skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ah, that sucks. Sorry about that. We haven't run into this.

This may be due to your PDF export settings or the library we're using to render the PDFs.

We'll look into it.
The Internet is experiencing severe outages across North American and Asia
Scott Hanselman interviews Paul Lutus.
I would love it so much to see people at google showing all the internal tools they're using to detect and solve this kind of issues. I can only imagine a war room with screens all over the place showing gigantic amount of red flashing lines :)
Hope it doesn't last for long though, i was just praising what a good choice app engine has been so far 10 minutes ago...
Downtimes happen regardless, unless you have a lot of money and talent to spend on your own infrastructure and even then it's hard to beat cloud providers like Amazon, or Google, who have more resources and knowledge than you do.

The greatest thing about cloud-hosting is that you can just sit by and let them fix it. It usually takes about half an hour, or a couple of hours if the outage is severe, but usually less than the time it takes for an update of DNS records (unless you've got some proxy in front of your IPs, which would be another point of failure).

And then, even with these severe outages, the overall monthly uptime is still better than %99.9 and it's really hard to beat that, so just relax and let them fix it.
I still get those the wrong way around [text url] often enough. I only mess up MarkDown slightly less often because I write more of it.

The "() is more common than [] in regular text, so it makes parsing-sense to start a special markup code with []" is going to help me with that, though. That particular mnemonic only works for coders, though :)

Also, doesn't MediaWiki syntax sometimes also have a pipe | between the url and the text in a link? Or is that only for internal links?
It's nice to see Tommy Flowers name on the list. It's a shame that his contribution always seems to be overlooked.
Ask HN: Best affordable hosted blog service?
Right now I'm using Tumblr as a personal blog, but their outage has finally inspired me to move to a paid service that's more suitable to long-form blogging. I know I could set up my own server, but I'd rather pay a small amount for a service I don't have to think about.

Does anyone have any suggestions for a relatively cheap service that I can plug into a subdomain? For those using CloudFlare- would you recommend it as method of reducing bandwidth usage?
It's probably the Ace Editor. Not really built for mobile phones.
It's a bit nuts that they're hosting the status pages on the same infrastructure.
> "App Engine is currently experiencing serving issues. The team is actively working on restoring the service to full strength. Please follow this thread for updates."

-- Max Ross (Google) maxr@google.com via googlegroups.com

https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/google-a...
I think this is larger than just GAE.

http://internettrafficreport.com/namerica.htm

It seems like large portions of the internet are down.
I'd say the answer depends on how fast GAE recovers. If you're building redundancy over multiple clouds, if there's a lot of data:

1) It's very complex and expensive
2) You're looking at DNS to hot failover, in most cases.

If GAE can recover in less than 30 minutes and sticks to, say, one outage a year, you just can't justify the kind of cost you're looking at with 2 (seriously, it's a lot of cash).
One option would be not to support Javascript (OK in certain parts of the world)

Where?

So, if you have a narrow function that the gadget is going to be used for, you're better of going full custom than programmable function.

How much inefficiency per unit in building small batches of a custom chip, as opposed to many units of a single design, would it take to overcome whatever gains you got when running the device?
With all due respect I think there's quite a few names on the list that should be way ahead in the queue.
Every time my kids tell me something they've learned online, there ensues a conversation about how everything posted online must be true because it is posted online.

What I haven't done well enough is teach them where to go to determine if something is true. Thanks for helping me realize that so I can do something about it.
My Google contact said that 'SRE are all over it. Hope to have more details soon.' but that was about 30 minutes ago.

Does tumblr.com use app engine? They're down...
Yes, Tumblr is experiencing difficulties and AFAIK they don't run anything on App Engine.
It's the very least we could do after having persecuted him whilst being alive even though he contributed so much. The apology he got years later always seemed a little feeble to me.
Top Things You Should Know with Windows 8
The argument isn't "If it isn't broke, don't fix it". It's that not all change is necessary (or even good). If something is clearly broken, by all means fix it. If it's not, then things get more complicated. Maybe a change is still in order (but maybe it's broken in a non-obvious way, like the Razr in a smart-phone world). The idea that change is always good and always a sign of progress is absolutely false.
In my professional life/time (I'm a teacher) I like to make time to think about how to present topics to students, and how to respond to their responses.

To do that, I have to manage the crap (management inspired paperwork that does not actually impact on teaching/learning/reflecting) and routine but very important tasks like marking work. I use a Pomodoro timer (actually a cheap one I got locally) to stay focussed on the mechanical things. I do actually record the number of pomodoros I spend on crap, and I feed that back when things get out of hand.

Students who don't like Maths much also find a kitchen timer helps them to focus, so I break homework up into 'pomodoros' of each topic. Strangely, they find the more pomodoros they do, the easier it all gets.

