skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This post happens about once a week on the Amazon forums. I've watched it play out dozens of times on the S3 and Cloudfront forums too, and every single time it turns out to be operator error.

In this case, the guy didn't realize he needed to take snapshots of his volumes. It's not surprising, really, since the documentation isn't so great for AWS, and it's probably even more painful knowing that it would have been a single button click to back up his volume using Amazon's tools.

But in the end, there's nothing to see here. Just like the guy who wakes up in the morning to find all his S3 files mysteriously gone (after he 'renamed' his bucked the previous night by dropping and recreating it), it always turns out to be the user shooting himself in the foot.

And in the cases when Amazon actually does something wrong, they're always on top of it immediately and back with a public explanation within hours. (from my experience)
The testimonials on each page make it look fake, anybody could have written those.
I think this is more useful for people trying to enter the industry. Startups looking to hire generally look more at what you have done, what code have you written. My last job interview asked to see my github / or any code examples. So this article to me just says "hey, you claim to be a coder. Let me see code that you took to write. I don't care if it's perfect, just let me see that you are constantly trying to solve problems and are interested in coding."
How to Force Anyone to Follow You on Twitter - Twitter hack
What this article's analogy misses is the hook that keeps (informed) people caught at Facebook. They've captured a de facto sole online social community. Your family and friends (both real and virutal) are on Facebook. Moving means severing many of those connections, and severing the ease of access to them.

In that sense, Facebook's actions approach extortion. Put up with our expanded, self-serving use of your data, or lose your relationships. In the analogy, moving to a different apartment building doesn't mean losing access to your friends.
Somehow I knew that was going to happen ;)
The problem is that doing great applications that sells well it's harder when you need to make them looks polished like iphone ones with such a big variety of devices. Soon your fridge will use Android, that doesn't mean I'd like to develop apps for it.

Also iPhone users have been "trained" for years with iTunes to buy digital content.
Reminds me of the scene in Meet the Parents where Ben Stiller is thrown off the airplane and interrogated for saying bomb.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQ25xMRHtj4
Wow, tested and verified.

Somebody is working late tonight.
Animated query on Duckduckgo
Okay, all followers of everyone just dropped to 0...
Already posted twice:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1334735
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1334747
banned on 3rd add..
Game is over, I have zero followers now.
Hedge Funds Gain More Than 1% In April; Paulson Shines
Wow, that was quick (or the timing was just right) - it was available 10 minutes ago.
That's quite funny. I just wanted to try this out and received an internal server error. Now all my followers are gone nor am I still following anyone. Twitter strikes back!
looks like they are getting on top of it, it is on mashable, and i now have 0 followers and am following 0. nice fun, best pr would be to clean it up, and publish who did what and when (hahah)
It seems they are doing something about it already, the few 'high profile' users I checked now have 0 following and followers.
Interesting. My "following" and "followers" counts just dropped to 0.
Not sure why people are down-voting this. This seems like a reasonable effort at argument by analogy. In point of fact, it is not uncommon in many parts of the world to pay for protection. Unfortunately, this creates an incentive for those providing the protection to also encourage the perception that protection is needed (possibly by committing crimes themselves). This is where the analogy seems to break down, as it is hard to see how private educators can foster the perception that public schools are failing (unless they are the people promoting standardized testing!).
Heh, I used this a bunch of times. It did work just fine, I had all sorts of people following me who really shouldn't care about me. And now I have 0 followers.
Seems to be fixed. I get an internal server error now. Damn, that was interesting.
And the command now gives "internal server error"
GPGPU with C# ('Accelerator' from Microsoft Research)
Looks like they're working on it... following/followers counts are blank for everyone
DO NOT DO IT! I just attempted an Accept BillGates and both my "followers" and "following" are reset to zero. this better be a bug. http://twitter.com/faramarzhashemi
Reminds me of that concept for a code editor UI with bubbles[1]. If the user interfaces let me visually organize the code in a way that makes sense, then the way the data is saved on disk doesn't really matter anymore.

