skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As an AWS user since 2009, I can only imagine the tremendous difficulties of running such a service but given the stability of my long-running instances in US West vs East, I really do sometimes wonder if Mr Bean is on staff in Virginia.
The superchargers are free for the Model S, which implies that they may not be free for future models.
Skynet is coming online.
He explained this in a later article: http://blog.ubuntu-tweak.com/2012/10/22/thank-you-ubuntu-twe...
He feels like Ubuntu tweak is getting too high maintenance and that he just needs to step away from it for a little while, to work out a balance with his job and life and such.
> they are sharing a digital copy of your book as a data-file, which is very quite different from a real book. You cant hold it you see, you cant smell it, you cant borrow it to your friend, only make another copy.

You can read it, yes?

I'm among the first to complain when people conflate "make a digital copy of" and "steal". However, you're going to the opposite extreme - pretending that because it's digital, it has none of the qualities of the original book. You're omitting quite a bit - he (and perhaps his editor) wrote every word in it, chose every image, researched the technology, and typeset the whole thing. Just because it ended up as both a PDF and a printed copy does not diminish the author's labor.

(It certainly diminishes the printer's labor, which is why we raise a stink when printed copies are cheaper than electronic ones.)

But you're hurting the entire ecosystem if you tell authors "stop writing if you don't like it". There's a middle ground somewhere.
nice design! i hope the amazon affiliate revenue will pay the .ly domain :P
It's degraded performance for some EBS volumes in a single availability zone - isn't this title a bit sensationalistic?
linked images also work with the xlink namespace:

<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink class="tributary_svg"><rect width="200" height="200" x="100" y="100" fill="#1A9224"></rect><image width="200" height="200" xlink:href="https://twimg0-a.akamaihd.net/profile_images/2560186719/7f57... x="325" y="100"></image></svg>

d3 code to generate this
http://enjalot.com/tributary/3747523/
"11:03 AM PDT We are currently experiencing connectivity issues and degraded performance for a small number of RDS DB Instances in a single Availability Zone in the US-EAST-1 Region."

Given that my sites are deployed using Multi-AZ RDS instances and yet they're still down, this takes the cake a little.
That Virginia datacenter has the worst reputation among my peers for any Northeast US datacenter. I highly recommend moving.
Per the linked dashboard, some instances in a single AZ in a single Region are having storage issues. Calling EC2 "down" is a bit dramatic, provided AMZN are being sincere with their status reports. Any system that can competently fail over to another AZ will be unaffected.
> then you choose to use your money to pay for expensive treatments for you or your children?

That's fine in any country with universal healthcare.

> What if spending a bunch more money buys you a great deal more than a couple of years?

It's possible, of course, but generally you'll have the best health outcomes with decent (cheap!) preventative health measures. The current insurance-based care system in the US doesn't gain anything from preventative care. Universal healthcare systems have a strong incentive to take this cheap route to a healthy population, fortunately.

> What if the discoveries made at your great expense helps others who aren't so rich?

Um; you can be proud of that, then? Of course, you can be a rich person who pays for treatments to be developed which you can then deny to poor people; that's called "the pharma industry".

> Ah, the smell of boiling frogs!

That's a myth; look it up. The frogs jump out when it gets uncomfortable. The same thing applies to most slippery slope arguments -- you have to prove each step would force the next. Most systems actually have forces pushing as well in the opposite direction.

Personally, I see how getting reasonable universal healthcare working in the US will be a difficult course, but I'm also convinced we have to fight our way through the problems (mainly: the corporations currently earning enormous profits from the current system...) and get it working. I grew up in the US, sometimes without medical insurance; I've also spent much of my life with a sometimes-expensive "preexisting condition".

Obviously, it's not "fair" if I'm bankrupted simply because I had the bad luck to have this condition -- hey, not everything in life is fair -- but I'm pretty sure that on balance, I'd be a more profitable economic unit/taxpayer to the US if I simply didn't have to worry about that.

