skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My experience is that SVG is simply not ready to support anything but the most basic vector art.

I'm never sure if it's Illustrator's SVG output, the format, or browser support that's lacking. But it's a total crapshoot if any kind of sophisticated techniques are going to make it out of AI. (Hell, it's a crapshoot if they'll make it through another PDF renderer, too; when I prep books for print, I just make a ton of TIFFs.)

Here's some other ways I might try to make that radial gradient in AI. And their results after eyeing the generated SVG.

- Draw about 8-10 lines in different colors radiating out from the central point. Make them into a blend. (This is an idiosyncratic use of the term "blend"; when you blend between two or more shapes, AI will draw a bunch of intermediary shapes that morph between them. You used to have to do this all the time before AI added the quick and easy gradient tool.)

This translates into SVG as a bunch of lines - SVG doesn't understand the concept of a blend, or at least AI's exporter doesn't, so six lines grouped into a blend become a hundred or so. It looks pretty good.

- Make a linear gradient; use a distortion mesh to turn it into a radial gradient. [1]

This translates into SVG as an embedded image. But it sure looks good.

- Draw about eight wedges. Blur them.

If I use AI's native blur, it turns into several embedded images. Also it's a bit pale as there are no 100% opaque pixels.

If I use an SVG blur, it's very compact - just a few blurred shapes. However, the rendering is just vile, with bounding boxes based on the edges of the polygons rather than ones expanded out to cover all that blur. Also it has the "no 100% opaque pixels" problem.

Also it's worth noting that Illustrator's UI for SVG effects is absolutely terrible; you've got a tiny list of cryptically named effects, and if you want to change the parameters you get to edit code.

- Finally, I revisited the line blend and turned those lines into long, thin wedges. Looks perfect. Translates into a whole ton of shapes.

I haven't tested file size. I suspect that it may not be a win over a bitmap until you get to like 1K pixels square.

Some of these results might be better if I was using Inkscape. If anyone would care to try doing similar things in that I'd be curious to see how well it fares on these methods - and on others you may come up with!

Reference JPG: http://i.imgur.com/ZSDAZ.jpg
Source AI and generated SVG: http://www.sendspace.com/file/rn83zw

[1] Tutorial here: http://vector.tutsplus.com/tutorials/tools-tips/quick-tip-cr...
It is a strawman.

People expect their computers to run Office. They will.

People expect their computers to run Facebook. They will.

People expect their computers to run email. They will.

The Geek Squad will say, "Windows RT is not backward compatible, but it includes Office, Facebook, and email."

Mom will get it.
Tell us what your ideas are and maybe you won't have to work on them alone.
Agreed there are exceptions! We need an xkcd sketch for this....
I'm multi-az and am being impacted. I also use multi-az RDS adn its being impacted. So calling BS on the 1 az impact.
The reference architectures and white papers here are helpful: http://aws.amazon.com/architecture/
Thanks. :) A lot of people at Startup School were more than happy to talk about the troubles they went through, but only after the fact — it was really hard for me to press submit to talk about current troubles. So much pressure for startup bullshit out there!
Amazon Failure
#amazon #ec2 #ebs your the best!! https://www.evernote.com/shard/s131/sh/1aa324d1-a548-4d21-89b1-79e9aa2a7c79/6881f5095bf8fb1213ed8647be0fb902 … I am so happy we pay you money for a fantastic service
pg, or someone else from HN... Could you please edit this title for accuracy? Maybe, "Poorly designed sites taken out because of problems in one Amazon availability zone."
Apple: "Insanely Great!"

Microsoft: "Unbelievably Great!"

Consumers: "Unbelievably Insane!"
A friend of mine founded a company that does email augmentation. Went from zero to acquisition in a year. Data is valuable.
This is the kind of stuff I think about when I hear people talk about the cloud and promise that downtime is a thing of the past.

