skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Full disclosure: I work for an AWS competitor.

While none of the specific AWS systemic failures may themselves be foreseeable, it is not true that issues of this nature cannot be anticipated: the architecture of their system (and in particular, their insistence on network storage for local data) allows for cascading failure modes in which single failures blossom to systemic ones. AWS is not the only entity to have made this mistake with respect to network storage in the cloud; I, too, was fooled.[1]

We have learned this lesson the hard way, many times over: local storage should be local, even in a distributed system. So while we cannot predict the specifics of the next EBS failure, we can say with absolute certainty that there will be a next failure -- and that it will be one in which the magnitude of the system failure is far greater than the initial failing component or subsystem. With respect to network storage in the cloud, the only way to win is not to play.

[1] http://joyent.com/blog/network-storage-in-the-cloud-deliciou...
Isnt amazing that at the time you apply to Harvard,Yale and other top schools,admission officials brag at just how many perfect SAT scorers they have turned down,yet a few years down the line turn back and claim to have sifted out the best and the brightest and gladly hint at scores as the measure of brilliance.I even remember reading an article about Harvard adcoms pointing out how they do not want to turn their school into an Ecole Nomale Superieure .Either they lie about inputs or the outputs.They cant have it both ways.
It's Microsoft. Microsoft has never been about innovation or creativity. I'm not one to bash them, it's just important to look back at their history. Their last innovation was the Start menu.
Sure, polling suits a lot of use cases just fine. I'm just wondering about the ones it doesn't satisfy.
I'm pretty stoked on Go. I freaking love C. Love it. It's like they took C and went to the best disciples of C's creators and said "look - we've got these problems now nobody envisioned 40 years ago. Can you make C for us again, but better?" And they said "yes!" and it was good.

We get some nice concurrency primitives, garbage collection, cleaner syntax, something between structs and objects that fits the right feeling, automatic bounds checking, cute array syntax, and a big-ass, well defined standard library. Oh, and this concept of interfaces that is so well executed it's not even funny.

Except. I feel like they are forcing the fanboy mindset. At one point in this slide deck, there is the following bullet: "The designs are nothing like hierarchical, subtype-inherited methods. Much looser, organic, decoupled, independent."

I didn't see the talk. But that is the most vapid, meaningless description I've ever seen of a feature of a programming language. Rob might as well have said, "it's hipster better," which would have conveyed exactly as much meaning.

So here's my question - and I hope there are real answers - can someone point me to >3 real, big systems that are built using Go? I'll accept Google internal systems on faith.
I have been to MSFT stores in San Diego and Seattle. They were like that before Surface. I felt dirty, and a little sad for everyone in the store.
How One Studio Saved Itself From the Downturn
...teachers don't want standardized tests to be used as metrics to determine the quality of their teaching, and they wanted to set the evaluations themselves.

There's a very good reason for good teachers to push back against evaluations based on standardized testing, and that's the fact that they can be assigned bad students to force them out of their jobs. When two equally qualified teachers at the same school teach the same subjects, and one of them plays the administration's political games and the other does not, you may mysteriously find that the second teacher's class sizes are larger, and that they got all the known troublemakers.
It's not about creativity when you're running a store. It's about finding a method that works and tweaking it to fit your product.

The creativity is in the product and advertising.
> It just works. (But it is "boring" because it's not bling anymore.)

The modern perl community could say the same for itself.

But more quietly, and with significantly less genital waving.

I consider this to be a feature.
I think the point is to ride in a limousine across the tarmac and then step directly onto your jet without any hassles. Direct point-to-point travel to any airport is convenient too. The Citation X can fly coast-to-coast in under four hours.
To be fair, in terms of Microsoft pieces from the big Apple bloggers, this comes off more fair than the stuff Gruber and MG write.
Web scanners not keeping up with HTML5, web services
"Does noone have any creativity left anymore?"

