skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Now Is the Time to Start an Advertising Franchise
Is the new Airport Express an iOS device?
This may surprise you, but every laptop and desktop that I own has a 32-bit processor in it.
Apple stores are the highest grossing retail stores in the world by a significant margin. Apple Stores produce over $5,600 per square foot. The next highest retailer is Tiffany, at a little under $3,000. The median for the top 20 retailers is well under $1,000 per square foot.

It's important to keep in mind that going into retail looked absolutely ridiculous when Apple announced their first retail store, for some of the reasons you have enumerated. Gateway was what people thought of as a computer retailer, and they were dying. Execution matters.
All services are billed based on time usage (its not hourly, its much more granular), including the database.

That said, an outage is still an outage.
If they're all running an unlocked Windows shell, there's really nothing that differentiates them from the rest of the pack.

The first thing anyone looks at on a laptop(unless it's closed) is the screen. And often, there is little to no branding on the keyboard and screen.

So when you have a row of Asus, Acer, Compaq and HP ultrabooks/laptops sitting in a row, each OEM needs to find a way to differentiate themselves from the rest. Apple can present the unlocked shell because nobody else sells OSX devices.
This is why http://AppFog.com/ is investing in multiple IaaS and is not being hit nearly as hard.
ICANN Pulls down gTLD List After Realizing Addresses were Disclosed
All stars have planets
> There's no way that we can entrust the business to something that can just catastrophically fail at any moment.

Anything, including service providers, can catastrophically fail at any moment. Fault-tolerant architectures are based on redundancy (including infrastructure provider redundancy, as you mention), not on "guaranteed" SLAs.
if you have a year of 99.97 months, don't you have a 99.97 year? how does having a shorter time make the numbers look better?

[edit: i realise they could be hiding worse months, but i don't think that's what the post i am replying to meant. perhaps i am reading it wrong.]
The Facebook IPO punched a temporary hole in their valuation. I think Microsoft got a modest steal due to that.

Yammer has already won their segment. Imagine owning a private corporate social network, spanning the globe, with paying clients. It's an extremely valuable segment.
DoubleClick is a public facing app, but you need an account which you can get only through a sales rep (I believe). The target audience are medium and large advertising agencies and not individuals.
Code Acadamy down...related to Heroku?
Just noticed that the Code Academy website is down, are they using Heroku?
Everyone should take a page from the book of Netflix right now. It's pretty embarrassing to be anyone that's entirely down and can't do a thing about it due to an EC2 outage.

How do you explain to your customers/users/etc that you were down and have absolutely no control of when you will be back online? How can you explain it to yourself?
Ok, I'll bite. No I have not read any other cyberpunk books, but necromancer was recommended to me. Anyway (unlike the implication from ynniv) I had no problem with the metaverse. Here are the issues I can think of at the moment

1. no character development

2. "hiro protagonist" 10/10 on the lame scale

3. no explanation for why delivering pizzas is so important. there is one paragraph that attempts to explain it but fails miserably.

4. the girl only serves as a plot vehicle and does so incredibly poorly

5. hiro's dad and raven's dad were captured together? absurd

6. love of the rat thing for the girl is disney-level goofy

7. the "magic spell" juanita reads at the end is a little too convenient

I did like the fighting scenes, though. There was one very good paragraph in the whole book -- the bit about how computers never seem to do the right thing and to get any modicum of productivity out of them the tools one uses must be transparent, meaning the user must have a deep understanding of their tools. That is a pretty deep insight that can be incorporated into daily life.
Can we get this title renamed to AWS outage as the problem is not Heroku.
There are games on Google+?
Wouldn't that only affect a small subset of visitors. For example why would I be seeing any issues if I'd be hitting an Asia-pacific volume instead of a us-east region one? Seems like it goes deeper than that.
Related: Right now when I try to cat /proc/mdstat or use mdstat to look at my RAID status, it just hangs. Seems it's trying to contact the EBS volumes and it's just failing. Any way to actually view my raid status?
I'm curious as to how it determines which apps are running on iOS. Apple doesn't expose this data through their APIs.
There are projects to connect Angular to other libraries, e.g.