Cloud hosting is not drastically different from any other type of service and is still vulnerable to the same problems.
Wikipedia says that they had $13.67B in capital in May. A 12% bet that upper- and middle-class baby boomers will keep spending at that rate for at least the next 5 years? Somebody must be confident.
We (Twilio) have released a number of articles & presentations in this area:

http://www.slideshare.net/twilio/highavailability-infrastruc...

http://www.twilio.com/engineering/2011/04/22/why-twilio-wasn...

It's strategy as opposed to how-to but the principles apply.
Two of our four EC2 servers are down. Both have RDS connections and EBS storage. Looks like the RDS connection has something to do with it...
I'm fairly certain that is for standard charging. The super chargers probably push too much current for this standard. I don't know if it can use the same "plug" format though...
http://downrightnow.com/netflix

If netflix is down, then it's something most companies who know how to design fail over can't cope with.
I vaguely remember reading somewhere a long time ago that on books that show "Delete" they can't do anything, but on the ones that show "Remove from device" they can control your access to the book.

This would mean, the only way to save your investment on the Kindle would be to strip DRM using calibre (or the unswindle tool) and transfer those copies to your Kindle. Well, obviously this negates the entire point if you have 3G but maybe you'd have to host stuff on your own private server if you want all your books available all the time.
Well, that's the last time I buy a kindle or any books from Amazon. ePub and other non-DRM formats exist. Luckily, I have only bough a few books so far that were not free.

Of course, for the ones willing to search, the truth is out there ... but the truth is copyrighted. That's what they forgot to mention in the X-Files.
Years ago I made the mistake of using them. Never again. Their habit of screwing users, followed by complete opacity as to why they're screwing a particular user at a particular time, makes them evil.

Which is really too bad: they provide what could be, in other circumstances, a useful service.

I actually sued them in small claims court.
All I've ever heard and seen in practice is that RDS should generally be avoided for production usage. Its opaque reliance on EBS is its downfall.
It's actually ok with a mouse - it just takes a bit of getting used to. To be honest, I use it entirely with the keyboard now (Metro included). I've forced myself to use Caret browsing in IE and the reuslt is that I've actually turned the touchpad off on my ThinkPad. This is not because I don't like the mouse interaction, but because I like the keyboard interaction.

I agree however that this is primarily touch oriented, which is why they're pushing surface. I'm grabbing a surface pro when it comes out.

I've tried it on a Sony AIO desktop PC with touch support and it was pretty good on that. Unfortunately it's the kids' PC so I don't get to meddle with it much.
Not only does it default to 1.9 after one year, it catches up all the way to 1.9.3-p286, released only ten days ago.
Yes, I'm sure "stockpiling against the need to re-create society" is much higher on most people's list than "I don't want to pay for the things I want".
Yeah, it's got to be much larger than the other regions, so it makes sense that we see more errors. Since error_rate = machines * error_rate_per_machine.
They've given both status updates and tweets. So much for actually reading first.
I admire Musk and tesla. However, I see two paths for them and none are good.

A - fully-electric cars are still too early and will get crushed by hybrids or more efficient diesel/fossil fuel cars. Tesla becomes irrelevent.

B - fully-electric is all the rage, and every brand will have one. Tesla will become the victims of their own success.

I'm going to assume many of you are going to disagree with me. Mainly because we come from a world with a much different customer acquisition models.

For most people, if they had a choice they would buy a trusted car brand. Would you buy an Honda/Acura, Toyota/Lexus, Mercedes, etc with dealership in every corner or an unknown car called tesla?
Also, unlike niche companies like Ferrari/Lamborghini that have brand and performance appeal, tesla doesn't provide anything unique. For the same price point, there are far better cars, than the original lotus-based Tesla. To that point, what's their beachhead?
Pretty sure Microsoft would have no problem holding their own in court - they had a good track record at that point. Seems like they just leveraged their and Apple's positions to bundle it into the deal.

If it were a "settlement", it would have happened in the court room. Apple surrendered the case just to stay alive.
just checked my site and it is up now!
My instances just came back up.
Although I totally agree with this sentiment, I think it too is a bit short sighted.

