Ask HN: Laptop recommendation? - <AUTHOR>

for someone who spends 8 to 20 hrs in front of a laptop each day, purchasing a new one is a huge decision. i need some help. Here's where I stand: macbookpro: wanted one but the new gen have a mirror where the screen should be and the old ones get hot enough to sear your skin
priorities are
	1)screen (LED, matte, 14 x 9 or bigger) 	2)touchpad/clit
	3)linux compat 	4)compact form
suggestions?
thanks in advance <comment><USER2> I suspect you'll get the same answers that usually come up when laptop recommendations are discussed here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=249579> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=268438> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=159153> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=197182>

(etc., etc.)

To summarize: the MacBook Pro + Thinkpad T/X series machines are widely liked, with people tending to make their choice between them on whether they prefer to run OS X or something else.

You may get a smattering of other recommendations, but honestly, any other manufacturer appears to be fairly hit-or-miss, while Apple and Lenovo tend to produce solid models year after year.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you don't like macs, the Lenovo Thinkpad T series are great. Dells are also fine.

Otherwise: <http://searchyc.com/submissions/what+laptop+to+buy>

<comment><USER4> Thinkpad T Series

I can swear by them, their powerful, built very sturdy and feels like a beast, not a plastic toy. Also their quite strong, I've dropped mine countless times, twice down the stairs without any problems. And their keyboards are quite nice for long hours of work. I am on my 3rd T series, T61p at the moment and looking to buy another in a few months.

Also Google around for coupons/deals they always have them, you can stack them very nicely.

<http://shop.lenovo.com/us/notebooks/thinkpad/t-series>

<http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/ThinkWiki>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> About three years ago was the summer of 2006. This was about the time the first Intel-based MacBooks dropped. _Everyone_ in the office bought one, it seems. Within a month they were all in the shop.

I bought a Compaq Presario v3000 with dual-core AMD Turion. It was my primary machine for three years. Not a single hardware issue to date. (Admittedly, shiny screen.)

The quality of Intel Macs has improved since then, of course. But if your wallet isn't that thick, from what I hear from friends who bought them, Compaq/HP still produce quality kit at an affordable price.

</comment><comment><USER6> You can get the 17" MacBook Pro (which is a 14x9 screen) with a matte finish (extra $50). If you don't mind a 2.66ghz proc (vs. 2.8) and a 320gb HD (vs. a 500) you can get one of the previous gen 17" pros for $2300

</comment><comment><USER7> I bought an HP dv9000 about 18 months ago and, aside from a few problems, the laptop itself is pure awesome. What I like most is the dual hard drives.

</comment><comment><USER8> When I bought my laptop a couple of years ago one of the primary considerations was disk drive speed. 7200rpm is zippy, 5400 is molasses, flash should be even better. I bought a Dell and have been happy with it. My adult kids all have Macs and are happy with them.

</comment><comment><USER9> The MacBook Pro line is solid, especially with the unibody construction. You also have the choice of running Windows and/or OSX. I converted after the Intel switch and haven't looked back.</comment>


Students discover bacteria that ingest ocean plastic and excrete water - <AUTHOR> https://www.physics-astronomy.org/2019/05/students-invent-bacteria-that-eat.html <comment><USER2> Fast Company has more details: _They aim to start field-testing this summer, hopefully in China, and to finalize a commercially viable process within two years. Wang hopes to remove about nine grams of plastic per liter of bacteria. She estimates that each 150,000 liter container of bacteria will cost about $20,000._

[https://www.fastcompany.com/3059629/these-students-are- devel...](https://www.fastcompany.com/3059629/these-students-are-developing- bacteria-that-eats-our-plastic-pollution)

</comment><comment><USER3> Called out as a Hoax on Facebook.</comment>


Show HN: Trialy, an Android library to create a free trial period - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/trialy/trialy-android-sample <comment><AUTHOR> Adding a free trial period to your app increases IAP conversion rates [0], but I've always found it a lot of work to implement a trial - once you're done developing the core of your app, you want to publish it as soon as possible, not spend 1+ days adding the code needed to implement a trial period. Using a low-tech solution like storing the installation date in the SharedPreferences works, but can be very easily circumvented even by non-technical users via uninstalling and reinstalling the app.

That's why I've developed a server-side solution that's very flexible (using offline grace periods, for example) and customizable - you can implement "try once per device" or "try once per Google account" trials, set custom trial periods, and even add multiple trials to a single app (one for each IAP, for example). I've decided to publish this as a library and open it up to everyone - you can check out the Android sample here [1].

Please let me know what you think and if there are any other features you'd like to see.

