skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Gmail down, Google+ down, gChat down, uploads in Play Store down
Almost all service are down at the moment.
I disagree with 4 out of the 5.

> "How many people do you hire in a typical month?"
Is there such a thing as a "typical month" in a startup? Isn't the definition of a startup that it's moving fast, things change and you have to roll with the punches?

> "Who was the last person to quit, and why?"
Good luck getting a real answer out of this question. They're not going to say that "he hated the atmosphere", or "the pay was too low". They're going to say something positive-sounding and completely bland. It tells you nothing about the company at all, unless they completely trash talk the person who just left.

> "When do you intend to raise money, and why?"
Again, you'll be lucky to get a real answer on this as well. If you get an "X months of runway before we need to raise again", there are a million assumptions built into that, and things change quickly. "Is the company primarily financed by selling product, or selling itself?" is probably a better question to ask.

> "Can I see where I’ll sit?"
Seriously? Again: it's a startup, things change. In the 2 weeks it might take you to start, the seating plan may have changed 3 times. Ask for a tour of the office, sure! Depending on the startup, it's unlikely that you'll be spending 2,000+ hours a year sitting at the same desk. Offices will move, things will be re-arranged, etc. Look at how the workspace is set up, to be sure; but asking something this specific seems like an odd request.

> "What do I want to do accomplish in my life, and how does this help me down that path?"
This one I agree with.
GnuTLS, OpenSSL, and CryptoPP are low-level libraries that for the most part provide only primitives and protocol compatibility. Keyczar, Nacl, and cryptlib are high-level libraries that provide secure constructions designed to be "developer-proof". The vast majority of people who try to build new cryptosystems using OpenSSL fail, because combining low-level crypto primitives to try to build a cryptosystem is very difficult and requires domain knowledge that people don't realize they lack.
This message conflates two issues in an unfortunate way. One issue is the licensing of GCC, the other issue is the architecture of GCC (how modular it is).

No one is arguing that GCC should change licenses. But he seems to think that making GCC more modular would somehow make it less free:

> If GCC were to change from a free compiler into a platform for nonfree compilers, it would no longer serve the goal of freedom very well.

There are two embedded assumptions here. First, that making GCC more modular would result in people creating non-free compilers with it (presumably by connecting a non-free component with GCC using an IR rather than linking directly, to get around the GPL). And second, that such use would become more prevalent than just using GCC itself (which is what would "change" GCC from a free compiler into a platform for nonfree compilers).

I imagine a few people would use GCC components that way, if it became more modular. But would that use be a significant one? That's unknown. And would that use "no longer serve the goal of freedom"? If a large number of nonfree tools appear that generate and consume a GCC IR, that could boost GCC as well.

The GPL seems to be able to defend freedom just fine for all the other gnu software, even the modularly-architected projects. I don't see why it can't ultimately do the same for GCC.
"hates our freedom"

I tuned out at this point. Polemics tend to bore me and are a fantastic way of turning people off of the rest of your message. (see also: All FSF anti-Windows campaigns)
Mine is down also. This is actually slightly terrifying. What's standard operating procedure for recovering from a lost gmail account? And I don't mean getting the account back--I mean, your account is lost forever.
Down for me and another user.
Count me in. However, the Apps Status Dashboard shows that Gmail should be working, so probably you're right with the small subset affected.
Cute cat picture
This funny picture will tell you what is the best present for a cat.
Is down in Boston
No Google status update as of the time of the orignal post, but a quick Twitter search suggests this is a widespread problem: https://twitter.com/search?q=gmail
I generally ask any company about their "churn" rate. I think it would be pretty silly not to. You are interviewing them as much as they are interviewing you, why just ask easy questions that let them hide the actual situation?
Yep, same here... oops!
No update on the App Status Dashboard

http://www.google.com/appsstatus
Looks like a pretty widespread outage: https://twitter.com/search?q=gmail&src=typd&f=realtime
It's not working for me either, and there are widespread reports on Twitter of the same experience. Funny thing is, the App Status Dashboard shows green for me.
dfm down for me
yup, and talk too.
http://apportable.com/
It's down for my (paid) Google Apps account as well. Which is nice since it means I'll get to start the weekend even earlier than planned!
Google Music is also having some trouble. Does this affect other services as well?
We’re sorry, but your Gmail account is temporarily unavailable. We apologize for the inconvenience and suggest trying again in a few minutes. You can view the Apps Status Dashboard for the current status of the service.

