skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I got a ton done on the side project I have been hacking together. It started as a blog post but will end a short book on the Meteor framework. Hopefully finished by the weeks end! I got about 3000 words in while we were down! :)

Edit: It will be totally free and open source, and is being written on a collaborative platform ala git where anyone can add a branch for edits/extra content/suggestions. I don't want to plug it shamelessly, but if you're really interested email me and I will send you a link. It's in my profile.
John Harrison and the Longitude problem
But without any way of correcting for this silent majority, or any sort of predictable systematic tendency, so what? We don't know everything? There's a lot of things we don't know, and on most topics we hear from only a small fraction of people, both expert and otherwise. Why is this worth pointing out?

(The point of knowing about things like publication biases in science is that they are systematic: once you know about publication bias, you know that estimates are on net, higher than they should be, and this is something you can apply to evaluating science that you read.)
Or maybe you'll just get more work done ;)
I realized how compulsively I click on HN. All in all it is not a healthy habit. I ought to give it up or cut down. Before it used to be The Register, Ars Technica and Wired.
I'm not complaining. I'm asking a legitimate question. A popular site has been down for a significant period of time; I think a postmortem will be insightful.
RAID arrays fail all the time; the system has famously been one server, and the only visible recent scaling work has been front end caching.

edit: the code has been public for a long time, and there is not a database to replicate. the site ran as a single server for years, and it is unlikely the front end caching has changed anything about the "database" components.

Since RAID failures actually are somewhat common, they are probably looking at a higher level replicated storage system now, a la DRBD, or some kind of distributed file system, a la Gluster.
Asking a technical site about a technical site outage isn't, in and of itself, complaining. It's an opportunity to learn.
Asking for a postmortem is not complaining.
Emergency Self Destruction of LUKS in Kali
I learned to code, finally.
I went to Slashdot for the first time in about a year or two. It still sucks.
The Inside Story Of Snapchat: The World's Hottest App...?
Just kept refreshing the page...
Wasn't really meant as a joke, but I completely understand where you're coming from. Haven't really been on Twitter today.
It bothered me more than it (probably) should
Silent Technical Privilege
Yes I noticed this as well from (the lack of) my own comment activity. I don't comment that often but I had written something yesterday that has disappeared.

On a more general note if anybody has backups and they aren't regularly tested restoring them, then you really don't have backups! As an added bonus, regular restoration tests let you practice for the "real deal" and you know how long the entire process will take.
> "PG doesn't care about HN's search listings"

Yup. re: "Why does HN have a relatively low Google PageRank?"

"Probably because we restrict their crawlers. But this is an excellent side effect, because the last thing I want is traffic from Google searches."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5808990

If you need to search for something that you know was on HN, HNSearch is a great tool. I use it all the time.
Well, I heard it was primarily because of Sina launching a Bitcoin news portal.
Mozilla: In 2014, all your hardware belongs to us
A More "Exclusive" HN. Lobste.rs: Invite only but great content.
Who's complaining? I only see curiosity.
My ISP Runs On Smoke Signals
This was posted a few days ago on Code Golf:

http://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/17718/meta-regex...

That link includes a perl 10-liner to do the same.
If a website outage affects your life in any significant manner then I'm sorry but your life is non existent.

Unless it's StackOverflow, I can't imagine StackOverflow going down.
Show HN: Memely - a clean ad free meme curator. Flask, Marionette, Require,Redis
why are people up voting this? it was a joke.
This article speaks as if it was 100% certainty that Zynga's announcement caused the fluctuation. Doesn't feel entirely accurate.
If anyone wants an invite, email me a basic fizzbuzz solution in a language of your choice and if it runs I'll shoot you an invite. Members can give unlimited ones, but the parent of your invite can be affected by 'bad behavior' in a method to encourage quality content/a lack of trolling. I'm enjoying it so far quite a bit myself.
The Intrinsic Value of Blogging
You claim it's objectively bad then only cite subjective things like function, structure, and variable names.

That word doesn't mean what you think it means :-)
He's right that for most sites this would be undesirable, but PG has stated that they aren't looking for a lot of Google traffic. But then, just because it doesn't matter to PG doesn't mean it doesn't matter at all.