[0]: [https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2016/11/learn- tips...](https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2016/11/learn-tips-from- memrise-to-increase-in-app-conversions-with-pricing-experiments.html)

[1]: [https://github.com/trialy/trialy-android- sample](https://github.com/trialy/trialy-android-sample)</comment>


Ask HN: Apple is always right. - <AUTHOR>

H.264 vs WebM
H.264 pros: - technically more advanced - more widely used and embedded
WebM pros: - somewhat "freer/opener/non-proprietaryier/no licensing fees"
Flash vs HTML5
Flash pros: - technically more advanced - more widely used and embedded
HTML5 pros: - somewhat "freer/opener/non-proprietaryier"
On some level it's kinda paradox, if someone wants Flash to be replaced by HTML5 and H.264 to become the new web-video standard (if they use the above arguments for their opinion), no? <comment><USER2> It's about control. Like most companies Apple prefers not to be dependent on unilateral decisions made by other companies. Even though WebM is free it is controlled by Google. WebM has only one implementation and Google sets the direction of the project. H.264 is the result of cooperation of many companies and has multiple independent implementations. For a huge company like Apple the license fees of H.264 are not important.</comment>


Trump signs an executive order taking direct aim at social media companies - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/28/trump-social-media-executive-order/ <comment><USER2> Already a discussion about this:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23342161](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23342161)</comment>


Darpa gets $500M for "cyber technologies" from FY2012 budget - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/02/darpa-gets-big-bucks-for-cyber-tech-whatever-that-means.ars

<comment><USER2> That is a lot of cash. DARPA does do some neat things. Hmm, what would Hacker News readers do with $500M?

</comment><comment><USER3> Should have heard the talks at Schmoocon.</comment>


BP unveils plans to shift away from fossil fuels - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/aug/04/bp-dividend-covid-record-loss-energy-oil-gas <comment><USER2> I certainly welcome a company with as much experience in the energy sector as BP embracing renewable energy sources. However, I do worry about similar problems of a handful of companies controlling energy policy world wide. Be it in fossil fuels or renewables. While we make this technological transition, we should also be aiming to democratise and distribute power over the energy supply and industry.

Edit: Fixed grammar.</comment>


The Truth About Lisp - <AUTHOR> http://secretgeek.net/lisp_truth.asp

<comment><USER2> More masterful examples of Lisp trolling:

[http://web.archive.org/web/20070706135935/brucio.blogspot.co...](http://web.archive.org/web/20070706135935/brucio.blogspot.com/)

[http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Wyx0KPrm0gg/TGiGXfrwdRI/AAAAAAAAAN...](http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Wyx0KPrm0gg/TGiGXfrwdRI/AAAAAAAAANo/mDAfZ1JfTus/s1600/blubs.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER3> Hahahaha "It's lisp, paul graham, lisp, paul graham, all the way down."

</comment><comment><USER4> The article starts with a grand puprose namely "In which the truth about lisp is revealed, and some alternatives are enumerated."

But it ends up being one big collection of headlines and popular opinions people have about the language. This has to be the worst article on Lisp I have ever read.

Why would anyone without any amount of research choose to write on a subject?

I have to ask this : How can XSLT be a substitute for Lisp?

<comment><USER5> It's not a troll, it's a satire. Like this: [http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/ez2he/this_flash_rpg...](http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/ez2he/this_flash_rpg_will_change_everything_you_thought/). The point of any satire is to get you to notice that the comments you're making about the satire, could equally be applied to the thing it satirizes. In this case:

> [Most articles about Lisp] start with a grand puprose namely "In which the > truth about lisp is revealed, and some alternatives are enumerated."

> But [they] end up being one big collection of headlines and popular opinions > people have about the language.

> Why would anyone without any amount of research choose to write on a > subject?

(Also, on a completely separate tangent: XSLT can transform XML, and XSLT _is_ XML, so XSLT can transform XSLT. Thus, you could have "XSLT macros" that work in the same way Lisp macros do.)

<comment><USER4> >Thus, you could have "XSLT macros" that work in the same way Lisp macros do.

Yes of course. How could I not see the power of XSLT macros?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> And it's hosted on an ASP blog. Quite Ironic.</comment>


Source Superstore – the world's first outsourcing superstore - <AUTHOR> https://outsourceaccelerator.com/superstore/ <comment><AUTHOR> Outsourcing has been around for 25 years, but it hasn't yet penetrated the startup and SME scene.

Outsourcing was popularised by Tim Ferriss 10+ years ago, but this is only small scale freelancing outsourcing - its not 'real outsourcing'...

TaskUs recently raised $250m from Blackstone, which shows a rising interest in the industry.

Outsourcing can save up to 90% on staffing costs, and is probably the most transformative tool in business today. Yet, no one knows about it... and not enough businesses are outsourcing...

People aren't quick to outsourcing because the sector is plagued by uncertainty, unease and ambiguity...

Outsource Accelerator has responded to this by creating the first 'TripAdvisor' for outsourcing.

We have now just launched the Source Superstore which allows you to easily browse, compare and purchase productised outsourcing services. Now it is easier than ever to learn about, and and shop for outsourcing services.

Would love to hear your thoughts...

Why aren't more people outsourcing?</comment>


Surgeon saves boy's life by text - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7761994.stm <comment><USER2> Awesome work on the surgeon's part. Is there a reason this couldn't have been done by telephone, or that text was a better option?

<comment><USER3> I saw him interviewed on the news yesterday evening and he said the signal was too poor to communicate effectively, but texts seemed to go through fine.

