skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Heroku is up. My production application on Heroku is up.

Heroku's provisioning, build, and remote console services have been down for a few hours. Luckily my production app is still chugging along pretty well. There was a time this afternoon when I wanted to restart one of my six dynos (because it was half-dead) but was unable to due to the API lockdown. That meant every sixth request was sent to an app server that was likely to barf on it for a while there. The dyno got better a few minutes later though.

Postmortem edit:

API outage is over after a period of about three hours (that I was aware of anyway). During this window my app's response time was about 1500ms. Now that it's over it's down to about 250ms, which is on the high side of our daily variance between 150 and 250.

Unfortunately for us, we pushed out a marketing newsletter right about the time they shut down the API. Looks like we're still getting decent sales though!

[1] https://status.heroku.com/incidents/633
That sounds like NIH syndrome.
Why would you want a Metro version? (I'm really curious, not just hating on Metro.)
Letter of intent. Pre-selling also works well in these situations to judge actual demand.
the board of overseers has a lighter touch perhaps but also the executive guillotine. even if the latter power is exercised rarely, the will of the overseers is final authority. to be sure the current overseers deserve no doubt in their moral commitment to YC, but as YC grows in influence, wealth, prestige and power, so too do its overseers, and the shadow of moral hazard darkens. actions impossible yesterday become intolerable today and invisible tomorrow.

as someone who cares about the future of YC, i am glad that a mechanism is in place to guard the integrity of the YC president, and i wonder mechanisms are in place to guard the integrity the YC board.
You say C++ has "been used to build the most horrible messy codebases in existence".

There are two kinds of programming languages: those that have been used to create horrible messy codebases, and those that haven't been widely used.
I like Chris and what he has done, but...

>>The Swift language is the product of tireless effort from a team of language experts, documentation gurus, compiler optimization ninjas...

Seriously? What is a "documentation guru"? What is a "compiler optimization ninja"? I find language like this so distracting and asinine that I had to stop reading. Am I the only one?
It would be interedting to have 'Ask HN' about drug use, especially correlated with age.

Jobs has taken many different drugs, but I can't stop wondering how long did he continue to do so. I really doubt he did any after age of 30 or so.
I don't necessarily agree. I think a big part of Metal is to address the limited resource space (such as RAM) that game makers currently face. If you have an iPhone 5S, you're usually fine -- but iOS 7 (and I'm sure iOS 8) takes up a lot more overhead than previous versions. In addition to paving the way for better experiences and better manipulation of the GPU, I also think this about providing game makers a way to better take advantage of the full iOS hardware stack.

That isn't to say there might not be another reason for them to forgo the Mac (whether it's waiting for ARM support or otherwise) -- or that Apple probably isn't actively looking at if/when it can bring an A-whatever to power a Mac, but that still seems a long way off.
Google will now name and shame e-mail providers that don’t support encryption
I think like most things in good UI design, the rule is:

"Make common user tasks as friction-less as possible."

Now, when a common user behavior is to use the main menu to switch between many different places in the app, then yes, hiding that menu from the user introduces an additional step. That creates additional friction. A permanent menu would be a good idea in that case.

But, if the most common use case involves a user mostly navigating from a main page (like a timeline or feed), then hiding the menu becomes less of a big deal. They will "organically" navigate through content from the timeline. Therefore allowing more space for the main element (the timeline) makes sense and increases the quality of the user experience.

As a plus, removing items from the screen helps make the action that you'd prefer the user to perform more obvious. That increase conversions in a context when you want the user to do certain things.

Lets focus on good UI/X design, which is often case dependent. No need to evangelize one particular approach and condemn another as being worthless (especially when you have weak reference studies).
What a great bit of dataviz. Would love to see similar for OpenSSL vs LibreSSL.
Mapping the Spread of Contagions with Social Network Analysis (2006)
Uncertain. I hope they do.