I've more than once found myself Googling old HN threads I'd like to find, but can't. Google's search (and site search) is miles better than HN's, but HN intentionally limits Google's crawl rate, thus limiting the amount of content crawled and indexed.
I think I would be very upset if Soundcloud went down for a week. But you know, we'd all get by. :)
Android on Windows gets another supporter in AMD
Avoid anything that starts with 'Why'. "Gather 'round children. I have wisdom to graciously impart."
Shakes and tremors. I no longer have fingernails and I chewed through an entire box of pencils.
The site has been up for minutes and already asking for a report. I'm sure that's the last thing on PG's mind at this point. It's just clueless and classless.
During the outage, https://twitter.com/HNStatus went from somewhere around 300 to 1163 followers.
San Francisco to charge for tech buses using city stops
Increased productivity.
Show HN: Jobsuitors, algorithmic job matching
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

I kept checking and checking HN over and over again. When I couldn't take it anymore I started to do some actual work.
I was highly productive today.
> Twitter is the place where I laugh, whine, work, schmooze, procrastinate, and flirt. It sits in my back pocket wherever I go and lies next to me when I fall asleep.

I can't for the life of me understand why people choose to publish their entire life to an amalgamation of online strangers.
I visited Hatena Bookmark (somewhere between HN and Reddit in terms of content type and quality, for Japanese links) much more frequently and discovered how much worse (for me) the curation there is (because it's more mainstream than HN).
Earlier today I saw it had about 45 followers. I think it was a new account. (Please correct me if I'm wrong.)
This article:

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/01/how-ne...

Makes the case that they are personalizing as much as ever, they just aren't using fractional stars to do it.
Show HN: mute.fm automatically pauses music when watching videos
One place in which this problem was particularly apparent was (is? I haven't kept up with it for a while) the PHP community. PHP gets a bad rap as a terrible language, but a large part of this was the ease of beginning the learning process with PHP; download [X|W|M]AMPP, spin up an Apache instance, and get just dive in. What this led to was a lot of sub-par instruction material from people who didn't have a solid grounding in design principles, or "tutorials" created from people who had little experience.

Despite this, there were clearly experts who could "finely craft" PHP applications. Although Facebook may not be the best example, it is the first one that comes to mind.
Yeah, I lost about 200 karma (what was about 15% of my total) in the crash.

Good thing they're just silly internet points :)
Backpack: Retrofitting Haskell with Interfaces
>> HNSearch is a great tool. I use it all the time.

Agreed - so is pinboard's search for #hn tags
If you're asking, it means you know that PG authors them in most instances. The fact you felt the need to start a new thread, just minutes after the site is back, tells me you're anxious and overeager.
Unless its healthcare.gov and you know you get sick or something.
Rebooting webOS: how LG rethought the smart TV
GSLV soars to space with Indian cryogenic engine
Thanks for pointing out HNSearch. site:news.ycombinator.com (whatever) works nicely with Google too.
I couldn't get my fix man!!!
Site is fizz?

I had fizz heard buzz fizzbuzz, well fizz buzz of it but didn't know it was a thing to solve.

(How is fizz relevant buzz this?)
Ask HN: Best word wrapping algorithm for plain text.
My old homegrown WW is showing its age and am looking for an open source one hopefully based on the Knuth-Plass line breaker algorithm.

Anyone know of good examples in any language (hopefully in C#) on the Internet?
Meanpath January 2014 Index
Jesus. Is this an actual question?
I had planned on writing up an email gleaned from some HN comment insight, and citing the comment.

"I'll just do that tomorrow" I thought.
But, as we found out, there was no tomorrow.
A New Era for Entrepreneurs and Startups Has Begun
Signing up right now. Curious to see what this offers compared to similar things such as Whitetruffle. Looks beautiful, though! I will give an edit with my thoughts of the entire signup process.
GSLV is a three stage launch vehicle:

Stage 1: S139 solid fuel core (HTPB) + Four L40 Vikas liquid strap on boosters (UDMH N2O4)

Stage 2: GS2 Vikas liquid engine (UDMH N2O4)

Stage 3: CE7.5 cryogenic engine (LOX LH2)

S139 and Vikas engines are used in PSLV as well. CE 7.5 is the indigenous cryogenic engine.

