Yeah I'm there with you. I got lucky as a kid with delving into this as a hobby and it turned into a professional career. Thought we could change the world for the better, what we made instead was social media cancer and LLMs that can pretend to make everyone 10x more productive. I loathe it.

As long as it's pretend productivity, things should settle in a decent place. How long that takes, who knows.

It's interesting to me that this is lower on the HN page than the Cloudflare post talking about the CVE handling even though the scoring is higher.

EDIT: Now it's off the main page, because of course it is.

it's about the comments / votes ratio.

To be more specific, it is a heuristic for detecting flamewars and/or controversial topics and it is quite good at that.

why exactly do we want to damp flamewars by comment count? as long as an individual comment fits the rules why do we punish comments in aggregate

Because it's a global optimization problem and HN gets less optimal* when there are flamewars on the frontpage.

Do you have a different approach in mind that we could do instead?

* https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

right but feel like comment count is a poor proxy for flamewar in an age where cheap intelligence to semantically classify discussions is available, so that, as affected me in the past, an author of a post simply enthusiastically engaging with every reply is not punished.

maybe to put it in a way where your values are aligned, i'm a curious person, and i learn a lot from the discussions that happen right on HN rather that only going to the source.. indiscriminate comment count damping takes away/lowers visibility of the most interesting comments that would provoke my curiosity.

one could instead do any sort of basic classifier system ranging from bag of words to running a ModernBERT to rate flamewarness and differentially apply the downrank based on "flamewar score" rather than "really poor proxy to flamewar score"

Yeah it’s entirely business people and executives who make these decisions in most companies. Not the ones who use it or implement on it.

It's absolutely this. Our Azure outages correlate heavily with Github outages. It's almost a meme for us at this point.

Azure's downtime doesn't appear to be as bad as Github's.

That's 100% because Azure isn't honest about their uptime.

Nearly every time Github has an outage, Azure is having issues also.

Actually the last 4-5 outages from Github, Our Azure environments have issues (that they rarely post on the status page) and lo and behold I'll notice that Github is also having the same problem.

I can only assume most of this is from the Azure migration path. Such an abysmal platform to be on. I loathe it.

Looks like there's an internal service health bulletin:

Impact Statement: Starting at 19:53 UTC on 31 Mar 2026, some customers using the Key Vault service in the East US region may experience issues accessing Key Vaults. This may directly impact performing operations on the control plane or data plane for Key Vault or for supported scenarios where Key Vault is integrated with other Azure services.

Honestly all of the key vault functions are offline for us in that region. Just another day in paradise.

Also the fact that the azure status page remains green is normal. Just assume it's statically green unless enough people notice.

I'd argue the opposite. The thing is so bloated and the simplest of things seem to be so hard. Import markdown in confluence? Nope not natively. Add an issue to the board? better go to the one workflow to do it and not in the actual ticket.

Confluence supports markdown natively. Even its MCP uses markdown.

I don’t know exactly what the other issue is referring to.

Confluence used to be built on top of pretty standard plain wiki markup that could be edited without being forced into a bad visual editor, even easy to edit in an external text editor to not have to spend so much time in the web UI at all. I remember having an Emacs mode for it installed.

Looking this up now, Wikipedia says the wiki markup was abandoned already in 2011. Not that I think Confluence was ever a great wiki, but at least having pages that were backed by some resonable plaintext markup was much better than not having that.

You can’t copy and paste markdown, nor can you use it in the native way in confluence. They have third party paid plugins that can do it.

I’ll take clarity and actual RCAs than Microsoft’s approach of not notifying customers and keeping their status page green until enough people notice.

One thing I do appreciate about cloudflare is their actual use of their status page. That’s not to say these outages are okay. They aren’t. However I’m pretty confident in saying that a lot of providers would have a big paper trail of outages if they were more honest to the same degree or more so than cloudflare. At least from what I’ve noticed, especially this year.

Azure straight up refuses to show me if there's even an incident even if I can literally not access shit.

But last few months has been quite rough for Cloudflare, and a few outages on their Workers platform that didn't quite make the headlines too. Can't wait for Code Orange to get to production.

Both can be true.

It feels like that's the entire MO of the Azure platform as well. Make a minimum viable product and then get adoption by selling at all costs, despite the products edges.

Didn't Nadella come from the Azure side? In that sense it'd make sense that what they were doing would spread to the rest of the company.

And Teams

Sadly Github moving more into Azure will expose the fragility of the cloud platform as a whole. We've been working around these rough edges for years. Maybe it will make someone wake up, but I don't think they have any motivation to.