skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Amazon likes to respond to Google with it's own price drops and product launches. It's telling that their announcements are orthogonal instead of direct competition with Spanner.

When Google announced Spanner back in 2012, I'm sure Amazon and Microsoft started teams to reproduce their own versions.

Spanner is not just software. The private network reduces partitions. GPS and atomic clocks for every machine help synchronize time globally. There won't be a Hadoop equivalent for Spanner, unless it includes the hardware spec.
> do a large number of players actually pay attention to that?

I anecdotally do.
Is this a bold move by Linode, or am I the only Linode customer (7 years going) who chose them in part because they steered clear of the bottom of the market?
You'd be wasting a lot of lifetimes if every kid learning a programming language wasted your minimum of 8 seconds to download a runtime to run something as simple as hello world.

A lot of people in developing countries don't have your luxury of bandwidth either. And besides, how many games on Steam are written in smalltalk? How much software running on Linux? So little in the best case scenario that nobody cares
HTML Robot
This only proves the company you worked and you are so incompetent. Does Google hire Indians who cannot speak English? No. You last company sucks and you worked there.
Holy shit.
From a brief scan it looks like the paper concentrates on recovering a numeric pin, but these attacks never get worse, only better, so I assume full keyboard access is not too far off.
What's the defense? Have your phone manage the passwords and unlock via fingerprint?
Very interesting. How does this pricing compare to AWS Aurora? https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/pricing/
The Intercom Messaging Starter Kit
I didn't pick up on it until just a moment ago, but when you say "They say", it's actually Eric Brewer saying that -- who's most known for coming up with the CAP theorem. I think they've got a pretty good understanding of it!
A chance to catch something obviously wrong that gets in the way of the workers but that they lack the power to fix. Big companies sometimes drop the ball. No grunt complains to the face of the CEO.

Apparently he missed one such thing by sheer bad luck. From the comments:

"Bill queried the knowledge base, which was normally painfully slow, but this time it was snappy and responsive."
The country is benefiting my taking in skilled labor from the rest of the world. Unless you're a Native American, you really don't have much grounds to criticize foreigners "taking your job".
I'll say this as someone who's pretty happy being on Digital Ocean - Linode's support is amazing. If they had had a $5 price point for one-and-done projects forever ago, I would have never used DO.
Moral of this (and every other) story: Never, ever connect to a free, public wifi.

ETA: This was meant to be glib, given the frequency of such stories seen on HN, and the many children below are quite correctly pointing out that the real moral is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13645694
Reading through the caveat page [1], it seems the marketing copy is not quite in line with reality in terms of ability to scale down directly:

> Decreasing the size of an EBS volume is not supported. However, you can create a smaller volume and then migrate your data to it using application-level tools such as robocopy.

[1] - https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/consider...
popped by the comments just to find something like this (but the link doesnt work)! thanks anyway!
Thank you for replying. My problem is that I want to start programming for either the web (front or back), desktop (¡java/python/ruby?), or mobile (¡android/ios?). In the case of web, either front or back, there are 100s of tutorials, and 100s of technologies, and 100s of frameworks. Same for Java and maybe less for mobile. So I just want to know what would be the path of quickest start, because if I try to follow all the options, I would be ending up doing nothing.
Your making value decisions based on expertise in your existing delivery methods and trying to map them 1-1 to aws features, that may or may not map 1-1. You keep disparaging aws' pricing (stupidly expensive, serious premium), without providing an alternative/baseline.

Again, if you have numbers and not broad statements we'd appreciate them.
Oddly enough, I regularly use three versions of Office -- 2007, 2010 and 2016 -- with zero problems.
A 5-Minute Fix for Client-Side Spaghetti Code
Alright TFL, your turn...
I've always felt that those options were mostly there as a stopgap while you migrate to a larger instance or figure out another plan. I don't think they want most users adding features a la carte as that would throw off their numbers and make it difficult to efficiently provision instances.
There was a lot of hype for electric light which was absolutely justified.
I'd love to hear some more specifics, because this sounds like deliciously vague marketing speak. Cost is cost. 100$ isn't all of the sudden 50$ because I have "rethought my architectures". Personally, my mindset isn't cloud or non-cloud. It is about how how to solve an engineering problem in a reliable, maintainable, repeatable, and cost-effective manner.
Ok, the problem seems like a clear-cut supply-and-demand one. So if artists don't want to look like a bunch of greedy jerks selling tickets for $500+ apiece, and there's only so many seats in the venue, why not increase the number of shows? Maybe the venue is too booked-up and the artists get too tired playing the same venue 5 days in a row and being on the road 5x as long, but it's a thought.

