skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a problem of "monoculture" dependencies and failure to implement HA by using multiple services. All Github releases are down, atom downloads are down and so on. Companies, including Amazon, should be using other CDNs for HA purposes, even if NIH.

It's a similar mistake of making DNS a dependency for monitoring/control infrastructure when DNS is down.
I guess they don't want to host their status page on their own CDN in case it went down too.
AWS - too big to fail.
Maybe with GCP? :)
Wouldn’t it be a rather gruesome performance penalty, sending all traffic through a proxy like that?
Hi all. I came across this forum on Google. I have the same error - and it's all a bit beyond me. I'm not a techie or coder but set up Amazon S3 several months ago to backup my websites and it generally works fine - and has saved my bacon on a couple of occasions. (Also back up in Google Drive.)

As someone who's really only a yellow belt (assuming you're all black belts!), just so I understand ('cos I'm cacking myself!) ...

I'm seeing the same issue. Does this mean there's a problem with Amazon? I can't access either of my S3 accounts even if I change the region, and I'm concerned it may be something I've done wrong, and deleted the whole lot. It was working yesterday!!!

Would be massively grateful for a heads up. Thanks in advance.
A very touching story about the two brothers. I especially enjoyed the idea that they send drawings and stories to donors. I hope they're still doing well.

I dl'd it and started it up. I'm now wondering what I'm looking at. Not being a gamer, I don't have the visual vocabulary or expectations, so I'm glad there's a wiki; the in-game manual doesn't fully work. EDIT: My reading comprehension is not fully functional, the manual works.

> “Water’s not doing it for me these days,” he said. “I know it’s bad, but the sugar goes right into programming the game. If I don’t drink soda now, I get a headache and can’t do any work.”

I feel bad that he's sacrificing his health for our pleasure.

> He’d enrolled at the University of Washington, ... Tarn moved into a string of “dingy one-bedrooms” with “bad moisture problems” — in one, he discovered a shelf fungus growing behind his couch.

I probably lived in one of those when I was at UW. It was a "World's Fair" apartment building, garden level, the only window facing north and looking up an outside stairwell into the alley. Google maps shows me that much of all that has been scraped and replaced.
The "red check mark is stored on S3" may have been sarcasm, but apparently there was a kernel of truth to it?!

Poor show when a service disruption means the status page can't be updated....
Now at the top of Drudge http://drudgereport.com/
Yup, all of our fail overs worked flawlessly. You wouldn't even be able to tell if you didn't know.
if that simple, why the text desc for Details also didn't reflect the incident?
That's piling on, and rudely at that. Please don't be rude on HN.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13756997 and marked it off-topic.
Show HN: Free Marriage Tips from Experienced Marriage Counselors via Mobile App
Definitely agree with this. Figure1 is great for focused learning, but Twitter has allowed me to hear about random clinical pearls, interesting cases, the latest research, and the ensuing discussions between active clinicians.
I'm not following re: lack of library support. Pascal links with C. ??
Virtfs is a cluster fuck. Using rsync over it creates hundreds of thousands of file handles that never close. Reported to Ubuntu months ago, nothing fixed. Red Hat had the better idea of going nowhere near it. Canonical produce so much shovelware that they don't support, I won't get bit by this again.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/qemu/+bug/1336794
We already have robots in space, such as the Mars rovers. It doesn't work that well: the round-trip communication time is very long, so it takes a long time for mission controllers on the Earth to get data from the robots, make a decision, and send that back. By contrast, a geologist walking around on Mars can make his own decisions on the spot and get a lot more done, much more quickly.
So now you know that a deadman switch is the better way to report availability. The logic was backwards for this signal. The default condition is failed. Not failed requires proof.

It's interesting how easy it is to accidentally invert logical operations. I see it in code all the time. A condition will test that A is true when what they really need to know is if B and C are both false. It's like some kind of cognitive tick.
Please elaborate, I don't get what you are suggesting.

