skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One problem which we've seen before is: If a large percentage of AWS infrastructure goes down, the customers don't just quietly suffer. Instead they scramble to try and launch infrastructure in other zones or regions, which creates a cascading series of load spikes throughout the AWS system.

AWS is a fascinating science experiment. Pity about the websites, though.
Heroku is back up.
if you're looking for some freelance work, shoot me an email. I have several, pretty basic ideas I'd like to get off the ground, but no time. Why not have fun and get paid doing it?
Ask HN: How far can you go when disparaging a competitor in your marketing copy?
Hi all,

I'm thinking of building a subscription web app, as a simpler-but-cleaner competitor to an entrenched current service. Every one of the last few places i've worked has used this existing service, so i know there's a huge market, and anecdotal evidence suggests that most people don't really like using it, so i think there's room for a competitor.

I've been thinking that in my marketing copy, it'd be great to position myself as 'the anti-xyz', and comprehensively cover their weaknesses to contrast against the purported simplicity and strengths of my service. In this way, i think i could really resonate with people's current dislike of the existing service, and hopefully build an opinionated fan base of customers.

But i'm worried about legal exposure - would i at any risk of being sued for trademark infringement, libel, or anything else for using my competitors name in my marketing copy and pointing out their weaknesses?

FWIW I'm in australia, and so is the competitor.
Mods, the title should be "C to Go", Go is not spelled with all-caps.
But they give you viruses from their pirated support software.
Whoops, I need to let those guys know that aiee is broken. Thanks!
I made Dokuen a few weeks ago, maybe that's what you're thinking of? If you're willing to live with a few warts, it's working pretty well for my personal use. My blog is still on Heroku so you can't really read about it now, but you can check out the code.

https://github.com/peterkeen/dokuen
I made a picture of one just for your perusal:

http://plus.google.com/photos/107137383545242155370/albums/5...
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I downvoted you. Here's why:

I've deployed SQLite to a large number of production software, from embedded systems to web servers handling thousands of daily vistors. In fact, SQLite is my tool of choice when it comes to a small/medium relational-db-based web project.

Sqlite is not a toy db. It is an impressive piece of software engineering.

So, unless you have a very narrow definition of the word production, you should do read up on SQLite (the official website is excellent) and seriously consider it for your next project.
FWIW as of approx 0450 UTC we're starting to see various instances that had become unresponsive return back to service.
A "nice round figure" is suspicious. Shouldn't a well-researched investment cost an amount that sounds well-researched (i.e. a more precise figure and not something that seems rounded up to the nearest billion)?

How about some brief brainstorming on what else they might have done...

If I look at the rest of the company: shouldn't Microsoft be more interested in, say, shipping Windows 8 sooner and with more features? They could pay engineers $200,000 a year (a very nice salary) and contract FIVE THOUSAND of them for a single year with that billion dollars. I'm not saying that would be any more sane of an investment, but I can imagine quite a bit that 5,000 engineers could do: more work on robustness, more bundled applications, more hardware supported, more optimizations...tons and tons of good stuff. Heck, they could do all of that if they hired just 500 engineers and kept them for 10 years, instead of 5,000 contractors for a year. The scale of any billion-dollar investment is insane in those terms.

(This is an example breakdown only. Pick whatever breakdown you like if you don't think this is realistic. The point is, money goes a long way. Companies should take extra time to see if there isn't a better place to spend a few million.)
One of mine is as well. The load balancers also seem to be haywire.
N. Virginia in my experience is by far the least reliable region on EC2/EBS... Fortunately our app servers are across 2 zone in the region... but our db server is just a lone master... Our slave is down... Very nervous.
Coming back up now...
being banned for mentioning "vagina" and "vasectomy" during a bill about abortions...how else would you discuss the topic?!
I've had so much more downtime with heroku/AWS than I ever had back when I was running my sites on slicehost.

I also feel like I've let my admin skills deteriorate because I've been dependent on heroku. Back when I was running everything myself, worst case scenario I could set up a new VPS from a backup in another datacenter. Now if heroku goes out I just have to twiddle my thumbs while I wait for updates.
Why don't you identify yourself as the author?
The laptops clean themselves up after a few minutes of inactivity. You can even play with most settings in system preferences.
Anyone know if Amazon Fresh is hosted on EC2? I had the worst connectivity and performance issues with their site earlier today...and now all of my sites are down.
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Throw money at http://appfog.com/ they have multi datacenters already
At their size they need to be running and managing their own hardware. I'd use them more if it wasn't hundreds of dollars a month to host a few apps that might not be up when my customers are.
I wouldn't speak negatively of them nor their shortcomings. Instead, I'd focus on positively promoting the benefits your platform offers.

