skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Let's not pretend that he cared at all about rationalization. A request to take down a picture that you clearly owned copyright on (i.e. camera and mirror) would usually result in you being ridiculed on the front page of the site, with requests to other users to find more photos of you, where you lived and worked and to harass you.
> I would be rather hesitant to call this "fraud"

How exactly is this not fraud?
SF (SOMA)
There are a million "it is down for me" but is it actually up for anyone? A few text messages to friends around the US show they are all affected.

Edit: back for me in California, too.
My bad I apologize to everyone. My botnet gained consciousness, went rogue, and for some reason picked Gmail as the first target to take down.
I agree with most of what you're saying but you can easily deal with your second issue by contacting former employees and former co-workers of people working for the startup via linkedin. Many people feel this is a bit stalkerish but if I'm asked to provide personal references to a future employer I'm going to seek out personal references for the people I will be working with as well.
Not necessarily.

If a 3rd world farmer is hamstrung by licenses on any tools they have (and seeds they grow), that could prevent them from making those tools better, or crossbreeding those seeds. Same with educational software and material.

Just because the focus is mainly on software, which is admittedly a 1st world problem, doesn't mean the ideals can't apply to the 3rd world as well.
Ask HN: Is Gmail down?
my pc died, my vpn connection is down. my mac doesn't want to rdp to work. and now gmail down. it's a perfect storm
last line of the article "Only new customers affected"

so, at the moment there is no filter for old customers, but that will change.
Probably never thought such a thing would happen.
Can't wait to read the post-mortem about this one.
Actually that's how I noticed it was down. I stay in touch with my fantasy league through Hangouts, and was about to post the new 'Bad Lip Reading' NFL version that just came out.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRqKYXcL-2U
For all the startups screaming "email is dead & broken"... the top of twitter and HN might indicate otherwise.

(well, except for this very minute, because it actually is broken)
It looks like google decided that we should all take a break from the internet.
Here we go:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7116971
Checkout is not working

http://i.imgur.com/wDL6MzX.png
Same, weirdly I can listen to radio but cannot load my playlists.
One could argue that you were just being productive and doing your work.
Chattanooga, TN
Google voice also appears to be down. Outbound calls showing up as carrier's phone number, and dial screen doesn't show normal "dialing with google voice."
The government "asked" (read: pressured) some of the biggest ISPs to provide parental filtering controls to all customers, set at a broadband account level. For new customers these filters are enabled by default, but any customer can turn them off through their broadband account control panel (see here: http://i.imgur.com/dWxORfJ.png). There are quite a few smaller ISPs who have refused to implement these filters. There is no filtering at a country level and anyone can opt out with one click.

The difference between now and 1 year ago is that instead of being opt-in the parental filters ISPs provide are now opt-out (for new customers).
free-as-in-ideology is brilliant, it so succinctly captures my feelings on RMS.
> Is it bad I just don't care that LLVM has enabled non-free software? Because it has done a hck of a lot for opensource software.*

This presents an interesting (to RMS) quandary. I take it as a given that he prioritizes the freedom of software over its technical merits (as discussed in other threads). But, even just from the freedom perspective: LLVM increases the amount of proprietary software produced, and also increases the amount of free software produced. Does RMS consider this a worthwhile trade-off? Or does he think that less software overall, and less free software in particular, is favorable to more free software existing and also some proprietary software.
Southern California
When do you think the shift from a non-free to free market happened? What brought it about?
It is back for me in Missouri, USA.
passes the popcorn
You could use Kolab:

http://kolab.org/
How To Access Gmail When It's Down
I think an even better question may be, why isn't there a decentralized approach to email to compete with centralized alternatives like Gmail.

Imagine that you could still use your email when Gmail goes down, but you would lose a lot of features like autocomplete, search, recommended recipients, etc.
...and it's back!
http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/gmail.com - more accurate than google app status
This actually raises a slightly terrifying reality.