That's a good summation of most comments on HN about Windows 8 and the Surface. It's too bad, because it's exactly the same poor level of discourse that happened when OSX came out and ALL developers were on Windows or Linux.

Of course, when Apple finally releases a unified version of OSX and iOS and releases their convertible device, I'm sure it will be perfect.
Unless you want your restaurant to be known as the "best" in town. That requires more than just tweaking.
Thanks! I'm really enjoying the process of learning to program (Ruby) and documenting it.

I'd like to share my articles with the HN crowd, but not sure how they'd respond to noob developer concepts.
Things We Didn't Know A Week Ago
So every other tech retail company that doesn't copy Apple is foolish? If that's the case we're headed towards a bland, uninspiring world.
Storytelling is Javascript
> If they are going to require a privacy policy, why not include it by default when you start a project?

They might include a blank one, but I imagine they tried to aviod including a boiler-plate policy, otherwise you'd probably find 95% of app submissions would just use the template.
Perhaps my reaction was too broad and quick. The technology is amazingly and perhaps there could be interesting applications of it that I failed to consider.
Have you tried a Microsoft Surface? I think he can scoff at the UI since he tried it.
> it wasn’t clear whether there just wasn’t a hidden context menu at that moment or I just screwed up the swipe

This was the hardest thing for me when I was trying out Windows 8. Was never sure the menu didn't exist or my mouse wasn't in the corner properly.
The nature of this attack does require you to be targeting a specific piece of code (probably a library crypto function), however the manual processing would be no different if that code was running on a different service. The issue is that having a key is useless if you do not know what the key is for. You could probably use the same type of attack to get that information, but it would likely involve a great deal more manual labor because the data is not in a standard format. Also, given how cheep it is to run in parrallel with a target VM, it seems like it is more economical to pick a target anyway.

On an unrelated note, isn't the attack described in the paper not a timing attack because it gets the information by reading the cache instead of reading the clock?
Yes, I'm typing on one right now =)

It certainly has some flaws as a first generation product, but on the whole it's a breath of fresh air in the tablet space.
I think the "C++ is different in different environments, making it hard to write portable C++ code" argument is pretty weak. Is C++ annoying across different environments? Hell yeah, but I fail to see how is this any different/worse than production code.
Thought experiment: What would you think a struggling college student would try doing if you told them, "you need to learn how to work"? What about if you said, "you need to learn how to learn"?

At least for me, the "work" priming hurts learning, since I do very inefficient work on something I've just started learning.
Okay, but c'mon its pretty funny for this site to pretend like Amazon did a post-mortem investigation and write up for them.
You don't know Apple if you think they're going to release a convertible device.

Also there were plenty of shopping mall stands selling iPad keyboards months before Surface was announced. Keyboards aren't what makes tablets successful.
The sound card comment was because the salesman was suggesting one advantage being a "PC Guy" was that he could upgrade his sound card. My response, btw, would have been identical to Marco's here.
... food hasn't really changed much in our generation. Only tweaked by ways of cooking it.

I promise you - whatever you ate in the last week has only been tweaked. The creativity came with the people who created the dish long ago.
correlations are aggregate data measures that are only meaningful on large datasets. a high score on the SAT for one person does not imply that that person is smart. it just means that if you had a large population of people and you wanted to predict their intelligence, you could use SAT scores and get pretty good results.
The loyalty of Apple's consumers speaks volume. It's only natural for tech companies to follow their lead. It's about great customers service and that's not limited to Apple.
agreed, Toronto's largest mall (Eaton C) featured the Surface today. It was packed. Everybody was exited and the product looked great.
I could not agree more, and have had zero downtime since the fleet-wide reboot last December from any of 20+ instance-backed VMs in US-East. Joe Stump of SimpleGeo and Sprint.ly and many others have come to the same conclusion.