JavaScript was hacked together in short time for the browser. You can't get any less server-side than that?
It is...it's literally the reason products like statuspage.io exist, because if your status page has any dependencies on the services for which is provides statuses, then it's not really a useful status page.
https://twitter.com/xiaodown/status/836656364965371904

https://twitter.com/ArturMakly/status/836665379233628161
Google’s AMP now accounts for 7 percent of traffic to big US publishers
Show HN: Read top news sources in a new way (Android)
Contempt for Rules Is Catching Up with Uber
Looks like they've fixed it now. (The status page, not s3)
The status page should work with just IPv4 or IPv6, BGP and round-robin on a bunch of location-diverse, simple, real metal, web-boxes that only serve status.
A VP in a bank is mid-level, an investment bank will have literally thousands of VPs. You could hop from MD (2 levels above VP) to the c-suite perhaps, but there are still hundreds of MDs.
One of a really rare times when it's good to be in Europe (s3 works here).
A good way to prove yourself are hackatons and programming contests.
Why? because you have a clear deadline not set by you.

Hope this helps
> I wonder if other firms will "retaliate" with their own Project Zero-style security teams.

If all the companies would to that it would be good for security
Yes this is an issue with Amazon and there is little you can do besides wait until it has been resolved
Coordinating Heroku's Incident
Those are two problems, and they both need solutions. Centralizing everything makes it easier for the government to abuse it's position. Sure, they can still abuse if if everything is distributed, but it's a lot more work.

> My main point is that an oppressive government is a huge problem, and it really doesn't matter whether you use aws or roll your own server, because either way you're screwed if you've let it get to that point.

But we aren't at that point yet. So lets not give up trying to build things the right way just because we may be screwed in the future.
Story of Life with Sir David Attenborough
finally status are updated
https://goo.gl/wCINaC
And yet, I cannot find any obvious information on where statuspage is hosted.
We'll have to wait for the postmortem, but I bet it was an unintentional dependency on S3 that no one realized had come into place until S3 went down -- especially considering how fast they were able to remove the dependency and fix it.
Thanks. I'm sure the formalism makes sense if properly developed and can lead to useful approximations. It's just that the "conceptual introduction" in that paper makes no sense to me... I understand it's just a simplification, but simplifying too much removes the essence of things.

> A grid of length N distributed uniformly in a D-dimensional parameter space requires N^D points and hence N^D evaluations of the integrand. Unless N is incredibly large, however, it is unlikely that any of these points will intersect the narrow typical set, and the exponentially-growing cost of averaging over the grid yields worse and worse approximations to expectations.

In fact any point within the hypersphere is as good (or better) as any point in that narrow typical set not including the mode. The problem is not missing the "narrow typical set", is missing the whole hypersphere (because the volume of the hypersphere is small). I fail to see where in that introduction the fact that the typical set excludes the mode of the distribution makes any difference.
Exactly. Ubuntu didn't and it wasted weeks of development for me.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/qemu/+bug/1336794
I'm not sure what you mean. If anything that link underscores my point. GCE has absolutely had it's own catastrophic errors. Remember last April when ALL instances in ALL regions went down?

https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/compute/16007?post-...
The sunk cost fallacy is when you (irrationally) decide to stick with what you're doing purely because you've already spent a lot of resources on it. It doesn't apply when you've done an economic analysis and found out it doesn't make sense to swap.

There are plenty of cases where it just wouldn't make sense to switch after looking at the costs, opportunity costs, etc. For example, if his site makes him $10 a month, outages cost him $1 a month that could be mitigated by moving, and it would cost $1000 of labor to swap providers. (Depends on interest rates.)

Perhaps it was originally a failure to not have a plan to easily move from a provider, but it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that right now it may cost too many hours of work to justify the move.
It looks like the S3 outage is spreading to other systems or the root cause of the S3 problem is affecting different services. There are at least 20 services listed now. [1]

[1]: http://status.aws.amazon.com/
I can empathize with your displeasure here but this argument represents a complete misunderstanding of games and how they're constructed.

