A few days ago we got an email from HN user thehodge (
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=thehodge), aka Dom Hodgson, telling us that HN's SSL cert was about to expire—as indeed it was. All the renewal notices had been going to Scott's old YC email, which no longer works.
Dom runs https://littlewarden.com/, which monitors sites for upcoming issues and lets you know when you're about to publicly embarrass yourself. In a twist on eat-your-own-dog-food (eat someone else's dog food as a service?), he had set up alerts for HN in their system. Lo and behold, it delivered the goods, and that is why you're reading HN as usual today instead of certificate scoldings, and therefore also why my ass is in a saved state, which is how I like it.
I figure the least we can do is proclaim our thanks, so all hail Dom and Little Warden! Yes, I know most of you can do this in 3 lines of Python and a cron job, and yes yes, there are other alert services—but only one has personally helped you waste time unimpeded on the internet. That is all.
