skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They are using the legal system - an important part of modern business. I can assure you in economies with inefficient or nonexistent legal systems, things get much worse and doing business is next to impossible.

Should apple not do this? This is hardball, we're talking billions... and they know they have a limitied window to take advantage of this before they have to continue. They'll make more than the hundred million they put up to do this in the time it takes to settle things.
No fanboy-ism here - but the iPhone DID fundamentally change the close-minded walled-garden ripoff stagnant mobile world to get off it's ass and innovate.

Are the patents absurd? Blame the patent system, not Apple for using it. Be sure their competitors are just waiting for a patent opportunity to come along to smash Apple over the head with. Let the big boys play their game. Apple anted up 95 million dollars that they lose if the case does not go in their favour... this isn't a freebie by a longshot.

So until the legal system levels the playing field and fixes the patent system or otherwise makes this type of action impossible, it's dog eat dog.

And in the end - the courts will decide. Don't like the patent system? talk to your representatives in government. Don't want to do that because it "won't matter"? Then you don't have much standing in my books to argue either way. Think politicians care about money? they care about VOTES, which money really helps buy - but convince them they have your votes and they money doesn't matter, they don't need campaign money if they have their votes locked.
The status page seems to really underplay the severity of the situation. Netflix and Heroku are down, yet these are just side effects of 'performance issues' instead of a 'service disruption'. I wonder what it would take to cross that threshold.
Netflix runs on AWS which is down on the east coast - http://status.aws.amazon.com/. These two things are related.
By what stretch of the imagination is this icon suitable for representing a total loss of availability due to a power outage?: http://status.aws.amazon.com/images/status2.gif

Is this not a 'service disruption' situation? At the bottom of the page, the yellow icon is associated with 'performance issues'.

If there's one thing that's shocked me about AWS, it's the total failure to acknowledge the severity of service disruptions. Like the above case, or the fact that a 3-hour loss of connectivity is displayed on the service history as a green tick with a small 'i' box: http://oi46.tinypic.com/x5qtch.jpg
Samsung Nexus. Banned.
There is a macro way to do this. It involves lots of magic and beating the preprocessor with a two-by-four: https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/comp.lang...

Go down this hole with caution.
Especially since Apple's long-standing mottos are think different/we do things differently to the rest of the pack.
The little red ribbon that you pull to get the AA batteries out is stcuk underneath - they are looking for a pen to flick the battery but since everyone switched over to Fire tablets there aren't any pens.
There's another comment thread going over at (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4180339), if, like me, you got extremely lucky and picked today's lucky availability zones, and have time to read HN instead of scramble to get things back up.

Good luck, friends.
I have occasionally had them. If you're doing something relatively common, like trying to compile a popular project on a popular platform, you can get answers pretty reliably.

However, if you're doing something really uncommon, or your problem is unusual in some way, there may be no remedy beyond building the required technical knowledge to solve it yourself. Sometimes that's years beyond you.

Compilations with lots of flags are a great example of that. If your particular system needs a flag that isn't there, Google isn't much help. And if you don't know what those flags do, you may not be able to learn enough to solve your problem in a reasonable amount of time.
You can't own an idea. The idea of 'searching with your voice' is not something Apple can own.

They can own a specific implementation of searching with your voice, but that's it. The general concept of "doing this thing" is not something that is protectable.

Also, not that it is really relevant, but selling point Apple copied from Android? Notification center. A direct, 'slavish' copy (to use Koh's own terms), but you're not jumping up to defend Google's 'innovations' in the untamed wilderness of "use part of the screen to tell you what's happening".
When some AWS AZs went down last year, Netflix made a big deal of their distributed architecture and how that made them immune to failures of an entire AWS region. That now looks more like blind luck.
Currently getting a 500 error when trying to create a password with special characters.

With all the password hash leaks going on these days, am I the only one paranoid enough to create a long, random password?
Amateur hour is over, indeed.
reading the linked page, "AWS is down" means "some N. Virginia AWS services are down"
That assumes that the hair color thing was their real reason. I doubt it.
"You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain."
unfuddle is down also, can't access any of my repos. I was going to spend the day working too - oh well time for a long lunch.

This isn't the first time this has happened to AWS - we moved our app to linode last year after this happened to us and it seems to affect AWS more than any other hosting i've ever used, i'd be interested to know how their infrastructure is set up because it doesn't seem particularly robust.
It is obvious we are dealing with the imagination of a marketing exec here. And that is a sick cynical place.
It's a preliminary injunction to prevent damages - the court has been convinced that this will go to court and that the damage done to apple during the time it takes to resolve the case warrants an injunction. They also wanted a bond from apple in case it goes the other way so the opposition doesn't get too screwed over if THEY win.... that's money in their pocket - not sure how common that is... first time I've heard of it.
Interestingly, this is a great time to see which of your favorite websites are rock-solid and which are kind of shaky.