How many people don't launch startups because they can't risk it?
Religious quotes are to be expected, since quoting a book is a huge part of Western religion.

There's religious fiction too. Though perhaps a tagging system would help you filter out what you don't want to see.
Basecamp Delivered
If amazon is not selling me a electronic copy of the book it should be illegal for them to call the button doing this transaction "buy".
Or build your application with the characteristics of the underlying platform in mind. Nobody would run a DB server on a single spindle drive since occasionally they fail. Accordingly, nobody should deploy non-multi-az AWS applications because occasionally they fail.
I'm super excited for a course I am enrolled in that starts today and cant log in. Lame.
The data included in that table is totally wrong. Chrome supports most of the filter primitives defined in SVG spec, IE9 supports none of them, Firefox supports vast majority but with serious performance issues.

The real blocker for SVG is the lack of good authoring tools. Illustrator (used by the author of this article) apparently generates SVG files by rasterising many vector effects.

I suspect that there is a bug in WebKit that breaks bitmap rendering in certain circumstances, this would explain why some Illustrator-generated effects failed on Chrome.
I've toyed with the idea of a social quote site or some basic paid software to create pretty quotes, and I love that you've included a Pinterest button. I think it would work better, if you were able to generate an image that could be pinned on Pinterest instead, though.

The image doesn't have to be shown; the bookmarklet/share button could probably detect a `display: hidden` image instead. Although that would add to the bandwidth footprint.
But Chile was not a communist country.

The dream of a "mechanical centralized control" was shared by a lot of people in the XX century. It's strongly featured in positivistic SciFi literature of the time, for example I, Robot from Asimov.
I have similar dreams but then a battery powered emacs machine. As a homebrew Raspberry Pi powered device will probably needs more power then a hacked phone running linux I'll opt for the latter. If only such a phone had a vizplex e-ink display! There is a PocketBook which supports a bluetooth keyboard, also a nice option.
This might be impractical but I'd love to see standardization across different car companies so all the different electric cars from different auto manufacturers can share the same / similar charging facilities.

Sort of like if I have a smart phone and I go to a friend's house it would be nice to be able to charge my phone on their charger. Phone chargers are cheap. Car chargers are not so much.
Ancestry.com Acquired for $1.6 Billion
Not even able to ssh to aws instance. AWS console shows normal. Are others able to ssh?
The "Step 0" and "Step 5" tutorial examples are visually glitched in Opera. The card appears to show no information, but a look with Opera's development tools shows that .card-back seems to be visible, while .card-front isn't. They remain hidden regardless of any selection of projects I do. The rest of the examples in the tutorial are working great, though.
IMHO that is a sev0 problem.
BOTH would seem to be an optimal outcome for us and the other lifeforms on this planet.
First a disclaimer: I think this is outrageous and hope that her account is restored.

Now my questions:

Does her account use her home address? That seems unlikely as she is in Norway but is dealing with Amazon US. What are the rules for purchasing content when you're not resident? Could this be the problem? If so that sucks.

Secondly, it appears that she began her Kindle odyssey with a used Kindle. Could that be what links her account to a fraudulent one? A unique ID from one of her devices has been used by someone else in the past?
Close enough: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scopes_Trial
Icenium - iOS and Android development in the cloud
If you would be devastated, why are you relying on something you cannot backup? That's not rational.
And this is why my new venture will be going pinboard.in's route and hosting everything on our own machines. More work for me but vastly cheaper and hopefully a lot more reliable.
Car manufacturers can certainly setup mall stores to advertise their cars, but the customer will still need to buy through a dealer.
No. Amazon just understates the issues. Reddit, Heroku etc. all have problems.
On a related note, seatgeek's main site seems to be having problems getting ticket prices currently
nope no luck SSHing
Yes they will usually extend it, like they did with the Godaddy outage.
was down, somehow they recover pretty quickly
It's number 2. He's hoping to take a break for a bit and then maybe come back at a bit slower pace. http://blog.ubuntu-tweak.com/2012/10/22/thank-you-ubuntu-twe...
AWS downtime strikes again!