While we have a couple of RDS instances, nothing is production critical. And this: "the root cause of the Multi-AZ [MySql|Oracle|SqlServer] failures we observed during this event will be addressed" only confirms my observations from the RSS history in the dashboard, that in nearly every major EBS-related "service event" (including the ones that happen every few weeks and never get this level of post-mortem), the managed databases, load balancers and config management (beanstalk) services go down too.

When you move from AWS' basic EC2 IaaS VMs with instance (ephemeral|local) storage to EBS-backed (basically vSAN) storage, your multi-month uptime odds go down considerably. But when you step up to the PaaS of managed DBs, load balancing, dynamo, etc., yes, they offload a ton of management drudge, but it's an order of magnitude more fragile.

The unpredictability of performance, network contention and stability with EBS, for me, just doesn't outweigh the relatively smaller risk of hardware disk failure I take on from instance-backed nodes. Yes, I know, disks fail - but EBS disks fail a lot, and when they do, good luck fighting the herd to spin up more -- or crap, now, even getting web console access to understand what the hell is happening. That's the irony here - API access (including issuing more IPs!) is "throttled" at precisely the time when you need it most.

My advice? Instance-backed >= large, and roll your own failover/DR/load balancing. Go ahead and "plan for failure" - but do it old school: plan for the more likely case of simple h/w failure, not the EBS control plane and everything that depends on it.
You don't reconcile. Tests of any kind have this problem as intelligence is not quantifiable, only knowledge and age. The GP is merely showing that the SATs are referenced as IQ tests. Since the same argument applies to IQ tests, even in this respect they are similar.
I guarantee you that Apple will release a converged device within 2-3 years, almost as much as I guarantee you that up until the day they release such a device, they will insist that the compromises associated with such a device would make it infeasible for them to build.

Honestly - who wants to carry both a Laptop and a Tablet - I currently do, but, if some clever company could figure out how to give me the best of both worlds (Light, 100% focus, responsive Tablet + Keyboard Base for laptop typing, shortcuts, touchpad, multi-tasking when I'm rocking out 20 Apps and 40 console windows) - then I'll be first in line. (And, if you really want to take over the world, release a device with a stylus that matches, or exceeds, the resolution of a typical pen-on-paper)

I'm actually quite intrigued by the Surface - looking forward to checking it out.

Now if only someone would write a decent Terminal.App for Windows RT.... (No, Putty and SecureCRT don't count. And I don't think either of them run on Windows RT anyways).
And now Google is down too... DuckDuckGo to the rescue!
Several thousand lines is at least 10x too small to be relevant to a discussion about programming large applications effectively.
Java has interfaces.
Java can't do type inference in a library.
Google Wallet Incognito Credit Card - my take
Lawyers aren't paid to be credulous. Allowing oneself to be enlisted in a fraud is a severe failure of professional judgment.
After reading maybe 1/4 of this I was left thinking if you can't say something positive, don't say anything at all.
On the iPad mini event earlier this week
Has the SAT been found to have a disparate impact on protected minorities, like other "IQ" tests have been? I know employers usually consider any sort of "IQ test" in America to be legally risky for discrimination reasons; I wonder if Universities could face similar issues.

A lot of those things, particularly the reading comprehension sections, seem like they could be heavily influenced by culture.
And we find out where to look based on empirical evidence most of the time

-- This is most often not true.

Conscious thought is terribly inefficient. Most 'looking' is instinctive, or intuitive. That's not to say it has not been educated or modified by empirical data at some stage. But this illusion of such hyper-rationality is worth avoiding.

What is interesting (sometimes) is to hear other people's intuition and prioritization as the evaluate what to look for. This is typically what seperates out class in real world performance. This can be considered "framing" done loosely. when, why and where people create a box (in which to think, in the manner you are suggesting above).

To the parent's point, it's often times boring to disregard an interesting framing (out of hand) because of a technical flaw. Similarly, there is endless boredom to be had reading articles with reasoned logic in flawed or boring frames (ie, those which exclude or impugn the interesting bits).

