skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
only 51% of north american internet is working ?? Am i reading this correctly ?
Major Internet Outages
You were hoping for what exactly? VHDL/Verilog for the chips? Netlists?

For most people I'd assume the main thing is that the architecture is well documented and open, as well as the board, and they have released all of the architecture documentation and a lot of other material.

As much as it'd be great to have a market in other sources for the chips, unless/until the architecture has some traction that is pretty irrelevant.
The World Is Not Enough: Google and the Future of Augmented Reality
It's really quite remarkable (to be honest, inexcusable is probably a better word) that their status page is failing as well. My expectations for a company with Google's resources and infrastructure are a lot higher than that.

Nothing on their Twitter account either: https://twitter.com/app_engine

A poor handling of a systems failure in my opinion.
And no big project like this would ever fail by < $50,000. Wouldn't the founders or their investors or whatever just max their credit cards to see it through?

Does Kickstarter explicitly prohibit such things?
In what way was electricity used? (I support your overall point that better preservation would've sped progress, and wish to know if there's something I didn't know.)
Is there a reason why i should prefer Markdown over restructuredText? rst sems to me has all i need, it has specs, it has decent documentation, it has tools, it's not only used to output HTML but all kinds of stuff.

rst just looks more powerful and yet still as readable as markdown.
Great find, I did not know this site.
I prefer Splitscreen. This is what Google has done for several TechTalks before.
> If you can pre-determine what functions your gadget is going to need, you can always build a greener solution by going fixed function.

How are you defining fixed function? For example, does eval [1] count as a function? If you have a gadget which only executes one function, eval, is it still a fixed function device? Presumably it is not, since eval can perform any function. If eval is a function which is not allowed in a fixed function device, how do you determine which functions may be used in a fixed function device?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eval
What's the earliest sign of trouble you've had?

Pingdom reports my GAE-hosted site has been down since 2012-10-26 10:37:38 EST, a bit over an hour now.

UPDATE: My site is back. Delayed report from Pingdom says site came back online after 50 minutes. Performance is sketchy still. We're probably not in the clear yet.

At least we can now get to the status dash:

http://code.google.com/status/appengine
If you could identify a large population of users that could be serviced with a narrow usage scenario and they agreed to stick with their function for say a year, you could build a viable solution the fixed-function way. For example, in India, PC penetration is only a few percent. Most of the population is completely technology agnostic. If you could identify the top three uses for a computing gadget for say the farmers of India, you could build a fixed function chip at low enough cost and high enough volume for them which would give them some solution instead of no solution because PCs are too expensive or consume too much power. Users such as these would probably not ask to change their gadget for years.
I've not had the time to read up on Xeon Phi, but compared to the Tilera, the Epiphany is a considerably simpler processor. There's no MMU in the cores, instead of caches there is direct DMA control, and the on-chip network extends past the edges of the chip (that's all the I/O, there are no peripherals in the chip). It all adds up to something you can scale by mounting more of them on a board, assuming your task is sufficiently adaptable to a data flow (since the external bandwidth scales slower than the number of cores). It's not at a level where you can run a general purpose operating system with virtual memory and memory protection (though extending it for that would be fairly easy - perhaps Epiphany V?), nor does it (currently) run multiple threads per core, but this simplicity affords it a much lower power expense.
A GPU may be more similar, as those tend to have prefetch operations and no memory protection, but they are designed to have huge bunches of threads doing the exact same type of work. They look like vector processors handling between 16 and 128 identical operations per control core (each a multiprocessor). Mainly the Epiphany is easier to program, but optimization is a different story (similar to place and route processes FPGAs need).
It's a move toward a data and control flow granularity currently not available at a price for individuals. And to make it more useful, those individuals need to try things.
Real time collaborative Web apps (think Etherpad or Facebook) made 100x easier.
Don't forget about voter roll manipulation as the votes of millions of legitimate voters, most of them visible minorities, are thrown out on spurious grounds.
Internet Traffic Report, while a nice concept, is unfortunately very misleading.

Their sample size is extremely small, and most of those are permanently down.

Have a look through their list of north american routers and find one of them where packet loss has gotten worse as their main overall graph for packet loss would suggest - I've just been through them all and couldn't find one.
It's not just for comments and blog posts.

I often find myself writing short plain text files, usually quick personal notes. Occasionally they grow larger than what I'd call a "short" plain text file, and at this point two extra requirements pop up:

1) they are going to need some structure.

2) odds are, that I'm going to want to show this document to someone else at some later point in time[1].

Markdown offers (to me) by far the easiest transition from "basic plain text note" to "slightly longer formatted document", because most times, all I have to do is continue writing the way I was doing already.