If the issue persists, please visit the Gmail Help Center »

Technical Info

Numeric Code: 93
Top of the front page in less than a minute. What does it say about us that our first response is to rush over to HN?
But the drivers might not. There is likely an exclusivity clause if you want to be an Uber driver.

If all the calls are going to Uber, the drivers will too. If Gett/others have no drivers, they won't be able to build a base of customers.

I believe this is what the OP was referring to with network effects.
That graph doesn't have labelled axes, so it's pretty hard to glean much of anything from it accurately.

Assuming blue is Nov 2012-Nov 2013, that means that the starting point for 6 months ago is roughly 2/3 of the way across the blue. Eyeballing it, the height roughly doubles during that period, which would be consistent with the article.

Disclosure: I work for Braintree.
Well yes, that's the basis for Stallman's argument. If end users cared about free code, we wouldn't need to enforce it from the other side - nonfree software would have no users.
The FSF itself classifies all non-ad clause versions of the BSD license as free software licenses.
down for me & my coworkers
yup down in the UK too
Gmail Temporary Error (500)
>Which brings us to a very important point for all the young programmer dudes: when you all crowd into the same tiny city and bid up the rents into the stratosphere, your available dating pool shrinks to a puddle (yet another consequence of the skewed gender balance in tech. sigh.) All the pour-over coffee in the world doesn't make you happy when you can't get a date, and those artisan cocktails are far less cute when you're jockeying for position at the bar in a crowded room full of guys. If you're a 20-something male programmer looking for a date in SF, I feel badly for you. Hope you like BART, because you're going to Oakland (if you're lucky!)

So what you're saying is San Francisco is now highly optimized for homosexuals? (part of why I want to move there from Boston, to be honest)
I was going to do a blog post but never got around to it! I copy-and-pasted the DNS one we use into a gist (removing specific bits of our setup). We use DO, but this should get you to a point where all the bits are working and then you can do as you wish.

Excuse the Python code...I'm very much not a Python guy! https://gist.github.com/njpatel/8603816
Yup, was confused since it didn't say it was down there, then decided to check HN.
yep, it's out

http://imgur.com/7dempIL
apps dashboard says app but gmail is down for me and my co-workers as well.
Their app status page says it is up, but for me it is down as well.

http://www.google.com/appsstatus
Not working for me in USA and my coworkers in Brazil, definitely widespread
It also seems like the Google Product Forums are down.
Really? This seems to be a pretty obvious tactic, I have no difficulty at all believing that the New York and Boston offices independently came up with it. And what does the number of competitors have to do with anything at all? If you're going to pull this tactic against one, you may as well pull it against all of them.

New user (green name), named "techreporter", posting an intentionally inflamatory accusation ("directive from the top") about Uber. What's your game?
Say where you are located.

It is down for me, SF Bay Area (east bay).
Well, someone is having a really bad day @ google today.
Everyone's gmail in my Chicago office is down.
What are some relatively-cheap ways of hosting your own secure email server that's easy to bring back up in case of power outages or other common reasons for downtime?
>I guess the difference is that you can fork gcc and start a parallel project. Or you can just let it die as llvm and clang become more and more efficient.

And watch as over a decade or two you lose any control over what software you run that you still might have.
Some blogspot blogs are down as well.
China is probably about the dump all of their T-Bills...
It[0] doesn't seem like a free[1] license.

