skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This more or less confirms what we’ve heard, and I appreciate the speed, but it’s incredibly lame from a details point of view.

Will a real postmortem follow? Or is this the best we are gonna get?
https://missoulian.com/news/state-and-regional/montana-psc-r...

The major providers are notorious for not upgrading their infrastructure. The bizarre decision to "punish" centurylink by giving them $91 million is par for the course.

The absurd definition of broadband used by government means centurylink got $91 million and all they had to do was keep up with dsl capabilities. You'd hope that much money would get fiber to the home to a few communities, but nah.
If you had two uncles who died of alcohol related causes, they were drinking a lot more than 2 drinks a day.
I answer calls. My family still often calls, and I know people who can't take a phone to work so they have to use a landline to call.

The spam call detection on Android works pretty well for me, it seems to catch and block at least 90% of the spam calls.
Ahh, so if the monster exists then it must, like the porpoises, only rarely travel to Loch Ness from the ocean, so that few sightings per century can be expected.

I thought all alien craft sightings were BS until four separate Navy pilots came forward to say they all saw that white tic tac in 2004. And three of the four pilots have done television interviews, most recently this 60 Minutes one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygB4EZ7ggig

If not for the link between Loch Ness and the ocean I'd think the existence of the monster could probably be ruled out as attention seeking liars. But now that we know porpoises sometimes make the rare trip from the ocean, we can't 100% rule out the monster never does. Does Dochfour Weir have 24/7 thermal and sonar monitoring and recording? Would Dochfour Weir capture on video and count every single porpoise that passes through at 3am, 365 days per year?
One might argue that the fact that you care about things like this is why you don’t run Facebook.
I mean if you own 3 independent businesses, each of which would be worth over $100 billion, and you break all of them simultaneously for an entire day, including your internal email and your badge entry systems, yes, that is definitionally an anti-pattern.
Older folks with declining cognitive abilities are especially targeted.

I have a friend whose grandmother had severe dementia and sent 400k to scammers via wire transfer.

I have nightmares about my father, who has shown a tendency to put credit card numbers into pop-up windows. I found a coin miner on his laptop recently.
Trying to turn Solaris into Linux was a mistake back then. Most of their stuff worked better than the gnu equivalents if you put in the effort to learn it.
Not to argue, just to post a contrasting view: while FB, and a lot of the internet, failed or slowed today—and I know there were tons of reports of HN slowing too—I also experienced a phone death and attempted to hobble along by putting my SIM back in my old iPhone 5. Basically the only thing that worked was HN. In fact it loaded as quickly as I’d expect.

There’s plenty of stuff I’d like to be different about usability of this site, but perf is basically at the bottom of that list.
If you want 1 facebook.com entity (that in turn controls instagram, whatsapp,etc) , then I get why a single AS change would take out globally.

The anti-anti-pattern would be to have country specific AS's, kind of like a franchised restaurant pattern, where each country's version of fb owns their own AS that loosely forms back into the facebook mothership org, but from infrastructure point of view points to their own set of AS netspace.
China is OK with losing a few billion citizens
Well that doesn't say a whole lot... I know it is early but they could use a little more detail. Even if it is just a timeline.
Quite the opposite. Back in the day you would've had to login dozens if not hundreds of routers individually to push the change, and it likely would've been caught after screwing up the first one. This is the result of SDN (software defined networking) and being able to push a change globally from one command.

I recall major ISP's screwing up their routing tables in the past but never globally on this level.
Gotta love how painfully vague this is. Sounds like a PR piece for investors, not an engineering blog piece.
Personally I won't ever use it as long as it requires a cloud login.
You are correct, but this problem isn’t Facebook’s doing. This is just how BGP works. Even big players like Verizon can screw it up and break the Internet.

For all it’s flaws, BGP is the piece of the Internet that truly makes it decentralized. Without it, there would be a centralized routing table of some sort.
Pretty safe.

I guess the way to bet on it is compounding interest, at least in the current world.
I have been unclear. By "here", I meant the country I am in.
The one problem with this is we still have a landline. All the time people will complain that we didn’t answer their text. They don’t seem to know how to respond when told it can’t receive texts. Then they promptly forget because the same people try texting us over and over again. I wish there was some way a number that can’t receive texts could immediately respond and let them know.
I hope you forgot a “not” in your last example!
I've seen 3D Secure implemented almost exclusively using apps nowadays, i.e. you need to confirm the transaction in your bank app. The iframe doesn't matter.