[1] http://geekswithblogs.net/andrewbrust/archive/2010/03/12/cod...

On the flip side, I guess there's the problem of being locked to the applications
Stephen Fry is following me XD
They are at least able to tell if you've used it--my account just lost all its followers. http://twitter.com/sjwalter

I'd had a legitimate 30ish followers, used this bug a few times, now 0.
The funny thing I come back to question myself with after seeing ExpandoObject and not needing to declare types (var blah = ), is, why not just go all the way to Ruby instead of being stuck inbetween?
Is it broken now? Both followers and follow count is 0 now?!
PSA for Developers writing iPhone apps that are not Universal
Just lost all my followers and the people i was following!!!! OMG!!!! Twitter took action.
amazing. They found out, it seems: right now everyone seems to have 0 following and 0 followers.
yep was posted here 45 minutes ago:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1334735
Twitter saw the bug: no one is following anyone right now.
Is it an exploit or is it a valid command? I don't think we hacked anything, we just typed in some text that causes people to follow us, for all we know that's a new feature of twitter.
Wow they fixed that really fast.
Kudos to Twitter for taking action quickly at least.
Twitter damage control:
TRUNCATE followers;
well, i can tell you right now that my followed and following lists were both just now wiped out, and using the accept bug now produces an internal server error.

edit: seems everyone is at 0/0, but the bug still produces an error for me.
My first reaction was to agree with your point.

But I wonder if there are varying levels of non-seriousness.

Names like Google and Yahoo definitely aren't serious, but they also have a sort of generic quality. Not in a bad sense, I just mean they don't evoke a specific silly image in my head - at least not by themselves (when I think Yahoo, I see a big purple !, but that's by marketing design).

Duck Duck Go, though, doesn't have that same nebulous quality. There's something more concrete there, and more specific imagery that comes to mind. And I think that's why someone might react that way to the name and not to the names Google or Yahoo or Bing. It's less vague, and decidedly more Saturday morning cartoon.

Is that bad? I don't know, it doesn't necessarily bother me. But I understand why some people view it differently than the search engine names already out there.
It is difficult for me to tell whether the author is joking at times or being serious; his arguments are lacking substance and the statements about Python are just silly.
It appears that they just wiped everyone's list of followers? My feed still works though.
Sometimes I'm annoyed, and saddened by how reactionary the internet can get. WE might look at it and see it as a joke, because our frame of perspective is totally different. The government, not so much.

If someone 'jokes' about blowing up a building, and the government does nothing, suddenly this is a whole different story. People ought to start figuring out how that works.

Pity the guy.
First, a masters in teaching is not hard to get. You basically just need to show up.

Also, the base pay of a teacher in NYC with 20 years experience is $83,000 (with pay going up if they have degrees). $83k/year for 39 hours/week, 9 months a year is not bad, even by NYC standards. (It's equivalent to $99k/year working all year.).

http://schools.nyc.gov/Offices/DHR/TeacherPrincipalSchoolPro...

They also get to retire at 55 with a full pension, assuming they started work at 25. So you need to factor in the value of those extra years of pension, and fewer years of work to get it.

http://www.psc-cuny.org/PensionApermanentDecision.htm
I think everyone is at 0. I didn't use the bug and I'm at 0/0
If you're in the Python, Clojure, Erlang, Haskell playground, you'd like F#. Also, clojure and scala on .NET are pretty quiet now (e.g. (I believe) they both still do type erasure on CLR just to conform with JVM), but the potential is huge.
Watch 37signals talk about server infrastructure
Looks like they are fixing the problem, everyone has 0 followers and 0 following right now.
Actually, I didn't do it .... and everything is set to 0's on my profile as well. Either it's part of their clean-up, or their attempts to fix this accidentally wiped everybody back to zero.
Now I am getting a 502 when I try to post accept messages.
They appear to be working on some sort of fix right now.