Edit: I just wanted to double-check this so found a video of the interview - it was the voice-over that said the line was poor, not the surgeon himself: <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7762920.stm>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Actual sms text:

"dude u got 2 cut off yr lft arm lolz"

</comment><comment><USER4> Am I the only one who couldn't stop laughing at the quote "It was suggested that he had been bitten by a hippopotamus while fishing"?

<comment><USER5> Actually hippopotamuses are known to be quite dangerous and territorial. Don't ever go near one.

And yes, I do believe it is "hippopotamuses" (see [http://www.askoxford.com/asktheexperts/faq/aboutgrammar/plur...](http://www.askoxford.com/asktheexperts/faq/aboutgrammar/plurals))

<comment><USER4> Also, they're very hungry. I know first hand that no matter how many marbles you feed them, they still want more.

<comment><USER6> first hand?????

<comment><USER4> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungry_Hungry_Hippo>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Now _that's_ tech support. I have trouble just getting people to click on the "start" button by phone.

Hats completely off to these guys.</comment>


Ask HN: Are DDoS attacks a threat to the decentralised internet? - <AUTHOR> For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.<p>With the increase of DDos attacks (Frequency and especially volume) what do you think will be the reactions/adaptation results effects for the internet? <comment><USER2> ISP will filter more traffic by default. It happened with port 25 outbound when we got too much spam. It happened with whatever port local windows network browser uses.

They'll just add 23 to the default inbound blocks.

</comment><comment><USER3> I expect that things will evolve along a trajectory similar to spam filtering. Most email is spam and most internet traffic will be noise. After several years spam filtering has become efficient and after several years junk packets will be filtered as well.

The reason I expect that is that that's what makes economic sense for company's at the scale of those attacked.</comment>


Eating carbs for breakfast could make you meaner - <AUTHOR> http://www.prima.co.uk/diet-and-health/diet-plans/news/a39217/how-breakfast-affects-personality/ <comment><USER2> "We all know that breakfast is the most important meal of the day". I stopped reading after this...</comment>


Florida bill accidently bans any device connected to the Internet - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2013/07/09/tech/gaming-gadgets/florida-slot-machine-law

<comment><USER2> Florida's new, expanded definition of a slot machine includes "any machine or device or system or network of devices" used to play games of chance or skill, which can be activated by not just inserting money, but an "account number, code, or other object or information." \- Doesn't exactly show a real solid understanding of this whole "Internet Thing", and it's importance to the economic growth of the state of Florida...

</comment><comment><USER3> Do we need unit and integration tests for the software that we call legislation?

<comment><USER4> I fear nothing short of a generalised type system will suffice.</comment></comment>


The Caging of America - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2012/01/30/120130crat_atlarge_gopnik?currentPage=all <comment><USER3> A close family member of mine was just arrested for possession of marijuana. They allegedly had a sizable amount, more than your normal 1/8th of an ounce, but nothing obscene. Due to a felony 10 years ago when they were a teen, they are looking at 5-10 years. Granted, Oregon is known to go easy on pot offenses, however even 6 months in jail is ridiculous. The real cost however, is not having their prior felony expunged - it will be another 10 years before that is a possibility, well into middle age for this person :( Try finding yourself a job with a felony record. If you can, it is probably paying a wage that will doubtless encourage the same illegal behavior that landed you a felony in the first place. When your only hope the rest of your life won't be utter shit is getting off on a technicality, something is messed up.

<comment><USER4> How will his wage _doubtlessly encourage_ him to engage in illegal behavior? I've worked plenty of overtime and minimum wage jobs and at no point did that ever cause me to consider committing a felony or engaging in illegal behavior. Your friend sounds like he's in the situation he's in because of _choices_ he made, not because society did something wrong.

<comment><USER5> It's a bit more complicated than that - when someone works under unjust conditions to make ends meet _because_ of a law perceived to be unjust, the commitment towards respecting other laws is lessened.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Other comments asked how incarceration rates could be reduced in the United States. One way would be for many of the forty-some other states to follow the example of the few states, including Minnesota, which have set up determinate sentencing based on severity of the offense of conviction and the criminal history of the convicted defendant.

[http://www.northfieldnews.com/content/understanding- minnesot...](http://www.northfieldnews.com/content/understanding-minnesotas- determinate-sentencing-guidelines)

<http://www.doc.state.mn.us/crimevictim/terms.htm>

I toured a prison in Minnesota in the mid-1980s, as an interpreter for an official visitor from another country. The visitor was amazed to learn that Minnesota then (and now) spends LESS per taxpayer on putting convicted criminals into prison, while spending substantially MORE per prisoner. Only the most serious criminals with long histories of offenses are imprisoned. Most convicted criminals receive sentences that involve community corrections but not imprisonment. Minnesota's maximum-security prison, the one I toured, had a population of inmates 97 percent of whom had killed at least one other human being before being put in that prison. The foreign visitor was a human rights lawyer, and he was actually amazed at how humanely the prisoners were housed and treated in that prison. (He had visited many prisons in his own country, and none were as well funded as the prison in Minnesota.) A prison can be properly staffed and funded, and not too crowded, if a whole state's criminal justice system is geared toward imprisoning only persons who must be kept out of general society, responding to most forms of criminal behavior with sentences that don't include prison time.