The old implementation with the iframe was bonkers, just teaching people to enter their banking credentials on random sites. I hope it bit them in court if they ever tried to blame customers for getting phished.
Not nearly enough energy in the rotor system of that kind of drone to manage an autorotation landing; and they lack a freewheeling system in any case.
This seems good but I do think this type of social media wouldn't be as popular. The posts you would like to see would end up being created on a different platform. If there are capped comments and no likes, then I don't visually see which content is worth reading (i.e I look at the title and engagement before I find myself wanting to read the content). I think even well intentioned people would like to see likes on their posts and maybe would provide more content with something as simple as that. Maybe something like Instagram, it shows who liked it and more.

I guess if I were to make my own I would make a messaging app that you can also post statuses. You can reply but the replies are sent straight to the creator. You would also need to approve anyone who follows you.

But I think apps that behave like Facebook because there is lots of engagement but with there is a price
Even though the angle grinder story wasn’t accurate, it’d still be interesting to know what percentage of the time to fix the outage was spent on regaining physical access:

https://mobile.twitter.com/mikeisaac/status/1445196576956162...
AKA always carry a wrecking bar and a 5 pound sledgehammer in the data center quick reaction kit.
A war involving 4 nuclear powers. What could go wrong?
Yeah Linkedin really took off this year in that respect. I always thought it was due to the demand for virality. People realized a big linkedin following was valuable and started acting differently.

If no one could ever see your posts.. maybe that goes away
In China, both are equally probable.
Sure they do. And it's why Whatsapp needs to be broken off from Facebook, because they blatantly lied about it and only bought it to kill off their competition
BGP has to converge to a single routing table.

You are effectively asking is why is there a single routing table for the internet.

To put in simple terms having a single routing table is what it makes it the internet we can share, otherwise it would just be a bunch of independent networks.
‘Fruits of Labor’ Provides an Intimate Look at the Life of a Teenage Farmworker
> most X11 takes some work to manage hidpi

The bigger problem was that CDE refused to place/draw windows outside of an area of 1600x1200 or so. That the panel couldn't be moved to the screen edge might have been slightly annoying, but it actively worked against having _any_ window outside of what is a small area on my screen.
Sorry, thought you meant HN.
Pairing for knowledge raises the bus number from one to two, which doesn’t help for that long in the current market for devs. Documentation is what endures.
One of the usual justifications for acquisitions is to save money using common infrastructure. Instagram and WhatsApp haven't been independent for a while.
Author here: I really should have checked about the availability of CDE. I I wrote the blog while I was fiddling around with Solaris and the strange way a lot of it came back to me was like dredging an old car out of a swamp. I got so involved in getting a compiler on there and trying out the tools that I forgot about the outside world for a while.

Coming back out of there to a Debian desktop is so much nicer, but boy is it fun to play in that little sandbox again. Sparc workstations were awesome and the emulator is a great way to revisit things.
Ars Technica has a lot of reports about this, if you wish to learn more about it:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2009/11/big-telcos-slam-...

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/07/comca...

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2009/06/monticello-appea...

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/09/most-...

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/06/lawsuit-comcast-...

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/10/isps-reminded-to...
>...I regularly update components in my systems each year including RAM, GPU, SSDs, WiFi...

Then go for it - you have choices, and no one is forcing you to buy a Mac.

I personally got shit to do and have no interest in replacing all of that at that type of frequency.
The Mystery of the “I Want to Live in This Era” Photo
In practice, it's mainly used for DRM.
It was quite ironic that while every Facebook property was offline there was an immense amount of misinformation about the incident perpetuated across the internet (including right here on HN) which everyone just believed as fact.
Tesla Ordered to Pay Worker $137M for Racism at Plant
Without in depth technical details of what exactly happened and how, it’s hard to say. With what we have heard and seen the answer is probably that there are some opportunities to build in more resiliency, but ultimately the kind of failure that causes domino effects is impossible to eliminate completely.

This is partially due to design limitations of BGP, and partially due to it being nearly impossible to eliminate all sources of large scale failures in any highly complex system, and increasing the uptime of a system that already has a few nines costs an additional order of magnitude for each new nine. At some point you set your risk tolerance and have catastrophic failures now and then.
https://archive.is/aKlPN
Reading this statement all I can think of is this scene https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15HTd4Um1m4
A 1/3 of covid cases are in the age group 6-12. You are unlikely to pick up covid in a hospital from a first responder because they are protected wearing the best gear available.
Don't AS "things" only affect the IP addresses? Surely you could have DNS records for facebook.com pointing to IP addresses in multiple ASes?
Open Source Tax Software
Maybe add a hint on what time most people have been on the site, or show a distribution of number of people vs. time.

Bonus if there's an option to change time zone.

Right now, it is 0357 where I am (UTC+1). I'm not sure who visits your site the most, and what time zone they are in.
> I've known plenty of people way smarter than me that didn't achieve as much, because they just wanted to turn off and tune out. Drink some beer. Watch some mindless movies.

