Same error for me, too. Not at all surprising that a first time Rails app wouldn't be able to handle the craziness that is showing up on the hacker news front page.

My sympathies to the author. This stuff is hard. Don't get dispirited by it.

Same here, still looks to be down ...

It stopped working suddenly! I just restarted the server. Hopefully everything should be ok.

No Joy. Still NoMethodError in SearchController#search

I'm still getting "undefined method `[]' for nil:NilClass" in "lib/modules/google_count.rb:22:in `search_count'"

I'm going to guess that your Google API parser is being rate limited thanks to the traffic volume you're seeing. Try adding some logging to that piece.

Also, you are running an outdated version of Rails that needs a security patch.

Great look for a first Rails project though, keep plugging away! Remember that most people aren't lucky enough to have popularity break their app ;)

Edit for code sample:

    Rails.logger.info " * Hitting Google now: #{your_google_parser.response.inspect}"

Redeploy, then:

   heroku logs -tail

Second edit for Google API advice:

From what I remember the GDATA APIs have not-entirely-documented rate limits. One naive solution I wrote in the past merely waited one second between sequential requests. This will obviously impact your app's responsiveness, so you'll want to figure out another strategy once you get it back up. Also, once you implement your rate limiting you still might have to wait ten minutes or so before Google lets you back in.

You guessed it right... unfortunately, this will end up killing my break on hn :( I will try to increase google rate limits

Try faking the Google piece for now (maybe only on every other request?) to get the app up and running again. You can legitimately fix it after the traffic dies down.

Edit: You got muted down to the 4th page, at #130 something down from the top 30. Probably the victim of some flagging or a moderator. Sorry.

Nope. Most assuredly not ok.

Same here :-(