-- angular-ui:
http://deansofer.com/posts/view/14/AngularJs-Tips-and-Tricks...
-- a set of widgets for UI elements, including wrappers for jQuery plugins

-- jquery-mobile-angular-adapter:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/angular/at8helGHd_g
-- for using angular with jQuery Mobile

-- sencha-touch-angular-adapter:
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!msg/angular/c8s...
-- ditto, for Sencha Touch

I believe mostly any object can be easily wrapped to be accessible by Angular (which is what's happening in angular-ui for jQuery plugins, for example). Right now documentation for these projects is sparse, but their authors tend to be active on the AngularJS Google Group, and people often offer solutions to problems very quickly there.
Some EBS volumes in North Virginia slow.... :-(
Male Character .... Check
Female Character .. Check
Nuclear Weapon .... Check
=> James Bond with iPhones

We should just hide the minority report and stop this crime against literature from happening.

[Edit] Obviously I should elaborate a bit: Snow Crash is precisely the type of book, where it is really easy to make an disappointing movie. It has enough action scenes to fill 90 minutes without ever mentioning any of the interesting concepts of the book.
It doesn't matter whether gauged by the month or year. It's a percentage. If they have 99.97% uptime every month for a year, they'll still have 99.97% uptime for the year.
They could have terrible uptime 2 months ago and you wouldn't see it in their status page, because it only showed last month's.
The ACCC is pissing in the wind. It's just a matter of geographic price segmentation to maximise revenue. End of story.

Also, end of legal challenge:

* there's no violation of free trade agreements, which are about governments dropping barriers like tariffs and quotas and confer neither rights to individuals nor obligations on businesses, and

* there's no violation of individual rights, because country-of-residence is not a protected class, unlike gender/orientation/skin colour/race/disability.
Dear Heroku -- I know it's my job to make sure my site is available (/thread). However, I think I speak for most enterprise customers when I say I will throw money at your company the second you come up with a multi-zone/highly-available offering.
Depends on the month...

31 versus 28 days.
Out of curiosity do we know if http://status.aws.amazon.com/ is hosted on AWS?
Cloud is an excellent solution. The issues is companies not taking advantage of multiple availability zones.
This is what I was thinking of (I think):

http://cloudfoundry.org/
Netflix's "Lessons Learned" from the April 2011 AWS outage: http://techblog.netflix.com/2011/04/lessons-netflix-learned-...

Though they're not 100% degradation proof today either: http://i.imgur.com/MJfqj.png
Overcoming Fear Is The Route To Success
Whatever it is, it's worse.

The new one requires a power cable. The point of the express was that it's entirely self contained. You could throw it in your bag and take it with you on trips. Now you can't.

So it's just a crippled airport extreme.
Fun fact: Snow Crash featured a software called 'Earth', a complete 3D view of the earth. Which inspired a company called Keyhole to write something like that. Which got later bought by Google and that product is now known as Google Earth.
Dear Heroku -- I know it's my job to make sure my site is available (/thread). However, I think I speak for most enterprise customers when I say I will throw money at your company the second you come up with a multi-zone/highly-available.
There has not been much that is both new and interesting in the graph partitioning literature in a long time. What you already know is probably not too far off from what is in the current literature. The literature on this topic has been stagnant for years.

Solutions to the graph partitioning problem exist and among people doing high-end graph analytics this has been rumored for years now. It just is not published and people that know how it is done are slathered in NDAs. I know of two different (related) algorithms for parallelizing graph analysis. IBM Research currently has the most advanced algorithms for graph analysis and they disclose very little about how they work.
OK, that may work with a hardware keyboard, but what about a manner of typing on on-screen keyboards? Will I be able to log in from the tablet or phone?
Amazon EC2 down?
I guess I am not understanding why you would be compelled to re-write massive Java apps in JavaScript. Especially anything to do with heavy finance algos.

