I agree that you raised some valid points but I think your delivery in making those points were pretty abrasive though. At least that's how I interpreted it!
every social community I've seen eventually has to give up the downvote as a tool and just have upvotes or likes, or else they peak when the downvoting gets out of hand. I think HNN passed that point about 1-2 years ago. I see more and more worthwhile comments greyed out and I'm sure good contributers who advocate unpopular languages or discount the latest hotness are now driven away.
I think the HN community is pretty diverse and for the most part attracts people who are genuinely interested in constructive discussions. The folks who blindly dismiss something as being the new "hotness" are probably down voted because they were simply doing that - blindly dismissing without providing any useful feedback.
There's nothing wrong with disagreeing with something, but I think it's important to provide useful feedback and even more important to provide it in a useful way.
I quite like seeing what the new hotness is, and I equally like reading about unpopular languages/projects too. I usually get more insight into those projects when I read through comments because a lot of smart people (probably a lot smarter than me) provide some awesome input. The posts that I see as having been flagged or down voted is usually because the comment was aggressive or completely non-constructive (trolling).
Personally, I'm indifferent in either case. If I don't like or necessarily agree with something I read, or it really doesn't add anything to the discussion, I just scroll down to the next comment. But I'm sure the people who are passionate enough to down vote a particular comment are the same people who will upvote others, and given the broad userbase HN attracts I'd assume that for a person who down votes a comment, there's probably another who upvotes - unless the comment is just a straight up troll then the community usually does a good job at moderating.
I think the up/down voting system works pretty well; it gives the community some ability to moderate a thread so that we can focus on the content that matters. That's not always the case of course, but I think it works most of the time.
How do you take a server out of rotation if one goes down? For example, if I hit a server in the round robin that isn't online, I could try force-refresh the page to initiate a new lookup but in that case 1 in every 3 requests to the site would still fail (assuming only one server is down, and hoping my client doesn't decide to cache the initial resolution?). In your post you mentioned a browser can handle this transparently - did you mean that if the client can see that the domain has multiple A records and the initial connection fails on one of the IPs, it will automatically try to establish a connection on the next IP in the round robin if the first connection times out, is that correct? Is this a browser standard or is this behaviour handled differently between different browsers?
Either way interesting project, thanks for sharing.
EDIT: Also it'd be cool if the code wasn't in a tarball. I'm on a mobile device (as I'm sure many of your users are too) that doesn't allow me to save/extract the archive. Would've liked to have had a browse through it! Maybe consider uploading to a service like GitHub, or having an extracted version available so we can view the contents directly in a browser? :)
I don't have to do anything to take a server out of rotation. Browsers automatically try all IPs, and then stick with the first IP they find that works. Even if some servers are down, your HTTP requests continue to all work. This is a standard browser behavior. For a really extensive outage (2+ days), I would probably bother to manually update the DNS records.
Thanks for the feeback about making the code browsable. Will consider.
The browser would time out after a few minutes. However if the user stops loading the page and hits Reload, the browser will try another IP and the page will load successfully. I verified this behavior with Chrome. For a personal blog, that's definitely "good enough" HA.
When you think back on it, this was the true genius behind RSS aggregators. I could still read your blog when your blog was not working, because Google Reader (or your favorite aggregator) had already downloaded it once. It's too bad that RSS died.
True. However this specific type of failure should be relatively rare. I expect most of my outages to be either network issues or a powered off machine (TCP timeout) or the web service is not running (TCP RST). Accepting a connection and not replying is just rare for something as dumb as an HTTP request for a static file.