I've been thinking about building a site with a Parse backend, and they're up, which is good to discover.
You "could" in theory write apps for the iPhone that interface over localhost ports. Which would be awful. (too bad ports in unix are described with file descriptors!)
I've flagged this. Please don't post stuff by Florian Mueller, hes a paid Microsoft shill that attacks FOSS and anyone who is pro-FOSS.

If you find an actually legitimate source for this news, please submit that instead.
Be careful. Nothing is as it seems right now. Do not trust any API output, nor should you do any API operations that are non-recoverable. Things are up that are reported down and vice-versa.

Wait for the dust to settle. We're all just going to be a bunch of Fonzies here.

EDIT: Looks like API access has been restored, so I'm cautiously optimistic about things working. Note though that some instances may have rebooted or be otherwise impacted so check your error logs.

EDIT2: Nope, ELB is still hosed. Continue to be skeptical.
Depending on where you are in the world, earthquakes are much rarer then insane storms. I'm speaking as a Floridian. I'm fairly ignorant on this issue, but would it be that difficult to use one or the other depending on which natural occurrence is more likely? Or is this also a cost issue?
AWS has historically been both slow to update and heavily optimistic with their status page.

When I got the frantic texts when EC2 first dropped offline, sure enough, the AWS status page was all green, but twitter was alight with people talking about it.

I suspect a service disruption would have to be Godzilla.
In other words, Amazon's power backups failed again. On the bright side at least they are not running a nuclear reactor.
I have 3 customers -- what the are they going to do, those poor souls!!
Until a solar storm hits, and our servers are no longer under the protection of the Earth's magnetic field.
For the set of features you have, with most calling conventions on most platforms you don't need to synthesize all that. You could simply have your apply function be written in assembly and handle setting up the parameters fetching them from memory.

That also isn't higher-order programming as such. Can you create new functions from doing that? There are ways to compose functions in C by hand, but the distinction is that it cannot be done elegantly. (One could always just do higher-order programming in C by constructing an abstract syntax tree, after all.)

A good first effort in that you did correctly handle calling functions without requiring them to fetch their arguments in an unusual way, which is what most people would try at first. With a varargs apply function, you can handle the case of passing values larger than a register and passing pointers without having to cast them to a list, too. Consider the case of an apply function which takes an unsigned integer as the size of the following argument. If it's zero, then the argument list is finished. Otherwise, it then fetches an argument of that size from the va_list and goes on to the next one. So then your apply function is slightly uglier (int j = 42; apply(printf, sizeof (const char ), "Hello, %s! %u\n", sizeof (const char ), "world"), sizeof j, j, 0) but perhaps more flexible, and at least avoids relying on a few nasty implicit casts.

Also, function pointers should not necessarily be cast implicitly to void *, but on only a few architectures are function pointers so strange that you'll have any trouble with your approach.

As it is, you could even avoid writing or generating any assembly by just having the apply routine be a static inline function that does a switch on the argument count and then casts the function pointer to a function pointer that takes the right number of arguments. The compiler could do constant propagation for the number of arguments and you'd have little overhead in your function calls. You couldn't handle arbitrarily-large argument lists, but it would work pretty well.

Keep at it!
It's going to be really tough to compete on price without slashing specs/quality. That's the part that confuses me here. At $250 or $299 it would have served the same purpose with the third party alternatives hitting closer to the $199 price point. If we look at the Android SmartPhone market only Samsung is really having a good time with it right now and that's in a market with carrier subsidies distorting the market and increasing margins. I can't understand why any OEMs would want to stay in this business now. They'd be better off building high margin accessories for Google's 0 margin devices instead of trying to compete against them.
5 years of iOS work and the only thing you can find is "notification center"? It's not even a copy. It's not close to what it is on Android.

I just stop here. It doesn't make any sense to argue about this anymore. I just hope this copying just stops and everyone can have it's own innovative feature and not copied crap!
We're soooo screwed
Yodo1 named exclusive partner for Hero Academy
Well, nothing of scale happens overnight.

But anyone deploying a critical application to AWS makes a point of cross-region data replication. Heroku have long known that they lose potential customers to, say, Engine Yard as a result of only hosting at US-East.

One can only conclude that this is a clear business decision on their part. I can hardly believe that Heroku's engineers are incapable of it. Indeed I would be very surprised to learn that they haven't brought up an instance of their platform at, say, US-West, for testing or proof-of-concept purposes.

