skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
MySQL is also apparently affected, according to the #mysql IRC channel.
FC15
I was disappointed to read that their solution didn't involve switching to TAI. The kernel should use seconds since epoch and leap seconds should be a user space issue, just like timezones.
Test That Can Determine the Course of Life in China Gets a Closer Examination
Fun that a bug for my team happens to be the thing linked in this article. :)
Static initializers aren't always free, FYI. They can slow down app startup (this is a serious issue for Firefox).
Facebook simply doesn't have an ethical central core. They've shown over and over that when user privacy or security conflict with facebook's goals, they'll choose facebook over the user. It's always relatively subtle; they strive to only do what they can get away with...but it's always pushing the line, and is never based on trying to do what's right, merely avoiding backlash. Facebook, the company, is kind of a sociopath.

I wish it weren't this way. I have several friends within facebook whom I like and respect, and they produce a lot of great technology. But, I fear facebook having more power than they already have. It can only end badly for the user.

Facebook really needs a "don't be evil" moment, but I suspect it's too late, and I suspect that Zuckerberg simply doesn't think that way.
text-processing.com[1] has a nice api, the bonus was that they restrict API calls on a per-IP basis. So client-side extensions work well here. :)

(meta: Let's see how much a smiley affects the positivity...)

[1] http://text-processing.com/docs/sentiment.html
iOS6 is still in Beta. be nice to see Apple haul Facebook through the hot coals (?) for this.

anyone else think Apple and Facebook make interesting partners? They're both doing their best to get users into their own domains to the exclusion of all else
I don't get what is so amazing by it. I would be surprised if they came to any other conclusion... it's Top Gear for crying out loud.
Hence, hybrid drives. Better yet, save yourself some money by ripping out the optical drive in your laptop and use that space for a second internal drive.
I'm actually coming up on ten years of having the same blog: waaaayyyyy back when I started, I was editing all my pages manually. (Though blog posts didn’t have permalinks, it was just a growing massive "list page" that I’d break off and paginate every so often.) It started to become a pain in situations where I wanted to modify some basic aspect of every page: I’ve consistently gotten the itch to either re-architect or re-design my blog annually.

You really can’t beat a system that uses templates.

I'd tried my own Javascript-based content system in the past (where everything is based on one HTML page and JS loads the page content), but those add a bit more client-side complexity (not to mention search engine reachability).

I think the ability to regenerate an entire 500+ page static HTML site is pretty powerful and useful. (Also: who wants to manually update date-based URL paths every time there’s a new thing? http://v3.mike.tig.as/blog/2012/06/30/ http://v3.mike.tig.as/blog/2012/06/ http://v3.mike.tig.as/blog/2012/ etc.)

EDIT: As to your first question wrt "dynamic features I wanted": CMS and full control over my site's behavior and templates. It’s Django-based, too, so I can theoretically extend it with any features as necessary. (I also have plenty of "non-published" content that I can view on the local, "hot type" development server of my site, but the "renderer" file is only configured to upload blog posts marked as "live". I find that feature pretty useful.)
iOS 5 doesn't have FB integration, so it couldn't happen directly.

I don't know if the FB app can write to your contacts (although it can read them, which caused that dust up earlier in the year). That's where the danger might be for iOS 5 users.
This isn't true, not when you can boot a large application cluster and promote/upgrade a database replica in minutes.

This is correct. Unfortunately, in the AWS context those of us who confidently planned to react to trouble in zone US-EAST-X by launching a new cluster in US-EAST-Y have often been frustrated by failures in Amazon's control plane. When one zone goes down hard, instances in other zones generally stay running - though the anecdotal evidence is not perfectly clear - but the ability to spin up new instances or drives in other zones often breaks.

What I don't remember seeing is a case where a failure spanned regions. Which does not mean that can't happen; perhaps a catastrophic latent bug in Amazon's control software could kick it off. But it is far less likely. So planning to spin up in a distant region is a workable plan, and then your point is back to being correct. But spanning regions takes a bit more work and planning.

And, needless to say, everyone's RTO is different. When people talk casually about "100% uptime" I tend to think "30 seconds", in which case redundant running instances is the solution, but obviously you do have to specify it. Because if you can live with 5 minutes, or even 30 minutes, as most apps probably can, your life will be much easier.
What's the explanation of that wacky date format?

minute day hour month year . second
Hey Daniel,

Funny to see your name there!
The leap second is applied at midnight UTC time, regardless of what timezone the server is in.
"One possible reason I dreaded was that nobody had
previously built something like CDE because it was impossible to get the details right to make it work e ffectively in practice. Maybe it was one of those ideas that looked good on paper but wasn't practically feasible"

No, there was autopackage, alien and any numerous other programs and battles/discussion long email threads that worked not just for python but for any language. Technically speaking as I see CDE, it is useful for python and standard installs in very select cases. For large research projects where the variables and runtimes will differ with no rhyme or reason other than "That's what we started with". It's probably a lot more of an issue to get running properly.

