> We run a Saas and someone wrote an email saying that our server was down, and when we'd expect it to be up. Not having had a notification, I double checked from a couple of geographic locations that our application was indeed up and responding. A tale as old as time: [this video]
Yeah, but how much of that time is actually butt in seat coding vs hardly paying attention in meetings? I've worked at multiple big firms and startups and I don't believe that even the majority of people are working "40 hours" in the same way that most people work 40 hours. This is the wonderful thing about technology. I was literally motivated to get into tech by the old "The Website is Down" videos, and in practice, it seems to be how many tech workers operate: [this video]
> do you really think there are masses of people who can’t tell the difference between a single sign on service being down and individual sites being down and reporting it to downdetector? Have you never seen The Website Is Down? [this video] The answer is: way more people than a software developer might think. Ask anyone in IT, or go to anywhere bugs are reported and read a handful.
Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.
4 Hacker News comments
From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.
Citations, criticism and jokes