In non-pomodoro time, I do things like reflect on what kind of activity works, make screencasts, quizzes and games, and make new ways of linking topics (e.g. areas and perimeters of rectangles and simple factors and multiples).

Outside of work I too like taking things slowly! The turn of the year always makes me think about time passing.
Love it. Great use of websockets to create a simple solution to a common problem.
Thank you, that's a good answer.
I definitely think there are times when you have to call things out in public. Your scenario is a perfect example of that. My general point is that I think we can be too quick to do it.
I'm seeing a bunch of Google properties also. Maybe they are running on app engine? Like https://developers.google.com/
Now those are some interesting graphs.
Jim Zemlin: Welcome Windows 8 to a Post-Desktop World
Several commenters and the OP, seem to think that this Kickstarter will fail. Having backed quite few Kickstarter campaigns, and watched a lot more, this seems unlikely.

Backing is concentrated very heavily in the first three days and the last three. Projects that have reached 80% of their funding goal by the last three days are extremely likely to succeed.

It seems that many people delay backing till the last minute. Possibly this is just human nature, though the Kickstarter process also means that as the project progresses more information is released in a steady stream, and often new funding levels are created.

Additionally backers who really want the project to succeed raise their pledges to help the project succeed.
Surely hosting yourself exposes you to just as much, if not more risk? Problem in the datacentre where you're co-lo'd, or one of your servers blows up?

I think people not trusting the cloud is similar to how people feel safer driving their cars then taking a plane. The stats say the plane's safer, but people prefer being in control. People like the idea of being in control of their servers, even if that means there's hundreds of extra things that can go wrong compared to a cloud provider.

We also get a lot more publicity when a cloud provider has an outage as LOTS of sites go down at once. Hardly anyone notices when service X who self-host go down for a few hours...
At some point in the next 24 hours, the backers who signed up for one unit will need to ask themselves if they would rather have two units or zero.

I can't speak for the other 1800 people in my bin, but I just decided on two.
For an even larger percentage of the population, "tissue = kleenex."

That doesn't mean anything except that they made a damn good product and had A TON of marketing.
Check out:

GearHost (10$/month cloud hosting)
Softsys Hosting (great Windows VPS for 15$/month)
AppFog
ASmallOrange
I don't think you move to the cloud for cost savings. More like time and headache savings.
Sharing and mobile sites
Howto: Build your Metro app for ARM & x64
That 24-bit DAC does nothing for you after the sound turns analog between the DAC and the speakers/amplifier. That's why I said the second step may not lose you bit depth if your DAC is floating point or as you say 24bit, but on the third step you will lose something.
Only $99 for the first reward that actually will come with a board to play with. Sounds good to me! I've added $119 (international shipping!) to the total, hope they make it...
My first impulse on reading the parent comment was an urge to note the difference in propagation speed between the inflammatory political cartoon and the manipulative tweet. On reflection, I think the impact of this delta is more than balanced by the resources a critical observer can bring to bear in the context of the process as it exists today. That being said, the political process in the US seems designed to marginalize critical thinkers trying to arrive at sound public policy, leaving the field to those forwarding and protecting private agendas. The national conversation, such as it is, is driven by those parties most adept at injecting noise into public communication channels.

<edited for clarity>
So when the next new web tech comes out you just obsoleted the chip and have to throw them all out. When a new image format arrives or video codec or version of HTML all those chips are trash. Yeah that's green.
I've done my master thesis on GPGPU, so maybe I can help out a bit. I'm not yet too familiar with Epiphany's design however. From what I could grasp what sets them apart the most is a different memory architecture compared to multicore CPUs, where the individual cores seem to be optimized for accessing adjacent memory locations as well as the locations of the direct neighbors. This is one point where the architecture seems to be similar to GPUs, although GPUs have a very different memory architecture again - for the programmer it might look similar however, especially when using OpenCL.

The main point where Epiphany is diverging from GPUs is that the individual cores are complete RISC environments. This could mainly be a big plus when it comes to branching and subprocedure calls (although NVIDIA is catching up on the later point with Kepler 2). On GPUs the kernel subprocedures currently all need to be inlined and branches mean that the cores that aren't executing the current branch are just sleeping - Epiphany cores seem to be more independent in that regard. I still expect an efficient programming model to be along the same lines as CUDA/OpenCL for epiphany however - which is a good thing btw., this model has been very successful in the high performance community and it's actually quite easy to understand - much easier than cache optimizing for CPU for example.

