skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Our app is down because it's hosted on Heroku and it's frustrating because it seems like N Virginia is the least reliable Amazon datacenter. Every year it seems to go down a couple times for at least a couple hours.

Heroku should offer a choice between N Virginia and Oregon hosting (I think they're almost comparable in price nowadays). That way people who want more uptime/reliability can choose Oregon. Sure it will be further from Europe (but then it will be closer to Asia) and people can make that choice on their own.

But basing an entire hosting service on N Virginia doesn't make sense anymore, considering the history of major downtime in that region.
This makes me think. In 2012 people still think that genetic programming, a numerical optimization technique (and not the most efficient one), magically solves random machine learning problems.
The wikipedia page for EC2 lists a couple similar incidents at the Northern Virginia datacenter. Victims of the previous NVa outages included Reddit, Quora, SpringPad, FourSquare, Netflix, etc...

Many of those companies are down right now... why didn't they learn? FourSquare seems to be up - although slow. I can load Quora but didn't try to log in. Netflix, Reddit, SpringPad, seem to be down for me.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Elastic_Compute_Cloud#Is...
> I've re-done the assignment twice this evening (the questions change enough that you have to think a lot, even when re-doing the same assignment), only to get 500 errors both times.

It's been about 8 years, so my memory may wrong, but I believe WebAssign used do have some sort of adaptive homework, where the questions would be selected based on your answers to previous questions (the same way the GMAT or GRE works).

I'm surprised that Coursera doesn't do something of the sort, both to avoid the problem that you're having (the 'state' of your homework would be updated each time you submit an answer to a question), and also to capitalize on some of the flexibility of digital learning that isn't possible on paper.
They've been down for several hours actually. I tried to get to their site this morning to check out the jedburg talk, and got the "We're on the case" message.
Great points!

But just to list more counterexamples, from another Hacker News thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3181272

I'm pretty pleased with my own similar essay on this topic, which I called "Nominology": http://messymatters.com/nominology
Countly mobile analytics platform servers are also affected from this issue (http://count.ly). Waiting and waiting. :)

@caseysoftware thanks for the links, we now have something to read and implement this week.
Keeping it Simple for Everyone
I'll keep an eye on this thread to answer any questions too. Thanks!
This issue is affecting both an EC2 Zone and Amazon's RDS servers, which are technically multi-zone. There are a ton of well-architected apps and sites that have been affected. Unconstructive...
What advantages does it bring in that role?
They should simply have an upfront test drive fee. Book a test drive online.
In the last couple of years I've been reading the books of Stafford Beer, and he had some interesting ideas which were way ahead of his time. It's debatable how well Cybersyn and Cyberfolk would have worked in the early 1970s, using a single IBM computer plus telex systems. Today we would call this type of system SCADA, but Beer's ideas extended beyond factory control into the overall economy and political process.

At the time Cybersyn was portrayed in the British and some of the Chilean newspapers as a totalitarian "big brother" system, but that wasn't how it was designed to work. Beer saw the economy as a closed loop rather than a top down hierarchy, and he knew about and was hostile towards the Soviet GOSPLAN type economy.

If you're interested in Cybersyn then there is a recent book by Eden Medina called "Cybernetic revolutionaries" which describes the system and its development.
Will the simulation assume perfect mechanics or try to simulate friction, flex &c based on materials around then? If latter, then strikes me as very difficult project.
It appears that libgdiplus 3.0 isn't currently available at

http://download.mono-project.com/sources/libgdiplus/

Would be nice to have it there :)
Wait a minute, is this taking private information about minors and, without guardian consent, using a proprietary API to give the information to private industry for-profit corporations?
Isn't that already the case? http://gigaom.com/cleantech/tesla-to-supply-powertrains-for-...
So architect your infrastructure to handle spike loads in the cloud and baseline traffic elsewhere.
is it really B&W?

was that a stylistic choice only, or are there some performance benefits?

some of the artwork reminds me a lot of Yellow Submarine stuff.
Yes, I was looking at the DOM. But why add styles as attributes? There is any performance improvement? Couldn't be done with just CSS?
There is already a thread about it being down because problems with AWS. Not sure this warrants another thread on HN. Maybe once we know the technical reason behind it, we can discuss more?
Yes they are:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPdXAyvWZdI

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

The problem with existing e-readers is with the poor programming of the display controller, not with the display itself.
Gucci Museo em Florença - Itália
Amazon LB is down
All my ec2 instances running well and LB is not accessible. What is the hell... the 3rd time ...
I use a different Pocketbook (model Pro 902) and am very happy with it. I have heard good references about several other models as well. A broad range of formats, good build quality, reasonable usability.
I recommend this as well. Performance is way more consistent on the instance/ephemeral storage as well.
Latest Tools, Techniques and Languages to consider - Tech Radar
I'm also having API and Console timeouts, so I would disagree that it's limited to a single AZ.
Hackers can defeat these entrenched interests. Set up online websites that work through these problems in a structured manner (like a mechanical turk for anti-corruption).
You should be able to pull off a great name in 1 day. Heroku is a great name: abstracted, unique, interesting and developer related. Ebay is also a great name.
My take on it is that it's being used to subsidize SolarCity. If the charging stations really are break-even in operating costs, then it could be a viable plan. At the least, I'd guess the stations are much cheaper than traditional gas stations, so proliferation may not be as expensive as it seems.