We see this alot in the media, now, because its part of the PR spin game. The formula is to put bounds around the problem that suit your desired result. Journalists also often due this due to ignorance of a technical subject matter. We also see this as part of the fairness doctrine -- every story needs 'two sides' so a (often false) dichotomey is cookie cutter textbook inserted into every 'analysis'. ect.
For anyone interested, here are the comments on the AWS outage: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4705067
For anyone interested, here are the comments on the App engine outage: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4704973
Apologies if this is a dump question, but isn't it trivial to derive the public key if you have the private key? If so, couldn't an adversary just keep a list of public_key->service mappings and profit by casting a wider net?
wait until this one shows up on fiver
> People who dislike Apple’s approach or whose requirements are incompatible with it will always exist in great numbers, and the Surface is for them.

I disagree. Historically, Microsoft software products have been more customizable and more flexible than what comes from Apple. PC hardware as well. But what we're seeing now, with Windows 8, is a departure from that. Microsoft isn't just copying Apple's store -- they're copying the fundamental mind-set behind Apple's software. Instead of a general purpose computing machine, they're both trying to sell closed consumer electronics products. In my opinion, Microsoft took their biggest advantage and tossed it. People who dislike Apple's approach or whose requirements are incompatible aren't going to find much of an alternative. Microsoft seems to think they can compete with Apple on Apple's terms.
I've got VMWare Fusion on a Macbook Air so I have the luxury of being able to pick my OS and application for most tasks (usually OS X, sometimes Ubuntu and rarely Windows). I took Windows 8 for a test drive today and I will be happily replacing the native OS X Calendar and Mail with the Windows 8 alternatives.
> What I suspect is more likely true is that AWS suffers thousands of small failures every month and most are contained as designed, with no(or minuscule) customer impact.

Isn't that the whole point of moving to The Cloud? There's supposed to be some magical system in place such that hardware failures are routed around and don't interrupt service. Of course you can roll this yourself with your own hardware, but this is done for you.

It should be no small surprise that a system complicated enough to appear magical has some crazy complexity behind the scenes, and accidental dependencies can result in catastrophic failure.
Too true. Today when Google's App Engine failed hard, they flat out said: "App Engine is currently experiencing serving issues – Python, Java, Go … Oct 26 2012, 07:30 AM-11:59 PM … Current Availability: 55.90%" and showed read/write I/O metrics were spiking through the roof. Their dashboard clearly labeled the relevant icon as the most severe "Service Interruption".

I admire that level of transparency.
Jessica got those monsters from Mino Monsters (http://minomonsters.com/).

(When you've funded 467 startups, you can find one to supply you with practically anything.)
Ah, thanks. I was building on OP's comment. My browser crashed from the page so I couldn't check on my own.
From the slide:

> Concurrency - Not well served by C++ or even Java.

Seriously?

Losing a lot of respect for the Go team.
>The Surface is partially for Microsoft’s world of denial: the world in which this store contains no elephants and Microsoft invented the silver store with the glass front and the glowing logo and blue shirts and white lanyards and these table layouts and the modern tablet and its magnetic power cable

Huh what? It looks like Marco's the one living in an alternate universe. I seriously doubt anyone would believe that. The whole "if you don't adore the iPad you're in denial" thing says more about the writer than the Microsoft store salesman. What bugs me the most about the Apple bloggers like Gruber, Siegler and Marco is their hate towards anything non-Apple, especially Android and Microsoft. It's one thing to like something, but to hate on something else because of that is very narrow minded.
Lol, thanks for a good laugh.
The problem with that line of reasoning is that GPA is a relative measure - your GPA tells people (theoretically) how you stack up against your classmates - the concept of grading classes on a "curve." Furthermore, there is a correlation between grade inflation and both the selectivity of a school and whether a school is private, with private schools exhibiting more grade inflation (http://gradeinflation.com).
An Amazon Locker Experience
"We begin a global restart of the traffic routers to address the load in the affected datacenter."