I'm sure there is no easy answer, it's really a human problem. What would really be highly useful is for standardization on a linux distro specifically for research but even then that would only be useful for at most an organization/institution/research lab. Getting researchers to stick to such a distro as a general rule is impossible without weapons.
I was able to restore my java app boxen (and all other boxen) by only setting the date to the current date. No restarts necessary.
Won't that lead to a slower page load time for a lot of people due to unnecessary DNS look-ups?
That's true. I'm always annoyed when I send a patch for a project, it's integrated and that's it. No thanks. No mention of what I did. Just as if the author just found something and added it. Sometimes it's one liners (which may take hours to debug as usual), sometimes its a few thousand lines.

This behavior kills the will to contribute quickly.
OT, and tardy to boot, but your comment reminds me of the only song I know about cave painting, "The Caves of Altamira", by Steely Dan:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBCa9WPHlWI

"Before the Fall, when they wrote it on the wall, and there wasn't even any Hollywood..."
Would love to read a root cause analysis of the relevant source code. Anyone have a link?
Gosh, I need to make much more positive comments.
https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/6/30/122
Also, good read.
The reason it took you 12 hours to get back online? Because you really never gave much consideration to availability.

You should THINK about your TTL values long in advance of a problem. You should also THINK about having a backup instance running (or at least ready to boot, if an hour of downtime is perfectly OK for your users).

More discussion here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4181918
That, and it helps to double-check /Library/Application Support/ and ~/Library/Application Support/ for any stragglers.
Why should users have rights in this situation, other than the right to stop using the service? I understand why it would be nice if they did, but why should they? Why is it am imperative?
Reading all of these post-mortems and guides to keeping your servers up and running, it strikes me how much AWS jargon is in there.

The fact that so many developers have invested so much time into learning Amazon-specific technologies means that developers are left to deal with the problem within that worldview. Going multiple-datacenter means learning two of every technology layer.

You could solve all of these problems using standard non-amazon unix tools, technologies, and products, however Amazon has enabled a whole class of development that makes it easier to just work within their system. It's easier to just wait for Amazon to figure it out for the general case and trust them than to figure it out and implement yourself.

There are other risks with being the lone-wolf but for a lot of people, being in the herd has a certain kind of safety, despite the limitations.

Not making a judgement call on it but it is something that I have noticed with these outages.
guys you absolutely need Facebook and Twitter integration. Wouldn't be a real app without it.
Is there any way to view your own profile on gild?
Xstrata pay packages criticised
fixed it for Twitpic too
The parent post is correct about the slowing. The land ice is (mostly) at high latitudes, and the meltwater tends to raise sea level, which moves the mass to lower latitudes, hence farther from the axis of rotation. Thus warming slows the Earth's rotation as its moment of inertia increases.

The parent post is incorrect about getting it "back" however; leap seconds are added because the rotation is slowing (a "day" is getting longer). More ice caps melting will lead to more leap seconds, not fewer (or negative).
The FB app can update your contact photos when your FB friends update their profile pics, I actually like that feature, it’s fun and relatively harmless.
I have consistently found Chrome to never quite feel "Mac like."
I, too, am a little curious. Anyone seen thread dumps from any of these floating around?
iOS6's settings allow you to block individual apps from accessing your address book.

In iOS6 any app that wants to access your address book or calendar has to request permission. It's very much like how an app requests permission to send push notifications in iOS5.
Low TTLs are a necessarily evil, otherwise you turn your load balancer into a SPOF.
Both the southern polar cap and the Greenland ice mass rest on ground rather than float in the ocean, which means any melting will cause the ocean levels to rise.
Long-distance Record: Canoniac Launcher - Free Online Games
Yes, this happened on my development MySQL instance and also one of my production instances of MySQL -- but not another one that I have. I'm not sure why it only affected one, maybe different versions of MySQL?
Side note: the detective in me has noted that the mystery mods somehow knew this was a Stripe hackathon project, as the original title didn't have the tag.

whodunnit?
A Picture of Prototypes in Javascript.
Javascript prototypes are like a stack of glass sheets with drawings on it. You add more to the picture by stacking another layer of glass.

The topmost sheet is the current 'object', and next sheet underneath it is the 'prototoype' of the current object, usually referred to via the "__proto__" key.

You can occlude values of the same key, like you can occlude pictures drawn on the same spot.