Then again, I'm not a business expert, so perhaps there's bookkeeping shenanigans here as well.
Ditto to #1 and #3.
idiette.
Congrats on shipping. You should post this on /r/gaming on reddit, they are really supportive of indie devs producing games.
The Console itself is down, <html><body><b>Http/1.1 Service Unavailable</b></body> </html>

Its high time AWS does something now.
My "optimizations" were trivial, in that they don't change the behavior of the regex at all, they just simplify it. As khafra points out, they are equivalent.

I also wasn't trying to say those simplifications should be applied between iterations of the algorithm, only at the end.
Are You Trying To Invent a Job or Find a Job?
all my service is in black now, so need to have backup plan for LB
Our multi-zoned RDS instance was able to fail over to another zone with minimal downtime. It took about 2 minutes.
How I played Russian Roulette with my SEO results
I'm interested to hear how you came up with your pricing. Likely you spent a lot of time coming up with the packages, but it seems like your market is really a tough market to price properly.

There is so much complexity in this industry that I would assume that the right pricing strategy would make a huge difference in your business.

At first glance I would assume things like... you must be low enough to not compete with wedding planners, so that would imply a max price of $2K to $3K. But then your pricing is only $79 which is far below (what I think is the average cost of a wedding planner). I'd be interested to find out what makes up that difference.

Are there ways to close the gap?

I'm sure there are a lot of considerations in the pricing that I cannot even think about properly, but it seems like there should be a lot of opportunity here.
the rebranding would be more cool as "io.io" but it is taken.
I think this has to do with the fact that the SVG graphics are embedded as <img> instead of just embedding them directly into the document as <svg>.

If you load them directly into Chrome, the SVG renders fine.
http://voormedia.com/blog/2012/10/creating-svg-vector-graphi...

Maybe this has something to do with Chrome's process of rendering this as a bitmap? (Random guess)
Amazon EBS failure brings down Reddit, Imgur, others
> Their sales people used to be pushy when they were all on commission. . .

And they still are, for the things they still earn commission on. It's amazing how pushy I've had people in blue polo shirts get about trying to sell me extended warranties.
AirBnB is also down.
Mantle: a Model Framework for Objective-C
Not necessarily, it could be some element of the Netflix architecture that due to their size and/or design trade-offs has taken longer / is harder to eliminate than it would be for others.

Other services, like Twilio, have come through several of these major problems with US-EAST generally unscathed while Netflix has had issues repeatedly.
Lucky you? :)
Possibly but there are bigger companies using RDS in production – also, the multi-az feature had worked out better than my own custom setup. Unfortunately lack of resources prevent me from rolling out my own setup on bare metal.
Anyone seen actual financials? FTA: To monetize all that information, the website has a subscription model that two million people pay into at $12.95 to $34.95 a month, according to the company.

So (say) $20/month = $200/year * 2 million = $400M/year run rate. In rough terms the buyout happened at 3-4x revenue.

I'd say it's not too rich a valuation, and given my wild-ass guess above, my error bars are big; But the bottom line: not an insane number.

Kudos.
If you go through the pains of architecting your system to span multiple AZs, or you avoid using EBS, then you probably dodge most of the EC2 outages. (Remains to be seen if that is the case here.)

That said, I don't think most people think using the cloud means that downtime is a thing of the past. I think the more attractive proposition is when hardware breaks, or meteors hit the datacenter, etc, it is their problem, not yours. You still have to deal with software-level operations, but hardware-level operations is effectively outsourced. The question is if you think you can do a better job than Amazon -- some companies think they can, most startups know they can't.
> Uh, yeah, I know that it's not biologically true.

You're skipping over my actual point; "slippery slope" is a logical fallacy by itself.

>How many people don't launch startups because they don't have the disposable income needed to take risks?

That's my point. You need to have much more disposable income if you're going to pay for medical insurance while you're hacking away in a garage. If you're keen on cutting down your life expenses, you can get then down really very low, even for a family... but expensive medical insurance doesn't play along.

> Wanna guess what that graph would look like?