Of course, productising that is a different matter. Extending the control plane, front end, and pricing/billing systems might have considerable associated project cost. Perhaps they have concluded that the costs outweigh the additional revenue. Or, just haven't got around to it yet.
"Contrary to what you might have heard on Hacker News, Netflix is not down. They're beta testing Elastic Spot Uptime. Give it a try!"
https://twitter.com/AmazonStatus/status/218920276207996929
Who Killed the Open Set-Top-Box?
The first classes in CS are indeed LISP at the local federal university.

That doesn't change the fact (it actually makes it even more amazing) that some people study CS for years, yet have near zero programming ability.
Recap on MIT's Distributed Systems Class (Part 1)
Just pay the extra money and get off US-East people.
Site failover is one of the exercises that are left to the user. Considering how relatively bare-metal an experience AWS provides, this has never surprised me.
No way to make it more lucrative?

Edit: I don't pretend to really know how to do it, or what the outcomes could be, but I guess I'm talking about socializing social networks (part of the business value itself), if that makes sense.
Air guitar. Air turntables. Air keyboard. Air drums.

Aw, yeah.
Pretty amazing memoir. Does a nice job of capturing the ups and downs of the grad student experience. Phil - consider distilling this down as a blog post or two - lots of good lessons here, but given the length they might be lost on most or your potential readers.
Any press is good press? Can't count the number of times I read about the Twitter fail whale.
1) This is purely my opinion - There is a fundamental problem with these Lytros. Photography is an art, and art is not easy, which is exactly why art has some value, and not everyone can come up with art. It gives one a sense of joy, pride and achievement, when someone comes up with their own art, because they have taken the pains to capture the right subject, at the right moment with the right focus. What Lytro does is removes this sense of achievement, pride by making it easier for anyone and everyone to capture photos with the right subject, with the right focus - Even if they had captured it originally wrong. It makes the pro's look like idiots.

2) Design - The traditional DSLR's give you a sense of satisfaction, completion and pride when you hold them, because when someone else sees you holding them, they know you are putting in some effort to capture good photos.

The Lytro on the other hand looks like a traditional Kaleidoscope and when someone looks at you holding them - 1) They think its some toy, if they've never heard or seen a Lytro before or 2) They know its a device that lets anyone capture beautiful photos, so its no big deal.

There is very little pride of ownership in owning a Lytro, with contrast to a DSLR.

The Lytro needs some design elements from the traditional DSLR, to make it more appealing to the Masses. Had the Lytro been pitched in the form-factor of a DSLR, but with all the features that Lytro has now, it would have caught up like forest fire.

Lens compatibility. When people buy DSLR's, MOST of them buy the body because they know its from a company that manufactures great lenses (Eg: Canon). With Lytro, I'm not even sure if there are plans to manufacture external Lenses. Even if Lytro does manufacture them, it won't matter because companies like Canon/Nikon have a great array of Lenses, proven with the test of time. Lytro should in the least add support to fix lenses from 3rd party companies.

Just my 2 cents.
You're joking, but I bet Netflix's Asgard system gets support for OpenStack pretty quickly now...
Ok startup people. It is worth it to host in a different zone than US-EAST.
Harvard scientists reverse the ageing process in mice
Yes, and that's why I think (most) software patents are a crock of shit, same as most design patents. The very idea that someone can get a patent something like 'a tablet with a metal casing and rounded corners' is revolting.

But then, the whole patent system has been fucked up for umpteen years because of the way lawyers lay out the legalese on most patents. Something as specific as a new protocol to transfer data (say, SPDY) can be massaged into being a vague generic definition ("a binary transmission method designed to make HTTP-like data structures and operations possible in a more efficient manner") that could cover a lot of ground, giving the owner of the patent the power to halt innovation (ZeroMQ could very well fall under the umbrella defined of such 'patent') while giving exactly 0 benefit to anyone.

I'm just waiting for someone cheeky enough to come up with a vague wording for describing a 'wooden and/or plastic object designed with the purpose of holding items and or facilitating common household tasks' (i.e. a piece of furniture) and sue IKEA.
It's like looking for a house in the rain, so you can see where the water drains.
Yes, in the U.S. you can sue for pretty much anything. You'll probably lose, but you can at least give it a go.
Blackout Tracker
I really can't see decentralized social networks being successful. 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. Patching together a stream when the people you follow are scattered across a hundred different servers painful. Account creation for average tech illiterate users painful. If they have to rely on some third party to provide a host, how is that any better than relying on Twitter or Facebook, as soon as the hoster decides it isn't worth the expense or to boot you for some random reason what happens?

Wouldn't it be better to build a centralized message bus and identity system under some kind of foundation like Wikipedia. You would have to get benefactors to fund it is the big problem. Twitter has proved itself to be a priceless service for communication and news streams, its like the real-time Wikipedia.

Its just major regrettable the people who are running it are completely trashing it in the predictable pursuit of the beloved buck and a fat IPO.

