Some friends and I were talking about civil litigation earlier this week, which made me wonder if anyone at HN would be curious about my experience with arbitration as a civilian. Right before I went to sleep, I submitted a link to last month’s post to HN and went to bed. The timing would have hit Central Europe around lunch, and EST at the crack of dawn. I figured if it was going to take off, the algorithms would start pushing it up throughout the Western Hemisphere all day.

And it worked! I woke up the 500+ more points and it kept rolling in throughout the day. I dove into the discussion, elaborated, argued, and generally watched the mood.

Participating in HN was cool as well as getting that sweet, hard-to-get HN karma, but the other coolness aspect was watching my little 4 GB Linode instance, that I manage myself, handle things like a champ. No complaints about the site being hugged to death in the comments, and every time I clicked, you’d never know it was being slammed.

Congratulations, someone at 18.191.116.239. You were (maybe) the first human to hit the post from HN at 9:52:41 UTC.

Each “hit” makes thirteen simultaneous requests for CSS, JS, and HTML from this server (8 more for Google’s fonts). However, they are very small at just 279.6 KB total. I credit my lack of sophisticated front end skills for that and Skeleton. On the server side, each hit spawned a php-fpm process that consistently took 3% CPU, 1.5% Memory. The server peaked at around 75% CPU a few times.

Currently, the post has 960 points, which is pretty high. Most front page stories are under 200. I have now made the front pages of /., digg, reddit, and the most coveted, HN.

All in all, fun experience.

“Arbitration consumer protection attorney here! Nice work, and nice write up.”
“Damn, that was helpful and encouraging. Pound for pound the best value of any article I have read on HN.”
“This was an excellent write-up! The TL;DR is perfect”
“This is interesting, thanks for sharing and good work!”
“As an attorney, I hope everyone reads this.”

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 2nd, 2022 at 1:12 am and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.