The other question I have is: decades ago, concert tickets didn't cost this much, even after adjusting for inflation, and that's when rock bands were in their prime. What happened? I'm pretty sure it didn't cost the equivalent of $500 to see Led Zeppelin in concert in the early/mid 70s, so why does it cost so much to see U2 (an old band now) in 2017?
It also says right on that page "$20 per month"
As others have pointed out here, a lottery system with ID can help beat this. Pearl Jam's fan club ticket sales require you to choose ahead of time which concerts you want to go to (max 2 tickets per show) and then on lottery day, you're informed if you won or not and your card is charged. Although a bit opaque, it does make it harder to game the system.
Good point, but public critics' opinions are amplified, and can make or break a work.
My pet peeve about Slack as of late is -- is turned into a single, long-dash. Even when you're inside ` or ```.

Which leaves me juggling there on my keyboard, trying to delete one, move my cursor and add a second dash before submitting.
> Not every application can handle Spanner's ~5ms minimum query time, but if you can, then you can have that latency for a very high-throughput workload
Are you writing instrumentation tests for your android app?
I used to be at Google; AGPL was banned there. I hear that it is banned at many other large/huge shops.

I run a tiny business. AGPL is banned there too.

It isn't an "unreasonable fear". It is a reasonable decision based on mitigation of risk. AGPL is a risky license for end users; it goes too far beyond the Four Freedoms.
Call for testing: snaps in trusty
> If you are just calling the service through it's API

That's contestable afaik.

> through the programming language interface

i.e. dynamically linking which is usually understood to be prohibited unless linking code has a compatible license.

> either CLI

Here's the problem - you can take any GPL library, make small CLI or REST adapter for it and license it GPL as well, then use that adapter from your proprietary application - is that still allowed? Because if it is then GPL can't ever be enforced and if it isn't you can't call CLI APIs even if original libraries themselves provide it.
Heh, I made the same thing but with global endpoints and swappable drivers so that components can be shared and endpoints can be stubbed/mocked: https://gitHub.com/tonyhb/tectonic

Think that genraally we're learning that these things should be automated for us: loading data traditionally sucks. GraphQL is really where it's at!

edit: that mobile keyboard though...
Honest question:

What do yo mean by "normal usability stuff broke horribly again"?

I'm using Neon now and it is one of the least annoying distros and DEs I have ever worked with.
Custom ELF program headers–what, why and how
This particular idea is bad.
With most (all?) of these conferencing, the host is the one that has to have an account and pay - otherwise nobody would be able to use them for support, sales calls, etc.
because if you aren't spending 8k/yr on your database then you don't need this level of scale
I'm not disagreeing. You're absolutely right that the other people reacted badly or could have done more to prevent things from deteriorating so far. Like I said, it goes both ways and I feel that either side could have defused the situation.

But since the guy was asking for help, I think it's fine to focus on what that guy could do. Perhaps I shouldn't have focused so much on what he should have done in the past.
At least you still have a job. What stops companies get jobs outsourced to other countries?
Yeah the load balancer was just intended for the application servers. Running a hot DB secondary with just read accesses is possible by setting up manually, but tends to require a lot of maintenance work during updates in our experience.

To be honest, we have not figured out how to connect the DO servers to AWS yet. Do you have experience with that?
It's not fair to compare these since Aurora is a traditional relational database. It does not have a horizontal scalability solution aside from read replicas.
Amazon already has Aurora: https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/details/

You're right that there's literally nothing else out there that has tight synchronization using atomic clocks, though.
not OP, but one thing we as developers should recognize is that programming itself is likely to become merely a skill like operating a spreadsheet or typing. In much the same way, writing was once a skill available (or at least, practiced) by a very small subset of people, and the spread of literacy made the job of "scribe" largely irrelevant over time. Children today are learning how to program—perhaps not yet in the numbers we might have imagined, but a growing number. As they grow up, they are not going to pursue jobs as "programmers" or "developers", any more than I would pursue a job in a typing pool. They will merely incorporate this skill into whatever role they end up in.

Those best suited to compete in that scenario are going to have deep experience in some area where programming is an applied skill, not an end unto itself.
The other commenter addressed this well, but I want to add something of an ethical dilemma to the mix.

Sure we can have schools teach people how to use PCs, but then people only know how to use certain software. If you've been taught extensively how to use Office and Windows, and that's all a computer is, then LibreOffice, docs, and Linux will be a challenge. Microsoft loves this and Apple has used it extensively in the past.

The danger for competitors is real. Office has caught up in the few features it was lacking; I've seen a resurgence in usage and very rarely see freshman using Google docs anymore (when I entered uni it was the opposite). Google relying on a dated, unintiutive interface that kids don't learn in school anymore is going to kill them if they don't react.
Not sure. If you need to scale beyond a single master, Aurora won't help in the same way Spanner does though. You can dial up the number of nodes in Spanner dynamically under load with good results.
You're exactly right on RevDel (revision deletion). However, in this case only certain edits were restored after the article was deleted—but the copyright violations were left deleted, so there was no record of them in the public edit history.