How much would someone have to pay you to never again recover your gMail account? I would demand just an absurd payout to willingly walk away right now, with all those contacts, messages, unread e-mails, organization, etc...

Scary how much faith we put in this free service.
There is a "UK Porn Filter". You can, however, opt out, and existing customers may currently not yet be affected. There is a fear that people will blindly choose the default "opt in" because of taboo and other social pressures. Also, in some cases it's very difficult to opt out (for example, I cannot opt out of my mobile content filter because I don't own a credit card).
If this were true than clang would be considered free software by RMS...

There is more to RMS's version of 'freedom' than just being able to modify the code, the AGPL is a great example of this.
Gmail is Up
Looks like it's back already.
Up for me too...back to work folks.
Very happy at times like these that I use the gmail offline webapp. I wrote a blog post about it a while ago, which I took down (deleted the blog) but still have the gdoc if anyone's interested:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1E0ApnDQyV0zRX6jhisBxHHuZ...
I still have my Gmail account hooked into Thunderbird. I don't actually use it to check my mail, but it keeps pulling it all down, so if Google's servers all catch fire, I lose nothing.
guys guys it's up again
Looks like Twilio rate-limits you to one SMS per second per phone number, so you'd need to buy a lot of phone lines to make this possible.
The app status @ http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=status&ts=139059123... just started showing Service Disruption for Gmail
Annnnd it's back up!
link to news, not rumors:

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230361280...
> "Can I see where I’ll sit?" Seriously? Again: it's a startup, things change.

I actually like this question. You can tell a lot about a company by whether they're thinking about how to integrate new people. If they say, "We put new people right here next to Michelle for the first few weeks so she can show them the ropes," that's a pretty good sign. If they say, "We'll find something," that's a sign that they haven't really thought about what to do once they have somebody on board.
SF Startups: Can you help some aspiring international entrepreneurs?
Hi Everyone.

I’m part of a team of students from Draper University of Heroes. This morning, our eccentric genius leader, Tim Draper, asked us to head to SF today on a startup scavenger hunt. We’ve been asked to collect tech business cards from around the city. If you can spare 60 seconds to have us swing by your office and collect your card, it would be a huge help! We’re a team from India/Taiwan/Canada/NY and we’ve just been in Cali a few days.

Many Thanks in Advance!

And if anyone should happen to have any questions about the amazing program at Draper University please don’t hesitate to let us know.
it's been fine for me
I wasn't able to access gmail (same error 500/93), so I just closed all my tabs and went on HN for 15 mins. I then tried getting on again, and it seems to be working for me.
Someone updates this title. Gmail is up again.
Yahoo tweets about gmail
down in India
Where do you find the time for side projects?
400 points in 15 min (can we get updates on how the votes are changing over time? it would be fun to go through those)
At least he didn't call it growth hacking.
No, I don't find it amusing. I think you missed the point. What is being discussed is _relative_compensation. Relative to additional revenue generated, or relative to what other professionals (doctors/lawyers) make. Keep thinking like a slave, you will be one for life.
I'm not well equipped to handle life without gmail.
Software developers are also end users.

In fact I'd say this is one of the largest practical benefits for developers when it comes to GPL.

If a developer releases their code under GPL and someone else improves upon it, they as end users will recieve the source code to those improvements with which they can improve their original code or simply adopt the improved version.
Not anymore, it isn't. As global outages go, that was quick.
Creating the archive takes some time and is it working during a Gmail outage anyway?

For OS X users, CloudPull (payware) is a good solution for a continuous Gmail backup. It's developed by Golden Hill Software:

http://www.goldenhillsoftware.com/
And this dear children is why gmail should be written in Erlang.
+1 for FastMail. Its interface is beautiful and blazingly fast (while GMail is unusably slow on my machine). It integrated trivially with my personal domain, including federated XMPP.

GMail jumped the shark when they forced the new interface on everyone, killing usability in the process. It doesn't deserve my eyeball time any more.
Charleston, IL
Its up !
Have you tried outlook.com?