[0]: http://llvm.org/svn/llvm-project/cfe/trunk/LICENSE.TXT

[1]: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

Edit: Yes, it is a free license, as other's have pointed out.
Dead here as well.
Status says it's up, but my Google Apps email doesn't work. Good thing I've my emails backed up.
Interestingly the page says that it has no problem but I can't log into mail.Google.com or send any mail from my phone.
BSD is absolutely free software; it is not, however, copyleft.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/bsd.html
Google gets access to the restricted Twitter firehose; you'd think they'd add it as another monitoring source.
Very funny that me and my coworkers at nearly the same time opened our office doors to look into each others eyes and silently confirm that we were having the same issue.

Then we all turned around and went back into our offices to check HN to see if it was just us.

Very funny that everyone reading this did something similar. 84 points in 4 minutes.
Seven R290x doing on average 5.89MH/s is not enough to solo mine doge?
Brilliant. This lets you drive new downloads of your game/app with ads that actually bring the fresh user directly to the value proposition outlined in the ad? Finally some integrity in mobile advertising.
Started with me not being able to download an attachment about 7 minutes ago. Now down fully.
Gmail goes down across world
Took the words out of my mouth.

I suppose that the logic is "hey, I wonder if it's just us... surely someone on HN will complain the instant that things go south, better check there first."

Checking twitter never occurs to me...
Welcome to St Louis!

There is a very active Meetup group for entrepreneurs here - StartLouis. Please check us out!
I'm not sure it's a really a small subset of users. My personal gmail is down as are all accounts in two different Google Apps organizations I belong to.
Currencies typically aren't mined. If a currency can be generated out of thin air indefinitely that is usually a problem. You can actually "mine" paper dollars as well: it's called counterfeiting. In all countries the act of counterfeiting is unfair, leads to inflation and is almost always illegal.

The fact that the mining is tapering off for bitcoin isn't a problem. It's actually a feature that is designed to mitigate uncontrolled inflation.

The TRUE problem with bitcoin is that the nature of the coins themselves are changed by the way people perceive the coins. If people treat the coins as currency then thats what it becomes, but if people treat it as a speculative investment asset similar to a stock share then that's what bitcoin will become as well.

Right now nobody buys bitcoins to use as a currency. I can assure you 99% of bitcoin transactions occur because people are gambling on the fact that the price will go up and not because you want to use the coins as you use a dollar bill. Currently, bitcoin is much more a speculative investment asset then it is a currency. It is exactly like the stock market: A market where people bid on worthless paper for the sole purpose of selling the paper for profit.

In short the main problem with bitcoin is YOU and ME. As users of bitcoin the way we perceive and use the currency will change what it will become.
Our Google Apps for Biz is down as well.. 10 minutes or so. Getting 503's from Blogger and errors from Google Plus.

Any idea how many Google services are affected by this right now?
Yup - down for me in Texas. Horrible timing. Hopefully it comes back asap.
Wow I was just about to post this here. Front page already too.
You forgot that the object is supposed to be attached to very powerful rockets, so not in free-fall, and presumably made of some advanced material that can withstand the acceleration forces.

Additionally, you still haven't addressed the issue of atoms, covalently bonded, either side of the horizon (and not in free fall downwards, but being pulled from a rocket above so as to be slower than that.)
You'll never get a straight answer on that. If a company told you the truth, I imagine they're opening a door for a lawsuit. You'll get the standard "left to pursue other opportunities / spend time with family / personal reasons" bullshit. Same reason that references are a waste of time: unless a reference really loved you, they'll forward you to HR to verify dates of employment. In my opinion, a reference is never going to give you even a tiny bit of negativity, and will only serve to reinforce a positive impression.
This particular change, in it's complete form, would be challenging in my opinion. Many other kinds of planner changes aren't so bad though, but people (including me) tend to avoid them.

Executor changes are much less intimidating and lots of people make executor changes. In my opinion, the executor is the most approachable/easiest major component.