Replacing swing UI's seems like a reasonable thing to tackle using HTML/CSS/JavaScript. You could just pass data back and forth over HTTP if you are talking remote client/server or bundle a local webserver if running host only.

In the case of a platform like Windows 8, you can write actual apps using JavaScript (no server) but you can also write libraries in native code and access them directly from the JS.

I think this is just a classic case of "use the right tool for the job".
Insights on doing business in China
This is why http://AppFog.com/ is investing in multiple IaaS and is not being hit nearly as hard. You can still sign up and even create apps.
They could have done it to the extreme -- show the numbers for the past hour. Then they could almost always report 100% uptime. And if they ever went down, wait an hour, then go back to reporting 100% uptime again.
That was their uptime for May, but looking at June it's going to be a worse picture. They're already down to 99.63% if you only include "red" incidents and down to 99.25% if you include "amber" incidents as well (as of 39m of downtime for this latest incident and assuming they don't have any more downtime for the month).
status.aws.amazon.com resolves to 207.171.185.167 for me.

That IP isn't in the EC2 IP ranges (https://forums.aws.amazon.com/ann.jspa?annID=1528), so at the very least it's not hosted on EC2.
I'm pretty sure nothing qualifies as "always the best" solution. "The cloud" can be an imperfect solution yet still be the best solution for certain apps.
Because this shit is really hard especially when you're trying to build a product at the same time.

It's not like you can just wake up one day and say "I'm gonna go build a fully fault tolerant distributed system that works across multiple data centers!" and then you're done by the time you go to sleep.

Go actually talk to some Netflix engineers. They'll tell you the same thing.
It's a key design constraint of status.aws.amazon.com that it not depend on any AWS services. (Or so I've heard.)
And my guess is his client doesn't give two excrements what the reason is. It's boolean to them; it's up or it's down.
Sounds like half of the startup world hasn't spent the time or the money to design their service to be redundant on top of AWS.
They posted an update on amazon: We continue to investigate this issue. We can confirm that there is both impact to volumes and instances in a single AZ in US-EAST-1 Region. We are also experiencing increased error rates and latencies on the EC2 APIs in the US-EAST-1 Region.

Also Amazon Relational Database Service (N. Virginia) is unavailible.

Seems like its snowballing.
https://status.heroku.com/incidents/151

Looks like they didn't actually do any of the remediation steps.
During the previous outage (which wasn't AWS related), Heroku's status page was down entirely (among other things, it relied on static assets from heroku.com), so I can't say I agree with that.
That's my point exactly. Everyone relies entirely (almost) on EC2 for mission critical business, and then they're left there with no outs as soon as a big outage occurs.
Well, that's one bullet dodged. I think the last thing anyone wants to see on G+ is games. I recall the Facebook UX being significantly (negatively) affected by the addition of so-called "apps".
We appreciate your trust in us and we’re going to live up to it. - Apr 27, 2011
It would be interesting to see someone go through a public repository and compare error rates / bug fixes between dynamic and static languages implementing the same kind of products. Might not point out differences in the approach but at least in the entire ecosystem (tools+developers+code).

At a certain distance you can swap the approaches anyway (but for syntax):

static as dynamic: Use Thing = HashMap<String, Thing> instead of objects.
dynamic as static: Put assert(type(x)=="int") everywhere.

