skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To the DNA/Seed Vault question, I heard a really interesting point of view expressed which resonated with me. It was this, "Why not create a mechanism to record all of our knowledge and information so that if an extinction level event occurs we can come back from the brink?" And the answer was "If we allow ourselves to become nearly extinct, especially through our own action or inaction, isn't is more reasonable to let what ever comes after us to have a fresh start?"

Can you imagine if all of a sudden, out of the ground a bunch of Dinosaur scientists emerged having kept themselves in cryo-suspension with all of their dinosaur tech to reestablish themselves as the dominant species on the planet? Are they going to be conflicted? Do they just eradicate humans because they were first? I'm sure Charlie Stross could make up a good story along those lines. I'd read it for sure :-)

But the meta question, the big one behind all those "Why"s up there, is well understood. As a planet, and certainly as a nation, and even on as small a scale as a city, we are divided in our understanding of the reasoning for why being a multiplanet species might be more important than say, feeding the starving in Sudan.

You can have a room of 100,000 people shouting in unison to colonize Mars and that is an insignificant fraction of the people who would have to be aligned to make that the generally agreed upon plan.

And that is one of the things that makes this announcement so amazing to me. When we achieve that moment where a small enough group of individuals can effect a legitimate colonization effort, then it can happen without consensus of a nation-state and can proceed based on the self interest of a much smaller group. And while it is a staple in science fiction that corporations have fleets of space craft they use to achieve their interplanetary goals like an inter-solar Dutch East India company, I never expected it to be possible for a company to be able to do that in my lifetime.
Additionally confusing since NVIDIA offers two different products with the "Geforce NOW" brand.

The "Netflix for games" version is here:

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/shield/games/geforce-now/

Some explanations at the FAQ: http://www.geforce.com/geforce-now/faq
Eh. I don't know if an old tweet stream has much entertainment value. It'd be like watching a replay of last seasons football game.
And system monitoring which isn't dependent on itself. Kind of a "duh" kind of thing...
I finally cracked open Factorio again over this weekend and sunk way too many hours in. It's quite literally Engineering: The Game.
There is no such thing as "just words". That's a position only sustainable from privilege.
A doctor's office that's unable to process patients due to the outage:

https://mobile.twitter.com/drjincali/status/8366578638879989...
> Update at 11:35 AM PST: We have now repaired the ability to update the service health dashboard. The service updates are below. We continue to experience high error rates with S3 in US-EAST-1, which is impacting various AWS services. We are working hard at repairing S3, believe we understand root cause, and are working on implementing what we believe will remediate the issue.

"Believe" is not inspiring.
We Analyzed 1.3M YouTube Videos. This is what we learned about video SEO
Medium, Imgur, Yahoo Webmail & Docker Registry Hub!
Getting 503 errors and/or timeouts on s.imgur.com
Gotta get that SEO juice baby
Reminds me of an even older joke (from 80's or 90's):

Q: Why computers don't crash at the same time?

A: Because network connections are not fast enough.

(I think we are starting to get there)
It's more finished than many "properly released" games. There are many games released to early and quite expensively as EA, but Rimworld really isn't in that category.
https://twitter.com/awscloud/status/836630468778864640

At least now we can see all the network failures in full RGB.
It's mystifying to me that the author comes to the conclusion that the solution to this is to educate people on debugging tools and edge-case semantics. The reason the code is difficult to debug is because the "bug" is that functions are apparently completely broken and violate every reasonable assumption anybody is likely to make about them without a priori knowledge about this specific edge case. Why isn't the conclusion then, that Python is broken, and has a serious and fundamental problem? Why doesn't anybody see this as a "broken window", that leads us as a culture to believe that this sort of thing is acceptable and to be expected and not an ugly, horrible, and utterly unnecessary problem? Is this really the language we're supposed to teach to beginners? How many combined hours have been wasted on solving problems generated by this behavior, and for what purpose? I don't understand why people accept this.
Tourists using Google Maps to get to Rio landmark enter favela, get shot
Just reported on USA Today.[1]

[1] http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2017/02/28/amazons-c...
We have a red error, finally!