I would encourage people to not get intimidated though. For every project where I was determined enough, I succeeded. Tom Lane does especially amazing things, of course, but I think reasoning like "I'm not Tom Lane, therefore the planner is too hard" is the wrong lesson to take away.
Google Play is not working for me either
and if you make 6 figures your income tax alone would make for a mortgage payment in Texas. Property Tax in Cali is also pretty messed up with people paying almost nothing because they inherited their home from their parents along with their tax rate from the 60s.
New XAMPP / Apache Friends site released
Wow. There are more implications than I would have guessed with CSP. Thanks for pointing that out!
Anyone have the ability to write a quick Twilio app to notify people via SMS when it goes back up?

Would save us all a massive amount of time continually refreshing the page. I realize a browser extension could do this too, but SMS would be much better.
I know you're trolling, but I don't get what's wrong with modern Objective-C. I, for one, like it's sane design patterns & in recenter versions ARC goodness, blocks, categories, etc ...
It's down with technical info: "Numeric Code: 151"
down in sw ohio.
This reminds me of the early days of parental web control products like Net Nanny. I remember being frustrated that www.titanicmovie.com was blocked and asking my brother why. And then I learned what tits referred to :)
Just FYI, the interview book was originally released in 2000.
I was more,

Someone asked on IRC, I checked - it was down - then I was, It got to be on HN
the mighty beast falls... Down for me in Phoenix, AZ.
You're reading dismissiveness into my post that was not intended. Uber has done something remarkable, but it is not so novel as to justify calling everyone doing the same thing a "clone".

Not to mention Uber is not the first GPS-based car-hailing app. They were the first ones that were able to gain mass traction - which is an achievement in and of itself, to be certain, but also makes claims that "X cloned Uber" somewhat laughable. If we're going to split hairs about who copied whom, Uber is on the wrong end of that statement.
Screenshot of the error message I received just after entering my credentials: http://i.imgur.com/0my28zo.png

(I'm in the Midwest and typically hit the Chicago DC, I believe.)
Down for me from Philadelphia (via university network) as well.
Google Plus is down.

I don't think anyone's noticed yet.
East St. Louis is really a separate topic from St. Louis; the name is just coincidental. That said, when I lived in St. Louis, East St. Louis was the destination of choice for carjacker-rapists who would take their victims across the bridge and dump them in some industrial parking lot.

St. Louis is currently listed as 3rd highest violent crime rate in the country (Detroit is #1, but in years past St. Louis edged out Detroit for murder rate). I'm not saying don't move there, but just be aware that north St. Louis is a pretty bad area and the economy doesn't seem to have improved much, despite the massive investments into the central urban attractions like the Arch, Union Station, and the things listed in the OP.

Perhaps the main problem with St. Louis is the division between the actual city of St. Louis and the various suburban towns that surround it. In 1970, the city boasted a population of nearly one million, and just 3-4 years later it was down to about half that. City residents blame the population implosion on school busing which led to white flight. The burbs like Clayton, Webster Groves, etc., in St. Louis County ("the County" as people call it) had their own tax base and when affluent people flocked there, the city lost a substantial portion of its tax revenue.

Overall, I really liked St. Louis but the crime rates are pretty bad. The weather in the summer is also bad -- very hot and humid. You will need AC, and it doesn't come by default with every dwelling. If it were me, I'd be looking at Phoenix or Tucson, because of their proximity to southern California and of course the weather, but then I spent some time in Arizona and fell in love with the place. Cost of living is probably comparable if not cheaper than St. Louis as well. Can't speak for the start-up community in Phoenix, however; there's not much of one that I heard of, as of 2010 or so.
Fishing for Karma! :)
I love how their status page says they're still up. Who will watch the watchers ;p
not if Twitter has anything to say about it
blogger is down as well
The App Status Dashboard also shows that it should be working for me, however I get the server error.

West Coast, US.
down in Greece too
Hah. I don't think you'll find a city in the world that's more highly optimized for gay men...but that was true before the tech boom, too.
5 free alternatives to LogMeIn
Or a feature. ;-) Don't forget that el-get has been popular for years, and it pulls dev versions of libraries. I don't see any compelling evidence that breakage is more frequent for MELPA users than for those who only use Marmalade.