That's why I've just restored the edits and revision-deleted the (copyrighted) text, leaving the editor and edit summaries public!
Can you secure an iron cage?
In most cases, they aren't diverting tickets directly to TicketsNow, and if they are, it's a select few. They don't need to. They sell to the public, which includes resellers (whether they be fans or brokers), and that public then sells the tickets on TicketsNow, which show up as verified resale tickets on the ticketmaster/livenation website if barcodes are supplied (or you sell directly out of your ticketmaster account). You can actually list and sell some tickets this way prior to them being available to download, as it syncs the token for the purchase and sells that, and delivers when the tickets are actually issued (tickets routinely have a delayed delivery now).

Ticketmaster makes money on every sale (fees, as well as 7%-12% of the sale amount) so it's not like they are really losing anything this way. In fact, they may make more money, since even if the tickets sell at a premium on resale, if they don't sell for more than the cut the exchange takes, the broker still loses money (which ends up in the hands of the exchange).

It is true that some artists and venues are more amenable to this than others though. Some allow the ticketmaster sanctioned secondary market (TM+), and some don't.
For those who want more information on CSI (Channel State Information):

http://dhalperi.github.io/linux-80211n-csitool/

This allows you to use a custom firmware developed for the Intel 5300 wireless adapter and read the CSI values with each packet.

Every 802.11n implementation that I am aware of keeps a CSI vector (IQ values, typically as integers) within the wifi chip. Both the Wifi AP and STA do this. The CSI vector is updated with every packet, using the training data at the beginning of the packet. (802.11 is CSMA [2] so there is a fixed transmission to start the packet)

In other words, Intel has this nice tool for one of their (now somewhat dated) chips. But CSI is not restricted to Intel chips. Atheros chips have a decent but limited CSI readback method, not quite as nice as Intel's [3]. But CSI has been used for experiments on all major wifi chips out there.

With 802.11n this is used to determine the quality of signal likely to be received on each sub-carrier within the signal.

CSI is useful for many other things: RF experiments, indoor position sensing, and now apparently also password cracking.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier_sense_multiple_access_...

[3] http://pdcc.ntu.edu.sg/wands/Atheros/
Basically replace "Go" in that article with "Java 8". Java 8 makes for a much stronger argument for their situation considering they wouldn't have needed to rewrite any of the Scala code.

The author of the article almost admits it multiple times. With really only one point:

One of the other benefits of Go was widening the pool of backgrounds we can hire. We can take someone from any language background and have them ramped up on Go in weeks. With the Scala side there’s the JVM learning curve, the Java world of containers, black magic of JVM tuning, profiling tools, etc…

Do new developers really need to know about the JVM and tuning? Hell I'm not even an expert with JVM tuning. You can go pretty far with the defaults.... Containers... nobody uses containers anymore. Profiling, debugging, monitoring tools.. ahhh the JVM has the best. You need to profile code regardless of language.

That is like saying Go lang developers really need to know about C and calling channels black magic.

I don't know of a wider pool than Java.
Really a CP system but with the Availability being five 9s or better (less than one failure in 10^6)

How:
1)Hardware - Gobs and Gobs of Hardware and SRE experience

"Spanner is not running over the public Internet — in fact, every Spanner packet flows only over Google-controlled routers and links (excluding any edge links to remote clients). Furthermore, each data center typically has at least three independent fibers connecting it to the private global network, thus ensuring path diversity for every pair of data centers. Similarly, there is redundancy of equipment and paths within a datacenter. Thus normally catastrophic events, such as cut fiber lines, do not lead to partitions or to outages."

2) Ninja 2PC

"Spanner uses two-phase commit (2PC) and strict two-phase locking to ensure isolation and strong consistency. 2PC has been called the “anti-availability” protocol [Hel16] because all members must be up for it to work. Spanner mitigates this by having each member be a Paxos group, thus ensuring each 2PC “member” is highly available even if some of its Paxos participants are down."
A standard UUID generated at the OS level and passed through seamlessly through a browser? Yes.

Client-side control means that you can turn it off depending on TOR, private-mode, VPN, or whatever else. The technical aspects though would make the web faster and easier to deal with.
Wikipedia was the original fake news. For instance, someone might edit an article to say that a person was a known political extremist. Someone else might write an article (not on Wikipedia) saying the same thing (after having read the Wikipedia article). Years later, if the information is questioned on Wikipedia, then editors will add a reference to the off-wiki article, and everyone will be happy. Circular fake news, with truth going down the plughole. The entropic heat death of information.

I've looked at large articles I contributed to a few years ago and they are now disasters. Full of bowdlerisation, inconsistent style, and false snippets of information. I think the abusive nature of many Wikipedia admins, and the hostility of Wikipedia itself to knowledge, will eventually just make it a 4chan with pretentions.
It's not contradictory at all. He's complaining about the prices, and then pointing out that the concert experience, even after paying a boatload for tickets, is very sub-par because of the bad behavior by other concertgoers.