The fact that your benefits happen to solve their problems is just a convenient coincidence.
They've since updated the article to indicate a 1.2B purchase price.
I saw this a while ago and will actually be using it very shortly to deploy 3-4 internal apps on our own mini cloud. I love Heroku and can't stand all of the open source "alternatives" like Cloud Foundry. Yours is exactly what I wanted and I can't wait to really start using it and contributing via github! Thanks again!
You can choose not to send heat-of-the-moment emails.

a) You can be intentional about all your public writing - and I think that we have learned by now that email always has the potential to become public.

b) You can set up a delay-sending rule in your email client so that you have a grace period between pressing send and the message actually being sent - this has saved me embarrassment on any number of occasions.
Well, it does have AirPlay.
...or you can keep on working knowing that your services will be magically back online without you lifting a finger.
Yeah I'm just evaluating options, if nothing else it would be excellent to have the equivalent of a "donut spare" on private hardware that we could throw on when events like this occur (although having done plenty of "self-hosted" sites during the first boom, I'm always running the numbers for either option).
$1.2 B
Moreover the original author says

"JavaScript is not suitable for large web apps.

I am serious: Don’t write large web apps in JavaScript."

I don't know how the first flows from the second. Certainly I wouldn't write a large web app in Javascript! I might write Javascript in a large web app though.

So I agree and think the original article overreached.
I'm getting a "Request limit exceeded" error in my EC2 panel.
I'm sure that some Heroku customers already depend on the fact they're hosted on EC2 for accessing other instances or AWS services.
As long as you keep using frameworks, yes!

Instead just use a base library to give you a cross-browser wrapper and few more utils, then develop the whole application core layer on top it to separate it from your sandbox. Write all processing in core JavaScript unless you are trying to access DOM where the library (usually jQuery) wrappers would come into picture. This would give you immense power to control what you develop; will be highly scalable and of course, not to forget, performance.

Don't even complain if you have server side frameworks which will generate JavaScript for you; that will never work and is only good till your project is in Mock-up (prototype) stage.

The problem seems, you don't have good UI guys.
except for any potential data loss that just happened
Why the iPad is more important than the Kinect
Yammer joins Etsy, 37signals in funding Hacker School grants
Looks like they are back. Now the fun part starts for the rest of us. Time to make sure that everything started and that the apps are running.
Yep, but they saw that flaw and addressed it and it's ok for the time being. Amazons has been and still is crappy.
This looks very interesting; thanks for the link!
Do you have reliable information on Yammer's success? User numbers, revenue, etc.
OWC has SSD upgrades for the 2011 MBAs (I bought one the day before the announcement–I should have waited until suddenly it became an obsolescent part) and I suspect they will develop the same for the new flat flash sticks. They also have a USB/fw/esata carrier for the old drive.

It's all memory anyway. Registers, cpu cache, ram, "hard" drive, etc. I'm happy any time more memory gets closer to the CPU.
I run a master with a "hot" master each in a different AZ and slaves of each in their respective AZs for days like today. Expensive, but makes it easy to sleep at night.

The slaves have their EBS disks snapshotted every 30 minutes, the master every 24 hours.
Signals bouncing off a strongly magnetic bubble.

The microwave was a separate but related example of electromagnetic interference on radio transmissions. Both combined paint a picture showing it's possible we might not hear from Voyager again and might not get a good picture of intelligent transmissions outside the heliosphere.
power outage in one of their AZ's. Only after lots of machines died did the generator kick on. Lovely.
I once wrote a simple keystroke analyzer for a login page.
It was based just on the duration and pauses of your keystrokes. Worked great but had little practical usefulness.
The advantage and disadvantage is you cannot simply write down the password.
I don't understand the article. He seems to be confusing using a language in a project vs using a language as the primary one in a project. We might say "Assembly language is not suitable for large OS kernels. Do not write your OS kernel in assembly language."

But I don't think that follows. Assembly language (the article's metaphor) is something that most OS kernels will use from time to time and in moderation. Similarly I don't see anything wrong with Javascript for some pieces of a large web app.
Thanks for your response.

I've considered that approach - it's kind of like taking the moral high ground, isn't it? Which is great. However, i think i could really hit a nerve in the marketplace with people who use X but really hate it, and it would position my product brilliantly.

As opposed to 'this product will do X really well'. I think the copy would pretty much write itself if i said 'Are you using X but sick of how complicated it is? I'll do the same job, but in half the time and with half the headaches.'

I'm just thinking this approach, however risky it is, could really be a lightning rod for attention. However i'm really interested to see what others think around here?
> 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.

To be precise, they both required external power. The old model was integrated with the plug, and bore a design similar to Apple's laptop chargers.