Launch video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7HIvfhoFHM (launch occurs at 00:38)
You talk about the levels contributed by your community - will there be / is there a way for those to be shared under open licenses too?
Your first startup should be someone else's
Bought and Unread Books
Navia, First Self-Driving Commercial Vehicle
I don't disagree with your assessment. I think it's more of an opportunist running an (admittedly) self-serving social experiment of my own. And I was also curious (naturally) and well-aware someone would ask the question.

I wasn't complaining, however. :)

Edit: clarification on motivation.
Why "Simple" Websites Are Scientifically Better
Patrick - have you considered selling BCC?
I run http://rebrickable.com and have built it up mostly via making it so awesome all my users drive the traffic for me :)
> It's just clueless and classless.

Speaking of which, I think you got the wrong impression here about the motivation of your fellow HNers who are simply curious. Your doubling down by snapping at people is really not the solution either.

Take a step back and look at this thread again. I think you misinterpreted the situation. Nobody's upset because of the outage. Isn't it understandable that people are giddy to find out what happened, though?
What I've learnt from David Ogilvy
How To Be A Better Software Developer This Year
Evernote CEO Responds to "bug-ridden elephant" blog post
I love Norvig's Python posts. He really gets the spirit of the language and has fun with it.
Benchmarking Mathematica on the Raspberry Pi
I know you're not supposed to bore anyone by recounting dreams, but the other night I dreamt my MacBook had a virus which booted into Win975.
Thanks, that would be awesome! As a side note, this is decidedly still in alpha. Feedback is the most important thing for us right now.
Bitcoin will fail without decentralized mining
It's a common argument - "Lots of people use this but don't talk about it! It still matters!". Common Lispers sometimes say that (but we talk a lot. ;-) )

On the other hand, you can't make decisions without data - without discernable activity, it's reasonable to assume a community is dead.
Starting Now, All Intel Microprocessors Are Conflict-Free
That's the idea! We would love for you to give it a try and let us know how it goes.
Unfortunately, the realpolitik of the situation is that when you're paying less than $1,000/month the vendor's response to any potential issue will be to throw you under the bus.
Good stuff going on over there at CodeCombat. My favorite part about this headline is that during office hours PG questioned them about their decision to go open source, so I wasn't sure if they would do it. This shows me that CodeCombat has a vision they are following and I believe a big bright future.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABuvRv4Vv3s
5-7 day battery life is really short for a watch.

I guess you don't have to set the time if it runs out of juice tho?
I regressed from man to beast, communicating in grunts and fueled by primal instinct. My time was taken up with hitting the ground with femurs and painting on cave walls with mud.
Questions to ask about a candidate
Clang 3.4 Release Notes
I find it interesting that this question is fresher (by a minute), has more points (67 v 42 at snapshot), and has more comments (18 v 10 at snapshot) than "HackerNews down, unwisely returning http 200 for outage message" but is ranked lower (2 v 1 at snapshot).

snapshot - http://oi40.tinypic.com/2mmbv5y.jpg
No, it sucks worse.

Their new layout is all Weboblag 3.0.
Enterprise Mobility and BYOA in 2014
OHGB: Beating the Wheel of Fortune Bonus Round - thoughts on programming
I went outside in what felt like -34F in Chicago to blow soap bubbles in the air and watch them land at the consistency of plastic bags.
Linksys WRT1900AC is the spritual successor to the WRT54G
Yeh but how long does it last? This ball was designed specifically because normal soccer balls fall apart:

http://www.oneworldfutbol.com/

I kind of think a hand-crank is going to break down less often and be much easier to repair by hand. "Whelp, the bear ate our nightlight" is not going to go over well.
Trolls and abusive individuals exist whether you're a man or woman. The idea this is the next great civil rights issue seems to be more than a bit of an exaggeration to me.