In manufacturing at least, the big technological drive (which we have seen in the last half decade) is towards flexible, low cost automation which fixes the problems of existing automation (extreme R&D and capital cost and total inflexibility). While lowering the barriers for getting things onto the market (which can be done just by reclaiming the manufacturing base taken by China), it will almost surely destroy the manufacturing based working class (which is about a tenth of the US's GDP).
One thing we discovered this morning: it appears the AWS console itself is hosted in N Virginia.

This means that if you were trying to make changes to your EC2 instances in the West using the GUI, you couldn't, even though the instances themselves were unaffected.
Indeed. I was actually speaking from personal experience and the experience of the few colleagues I introduced to i3. I don't really know what the average user thinks - could be very different.
Corruption in Italy is hardwired in the behavior of people and their approach to life. It's enough to live in Italy for a long enough time to understand how people reason and why corruption is so widespread.

Obviously, being Italian doesn't make me an expert in corruption from a legal point of view, but I am pretty positive to know a bit about Italian mentality and facts confirm that corruption is as common in the North as it is in the South (I can cite my sources, if necessary.)
Looks like multi-AZ to us too
Rights? You have no right to your eBooks.
There is new information here:

Rights? You have no right to your eBooks.
http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2012/10/rights-y...

Edited to add: So this seems to be a case of a used Kindle's UDID being tied to a previously-suspended account and she got caught in the dragnet by buying that device used without knowing of its history. At some point -- if someone can get through to a live human being at Amazon -- this should all be straightened out. This is yet another reason why everyone should be careful buying used electronics with UDIDs (see eBay and Craigslist for all the "clean ESN" mentions for used phones!).
And Netflix's Simian Army is awesome:

http://techblog.netflix.com/2011/07/netflix-simian-army.html

They've even released the "Chaos Monkey" open source:
http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/07/chaos-monkey-released-in...
Don’t call it “open source” unless you mean it
How often do these happen? I've been using EC2 for about a week and it was a surprise when my instance ground to a halt before my eyes.
Here's the series of events from my perspective:
Nginx is no longer able to connect to uwsgi
Instance successfully rebooted via EC2 console
Celery tasks are not able to reach the RabbitMQ broker
Halfway into a dump of Postgresql the session goes dead
Green check on EC2 console for the instance still
rclick -> stop causes instance to get stuck in a 'stopping' state, which persists to this moment.
Is anybody using MonoTouch to create cross-platform apps for iOS and Android? What's the experience like?
Not all instances are EBS backed.
I'm seeing issues across multiple AZ's. Everything is still up, but that doesn't stop me from getting paged.
My father did some of his ancestry research with help from the LDS people at a centre in London. I was wary, expecting a bit of evangelising or conversion talk, but they didn't try any of that stuff.

It was interesting that at the time it was one of the best ways to get access to computers and cd rom drives for no cost.
How _should_ Tesla sales prevent any random techie from asking for a test drive?
Win 8 is a better OS than Win 7. Sensibly faster, proper multi monitor support, lots of cool improvements (explorer, task manager etc).

It's sad that most people can't see behind Metro. Press Winkey +D on that start screen and start enjoying a great OS.
Well, I figure when I get home, I'll rsync the kindle over to a local directory. :-)
I had the pleasure of being next to some of the engineers from Ancestry.com in the queue for the WWDC keynote this year - it was really interesting to hear about a business that you don't think is that big, but is actually massive. They said Europe was also a very big market for them (I know genealogy is quite popular in the UK at least - the TV show that the article cites, 'Who Do You Think You Are', was originally a BBC show first), so being acquired by a European private equity firm makes some sense.
One of our Multi-AZ RDS instances failed over successfully. It was down for about 5-10 minutes.
"Expert" is a relative term. He may not know all the intricate details. But having to live in the system he has first-hand knowledge, and not being part of the system (apparently) he has no personal reason to hide its dirty secrets. Also, his experience is likely to be typical for other people like him. This, I would say, makes him a great source. Then if an "expert" wants to perform a scientific study or in-depth journalistic investigation or some other thing "experts" are supposed to do, the said expert would need to contact him and other like him, for knowledge. Which he, thankfully, has freely shared with us here.
The Fragmentation of Mobile Fragmentation
The bender is nature; the scientists are the observers.
I reacted quickly enough to get a new instance spun up and added it to my site's load balancer, but the load balancer is failing to recognize the new instance and send traffic to it... yay. Console is totally unresponsive on the load balancer's "instances" tab. If I point my browser at the ec2 public DNS of the new instance it seems to be running just fine. So much for the load balancer being helpful.
Multiple AZs here.
At least HN isn't down! :D
It does matter to Gmail, when signing in to its web interface (as opposed to email addressing and delivery). Or, it used to. Even though you could not create account names differing only by the presence or absence of a period, when it came time to sign in, you needed to use whatever variant you used when you created the account. (In my very limited experience, at least. Account created as xxx.yyy at gmail dot com needed to sign in to the web interface as xxx.yyy, Gmail would not accept xxxyyy as the user ID for the account.)
I'd just say: try them. I learned microcontrollers with Basic stamps (many years ago), bought a Teensy a few years ago and learned AVR (avoiding Arduino for various reasons), and am now learning the STM ARM stuff.