It's correct that we don't want our current packages to build off non-master tags or branches, and that's because we've a bigger picture in mind. It's a concrete goal of MELPA is to provide two parallel archives of packages: the existing one, filled with "bleeding edge" packages, and a new archive containing "stable" packages which have been built from the same upstream sources, but using existing version tags found there. We're making progress with this goal: see https://github.com/milkypostman/melpa/pull/1407, for example.

If we can pull this off, this will yield the best of both worlds: users will get known-good versions of packages, and at the same time they will be confident that the stable packages came from the upstream developer's source tree (which isn't at all assured with Marmalade). It will also make releasing a new stable package as easy as tagging a source repository.

Recent versions of `package.el` allow packages to be pinned to specific package archives, which lets those concerned about bleeding-edge breakage pick and choose between "stable" and "unstable" packages on a case-by-case basis.
With Gmail down, now I get a chance to catch up on HackerNews.
never seen a thread get so many votes so far. Damn you google
> The more you share, obviously, the better.

Better for who?

They obviously have a strategy, and your comment is rude and presumptive. This is why people often hate the press.
I tried them in the early 2010s. My biggest gripes:

* Hard-to-find, outdated, labyrinthine documentation.

* Confusing web front end.

* Flakey login. I had trouble accessing my account more than I should have.

* Flakey POSTing back to my server. Notifications came through late or not at all.

All of that together was a deal killer for me.

Granted, a few years have passed. So perhaps these issues have been corrected. But it would be hard to persuade me to use PayPal again.
Up in Brazil... fuckyeah!?
Down in Montreal!
The cynic will say "karma whoring" but I think it's actually because it increases the likelihood that something will happen.

For example, when there were coinbase issues, people wouldn't get responses for weeks. However, once a post about the delays hit the front page, the founders finally responded.

So no, I'm not surprised this happened and I wouldn't be surprised to see a swift response
...someones getting fired
Why is there no alternative webmail of the caliber of gmail? Is it a difficult problem? If there were such an alternative, all they would need to do is wait until gmail fouls up, as they did here. Then they'd have a flood of new users.

I can imagine a few reasons why there currently isn't an alternative, like network effects stemming from your contact list, or the fact that you'd have to change your email address everywhere and forward from your gmail account. But what are the real reasons?
No, they paid cancellation fees because you get charged when you cancel. This wasn't "Oh, sorry, here's $10."
All jokes aside, LiteCoin & Dogecoin(a fork of litecoin) have usage advantage or Bitcoin because it's transaction confirmation is ~2-3 mins vs 15-20 min for Bitcoin. 2-3 min is still not ideal, but it makes it better for the retail environment. The confirmation period checks if there is any fraud in the transaction. Bitpay for example takes on the risk of Bitcoin's double spend fraud (sending the same bitcoin to two merchants simultaneously). If there are some way to reduce the transaction confirmation time to seconds, then alternative crypocurrency could be widely adopted in brick and motor retail.
Well it's a selection bias. The many people who did not do something similar are not here to say so.
down for me too, in Ontario, Canada.
Currently down in Toronto, Canada
Down in the UK also.
You've got it exactly right, but I don't see why that would turn you off of the movement, or at least keep it in mind as you develop and use software.
RMS has a ideology of what free software is that ignores how much 'free' software actually gets delivered to users. As an example XCode is not free but since Apple can make an ecosystem around LLVM/clang it creates the profits necessary to pay developers to put lots of work into LLVM/clang that people can use under a BSD/MIT license.

RMS has a kind of natural law approach to freedom while most 'free' countries have a limited amount of freedom that people give up in order to have an organization that guarantees the remaining freedoms. RMS is much more concerned about maintaing ideological purity than implementing a less ideologically pure system that may or may not benefit users more.

Fundamentally once GNU code supports clang, GCC dev stops because it's codebase a horrible mess.
It's also a social movement that cares about what is the epitome of a first-world-problem.
I was in the midst of trying to upload files to Google Drive ... I guess I'll use DropBox for this one (I love having choices!).