Disclosure: I work for Microsoft (not outlook.com team though).
If only HN would go down at the same time so we really could get a ton of work done!
Same for me. YouTube already acted weird for the last few hours.
This has always bothered me.

I am not a point mass. If I can cross the event horizon and not know it, then there is a time when my feet are on one side and my head on the other. If signals cannot cross the event, how would I not notice my missing feet? If signals from my doomed feet can reach my not yet doomed head, then how is it the event horizon?
GMAIL WORKS
I don't think there are network effects, really. The contact list you can export just fine. I think it's just a good product overall.

- The search is very good, even searches within attachments.

- You can have large attachments.

- Doesn't run out of space and is free.

- Spam detection is flawless. I've rarely had anything important fall into spam. Alternatives like spambayes are not nearly as good.

- The threading is excellent. Most competing products suck at this.

- The keyboard shortcuts are comprehensive and save me tons of time. Most competing products suck at this.

- Labels and filters are super powerful and save me tons of time. Most competing products suck at this.

I don't like any of the non-webmail alternatives, simply because they are not webmail, and you can't get to them from everywhere.

Alternatives seem to be:

- http://roundcube.net/

- https://www.mailpile.is/

- http://www.horde.org/

- http://openwebmail.org/ (pretty bad)

- http://squirrelmail.org/ (also pretty terrible)

edit:

Looks like mailpile is closest to what I want, with a open source and modern python stack, super clean and simple UI, focus on the right features. But it's fairly alpha. On the other hand, they seem to have gotten some 160k of crowdfunding, so the main developers seem dedicated.

Fastmail also seems to be the best non-open alternative around, imho.

edit2:

Somewhat disappointed that mailpile seems to have reinvented the wheel multiple times by not using an existing web framework / search server.
I've been having intermittent problems with the GMail-integrated Talk / Hangouts client all day as well.
I could drop it without too much pain, honestly. It wouldn't cost that much for me to delete my gmail accounts.

But I learned to own my data where it matters and not sweat the rest ages ago. (Stopped compulsively "hoarding")
Google voice appears to be down as well.
not just gmail... g+, google app engine, cloud console, cloud storage, cloud sql, everything... GOOGLE is down.
Was briefly down in Montevideo, Uruguay.

It seems it was worldwide.
Seems to be affecting google docs and sites as well. My site loads but some of the image assets do not.
And more importantly, does their existence help or hinder the work done on LLVM?
now up
Can we not do this with every outage? When Gmail is back online, what is the value of seeing dozens of people claiming up/down for them?
It doesn't take every company, it realistically takes less then 30%.

I have never seen companies trying to pay more then the bare minimum to get someone to fill the role. Being generous, sadly, isn't in the DNA of the majority of organizations. They always attempt to pay as little as needed.
its back up in gandhinagar, india
if gmail charged $200/month, I'd tell Google to shaddup and take my money. That's how important it is to me. Hell, I'd pay $200/month for their search engine as well.

Would I pay $5/month for your SaaS? Most likely no!
Not at all when you realize that the developed and a large part of the developing world is absolutely dominated by computing and software. We're heading towards a completely digital society of ubiquitous computing in every conceivable part of our lives, and there is no denying this.

Whoever controls our software, controls our world. Free software isn't a first world problem, it's a gigantic and urgent issue. It's only a shame that so many people don't realize this.

Open source works for a lot of cases (I wholly think BSD licensing is just fine for Clang/LLVM and disagree with RMS on this one), but it's just a pragmatic element. Merely a part of free software. Something being open source doesn't imply any particular redistribution rights and ethical guidelines by itself.
And it's back! 2:24pm EST here in Ontario, Canada.
About me it indicates that I am totally dependent on Google for acquiring information about work-state and communication. I think that's OK, since I work here, but I'm not sure.
Back up for me in Chicago however I can't actually send an email:

Oops... a server error occurred and your email was not sent. (#793)
Yahoo seems to be enjoying this news: https://twitter.com/Yahoo/status/426795724542455808
Back now in San Francisco!
Thanks for reminding me to backup!
>Stripe doesn't need to share data if it doesn't want, but then criticizing us for being inaccurate is a bit ridiculous.