If you look at "following" lists, everything is showing up as zero for me right now, as in it shows that I'm not following anyone. All other users that I check are also showing that they aren't following anyone.
We support 128-bit and 256-bit encryption. We have no access to the keys. In the event that any of our customers lost their encryption phrase, we would not be able to restore the data.

edit: Well we also take operational and technical security precautions to validate our data integrity on a real-time basis. Our facilities are monitored on hardware and network levels 24/7/365. And we meet Federal HIPAA guidelines for privacy and security.
I think you should think of those things long before you're about to hit deploy. Once you hit that point, you're probably not going to change your mind.
All twitter accounts are reporting 0 followers / 0 following. This is going to be a fascinating study on how Twitter manages crises.
My problem with Pepsi is I am not fond of the taste of Pepto-Bismol.

But then on the whole Coke/Pepsi argument I am more a Dr. Pepper drinker.
UK's Gordon Brown to resign as prime minister
yep me too, 0 and 0 after testing it . . .
This is up there with putting everybody in a root terminal by default on their Androids.
I went crazy and start adding the top 200 twitter accounts:
http://twitaholic.com/top100/followers/

Thought I could sell it afterwards or something. lol
confirmed, everyone is at 0
> Of course, snowstorm spin is possible only if the public (and journalists) are statistically illiterate.

The inability or unwillingness to do statistics, especially on the part of the media, is indeed a problem. However, it doesn't require statistics to clear up the motivating example-- confusion between weather and climate.

Fifteen years ago, one could laugh or feel sorry for those who couldn't make this simple distinction. In 2010, it feels more like willful ignorance. In other words, Inhofe's family built an igloo as a political act, not as a result of statistical illiteracy.
I think that is up to them. I can imagine an author and editor producing a book and selling it on Fifobooks (my startup), and have an agreement between the two of them.

I see it similar to cofounders launching a startup; they each bring something to the table and it is up to them to agree on a valuation/profit share.
Perfect analogy. Looks like Twitter is resetting followers/followees as we speak for people trying it. Is this their 4 story containment unit?
Subjectively disagree on point 1, I like reading DDG SERPs.

Subjectively agree on point 2, I find it a little disorienting not to be anchored to a page in the result set.

DDG is my default searchbar site.
Ask HN: No more twitter followers?
My twitter Followers and Following both read 0. I assume this is related to the auto-follow bug, but still interesting.

http://twitter.com/following
Except he doesn't know his FP, e.g. he doesn't know about TCO and how you can use that to avoid having recursion blow the stack.

WRT to 2, your scoping discipline is pretty orthogonal to your typing discipline. E.g. dynamically typed mainline LISP was dynamically scoped before Common Lisp adopted Scheme static scoping. And I'm sure there are dynamically scoped statically typed languages out there (if I ever learned about one, I would have tried to forget it as soon as possible (worst of both worlds)).
Thank god. Its everyone.
Now he's at 0 along with everyone else
It's 0 for me, and I didn't send an "accept" tweet.
"block" :P
Everyone shows 0 followers, but your stream still shows those you follow. Interesting.
15 Agonizing automotive atrocities
Awesome list of crap!
Yea.. Sorry folks. Pre-mature panic. Looks like a site-wide event
This is due to a lack of being able to think abstractly, not with files and hierarchical folders specifically (which is a specific kind of abstraction), and I find people's frustration frustrating myself. If you gave the same person a print of a photo, and asked them to resize and fax, they'd have no trouble doing so with a photocopier and a fax machine (other than that these devices are often complex themselves, but that has nothing to do with the photo print as portable storage, which is all a file is).
I have to think that if you're getting your job at a job fair at the end of senior year you aren't qualified for a startup.
EDIT: My original message invited people not to try this. It turns out that everyone's counter is showing zero followers, regardless of whether you tried the hack or not. Thanks Travis for pointing this out. I was misled by my desktop client which cached my follower number.
This app-centric model works well until you find that you want different apps to operate on the same file - which will eventually happen on devices that people spend a lot of time in

The file-less model may work well for a consumption-centric system like the iPhone where you're not expected to spend much time on it trying to produce content (and the places where you do - like email and sms- the mechanism is simple and is handled by a single app). Even there, photos are exposed in a special way because it's understood that people will want to do various interesting things with them (like edit them or upload them using different apps).