<comment><USER7> But what if our system is actually erring in the _other_ direction?

There are undoubtedly quite a few Americans who are in correctional supervision but shouldn't be. There are also quite a few Americans who should be in correctional supervision, but aren't. (For a bare start, suppose we believe the commonly quoted meme that there are 1 million gang members in America.)

In either case, I think the most basic question is: why are there so many criminals? What about the present-day American system of government is so amazingly criminogenic?

For instance, one commonly quoted "root cause" is our proverbial callousness to important issues of social justice. Is an absence of social justice the problem? Let's consider some evidence.

Robbery is a pretty good "index crime." For instance, in 1900, there was about 1 robbery per day in all of England (source: [http://www.parliament.uk/documents/commons/lib/research/rp99...](http://www.parliament.uk/documents/commons/lib/research/rp99/rp99-111.pdf)). This is roughly a factor of 35 lower than current reported crime rates (same source) in the ol' Sceptered Island - assuming you trust HMG's statistics. And all crime statistics in all countries everywhere are generally admitted by all informed observers to be utterly buggered to hell. (example: [http://www.villagevoice.com/2010-05-04/news/the-nypd- tapes-i...](http://www.villagevoice.com/2010-05-04/news/the-nypd-tapes-inside- bed-stuy-s-81st-precinct/))

In any case, you may compare the public concern for social justice in England, in 1900 and 2000, and note precisely the reverse of the correlation predicted by the hypothesis.

Japan has extremely low crime as well, and is probably the least Americanized of all First World nations today. Clearly, it is physically possible for the State to eradicate crime. Clearly, the American system of government, at home or abroad, seems to carry with it unusually high levels of crime and disorder, at least by historical First World standards.

But why? If what we need isn't more social justice, what is it?

(edit: I just checked and this parliament.co.uk link isn't the right one for my robbery numbers - I'll have to look. Still, money graf - "The number of indictable offences per thousand population in 1900 was 2.4 and in 1997 the figure was 89.1." Two orders of magnitude any way you slice it.)

<comment><USER8> This is why you are being downvoted:

You ask two unrelated question to which you provide no proof.

>But what if our system is actually erring in the other direction?

Okay. _How_? Every other nation on earth has lower incarceration rates, and a fair number of them are safer than the US.

So given that that are still criminals on the outside, the answer is that you need to become more efficient at apprehending the right people - not increase incarceration rates.

>I think the most basic question is: why are there so many criminals? What about the present-day American system of government is so amazingly criminogenic?

Criminals break laws; laws are often injust. The War on Drugs, and mandatory sentencing.

>If what we need isn't more social justice, what is it?

This is entirely unsubstantiated by anything you wrote preceding this sentence. Frankly, it's kind of confused.

<comment><USER7> Perhaps someone else can parse this better than me.

I can make sense of one of these lines: "Criminals break laws; laws are often injust. The War on Drugs, and mandatory sentencing." I think behind this line is lurking the belief that America's prisons are full of Humboldt County potheads, or something like that.

The typical American in jail for drug offenses isn't a system administrator who made the mistake of toking up one night. It's a gang member whose real offense is being a worthless thug. The prosecutors and LEOs who busted him are experts in the technical details of putting worthless thugs in jail, to the extent that this remains possible.

Nonetheless, all major American cities retain a very substantial population of worthless thugs. If you're unaware of this reality, I strongly recommend this Chicago cop blog: <http://secondcitycop.blogspot.com/>. Or you could watch "The Wire" - I hear it's available on DVD.

Last month, my wife and daughter were leaving a child's birthday party in the outer Mission, SF, when bullets flew down the street past them, followed by a worthless thug who ran past them gun in hand. You can argue that Bayshore Blvd. is a lousy place to put a space that hosts children's birthday parties, and I'd agree. Still, it's my country - why shouldn't I feel safe in it, anywhere, day or night?

<comment><USER9> "worthless thug" has some pretty racist overtones. I'll make to watch more of The Wire to get real info on the causes of crime in America.

<comment><USER10> Huh? _Racist?!_

Do you mean racist by reference to the etymology of the word 'thug' (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thuggee>)?

That's a pretty obscure use of the 'race card'...

<comment><USER11> Are you feigning ignorance here or did you actually think the original comment's repeated pejorative of 'worthless thugs' was talking about white people?

<comment><USER7> Not in San Francisco, but there are plenty of white "worthless thugs." See under: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chav>. The American equivalent starts around 80 miles east of here and doesn't let up until Westchester County - <USER2> exaggerate, slightly. See under: "Winter's Bone."

<comment><USER11> Except people don't casually malign them as "thugs". "Rednecks", maybe. In the context of the original comment, there was definitely a racial component and liberal use of the word "worthless".

You can dispute whether that's racist, maybe, but being shocked at the suggestion? It quite clearly has a racial element.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I admit I've only skimmed the article and the comments on HN, but I don't think that either have mentioned the CCPOA (California Correctional Peace Officers Association). It's basically a union of prison guards who are heavily pro-incarceration. The quick version is that stricter laws produce more prisoners which leads to more money for prison guards and their organization. The story is better told here:

[http://ordinary-gentlemen.com/blog/2011/06/05/the-role-of- th...](http://ordinary-gentlemen.com/blog/2011/06/05/the-role-of-the-prison- guards-union-in-californias-troubled-prison-system/)

The phrase "prison-industrial complex" leads to some interesting reading, as well.