Ridiculous is to making ANY present tense assertions when your using old data, like in the title you don't say "Memo for Stripe for where it was 6 months ago" or any other indication of the time period at hand.

Your magazine is the only thing here poisonous for the ecosystem.
Google Plus is a big whitespace https://plus.google.com/
Per their SLA (http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/terms/sla.html) if it's out for more than 45 minutes (0.1% of January) biz users get 3 free days. Yay?
It's back for me - bay area.
Freelancers Vs Entrepreneurs – The Jedi Edition
No, they gave me that rate when I was doing just a few thousand a month in volume, before I launched my current SAAS business and switched off PayPal subscriptions. I'm getting that through Vantage now. I used to use FDIS, which initially gave me similar rates, but they had a habit of adding new fees every month which is why I switched to a processor that does interchange-plus instead of a rate table.

http://www.vantagecard.com/

I happen to have this picture I took for someone else that didn't believe me a few months back. This was the rate sheet in the paper application I signed to open the account.

http://i.imgur.com/Od6510E.jpg
There's plenty - we chose Roundcube. http://roundcube.net
User d1egoaz just hit the Karma Lottery. First and only submission: 435 points in 18 minutes.
google voice now working for me.
No one really noticed that
http://www.google.com/appsstatus

had gmail green for a long time, right now half orange. clearly not fully dynamic.
My Gmail is back … :)
RMS appears to believe that the creation and distribution of non-Free software is a categorical and unscionable evil, such that anything that anything that encourages it (whatever other benefits it provides) is categorically morally wrong, and anything that discourages it is categorically morally obligatory.
I guess it's intermittent here (Rio). Sometimes it loads, but it's definitely slow!
Looks like it came back up in the last few minutes.
> get the area you want to save in screen, click the search bar and scroll down to the bottom to see the option.

That is going to be really useful, it doesn't allow me to search even for something as simple as "home". It does let me zoom right in and keeps names of important landmarks intact like rail stations.

Thanks for the tip.
A friend pinged me over IM to ask if it was down. I hadn't noticed since I've been using the Gmail Offline chrome app. (Which I really wish they'd merge with the main gmail app)
Up and running in Europe.
Weird, I seem to be one of the few without any problems.

Edit: Gmail up, Hangouts down.
In what moral universe is offering someone a job (and a better paying one) being an asshole?

Additionally, this is gossip and presumption.
Dude. rms founded the freaking FSF. If he doesn't support free software, then what the hell is he doing? I think what he wrote here makes total sense, even if I use tons of nonfree software myself. I value convenience and performance more than rms does - to him, freedom is much more important.

I think his argument is just that the whole point of GNU and the FSF is to make free software - if they compromised on that, then what would they stand for? And I think that argument makes perfect sense.
When I clicked the "status dashboard" button I saw a board of green dots. I didn't trust that so I came here because I figured it'd be the first place I could confirm that gmail was in fact down.
"Extremly clear" would have been to mention the time-period in the title. And "pretty generous" according to who? you?
That was the more boring 19 minutes of my life
It was back up for me, but now it's down (as soon as I hit the Send button... boo).
A few good apps would cement the doge position. Its reddit growth is massive. I have ideas for a social network in fact, with screenshots. But I shelved them, but I have thought it through. Soundcloud tipping is something I personally would like to see (I think it has massive potential,) some way to see what artists have attracted the most tips, an easy way for artists to leave their tipping address which is not a blockchain address, or a link from each track that uses the referral to work out what track is being tipped (which the tipper confirms as correct) and generating an address on-the-fly.

[same with youtube, that is also a huge area of tipping. Who wouldn't leave a single url in all their tracks and videos if they receive tips from it, especially if the giver is recorded and the initiating media identified?]