Cognition can be painful in a psyche impacted by a history of high stress. Read about substance P neurotransmitters and depression; chemical messages for physical pain are high in depressed patients, and yet there's nothing to indicate that there should be pain. Block the substance P neurotransmitters and you get an antidepressant.

So, I think there are repressive forces in addition to what you're describing above. Modeling the problem this way, it's easier to be optimistic and figure out societal machinery to promote more problem solving by addressing forces like stress; instead of TV watching and etc., since these habits are side-effects of other problems.
Dns providers are basically every ISP in existence, it would be impractical to communicate with by phone calls
No, I am sorry as my reply was ambiguous and unclear.
The China surveillance apparatus is based on compulsion of private companies. Where are you drawing the distinction?
Good ol’ CoDel - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CoDel
Ultimately I think you are right, but I don't think this is the right way to think about the question. It's not as though they thought they were creating a monolith on purpose by following a pattern for creating monoliths. They thought they were following best practices and building a distributed system, without single-points of failure. I think a more productive way to think about it might be what's the psychology and practices that led them to be wrong? My best guess is that at some points in the stack DNS is opaque, and at other points, particularly for trained network people, it becomes transparent (i.e. invisible) and disappears (like a mirage), so then they make both the network and physical locks dependent on it (and BGP) and... lock themselves out when it fails.
> configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues

This could be anything, potentially.

I'm not very knowledgeable in computer networking, but this could be as trivial as an incorrect update to a DNS record, right?
Right, I'm not familiar with their data model or even features, since I don't use it, but bottom line is that users are probably not in control of the data, and what you see in the app is just a client app reconstruction based on your actions and preferences. It sounds that's what you're alluding to.

> but if they "actually delete it"--which I imagine you want--then they might also forget any unique identifier stored with the message, which likely makes it hard to know that this message was both already received and deleted in the past.

I would expect any messaging app to work like email, where you're also in control of the email server. Once you receive someone else's message, it's in your inbox, and you can delete it forever as well. The email message model is more intuitive, and I would love for modern instant messaging clients to work the same way except in real time. Of course when you have that level of control, you would need to make it paywalled or subscription of some kind.
Yep nostalgia is weird. Some of the software from that time just feels weird and constricting (Windows 3.11 or the contemporary Mac operating systems). Solaris doesn't quite feel modern but it sure is a lot closer to modern than Windows 3.11
One of the things they restored was annoying sounds in the app every time I tap anything. Who knew that was DNS related!
The best course of action is to split FB into separate companies. It is already neatly divided between instagram, WU and legacy facebook. That would be the best for the government to avoid disruptions.
> how many legitimate phone calls can come from India anyway

Spoken with the hubris of someone who has never been more than five miles from the town they were born in, and who can't imagine why anyone else would do such a thing.

India isn't Mars, there are over a billion people living in it, most of whom have telephones, many of whom using them to talk to their friends and relatives who live abroad. The Indian diaspora is 18 million people, but I guess we should just write all of them off, their needs and desire to communicate doesn't matter.

You're going to need to come up with a better solution than 'Blackhole the entire country'.
Seriously? I can't tell I'd that's badass or scary.... Probably both.
Surely “anti-pattern” doesn’t just mean “anything with negative outcomes.” Couldn’t this just be a really big mistake that isn’t indicative of an anti-pattern?
Firefox 93 Release Notes
This made me laugh out loud. I too forget this little website is run by an enormous Venture Capital firm.
Why don't you get rid of the landline and give these people your cell phone number?
> It's not the HN readers that the FCC is concerned with.

I hope it is. I hope it's everyone they are worried about. I remember in the way back of the late 90s/early 2000s I always picked up the phone, and if I missed I'd actually call back an unrecognized number. Can you imagine? And believe it or not it wasn't just me, it was a thing people did. Odds were that the person at the other end was someone you wanted to talk to.

Now a few years later when the phone rings all I'm looking to do is silence the damn thing. Literally 9/10 (maybe more) calls I get are just spam, and that's letting Google filter the calls it knows are spam. It doesn't have to be this way, and I hate that we've just thrown up our hands and accepted this. I really hope that we can get back to a place where the phone ringing is a precursor to human contact and not just another annoyance.
Perhaps you meant the fool's gold standard?
Dang I missed the misinformation.
We almost went down the ‘this is a subterfuge to delete whistleblower evidence’ rabbit hole.
We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time.

Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%.
I didn’t see any disinformation, just initial reports that it was DNS which were later explained to be caused by BGP.
I think you need to re-adjust your expectations, it's not reasonable to have a fully fleshed out RCA blog post available within hours of incident resolution. Most other cloud providers take a few days for theirs.
Seriously. I also saw lots of posts about how quiet it would be with Facebook down, but I don't think I've ever been exposed to so many stories and so much chatter about Facebook in a single day.
RCAs take time. It's best to issue vague statements during and right after an incident rather than make guesses.
Ask HN: Is there a comprehensive guide to the self-publishing industry?
Do you know a good resource on the current state of printing/pos/fulfillment in the self-publishing industry? Also how to get into airport bookshops. Ok that last sentence was a joke! But learning the best options for printing/sales/distributing is not a joke. I don't need a marketing guide.
You're missing something: sensible transaction speed and ease of currency conversion from usd.