As to building large apps. If you need to build a large app (ie you cant divide it into isolated subsystems) then your goose is already well and truly cooked :)
this. stop talking about how great a MVP is and then complain when people haven't build multi region distributed services that are fault tolerant to major platform outages.
If anyone from valve is listening, would really appreciate it if you added commenting support to your blog, I am looking forward to this series of articles, it is a very interesting and unique space.
I saw what they were doing when they launched and thought "you know, twitter of business sucks but Facebook for business would be brilliant." Too bad I let myself stay stuck in a service business. Going to end that July 1.
the Apple experience is based on the GAP experience, and it's not about contrast, it's about comparing stores that are worth comparing.
"The words MICRO and SOFT don't apply to my..."
Better programming tools; particularly mutation-based fuzz-testing tools; code structure visualisation; statistical, nonlinear code quality metrics, structure-based code similarity metrics and similarity-based code search/suggestion; better linting & static analysis tools; refactoring tools that integrate with unit tests; continuous testing tools; better documentation for existing tools.
This was in the recent Heroku down thread. You might be interested in Stackato (http://www.activestate.com/stackato). It is based on Cloud Foundry, with numerous enhancements, including support for Heroku buildpacks (http://docs.stackato.com/languages/buildpack.html). Heroku-in-a-box - give it a try.

BTW, while the point is to enable private paas, you won't get around the issues that hit sites like this without heeding all the warnings and recommendations about building in redundancy for high availability.

This was noted well in this post: http://www.newvem.com/blog/main/2012/06/aws-cloud-best-pract...

"""It is a lot cheaper to add 1% uptime to a 95% SLA than it is to add 0.09% to a 99.9% SLA. Cloud application vendors (SaaS) need to pay very close attention to the additional resources that are invested in order to support a 99.9XX…% uptime SLA, and perhaps build it into their pricing plans."""
> Sure. So long as you have a full proof way of identifying the best developers.

It's easier to grow them.
Even though I had no clue about actual economics at the time, this is what I saw as so screwy in runescape. A lot of the ingame money came from alchemy. A few clever people had figured out that the two of the highest tier bows were easy to produce en masse and so created a market for their components. Since runescape does not have a shard system like WoW or other MMOs, this particular market was huge. RMT (real money traders) came in and automated the gathering of these components. Jagex tried numerous methods of eliminating RMT from the game, including fixing ingame prices to within a certain amount. Not sure what happened then, but I still can't figure out why they didn't simply fix the mechanic at the heart of it.
Fortunately for most, they dont have customers yet
Yes, you're absolutely right. However, Netflix is distributed across multiple AZ, while Heroku has spent the last two years after their $212MM acquisition in the same AZ.

That makes it sound like Netflix has a more reliable platform than the PaaS company.
The other side of recognizing that this is a language issue is recognizing that we're raising the bar for computer literacy. My mother isn't likely to figure out what the three lines mean in any context, because she simply isn't all that computer literate.

Now, in the mid-late 90s she would have had no trouble recognizing the save icon—the floppy disk was what she was probably saving to anyway, and there it is on the icon. People 20 and under are unlikely to have had real experiences with floppy disks, so to them, the floppy icon is just what the save icon happens to look like, for no ideographic reason at all. That's just what save icons look like, and they recognize it, because it's part of basic computer literacy.

I think it's healthy of people on HN to recognize this as a language issue, because that's what it is, but there should be some corresponding philosophy: do we want to keep moving towards digital hieroglyphics or do we want to strive to retain representativeness in icon imagery? More meanings and context sensitivity for differentiation, as is the case with the three lines, is certainly the abstract direction.
"We're sorry about the current downtime. We know some of you are frustrated, so we thought we'd take a moment to explain why this happened.

"Running a web server is very expensive. After we've built the site, if we want to keep it running, someone needs to be on-call 24 hours a day. That means at least one full-time staff member who does nothing else-- more if we want them to stay sane.

"To save us and you some money, we've contracted maintenance of our servers out to a third-party service. This is great for us, since they run it more reliably than we could, and it's great for you, because it costs a lot less. But the downside is that things still break sometimes, and when they do, it's completely out of our hands. We're left waiting for things to get fixed just like you are.

"So we understand your frustration; we're frustrated too. But unfortunately, downtimes do happen. Guaranteeing our service 100% of the time would cost hundreds of thousands of extra dollars per year, and for most of our users, that's simply not worth the cost. Our provider guarantees 99.[nines]% reliability for much less money, and this is the 0.01%.