If we compare epiphany to CPU what's mainly missing is the CPU's cache architecture, hyperthreading, long pipelines per core, SSE on each core, possibly out-of-order and intricate branch prediction (not sure on those last ones). The missing caches might be a bit of a problem. The memory bandwidth they specify seems pretty good to me, but from personal experience I'd add another 20-30% to the achievable bandwidth if you have a good cache (which GPU has since Fermi for example). The other simplifications I actually like a lot - to me it makes much more sense to have a massive parallel system where you can just specify everything as scalar instead of doing all the SSE and hyperthreading hoops like on CPUs - optimizing for CPU is quite a pain compared to those new models.
"App Engine is currently experiencing serving issues. The team is actively working on restoring the service to full strength."
@tumblr (https://twitter.com/tumblr/status/261840787350896640)

Tumblr is experiencing network problems following an issue with one of our uplink providers. We will return to full service shortly.
For China Inc., the efficiency is fine, but accountability is not that ideal. Consider the cases in which the companies buy their auditors.
Service outages happen to everyone. Thats why everyone advertises 99.99% uptime four nines or five nines. No one can achieve 100%. The good thing about the cloud is you can say, this one isn't my fault.
I think the award in that category goes to NSIncrementalStore :) I could often guess what I had to do in an overridden method...but in some places, I am still scratching my head.
Yes, but they're not doing it to optimize power consumption fro web browsing. Web browsing consists of a typically very short burst of work (parsing and rendering) followed by long periods of idleness while the user actually looks at stuff.

CPUs power consumption is important when you're using it constantly, but most web browsing doesn't do that.
While I am happy to see another post for this on the front page, I would have preferred a positive post. People jump on bandwagons I would rather we started a positive bandwagon rather then one looking to find the shovels and a decent grave for a awesome project
I think there is an interesting debate to be had here. When your site goes down at the same time as Tumblr/Reddit/one of the big guys, the damage might not actually be that high. In the minds of many, "the internet" is probably quite broken.
Today's microprocessors use a billion gates and have to be produced on 22nm advanced processes to fit. The energy spent in producing each chip is pretty high. In the fixed function case, the gate count is a lot lower so you can use an older and cheaper and hence greener process. On average, people use their PCs for 2 years before replacing them. If a fixed function chip had to replaced say every year to update it with newer technology, it would be in the same ballpark. The change that you have to make is instead of promising your customer a gadget that is infinitely programmable through software apps, you have to ask them to decide what they want up front and stick with that decision for one year. This is a paradigm change from the user's viewpoint.

Economies of scale are orthogonal to how you decide to implement the function.
Well this sounds like a good example of social engineering. Someone was really interested on his data an he just send it to them for free :/ I mean "Policy - Police", "It's secret", "we're recording you" are classic social engineering techniques used to put the target in a uncomfortable situation. I used them a few times, too.
They're only selling upgrades for the Pro edition on their website for the time being. So if you already have Windows 7 Pro or Ultimate running in Bootcamp or VMWare, that's where you should be running the upgrade executable.

If you're running Windows 7 Home or Home Premium, or don't already have a copy of Windows 7 at all, then what they're selling on their website isn't for you. You'll need to pick it up from a 3rd-party retailer for now. The fine print does suggest that they'll start selling all editions on their website in February. (Maybe they had some sort of agreement with retailers or OEMs?)

In shopping around, I've seen the System Builder edition from a local big box retailer for as little as $80.
Sometimes projecting an air of grumpiness is the most socially apropos way to keep people away from you when you need to focus intensely on difficult problems. It's one thing if you're talking to another developer or someone who at least has some sense of the focus that programming requires, but if you work with a fair number of non-technical people it's sometimes not enough to give an academic explanation. It's just in some people's nature to always ask a question in person or on the phone rather than email where it can be dealt with asynchronously. I am very friendly when the time is appropriate, but if it's not, and I allow interruption it is bad for everyone. Sometimes I even feel guilty for explaining that I need the vague and complex bug report in an email rather than casually delivered from my door frame. If, when necessary, I can simply repel people without breaking concentration than it's for the greater good.
No. Volume sliders do not use a linear scale. A linear scale is all but useless for volume. Most volume sliders use a logarithmic scale, where 50% basically has no meaning except in relation to the minimum value chosen by the slider.

This is perfectly sensible, since our sense of hearing does not scale linearly from silent to loud. Our ears have a dynamic range of about 120 dB. On a linear scale, the 50% value would correspond to about -6 dB, which is perceptually one 50th of the full audible scale.

A sensible volume slider (on a PC) would range about 40-60 dB, since anything below -60 dB will be lost in background noise anyway. Thus, the 50% mark would be somewhere around -20--30 dB. Thus, this 50% setting would lose roughly 5 bits of information, not one.

Note however that a reduced dynamic range at "half loudness" is usually just fine, since the full dynamic range can only be heard at high volume anyway.

(Also note that the bottom value of volume sliders usually mutes. Analogue equipment sometimes does not do that, which results in very faint signal playing even when turned all the way down.)

