skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
+1 on "root cause" being the field rather than "person to blame".

"person to blame" pre-supposes that the root cause is a person, which is not true in most cases. While programmers do introduce bugs due to oversight, I have seen that systemic issues (build environment doesn't allow for tests to be written, missing patches in legacy architecture, bad staffing decisions etc...) introduce a large percentage of defects, especially in larger projects.

If your manager is really interested in reducing defect injection, you will want to champion root cause analysis (read up on it - Karl Wiegers and others have some some great work on this).
People won't switch because sites are hectoring them with lectures about how something they might be fine with is actually awful. All it would take for them to switch are compelling apps (whatever definition of "compelling" applies to each person) which exploit the capabilities of, and therefore require, the newer browsers, and whose existence is advertised to them. Not "your browser is bad and you should feel bad", but "this site is awesome and will make you feel awesome, there's just one thing - you need to install this awesome browser to get your ticket to awesomeville". Same as any other platform.
Apple's injunction stopping Galaxy Nexus sales is shameful
If all hosts are going to be synced the traffic would be huge. If they aren't synced search for both messages and users would be painful.

Not really - I could see that if you decentralize then you can setup something like a peering scheme between social networks. And if a person wants to find another person on another social network, then perhaps a peering relationship should be setup with that other network, or perhaps that person can migrate to the other network.

It could be practical, but the infrastructure at the moment isn't really there.
I guess, it is always a good plan to have an instance deployable on Linode.
oh, no worries at all! in fact, i just shipped today. thanks for posting, ethan.
This is Our Planet [video] (amazing new time lapes from LEO)
Is there a chance this was an accident?
Charles Chi is a great guy. He recently became the chancellor at my alma mater(Carleton U), is very approachable and gives tremendous advice.
What infrastructure do you use for alerting your customers?
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Javascript has weaker typing than PHP (in php you can have typed parameters for object parameters), but javascript is the new hotness and php gets no love. Typing is not the issue that makes php so ugly.

Also, i write php all day and i almost never run into bugs due to typing. You adopt some habits like always casting before use, and use an ide that warns you when you're doing stuff like using uninitialized variables (phpstorm is awesome), and the whole issue goes away for 95%. I'm not saying it doesn't cause bugs, just that i've found it to not be that big of a deal.
I don't get the point. Why not use the generic function type?

void *(*routine)(void *)

If you have a function already, just create a simple wrapper once. In the code shown, the wrapping has to be done by the caller of apply().

And this apply() doesn't work on all functions anyway. Casting an array of long into an array of void* makes quite a few assumptions and is very limited. What would you do if your original function takes a struct as an argument?
Tornadoes in the midwest and earthquakes in the west. You're doomed.

Yup, everywhere has got its natural disasters.
Heroku down, Netflix down, AMAZON UP.
Hmm... Strange. Even though AWS was severely impacted, Amazon.com never went down.

Could it be possible that Amazon doesn't use their namesake cloud service?

Could it be that they use it they way it SHOULD be used, as a backup to their primary, non-cloud-based systems?

Could it be that they know their competitors aren't very smart, and strategic outages drive movie buyers to Amazon's own streaming services?

When are people going to learn that hosting your business in the cloud is among the least intelligent decisions you can make?

Probably never.
I used Foundation a lot a while back before Bootstrap 2 was release (honestly I think I liked the Foundation 2 default look better than the current look of Foundation 3, especially the buttons). Not sure which came first, but I used Foundation because it had the responsive focus while Bootrap 1.x was fixed width. Since Bootstrap 2 brought a responsive grid, I switched because it seemed like it had a larger community.
> Don't take it personally, but I've seen a lot of confirmation bias from ex-PHP developers.

> Often from developers who may, thanks to language Y, write more elegant code on the line / function level, but still create the same architectural mess as they did before in PHP.

That's a longer-winded version of "You Can Write FORTRAN in Any Language". Certainly nothing exclusive or even particularly unique to PHP or PHP programmers.
Yeah sometimes I wish there were a warning whenever someone defines a function with [] as def arg.
I just lost a potential hire because of this, was demoing my app to someone and it wasn't working, she thought it was because of the product. Damn you heroku!
@glenngillen (a Heroku dev) mentioned that it's the add-on providers who set the pricing for add-ons.

https://twitter.com/glenngillen/status/218830351307522048
Scientists Fevelop Toilet System That Can Turn Waste Into Energy
You should try google+. I like it better than twitter and I use it primarily as a news stream.