Source: https://status.aws.amazon.com/

After two hours, they have finally updated their dashboard.
High availability is improved by hosting in multiple AWS regions.

S3 offers alternative region replication functionality and you can use Cloudfront of another CDN to load balance between buckets
I thought this was funny so I took a screenshot of the blog post and uploaded it to the company Slack. The upload failed because Slack uses S3.

This is getting crazy.
That was inspiring, thanks!
1. Remove senior management. They do not know what they're doing.

2. Experiment and find the right point between monetizing users and those that get the most value out of Twitter. Right now users' eyeballs are being bled dry, and getting their experience ruined with tons of ads, and timeline shuffling. It feels like those with tons of followers are getting a free ride at the expense of everyone else.

3. Introduce meaningful timeline features such as:
3a. Ability to follow #hashtags/topics instead of just people and companies. Curated "Moments" are a weak substitute.
3b. Follow geographical areas of interest (e.g. Top Tweets in Oakland, SOMA etc.)
3c. Ability to explore Twitter geographically. Again, I feel this is a huge and untapped. Heard something crazy happen over your neighborhood? Pull up an map and explore what people are saying around there.

4. Actually do something about trolls (Perhaps a reputation system?)

5. Clamp down on bots. Why is it even possible to follow 300k or a few million people?

6. Slim down the workforce, by a lot, unfortunately. I don't think a sustainable Twitter can ever be a large as it is today.

7. Bigger focus on live TV + discussion

8. Fix search: Its awful and nearly useless unless you put in a ton of effort in "advanced search". Top results are often times just the same retweets and news articles over and over again.

I could keep going...
If by nearly identical, you mean growing twice as quickly.

That page allows displaying both on the same graph (compare to "US GDP") and when placed by side by side it's easy to see that Ireland has grown at least twice as quickly since 1995.
Sure, but an ICBM with a single 10MT detonation would be dramatically better than both as you want it up in the air and over the population center. Remember the closet km is always gone, it's a question of what appens further out that's important. And thus you don't want a line of buildings to protect anything.
Unfortunately the issue has no log of communications with Microsoft, this is something we usually see in P0 issues from taviso and others. Not sure why it isn't included in this case.
We did a failover to us-west-2 and it seemed to work.
The problem is that what passes for a finished game these days has diminished compared to years ago, for the same base price. It is easy to see for instance that an older RPG easily had 100-150 hours or more of play, while modern ones top out at 40-50 “unless” you pay more for extra “chapters” (read: stuff that should have been there when you bought the game). They release HALF a game for the same $60-$80 or whatever they would have charged years ago, except now they know full well that they will demand another $5-$20 or more to obtain the rest of the game. It is a racket that rewards crippleware over quality.
Public docker registry is down
Summary of ‘top 100 awesome deep learning papers.’ – blog series
Could you go more in depth? What does S3 have anything to do with it?
Twilio call recordings appear to be missing as well.
Yep. I was wondering why my heroku deploys were hanging so I was looking into every possible issue on my end.

And then I see the news.
Try Gambas
> They did bar them from attending some press briefings

Citation is still needed
Load Balancing looks very interesting. Hopefully that'll be out of Beta sometime soon?
> We have now repaired the ability to update the service health dashboard
-- AWS Status

Well that explains all the green checkmarks /s
This sounds like the jobs to be done model, here is an excellent writeup on it: http://www.docfoc.com/intercom-on-jobs-to-be-done-pdf
Finally! The status page admits something's up.
"Update at 11:35 AM PST: We have now repaired the ability to update the service health dashboard."

Yep.
To be fair, the tinker board is only 50% more and does include additional features (some extra speed and GbE). The US release is happening right now, so that could affect availability worldwide as Asus tries to launch with sufficient quantities. I somehow was able to order one, sold by Amazon US no less, and get it last week; there's not even a listing anymore.