[1] corollary: as programmers know, when reading their own code, "someone else" also includes you in three months time.
The data for Asia: http://internettrafficreport.com/asia.htm
I was reading that article last night thinking... this is gonna get blocked.
I tried increase volume via VLC and macbook pro speakers got fried, will stick with using external speakers and changing volumes on them
+1 to the best answer-- always turn up your iPod before your speakers, folks. It makes all the difference.
Supporting a (Very Interesting) New Database
Five simple steps to better typography
It's one of the first times the whole service has been down, but parts of the service go down at least once a week. memcache, task queues are "elevated" with regularity and urlfetch is frequently down totally. ("elevated" generally means unusable).

Of course master/slave even has scheduled downtime.
I agree with you. From my past experience any data center is subject to risks. I've witnessed:

Power failures.
Cross site links being cut due to engineering works.
Over heating due to air conditioning failures.
Flooding

And I've experienced all the above from a very large, very well known, very expensive data center company based in London.
How on earth do you get to "it's the most socially appropriate way"?

It's often the easiest and lowest effort for the developer, but what basically amounts to passive aggression is never going to be remotely sociably appropriate.

If you educate people you get a massively better outcome - you don't get interrupted when that's important to you and you're more likely to get valuable and useful interaction when that's acceptable.
I think the author is trying to point out that you don't have to be a jerk about it.

Its one thing to say "Hey guys when you run X, your computer literally catches on fire"

and another to say:

"HAY GUYS, AUTHER X SUX0RS AND THERE APP BLOWS. IT MAKES YOUR COMPUTER EXPLODE LOL"

I know I'm guilty of this sort of thing sometimes.

Anyway, I don't think the author is saying you can't criticize at all, just be critical in constructive ways.
Well, exactly!
Maybe you should author a summary of your findings ("A Novel Theory on the Subconscious Motivations of Personal Productivity Articles") and then we can analyze the subconscious reasons driving your quest.

A mirror in a mirror :)

EDIT: I think OP did confirm that he believes his own intent was to share with the community, but one can debate whether or not he is a fair judge of his own motivations.
Who in your opinion should be ahead?

I see a few names on that list that shouldn't even be in the queue in my opinion.

David Beckham, Jonny Wilkinson, Robbie Williams, Michael Vaughan, Terry Wogan, Princess Diana...
You would refresh your technology at some rate say once a year and try to match it with rate of the other technology suppliers just like in the microprocessor case. Your cadence is a little shorter.
So their song list seems to be at : http://www.getworkdonemusic.com/fast_tracks.json . Does anyone know if this list gets auto compiled using some bpm measure or if the person behind the website populates them manually?
The Turing hype has gone over the top.
At first I thought this was worrying comment.

Then I saw this entire subthread was a brilliant meta-comment showing how spurious rumors are spread through social media.
If you can pre-determine what functions your gadget is going to need, you can always build a greener solution by going fixed function.

No, not always. Designing and producing such solution takes extra energy, both fixed and marginal.
Meanwhile... Gmail etc are working quite fine. So the claim that if you build on GAE you "take advantage of the same infrastructure used for Google services!!" starts to ring a bit hollow.
That's addressed in the article: this is going to be an opportunity, things that help us do that.

I think your question shows you're missing the point, but I could very likely be wrong: the way this sharing is going to happen isn't in ways we currently see or understand. It's going to be different.
The cars he mention don't look that bad:
http://yachtpals.com/files/news/boat-car-aquada.jpg
jz only 1-2 hr down-age ;)
Agreed. I was surprised to see only one[1] of the "down" routers with any packet loss over the last 24 hours.

That said, it's still interesting how the overall traffic trends so sharply downwards. I wonder if they have more data than they are showing in the graphs.

[1]http://internettrafficreport.com/history/190.htm
For what it's worth, this is the first I've heard of it, and this convinced me to contribute.
> I hope and expect that the Bank would not consider putting the image of a living person on a note.

I dunno, I'd make an exception for John Cleese.
Dropbox down?
Beware the Alan Turing fetish: http://blog.jgc.org/2011/11/beware-alan-turing-fetish.html
It seems like the individual router graphs most recent update is 10/26 00:00 whereas the overall graph has been updated at 10/26 08:30.
The point is that they used their control over the information available to their "population" to retaliate against and block journalism that revealed information unfavorable to their internal narrative.

I'd say that's the exact same tactic.
The "safety" of the cloud is about two things: 1. trusting your service provider, and 2. redundancy.

You have to trust your cloud provider. They control everything you do. If their security isn't bulletproof, you're screwed. If their SAN's firmware isn't upgraded properly to deal with some performance issue, you're screwed. If their developers fuck up the API and you can't modify your instances, you're screwed. You have to put complete faith in a secret infrastructure run for hundreds of thousands of clients so there's no customer relationship to speak of.