My biggest takeaway is that teaching hardware people about unit tests would make humanity as a whole about 93% more productive :)
Bigger Data, Smarter Scaling
yeah our site went down too
40,000,000 installers and 56 years of work/month. Ninite (YC W08) turns 3.
Mono is excellent as a drop-in replacement of Visual Studio's command-line compiler.
If someone is building a site with no UX experience, is isn;t the fault of this incredible CSS developer that his site has bad UX. His site would probably have bad UX with or without this menu.
That's editorializing.

For many sites, a single server in a single zone (e.g., a non redundant server, an instance, a slice, a VM, whatever) is the right decision for ROI.

For many sites, the money spent on redundancy could be better spent on, say, Google Adwords, until they're big enough that a couple hours downtime has irreplaceable costs higher than the added costs of redundancy (dev, hosting, admin) for a year.
ICE switches from RIM to Apple
Many young techies are accustomed to chasing one specific type of profit function: namely, massive quantity x low price.

Ancestry.com is a good example of the opposite, though potentially very lucrative function: small quantity x high price. The site has only a few million active users, but each of them pays a decent chunk of change per month. Those users also use the site very frequently, and for long periods at a time. (Again, contrast this with a service like Facebook: lots of users, each one presumably browsing or using in very quick and sporadic bursts).

People forget that a market involves both # of users -and- willingness to pay. There's more than one way to reach a large addressable market.
Skipping over the difficulties of implementing universal health care for the moment -- the thing I like best about it is that it drastically simplifies an entire category of "stuff I hate that keeps me up at night".

If "but what happens if I get sick" is no longer a large factor in questions like "should I start this business", people are freer to throw themselves into developing the kind of technology you're talking about.

I've literally spent months of my life dealing with the details of arranging and paying for healthcare for myself and my family -- including time worrying about "but if X happens, how will I pay for it?" It's one of the main stresses in my life, and it very obviously costs me in productivity.

Hm; hope this is coherent; I'm out of time. :(
I don't find 'xkcd' particularly easy to pronounce or remember.

Given its target audience, it works for xkcd. Geeks like geeky sounding, hard to pronounce names (like gnustep, xmlhttprequest and PostgreSQL). If a name like 'xkcd' were chosen for a consumer service, it probably wouldn't work very well.
XSquare : Responsive Image Slider in html5/jquery
Even if your own infrastructure relies on bare-metal hosting, odds are very good that some external service is going to be based in at least part on AWS or a constituent service for any non-trivial service offering. Your objective of being completely fault-tolerant and independent of Amazon is going to be hard to attain.
seems they should have a back up
Thanks! It's really just a trivial Django app. The real magic comes from memcaching everything. It's all on a 2gig rackspace vps.
If it has USB OTG and allows installing custom Linux software, I'm sold.