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.compilers.clang.user/492
Stop writing JavaScript frameworks
Chrome goes 64-bit on Windows
Ask HN: Startup lawyer in Los Angeles
I am looking for a startup lawyer familiar with the latest like SAFE in the Los Angeles area.

Does anyone here have a recommendation?
Heroku is not accepting new builds, but is still performing for my web apps that are deployed there. I would say it's not down, but that they're having deployment issues.
I know, I just wanted an excuse to post the Montparnasse photograph again. There was actually an air-brake related derailment in Canada just last January on a train carrying crude oil, though luckily without major loss of life this time. I was surprised to learn that electronically-activated braking systems aren't the norm.
Large installations with heterogeneous clusters, accreted during many internal reigns and rounds of partially-integrated M&A.
brilliantly clear explanation
"why startups need to focus on cash collection (accounts receivable), not sales."
For some values of universe anyway.
Very doubtful. They don't seem to be pushing productivity apps away from the desktop interface.
Probably because it allows connections that aren't perfectly secure, such as supporting anything less than 256 bits.
No, this is a very wise strategy that puts users' interests before short-sighted goals to increase revenue at all cost. Companies need to understand it, users' interest must come first, revenue will follow.
Ask HN: How screwed would you be if someone stole your laptop and phone right now?
Hypothetically of course & they are impossible to get back. What would you do, how much data would you really lose, could you get back online without two-factor auth.?
The 99.9% freak me out.

The huge problem with email encryption right now is that you can't reasonably make it mandatory (as you can see, a lots of domain do not support it) so it can be easily be stripped à la sslstrip, and there is no such a thing as HSTS. (Again, please, build pinning into everything.)

So an active attacker able to MitM can simply turn encryption off, and those 99.9% make me wonder if that happened to the 0.1%...
There is nothing like a right to free entertainment, whether free as in beer or free as in speech. If you thought I'm one of these people who just want to access everything without paying anyone, I'm sorry but you're wrong.

My biggest concern is that it will be easier for people who are against sharing to continue their way, and will not make it easier for people who are for sharing. I want to respect the decision of the people who create, but if it is easier for them to make sure we can't see their movie more than once, it feels like more and more content (and people) will be against the principles of sharing.
Heroku isn't down, only some parts of the infrastructure are disabled. I haven't seen any service interruption to my production app however (which would be the case if Heroku as a whole was down, which is what the title implies).
Transparency Report: Protecting emails as they travel across the web
Well, they could just serve privacy ads to people who were encrypting their communication.
I feel like swift is really a good view on the future of programming. And it seems that in the future we have really two different kind of software engineers. As we make programming mainstream and easy, we will see some new people able to use langages like swift and dev good apps without having the slightest idea of what is happening underneath. We used to have at least a common background between software engineers but I think it gonna slowly disappear. Is it good or bad? I can't make up my mind yet, but I'm really considering more and more to go back to lower level langages as I feel like the upper levels are going to be crowded by young generations.
It doesn't support only NIST curves, does it?
This is ironic, as Gmail has never supported email encrypted (or even signed) using S/MIME and digital certificates.
> Why would attachments be considered part of the body?

Because if you look at the low-level structure of email, "attachments" are just parts of a body that is in multipart/mixed MIME type.
I'm curious to know why it is that AWS can operate its API with a much higher degree of reliability than Heroku. They clearly have superior design and processes given the large difference in reliability.

Having been a heroku user for quite a while in the past I'm not surprised, these sorts of issues are sadly common with heroku.
Simple: the more your job is about helping others, the less it's about helping yourself.
If two people can't figure out stuff they should ask third to join them. Then you are having worthwhile meeting. Meeting that are not about figuring out stuff or about figuring out stuff that can be figured by two people are not worthwhile except socially. But if you need social meeting why pretend you are doing work?
This is similar to universities, where most of the trustees are extremely successful former alumni. I think that's the model they're trying to follow.
I love that his account's URL is http://www.quora.com/Bret-Victor-1, because http://www.quora.com/Bret-Victor was already dedicated to his name as a topic.
OK, that was fast!
Ask HN: Swift and the future of RubyMotion
I wonder what future a toolchain like RubyMotion has after the Swift announcement.
It's possible, but from my conversations with Google engineers in the past I'd guess (with no inside knowledge) that it was the result of a serious security evaluation of existing code.