The only reason I don't use it more regularly is that they don't have a proper API yet and therefore have no apps for my blackberry.
I'm not convinced that these type of commitment devices work unless the monetary fine is significant to the user. The problem is that 1) people have varying levels of what "significant" means, 2) if the fee is more than one can afford to spend, then one would not sign up for risk of losing the sum and 3) if the fee is easily affordable, it's not too difficult to justify in one's head losing the fee -- especially if it's donated to charity. It would take a lot of calibration to find the perfect amount to charge, if a general 'perfect amount' exists.

Personally, I think more companies should bring in more 'social' commitment devices, like setting up an e-mail that goes out to all my closest friends, my boss, and that girl I like -- when I fail to complete something. Social pressure, perhaps along with monetary incentives, are quite powerful and nuanced in a way that money could never be.

EDIT: Wanted to point out that qntmfred made the same point on social pressures 3 hours ago -- didn't see it until I posted.
It's interesting how AWS outage didn't take down Amazon.com.
Malware authors have learned to spell -- many apps I install under the mistaken assumption that they will not run background services or send information back to the company, in fact do.

I also note that Dell's laptop division has a number of malware authors hard at work.
Here's a source from 2011: http://articles.marketwatch.com/2011-02-23/industries/307024...

> Peter Oppenheimer, Apple’s chief financial officer, added that the company runs its App Store and iTunes store “just a little over break-even,” to counter claims that the company is trying to use apps to drive up its profits.

saurik has also written a few comments about this - see here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4155998

> ...despite their massive volume, Apple's App Store makes sufficiently little profit that they don't even break it out as a separate line item on their 10-Q (instead lumping it under "music related products and services", the same category that handles both iTunes and iBooks)
You may want to review the Red Hat model, I think you must have it mixed up with something else.
Yes, lots of memory, much worse performance, but it doesn't really matter. If you care that much about those, you're not using any interpreted language.

Besides, most PHP code is linear without much looping other than iterating database records. The overhead of such an approach wouldn't matter that much, and when it does you can always use the old way of doing things.

But you wouldn't need to create an object per call, you could reuse a singleton that gets initialized by a wrapper function to work on your current variable (using references). Fix($str)->replace("foo", "bar") is a syntax that doesn't require object instantiation or string copying. And the singleton could use the mb functions internally to be multibyte aware.
So how would an electrical storm take down AWS? Don't the data centers have backup generators?
http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-07-11/tech/29964545...

http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/apple_app_store_runs_...
this issue is still not resolved

Not exactly. Apple's guidelines state that they do not want more "apps such as fart, burp, flashlight and Kama Sutra apps". So, this issue is resolved in the sense that Apple has successfully booted this app out of the App Store. Game over.
That is an excellent point. A track record of good customer service also means Amazon has an advantage over Google.
Quantum Conundrum: A lighthearted puzzler that shifts into action
i'm done developing for SHINE
Ah, you MIT guys all know each other :)

While you are at google, you might consider continuing to engage with the academic community to a limited extent. Onward! is very different with a new/improved community that is interested in bridging gaps between PL/HCI/systems and isn't so concerned about the publishing rat race.
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Ok, I may have to agree with you there. There is definitely a measure of 'getting something working' that you may not get anywhere else.

Although I disagree with the last paragraph there. If you think PHP is ok, then maybe perl would suit as well. I know there are a few perl frameworks, but not sure if they are as quick as PHP.
It depends; more than once I remember reading something on here from some time ago and I do a site:news.ycombinator.com search.

It's sort of interesting to see discussions about technology that has long since moved on.
This certainly can happen. You can't rely on being able to launch enough replacement instances if a zone fails.

You can at least mitigate it by keeping utilization of your instances below what would be needed to handle load of one zone failing. I suspect to save money, many people are pushing utilization as high as possible.
That is very true. Most of what I say is phrasing or idioms I've unconciously absorbed. However I obviously don't randomly repeat anything I hear. The things that I absorb are ideas that resonate with my existing world view, which has been crafted by original thought over a much longer time. So behind those memes and tired phrasing in the arguments you heard there is porbably a kernel of unique thought.

This is why I prefer online forums and other forms of asynchronous communication over face to face debates. The former allows me to form an opinion - which can often change as I try to articulate myself. The later relies on my initial reaction, which is always much less refined.
"I can't run my business/research/whatever"

vs

"This site is so popular it barely works"
Exactly. Anyone running their own data center would be subject to exactly this kind of outage, and wouldn't have access to the many, many resources that cloud providers make available to ensure successful fail-over.
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Heroku is single-AZ within US-East, not even multiple-AZ.
Twitter Continues to Restrict Access to Our Tweets
Different strokes for different folks. It takes a special kind of person to be a professor, but this doesn't have so much to do with aptitude. There are many ways to contribute to the world, getting a PhD is useful even if you are not dreaming of being a professor.
If someone is following thousands of people in their stream, and they are scattered across a hundred servers, how do you go about assembling their stream for them in real-time. Is the host server going to have to send user id's for everyone every user based on that server is following, to every server where the people being followed are based, and have every one of those server send all the messages of interest so the host server can build streams for all its users?

