YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Incident with Actions, Pull Requests and Issues

45 points dkpk 2 hours ago 30 comments

esher 1 hour ago | parent

Oh again?

phtrivier 55 minutes ago | parent

At this point, a status bar color when gh is down would be enough.

esher 1 minute ago | parent

I am using Linear. Some component in Linear showed me the warning. I went to a GitHub PR, there was no warning. Hm.

bob1029 53 minutes ago | parent

I was just debating if I was going to side step actions altogether for a new build and deployment flow.

I'm at a point where I'm going to set two permanent branches on the remote, one pertaining to each environment. The targets will poll for the latest commit at their configured branch and perform a rebuild internally if a change is detected. Assuming git core ops are still alive, it is possible to keep this running. It's also easy to migrate to a different vendor.

baxtr 44 minutes ago | parent

Whose agents have escaped this time?

VorpalWay 42 minutes ago | parent

Is github built out of a house of cards? How does this stuff keep happening?

the_sleaze_ 33 minutes ago | parent

Sort of.

It's on Microsoft Azure.

BoppreH 17 minutes ago | parent

GitHub usually says it's because of the increased demand from AI. I didn't believe it until I saw the numbers: https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/the-august-17...

username_my1 22 minutes ago | parent

I'm genuinely amazed by anyone still using github CI for anything serious.

sdcfgy 19 minutes ago | parent

Yep. We're a huge customer. It hurts. We are making exit plans.

johnhamlin 18 minutes ago | parent

Which alternative do you like?

orsenthil 21 minutes ago | parent

Yeah, only yesterday I let claude build and deploy me a end to end project that will flicker my lifx light-bulb when commits to any open source project lands. In the morning I saw it stopped around 11 pm PST yesterday. I was wondering why and I was wondering, how easy it is do a complete working project like this in minutes and what is stopping people to do 100s of such project per day. Github wasn't built for this scenario.

xnorswap 12 minutes ago | parent

Free Github Actions weren't built for this scenario.

Make Github Actions a paid-tier exclusive and this problem goes away.

GitHub are too scared to do that after the backlash around charging people for their own runners, but this would be a very different thing, simply stop giving free actions to people who have never paid them a penny.

LaffertyDev 9 minutes ago | parent

> GitHub are too scared to do that after the backlash around charging people for their own runners, but this would be a very different thing, simply stop giving free actions to people who have never paid them a penny.

I had no idea they charged you to run your own runner. I am immediately of the opinion that is wrong.

Conversely, I would have no issues if GHA become a premium product. Or maybe "your actions only run when we have spare compute". I've personally given Github money (back when private repos cost $$) and wouldn't be concerned about doing it again.

That is to say, I think you've nailed it.

zanderwohl 20 minutes ago | parent

I have not understood, and still do not understand, why everyone locks themselves into github's CI/CD pipeline. It's not hard to set up checks that run on a generic docker setup. I have a home server that I use for all my builds and checks, with a github actions config to run manually if I can't VPN into my home network.

Besides being more reliable, it's just faster to run on a machine you control.

jasbury 15 minutes ago | parent

Because that model does not scale for teams of developers who need a consistent view of CI health, build health, and PR readiness

999900000999 15 minutes ago | parent

Because I don’t want to maintain a server and pay for it.

I have a few GitHub actions that have ran for years without issue. You add a yaml file to your repo and it’s done.

As a hobbyist, I’m happy.

I would never do any real work with actions though.

tombot 12 minutes ago | parent

Even if you still use the actions the CI / CD minutes can still happen on a self hosted machine. https://docs.github.com/en/actions/concepts/runners/self-hos...

flohofwoe 11 minutes ago | parent

Maintaining Windows and macOS self hosted GH (or GL) runners is a hassle I really don't want to deal with anymore (been there done that).

baq 10 minutes ago | parent

It's probably the biggest, bestest, hardestest proof of 'worse is better' anyone could think of. The system is so dumb and inconsistent and simplistic it's actually a selling point: 'everyone in my team knows yaml' is an argument I kept hearing, but this conveniently ignores the fact that a) yaml is a serialization format, not a business logic description language b) the values in the yamls are a cursed mix of shell, whatever js variant it is c) actions themselves are mixes of scripts that accept completely schemaless values, so good luck figuring things out (at least in the pre-LLM era, anyway).

It's like everyone collectively agreed that assembly is bad, yes, but building CI/CD in assembly is actually good.

woodruffw 7 minutes ago | parent

There’s a great deal to be said for having (inter alia) matrices, job dependencies, and cross-platform runners already working and available. Docker won’t immediately provide those things.

fidotron 7 minutes ago | parent

One reason is it lets you access Windows build machines for free when you no longer have any around.

I would not underestimate how strategically important that will prove to be for Microsoft moving forward.

provenboard 17 minutes ago | parent

doesnt surprise me

sergiotapia 14 minutes ago | parent

There must a top 0.05% of users that account for the vast majority of this bs. GitHub should charge them and serve the majority.

anonreplier 4 minutes ago | parent

Or just punitively rate limit them

kevmo 13 minutes ago | parent

Microsoft should have never been allowed to buy github. A functioning government would have prevented the acquisition.

The entire US economy is tottering due to a lack of anti-trust enforcement.

Even The Economist, an oligarch-friendly magazine, has been hitting the alarm bell on this for over a decade: "America needs a giant dose of competition" https://www.economist.com/briefing/2016/03/26/too-much-of-a-...

richwater 11 minutes ago | parent

At this point just start charging and get rid of free repos. It's obviously killing the service.

mglvsky 11 minutes ago | parent

Why they didn't prompt something like "please make whole system more reliable, don't make mistakes"?

donandon 5 minutes ago | parent

Exactly! Let's keep it light and casual!

rvz 4 minutes ago | parent

Last time there was an incident like this was 4 days ago.

There are no more excuses to self host. You can now ask Claude to do it for you, given that “coding is solved”.

Or even vibe code your own GitHub at this point.