<comment><USER13> Private prison companies such as Wackenhut stand to profit in the billions from increased rates of incarceration. There is absolutely _no question_ about who benefits the most. Please take your blatant anti-worker agenda and shove it.

<comment><USER14> How does that fact make parent's point untrue? He never said the workers stood to benefit 'more' than Wackenhut; it's not clear what that would even mean. Clearly both the unions and the contractors both are in favor of increased incarceration, that's not very surprising.

<comment><USER13> It makes his point irrelevant; those workers' interests pale in comparison to that of the owning interests of those corporations. He presents unions as the sole cause of the problem, which is not only intellectually deceitful, but _quite incorrect_. More importantly, it reveals an underlying agenda that needs to be challenged as strongly as possible in civic discourse.

In fact, private prisons and unionized guards aren't even on the same _side_ , due to the former hiring largely non-union labor. And the private prison industry has been growing and lobbying faster than ever:

[http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2011/09/26/328486/us- privat...](http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2011/09/26/328486/us-private- prison-population-lobbying/?mobile=nc)

<comment><USER15> " He presents unions as the sole cause of the problem" - When did he do that?

<comment><USER13> When he posted a comment _in which he said essentially that_ , and in which he referenced a one-sided article that goes to extreme lengths to attack blue collar workers' retirement plans and their own collective efforts at bettering their economic self-interest.

The point should be clear as day by now; if you can't extract the basic message and argument from his comment then you have no basis for inserting yourself into the debate. Please don't waste any more of my time.

<comment><USER12> This was not my basic message at all.

I'm here telling you this right now.

They are a special interest group that promotes incarceration. There are others, as well.

People are far more aware of private prisons than they are prison guard unions. I've known nasty things about private prisons for 10+ years. I found out about CCOPA and other similar entities in the past 1-2.

As stated earlier, I was simply presenting something that I figured people here likely hadn't seen.

You're too emotional to reason with, I'm afraid.

I'm done.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> 6 million people is roughly the working age population of some of the smaller countries in Western Europe. Thinking about the massive waste of resources and the cost in terms of human lives extinguished (6 million people in prison translates to ~85,000 peoples lives wiped out every year, and that's only the inmates not the guards and whoever else is involved in the system) is instantly depressing.

Gruesome.

Here is a good graphic to illustrate how bad it really is:

[http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/04/22/us/20080423_PR...](http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/04/22/us/20080423_PRISON_GRAPHIC.html)

<comment><USER17> One should probably subtract off a more average incarceration rate first. There is, alas, a subset of people who are behind bars because if they aren't, they truly will net an even _larger_ loss to society.

<comment><USER18> I wonder how many non-violent criminals are arrested for every 'truly dangerous' menace to society.

<comment><USER19> From what I've read and heard, one of the biggest contributions to prison population growth has been the advent of the predicate felony ("three- strikes") laws in recent decades. These days, incarceration is like compounding interest. Get locked up once, and the next time you so much as look the wrong way at the wrong time, you're back in prison serving an even more severe sentence. In this way, someone with a string of nonviolent offenses does the same time as a violent criminal.

Prisons also serve to harden the imprisoned -- helping to ensure our country's record-high recidivism rates. Prison conditions are brutal. Gangs run daily life, and failure to join a gang can mean rape, severe injury, or even death. Of course, joining a prison gang means an indoctrination into the world of hard-core violence and reprisal. It's pretty hard to go to prison a relatively nonviolent person and emerge the same way.

Another big trend over the last 30-odd years has been a marked shift in society's -- and our justice system's -- philosophical view of the prison itself. Many years ago, prisons were seen as places to reform criminals -- not just to lock them away for a certain number of years, but to adapt them to a successful return to society upon completion of those years. These days, reform and adaptation aren't on the agenda. (Hell, good luck trying to find a stable job in post-release society with a conviction on your record). Modern prison is purely about locking people away and treating them as hopeless causes. More often than not, that hopelessness becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

To be fair, some people in our society really are lost causes. There are violent psychopaths rotting in prison who should probably stay there and rot. But today's criminal justice system paints all offenders with that brush. Perhaps I'm a softie, but I choose to believe that a significant fraction of the 6 million is not beyond redemption.

<comment><USER20> > From what I've read and heard, one of the biggest contributions to prison > population growth has been the advent of the predicate felony ("three- > strikes") laws in recent decades.

Actually, three-strikes laws and the like aren't new, they're returning. They were abolished in the 60s.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Before I went to law school, I had a somewhat conservative view of the justice system (they deserve to be in there!) But the more you learn about the prison system in the U.S. the harder it is to see it as anything other than a crime in and of itself.