Current status: [USB Host on the Kindle 4](http://www.christian-hoff.com/?p=139)
Every brand may have electric cars using licensed Tesla technology.
I was seeing that too, but it looks like Amazon has now updated the availability zone status. When I run ec2-describe-availability-zones from the command line, it's telling me that us-east-1b is impaired. (Availability zone mapping is different for each account, so my 1b may be some other availability zone for you.)
Thanks. (Hard to post ignorantly without sounding ignorant)
China's labor costs are now as high as Mexico's
The name was chosen explicitly to be difficult to pronounce and remember.
shouldn't amazon themselves have architected their own app to be able to move around?

I get tired of the snipes from people that "well, you're doing it wrong", as if this is trivial stuff. But if Amazon themselves aren't even making their AWS console redundant between locations, how easy/straightforward is it for anyone else?

To what extent is this just "the cobbler's kids have no shoes?"
The last Netflix post mortem mentioned they had a bug in their configuration where they kept sending traffic to already down ELB instances, which was the cause of the last outage for them if I remember correctly.
"Free long distance travel" obviously means B. It's not like this is a secret.
Reddit is down?
Why?
Makes sense. They probably get a lot of people who pretend to be buyers just to be able to test-drive a Tesla. Since such people don't end up buying one (as they cannot afford it), letting them test-drive serves no purpose other than wasting the dealer's time, and setting a $300 fee helps weed them out. Note that most high-end car dealers do this.

Another way to think about it is this: if you were a serious buyer, i.e. the type who can spend a tens of grand on a car, then a $300 fee would be pocket change for you. In all likelihood, it would count towards the purchase of the car if you decided to buy one. But declining to pay the fee basically confirms their suspicion that you were not a serious buyer and were there simply to satisfy your curiosity.
Apparently, Amazon did not delete the books from her Kindle. See the twit:

http://boingboing.net/2012/10/22/kindle-user-claims-amazon-d...
I never understood people's love for Windows XP. It maybe started to get good after a few service packs but I found it to be unstable and prone to slowing down after a short while of use even into SP2.

Whatever initial criticisms of XP that had come out were probably justified (It definitely was and still is an ugly operating system). I don't agree with the author's point that people automatically hate whatever windows version come next. It just seems that way because we haven't had a good windows since 98.

The only reason why windows 7 actually turned out to be a decent operating system is because it needed to be, the competition(OSX, linux) was gaining ground under XP primarily because of how bad it was. Sure I imagine that the age of XP had something to do with it but I remember installing linux back in 2004/2005 after one to many blue screens with XP and not looking back until windows 7.
Or, just name your company quickly and move on. We lost a couple weeks early on to naming Matasano, and after some false starts, eventually gave up and thumbed through a list of exotic plants. By the time the book of plants had been opened, the naming premise had been accepted: we were done trying to find a semantically "fitting" name for the company. We just picked a plant with a cool name.

We ran into two "problems" down the road; first: it turns out that a "Matasano" is a "quack doctor" in South America, which we discovered shortly after hiring someone from Argentina. We quickly convinced ourselves that the irony was a value-add, not a cost.

Second, we kept getting confused with Monsanto. This sounds (a little) sillier than it actually is. A lot of our clients, particularly back in 2006-2007, were large enterprises where the staff was particularly likely to have some confusion. We had more serious conversations about renaming over the Monsanto thing than over the "quack doctor" thing.

Ultimately, we just got over it and kept plowing forward. Equity goes into your name; it usually doesn't get extracted from your name. There's some sense in picking a good name, but keep in mind that weeks of time --- which is what we were facing --- is a very steep price to pay for something that might only be marginally important down the road.

I submit that the term "Airbnb", while memorable, has very little intrinsic meaning to most people who rent out their places on Airbnb. Ebay has none whatsoever. "Heroku" was one of YC's biggest acquisitions; that name breaks one of the rules of thumb of this post (3 syllables, yet means nothing to its customers). "Stripe" and "Square" and "Paypal" are great names, but "Braintree" seems to be doing pretty well too, and if "Braintree" is OK, I humbly suggest that "Mindweasel" and "Thoughtpants" will work too.

This is a good post. All I'm saying is, be careful of the procrastinate-y issues that come up early in your company. They all matter less than execution on everything else.