'100-150 hours or more of play' is completely meaningless. A game can be 150 hours because it's completely padded out with awful grind (i.e. WoW's widely reviled kill 10 rats formula, widely disliked formulaic Ubisoft Open World Games with repetitive side-quests), or a 5-hour experience with adjustable difficulty, optional objectives and high replayability (multiplayer!)

You simply can't judge the value of a game based on play time, no more than you can judge the quality of a piece of software by the length of its features list or the quality of a film by its running time.

I would make arguments that the quality of the experience you get out of retail games is much higher than a decade ago, due to increased budgets, better technology and general design refinement:

* Almost universally better tutorials

* More widespread access to options like control remapping and sensitivity adjustments

* Access to patches that fix obscure bugs and performance issues found after launch

* More consistent UI and narrative feedback telling you where to go in a game (so you don't get lost if you take a break)

* More consistent availability of adjustable difficulty levels and 'gimme' help in response to multiple retries

* More games that offer alternative paths and solutions

* Cloud saves

* Automated checkpointing

You can view some of these things as steps back from what you liked in (picking random examples here) Final Fantasy 7 or even Final Fantasy 12, but for the vast majority of game players (now a HUGE audience compared to a decade ago) these changes make games more accessible and are generally steps forward, despite some weak points.

I'm the sort of person who happily dumps 100+ hours into a JRPG, but I still find that things have generally moved forward. Most of the high-profile 'short' games I purchase are stellar experiences, some of them are genuinely on par with movies. Others are cheap enough that the short duration is not a weakness - I didn't spend much on Life is Strange or Firewatch but they were very memorable and delivered exactly what I paid for. If you want a big sprawling RPG those are still out there, and they're great - Witcher 3 and Final Fantasy 15 and Xenoblade X are 3 recent titles that I thought stacked up well here for a lower cost (considering inflation) than you would have paid in the past (especially if you use Amazon prime to buy games below retail!)
yup - https://twitter.com/awscloud/status/836662601090134017
Just because its binary doesn't mean it can't be studied. Even with something like compiled native machine code its still relatively easy to disassemble and look at how it works with the right tools. With WebAssembly, dissassembly should be even easier and be more clear than native x86 or something. Still not as easy as well written javascript, but I expect it will approach the difficulty of minified js.

In my eyes, the size and offline compilation aren't even the biggest benefits. Having a low level assembly language for web computation lets people write in any language and compile it for the web. There's already an LLVM backend for it - although still experimental. But this may even mean we can simply port existing codebases to WebAssembly with little performance loss.

You've been able to compile stuff for web for a while, by transpiling to javascript, but the result has been too slow for many applications, so it never really picked up.
I'd say they have writers capable of doing a little better than that.

Virtually every PR statement omits detail and evidence that would back up their statements.
Neither ReactOS nor FreeDOS nor their proprietary counterparts have drivers for virtio-9p, so most likely you are not using the device and are not vulnerable.
Google should get the crime data and route taking it into account, especially walking directions.
Read up about 'Accelerando' (the book).
Twitter should own the utility of being a messaging forum for the public. This means a communication layer that can be easily used by many different services for different purposes. From there on, it should open up this message level integration as easily embrddable feature for websites and to app developers. Monetization potential will increase with engagement and engagement to a forum using twitter should be made as easy as text messages.

Cut costs and cut it by a lot!
Do you really think that writing our own encrypted messaging apps and using our own servers instead of Azure/AWS/Google is an important step in protecting ourselves from a totalitarian government? It seems to me to be too little too late
Thanks. I'll try it on Linux in the meanwhile.

PS. The doc is really great but very hard to read - I think it's that background you're using.
The Adventure of a Lifetime (short story about factory farming)
Supply and Demand: The supply of humans does not balance with the demand for humans; there are just too many people—society doesn't need them.