<3 Rackspace
Except if you want to, you know, ship.
calling a hackathon a 'hack' is confusing, the generally agreed upon definition of 'hack' is the one in the jargon file
Just don't use EBS. Most everything else is pretty stable.
The lesson is: don't build a system that requires or advertizes high avilability but that runs in a single datacenter. Load balance. Elect leaders. Batch, queue, and distribute. Fail-over. Fail fast. So long as we have earthquakes, lightning, human malice, and human error, single AZs will fail.
We're having problems in multiple AZs. In particular, we're unable to connect to our load balancers and multi-AZ RDS.
I have sympathy for the lady (and others) who lost their Kindle books.

However, I am going to take the opposition view here because I feel like people don't understand 'the beast' also known as Amazon.

Amazon optimizes on low margins, and cheap prices for goods (both physical and electronic). Amazon optimizes on the benefit to the mass majority of their customers at the expense of a small minority who do occasionally get "thrown under the bus."

I buy lots of Kindle books, but there are a few things I do to mitigate risk. First, for technical books I try to buy from publishers who have daily 30% to 50% off sales where I get PDF, a MOBI (Kindle format), and a iPub files. Secondly, I buy a physical book if I think that a book will have long term value (for example, I would read it several times during a financial meltdown when electricity is scarce, and we spend most of our time grubbing around for food - this has happened in Argentina, Russia, Iraq, etc., and it may well happen sometime in the USA). Thirdly, I buy "good deals" on the Kindle; for example, I am reading James Joyce's "Ulysses" right now and I only paid about $2 for it - a great bargain.
Maybe that's b/c 80% of all websites on Earth are having problems right now?

(Exaggerating, but you get the point...)
The last point can't be overstated.
Optimization is highly likely to overfit the training data.

For example, given training data
000001
000002
000003
000004

The "optimized" version would be \d+[1-4]

If the goal was simply to find the smallest regex that matches all the training data, that's trivial to code, NP-hard to execute.

But the goal isn't to find the smallest regexp, it's to find a "good" regexp.
This has been noted almost every time AWS has outages, and yet it still amazes me that they keep formulating it as if "you might get slow response time, but everything works".

While it is not solely AWS' fault (cloud !== no need to do proper engineering) reddit etc. is down, I do have my doubts that "degraded performance" makes all of the ec2 instances reddit runs on go haywire and shuts down the entire website, leaving a static "come back later" html page.
I now regret using EBS boot.
It's also interesting how similar this is to the previous round, a century ago: the first-sale doctrine arose precisely to put an end to shenanigans publishers were trying to pull where they claimed they were only "licensing" a copy of the text to the person who purchased the dead tree. It reasserted the property rights of the purchaser, which companies now are trying to erode with the same "just licensing" shenanigans.
Are the chargers really that smart? Do they communicate with the car and know the make/modle/year etc?

Which brings up something else. Could a company potentially build a step-down converter to use to charge my Leaf for free? I'm not really sure how much hardware it takes to step down voltage that significantly.
I am really infuriated by this. It's high time one of us build's Kindle's competition. DRM "must" not be handled by the store. If DRM has to exist, it should be the prerogative of the author not the store owner. What the hell man!!
I've seen a feature phone do this as well, when "powered off" in charging-only mode.
The whole approach seems very much alike to Apple Retail stores strategy. High foot traffic locations, product specialists working not on commission, a lot of service centres - Tesla "Genius" bars. Applying proven working strategy in a different industry is a very smart move from Tesla. I see no reason why it wouldn't work.
Isn't Microsoft pushing Metro as the primary environment and the desktop as a legacy environment?
Color me ignorant(no really, I am), but really- cheaper? I thought part of why you used AWS was because short of the biggest properties, running your own servers was more expensive?
Scientists guilty of manslaughter for failing to predict severity of earthquake
Thats easier said than done.
While I agree with the word similarities, and that it will surely be "translated" or used in Spanish with the alternate sounding words, I disagree that it's necessarily bad. It may in fact turn out to be an advantage, especially within a bit-torrent using group of people. Funny translations will give it mind-share… at least initially. Surely not in the business world, but by using torrents, that was already a given, IMO.
Been getting crap loads of alerts stemming from their North Virginia data centre. Got 9 of these yesterday ...