That's just the "trust" issue. Then there's the issue of actual redundancy. It's completely possible to have a network-wide outage for a cloud provider. There will be no redundancy, because their entire system is built to be in unison; one change affects everything.

Running it yourself means you know how secure it is, how robust the procedures are, and you can build in real redundancy and real disaster recovery. Do people build themselves bulletproof services like this? Usually not. But if you cared to, you could.
Could you imagine a time when everyone you'd basically ever met could passively browse a catalog of over 1000 pictures of you? I couldn't particularly imagine that day 7 years ago, but here we (or at least I) are/am.
You could try Orchard CMS on Azure websites. It is a CMS, but it has an out of the box "Blog" recipe that let's you get started without writing any code. Azure websites is cheap (and free if you use the free tier). You can deploy with git, or you can deploy with a canned Orchard CMS image already on the Azure portal if you don't want to touch any code.
I seem to recall repeatedly reading that Kickstarter projects collect he majority of their funding in the first 72 and final 24 hours.

My anecdotal experience backing and following half a dozen projects agrees with this.

I'd be quite surprised if this project doesn't make it.
it would be quite ironic to put george orwell on a currency note
The point of the write-up is to highlight the fact that you don't have to assume programmable function is a better alternative to fixed function under all circumstances, an assumption we have made for the last 40 years.
How Singleton Java Object brings Varying Design Patterns
I have never run a large-scale AdWords campaign, so this is back-seat driving, but I wonder if Google's Pay Per Conversion pricing (http://support.google.com/adwords/bin/answer.py?hl=en&an...) would be a way to attack this problem.

For example, send incoming customers to a survey. Pay $1 for customers who self-identify as non-profit or academic, $10 for customers who identify as Fortune 500. Google will go off and determine if it's more efficient to deliver you 10x non-profit customers, or 1x corporate ones.

Folks who have tried something like this, does it work?
Why? I'm sure he'd find it a bit embarassing while he was still alive.
Apple gets a small sum every year from those of us who bother to upgrade. But every few years they get much more than $140 out of us in the form of the purchase of a much higher-margin computer for which they don't have to split the profits with anybody else.

Also, let's compare apples to apples (ahaha). Apple only retails their OS in an upgrade so we can really only compare upgrade pricing. Apple charges about $20 for an upgrade every year, which averages out to $20/year. Windows 8 upgrades are selling for $40 right now, and the last version of Windows came out about 3 years ago. $40 / 3 = $13.33.

Now I absolutely agree with your assertion that $20 is a fairly small sum. But I'm not sure I agree that $13 is a price gouge by comparison.

(Spoken as a Mac and VMWare Fusion user.)
things are starting to run again...

My site is back up :D SLOW but up.
http://www.snopes.com/politics/romney/votingmachines.asp
Autocomplete for "why steve jobs was a" gives "Jerk" as first result.

That was kind. My first impulse was to see what autocomplete has to offer about blogs and bloggers. Autocomplete for "why bloggers are" gives "not journalists" as first result, whereas "why blog authors" comes up with "ask rhetorical questions". Not to mention the first result for "why blog writers are".

Seriously, let's not use Google autocomplete as an excuse to jump on a meme bandwagon.

There was a post and a discussion not so long ago (can't find it now, no matter how much I try) about how people in our line of work focus on the negative by nature of our work and how we receive negative feedback all the time. At least that discussion was interesting, whereas this post is a typical "don't be such a jerk" post. Not that I necessarily disagree with the content, but this has crossed beyond the "beating the dead horse" territory into that "inflict Peter Jackson gore films on the poor dead horse" place that, ironically, makes me even grumpier.

EDIT: Thanks to @mrdazm for providing the link to the "Be nice to developers" discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4631607
Usually takes about an hour to be replicated out to the store when you upload an APK ... but no humans are involved in that process.
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...

We were talking about reducing volume in the App. If the app is using the system volume then the App->CoreAudio step is irrelevant (as nothing changes), the CoreAudio->DAC step doesn't change either (full bit-depth and an OOB message to lower the gain), but the DAC->Speakers analog step still has to output half the volume and thus reduce the range of the signal. For this not to matter the OS would need to be able to change the gain in the speakers instead of the DAC.

