | Go uses a proxy for downloading modules, so there's no Github
           | involved. And you could run your own proxy-cache if you
           | wanted. In addition, your work machine has a local proxy
           | cache of the modules you already downloaded.
           | 
           | Go doesn't use a repository as a single source either, which
           | is another problem in of itself.
        
           | ggktk wrote:
           | I think Go dependencies should still work, thanks to Google's
           | module mirror[0] (enabled by default), which has cache.
           | 
           | [0]: https://proxy.golang.org/
        
         | fowlie wrote:
         | I was working on my Nix config. I had just added a small
         | command line utility and wanted to install it, but then got 504
         | errors from github.com. Annoying!
        
         | dandotway wrote:
         | In the 1970s-80s we managed with email lists and tarballs on
         | multiple mirrors. Git itself decentralizes source control, and
         | yet we all want to use single-point-of-failure Github.
         | 
         | Anyone remember when Github took down youtube-dl?
         | 
         | I wonder how much Big Brother data Microsoft is gathering on
         | Github developers. "Oh, as part of our hiring process, just
         | like we scan your FB and Twitter, we also scan your Github
         | activity to evaluate your performance as best as our machine
         | learning overlords can assess it. Do you create Github projects
         | and then abandon them when unfixed issues accumulate? Our
         | algorithm thinks you're a bad hire."
        
           | adeelk93 wrote:
           | > Anyone remember when Github took down youtube-dl?
           | 
           | I would blame the law (DMCA), not those forced to abide by
           | the law (Github)
        
             | roastedpeacock wrote:
             | It was an unfortunate situation. I don't entirely know how
             | GitHub handled things before the Microsoft acquisition but
             | it also wouldn't surprise me if Microsofts legal department
             | is more risk adverse compared to GitHub internal.
             | 
             | > I would blame the law (DMCA), not those forced to abide
             | by the law (Github)
             | 
             | It seems even in the context of US-based companies that
             | some companies are a little more "trigger-happy" with DMCA
             | and other claims compared to others.
        
             | skeeter2020 wrote:
             | Especially because they worked to try and make sure this
             | wouldn't happen again.
        
             | [deleted]
        
             | kevin_thibedeau wrote:
             | The law also permits content to be restored immediately
             | upon receipt of a counternotice. Somehow the data silos
             | never get around to supporting that.
        
               | anchpop wrote:
               | twitch actually does do that IIRC, not sure about others
        
               | zinekeller wrote:
               | GitHub can't, until at least the the public support is in
               | their favour, because legally it's a hot water. This is
               | _not_ your ordinary copyright DMCA Complaint, this is the
               | section 1201 concerning circumvention, which is held to a
               | different standard. This is essentially RIAA telling
               | GitHub  "if you're not stopping this, we'll see _you_
               | (not the YT-DL developers) in court ".
        
               | roastedpeacock wrote:
               | > GitHub can't, until at least the the public support is
               | in their favour
               | 
               | Public support on which grounds?
        
             | dandotway wrote:
             | Laws need teeth to be enforced. It used to be illegal to
             | harbor runaway slaves, or to be a Catholic priest in
             | Protestant England. So people built cleverly hidden Priest
             | Holes[1] in houses to hide. But you can't really build the
             | equivalent of a Priest Hole within Github, because Github
             | is not your house, but rather your lord's castle.
             | 
             | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priest_hole
        
             | Teever wrote:
             | Your argument is pure sophistry.
             | 
             | Microsoft is a member of the RIAA and works closely with
             | the MPAA to further control over society with DRM and
             | intellectual property restrictions like the DMCA.
             | 
             | It is well within the power of an entity the size of
             | Microsoft to oppose something like the DMCA and the fact
             | that they don't indicates not that they can't as you imply,
             | but that they don't want to.
        
           | surfer7837 wrote:
           | Don't create a Github account with your name then?
        
             | asxd wrote:
             | Yeah seems like this would be a simple workaround if
             | companies did start adopting this practice
        
           | tester756 wrote:
           | but that data is avaliable to everyone cuz it's mostly
           | public?
        
         | pasabagi wrote:
         | Cargo has an --offline option. It's actually pretty possible to
         | use rust totally offline - the doccumentation can be built, for
         | instance, then locally served with (iirc) cargo doc.
        
           | jiggawatts wrote:
           | Offline should be the default, not an option.
           | 
           | Otherwise nobody will notice how fragile their workflow is
           | until it is _too late to fix it!_
        
           | xfbs wrote:
           | I build and host documentation on every commit anyways in the
           | CI. And yes, that is true, I eventually figured it out (had
           | some issues with it at first) but it seems like GitHub is
           | back up so all's well anyhow. I do however wish that there
           | was some public mirror that cargo could fall back to,
           | wouldn't that make a lot of sense?
        
       | cube00 wrote:
       | Watermelon status.
        
       | donutloop wrote:
       | Dam!
        