Especially post-Snowden, Google is taking this very seriously. See these posts, for instance, about TLS weaknesses and implementation of ChaCha20 and Poly1305 in OpenSSL -- a non-trivial task:
http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2013/11/a-roster-of...
http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2014/04/speeding-up...

Also, the account you're posting from was created 22 minutes ago and has done nothing but post criticisms of today's announcement. Coincidence? :)
It may be true in the normal people market segment that it will increase sign-ups, but it's absolutely not true for me.

Admittedly I'm not normal, but it might be considering the market at which the site is aimed, and the type of people you're trying to get signed up. I have significant disposable income, and actively look for ways of trading that money for either time or knowledge. Having that modal pretty much guarantees I won't be back.

So ask, it might increase number of emails in your list, but will it increase your income?
Are You Ready for Apple's Next Hardware Platform? The iPhone
Does anyone have experience using Piwik (or another free analytics suite) for individual user analysis?

I run a fairly simple site with a few "interactive parts" and some calls to action, and it would be amazing to see individual tracks of what each visitor did. Do they read the PR text? Do they click on any of the interactives? Etc.

I'm using GA events now, and it gives me a rough idea of what is going on, but not the sequence of events, like what happened before they decided to click on the call to action.

Amy recommendation for tools that can make this happen?
Yes - the magic is stripped away by very clear algebra.
a good piece. one that I suspect resonates with more people than care to admit.
What a pity that you cannot install it side by side with other version of Visual Studio.
Well that means I will have to setup a VM for it :D
You're too late. We're past Peak Cupcake (http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/04/gou...), and well into the Cupcake Deflation (https://twitter.com/JustinWolfers/status/335017341295419394) era.
It runs really slow for me, like 1 FPS. Firefox 29 on Linux.
A load of colleges (e.g. Stanford) already teach iOS development. Swift and playgrounds will automatically chance how this is taught.
"Underneath" just means "the level below where I'm writing". This has pretty much always been true, the way systems are layered. You write install scripts? Apps? Libraries? rendering engines? Drivers? OS? Firmware? Chip layout? You probably don't really know what goes on 'underneath' your layer.
As you say, when it comes to the brain, there is only a modest relationship between how things feel and what damage is being done to neurons. Neurons themselves do not feel pain, so it is quite possible that you could take drugs that severely damage your brain without feeling their effects. Conversely, headaches and hangovers reflect irritation of the tissue surrounding your brain or of the nerves leading to it. While in some cases a headache can reflect a serious problem that affects or could affect the brain itself (e.g. meningitis), in most cases headaches don't imply damage to the central nervous system.

I am a neuroscientist (in training, at least, in a subdiscipline that's only somewhat related but does occasionally involve drugging monkeys). There is good evidence that frequent use and probably even rare use of MDMA is bad for brains. Neurons don't necessarily die, but axons disappear. It is not clear that rare use of MDMA can cause lasting cognitive impairment in humans.