Perhaps it's time to start thinking earnestly about the supply-side economics of population; perhaps, society should reconsider how it subsidizes reproduction (or lack there of).

Is it better to use resources to build more people who have a lower quality of life, or is it better to use resources to build a higher quality of life for a population of fewer people?
Quora.
The reason why I associated it with PlayStation Plus is because as part of the subscription, members are given six games every month for free as long as they remain members. After a while you amass quite a large library of free games.

Jan 2017 Games:

Day of the Tentacle Remastered (PS4, PS Vita)
This War of Mine: The Little Ones (PS4)
The Swindle (PS4, PS3, PS Vita)
Titan Souls (PS4, PS Vita)
Azkend 2 (PS4, PS Vita)
Blazerush (PS3)

Feb 2017 Games:

LittleBigPlanet 3 (PS4)
Not a Hero (PS4)
Starwhal (PS4, PS3)
Ninja Senki DX (PS4, PS Vita)
TorqueL (PS4, PS Vita)
Anna - Extended Edition (PS3)
Drone crashes into my living room with groceries. Receive email that my package was successfully delivered.
This is unquestionably an H1B's fuck up.
Password Safe is missing …
that's pretty normal. Once a technology goes into the mainstream and matures, people don't have to learn how it works anymore but juts use it. 50 years ago every car driver needed to have a pretty good understanding of their car. Now not too many people have even a basic understanding of cars but they still use one.
Because probability has to sum to one. The higher you go in dimension that unit probability is distributed across more and more "boxes" until any single box, including the one around the mode becomes irrelevant. When you are computing expectations you need to focus on those boxes that dominate contributions to the integrals, which are all in the typical set.

The typical set is a vaguely defined notation as you cannot define an explicit neighborhood without defining some explicit probability threshold which is often done in information theory of discrete systems. The point here, however, is not to define an explicit neighborhood but rather to motivate that the whichever neighborhood of high-probability mass you would define would not near the mode and instead extend out into a compact neighborhood around the mode.

You are welcome to define a neighborhood as the convex hull of the typical set, which would then include the mode (subject to some technical conditions). That wouldn't add any appreciable probability mass, however, but would introduce a whole bunch of space that your statistical algorithm would have to explore at additional computational cost.
It's still down. All morning! So much business lost.
Hashtags are basically adhoc rooms to begin with. They kind of suffer from the same discoverability problems that an IRC room like system does too, sorting through the chaff to find and interesting tag/room requires largely knowing what you're looking for when you start.
'Increased Error Rates' is a bit harsh, couldn't they call it 'Sub-prime Success Rates'?
> When you've finished designing it you've then got another 1/3 of getting it manufactured at a decent cost with a decent yield.

The difference here is that this is an already proven design? Have a competitive bid process for the right to market under the trademark, eliminate factories you flat out don't trust, then require ability to randomly sample and test on Pi's side.

If pass rate drops below agreed parameters, revoke the trademark and pick another factory. Then let the factory self-QA or face the consequences.

I can't imagine there are no factories in China that can make a profit on a chip that's being made profitably in the UK.

The only argument I can see against it would be that a commercial market doesn't exist in any volume. But I can't imagine there wouldn't be decent profit vs {insert lower priced Pi clone here}.

... The other argument would be if Pi has an exclusivity agreement with Sony UK (who I believe is the majority manufacturer) that precludes this kind of deal in exchange for pricing?

> "unusual chip-on-chip technology"

You mean the package-on-package mounting of the SDRAM on top of the BCM2835? Defer to your experience, but if Raspberry Pi is doing this then how expensive/rare is the investment?