       | activitypea wrote:
       | Started learning Emacs tonight, and now I can't access Helm's
       | documentation :\
        
         | brabel wrote:
         | Good time to swith to the lighter (and cooler) Ivy [1]. This
         | site is up, but the actual Ivy Docs Page [2] is also returning
         | a 500!
         | 
         | [1] https://writequit.org/denver-
         | emacs/presentations/2017-04-11-...
         | 
         | [2] https://oremacs.com/swiper/
        
           | activitypea wrote:
           | Thanks for the suggestion, but for now I can only bookmark it
           | for later. My priority right now is to reach basic competency
           | ASAP, so I'm running Spacemacs. I love the "batteries
           | included" thing, but just installing it took like an hour of
           | fiddling before I just gave up and ingored the error message.
           | I don't think it'd be wise to fiddle around with the settings
           | if even the defaults are going haywire.
        
         | thumbellina wrote:
         | Helm might have info documentation, available offline within
         | Emacs.
         | 
         | Try `M-x info-apropos` and type "helm".
         | 
         | Info docs form a tree: press '^' to go up a node, 'n' and 'p'
         | to go forward and back on same level, '[' and ']' to go
         | forward/back a page like a book.
        
       | qwertox wrote:
       | I just had a very odd thing happen to me on GitHub.
       | 
       | I accidentally closed my browser so I reopened it with Undo Tab
       | Close, and GitHub's tab title was labeled " _Your account
       | recovery is unable to load_ " for a very brief moment. Then the
       | GitHub error site with the pink unicorn loaded. The URL which was
       | supposed to load was https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs which
       | I had tried to load about 15 minutes earlier or so, but which
       | would not load because the site is down.
        
         | sodality2 wrote:
         | It sounds like some HTML was cached by your browser and it then
         | tried to load some info, which of course results in a 5xx
         | error. Then the existing HTML realized that and showed the
         | error.
        
           | qwertox wrote:
           | Why would something related to _account recovery_ be cached
           | in such a way that it is the first thing which gets rendered?
           | I really doubt that it is related to caching. Also, that tab
           | was idle for a couple of minutes while I was trying to load
           | GitHub in another tab multiple times before I accidentally
           | closed the browser (just that window, I had other windows of
           | the same browser instance open).
        
             | sodality2 wrote:
             | Just the HTML of the existing page could have been cached,
             | and it may check in the background to reload account info.
             | Then, if this can't be loaded, it shows the error.
        
       | carbocation wrote:
       | And no updates from https://twitter.com/githubstatus
        
         | yellow_lead wrote:
         | https://twitter.com/githubstatus/status/1464696434645741574
         | 
         | Got one after you posted at least
        
         | nickradford wrote:
         | I mean... it _literally_ just went down.
        
           | carbocation wrote:
           | Yes, if it's a manually run account, then the fact that it
           | just went down a few minutes ago would be a good reason for
           | it not to be updated.
        
           | yellow_lead wrote:
           | It's been like 30 mins at least...
        
             | nickradford wrote:
             | My coworker and I just reviewed and merged a PR, at 12:38
             | Pacific
        
       | milankragujevic wrote:
       | I rebooted my modem two times before I realized (with VPN) that
       | Github truly is down.
       | 
       | And I need it right now.
       | 
       | Guess I'll be setting up a local git instance very soon...
       | 
       | edit: by local I meant in the intranet. not on my local machine.
        
         | maximilianroos wrote:
         | > Guess I'll be setting up a local git instance very soon...
         | 
         | The incorrectness of this highlights how useful DVCS can be --
         | a git server going down doesn't affect working locally at all.
        
           | markozivanovic wrote:
           | What if he needs to pull some changes he needs to continue
           | with his work?
        
             | Jweb_Guru wrote:
             | You can merge from anywhere, not just Github master. It's a
             | little more work, but a coworker could share their
             | repository without much difficulty. You can even apply
             | patches sent over email, if you're so inclined.
        
               | markozivanovic wrote:
               | All legitimate solutions, I agree. The thing is, it
               | really sucks when this happens over the weekend. Alerting
               | a colleague in their off-hours to be able to continue
               | with your work is not ideal. Of course, it happens
               | rarely, so you're making a good point. If it happened
               | weekly, that would be another story. :)
        
             | julianlam wrote:
             | Then a local git instance would preclude him from needing
             | or receiving those changes anyway.
        
               | markozivanovic wrote:
               | Hmm, I think we understood 'local' as two different
               | things. I understood it as a self hosted git server, like
               | on premises in parent's company that he and his
               | colleagues would use. Now that you mentioned it, I'm
               | starting to think I understood it wrong.
        
               | milankragujevic wrote:
               | Nope, I may have misspoke, but I meant self-hosted git
               | instance in the intranet.
        
         | backoncemore wrote:
         | Could have just connected your phone to data and tried it out.
        
           | milankragujevic wrote:
           | A VPN is a button click away, and modem reboot is two clicks
           | :) For me personally more convenient than tethering.
        
       | yellow_lead wrote:
       | https://downdetector.com/status/github/
       | 
       | Yep, can't even push
        
       | pupdogg wrote:
       | For record keeping: https://imgur.com/a/b6JIQT3
        
         | svnpenn wrote:
         | https://i.imgur.com/SJDJRyo.jpeg
        
           | breakingcups wrote:
           | Showing (nearly) all-red for me, 18 minutes later:
           | https://imgur.com/a/plZbFky
        
             | svnpenn wrote:
             | https://i.imgur.com/3TyNW9A.png
        
       | jmeyer2k wrote:
       | Thought I might be the only one seeing this (account-related or
       | something), but nope, just Github's misleading status page...
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2021-11-27 23:00 UTC)