You can only write to the topmost object, as in a stack of glass, where you can only draw on top (unless you manually uncover the sheets).

This analogy isn't perfect. In real life, you need to choose which sheet to put upon a stack -- that is, two sheets can't simultaneously be the topmost sheet. But in Javascript there is superposition, so to speak.

--

I have found that you can have a Pythonic class system by mixing CoffeeScript semantic sugar, and the Object.setProperty system. You can have Rubyesq class (module) property injection as well.

https://github.com/jaekwon/Cardamom/blob/master/src/clazz.coffee
The Entrepreneur’s Dilemma
I am not sure why you think group selection has been thoroughly falsified. From what I've seen on wikipedia and elsewhere, there's simply a strong bias against it being right, and many people react vocally and vehemently, suppressing research of group selection. For example, E. O. Wilson writes a book and all of a sudden he gets a barrage of angry correspondence and rebuttals.

I would say stuff like that discourages exploration in science, and pushes an echo-chamber agenda.

To me it's rather clear that groups dominate individuals. Let's look at the level of groups of complete organisms. The individual is dominated from early childhood and is taught learned behaviors which may actually impede its reproductive success. For example, non-alpha-males in many species simply don't reproduce. That may be ascribed to kin selection, but the mechanism is not kin-related: if a wolf is adopted, the same mechanism applies.

In humans this can be summed up by one word: CULTURE. All the morality, etc. is taught from a young age, and the kids are dominated by the culture, and as they grow up they don't think of doing it any other way. If the culture told you that you can't have more than one wife, then that's what most men will approximately end up with. The man isn't going to go out and get a harem because modern society has basically trained this man that a shitload of problems await him should he try to do it. In other societies, however, the harem is fine.

So basically, the individual behavior is dominated by the group. Selection is a byproduct of that. In men, it typically selects for those traits which the most prolific (reproductively) men possessed. Genghis Khan is one of the ultimate examples.
After reading these tales of woe, all I can say is that I hope the criminal element doesn't start assaulting NTP servers.
Its a start, but missing the point nonetheless. The grand idea is to have all the codecs and formats unified into one API, but the reality is that said API has become a gigantic dump yard. Redundant options and variables with one codec using one set and a different codec another. Not to mention to have stuff fail because a particular codec does not like a specific configuration.
Given that Chrome and Safari extensions are "just" javascript, has anyone made a Chrome to Safari extension converter?
Leap Second crashes Sydney Airport
A lot simpler:

date --set "`date`"
I hear this statement all the time. Great developers are 20x more productive than average developers.

I've been a software engineering manager for 20+ years.

I've worked with great teams and I've worked with teams where it fell on me to fix a bug because no one else could figure it out.

In my experience, it's more complicated than good developers vs. average developers.

There are best practices that great developers demonstrate. There are great developers who are terrible team players and there are terrible developers who turn out to be great product managers. There are average developers who have a critical ability to keep the team together and to get even more out of the top developers.

In my experience, I prefer the right attitude, the right drive, and a person who is constantly striving to do better.

There's a lot of arrogance in our industry. I'm not sure it's something that we should continue to embrace.
"But you didnt, and you should feel really embarrassed about that."

Sounds to me like they learned a lot, and are sharing what they've learned to help others. What's really to gain from shaming them over it?
I can't praise Chef by Opscode enough. We had several webservers running with a fresh deployment of our web stack in a matter of ten minutes. We've built several recipes to install the pre-requisites (nginx, php5-fpm, Rails depending on the system role) and then it uses a GitHub deployment key to checkout the stable revision of our applications.

Even before you can afford a part-time DevOps engineer I highly recommend automating your system administration as much as possible. When you say you should script your installation of an application server I recommend doing that with Chef!

This will allow you to quickly bring instances online on about any cloud. HP, AWS, Linode, or your own self-brewed OpenStack cloud. You will still have challenges with your persistent data but it's a lot easier to breathe and act quickly with your persistent data knowing you'll have content servers to access that resource.

edit: I have no affiliation with Opscode - we aren't even a paying customer we use their free server. I am sure Puppet or any system administration tool will get you similar milage.
Annoyingly their premium link 404s, here's the pricing link for anyone interested: http://www.mashape.com/japerk/text-processing/Pricing

Free plan is 45k queries, $35/m for 450k and 1,500,000 for $75/m!
Improving the Coding Horror Logo
Groups that find themselves in the same area become kin a few generations later.

So I don't see why kin selection must be the sole mechanism to explain all kinds of group selection. The group dominates the individual by indoctrination from a young age, as well as by force. You can refer to all this as "culture". The group is smart enough to threaten the individual with things that the individual cares about, and the individual has evolved to be receptive to such correction by the group, and learn to stop doing something, even if it would give them a better reproductive fitness.

