skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've heard many variations of the above, and the solution to almost all of them is loop versioning as appropriate to the particular case. In this case, a single check before the loop would suffice, and then that 6% disappears.

The battle can't be won because of a perspective difference. It's really difficult to communicate the importance of a sane programming model when a sane programming model has not been a priority for C or C++ since their respective inceptions. They've prioritized low-level manipulations and performance over everything else and ironically painted themselves into silly corners like this one; even when you want the hardware instruction that does signed two's complement arithmetic, you can't get it, because the other firmly-held belief that compilers are never wrong.
I couldn't help but to think of the fellow who has no monitors but uses an Oculus for virtual displays full-time, from last week

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28678041
NYT tech reporter Sheera Frenkel gives us this update:

>Was just on phone with someone who works for FB who described employees unable to enter buildings this morning to begin to evaluate extent of outage because their badges weren’t working to access doors.

https://twitter.com/sheeraf/status/1445099150316503057
A few wordpress blogs crashed because addon facebook pixel is crashing. Very intensive lesson for the internet!
Yes. The continual obliviousness which product makers (and buyers) have towards battery life is very annoying. I used to have a wristwatch which was the most technically advanced watch I could find, and it had a touch screen and various applications. Its battery consistently lasted for more than two years after each battery change. Eventually the touch screen wore out, and I stopped using it.

I can’t stand all this modern hardware which must all be charged after a few hours of use. It’s a continual stress factor to keep track of the charge of all your various devices.
You are probably right but if that is the case, it isn't really out of band and needs another look. I use OpenGear devices with cellular to access our core networking to multiple locations and we treat them as basically an entirely independent deployment, as if it is another company. DNS and credentials are stored in alternate systems that can be accessed regardless of the primary systems.

I'm sure the logistics of this become far more complicated as the organization scales but IMHO it is something that shouldn't be overlooked, exactly for outlier events like this. It pays dividends the first time it is really needed. If the accounts of ramenporn are correct, it would be paying very well right now.

Out of band access is a far more complicated version of not hosting your own status page, which they don't seem to get right either.
Anonymous pages are cached.
That's interesting. As a developer I've often felt outright hostility coming from Apple developer relations, and maybe it's this lack of a partnership mentality. They generally treat end users really well, but it's like they see external developers as some sort of parasite feeding on their products. In my experience it's difficult to get actual technical help unless you personally know someone internal to Apple.
Likely due to accessibility: Standard guidelines for Android is that all touch targets should have a 48x48dp minimum size + 8dp spacing.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/accessibility/forproducts/guides/mobil...

https://material.io/design/usability/accessibility.html#layo...
I can assure you that Google has a procedure in place for that.
Heck of a coincidence I must say...

I can imagine this affects many other sites that use FB for authentication and tracking.

If people pay proper attention to it, this is not just an average run of the mill "site outage", and instead of checking on or worrying about backups of my FB data (Thank goodness I can afford to lose it all), I'm making popcorn...

Hopefully law makers all study up and pay close attention.

What transpires next may prove to be very interesting.
I learnt Python in 2013, when Python 3 still had some serious growing pains. I switched from 2 to 3 almost overnight circa 2015 or 2016.

The last few years I cannot help but feel they were very close to making 2 and 3 play nice together, but the idea ironically lost traction because of how much Python 3 adoption had accelerated.
Dask as a Spark Replacement
Its a daycare center for young adults. They grow up eventually.
Thanks to the GDPR at least that's easy to verify for European users.
How many objects of negative size are you typically dealing with?
You CAN do this in the US, for $1000-$2000 per week.
> 3. People designing software are getting older and have worse eyes, so larger, clearer, less noisy UIs are a godsend.

"Modern" UIs most often are anything but clear and less noisy. Part of what made the Windows 95 design so strong was that UI elements were separated by visible lines, you exactly knew what the touchbox of any element was, the behavior and look of UI elements, menus and icons were generally consistent across applications...
Out of band management is an important feature for the reliability of your network.
> pretty much every time I've seen a developer complain that something is slow and then 'prove' that it can be faster by making a proof-of-concept the only reason theirs is faster is because it doesn't implement the important-but-slow bits and it ignores most of the edge cases

It's still a good place to start a discussion though. In such a case, apparently someone believes strongly that things can be made much faster, and now you can either learn from that person or explain to them what edge cases they are missing.
> I doubt WFH will be impacted by this - not an insider but seems unlikely that the relevant people were on-site at data centers before COVID

I think the issue is less "were the right people in the data center" and more "we have no way to contact our co-workers once the internal infrastructure goes down". In non-wfh you physically walk to your co-workers desk and say "hey, fb messenger is down and we should chat, what's your number?". This proves that self-hosting your infra (1) is dangerous and (2) makes you susceptible to super-failures if comms goes down during WFH.