The new model now requires a separate cable, but the power supply is still internal.

FWIW, the new unit is actually nice when you have to deal with those pesky power sockets at ground level (on skirting boards) that don't provide enough ground clearance to mount the old Airport Express/other chargers without an extension cable.
Yeah... I snapshot our slaves every 30 minutes.. When you say "hot" master what exactly do you mean?
what is your email? - the email field on your HN profile is not accessible to others.

thanks.
This is pure uninformed speculation. Does the A5 even have PCIe or Ethernet?
Hopefully Open Graph will get a lot more mature. Right now it has a lot of bugs and there's not a lot of documented examples of best practices.
I understand what you are saying. I host most of my projects on Rackspace. I've been intending to convert current ideas to Heroku because learning SysAdmin stuff doesn't seem to have much upside potential. However, these multiple outages while Rackspace (seemingly) keeps chugging along are discouraging. That being said, every Heroku outage makes front page of HN, and there could have been Rackspace downtimes much more often that I didn't notice.

Eh, I'll probably continue converting to Heroku and not look back.
'tis what I heard on an outage call...
9-Year-Old Who Changed School Lunches Silenced By Politicians
You can serve your own error pages instead of Heroku's and show your boss whatever you want. They're specified as URLs, so they can be hosted on some other platform. I don't know if that feature works when AWS is failing Heroku, but if Heroku's up enough to serve the error page, maybe it's up enough to serve the error page you configured instead of its own.

https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/error-pages
We learnt our lesson the hard way after the great AWScalypse of Apr 2011.

The lesson: Use n>1 hosting companies (even if one of them promises a-z-multiregion-distributed-fault-tolerant-back-up)
Theresumator.com is down; no word from company
All of the things the Airport Express needs to do are already being done by the Apple TV, so the capability is there.

The only sticking point is perhaps that 2nd ethernet port, the Apple TV with the A4/A5 seem to use a separate ethernet chip made by SMSC connected to the processor via USB. As far as I know they don't support ethernet internally but they may not need to either.
Analyzing LightAidra (Bruteforce-based Telnet Malware)
Sheesh fellas, lighten up, he has some interesting things to say. He's not laying out the 10 web commandments, just some opinions about software design. And his thoughts have some merit. It is distinctly hard to build large applications with a language as dynamic as javascript. At least in python and ruby you have classes. In javascript all you can do is duck type. Also javascripts scope is great for being the worlds most flexable language but not for building large web apps or hiring devs for that matter.

JS is a great and flexible language that runs on more devices than practically any other language. But it is hard to write large web apps in it.
Honestly, I haven't the resources to guarantee site uptime, and have accepted this will happen as a result; my complaint was more targeted at the default error messages.

It seems this can be changed, though, fortunately for Heroku.
So this is basically a Win32 version of Zynga? Or, is it COM?

Well, either way, good for them.
It's probably best not to muck around with the RAID right now when the drives it thinks are there aren't actually there. If it were me, I wouldn't touch anything until Amazon fixes itself.
Solid, thanks for the heads up!
Has any specific effort been given to archiving the knowledge and history of the human race, off planet, and at a considerable distance from Earth?
The last time I really played with the machines they were locked down quite well. Sure you can play to your hearts content but there is not a whole lot of damage that you can do.

Also, when required they can re-install the machines using a network boot with an ready made image. Pretty much the same way that they rebuild customer machines (if you ever get a reinstall at the genius bar they no longer grab an external hard drive or DVD, they simply plug it into a network cable and network boot it, they then select from a list of options and the re-install happens automatically from there... pretty slick system (BTW, that is how they have all of their diagnostics tools available as well).
A "full-spec" machine, another X-Large with 4 EBS volumes that I can fail over to. Its in circular replication with the other "active" master (only one is receiving writes at a time). These instances are only snapshotted once a day to keep them as fast as possible.
Heh, I suppose so. Thing is, I still feel like my initial assessment was right. It was a very poor fit the company I was at, not to mention it was a rather immature service at the time -- it felt like a half-baked Twitter clone and it made for a poor replacement for chat/email, especially in a small company. Today it seems like an almost completely different toolset with a lot more features. Looking at it now I think it could be useful, but until this story came out I hadn't thought about the service since that time more than 3 years ago.