D.A.'s being elected officials, try to railroad people accused of crimes to get them in jail. Legislatures looking to be "tough on crime" have jacked up the penalties for offenses to ridiculous levels, so much so that most people would be foolish to take their chances at trial instead of pleading guilty in exchange for a lesser sentence. Forensic "science" is anything but, with error rates in finger printing being in the 7-8% neighborhood and rising from there. Handwriting, hair samples, and bite mark analysis have error rates in the 40-60% range.

As the article mentions, the system elevates procedure above everything else. If you have a busy, poorly-paid public defender who doesn't present any evidence in your case and actually argues in favor of the death penalty in the sentencing hearing (a real example) the Supreme Court has no sympathy for you if that attorney also forfeits an avenue for post-conviction relief by failing to make a particular argument at the right time.

</comment><comment><USER22> The article makes the good point that reform won't happen with one piece of sweeping legislation, but rather with patchwork improvements to the system.

What would you do to reduce incarceration rates?

I would start with a reform of drug laws inspired by Portugal [1]. We're not sure if the same solution can scale to the size of the US, but we can introduce reform incrementally, starting with the decriminalization of Marijuana. (Which I think most would find agreeable.)

Education reform is important too. Obama is pushing reform to get states to increase the age of required education to 18 [2]. This sounds like a good idea on paper...we'll have to see how it pans out. His push for increase utilization of community colleges also makes sense, since they provide a decent education for the increasing number of Americans who can't afford college.

1: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_Portugal> 2: [http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer- sheet/post/obama-...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer- sheet/post/obama-states-should-require-kids-stay-in-school-until-18-or- graduation/2012/01/24/gIQAPg63OQ_blog.html)

<comment><USER23> I think that removing the power of prison guard unions is something that will need to be addressed first.

Fore example:

Correction officers' unions are powerful forces in states like California and New York; they push for the construction of more prisons and for longer sentences for criminals (so that there are more people for correction officers to guard). Their activities in California are a case in point. In the last eight years they have spent $10 million on state politics — either in direct contributions to politicians or in spending on ballot initiatives relating to crime and punishment. They have mounted full-scale political campaigns. For instance, the California corrections union has attacked public officials, such as the Los Angeles district attorney, who supported an alternative to the union-favored "three-strikes law." Indeed, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy in February of this year noted that "the three-strikes law sponsor is the correctional officers' union and that is sick!" In 1999 the union even successfully opposed a proposal to permit the California attorney general to prosecute brutality in prisons.

[http://www.hoover.org/publications/policy- review/article/432...](http://www.hoover.org/publications/policy- review/article/43266)

<comment><USER24> <http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=CXW>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The fundamental problem is that there is a whole industry, and corresponding political lobby, built on incarcerating people.

<comment><USER26> I nthe land of the free, there is an entire industry built around destroying freedom.

Fuck the prison industry. Every single politician who cohorts with the prison lobby should be called out and shot.

Yes. Shot.

<comment><USER27> Ironically, shooting people is one of the activities that freedom is taken away for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> _Crime ends as a result of "cyclical forces operating on situational and contingent things rather than from finding deeply motivated essential linkages." [...] Curbing crime does not depend on reversing social pathologies or alleviating social grievances; it depends on erecting small, annoying barriers to entry._

Funny how this comes up again and again in so many different contexts. Minor bottom-up tweaks are more effective than top-down policies. In one of Joel's classic articles he talks about how small UI tweaks to forum software completely change the course of a community. Tiny changes in economic incentives have massive effects. It's a great lesson to be applied in so many fields.

</comment><comment><USER29> One problem with putting so many people in prison, and keeping them there for so long, is that you end up with a large number of prisoners with dementia like illnesses.

The routines of prison help to mask some symptoms of those illnesses. And because some of these prisoners are in for serious, violent, crimes it's hard to release them to nursing homes.

Here's one prison's response:

([http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/health/dealing-with- dement...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/health/dealing-with-dementia- among-aging-criminals.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=all))

I submitted it to HN here: (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3649276>)

</comment><comment><USER30> _By "supply side criminology," he means the conservative theory of crime that claimed that social circumstances produced a certain net amount of crime waiting to be expressed; if you stopped it here, it broke out there. The only way to stop crime was to lock up all the potential criminals._

Very odd to describe this as a "conservative" idea. Most conservatives I know object to this sort of sociological determinism, instead embracing the idea of individual responsibility. If anything, they believe in the power of (slowly) malleable culture and institutions to shape outcomes, rather than accepting bad outcomes as inevitable.

<comment><USER31> Unfortunately for most nowadays a conservative and a dogmatic neo-con are the same thing. Only two parties, remember?

<comment><USER32> The 'con' in neo-con stands for 'conservative' (unless I'm horribly misinformed). I'd say that it's less of a matter of 'there can be only two parties,' then it is of them being associated with each other by trying to use such a generic term to describe themselves.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Why don't prisons get their asses sued off for allowing inmates to be raped?

<comment><USER34> 'Sovereign immunity' (states are liable only for what they choose to allow themselves to be liable for), waivers for private prisoners, and probably some sort of 'reasonable precaution' clause in liability legislation would be where I would start looking for the reason why not.

<comment><USER35> I would file on civil rights grounds, that incarceration where rape is known to be highly likely amounts to cruel and unusual punishment.