Again, how much this actually has an audible effect on quality beats me...
Backbone latency seems fine http://www.internetpulse.net/
This doesn't work well with games. Yes, you could change the volume settings from there, but most 3D games are full screen and it's not usual to alt-tab the game just to modify the volume settings.
I can not bear with a wall of text about a note-taking app. Could you pastebin that?
And Diebold? Who used to have a CEO committed to G. W. Bush's presidency? Is that also false?
If you check the certificate for https://steamcommunity.com/, it should show Valve Corporation. Regardless, you can log in at the Steam store (https://store.steampowered.com/); the session should automatically transfer to Steam Community.
Now even the Google AppEngine status page is down.
That works out to ~$28 per year. Just a little more than what an OSX user would pay every year.
Uhh. not to be grumpy, but i read socially apropos as socially relevant and not socially appropriate.
Disclaimer: am biased towards the OP. sometimes grumpiness can keep people away and let your brain/attention free from figuring out having to find the socially appropriate response/action.
Dropbox [0] is showing a 500 for me to. I've very confused as to what has just happened to the internet...

[0] https://www.dropbox.com/
Exactly what I meant.

The main problem with Windows 8 is not the innovation (or lack of), but the legacy elements and the awkwardness resulting from it.
Location updated: Cambridge, MA
www.howfuckedisappengine.com
> 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.

And if applications were written correctly the first time organisations wouldn't have to waste money on test teams or help desks and users wouldn't have to waste time dealing with application crashes and bugs, if developers could estimate project mangers wouldn't have to waste time replanning and writing exception reports when things overrun.

Until we're all perfect it's really best not to go down that route.
Many thanks, what a great resource.

I saw that there is a big focus on modularity, how come there is no talk about why use the commonJS and not AMD?
Do you doubt that voting machine manipulation happens? Programmers of the machines have testified in Congress that they built rigged machines. Exit polls vary dramatically from vote counts almost exclusively when machines are used.

The very idea that 20% of votes are moved through closed-source machines run by Republican friends should be enough to make everyone assume that the votes cannot be trusted.
> Try Again Later

I'd say - dump MS. Try something that treats developers as humans.
The Jason Bourne Effect
Whoa did not expect to receive such negative feedback on this post. Was really looking for feedback from the community on a replacement. I'll post this elsewhere I guess.
It's time we remembered the whole strength of the internet was that it was distributed and we avoided introducing single points of failure. We have ended up using vast amounts of infrastructure for no reason other than developer convenience (often with respect to security), when having local direct connections is often more suitable than shooting everything into the cloud.
Having equity in some company that makes and sells voting machines does not prove a vast conspiracy of voter fraud.

I mean, if this were true Romney would win. What's the point of rigging machines if you can't swing the swing states in your favor?
As Ewantoo mentioned, ITR is pretty unreliable. We have found it works as a relative measure -- when their packet loss rises, we do indeed see consumer traffic fall, though usually not by the amount their graphs would indicate.
Great work Alex! This looks very useful and promising.
Yup. But what they're selling on their website is only an upgrade version. So it's a pretty reasonable restriction.
Blah, blah, blah... "software bloat = CPU cycles = energy consumption". Another boring blog post about the same old crap.

I really was hoping to see an article about the harsh chemicals, heavy metals and exotic compounds used in chip fabrication plants, and printed circuit board production. Not to mention the all the batteries attached to them.

...or maybe at least how we consume all these devices like candy, compared with statistics gathered on actual recycling practices employed by end users.

But no. Just another head-in-the-clouds post on Hacker News about software and conflated theories about chips from some blogger who probably hasn't ever even bothered to look at the assembly produced by a compiler (or even a disassembler).

Oh well.
So basically what you're saying is: it's everyone elses fault.

Seems like you need to improve communication in your org. and get more involved with the business side. The common denominator in all the problems you listed is you.
We're coloed across three datacenters spanning the US (one might be in TO I think) and if a datacenter were to go down, we have a hot backup that's no more than 12 hours stale.

The only real manual maintenance that we've got is a rolling reimaging of servers based on whatever's in version control, which usually takes a few hours twice a year, but we'd probably do that if we were in the cloud anyway.

When you can script away 90% of your system administration tasks, hosting in the cloud doesn't really make a ton of sense.
They aren't paying anywhere close to all that cash back to investors. They are paying roughly 1/4 of the new money they make each quarter. Total cash still went up last quarter by several billion. Apple TV may or may not be a myth, but they haven't announced anything yet so I don't think you can say whether or not it is ambitious.

Samsung is killing it, but Apple still made more money this quarter (and every recent quarter). They are a 6-700 billion dollar company that is growing > 20%. With a PE of 11, how do you short that?
Howfuckedisappengine.com
You're reading it correctly, it's just telling you the wrong thing.

51% of a very small self-selecting set of machines are down, mostly small businesses or home users which have obviously been shutdown or renamed.

If internettrafficreport automatically removed all devices which returned no results for 7 days, they'd be a slightly more useful resource.
Now I m anxiously waiting for one written for Vietnam. I lived there for a few years and the 2 countries closely resemble each other