Not too bad for a product that was announced late January.
What a shame they took down MegaUpload! Clearly we need greater competition in the wholly-owned-infrastructure, file-hosting-as-a-service space.
Updated:

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (N. Virginia)	Increased Error Rates less
11:38 AM PST We can confirm increased error rates for the EC2 and EBS APIs and failures for launches of new EC2 instances in the US-EAST-1 Region. We are also experiencing degraded performance of some EBS Volumes in the Region.

Amazon Elastic Load Balancing (N. Virginia)	Increased Error Rates more

Amazon Relational Database Service (N. Virginia)	Increased Error Rates more

Amazon Simple Storage Service (US Standard)	Increased Error Rates more

Auto Scaling (N. Virginia)	Increased Error Rates more

AWS Lambda (N. Virginia)	Increased Error Rates more
There's some information theory that goes over my head, but I think the point is that you can approximate E[f(x)] with an integral over the typical set and expect good results, for non-pathological functions f.

Defined in this way, you could of course leave the origin in the typical set. But then there would be another, smaller, typical set that would do the job just as well.
Fox News now has the story.[1]

[1] http://www.fox5ny.com/news/238689310-story
This can't be only the US-EAST-1 region. I'm a european resident and most things are down for me too.
SES seems to be downf or us as well.
1. Sublevel has a limit of 640 characters, but it didn't start like that. First it was set at 256 and people kept complaining. Then I set it at 512 and people kept hitting that limit. So I go for 640 and voilà, nobody is complaining any longer.

You can call that pure A/B testing. So Twitter should aim for at least 500 more characters.
SES seems to be down for us as well.
Of course they're doomed. My signals are first the "self-driving" cars that strike me as, umm, not so self-driving. Second, and the clincher for me, was the "flying car" announcements. Now, I understand they'll need that flying car in order to jump the shark, but that announcement just struck me as a company desperate to keep their name in the news.

Pile on the internal problems, and $DEITY only knows their burn rate (or maybe it's documented somewhere), and IMO they're going to have to pull a rabbit out of the hat to keep going.
Sunk cost fallacy.

I do agree that we should all plan for failures.

However, I also think it's a sign of failure in planning and architecture foresight if it's too expensive to move away from a particular cloud provider.
That is great, however, it is still worrying since we have no chance to know if bad actors had already exploited the vulnerabilities. I am still very sceptical with regard to password managers as SaaS in the cloud – all eggs are in one basket and this basket is often not well enough protected.
Why is the status board hosted on AWS? Most providers host such pages on a 3rd party, specifically for this reason; correlated failure.
Then why are there so many more drivers than lawyers?
FYI to S3 customers, per the SLA, most of us are eligible for a 10% credit for this billing period. But the burden is on the customer to provide incident logs and file a support ticket requesting said credit (it must be really challenging to programmatically identify outage coverage across customers /s)

https://aws.amazon.com/s3/sla/
So just as a FYI the reason that probably happened to you is that the underlying host was failing. I am assuming they wanted to give you a window to deal with it but the host croaked before then. I've been dealing w/ AWS for a long long time and I've never seen a maintenance event go early unless the physical hardware actually died...
SES seems to be down for us as well in Virginia. Of course nothing on the status page.
Is anybody else having trouble loading http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js? It is probably hosted on S3 I assume
Maybe research tools for long tail targeting content creators?

I could see paying for a tool that helped collect, filter and organize what the top people are saying and pain points in general.
Then I guess it has begun, the page is now showing red. I'd put a picture on imgur but it's not loading.
> Update at 11:35 AM PST: We have now repaired the ability to update the service health dashboard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism

That was only ~60 years ago. I would absolutely argue that we aren't that far off, ATM.

EDIT: Also, look at places like China. They absolutely do use that type of data to do harm to people.
> This bug is subject to a 90 day disclosure deadline. If 90 days elapse
without a broadly available patch, then the bug report will automatically
become visible to the public.