While DrugMonkey is sometimes a bit of an asshole, I don't find much fault with his assessment of the current state of MDMA research in this post: http://scientopia.org/blogs/drugmonkey/2012/07/25/single-ora.... Note the caveat in the comments: although MDMA is probably neurotoxic, it is still not clear that the neurotoxicity translates to behaviorally meaningful deficits. There exist studies that have shown such deficits, but there also exist studies that have not. Most studies are correlational; I have yet to see a longitudinal study that provides convincing evidence that MDMA itself is a causative factor.
Maybe encryption/decryption could be performed in a separate, isolated process, which stack would never be sent? It seems like Chrome multiprocess architecture could allow for this.
This post is referring to the secure transport of plain text emails between email providers. I.e. protecting from a mitm between gmail.com and hotmail.com when somebody sends a normal email from one to the other.
Pentagon Wants a Social Media Propaganda Machine (2011)
The *other* swift programming language
Some workers are pretty interchangeable. If Sarah can assemble parts at the same rate as Sven, then the employer shouldn't care who does it, right? However, for specialized positions or ones that are knowledge-based, this doesn't work. Sarah is a lawyer who's been working on a case for the past 3 months, so it will take her much less time to complete the next step than Sven, who has been working on something else. So in that case, the employer would be pretty unhappy about Sarah wanting to work 30 hours a week, even if Sven is willing to pick up the extra 10.

Software developers with the same skills working on the same product are generally closer to the former than the latter, but it depends.

The other thing is that there are many fixed costs associated with hiring an employee. They need a desk and office space and computer, they need health insurance/unemployment, you need HR to manage all of this. So it ends up being much more expensive (and complicated) to have two part time employees than one fulltime one. If most benefits were decoupled from employment, a lot (but not all) of these costs go away.
That Netgear dumb switch? We've got 10-20 of those running 24/7 in user office spaces; they're all cool to the touch because they do practically nothing. Jam them into a tight, hidden space and safely forget about them forever.
but you may be passed over for promotion

Why single out "Small town America"? It wasn't that long ago that here on HN, many were calling for the resignation of the Mozilla CEO because of his political position on gay marriage.

Being an atheist in some small towns is no worse for your career than being a Fundamentalist Christian in Hollywood.

I say this as an atheist: Obnoxious toe-the-line political correctness is in all corners of our society.
Heroku is effectively down if your application uses the Heroku API for auto-scaling. It probably means that only larger applications are affected.
Or the decision has been made but it's not ready to be announced yet, for whatever reason.

Apple is notoriously secretive. They hate saying anything ahead of time if they don't have to. They could have committed (internally) to open sourcing Swift when they started on it four years ago, but they still probably wouldn't say anything until they day it happens. If they thought they could get away with it, they'd have kept the very existence of Swift secret until the public release, but they need feedback from third-party developers at this point.
None of these is inherently wrong and "unleashing a programming language on junior programmers" is a a bit of a cliche that can be levelled at any language.

I get to maintain some nasty c++ code at work that was two decades in the making under a succession of (at least) two separate teams and is some freakshow of cautionary tales with occasional comments in Russian for comedy relief. And I still think c++ is one of the greats and will be around (and alive) in 30 years' time and I'm apprehensive of people painting it as some cautionary tale.
Where Old Computers Refuse to Die: David Bunnell
Title is junk, article is overwritten, some claims are wholly unsuported by evidence, but there are some uncommonly heard ideas that make it worth a skim toward the bottom.
Ask HN: Any interest in Swift based server side web framework?
Apple has released python/javascript/c# like language for ios/mac programming. exciting things about swift is it runs way faster than python/objective-c but with ease of scripting language syntax. How nice it would be to use the same language for ios/mac development as well as server side component.

Imagine a ExpressJs like framework for Swift along with npm like package manager would bring a type safe but still expressive framework running in a mac pro.

Any thoughts? is HN has similar thoughts?
How to analyze traffic with SPAN feature
Visual Studio's naming scheme is pretty strange. They'll release this version in 2015 and the Visual Studio DLLs were previously on version 12.

So it'd have made sense to name it Visual Studio 2015 or Visual Studio 13, but they opted for 14.
This "end to end" encryption happens in the browser. Google is the browser. Google dont need your keys, they have the plain text.
Potential For Computer Invasion Of Your Life Called Horrifying (1977)
Because everyone's on Instagram
Interesting. Does FF 29 on linux perhaps have purely software graphics? It runs much faster than 1 fps on iphones and most androids, 60 fps on modern desktops in safari/chrome, and 30 fps on FF / osx.
Apple Allows Virtual Currencies in Apps, Opening Door to Bitcoin
Heroku has lots of single points of failure in its architecture.