<comment><USER36> However, that would fall into the trap mentioned in the article: that it's not unusual.

<comment><USER37> Rape is an unusual form of punishment in that the courts never ask for it to be applied.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> _The accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is just as startling as the number of people jailed: in 1980, there were about two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to seven hundred and thirty-one. No other country even approaches that. In the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education._

If the New York Times is to be believed, the crime rate has nearly halved since 1980 [1]. Obviously it needn't follow that the increase in the prison population caused this, but the author's unwillingness to even explore the idea seems awfully incurious.

[1] See the "In the U.S." tab on this graphic [http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/04/22/us/20080423_PR...](http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/04/22/us/20080423_PRISON_GRAPHIC.html)

<comment><USER39> It's addressed on the second paragraph of page 5.

 _While the rest of the country, over the same twenty-year period, saw the growth in incarceration that led to our current astonishing numbers, New York, despite the Rockefeller drug laws, saw a marked decrease in its number of inmates. "New York City, in the midst of a dramatic reduction in crime, is locking up a much smaller number of people, and particularly of young people, than it was at the height of the crime wave," Zimring observes. Whatever happened to make street crime fall, it had nothing to do with putting more men in prison._

<comment><USER40> NYC is not insulated from the rest of the country, which did lock up dramatically more people. As neighboring cities and states imprisoned large numbers of people, it would have an effect on NYC street crime.

<comment><USER41> That's the kind of Derridean approach to Criminal Justice that got us to where we are now. You're saying the same thing, though: a cities crime rate is entirely dependent on the policies of surrounding cities and not on itself. Think about what you're suggesting: even if NYC experienced a crime drop while also housing fewer inmates, it's only because their own policy was ineffectual and the surrounding cities picked up the slack (or something).

<comment><USER40> Indeed, many policies work locally but not globally. Harassing criminals and putting them on busses leaving town appears to work, but only locally.

Anyway, the story seems to say that since there was a period of time in which NYC crime decreased while NYC incarcerations also decreased, the theory that incarceration reduces crime is refuted. Hardly.

<comment><USER41> I live in a city where people are said to commute in from the outer parts in order to commit crimes, but the assertion is only ever backed up by anecdata.

<comment><USER42> Yes, I've heard this as well, and it is absolutely terrible.

I am told that they are international in scope and go under the gang-sign of 'Bankers'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> This reminds me of an article Time Magazine did on Norway's Halden Prison.

Essentially, when the Norwegian justice system treated their inmates more humanely, their recidivism (crime after prison) rate became 40% less than the US and the UK.

Similarly, in Norway, there are only 69 inmates per 100,000 people, compared to 753/100,000 in the United States.

[http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1986002,00....](http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1986002,00.html)

</comment><comment><USER44> _The normalization of prison rape—like eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows—will surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized._

"Surely"? Let's start with "hopefully" and rigorously work our way up to "probably."

</comment><comment><USER45> Reminds me of an Econmist article from a while back [1]. The theme being shared with the two being: systems we set up to punish _criminals_ rarely do just that.

[1] <http://www.economist.com/node/14165460?story_id=14165460>

</comment><comment><USER46> Reading this reminds me of this quote: "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." - Buckminster Fuller

and another darker vision: "For if you [the rulers] suffer your people to be ill-educated, and their manners to be corrupted from their infancy, and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded from this, but that you first make thieves [outlaws] and then punish them." Sir Thomas More (1478-1535), Utopia, Book 1

Here's an idea for a frighteningly ambitions startup: Kill the prison- industrial complex! How? Fight crime! It costs a lot of taxpayer money and social wealth to keep things the way they are. Ostensibly the goal is to keep people safe from criminals and reduce crime opportunities.

A friend of mine was mugged on the street for his iPhone last night. He was stabbed in the leg when he fought back (mistake but he's ok thankfully). I wonder if a few high-res web-cams on the street would have kept the attackers at bay?

How about a Peer-to-Peer police/surveillance state? Found these startup ideas tonight:

idea: turn my webcam into a security cam [1] [http://ideashower.posterous.com/idea-turn-my-webcam-into- a-s...](http://ideashower.posterous.com/idea-turn-my-webcam-into-a-security- cam)

idea: millions of sensors / millions of surveys [2] [http://ideashower.posterous.com/idea-millions-of-sensors- mil...](http://ideashower.posterous.com/idea-millions-of-sensors-millions-of- surveys)

<comment><USER47> > How about a Peer-to-Peer police/surveillance state?

Britain has been doing the experiment for you and is generally regarded as the most surveilled western society.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance#United_Kingdo...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance#United_Kingdom)

Sensationalist article by the Daily Mail:

[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1205607/Shock- figure...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1205607/Shock-figures- reveal-Britain-CCTV-camera-14-people--China.html)

Some articles on the resulting (in)effectiveness of having the cameras:

[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/6082530/1000-CC...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/6082530/1000-CCTV- cameras-to-solve-just-one-crime-Met-Police-admits.html)

[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/telegraph- view/6083476/CC...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/telegraph- view/6083476/CCTV-cameras-If-they-do-not-stop-crime-or-catch-criminals-what- are-they-for.html)

<http://www.library.ca.gov/CRB/97/05/crb97-005.pdf> (Warning: PDF)

<comment><USER48> News paper reports aren't peer reviewed scientific research.