Point-of-sale is also underdeveloped.
Up in Herndon, Virginia
I wonder if Google can be DDOSed; isn't it always?
Microsoft offers product to compete at many different levels of the market. Postgres is their competition for some needs, but I would think that if you need more advanced features like you mention it would be more of a comparison to Oracle and db2.
How would it be negligible? Seem like it can easily be done.
Both of my accounts just came back up for me.

Note - I have no inside knowledge of what's happening. I'm just posting my observations.
Ask HN: Can we save the entire Gmail data offline?
As most of you know by now, Gmail is down. Before today, I had never thought it could go down.
This has made me think that I should save all my Gmail data on my PC. Does Google offer that functionality? If not, what is the best way to do that ?
Using Gmail is no reason to ignore the necessity of a local backup. I use CloudPull (OS X, payware).

And please note that Gmail is not free for everyone, there are many Google Apps users.
I'm old enough to remember that gmail was largely the creation of one person; a person who was neither a programming god nor business guru. It's tempting to think that we could sit down and make an open source gmail clone.
I think they have to manually change it
I always prefer an explicit answer on financial runway vs. inferring based on the company's last round. That provides a more meaningful picture since there are things you may not be able to piece together during the hiring process (current burn rate, future hiring plans or other significant expense shifts, etc.). E.g. knowing they raised 4 months ago can be deceiving if they only have another 4-6 months of funding left.
Each one of us has the power to do something about it: Perform a Backup.

We should be downloading our mailbox with our contacts on a regular basis. I'm guilty for not doing this, but seems like an area that can use a SaaS.
Urgh. If only there were a simple protocol to transport mail between distributed systems so the world didn't grind to a halt when the central router died.
IPXE boot images at Rackspace cloud servers
In the specific case of google, clearly no. But I've seen cases, such as with coinbase, where a post on the front page of HN really did lead to action.

My summary: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6932224

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6929705

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5427985
I'm surprised the status board isn't nearly instant when this type of thing happens. I wonder if it's a manually switch or if it's automatically triggered after a certain number of regions become unavailable.
the problem resides on big companies.

I use google apps for email, and it's almost impossible to backup all the mails..
Of course there is definitely a leverage difference, but its impossible to completely eliminate that in a migratory concern. Argentina has very low requirments for immigration, so if an american went looking for work there, he wouldnt have nearly as much hassle from the government to do it. And even then, he would be less leveraged than locals: "you dont know the language as fluently" , or the market, or whatever.

About the argentinian wages: you can work from argentina to an outside company as well, which is what i used to do. Wages are less, but so are taxes and cost of living. If you want to get a US wage and live the Argentinian life, you are taking the best from one and the best from the other, its not a sensible comparison.

At least with what I see on the visa, companies have a lot to lose by "abusing" the power: a formal complaint could put the organization under review and that is probably not a walk in the park.

Overall, from the US market perspective, getting "slightly cheaper labor" is still much better than straight down outsourcing.
Let's do a quick head count to make sure everyone made it through alive.
aaaaand we're back
Extending the iPhone Simulator
Down in San Diego, CA
RMS is a proprietary software obscurantist in general and goes as far as opposing that proprietary software even be mentioned as an alternative.

He makes a lot of good points and is very aware, but his extreme ideological dedication is what drives people off. Which is a shame, because he's done a lot to convince and further adoption of free software in government and education, plus there's plenty of things one can learn from him.
Such a great wordsmith Steve Jobs was.

I'm so conflicted --- I like Richard Stallman's freedom defending approach, and I also like the capitalist fruits of Steve Jobs...

Anyone else on here want to help make a serious run for Nobel Peace Prize for Stallman?
It is back up for me as well but saying it's now offline on the status page.
"In a typical midwestern city, anyone who can afford it commutes to the central business district by car."

And, as I was walking about at rush hour, I expected to see a lot of car traffic, but the streets were practically empty of autos. The nearby freeway across the river was quite busy, however. I think the reddit thread had good things to say about the former decline of the city center.