I think the real problem is in how the file system is presented to users.

When a user saves a file, they have no clue where they saved it.
The concept of file shortcuts is another killer - I've seen many cases where someone copied a shortcut onto a pen drive - or worse- burned it on a CD.

Instead of presenting a 'Save' dialog, have the user drag some file icon next to the top of the app into the desktop or some folder.

When browsing a list of files on the system - instead of showing folders in a hierarchy, show a list of apps - in each one, show the list of files whose last modification was done by that app.

Many users already follow a model like this- they just fire up the app and click the Open button which shows the most recently saved location.
Yes, this is true -- I was speaking figuratively :)
Upvoted - good criticism of my criticism. My reading was concentrating more on the "good or bad" part, rather than what area they're attributing the area to.
I can't believe they didn't create an OOB mechanism for accept/deny requests, especially since they send so much meta data w/ each tweet anyway.

This seems like an extremely basic design flaw.
Ok, you answered about half of the first question. Not good enough.

If you really had "NSA-level" encryption you'd be able to do a lot better than that. (Unless your answer was "I can't discuss that and this product is only available to US government employees with the appropriate security clearances", of course.)
It's not about the size of the market as much as the quality.

Would you rather have 100,000 potential users and make 1,000 sales or 200,000 users and make 800. Or maybe make the same amount of sale but being able to charge more because you know that who spend $500 for a phone is more incline to spend $10 on an app than somebody who spent $100?
Here you're assuming all your photo work can be done from within one program (and this seems to be along the same lines as the original article).

I reject this idea completely. Files are powerful because they let me manipulate the same object in many different programs.
I had the exact same feeling of panic, then relief to find out I'm not alone.
If, quoting him quoting Mark Tarver, Python is indeed "not new; its just a sugaring on the Lisp genotype in favour of a syntax that people feel comfortable with.", who then follows with a note on how far that got, it still "went somewhere", both in the adoption by so many of its interesting syntax and dragging people even closer to Lisp than the half-way that Steele said Java accomplished.
Yeah, I can be rather predictable at times. What I don't understand is how coreyrecvlohe didn't expect this. :-)
Electricity-Generating Shock Absorbers
even if you don't try it, you'll lose all of your followers
I would guess this exploit has always been possible until today? What's interesting is that someone has probably been wielding this secret power well before it got outed here on hacker news.
I think you should take it one step further and along with listen to their needs, put them in front of a computer, and WATCH what they're doing. Find out what their quirks are, how they expect the software to work and build on that.
while the notion that files are "dying" may be true, the way iphone os handles them is still not usable.

When you see a photo on your desk, do you think “a file!” or do you think “a photo of my family!”?

i think, "a photo of my family", but then i think, "i want to make a copy of this and mail it to someone" so i take it to walgreens and get a copy, then i go to the post office and mail it.

to send a copy of the photo on my ipad, can i carry the photo with me as i launch the e-mail application? or can i carry it with me as i launch a flickr uploading application? or carry it into beejive and send it in an instant message?

on a mac you can. you just drag the photo out of iphoto and drop it on some application. on android, you click the share button while in the photos application and up pops a list of every application that can do something with your photo.