Is this a common pattern in the bugs world ? publicizing a critical bug after 90 days of no response ?
Well, if the "sponsored hashtags" were clearly marked as such, like google's ads next to search result, I believe the loss of trust would be limited.
Good to see Harvard Mag is paying attention to this

Read about this two years ago: http://fusion.net/story/118401/meet-the-lawyer-taking-on-ube...
Heroku has issues too.
It's been down that level from before this started happening. Surprised this outage hasn't moved it yet.
When I lived at my grandmother's house (rented from her), the utility bill was almost as much as rent through the winter (I think the highest I saw was about $500 one month). The house is from like 1890 or whatever and they did add insulation and all but the heater was on a lot.
Sorry: it's an emergency measure to try to mitigate HN's slowness today. We're being hammered by unusually high load, as described here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13756819.
In 150 years or so, just for kicks, somebody should write a book about that book.
Blake Gentry gave a full accounting of Heroku's response process here - http://www.heavybit.com/library/video/every-minute-counts-co...

Amazon should take notes.
Just commenting here because hopefully people can see: AWS status page updated: 1:44 CST
How to change to the more secure vault version:

https://support.1password.com/switch-to-opvault/
Update[1]: AWS Status dashboard now showing icons other than green. https://status.aws.amazon.com/

[1] https://twitter.com/awscloud/status/836662601090134017
According to the personal health dashboard, they've root-caused the S3 outage and are working to restore.

In the meantime, EC2, ELB, RDS, Lambda, and autoscaling have all been confirmed to be experiencing issues.
why use syncthing when pass supports git?
I dont disagree with you. What I am saying is some people can look at a device, in the simplest of ways, and think to themselves... hmmm, perhaps I shouldnt fly this directly over people, or in the path of aircraft, etc. Perhaps I should be careful, take precautions, maybe have some training. And then there are others, that don't. Theyre fucking idiots. They could be told not do shit. They could be trained to properly operate the equipment. There could be laws against certain behavior, and quess what... theyll still act like idiots, b/c that is exactly what they are. And that is point... put anything into the hands of an idiot and it becomes dangerous, a spoon, a rubber band, a piece of toilet paper, a gun, a car, anything.
To do this you'd create a 'Page Rule' that specifically tells Cloudflare to 'cache everything' for a URL pattern like https://examplesite.tld/* .

You can set a cache invalidation time too.

Always online is a slightly different feature I believe.
It's a really bad experience to be playing a game and encounter a quest that asks you to pay for and download an expansion. This actually happened with Dragon Age 2, one of the fairly early quests shows up just like any other quest, but requires a paid download to complete. Very frustrating.

Another example is Rocksmith. Paid DLC songs show up in the song browser in-game in the same list as songs that you already own, but when you pick them to play it takes you to a screen where you have to put in your credit card and download them. It makes it seem like the game has more songs than it actually came with out of the box.

A really egregious example is Bioshock 2, where the paid DLC is actually on the disc already. So it was created and added to the gold master, but they still charge you extra money in order to access the content that's on the disc you already paid for.
Seems like my Wolfram databins are all down. Disappointing.
You can always check by going to www.isitdownrightnow.com/

Oh wait. The site sits on S3. Never mind.
I think the "walls" could be your expectations. The world is just the world, but it's your job to define what's that you want from it.

And your actions play a very important role in the outcomes. Sometimes different are better.
I can't remember the last time I have read a Forbes article.
It seems status pages should be on entirely independent infrastructure, give the criticality of the information they provide. Perhaps even a separate domain.
How to measure success on SoundCloud – performance indicators and vanity metrics
Next month is tomorrow...?
Amen. We setup our company cloud 2 years ago in US-West-2 and have never looked back. No outage to date.
>but then you say he could have injured her badly, as if you think being knocked unconscious isn't a bad injury.

I blame TV and Movies for this, we see people get knocked unconscious all the time and it's always treated as this minor thing, like we just have an off button that takes a good hard knock. In real life of course, any blow that knocks you unconscious has a very real risk of killing you.
I think I agree that there really isn't a comparable competitor to rpi .. rpiZero W offers a lot for an iot module at such a great cost. maybe something like the CHIP, but not even?