"You are receiving this email because your Amazon CloudWatch Alarm "awsec2-WM-Live1-i-8747ece1-High-CPU-Utilization" in the US - N. Virginia region has entered the ALARM state, because "Threshold Crossed: 1 datapoint (93.13) was greater than or equal to the threshold (85.0)." at ."

Maybe their data centre was over run by mutants ?
Looks like multi AZ setups are also failing :( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4684491
There's a standard in North America: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAE_J1772
I understand the fear expressed here by a number of people that this might happen to them, but honestly? I think the answer here is pretty mundane and deserves a bit of perspective.

Some low level intern screwed up somewhere. While that hardly excuses Amazon for their exceptionally horrendous CS in this case (usually they're know for being good on that front), ask yourself:

* How many customers does Amazon have?
* How many instances of this have ever happened?
* How likely is it to happen again?

The answers there are "a hell of a lot" (>100M), not many, and not very.

One cockup with one customer hasn't shaken my faith in Amazon's ecosystem. They're going to have to try a lot harder in order to achieve that goal.

Look at another platform like Steam. I'd say they have even more issues because they'll actually dismiss people from the service for things like card chargebacks or restrict multiplayer account-wide in case of cheating. They've had errors too. They're rare and statistically insignificant, just like in this case.

And for the love of god if you're going to downvote me, please at least bother to explain why so we can all learn something.
While it's more frustrating to have no control over the reliability, I suspect that most companies could not achieve the level of reliability from AWS by self-hosting, at anywhere close to the cost (inc. stafftime). Nothing is 100%, and getting as close to 100% as you can gets exponentially more expensive the closer you get.

Of course, this could change if AWS's reliability trends downward. But it's never going to be 100%, and neither is anything you do yourself.
Even then, there seems to be issues with ELB currently.
We're paying 2x for the RDS multi-AZ setup that is supposed to failover in these cases. So far no luck. Think I'll ask for a refund.
Thank you! Would be happy to post more details about how it works if that post isn't clear enough. The source should be readable enough, but it's a bit messy (I'll blame it on the hackathon time constraint).
Actually, the last point can be overstated, because the optimizations he applied created a functionally equivalent state machine to the non-optimized version. If it overfitted, the original GA-generated algorithm overfitted as well.
Women in general take less risk than men. Women in programming/hacking are far less compared to men. Women who are married/with children find it hard to get themselves around startup scene.
I do not have any source to back all that, just my personal view. I see things are changing and see more women in hackathons, programming meetups etc. But it will take at least a decade to bring balance.
I wonder if US East just has a LOT more customers.
I'm understating the benefits because I highly doubt the average person is reading anywhere close to what you are reading. Personally, I'm not exactly sure where you are finding the time to read this much, but I digress.

A vast majority of people read one book at a time. Two max. Given this, the idea that there is a massive benefit in portability is completely overstated - few people (outside of students) were carrying ten pounds of books around with them to support their reading habits.

This same line of thinking holds true with purchasing. There is most certainly a convenience in not having to visit a store (or even order online), but most people read at a pace that is fully supportive of being able to find their next read in the traditional manner.

That being said, I recognize these are both advantages. What I'm saying though is that there are very few people where this "advantage" makes any form of economic sense. Assuming your usage, this advantage is costing you $200-$500 a year. And your purchase isn't one of ownership.