I'd love nothing more than foundation based centralized message bus and identity service offering API services to any and all responsible developers and apps, short text only messages and links to avoid all the issues with attachments little or no censorship, private communications between users encrypted so even the foundation can't read them or offer them up to prying governments, some mechanism to control and kill spam.
According to other HNers, their RSS feed seems to be fairly accurate (someone please verify this), which makes the whole thing that much weirder.
Not to mention the insanely low rate limits...
Megaupload Judge To Issue Order On Return Of User Data “Shortly”
Too bad, just got one and by no possible stretch of the imagination is it an iPhone. It's not that it's bad or good, just completely different.
So apple should be off the hook for innovation once it's released a product and gained a "market position"?

I'm sorry but I'm always going to have trouble with the idea of a company resting on its laurels, yet bringing continual revenue in year after year after year because a piece of government paper says that no one else is allowed to do anything remotely resembling what that company is doing since they got there first.

Also:

"A means of searching multiple databases and sources for data." Last I checked federated search has had a wikipedia article since 2005. Hardly seems like innovation pioneered by Apple and stolen by evil Google.

Slide to unlock... have you used an airplane bathroom?

c'mon people
sorry to hear that, my friend. Best of luck, may the force be with you and your +1
UK's 3-Strikes Plan Continues To Grind Through The System
I'd quite like to use bind() in C / nasm for my current project. I think you can use a similar approach - create an executable area on the heap that pushes an extra parameter and jmps to the target function, then just return a function pointer to it.

EDIT: there might be a problem with arranging the stack parameters - if you use call on the target, then you're pushing a return address onto the stack, which messes up the arguments. But if you simply jmp, then neither the caller or callee know exactly how to clean up the stack when the function returns... hmm. I guess you could permanently reserve a register for this shimming but that's hardly an elegant solution.
Ask HN: Whos applying for Startup Chile?
I used to be of the mindset to keep a clean desktop, then I came to my senses and used it as a working space. It's easy to get to from anywhere in the OS as it generally has it's own shortcut'd location. Temporary working files just get stored there. Permanent files might have a shortcut to them stored there instead, leaving the real file in a more suitable location. The 'ugliness' associated with such a desktop is meaningless once I realised most of the time the desktop is covered.

The most infuriating thing about Gnome 3 is that it decides for you that the desktop is an unholy place to keep anything, because you're too stupid to figure out how to do things efficiently.
Love this Twitter account - hope it lasts!
Cloudflare Always-Up isn't showing on my page - is Cloudflare affected too?
I'm boycotting Apple
New Mac Malware Found, Attacks Uyghur Activists
Not weird at all. Companies the size of Amazon are practically bound to be schizophrenic.
hi matt - wow, i was gonna email you tomorrow, but HN scooped me.

re: distilling -- my main intention in writing this memoir wasn't to provide advice, since it's hard for me to determine how much facets of my experience generalize. i do have plans to convert the "lessons learned" section from the epilogue into a talk, though.

i have this other article from the beginning of my third year that's more of the "advice" type, although again, I'm wary of making generalizations about Ph.D. life:
http://pgbovine.net/PhD-life.htm

(other fun fact - i used one of your blog quotes as the title slide of my Ph.D. oral defense)
Wow, I can't believe I just read that whole thing. Maybe it was the excellent writing quality or maybe I just find things like this interesting.

As someone who just graduated with a B.S. in chemical engineering and will start work toward my PhD in the fall (also in chemical engineering, but will actually involve a TON of programming), this strikes a chord with me.

A few takeaways from the article:

-The author does not give himself nearly enough credit. "Self-deprecating" is probably the right term. He considers himself average, but he is far above average. I mean this as a compliment of course.

-I think some of those tools he wrote could actually help me with my work (particularly CDE) -- I'll have to go take a look.

-I am going to have to learn how to focus, and very quickly. I consider myself very motivated/stubborn but I get distracted so easily that it's ridiculous, and this is not going to work for grad school unless I alter my behavior substantially before I get there.

-Before reading his book, I too had the idealized notion of "brilliant idea, years of writing one paper about it". The reality isn't quite as fantastic, but I appreciate learning the truth over belated disillusionment.

-Just realized the author is pgbovine -- excellent work! I currently have a completely free summer to do whatever -- would you have any tips on how I should prepare before I get to grad school? I already know which professor I will be working with, so I'm trying to figure out what level of "initiative" I should take before I arrive.
> "Learn how YOU can help Hyundai make August National Fuel-Efficiency month!"

Learn what YOU can do help OUR company! Dale Carnegie must be rolling in his grave.
For ecommerce, people will just got buy somewhere else. So not to big a deal for them but a really big deal to your bottom line. Especially when you are still paying for traffic acquisition, sure you can turn Adwords off in minutes but other traffic sources may take 24 hours.
You called it. I had my money on the volcano.

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