This sounds like "Did you turn it off and on?"
What is this guarantee based on? Apples DNA is to optimize the device for each use case.

A tablet is optimized for finger touch and on screen gestures. A laptop is optimized for portable productivity and keyboard input. You can't create a UI/UX that works best for both and Apple isn't about to start compromising.

My Air and iPad combined is lighter than most other laptops, when I want instant info + utility I whip out my iPad, when I need to do work I open the Air.
Full iPad? Is that what we're calling it now?
I honestly think Tim doesn't really see Microsoft as a threat just yet. The iPad mini is a response to low-price disruption from Amazon and Google.

I think Amazon's "$50/year data plan" gives more heartburn to Apple strategists than anything Microsoft has put on the table or even hinted at.
Nice postscript about ARM, a British company.
It's obvious that the writer is an Apple person but the piece doesn't feel too biased.

This makes me a little sad, I was rooting for Microsoft this time.
Few weeks ago, there was a news about ballmer praising and hinting at adopting the Apple's approach of integrated hardware and software. Surface is the move in that direction.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/10/us-microsoft-ceo-i...
I was having lunch with a friend of mine who works at Google a few weeks ago and I asked him how popular Go was at Google. He said the only people using it are the Go team. Java and C++ continue to reign supreme at Google.
Yeah, was thinking the same thing while looking at all the cool graphs.
I am still rooting for Microsoft this time. I can see myself using surface as a reading device as well as popping up visual studio and writing code in C# :-)
Fair point, this attack on the crypto code would be sufficient to extract publicly identifiable information. However, in many encryption schemes, the public key is not a function of the private key. So a targeted attack would allow you to succeed with recovering fewer bits of data (only the purely private bits), and with less complexity. Also, even if this attack would work on any crypto system (instead of the specific code it is optimized for), I suspect that it would still be more econommical to target high value VMs.
not a ms person here(not at ALL in fact).

but ok i get it, was reading, then started skimming, then got to the conclusion tl;dr.

apple store employees handing out stupid useless flyers in the middle of the street in gangs of 3 is better of course.

microsoft is giving out muffin fragments? i'm surprised they gave out anything at all.
Marco Arment enters a Microsoft store beady-eyed, looking for things to nitpick, sneering at everything, seeing the negative side of everything. Whodathunkit.

The article by this fully-grown adult is summed up as he bitches about how "he isn't told how to exit other stores." What a clown.
The Apple store do the forced cheering by sales staff. I find that really tacky.
The PSAT is (in my anecdotal opinion) much harder to "ace" than the SAT. NMSQT qualification was around ~215/240 for last year, that would definitely count as flying colors. I'd say anything over 205ish would be "acing" the PSAT.

I've met many highly-talented individuals who did really great on PSAT/ACT/etc, but none of whom could have achieved a 200+ on the PSAT without studying (for) the test extensively beforehand. In fact, I'd bet there isn't a single NMSQT scholar who didn't kill themselves in preparation for the PSAT.
I don't get the interface stuff. If you had a method on an interface, you have to add it to all implementors, or clients won't compile. How is that different from Java? Java just adds the implements declaration, so Eclispse can help you find those implementations, instead of making you pore over compiler error listings.
Well, http://xkcd.com/927/ holds true again. I think these things are awesome -- though, I wish they weren't presented as something that is supposed to /reduce/ fragmentation. Perhaps it will at some point, but it probably won't -- just like the others.
And thus Android/Chrome may become the new "frankenstein customizable" option, which MS has historically been.
Haskell's designers believe in the goal of great pegramming, but they refuse to compromise today to help engineers. Haskell Ultimate will be better than Go. But it doesn't exist yet.
There are definitely tiers of reliability. An external drive drive is easily lost or damaged. A backup service can take individual drive/server losses but that might be the limit. S3 can lose an entire data center - the only real risk comes from software bugs.
The Go team has the highest Java hatred to lines written ratio you will ever see outside of a Ruby meetup.
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