Sites that do user notices on a regular basis often create a system where small bits of text go into a DB along with start & end times for display, the admin who posted it (for auditing purposes), countries where it's visible, etc. There's an ACL for who's authorized to post new notices. Then the main site template has a section that's shown only when there's an active notice and automatically disappears when the notice is stale.
All this is probably overkill for a site like HN. However, think about things like tsunami warnings on the Google homepage. These get shown only in a certain geographical location, they need to be approved by multiple people, and they need to get pushed out to tens of thousands of servers, all within minutes of the alert coming in. There's a lot of complexity that can go into even a simple feature.
I love the page source! It's educational in its simplicity and confident in its austerity. I've used it as a learning guide in the past, when I was starting to code simple projects.
I promise to do a post-mortem (with details), but from my perspective the issues that began on Jan 6th are ongoing. It's all I've been working on since then.
Once I get a break I'll write a blog post about it, and try the Matasano/Square and Stripe CTFs :)
As do I. In fact, one of my favourite Firefox add-ons is called NoSquint, which remembers your zoom setting on a per-site basis. For me, Hacker News is constantly at 150%, and wikipedia is 180%.
As for the arrows being pixelated, rather than having higher resolution images, shouldn't the images be replaced with unicode?
After playing with the extension for a moment, there's one key feature that'll probably make me keep it installed: per-site configuration of text-zoom vs. full browser-zoom. Firefox's "Zoom Text Only" is a global setting, but the extension permits it on a per-site basis.
I think the answer to your question is yes, but at the risk of being downvoted, you might get a nasty reality check if you view source and do a find on the string "table."
I think sort of statement is pg's secret intention / reasoning behind keeping HN the same: hackers will make it work for themselves (e.g., via custom stylesheet etc.).
The problem with that reasoning is that it only applies to desktop. It's mobile where reading HN is painful, and that's exactly where I can't use custom stylesheets, at least not without installing a new browser.
I guess most folks do know the difference between their own local timezone and UTC. That would have really saved me a couple of seconds to find out the difference between PST and UTC first.
I'm sure you can find PST in a standard somewhere too, but the point is that by using UTC+x everyone can instantly determine their local time.
Okay quick quiz: What time is it currently in Europe/Zaporozhye? ... Time up! Alright next question. What time is it currently in UTC-3? ... Time up! Final question: What time is it currently in the GST timezone? ... Time up!
All of them used standard formats. Which one was the easiest?
pg actually just types the text of the page in when you request it. This system increases the average page generation time, but also increases civility.
This "planned maintenance" is just a cover for a quick nap.
I object to labeling "Tweaking our storage configuration a bit" as "details", though. ;)