Twitter didn't stop sucking reliability wise until they switched to a single persistent user stream connection and abandoned REST most of the time. You really want to have that one persistent connection for a user's stream.
Not at all, especially in systems.
As management, we should always be aware of the employee that needs that extra coaching (don't call me soft cause I'll fire them if 2 months of coaching doesn't work. It is a startup after all). However, this public shaming seems like one's inability to figure out who needs more guidance and/or one's lack of comfort-ability in having the difficult conversations that ensue once you've identified the individual who needs extra coaching. In either case, something tells me you're somewhat a wrong fit for this management role and I hope your managers have the ability to identify those that need extra coaching before you kill the spirit of your team/company.
Massive cost issue, plus some technical issues.

According to this document [1]:

"The North Carolina Utilities Commission
studied the cost of placing Duke Power’s distribution facilities underground and found it would
cost more than $41 billion, resulting in a 125 percent increase in customer rates."

[1] http://www.sceg.com/NR/rdonlyres/465E6534-2FFB-4069-BF84-814...,
>> Many people who aren't programmers don't seem to get deep hierarchy (deep meaning > 2 levels). Searching works, tags kind of work, but few people really know how to set up and use a folder hierarchy.

Yep. Search works. (But forget tags and taxonomy. Taxonomy is sooo 1994 Yahoo! Library science! LOL!)

Imagine if the whole internet were below /. Now, where's Walter? Lessee. His initials are wrs. He did the Newton object store. Hmm.

Finder can't find. Explorer can't explore.

However, if I simply type "wrs newton object store" into my Chrome address bar, it instantly coughs up the Newton Hall of Fame! https://www.msu.edu/~luckie/hallofame.htm

QED. Wallyscript indeed!
In the U.S. there is a documented deficit of students entering STEM fields, which includes (but is not limited to) CS.

My thesis is that this is because these subjects are objectively harder than, say, business or English. Whether it's politically correct or arrogant to say so has no bearing on whether it's true or not.
I cringed a bit when the article mentioned that physical goods built the business case for Amazon selling the Fire at cost. I find it very difficult to believe that Amazon was banking on Fire customers purchasing significantly more physical goods; by that same logic, Amazon should get into the laptop business - do you see that happening?

More realistically, Amazon quickly realized that the tablet is largely a consumption device for high margin content. The lack of a keyboard and touch, along with other design differences, makes the tablet relevant for consumption. Also, Amazon wouldn't have built a closed app and content store system if they thought that physical goods would be the bulk of the business case.

The Fire is part of Amazon's push to ensure that as virtual content sales explode, they get the bulk of the pie.

This is exactly why Google has built the Nexus 7 - to get on the bandwagon for virtual content. If they sell a lot of Nexus 7s - they will definitely be upping their content portfolio on Play.
I don't see how the author's alleged affiliations has any implication on the story. Fact is fact, after all.

In any case, here is the same story on Businessweek: http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-06-29/google-said-to-f...
There is no shortage of people complaining about RoR today. [1][2]

Also, does the word "ghetto" ring any bells?

Not that I think Python solves all the problems well either. I'm a fan of Lua, personally, but only because it's a much cleaner language design, and it's faster, and it's easier to set up, and it's easier to write Node.js-style code that's easier to read, and... well, I guess there are a few reasons.

[1] http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel.3.309321....

[2] http://techcrunch.com/2008/05/01/twitter-said-to-be-abandoni...
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Yes, and it's a standard redefinition of better in CS that you seem unaware of. Go and read the canonical "Worse is better" paper.
My response to this, including how file systems and file explorers will never die -> http://blog.nitinkhanna.com/why-the-file-system-will-never-d...
Rackspace got hit by a truck last year and went down for a while too. Not cloud != perfectly reliable.
Hopefully they have a better system so that if anything breaks on the page, the returned result is an error page / code.
You 5 months ago shouldn't be a stranger
I thought App Engine was much more reliable when they switched over from the Master/Slave Datastore to the High Replication Datastore.
I'm not sure why you think Apple cares so much about developers. Is it the warm glow they engineer for you at WWDC?

Your question is perfectly natural, of course, given the way they flatter us developers in their keynotes. Just don't get caught in the reality distortion field. I've spent a lot of time working with Apple during good times and bad (for them), and even during bad times, the attitude toward third-party developers was that, if they weren't loyal followers, Apple didn't want them around anyway.

I was astonished to hear this kind of thing repeatedly at Apple HQ back when I thought they should have been desperately trying to woo developers to save their platform from extinction. Now that they are on top of the world, imagine what their (real) attitude must be toward third-party developers.