Major tech companies (GAFAM+) all self-host and use internal tools so they're all at risk of this sort of comms breakdown. I know I don't have any co-workers number (except one from WhatsApp which if I worked at FB wouldn't be useful now).
Can't help but feel that the world would be a slightly better place if it stayed this way.
Perhaps allowing Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram to merge was efficient after all - now that they have synchronized outages, people finally have a chance to get on with their lives, free of clickbait news and misinformation.
On the margins this really isn't true. I know a couple people working on Mckinsey's renewable energy team. They're directly responsible for billions of dollars of solar and wind farm build out that likely wouldn't have happened to anywhere near the same extent if the generators hadn't brought in consultants. I also know someone who was on the Tyson chicken team whose job was to remodel the slaughterhouse so they could fire everyone.

Mckinsey absolutely lets you choose the team you work on, there is zero expectation to work on teams that service immoral industries or companies.
This is why everybody should do all their browsing with Tor, excepting maybe banking and shopping.
Right, but imagining that DNS goes down doesn’t take a science fiction author.
Probably because it can be cached instead of serving customized pages
Eventually MS figured out it actually those power users because they were developers. So they made visual studio code to lock them down like it's 1995.
Is there any site that tracks number of users for messaging apps? I'd be really curious to see if signal\telegram\etc are seeing a big bump.
massive whistleblower leak surfaces about Facebook

public opinion starts to change about fb

Zuck fears people will abandon his platforms

shuts all of the down and claims hax0rs

facebook goes down

divert the story to Russian and Chinese hackers

people instantly forget about whistleblower

facebooks stock balances out after a week
Unpopular but true? No. Popular and false.
I'm also a little surprised the article didn't mention the loss of Destiny from the Activision portfolio and the turmoil in Overwatch and the loss of a lot of key Overwatch 2 executives and the slipping of almost all of its deadlines to the point that some people are on "death watch" for the title expecting it to be canceled. Activision's executive problems have already bubbled down to affecting their future games in a way that could snowball.
Platforms That Trust DST Root CA X3 but Not ISRG Root X1
Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp down in global outage
Then you have security issues like this where someone impersonates a client with helping hands and drains your exchanges hot wallet:

https://www.huffpost.com/archive/ca/entry/canadian-bitcoins-...
TBF, going by the problem statement in the article, the objective function could be pretty wacky. For example, do you weight accuracy by location? Is it more important to get your predictions right over sports stadiums than over residential areas? Would it be useful to weight accuracy by time, like, it's more important to get predictions right at 7 AM when people are driving to work than it is to get it right at 1 AM when everyone is asleep? I don't think that that's what's actually happening, but I do think that weather is a sufficiently ugly problem that comparing to human performance is useful.
Too easy to get around, as soon as company A starts making $11B they make a new company B that charges $1B for some random service, probably "consulting".
With the flood of medium quality content coming from Netflix in the past few years I'm almost happy with it not showing up.
I came here to move fast and break things, and i'm all out of move fast.
I remember my first time having a meeting at Facebook and observing none of the doors had keyholes and thinking "hope their badge system never goes down"
Big ISP outages in NYC right now
Are you sad that you can review the source code before the OS gets installed on your device?
Youtube and google are definitely working for me without any problems (haven't tested telegram or zoom).
> How else are they going to serve you ads based on your search terms

They obviously have the search term your searching! They don't need to track you, they send the ads back with the search results!
Heard a story once about the badge readers at a European Google office being suspiciously slow.

As in, "the duration of a ping to the US and back" slow.

Yep, every badge in and out in the whole office had to go cross-continental (before the door unlocked).
Absolutely not a solved problem. The utilities have no reason to innovate at that point.

In my local municipality I have no way to choose renewable energy apart from building my own power plant on my roof. That’s a complete failure of these government granted monopolies.
What's wrong with the internet?

With Facebook down, some large DNS servers seem to be struggling with the extra load of failing requests to look up "facebook.com". Cloudflare reports overload with their DNS server at 1.1.1.1, although that's working for me.

Billions of things worldwide are trying to connect to Facebook. The lookup which normally returns the IP address for facebook.com on the first try now requires trying a.ns.facebook.com, b.ns.facebook.com, etc. several times each before giving up. Probably several times a minute for everyone who has a Facebook app in their phone turned on. That may be using a big fraction of world DNS resources.

Vodaphone Ireland seems to be struggling with a DNS overload right now, per the Irish Independent. Also, their status page can't find "Dublin" as a city.
Sorry, are you referring to data center technicians as “ape people”?
That is wild and definitely newsworthy. Capture as many screenshots and data as you can.