on the ipad, it's backwards. you launch the flickr application and then have to find your photo again. and this is restricted to photos, since it's an internal api. any other 3rd party app wishing to share data with another app can't do it. right now if you want to print an e-mail from an ipad, you install a printing application and it has to have an embedded e-mail client where you have to duplicate your settings and e-mail storage. apple could make an api to access your e-mails (not likely) but it's still backwards. the e-mail client should let you print or do anything else with an e-mail from the e-mail client, not the other way around.
"Does that matter to us?"
Yes, I imagine fragmentation would matter when it comes to developing for a platform.
Finding a dynamically scoped statically typed language would be quite a trick: dynamic scope doesn't seem to have caught on outside the Lisp community. (I remember reading academic papers (separately for C++ and Haskell) that tried to explain why you would even want dynamic scoping and "look, wow, here's how to implement it.")
As they used to say, why not just go all the way to Lisp instead of etc?

Just so as not to scare people off.
Concurrency FUD
Funny though ;-) Those guys are quick!
Does this reflect poorly on the file abstraction, or the file picking interface that so many programs tend to use? If you were writing an email, would it really by more intuitive to first select what kind of thing you are attaching before diving into a hierarchical structure, or worse yet, before diving into a monolithic list? It seems to me that it would be better if we can improve how we get the user to pick files (or generally interact with files) instead of doing away with the notion of a file altogether.
http://duckduckgo.com/?q=lmddgtfy&v=
What I don't understand is why he apparently didn't do his homework. Before announcing a new online backup service on HN you can bet that I'd be studying the material for months on end to avoid a thorough cleaning of my clock.

Go easy on him, he's put a ton of work in to the graphics, we all know that's what is what counts when you do online backup.
Redo title to gizmodo brings down twitter!
I just ditched my iPhone 3G and got an Android phone just to have files back. Seriously.

And I've never been happier with a phone (it's an HTC Desire, FWIW).

The death of files is the death of freedom.
Official:

http://status.twitter.com/post/587210796/follow-bug-discover...
The big problem, I think, is that this decentralized system requires "a centralized database with pointers to user profiles". Who pays for and curates this database?
I'm really looking forward to seeing how they handle this.
It's a shame some HN users down vote people just because they disagree with their opinion. I didn't seen anything in this comment that would be considered offensive to anyone. I didn't even see any FUD.

Can any of you really disagree with "No more viruses, worms, trojans, piles of malware..."? In all the time I have been using Linux (OpenBSD now) I haven't had this sort of problem. I am not saying this systems are invulnerable. But OSS/*NIX system users will probably not have this sort of problem and even if they do it won't be as often as Windows users.

P.S. Maybe the title attracted only Windows and C# people?
Imagine if in the real world, the only place you could put food is your refrigerator...

The machine isn't the real world. In particular: People often like to have software do things for them. But software has no intelligence. So we have to design a system that both the human and the software can understand.

If you had a personal robot that would automatically throw out, and reorder, any food that's more than six months past the expiration date -- but only if the food is in the refrigerator -- you might find that you would rather store 100% of your food in the refrigerator than have to deal with your own shopping.

Then, a few years later, when you smell the six-month-old food that you accidentally forgot to put in the fridge, you may find yourself wishing for a system that actively constrains you from storing food outside the fridge. And then hides the fridge from you, so that all you see is a list of foods and you don't even have to care about where those foods are being kept.

This is the age-old art of database design. On the one hand, databases often feel constrained and clunky. On the other hand, if you learn to deal with the constraints, magical machines can come along and save you thousands of hours.
Yeah, when I get the replacements from the drive manufacturer, that's how I receive them. But I've ordered pillows that are better packed than what I get from Newegg.
Five hidden dangers of Facebooking | I Didn't Know That
That's my exact thought. Google and Yahoo! come off as genuinely irreverent and fun (but, importantly, not childish). It's like something you'd expect a couple 20-something hackers to name their product.

Duck Duck Go comes off as the 50 yr old guy who yells "'Fo Shizzle!" and holds his hand out for a fist bump. It's something you'd expect from an older guy trying to pretend to be a 20something hacker. It thus comes off as insincere.