If the high ticket prices guaranteed him a first-class concert experience (no bright cellphones in the air, etc.) then at least the high prices would have some justification. But as it is, they don't when the experience is so poor.

Usually, with other luxury goods and services, the prices are outrageous, but at least you can count on a premium experience. You're not going to buy a Bentley car and get the same crappy treatment you get at a Chevy dealership, for instance.
Squats and Deadlifts up to your body weight should be fairly easy for any otherwise healthy male.

Best thing I've learned from bodybuilding and yoga - listen to your body. If you feel any discomfort beyond normal muscle contractions - stop, rest, and come back tomorrow. Do slower, more controlled movements that tax your muscles more than your joints.

Calisthenics is generally very safe as well (compared to powerlifting), and you can build up an impressive physique doing it.
No, we make products to do stuff. The problem with simplifying is that you take power out of the hands of those who know how to use it, by reducing the combinatoric explosion of paths through your program down to just a few easy-to-understand use-cases. In the end you get software that looks and feels like it was built for children, but is instead targeted at adults, and if that adult wants to do anything outside of the easy-to-use program's very narrow and opinionated understanding of the world, that adult is shit-out-of-luck.

In a model of software consumption where users aspire to better themselves, yes the beginner is stymied but the possibility is still there for completing the task. That's not possible in our current model -- either the program works and you use it the way the designer intended, or you're fucked.
Castle Dark – A book created with python and opengl
You may be interested in CockroachDB[1] and TIDB[2], which are open-source newSQL databases inspired by Spanner and F1.

1 - https://www.cockroachlabs.com
2 - https://github.com/pingcap/tidb
Congratulations to the Spanner team for becoming part of the Google public cloud!

And for those wondering, this is why Oracle wants billions of dollars from Google for "Java Copyright Infringement" because the only growth market for Oracle right now is their hosted database service, and whoops Google has a better one now.

It will be interesting if Amazon and Microsoft choose to compete with Google on this service. If we get to the point where you have databases, compute, storage, and connectivity services from those three at equal scale, well that would be a lot of choice for the developers!
Agile in Large Startups: 6 Fallacies, Culture and What to Avoid at All Costs
It would seem that that's not the moral of the story: it looks like your device doesn't even have to connect to the wifi. It appears that this is more like using wifi as radar to detect finger movements.
New Interactive v3 API documentation and C# library – SendGrid
> If you believe that partitions are inevitable, any distributed system

How does that answer it? Are they implying that partitions will not happen if you don't believe in them?
Is it cool if I just sit on your lawn and listen to your interesting stories? I'll pluck weeds!
Those are legacy options and to the best of my understanding are not available on new accounts or after switching legacy accounts to hourly billing.
Let's transpose the difficult/easier dilemma to other areas, where you might be the newbie:

- Prepackaged food. Why should lettuce leaves be separated, cleaned and packaged in handy sizes? People should be totally okay with tearing apart heads of romaine if they want to make a salad.

- Zippers. Way back when, people fastened and unfastened buttons or laces to get their clothes on. That seemed like a reasonable burden at the time, so why didn't we just leave it like that, instead of switching to zippers?

- Highway exits and lane merges. Designing a network of roads can be difficult. How many signs alerting you to the next exit are sufficient? What if we asked everyone to pay attention to one clearly posted sign, because anything more is redundant?

I'm grateful for all the simplicity that keeps coming into my world. If grocers, clothes makers and urban planners can embrace simplicity, the software industry can, too.
Building a United States Sales Tax Calculator Part 1: A TDD Approach
Dart 1.22: Faster tools, assert messages, covariant overrides
Another point is that since all records are globally timestamped, you can do a read that is consistent at a timestamp in the past (i.e. read data as the database was 1 second ago, or something like that).

If data from other places has synchronized to your zone, you may be able to do this globally-consistent read while only touching your local datacenter (because TrueTime guarantees that no other records anywhere in the system will be created at the time you are querying).

Note: I work at Google, but I don't know more about Spanner than the Spanner paper.
Microsoft Chief Geek on Why Enterprises Should Embrace Open Source
>I don't see the GP making any claims about where they are on the political spectrum, however.

True. It wasn't meant like that. It was more of an observation on how the frame of public debate has shifted.
Amazon's Aurora databases seem to be solving the same problem, and are MySQL or Postgres compatible to boot.
Likewise, the Online Etymology Dictionary says the English word may have originated from confusion with "trump" short for "trumpet."

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=trunk
So don't teach them Windows and Office. Teach them software and computing concepts.

Stuff like, "most software has a menu bar, you can expect to find File, Edit, Window, and Help menus, here's what they usually mean," and so on.