Stablecoins like USDT fits this.
You also somehow missed the word "competitive".

Massively subsidized commercial (I should qualify, here, hot-neutron) fusion power seems technically possible, and could even happen, given enough corruption. But total cost to the public will necessarily be overwhelmingly more than long mature (by then) alternatives.

It starts out many tens of $billions in the hole, before the first watt-hour comes out. And taxpayers are already paying for that, today.
Yeah they're doing a fast controlled descent. Whether it's a low battery failsafe or a response to loss of control signal isn't clear but they're doing their best to land.

The first few look precipitous but you don't see them approach the ground, later in the video you see one that's coming down very fast and then makes a reasonable effort to brake when it gets near the ground.

Edit: Most of them are doing a fast controlled descent, a few seem to have just powered off and become rocks.
TL;DR

We YOLO'd our BGP experiment to prod. It failed.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210626191032/https://engineeri...
The connection the writer makes between financial success and curiosity is strange to me. Most of the cleverest and most curious people I know DGASF about money, beyond earning an average wage.
Krebs did not promote a DNS service he works for a total of nine times in his blogpost, so I did not feel like I was reading an infomercial for how great Cloudflare's continued MITMing of the internet is.
The only thing you really miss is right clicks. The Gnome (not phosh) keyboard supports some of that but I prefer xvkbd.
Looks like the 'Failure Generator' was brought online.
There seems to be nothing uncertain about the immediate cause of the issue - Facebook revoked all of their BGP routes, and all of their IP addresses couldn't receive packets until they were restored.
Are you intentionally misreading what I wrote?

I never said anything about federal laws being invalid. I said they are enforced by police action. Which is obviously true.
Drones almost always use fixed pitch props which aren't capable of autorotation (in this sense anyway).
The right to keep your job has. Which means your right to choose has been compromised.
Microsoft Office 2021 Includes Better Support for LibreOffice Files
The author describes using HTTP and a stub page to copy a file from host to VM. I've found Netcat (nc) to be a better option -- it's widely available and easy to use as a simple pipe. You can combine it with tar to copy directories.

[guest]$ nc -l -p 1234 > some_file
[host]$ cat some_file | nc $GUEST_IP 1234

If Netcat isn't installed, many older UNIXes have Perl available to DYI a simple TCP server.

In the limit, some shells (GNU Bash for sure, and I think also Korn shell?) support connecting to a remote TCP endpoint via the /dev/tcp/ special prefix. In this configuration you'd have the host listen and the guest initiate.

Another trick with QEMU is bundling files into a disk image and then mounting them (as a CD-ROM or SCSI). Somewhat more cumbersome, but works even for guests that don't have a working network.
- It was government intervention

- Facebook was hacked

- They did it on purpose to bury the whistleblower story

- No one could access Facebook offices

- They had to cut open servers with angle grinders

- Disgruntled employees changed DNS records

- Lots of made up numbers for how much money Facebook/the rest of the economy was losing (or gaining)

They probably rushed out this blog post just to dispel some of these rumors.
This would be really insightful if possible, thank you!
I think the Steam Deck will be successful using Linux but that's because it's a device designed for a specific use. As a portable device designed to play games through Steam it will excel, because Valve has put a lot of effort into making gaming on Linux "just work."

As a general purpose desktop OS Linux still isn't there for most people in my opinion, as much as I want it to be. Every so often I try to make the switch to Linux full time and there's always some hitch that pushes me back to Windows. I don't even mind digging around and making changes in conf files if it will fix the problem, but I always encounter something that I consider a deal breaker where I hit a brick wall and just can't figure it out.
I saw a couple of people clearly guessing something along these lines but none of them seemed to be claiming that it was actually happening, more like “isn’t it convenient that…”
What is BGP, and how might it have helped kick Facebook off the internet?
No, Blue Origin really does go into space. But it's good to point out the huge difference between going to space and staying there.
I don't see the problem. ATT cleans up their network, or they get shut down just like anyone else that is allowing anonymous bad actors on to the network.
This is a real and growing problem.

I have a few clients who are getting up in years. Talking to them one on one, they seem as sharp as ever. And yet
both of them have recently called shady 800 numbers from obvious (to me) scam emails.

Thankfully both spoke to me before completing the money transfers, but it was close. As one of them was explaining to me after the fact, they got so startled by the (fake) expensive invoice, they felt overwhelmed, and just didn't even think to think that it might be a scammer.