"If you have something that absolutely must get done, shoot us an email right now and we'll take care of it for you as soon as the site is active again.

"Although this is technically out of our hands, we aren't trying to shift the blame; we made this decision with open eyes, and we stand by that decision. Again, we sincerely apologize for the temporary inconvenience. We hope we can make it up to you with some new features we'll be rolling out this month :)"

It doesn't have to be that hard.
Possible (portable) alternative to Heroku
It may be an AWS outage as the cause, but ultimately it's Heroku's problem. They're the ones touting:

"Erosion-resistant architecture.

Heroku takes full responsibility for your app's health,
keeping it up and running through thick and thin..."

The thick happened today, something eroded, and people are holding them to their word: full responsibility for their app's health. Heroku could do load balancing between multiple independent providers rather than be solely dependent on [one region of?] AWS.
Has anyone here played EVE online? I keep hearing about how intricate and rich it is, but I've never met anyone who played it. Is the complexity interesting? Or is it 'time-sink' complexity in the vein of Diablo 3 -- as in rather mindless optima-seeking?
I thought I read somewhere that it was on Rackspace
It's now yellow with this: "9:27 PM PDT We continue to investigate this issue. We can confirm that there is both impact to volumes and instances in a single AZ in US-EAST-1 Region. We are also experiencing increased error rates and latencies on the EC2 APIs in the US-EAST-1 Region."

AWS has been historically bad at reporting the severity of their outages promptly.
Isn't it your fault you didn't build a fault tolerant application? The first rule of building services is assume everything is broken.
Maybe you tell them that they won't be able to trade cat pictures for some time. And that the outage happened because you didn't overinvest in infrastructure so that you could keep prices down and roll out some new features faster.

Even if you aren't a cat picture site, many startups can deal with some downtime occasionally and it's the right tradeoff to make.
Agreed. 99.97% uptime for May is excellent. I've worked with a lot of enterprise systems (to include military!) and we would love to have that high % of uptime.
If Heroku moved off of AWS they'd have better uptime and lower prices.
I spoke to one of the guys from Heroku recently and he said they are working on it but he couldn't give me a date.

It couldn't come soon enough for us, but also for Heroku as AppFog seem to have its foundations built on a multi-zone/region/provider architecture.
I guess all parents of small children are doomed? sensational headline is sensational.
Yup, very down. My site is down, and I've been attempting to reboot and recreate instances like a madman... Why didn't I just check HN first??
That's hardly surprising. The groupthink on cloud services is that they magically make everything scalable, cheap and easy. Making redundant software is hard work.
That'd depend where they moved to, wouldn't it?
Scientists find key to happiness
> SEO rubs a lot of people on HN the wrong way.

It's too bad. The bottom line is that what SEO means/does is pretty wide ranging, and my idea of it (making content usable/understable for bots) is very different from the dismissive circus caricature conjured by the masses.

But my bet is that I'll win the meaning battle in the long term. patio11 and randfish are good examples of people who are moving the perception toward reality.

For all of the people on HN who bitch about how MBA types have idiotic stereotypes of programmers, it might be worth considering the view from our own glass house.
Maybe you should consider that a Ubuntu problem...I use Arch and only one additional package is required.
Parent post was saying that, without taking into account the entire year, you can have one month that is terrible and the rest quite good.

The measurement in question is supposed to be about consistency.
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That made me laugh. Am I a bad person?
The sales pitch is kind of that it's already redundant. You know, RAID and load balancers and all.
So you're implying that if you changed the HTML colors based on mouse events, the claim of "difficult or even completely impossible for robots" would hold?

Such a claim would be no less ludicrous.

I'd put my money on there being hundreds of people on Hacker News alone that could script a DOM-monkeying cracker for such a system. That runs with ~100% accuracy. And in under an hour of coding.

This Captcha strategy is so absolutely terrible in light of modern libraries that I'm honestly shocked you feel the need to defend it.