It's like the old Saturday Night Live parody of the phone company, when AT&T was still a monopoly: "We're the phone company. We don't care. We don't have to."
If you're that price sensitive/need big RAM and can use RIs you should really be looking at dedicated servers, too. (for which Rackspace is expensive as well, but actually provides a service level to justify it in many cases)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-field_photography

i'll refrain from saying more.
actually i don't know wilson, but he went to grad school with my advisor, so i figure i should ping him!

re: Onward! yes, i've heard good things about it; will keep a look-out.
Definitely a possibility - I was actually watching Netflix when my phone started rattling with all the alerts.

I was able to finish out the episode, so their CDN was working for the actual media, but everything else was dead for me.

Another useless anecdote: A coworker was watching on his xbox, and it apparently cut mid-stream for him.
2,3,4 and seem ridiculous.
AWS is not down. Only US-East. If your app is down, it's only because you don't care about the availability of your service.

It's pointless to complain. We've all seen before that Amazon can't keep whole regions up. If you rely on a region being up, you will have downtime and it's your fault.
Even better (the silence principle):

#!/bin/sh
imagesnap -q -w 3 "~/.gitshots/$(date).jpg"

(date(1) with spaces will be fine due to the double quotes, although it won't be in date order when sorted by name, which would annoy me...)
Http://www.searchr.us/
What the hell? How is the PageRank patent not protection to Google? If Yahoo, LiveSearch and whatever other famous search engine just went ahead and ripped off Google then Google wouldn't be the Google we know now... Proving it shouldn't be any more difficult than asserting any patent. The defendant would have to show how they're ranking pages I would imagine, and if there's an infringement, they're found guilty.
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>The first half of your post is basically a long-winded appeal to popularity.

No it's not. We're not talking about music --how popular Bieber is vs Bach, for example. So he didnt just say "tons of people use PHP", he said "tons of people use PHP and it solves their problems giving results".

This is not an "argument by popularity", its an argument by number of empirical verifications. Which is supposedly what engineering and science is all about.

On the other hand your arguments are appeals to "logic", "theory", etc, eg idealism and elitism in the face of actual results. "That's (eg python) is how a language should be, and not like php" etc. All the while forgetting to take no account practical, verified, php benefits.

>Yes, most people on the web use PHP and Apache. Most people on the web also need nothing more than a WordPress installation and their online needs are met. Does that mean WordPress is the best tool out there?

OIf it meets their needs and has them happy, of course! Anything else would be dellusional to say.
Well, yes, but the trouble here is the particular patent for which this injunction was granted. If they had used patents that were actually innovative things which their competitors were copying then I'd be sympathetic. But a really vague patent that covers search stuff? Really? Is that what makes the iPhone so great that Google skimped on R&D costs by simply copying?(I know Samsung is the defender here, but it's a software patent and the software was written by Google)

This just doesn't make sense. While I understand your point of view from a patents-in-general perspective, I simply cannot sympathize with Apple in this particular case. I concede that they are operating within legal bounds but I cannot give them the moral high ground of being poor oppressed inventors who are being copied.
It's too bad iOS guidelines don't allow for the V8 engine.
I am getting tired of all of these outages.

I know outages happen all the time at hosts, and maybe as a result of either a) news is more accessible now, or b) Amazon is bigger than most other hosts....I feel like Amazon & Heroku are going down WAYYYYY too much.

I am starting to wonder if this "tell all" policy is really best.
The first two paragraphs make it obvious the author hasn't a
piece of apple equipment to boycott in the first place. That wasn't a well thought out opinion; it was a tech-pundit's idea of Mad-Libs.

I want my page view back.
Are Apple employee's forbidden to release their own apps?

How easy would it be for some person in the loop to just rip off an app and have their competition kickbanned? There's probably no law against insider-"apping"
"it could disrupt photography by making it easier than ever for beginners to take good photos."

These cameras do not help beginners, or anyone else take good photos. In much the same way that instagram doesn't. Sure, it might be a fad, like HDR is, but nothing short of learning about composition and lighting will make anyone take good photos.

I don't see anything disruptive about lytro photography. Being able to pick the focal point arbitrarily after the photo has been taken is a cool gimmick, but what's the point? How many times have you really wanted to do that with a photo? Beginners seldom take photos that are out of focus because autofocus systems have improved so much. Most blurry photos are due to low light and camera shake, poor handling of the camera. Lytro does not solve that problem.

I hope it succeeds and becomes a viable alternative, just as foveon sensors were/are, and I hope the company do well, this is an exciting time for photography.
Except having some fun, please email his email address to the dozens of email address list CL scam websites so his email comes up when someone Googles him. This way you can prevent someone else from being scammed.