HN Search isn't ingesting new data since Friday

(github.com)

189 points | by busymom0 11 hours ago ago

39 comments

  • dang 10 hours ago ago

    Sorry all. We've let the Algolia team know and they're working on it.

    • nickv 6 hours ago ago

      Sorry for the delays here. All the stories and comments missed should be backfilling as we speak. It's almost done. I posted updates further down, but wanted to post here since it's the top comment. We'll get an update on what happened and our plan to make sure we are on top of this in the coming days.

      • keepamovin 3 hours ago ago

        How much does this service "cost"? What's it run on?

    • dataflow 9 hours ago ago

      Btw, HN Replies also stopped working for me a month or two ago. Not sure why (I imagine something to do with my email or domain - re-registering didn't help), but if you find a chance to look into it I'd be grateful.

      • dang 4 hours ago ago

        That's a third-party project but I've emailed Dan to let him know.

        (That's a different Dan. A different Dan G in fact! but not a dang as far as I know.)

        • dangrossman 4 hours ago ago

          Thanks for the heads-up! HN Replies is up and running though, and notified me of a test comment I just made. If anyone would like to troubleshoot their subscription, feel free to email me.

          • dataflow 2 hours ago ago

            Thanks for replying! Is the email necessary? It seems it's at least affecting 2-3 folks who replied here, so if you might be able to just look into email sending/delivery for us, that would be wonderful.

        • dataflow 4 hours ago ago

          Oh I had no idea that's not you. Thank you!

      • setsewerd 8 hours ago ago

        I normally use the Harmonic app and it hasn't been loading post replies the last 2 days or so, citing a likely Algolia issue. Maybe a related issue.

      • ChrisMarshallNY 6 hours ago ago

        I have found HN replies always just stop, after some time. I resubbed a couple of times, and never bothered, after the last one stopped working.

        This has been going on for me, for a couple of years, I think.

        • chistev an hour ago ago

          What do you use now for replies? Because the RSS I was using stopped working too.

      • lukebechtel 9 hours ago ago

        Same!

    • cylo 10 hours ago ago

      This has happened before and it will happen again. Outages happen.

      Can you share with us what the best point of contact or escalation path to reach out to the next time it happens on the Algolia side?

      • dang 4 hours ago ago

        I'm not sure what the best point of public contact is, but maybe nickv can say something about that when there's a minute...

  • sitkack 11 hours ago ago

    Someone else posted this as well, but ... you wouldn't be able to find it.

    There are dozens, dozens of us that use hn.aloglia, much better interface than the front page.

    • GeoAtreides 10 hours ago ago

      I use it as a front page, because it shows flagged posts and ranks them by total number of votes, not by arcane algorithms.

    • postalcoder 8 hours ago ago

      Try https://hcker.news (I made it), the front page interface is made for hn. It captures pretty much all you could do with the algolia site as a FP and then some.

      Unlike most hn frontends out there i don’t rely on algolia’s api for any of its functionality, so it’s resilient to their outages.

      • flashblaze 4 hours ago ago

        I'm getting 500 after visiting

        • postalcoder 3 hours ago ago

          Shouldn't be happening, please try again!

    • busymom0 11 hours ago ago

      I became aware of it last night when a few users emailed me of chronological data in my app being outdated since Friday. Then went to GitHub and saw an issue was already open and upvoted by 8 others.

  • nickv 7 hours ago ago

    Hey folks, sorry for the delay on this. We're investigating and I promise a response on what happened here. Will update in a bit when I have more, and will make sure to let you all know what happened.

    • nickv 6 hours ago ago

      Quick update.

      We are backfilling the comments and stories we missed. You should start seeing them in the search results page. I will update when it's all caught up.

      Apologies for this again, didn't want to send an update until I had something and every time it felt so close.

      We'll work on an HN update on what happened here and lessons learned. (spoiler alert: ownership has become muddled over 10 years so we had to figure out how the portion that stopped crawling worked. That was fun. We'll make sure to work on a clear plan here and be transparent about it. So sorry :( )

  • jasfi an hour ago ago

    I noticed this too, using it for https://kindred.fit.

  • indigodaddy 10 hours ago ago

    Ah man then how do I know if I beat the other person for the latest simonw or rachelbythebay submission?

    • andai 10 hours ago ago

      The "from site" feature is native to HN.

      You're probably kidding, but it's a cool feature and maybe someone doesn't know about it yet.

      When you click the url next to a submission, it shows all the submissions from that website.

  • kazinator an hour ago ago

    HN Search has poor defaults: "stories by popularity for all time". Almost never what you want which is recent content, and often comments and stories.

  • awkwardpotato 9 hours ago ago

    I just happened to be checking the website "manually" because hnrss.org stopped updating, this explains why lol. Glad to know it'll hopefully be resolved soon.

    • belter 9 hours ago ago

      You can Google or use LLMs they index HN too.

  • Ms-J 8 hours ago ago

    Glad there is a thread about it as it seems to have happened before. Also if using certain IP ranges, sometimes the search is forbidden. It would be great to have a more robust search without the blocking.

  • hoherd 3 hours ago ago

    This outage helped me work through my backlog of articles. I've also reduced the frequency that I refresh the feed. Silver linings :)

  • vunderba 11 hours ago ago

    Hope this gets fixed soon. I've had to write a fallback for my extension to use the HN firebase but it's a lot less efficient for the data I need.

  • andrewinardeer 5 hours ago ago

    RSS was broken too? At least https://hnrss.github.io/ was broken.

    • chistev an hour ago ago

      Seems so, because I don't get notifications for rss anymore

  • mehulashah 10 hours ago ago

    Ok. I thought it was some change in the algorithm.