That said, the whole argument about losing resolution probably does not make sense anyway since the operating system volume sliders attenuate the sound hardware DAC gain instead of actually decreasing digital gain...
I hope it's not due to DiRT Exercises (SRE Disaster Recovery Test). Looking forward to reading the post-mortem report!
latest updates: https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/google-a...
Grumpiness, at least for me, comes from the frustration of dealing with people who don't understand the ramifications of their change-requests. "Can this app run in offline mode?", "Can you make it run in 128k RAM?", "Your software doesn't work right if I run a butter knife across my motherboard when I start it up!"

What seems like a simple change to them is actually a large change to me, and the pushback/explanation burns through my emotional capital. Without that emotional capital I become grumpy.

I think it is also related to the fact that much of what software developers do is a waste of time. By this I mean that if the app or service was specced correctly the first time (by the end-user or project manager knowing what they wanted) then there wouldn't be so much backtracking or code getting thrown out. All that wasted effort tends to make one question what they're doing with their life and makes them grumpy.
If the current trend rate continues, they should be able to reach their goal. If they could somehow get on the Reddit front page it would easily happen. I think there are many who might be interested if they only knew.

Here is the trend graph:
http://canhekick.it/projects/adapteva/parallella-a-supercomp...
The internet is burning :O Well, seriously what could be a root cause that affects so many nodes?
Argh! I get paid in a couple of days! I was hoping the cash would go into my account before this runs out. Looks like that might not happen now....
Why couldn't you have given us another few days?
Oh well. I bet it'll get funded.
And we all wonder where the hipsters of the internet are getting their "feels" from now...
Huh? It's the name of their site feature. Someone has to call it something so we know what we're talking about... that's the basis of language.
It's funny, i've got the exact opposite reasoning : it's those moments where i can really appreciate the fact that i'm using the cloud :
1/ I don't have to spend the night debugging or replacing broken hardware
2/ It doesn't cost me any time, any additional resource, any support upgrade, any hardware.
3/ No one can blame me or anybody in my team for the fact that it's not working.

I don't feel like i'm lacking control, i feel like somebody else is taking care of that really annoying shit that happens all the time, no matter how well you design your system.
Also,

http://dartlang.org

http://golang.org,

http://code.google.com/codejam/

http://www.chromeexperiments.com/

Gotta give 'em props for dogfooding.
Same. Minor updates and issues pop up with GAE but I've never experienced an outage such as this in my two years of use.

Wonder what's happening.
passpack.com seems to be affected.
Looking at the list of names proposed by the public (http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/banknotes/Documents/about/ban...) there are some people who are still alive.

I hope and expect that the Bank would not consider putting the image of a living person on a note.
It's the example pdf, so it's probably the renderer. I'm using v22.0.1229.94 on 10.8
This isn't about perception or having fun, it's about behaviour having a genuine negative impact on things.

Developers have a tendency to optimise for themselves or for what they perceive as important. Sure curt replies and cutting meetings short may be the right thing to do and often is, but in many instances they're the right thing for the developer rather than for everyone involved.

If these actions result in developers being seen as unapproachable then there are genuine consequences of that - developers will be consulted less (which long term will have a negative impact both on the organisation and on the developer who will ultimately have less influence than they might have), clarifications won't be sought or offered uninvited (which always comes back on developers) and so on.

In of itself any individual action is potentially defensible, but if the overall effect is to deter useful lines of communication within a team, that's going to work out worse for everyone.
And instead of downloading software that wastes energy, I can drive to the store to buy it in hardware. No external costs there!
Apart from HM The Queen?
I tried to introduce my gf to Letterpress last night. Game Center stumped us. It wouldn't send an invite (email? Apple ID?) and we both wound up connected to strangers, which was totally confusing. And it looked like some sort of online gambling interface, which didn't help.
How does the BSD license avoid something like the Oracle lawsuit against Android? From my understanding it wouldn't have made a difference.
Are TED and anti-Great-FireWall movement similar in that they are only shared by a relatively small number of elite youths?
> The court is very specific about what has to be said which is that Apple make it clear that the court ruled that Samsung did not copy the iPad

On the contrary. The court was very specific that this case actually has nothing to do with whether Samsung did or did not copy the iPad, and went to some lengths to explain why not.

"It is not about whether Samsung copied Apple's iPad. Infringement of a registered design does not involve any question of whether there was copying: the issue is simply whether the accused design is too close to the registered design according to the tests laid down in the law. Whether or not Apple could have sued in England and Wales for copying is utterly irrelevant to this case. If they could, they did not." (http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWCA/Civ/2012/1339.html at [3]).

Registered design law is not copyright law. You can infringe a registered design without having ever copied, seen, or even know of the design you're infringing on. Conversely, you can copy a design but alter it enough that it "produce[s] on the informed user a different overall impression" from the original and not infringe.
my one M/S app is up and running.