I'm honestly trying to reconcile the following statements: "They're hard to manufacture" + "We make a profit on each one sold" + "We can't afford to make them at commercial scale"
Amazon AWS S3 outage is breaking things for a lot of websites and apps
You think this is bad? Just look at what's happening in Sweden...
Yes, this lack of depth is really hard to take as a fan. But of course most of them are professional works not life long works of art.
Reuters, Associated Press, and The Hill now reporting the outage.

"http://www.isitdownrightnow.com/" and DownDetector are down.
> What am I missing?

Head tracking as input.

Right now I have my SMS window peeking out from behind this browser window. I have it so that I can just barely see if there's a new message.

In VR, I could just move my head slightly and see the whole message. As it is, I have to Alt+Tab.

The other thing that I think will be big is permanent placement of data in 3D space. Right now some people do this with virtual desktops... laying out windows and files in different workspaces so you have different places for different tasks.

A lot of people don't get that far for two reasons:

1) the virtual workspace navigation tools aren't great. This could be improved in 2D, but I believe there will be a strong incentive to solve these problems in VR

2) many digital objects don't currently have very good spatializable 2d representations. For example, I just bookmarked that article about good programmers. It's currently represented as a DIV on pinboard, but it has no generalized 2D or 3D representation. In a VR desktop, things will need to have bounded 3D representations just to exist in the UI. Once it has a representation, it's a lot easier to arrange spatially. I could put a collection of links in the same place as my code, which is currently awkward.

That all said, I do think there is a core idea you are suggesting which is fully correct: Once VR takes off, and we see how things work in VR, we will "backport" a lot of those interactions into 2D. I think interest in headsets will surge, but we'll eventually settle into a balance of 2D and 3D and the 3D will mostly be for things which are spatially intensive.

So, in that sense you're right the monitor will do everything. But VR is still interesting because it will be the source of a lot of inventions.

Also consider: dogs and cats can't use mouse and keyboard, but they can do head tracking. The first game platform that lets people play video games with their pets will be massive. In that sense, VR isn't about letting pro users do more, it's about expanding capabilities to a wider audience.
Will Mars Colonists Evolve into This New Kind of Human? – NBC News
Microsoft's monthly patches are released on the second Tuesday of the month. So that's two weeks away.
So Palantir is actually twelve tentacles, no? A dodecapus?
The fact that we even have "key" services is absurd.
>You haven't explained why having a lot of work is good.

Because it means there is an opportunity to make progress. However, if you overwork yourself, stress yourself, or are simply incapable of putting in the work necessary to make that progress happen, then you would have squandered that opportunity.
It's not meaningless. It would be more appropriate to compare it to a human-designed insurance algorithm that will refuse to offer a discount for extenuating circumstances. That's not so much an analogy as it is a reimplemented example of the same philosophy in practice.

The meaningful distinction is that a human can be persuaded to extend the deadline, at least in theory. A bot cannot be persuaded to do anything, and if a deadline passes an action is triggered like a dead man's switch. In one scenario, a human needs to maintain the decision to uphold that deadline without bias every single time it comes into question. In the other, they only have to do it once: when the bot is initially designed.

They're different things entirely. Arguing that they're not is like arguing that it's easy to maintain a diet or exercise regimen because you just have to uphold a New Year's resolution for a week. This has important ramifications for a security disclosure deadline, because it (theoretically) reduces bias. There are other elements of a disclosure that can still elicit bias, but at least the deadline time itself will not be one of them.
So the obvious answer would be to host it on like azure or google cloud storage but I can just imagine the institutional push back that would get trying to do that.
I think you're being pedantic. It's pretty clear what the headline implies and what the parent commenter is saying.

From headline reading "X goes public with...", most people would infer a scenario where something out of the ordinary is taking place. Pointing out that this disclosure was made by a bot is a meaningful distinction.
Wrapped in a closure, thanks!
For some reason, reading about "believe we understand root cause" made me think of: "A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable."
There's logic behind the complicated rules. The idea is that you can't cause the calculated availability to go down by generating lots of requests when the service is down.