I'm currently working on an agriculture sensing iot platform and going to try to use rpiZero W with the current spectrum sensor from nanolambda. http://www.nanolambda.net . luckily they have the rPi api,sdk already.
We'll switch to Github Integration soon to avoid this issue.
Looks like the dashboard is fixed https://twitter.com/awscloud/status/836662601090134017
Hurry, look now, so you can tell your grandchildren!!!

Greenish ELB, RDS.

Yellow EC2, Lambda.

Red S3, Auto Scaling.

EDIT: A few dozen services in us-east-1 are down/degraded.
London Daily Express [1], CBS[2] now reporting the outage.

[1] http://www.express.co.uk/life-style/science-technology/77332...
[2] http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2017/02/28/amazon-web-service...
travis-ci.org free builds
I was just riffing on the nuclear winter thing. But actually, blimps would be unworkable, because we would need to inject millions of tons of SOX per year into the stratosphere. And energy requirements are mostly for lifting, not dispersion.

Perhaps nuclear devices could be designed to produce upward-directed jets.
No, the equivalent of PS Plus is Xbox Live Gold. This is not exactly the same thing as PS Now (you download the games rather than stream them), but it's intended to be another entry in the same general category that PS Now and EA Access operate in, where you pay a fee for access to a catalog of games.
Any is always the manager that is the bad guy in these scenarios? Haven't we grown up yet?
Maybe, but I was not discussing whether or not it was practical.
> The RPi Foundation's choice to remain so closed-source is a bit confusing and puzzling, considering their non-profit and educational mission and goal.

Their founder and key personnel was/are employed by Broadcom. IIRC, essentially Broadcom thought of the Pi as a fun side project and were completely blown away by the demand.

The other problem is that people have written stuff, and loads of that, specifically for the Pi CPU/GPU - which makes a move away from BCM next to impossible:

- anything involving accelerated video isn't easily portable (e.g. omxplayer)

- anything that relies on a given special function of the CPU mapped to a specific GPIO pin might break with another CPU (e.g. extension boards)

- anything that relies on other rpi-specific hardware features (CSI, DSI) will be hard to port, but then again you don't really have a choice with non-usb/i2c camera or display modules...
Dashboard has been updated, finally!
There are several options. I guess Twitter could go with one or all of them.

As a backend service it would be nice if they focused on making your Twitter account into a sort of “internet driver’s license” to identify you anywhere and everywhere online through a sort of trust chain. I never want to have to sign up for an account again unless it pertains to my finances. I so desperately wish I could manage all my various subscriptions and accounts for random services from a central place that is highly secure and easy to access. I should be able to sign-on seamlessly, unsubscribe effortlessly, and never have to remember a username or password. This would also allow a central place for me to set privacy preferences so we can dictate exactly what the downstream services should and shouldn’t be able to see.
If Twitter can just let me two-factor authorize with a token+pin and have this let me into just about any account online (aside from maybe my main email and financial accounts in the interests of not having all the eggs in one basket) that’s a service people would indispensible. (So much so that maybe ICANN should just work on something like it as a public utility?)

On the more user-facing end, Twitter’s niche has always been people who are keen on promoting themselves and making announcements (new paper published, new product announced, press releases, etc.), so maybe they should just fill into what Facebook was before it became a NewsFeed. They could give you an About Me page and a status-bar. This basically is what Twitter is now, but they lack the focus to design it around that stuff as a central purpose for the service. They focus more on the “Status Bar” than the “About Me,” this would really just a difference in design language and emphasis. Make it into an RSS feed for people.

Or, as a third option. . . they could just make Twitter into an RSS reader. Maybe even add Wordpress/Medium style pages for long-form writing and feed that all through the same “feed” paradigm.
Python: default argument blunders
Sure I guess they were small but their problem space seems to be similar to a more standard CRUD. I could be wrong but the one to many and many to one relations within Twitter seem much harder (at least from my perspective).

Both are super tough at the scale they run :)