Hard to say -- how would you make it apples to apples? Obviously "has universal healthcare" isn't the most significant variable in a straight comparison.
Good to see Scala and Clojure becoming mainstream languages.
Thanks for your feedback Mahesh.
I didn't realize it was so bad so i will make a point of pushing the new design live asap.
Everyone has to start somewhere though.
Most of the product are from data-feeds so its just trying to create the best we can do with different formats and different information.
Also /r/gamedev and /r/indiegaming. However reddit is currently down right now.
For me just to see them (the speakers) in person was worth it. It's like being at a concert of your favorite band x 1000. This was the first time I saw them all and I felt emotional and wanting to be one of them. Besides that, the talks themselves were good, inspiring and eye-opening.
Good point. In my case I think I'm in the clear. The only services I'll be outsourcing are DNS (via dyn.com), backup (via rsync.net) and CDN work via Rackspace. As far as I can tell, none of them have a connection to or rely on Amazon/AWS.
Fair enough. I would no more blame the manufacturers of spoons for America's obesity rates than I would this developer for incorrect application of this demo.

Although, this demo is the equivalent of a spoon manufacturer demonstrating their spoons by having a picture of someone eating a giant bucket of gravy. Maybe the manufacturer can't be blamed for obesity, but they could help out by providing a healthier demonstration of how their product should be used.
Exactly. Whereas windows 7 stood firmly in the middle ground between power users and novice users, Windows 8 now has two modalities of use. The mouse driven approach is friendly/easy to use for novice users, while the keyboard driven approach will allow power users to be more productive.
I would agree with you, but Amazon is just downright dishonest in their reports, which makes me sad, because I love Amazon. Go look at the past reports, they've never shown a red market, only "degraded performance" even when services for multiple availability zones went down at the same time due to their power outage (so had you architected to multiple AZs you were still fucked). When they have a single AZ go down, they won't even give it a yellow marker on the status page, they'll just put a footnote on a green marker. It makes their status dashboard pretty much useless for at a glance checking (why even have colors if they don't mean anything?)

Read their report from the major outage earlier this year, they start out by saying "elevated error rates", when many services were in fact down, and it wasn't until hours later they finally admitted to having an issue that affected more than just one availability zone.

From Forbes:
”We are investigating elevated errors rates for APIs in the US-EAST-1 (Northern Virginia) region, as well as connectivity issues to instances in a single availability zone.” By 11:49 EST, it reported that, ”Power has been restored to the impacted Availability Zone and we are working to bring impacted instances and volumes back online.” But by 12:20 EST the outage continued, “We are continuing to work to bring the instances and volumes back online. In addition, EC2 and EBS APIs are currently experiencing elevated error rates.” At 12:54 AM EST, AWS reported that “EC2 and EBS APIs are once again operating normally. We are continuing to recover impacted instances and volumes.”
Full black and white, yes.

My original reason was that I'm not at all good at working with color, and especially not creating colored sprites. By sticking with black and white I could easily draw images with my tablet and modify them pixel by pixel to look sharp. I eventually came to like the look, so I suppose it's also stylistic.

It wasn't intentionally done for any sort of performance reason, but oddly enough, it kind of ended up that way in the end. If I'd gone with full color sprites, there's no way I would've fit within the 10 MB constraints of the Chrome store. Images with one black and one white compress much better than images with dozens or hundreds of colors.
As far as I can see Reddit is still down.
The API and Console timeouts are likely due to high load from everyone logging in to see what's going on.
This is affecting more than a single Availability Zone, but probably for reasons that have been seen before. One reason might be that an EBS failure in one AZ triggers a spike in EBS activity in other AZs which overwhelms EBS. (I believe this is what happened in April 2011).

Does anybody have any experience with migrating to Oregon or N. California in terms of speed and latency?
Neat! Please release a simple playable demo. The video is enough to intrigue me, but not enough to get me to buy. (I just bought Osmos for my Android tablet, and it was the playable demo that pushed me over the line.)
>legal technicalities be damned.

I think the moment anyone says this, I'm well within the realm of normality to question that person's judgement making abilities.

I happen to agree with you, but to simply ignore the fact that you need to break the law to make the value equation work in your favour is pretty much, well, idiotic.
Tesla are the Apple of cars. Elon Musk is the new Steve Jobs. The other car companies will have non-tech retards as ceo's and will always be playing catch-up. Tesla only has to fear techie's like google or apple itself entering the space.
As https://twitter.com/DEVOPS_BORAT says, At conference you can able tell cloud devops by they are always leave dinner for respond to pager.

Also, What is happen in cloud is stay in cloud because nobody can able reproduce outside of cloud.

(And many other relevant quotes.)
Thanks! Do you see node being widely used as much as RoR these days in few years?
Looking forward to installing it and trying it out with Torquebox ( http://torquebox.org/ ) for a new project.
Relax. This is no Surface. You can create another account or flip the developer switch and install your own OS on it. It should run Ubuntu (for ARM) just fine.
JRuby is really great. I use it every day for both work and personal projects.