Anecdotally, you'll usually see people going out of their way to defend woman on most public forums. On any public threads in Reddit where any guy expresses the tiniest hint of misogyny or creepiness to a woman, you'll have about 50 people shouting them down.
Head Fake: Why a government would create Bitcoin [fiction]
Thank you for making my paltry 22 lost karma points look so, well, so paltry. ;-)

edit: to clarify "lost" karma
The perils of belief
So we're doing Open Handset Alliance 2.0?
The Answer Sheet  ‘I would love to teach but…’
Interesting note--this release brings a front-end cl.exe replacement for Visual Studio:

http://llvm.org/releases/3.4/tools/clang/docs/UsersManual.ht...
Why Do Government Software Projects Fail?
Cicada 3301, the Internet mystery, returned at 2 a.m this morning (EST)
There seems to be a trend of singling out young successful professionals and publicly shaming them for page views. I think this is disgusting. Is it such a bad thing that young people who chose to work hard and get a valuable (and relevant) education are paid adequately in a booming industry?
For anyone with hung request - http://www.lobste.rs isn't working for me, but http://lobste.rs is.
I'm just going to hazard a guess that that Nick, George and Scott made a very clever decision to set up a script to alert them when HN went up (and perhaps even to submit this post as soon as it happened). This was the first post after the site went up. They might just be lucky, but somehow I doubt it.

Way to hack HN. You win my upvote.

Edit: Also, more specifically to the news of them open sourcing: It'll be particularly awesome if people eventually graduate from learning to code on Codecombat to working on its codebase. Since the backend is all node, it's not inconceivable. A virtuous loop for sure.
If someone makes a level on another CodeCombat server in their own database, they can share that with other CodeCombat servers all they please. We are just being cautious about the levels that end up in the main codecombat.com database, because at some point we might want to either make premium-only campaigns or allow others to sell access to their campaigns, and we can't do that if the levels are all MIT.

Hopefully we can keep all levels free for everyone anyway, since recruiting is looking pretty good as a monetization strategy so far.
Broadcom’s 5G Wi-Fi chips will triple bandwidth for wireless home networking
SpaceX successfully launches Thaicom6 satellite to geostationary transfer orbit
I've had good customer support with vendors listed on LowEndBox and I was paying just a few dollars per month.

Maybe DigitalOcean are just crap?
Understandable! I'll make sure to give it. My email is in my profile if you would like to chat about it a little more in-depth!
Obviously subjective, but I think the design is hideous. It reminds me of tacky faux-professional 80s watches. In fact, doing a search for "80s watches" brings this up pretty quickly: http://modculture.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/02/2...

Which is exactly what comes to mind for me. I think it really works against what they're going for with the product.
I thought it was going to be meta-meta-regex golf, and couldn't imagine how that would be possible. But meta-regex golf is an interesting exercise, and is far more tractable. :)
I don't know why Randall's regex incorrectly (?) matches "Fremont", but it's worth noting Wikipedia's primary spelling has an accent aigu "Frémont":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_C._Frémont
I seriously doubt Cloudflare's behaviour would be that stupid, wouldn't it momentarily cache error pages instead of hammering the server? At a minimum it would throttle/prevent concurrent requests.
@hnstatus on Twitter was posting percentages:

https://twitter.com/HNStatus
OP didn't even ask nicely, and if you read the follow up to my comment, you'll see that the OP was motivated by something other than curiosity.
Valve announces 13 Steam Machine partners
Browsers tend to cache 200 OK responses. When HN came up (as reported on Twitter) I kept getting the error page until I bust the cache and reloaded. Yup, that's what 200 OK for an error page can cause. A regular reload will still show your _down_ page
Their first post is dated 28 July - https://twitter.com/HNStatus/status/361707202123268096

edited: "They're" --> "Their" (there/their/they're will be the death of me!)
It was simply the test someone else gave me to get my account so I figured it would appropriately filter out the audience. They just wanted to make sure it was very hacker/programmer-centric, I imagine. Such a test is a good filter of that. And if you just google a fizzbuzz solution and send that, obviously its interesting enough you would be motivated to learn some things, and who isn't going to help foster that?
It gave me a chance to really compare the opportunity cost of readership versus the amount of personably actionable material I find here.