The argument for e-books right now is like leasing a car for $50 more a month than you can buy it for. Sure there are advantages to leasing, but logically, they don't come close to outweighing the costs.
That would be because they hired George Blankenship, who previously created Apple's retail strategy: http://www.teslamotors.com/about/executive-bios#blankenship
My site is currently down because of this.
Did you try their status page? https://status.heroku.com/
Nope, cannot ssh into affected instances.
I have yet to see a typical user use keyboard shortcuts. My mother, for example, will still use the mouse to click File then Quit/Exit when she wants to close a program.

Your testimony tells me that Win8 may see better adoption amongst windows programmers than windows users.
I definitely see the appeal here. Do you have any plans to give schools an on-site solution, rather than use your servers? Do you do this? Your site is rather light on details.
Either I missed it, or am a little dim this monday morning but it took me reading the whole landing page to actually figure out what it did. A "torrent gofer".

I am confused at the value though except for the remote control aspect. I can torrent at speeds that saturate my ISP or I can download from put.io and saturate my channel, either way it amounts to the same time. And I have to pay for the intermediate storage? The one benefit I see is when a torrent is slow and the person wanting the file doesn't have a computer available to cover the download period, put.io act as a store and forward server. Possibly if the client->put.io is https then this solves a problem whereby ISP's track the port usage. I suppose torrent->https is an advantage for some.
You can't remember the names of <10 people that you count as your best friends and are already connected to on Facebook?
Amazon is downplaying the problem. It is affecting many large sites.
Note to all the postgres users cursing EBS right now: you can persist your db instances to s3 with https://github.com/heroku/WAL-E, which, combined with streaming replication and some redundancy, should let you run off ephemeral disk.
About 33 minutes after they first acknowledged the problem, they've changed one of those indicators to as goldenrod-yellow color. Presumably this indicates that the world is on fire and the sky has gone black with carrion crows:

> 11:11 AM PDT -- We can confirm degraded performance for a small number of EBS volumes in a single Availability Zone in the US-EAST-1 Region. Instances using affected EBS volumes will also experience degraded performance.
Now is a good time to stroke your dev pair :)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4680178
There have been multiple tweets mirroring the status page: http://twitter.com/herokustatus
Even if they do understate the issue, It's limited to US-EAST 1, and is an EBS issue. Saying that EC2 is "down" because of this is totally off the mark - I've got dozens of EBS volmes in EAST 1 that are unaffected, plus all of the other zones that are operating normally...
From what I'm seeing, if your root disk is on EBS and your SSH keys are there, you cannot SSH into those hosts right now.

Also, the availability zones are disparate in terms of what they can support. A great number of my instances are in 1d because of unavailability in others.
I like to pace myself.
At least Netflix is still up.
Twitter used to have a link on every public/open profile to an RSS feed of tweets. They removed the link about a year or two back. Worse yet, about a week or two ago, the feeds went dead. This used to be the feed for DEVOPS_BORAT:

https://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/167499429.rss

Those links have since gone dark. An alternative format still (sorta) works:

https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_...

Per twitter devs, though, all RSS feeds are going away some time very soon. They want you reading all your tweets under their control, not in your feed reader.
That's fair, more or less. My argument is that it's very difficult to predict how you'll act when you're "in pain, short on sleep, and flooded with anxiety and emotion." Even if you've thought a lot about what you intend to do in advance.
The world's first smartphone for blind and visually impaired people [video]
I jokingly said the internet was broken this morning as I've been having weird connectivity issues all morning. Funny that I was sort of right.
EC2 is not down. My EC2 sites are all functioning.
The only way AWS is theoretically cheaper (and even then I find the argument a bit of a stretch) is if you factor in "sysadmin costs". The argument goes that setting up and monitoring your own servers (especially if you go colo rather than renting) is more costly in terms of labour than point and clicking it with AWS.

If you strip the labour cost out of the equation, hosting it yourself can be up to an order of magnitude cheaper. Of course stripping the labour cost out is only possible if you can do it yourself :)

In my case, I can (as could maciej of pinboard.in fame).

Edit: also helps if you can find a well priced data centre or two. For me, I'm planning on going with hetzner.de and ovh.net