The important takeaway I get from this is that they kept trying and managed to improve and deliver a service that actually works for their target market. If it had stayed like it was I don't think it would have gone anywhere. Hats off to them for pushing through and executing well!
Or if they have 100% for six months and then 99.97% for one month the long-term average would be better.
The Crowdfunding Bubble of 2013 (part 3)
>M$

Success! I've finally done it, ineluctable proof that my time machine works. The Nineties was a great time, I'll be able to experience the release of the PlayStation again, Ultima Online in its prime and the Initial release of Linux; just in time to get rid of that pesky Finnish fellow before any widespread adoption.
...the sequel.
Did you not get the consultant's report on inventory shrinkage and oversight? I'll send you another copy along with the Powerpoint presentation. Please review it, we'll be moving forward with standardization on action points 2 through 7.
Are you sure? I have a graph of one of my Resque boxes taking 30Gbit/s of inbound traffic. Looks like a DDoS attack to me.
> Do you know that apple kicks back? I'd think that apples own retail presence would give them the ability to say, "You sell our products this way on this table or you don't get to sell our products". Apple's strong retail presence has to give them more negotiating power than most other CE companies.

They absolutely do - they pay for the floor space in retail stores. They also have their own reps who manage the products there; performing software updates to new OS versions, installing new demo apps (i.e. iWork, iLife, etc), and managing the ticketing.

They also provide training to staff (in-store and online) and have a strong preference that only trained staff sell their products.

(I did a short stint in retail here in Australia between jobs when I was studying; so this is first-hand).
Hope it's not a something big.
N. Virginia is by far the most used region. There's more stuff to fail and any failure will affect more people. I don't think there's anything inherently less reliable about the geographical location of the building.
Reading through 2 threads I'm convinced your the author. Why not just admit it?
Provider redundancy goes against the concept of PaaS IMO (ignoring the sci-fi future where there are multiple 100% compatible providers). Heroku needs to become internally redundant to really live up to its promise.
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What is an organization (Business)? - Message from Sridhar Vembu
from http://www.getsetgrow.org/2010/04/from-chennai-to-california-journey-of-a-silent-entrepreneur/

Sridhar Vembu said

"What is an organization? It is a community of people who come together for a common purpose. If we don’t have that community, if we don’t have a sense of belonging, it is merely a place we go to work. In such a place, there is no soul, no spirit, no passion, and as I like to say “God has left the temple.” We have to make a profit, because without it we will not survive as an organization, unless we expect deeply immoral actions like getting bailed out by tax papers. To make an honest profit, we have to serve customers. We have a commercial motive, because I consider commerce to be one of the key enablers of culture and civilization. By figuring out and serving a customer need, we become better people"
- Sridhar Vembu

Hope it inspired you

EverFriendly,
Thanks & Kind Regards,
Manoj Thansi
“There is no greater legacy that we can leave our children and grandchildren than a peaceful and safer world”
- Ted Turner
RDS actually uses EBS so it is most likely the same underlying issue.
Here in Colorado there is a Microcenter that sells Apple products. I was talking to one of the managers about the Apple section and he said that he sells less of them than any other brand and they make almost no money on them. Probing a little further it is because the sales guys don't get a high commission on them unlike the other products, and thus they are unloved. Just like most of the other sections of the store the Apple section was almost entirely empty.

I've bought a laptop from Microcenter, and boy was it something I regretted ...
It's an open offer. Do they support python?
edit: they do, but it's not clear how to easily deploy a multi-zone application. Could you point me towards some docs?
The update I heard was (essentially) 'Another update from Amazon: Looks like it was a power issue for one facility that services a particular AZ in us-east-1, flipped to generator, now back on power and in recovery mode.'
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I don't think there are many (any?) African-American/Korean actors out there.
I came to the belief this is the goal to make human captcha factories more expensive.
I guess my real point is your customer, 99% of the time, doesn't give a shit WHY your site is down. It just is.
Another update from Amazon: "9:55 PM PDT We have identified the issue and are currently working to bring effected instances and volumes in the impacted Availability Zone back online. We continue to see increased API error rates and latencies in the US-East-1 Region." Been thinking that maybe most startups are seeing that cloud computing is the most reliable way to go, but today I'm reconsidering having another type of backup server. Just hope there is no data loss in the apps.
I usually do the following:

- if function A and B are always used together, than they are one file.

- if linecount gets to big, split A and B into separate files

- if function C is shared between modules than it belongs in it's own file

So far it worked out great.
If I were in her shoes, they wouldn't have heard the last of me by a longshot. I'd start pulling out hidden cameras, and when they caught on to that I'd show my lunch around to everyone in the school during lunch...one of whom has a hidden camera and will photograph the lunch.

Once they start taking disciplinary action is when I get others to start blogs and post pictures. If for no other reason than because I'd have a damn good time doing it.
There's actually information aboard the Voyager: http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/goldenrec.html

Also, there's a more ambitious project that keeps getting delayed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KEO
I'm relieved about games not being on Google + too.

But I also know that's not what Google wants. Google wants the herd. They don't want to be 2nd (or 3rd). And if you want the "herd" you cater to the herd.
Looks like they support everything except Python :(