As a result I've decided to drastically restrict the time I spend here. (And that's me done for today)
I just had a Chrome extension refreshing the page every couple minutes is all. I think it was actually a bad decision, because we were #40 on the new page in under 10 minutes with everyone doing the same thing. I just posted it because it's news today, and fortunately some people like it.
Self posts are penalized so they don't clog the front page for long.

http://jacquesmattheij.com/The+Unofficial+HN+FAQ#selfposts
So is it not more exclusive, or is the headline just gratuitous abuse of quotation marks?
here's a tweet from July 28th, so it's not a new account https://twitter.com/HNStatus/status/361707202123268096
If you are looking for a simplified C but still want it to compile on standard C compilers, just don't use the features you don't like. Out of curiosity, to which syntactic/semantic corners are you referring?
MADlib: Big Data Machine Learning in SQL for Data Scientists
Ah, so back to your day job with PHP I see?
I always found it really odd and funny, that no matter how hard I try, I always read upper case words as yelling in my head --> definitely straining.
Webcam de chicas
Conoce interactua con miles de chicas por webcam en vivo
It has tweets from as far back as July of 2013.
Is there any plans to release a new version of Arc, if it exists or server side code (without business-critical stuff)? I guess that there are lots of improvements since last Arc release.)
I know it suppose to make you more productive when it's down (I was), but suddenly I felt clueless during my commuting (which can take 2 hours total).
Not really. There were plenty of times when I tried to find an article a few days back but google was coming up blank even with `site:news.ycombinator.com`. Had to resort to scrolling through HN's facebook bot page (posts all the front-paged links)
I think you're getting "asking for a postmortem" confused with angrily raving about downtime. Or, you know, self righteously admonishing others for asking such a question
I suppose like all businesses it is on sale for the right price, but I haven't given much thought to actively attempting to sell it beyond "I don't think the standard going rates for small Internet businesses would value this highly enough to make me want the lump-sum of money more than I like owning it."
Looks like from the little on the site.

I was hoping for something saner than CAN bus
Indeed you are right; the original links still work for me. Though the ones I checked so far look exactly the same as the Google Cache version, so I don't know what happened there.
but wouldn't it be better to have kids playing with a soccer ball that produces electricity all day than have them sitting around all day cranking a hand crank? Seems a little cruel...
> "Probably because we restrict their crawlers. But this is an excellent side effect, because the last thing I want is traffic from Google searches."

Am I the only one who finds that puzzling?

This isn't Fight Club. It's not even Entrepreneur Club. It's a bunch of generally smart people talking about technology, with an emphasis on making money from it. It's one of my favorite sites, and I love it, but it's not an invitation-only club, is it?

(I also find it weird that one of the go-to sites for web-savvy people would be like, "yeah, screw status codes and how the open, linked, web is supposed to work".)

To be clear, I'm not Protesting a Great Evil. I just find it puzzling, as in, "That's odd, I must not understand what this is all about, after all."
You make a good point. There isn't really anywhere to go from my current position if I don't pick up more javascript. However, I'm currently happy in my role.
A Stand-up Desk (IKEA hack)
Sell call. But I guess there is not much demand at this price.)
I'm also interested in what the infrastructure of HN looks like. One of the tweets via @HNStatus seemed to imply that the site runs off of one application server.
Is anyone working on pairing these small devices with keyboards, mice, tablets, monitors, televisions, glasses, etc? Everything has to be wireless, of course.

I'd like a keychain computer that I could drop next to whatever peripherals I happen to be near.
Lookalike audiences from email lists are your best bets.
Intel announces Edison, a computer the size of an SD card
My epic list of reporting, data crunching and OS X power user tools
Ask HN: How would you teach web development to college students?
I've be working with a few other students to create HackBU [1], an organization at Binghamton University designed to teach web development and create a “hacker” culture.

We have 300+ people signed up and only 1/3 are CS majors. The plan is to hold weekly workshops with 45 minutes of lecturing and 2 hours of “office hours.” We’ll be organizing trips to hackathons and eventually host our own 24-hour hackathon at the end of the semester.

So, HN, how would you structure such a program if you were planning it?

Or, what would you like to see as a student?

[1] http://hackbu.org/
Success Beyond the Barrier of Full Understanding