It just so happens that groups which live together start becoming genetically related down the line. But the mechanism that acts isn't kin selection.
IPhone turns 5: Here are the naysayers
Great. Another lame Flash-bashing bandwagon article by someone who's probably never written a line of code, and obviously never tried to write a game in HTML5. He seems to think video is the last Flash hold-out. Video should have been handled natively in the browser years ago, it shouldn't have required a plugin to do that.

The only result of pulling Flash-in-browser from android is that people will compile games with AIR, which they're already doing because it's a better business model. Unfortunately what this has always meant for iphone users is that only games Apple is willing to sign off on are available to them, unless they want to play a crappy HTML5 version. But fanboys are always looking at the bright side.
Sorry, my clearly US centric bias was showing. I didn't even think about someone who actually has decent insurance replying on this thread :)

I've been fortunate enough to get promoted & change jobs over the past 5 years so I've actually out-paced insurance costs. We'll just see if that continues.
The NDA was still in effect. Any company would have done the same thing.
Thanks for sharing, I find your writing style very engrossing. As someone who doesn't have much experience in academia, I have a new level of respect for Professors and Ph.D.'s.
If it's not too rude to ask, what is your rent? I'm seeing $4.50-7 in Palo Alto for a range of spaces (it gets cheaper for huge space out of downtown); $1-2.50 for light industrial or office space in Mountain View, and $1.50-4 in SF.

I'd far prefer to be in Seattle (and love Pioneer Square), but I think I'm stuck down here.
It's a de facto imperative for startups looking to build loyalty, but FB is far from a startup now. They can do whatever the hell they want and get away with it... for now.
This article is operating on an assumption that you let any given developer access your entire codebase. By partitioning developers into certain projects, you can isolate bad developers and move them into less harmful positions, while moving the majority of your great developers into critical infrastructure areas. There are ways to handle this that do not include missing out on good developers.
Eclipse Git and Github Plugin 2.0 Released
Agreed. Hopefully OpenStack or similar gets some serious traction and the IaaS players move closer to simply being providers of hardware. The likelihood of that happening seems quite slim while AWS holds such a strong position in the market though. And a significant chunk of AWS's success is due to their innovation in the software layer.
"automated scoring" and "social network activity".

That sounds like a fantastic way to find scads of mediocre developers. Development isn't about language, it's about comprehension.
I stopped at the second sentence:
>Steve Jobs led us to believe it was as good if not better than Google search

If you recall the iPhone4S keynote and Jobs' absence, it was because he died the next day. Between that and the photoshopped pic... lame.
meta: This makes me so happy! :)
Way to read into it. That was totally beside the point. The point was just to specialize. The example pitch was exactly that; an example.
Please make it work on the user's own comments page.
This webpage is not available
SQLCipher for Android, and You
Are we done with having original thoughts now? Why was this written? Programming bloggers that are in some kind of management or, especially, founders write this exact same post 100 times a day ... We get it ... The "20x rock star progammer" meme is real and we have to pay attention !!!!

Ok, whatever. Stop talking about it. I think it is probably true that great programmers are order of magnitude BUT please don't flame over that because I don't care.

However, why do most of these CRUD projects think rock stars want to work for them or why do they think they are doing "really important stuff" when they are really just doing CRUD, and in some cases plain old boring CRUD.

Anyway, this whole concept, true or not is just cliche at this point.
Wow, threads like http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4180543 are amber waves of hate.
What it shows is that the characteristic of being a good "benevolent dictator" isn't the same as "getting along" with your peers. Theo was a poor collaborator in a larger project. Linus probably would be too.
Yes. I don't recall if it was that dust up or another one, but about a year ago I completely deleted my FB account. As noted above, because it was clear that this was a continuing pattern.
Fits my usage perfectly. I have the 4 programs that I use 95% of the time pinned to the taskbar, everything else I use search to run.
>I await the day

I see what you did there.
Hey Daniel, thanks for the educational writeup. I have to wonder about ways around the AMI issue. We use puppet to setup new instances (and keep existing instances in sync... although we tend to just recycle EC2 instances anyway). This is pretty nice to work with given its declarative nature, but we have to put up with long, long startup/initialization times for new instances. Which sucks in downtime of course.

Do you think there's some middle ground of using AMIs but also using puppet somehow, so you make new AMIs as a perf optimization but keep puppet config up to date? TBH it's something I've only casually wondered about. But maybe it's what we both need. Having a puppet config would mean you can launch on basically any provider.
OS X manages just fine without a formal "Start" button. Who needs Start buttons when you can pin, search from the desktop, or use Launchpad? So goodbye, old Start Button, we've had a good run. You will be remembered.