Big thanks to all the contributors!
Can't update my list fast enough, but other major services experiencing problems are Netflix and Pinterest. Lots of other (smaller) sites are starting to fail too.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyclay/2012/10/22/amazon-aws-...
Store each number as a delta from a previous one, first number as a delta from 0. Each number starts with a code describing its length: 0 (duplicate), 7, 9 or 27 bits. For storing a code use values '1', '01', '001' and '0001'. Calculate statistics for different code types and when space is tight replace most common codes with shortest ones.
The reviewer claim it's not much slower than IE on an average Windows machine. Seems reasonable to me.
Awesome problem to solve (been looking for something similar without having to use three different tools), but there's no tutorial on how to use this or what it can do. Does it assume I've already assigned the glyphs in another piece of software or will it let me assign to characters if it can't tell?

It'd also be nice if there was a live specimen preview so I could adjust the ascent/descent visually. Also wish the weight was a drop-down that showed 100-900 and where the typical weights fall in e.g. 100 (Hairline)/ 400 (Regular) / 900 (Black).

Obviously you guys just built this thing two weekends ago, so those are just my two cents :)
Opposite end of JMS would be pretty good still. AMQP/1-0 throws away the broker model which is well defined in JMS (Queues & Topics).
Maybe I am abnormally ignorant about recent history, but could you expand on this statement?
Because they sell more power back into the grid than they use up.

That doesn't make sense. The breakeven point for a solar panel is around 10 years (assuming you're using it solely for your own power generation purposes, that is how long it takes for the panel to "pay for itself" in offset electricity costs).

The charging stations are there to charge vehicles. To keep them breakeven on power (forget about land/rent/taxes/maintenance) they would need a field of solar panels.

Hardly seems like a logical approach.

My guess is more that they will sell "upgrades" to the vehicles, they mentioned the large touchscreen and upgradability in the article. Perhaps certain future software enhancements will be paid, in order to generate some residual revenues.
Linux requires more resources, but if it's a small board you want to roll Linux checkout the Raspberry Pi!

http://www.raspberrypi.org/
Italy is an absolutely corrupt shit hole. I remember a scene where they showed recordings of civil protection officials gloating about the disaster on the phone, right after it happened. They talked about the opportunity to make money

Just as another data point, lots of countries have corrupt and self-centred politicians. A spin doctor the UK government, on September 11th 2001, between when the towers were hit and when the fell, wrote an email to their staff saying "It's now a very good day to get out anything we want to bury. Councillors' expenses?" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jo_Moore ). You'll always get slimey politicians who will see oppertunity in tragedy.
Yup. Most - on my camera, some - on the phone.
33 ways to use SMS/MMS APIs
Very nice - I've been following Mixpanel closely for a few months and like what they have done so far. While mobile analytics, customer engagement and retention calculation is very hot nowadays, technology is in its infancy (as opposed to web analytics).

FYI - Countly (http://count.ly) is a real-time mobile analytics platform which is open source, which makes it possible to install it on your servers. It can track events (eg ARPU, revenues, levels passed etc), together with any data that can be collected from iOS & Android devices.

I'm pretty sure we have many things to learn from each other, and come up with a standard definition of how to track mobile devices and a consistent terminology - which is something lacking. There are also unsolved issues like how to import and export data, to migrate from one provider to another.

Wish you best of luck! :)
Me too. Though the big sites, like The Pirate Bay, have a lot of eBooks.
I'll do that. I'll try to have it done in a couple of hours.
HA! Point taken. Glad you think it’s useful nonetheless. ;)
Then why not publish your API specs and data formats under an open copyright license?

You don't necessarily have to submit them to a standards body like ECMA or IMS. You can just publish them under an open license that is free to use by everyone involved.

You'd still be able to provide your service and charge for it accordingly.

Pearson already offers an open-standards based integration solutions. Yes, it's convoluted and difficult to implement. But it's out there and it's used by almost all of the real SIS providers. The idea that FTP and CSV are the only options available to schools is false. See http://sifinfo.org for an example.

All you are doing is changing which fox is in the hen house. It's a good game, business-wise, but is it really the right move for the K-12 providers and their customers?
This looks awesome. Congrats.
previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2585962
http://www.betterworldbooks.com/
Used and new books. Free Shipping Worldwide.

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Minimak: The benefit of Dvorak without losing your investment in QWERTY
There have only been about 17 posts today about Amazon EC2's East datacenters being down
Heh, the cynical side of me would like to point out that this is a great way to get people to stop talking about wiping a user's kindle. :-)
The advantage is it runs on linux so you can get it right next to your redis or whatever else.

I really hope 3.0 addresses missing SqlDbTypes like Date, Structured etc.
I gave up on Amazon (and ate the reserved instance fees) 2+ years ago over this. I was paying through the nose for multi-AZ RDS and when EBS failed in one zone, nothing failed over.