Heroku also has no transparency into its architecture, which is why no site on Heroku will be able to be PCI compliant after Jan 2015.

I'm not optimistic about Heroku's ability to continue to be a leading PaaS.
Someone else pointed out that subject lines will not be encrypted.
Why do Bret V and Chris G get all the credit for something invented in the 90s? E.g. Steering programs with time travel (http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.33....).
I like metro better, with its full-screen/tiled modality, and find it really frustrating as well as unaesthetic to have to switch back and forth to the desktop. If Microsoft's own apps won't make the switch, it seems like they'll never manage to get rid of the desktop.
"We have completed the maintenance work. API functionality has been restored, and builds are resuming. We're continuing to monitor the affected systems." - Heroku Status

Builds are back up for me after a few hours of downtime.
The number 13 seems to get skipped for superstitious reasons.
65% Out, 50% In overall.. that's actually a lot better than I was expecting to see.
helping other is also an intrinsic reward which lowers the amount of money you need in order to be willing to do the job
(Another marketer here.)

From my experience, the HN crowd knows better. The author is just painting this a black-and-white issue (either you're doing completely oblivious and vague marketing, or you're doing nitty-gritty hardcore sales!). Of course, this doesn't at all reflect what companies are actually doing.

If the gist of the article is "speak more with your users," then I strongly agree with that. If it's "marketing is useless for startups," well that's simply wrong.
I wish my company's IT team took their jobs as seriously and provided on-demand, easy-to-read timelines for service outages along with regular updates. That way anyone in the company can see at a glance how reliable the infrastructure is and how quickly issues are resolved.

Of course, the IT team would probably hate being held visibly accountable like that. But hey, I guess that's why they are working in corporate IT as opposed to a well-known and successful cloud service provider.
He does not have a beard. I'm very skeptic this language will be successful
> no site on Heroku will be able to be PCI compliant after Jan 2015

do you have a reference for that?
Didn't know it had a term. I made a little comic about this: http://www.gkogan.co/blog/simple-user-acquisition-comic/
What graphics card/driver combination do you have? It runs decently for me with Firefox 29 on Linux, intel graphics (Sandy Bridge).
"the shadow of moral hazard darkens" - are you referring to this definition of "moral hazard"? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_hazard

If not, can you clarify what you mean?
> What is more harmful than an idea that inspires it's adherents to close their own eyes to reality?

There is a difference between Existence & Reality. Reality is based on perspective of Existence. Thus Reality is relative and seen by some as "mutable" (though I prefer the functional "immutable" view of a Reality).

So the adherents you are talking about are viewing Reality perfectly well. It's just their Reality is different from yours. Now if their Reality is based on an illusion, like the bad plumbing in the OP, there's the matter of changing their perception & Reality by exposing the illusion.

> But it would be free of disagreement born of irrational prejudice.

What is irrational is in the eye of the beholder & heavily influenced by culture. To your point, some cultures are closer to absolute truth (less based on illusion) than others.

However, even Rationality is based on a culturally defined Reality. What was Rational 100 years ago in America may not be Rational today.

As humanity progresses, we expose the truth and create more illusion in different areas of Existence.
From the one screenshot that shows window decorations, it looks like they're keeping those broken where they don't match the rest of your windows and don't change color to indicate active vs inactive?

I have multiple monitors and tend to have several programs open. I like knowing where my input focus is.
See the other gmail announcement today: https://code.google.com/p/end-to-end/
Read the PCI DSS 3.0 SAQ A-EP documentation (and some of the blog posts people have written about it).

Heroku has never been able to pass a PCI Level 1 or Level 2 audit, but as of Jan 2014 it will also no longer pass level 3 or level 4 SAQs.