"Somehow I don't think any harm will come if Hacker News goes down for a few hours."
What do you define as "harm"?
People are creatures of habit. If something isn't available many times they will fork and find something else to do with their time which they might find as or more enjoyable or educational and then start to gravitate toward using that website. You only have so much time. If you find an alternative site that you like that might very well end up being your "addiction" and then that site could build critical mass.
I used to start the morning with my laptop at Starbucks. I no longer do that. For the longest time I did that every morning. Then something changed and I found something else to do in the AM rather than that and achieved the same benefit. As an aside this is well known by Starbucks. I was told by one manager that at all costs they try to keep a SB being renovated open lest they loose people who have made it a habit to stop by and pickup their coffee.
Now all this may or may not be important to PG. And sure a little downtime isn't going to have a major impact on usage.
But there is no question that it is a good idea to get to the bottom of why this happened. I have found in the past it always pays to do a post-mortem on any system problem as many times there is something lurking that will cause that same problem in the future.
What do you define as "harm"?
People are creatures of habit. If something isn't available many times they will fork and find something else to do with their time which they might find as or more enjoyable or educational and then start to gravitate toward using that website. You only have so much time. If you find an alternative site that you like that might very well end up being your "addiction" and then that site could build critical mass.
I used to start the morning with my laptop at Starbucks. I no longer do that. For the longest time I did that every morning. Then something changed and I found something else to do in the AM rather than that and achieved the same benefit. As an aside this is well known by Starbucks. I was told by one manager that at all costs they try to keep a SB being renovated open lest they loose people who have made it a habit to stop by and pickup their coffee.
Now all this may or may not be important to PG. And sure a little downtime isn't going to have a major impact on usage.
But there is no question that it is a good idea to get to the bottom of why this happened. I have found in the past it always pays to do a post-mortem on any system problem as many times there is something lurking that will cause that same problem in the future.