FWIW it seems possible that the messages remain cached locally on your device but deleted from their servers, and with their outage they aren’t being updated to delete?
I doubt this is the case, but someone on twitter was speculating "what if this is fb's infra team going on strike"
The timing of this is so rich in irony I can't help but wonder if there is an element of internal sabotage. How many FB employees hate FB right now? The latest expose of FB is both effective and truly awful. I can't imagine feeling good about a FB job. And it's gotten worse! Now they look like they can't even keep their websites up.
Curious/unfortunate timing. The day after a whistleblower docu and with a long list of other legal challenges and issues incoming.
Aren't there places around poorer countries where Facebook is basically an ISP? What about them? They have literally 0 info.

https://tcrn.ch/3kOHco1
Facebook employees unable to enter buildings this morning to begin to evaluate extent of outage because their badges weren’t working to access doors.

https://twitter.com/sheeraf/status/1445099150316503057
Server Down of Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram Worldwide
My favorite example of this is when I saw references to "Goatse Security" on the front page of the Wall Street Journal
Move fast and break
.
.
.
<NO CARRIER>
"Something went wrong. Try reloading."

its not loading for me. could you say what it said?
"Publishing news should be a crime" - Dudeman12
Aren't there places around poorer countries where Facebook is basically an ISP? What about them?

https://tcrn.ch/3kOHco1 2Africa cable, as an example
The risk vs. reward doesn't quite make sense for very nearly all ambitions of manned space exploration. But this isn't space exploration, it is civilians in space, which always was and always will be a dumb idea. Though 7 died in the Challenger disaster, 6 were astronauts, and 4 of those were military. They, and the 7 astronauts lost in the Columbia disaster, knew and understood the risks of space flight. Christa McAuliffe was neither an astronaut nor had a military career. Of all the mistakes NASA has made, the worst of them was killing a school teacher. Blue Origin and SpaceX have some astoundingly bad ideas specifically regarding civilians in space. There may be a compelling demand for it, but that doesn't make it moral or rational. I rate putting civilians in space on par with selling cocaine, except cocaine, as dangerous as it is, is not nearly as dangerous as space flight.
Either there is a massive number of HN users F5ing the homepage for the last few hours, HN is woefully unprepared for surges in traffic, or there is some kind of outage with their infrastructure.

hnstatus on twitter and hund.io show no outage news.
Let me guess, it is tied to FB systems which are down. That would be hilarious.
Googler here - my opinions are my own, not representing the company

at the lowest level in case of severe outage we resort to IRC, Plain Old Telephone Service and, sometimes, stick-it notes taped to windows...
https://twitter.com/sheeraf/status/1445099150316503057
I know you’re joking, but do you have some links to such projects for future reference?
Apple is pretty dark-patterny about the subscriptions too. On Android the refund/uninstall button is right next to the open button in the Play store. You buy an app, don't like it, click a button and return it.

I just bought an iPad app the other day (my first), it didn't meet my needs, but I still can't figure out where to go to refund it. And Apple's subscriptions expire immediately if you cancel during a free trial, whereas the Google ones will still let you finish the term of your trial.

Apple's not really the good guy either. They're just the powerful ones.
My general anxiety is already lifting a little.
that's not how post-mortems work
Thanks for the “know the code one and possibly two layers below them” point, haven’t seen it written out explicitly before, but it sure puts into perspective why I consider some people much better programmers than others!
These few sentences were a better and more meaningful read than what hundreds of PR people could ever come up with
That's what I thought but now Twitter is having problem loading replies to a tweet. I think it's something more general rather than FB centric.
Sheera Frenkel:

Was just on phone with someone who works for FB who described employees unable to enter buildings this morning to begin to evaluate extent of outage because their badges weren’t working to access doors.

https://twitter.com/sheeraf/status/1445099150316503057
We’re in an awkward spot with our pricing right now for sure - we only had the 5% option for the longest time but introduced the flat rate recently for a number of reasons. In the next few weeks we’ll be fully switching over to a freemium model with Shopify-like tiers.

Needless to say if you’re making $6k+ per month it’s worth paying for Scale, but many users also pay for the advanced features even at $1-2k of MRR.
Taiwan preparing for possible war with China
It's odd that the article doesn't seem to touch at all on the automated scambaiting systems that exist, such as the legendary Lenny: https://www.youtube.com/c/ToaoDotNet/videos .
Ya, on hn it's merely productized.
The difference today is that dark patterns aren't monopolized.
Sure but the momentum today goes towards more restrictive norms, contrary to what was happening in the 70s.
This post was sponsored by the liar's paradox and written by Bertrand Russel himself.

(meaning if HN is down you can't post about that, and if it's not down you won't post it; proving that you can never have a post "HN is down" on HN)
Facing compounding stressors, many Americans plan to change jobs in coming year
Mainframes are still a big business for them.
It depends on your destination. It doesn't make sense to get things on Mercury and bring them to Earth, but if you need them in space, it may make sense. Don't forget that you pay about 12-13 km/s of delta V to get anything from Earth either.
> a massive number of HN users

It'll be this, I'd bet money on it. Lots like me who don't visit every day are coming to HN for more info. This site probably only ever sees a tiny percentage of its registered users accessing at once; right now, it'll be a much larger percent.
What do you think all those superfluous chat apps were for?
I’m fully aware of that. Apple released the first SOC implementing it.
> Was just on phone with someone who works for FB who described employees unable to enter buildings this morning to begin to evaluate extent of outage because their badges weren’t working to access doors.

https://nitter.net/sheeraf/status/1445099150316503057
Facebook is well known for having really good PR, if they go after this guy for sharing such basic info that's yet another example of their great PR teams.
Who is https://www.reddit.com/user/nathan131412/
Facebook should have had a panic room.

Operations teams normally have a special room with a secure connection for situations like this, so that production can be controlled in the event of bgp failure, nuclear war, etc. I could see physical presence being an issue if their bgp router depends on something like a crypto module in a locked cage, in which case there's always helicopters.

So if anything, Facebook's labor policies are about to become cooler.
Disclose.tv
@disclosetv
JUST IN - Facebook employees reportedly can't enter buildings to evaluate the Internet outage because their door access badges weren’t working (NYT)
Anyone wanna estimate the cost of total downtime for facebook and instagram, as far as lost ad revenue goes - per minute?
From the Tweet, "Was just on phone with someone who works for FB who described employees unable to enter buildings this morning to begin to evaluate extent of outage because their badges weren’t working to access doors."
Reading this, it's really ironic that the first leadership principle of Amazon is customer obsession and after 20 years Blue Origin's leadership is just tapping their forehead saying "maybe we should make a rocket that customers actually want?!".

This demonstrate such a staggering lack of leadership it's obvious that they've been relying on cash infusion from Jeff Bezos for far too long.
I am also guilty of this. Can you give me an example of a blogpost you enjoyed reading?
Reminds me of S3 outage a couple of years ago when AWS status page went down because it was relying on... S3...
https://lkml.org/
We can only hope that they will be gone forever... and HN is having major issues at the same time!
Cloudflare is the good guy now promoting the growth of the decentralised web.

In a decade or two theyll be the bad guy putting up walls and centralising it.

Weve seen this cycle before.
> If one of the ends decides to share a message, it's still E2E. That is the big difference.

True. But you can't prove that "one of the ends" must necessarily be a human and not the logic in the app code, or an intended backdoor? E.g., an automated logic scanning for 'malicious' messages on-device.
I honestly think it will never be about EVs but about creating opportunities to increase tax.
If people I know saw me working with that server, they'd likely laugh, point, say "look what jerry is working on", then hearing that others would gather around and laugh at me while I try to explain that the guy is european.
Um…what’s a “AAA” record? Is that like a AAAA record, but for the elusive ipv5?
You are very wrong about that
https://lkml.org/
> Personally I wouldn't accept a signature made by mouse instead of a pen.

I had to implement a "signature" at my current gig and, legally speaking, a check-box is a valid signature when e-signing something.
Sheera Frenkel
@sheeraf
Was just on phone with someone who works for FB who described employees unable to enter buildings this morning to begin to evaluate extent of outage because their badges weren’t working to access doors.
I'm genuinely not sure if the reports I heard of employees being locked out of the systems they need to fix it because their network is down are jokes or true.
You are very wrong about that ;)
https://lkml.org/
Some people here say their fallback IRC doesn't work due to DNS reliance. :|
> The difference between having someone who always triple-checks every parameter they input, versus someone who never double-checks and just wings it. Sure, the person who triple-checks will make mistakes, but less than the other person. This is the issue I'm trying to get at.

If you rely on someone triple-checking, you should improve your processes. You need better automation/rollback/automated testing to catch things. Eventually only intentional failure should be the issue (or you'll discover interesting new patterns that should be protected against)
What incentive does the app store have to innovate now?
Link to such claims here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28750894

I have no doubt that the publicly published post-mortem report (if there even is one) will be heavily redacted in comparison to the internal-only version. But I very much want to see said hypothetical report anyway. This kind of infrastructural stuff fascinates me. And I would hope there would be some lessons in said report that even small time operators such as myself would do well to heed.