How many journalists do you think even have a rigorous enough understanding of statistics to even begin to be able to answer these sort of questions ?

Do you think before this data came out that the Telegraph or Daily Mail were pro-CCTV ? - or do you think that they'd already decided their position long before and were just looking for whatever data would back them up ?

<comment><USER47> If you have good sources then show them.

The wikipedia page sites sources. The Daily Mail article I described as a "sensationalist article". The first Telegraph article cites its source of data. The second Telegraph is a commentary piece with 106 comments from people giving a sampling of opinion with "comment" in the URL. And the final report is from the California State Library and shows its working.

Better more rigourous sources would be nicer but we at least already have some that aren't particularly promising which seems counter intuitive. CCTV also comes at a huge cost, paid for by tax payers and hence determined by voters.

<comment><USER48> The problem with non-peer reviewed articles is that you don't know how they selected the data, etc. Scientific research requires you set your hypothesis before you get the results.

Clearly this didn't happen in this case. Why did Telegraph chose to use this particular metric ("crimes solved using CCTV") rather than for instance "crime rate change as a result of CCTV" (which would take into account deterrence). Why did they choose to use total number of CCTV cameras rather than the number of active CCTV cameras ?

One of the points of peer review is spot biases like this.

I'm not saying that CCTV works (or that it doesn't) but newspapers or non-peer reviewed research often falls far below an acceptable standard for evidence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> I can't help but think that, given this quote:

 _More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives._

The first step is simple & straightforward. Fix education (or what is preventing them from getting an education) first, _then_ tackle other problems with prisons.

<comment><USER50> Your first step is simple and straightforward just like saying "go fly to the moon" is simple and straightforward. Above and beyond the limited resource distribution we struggle with today (where does increased educational spending come from? Medicare? Defense Spending? Police?) there's an anti-education attitude that has worked it's way into lower socio-economic culture. I think combating this culture component is just as large (if not larger) a job as providing the educational resources.

<comment><USER51> I'm not googling for them just now, but I _know_ I've seen graphs that show that as we've spent more and more money on education, we've seen no affect on educational metrics (test scores, basic competencies, etc.)

I don't think it's a money problem. It's a problem with an intractable public education system in this country that's only really concerned with its own power and growth. We could solve that problem with the stroke of a pen by eliminating the monopoly that the current public education system has upon our educational tax dollars.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Many people reading this will fail to realize that "correctional supervision" includes about 4M who are on probation or parole. Horrible article.

<comment><USER22> The entire article is rendered horrible for overlooking one gruesome statistic among many?

<comment><USER49> Your parent is objecting to what would appear to be intentional manipulation & misrepresentation of numbers, not accidental overlooking.

Most people reading the article will assume the 6M people are _in a prison_. Odds are this misconception is intended by the author.

<comment><USER53> Be careful with "most people" comments. I read the article and did not at any point assume the figure meant # of persons in a prison.

Correctional supervision stood out as not meaning incarceration.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Something's really wrong with this article - lack of an economic angle. Prisons in the US are an enormous _private_ business, with free labor. (i.e. <http://www.unicor.gov/about/faqs/top_ten/index.cfm>)

Another problem is the silly/cruel "three strikes" laws, which might put someone in jail for life for stealing a loaf of bread out of hunger.

</comment><comment><USER55> Awesome TED talk touching on similar topics. I would recommend if you haven't watched/heard it yet. [http://www.ted.com/talks/bryan_stevenson_we_need_to_talk_abo...](http://www.ted.com/talks/bryan_stevenson_we_need_to_talk_about_an_injustice.html)

</comment><comment><USER56> How would a hacker deal with solitary?

<comment><USER57> Under humane incarceration, by programming on their computer and communicating over the internet. There's absolutely no reason these should be denied by default.

<comment><USER51> I don't understand why we should make prison suck less.

You do realize that if you make prison overly "humane", it eliminates prison as a form of deterrence.

<comment><USER58> Yet, there are many examples of making prisons more humane having a _positive_ impact on recidivism.

And conversely, there is plenty of evidence that severity of punishment does not have a significant impact on crime rates.

The simple "heavier punishment -> less crime" appeals only to simplistic logic, but in general is not observed in reality, either in the US or abroad.

The odd thing about many people in the "deterrence" crowd is that so many don't seem to actually be concerned about lowering crime rates, and are concerned moreso with exacting their pound of flesh for the injustice committed by criminals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Corrections Corporation of America = <http://www.plainsite.org/flashlight/index.html?id=47162>

</comment><comment><USER60> As I age, I realise that time speeds by faster. A year in prison now would a much smaller punishment than when I was in my teens, when a year seemed like forever.

Perhaps we need an age-related transform to prison sentences.

<comment><USER61> Engage in novel activities - time "speeding up" is pretty common as you age. Read about it here: [http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1223225...](http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122322542)

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> As a voting American let me say this is a disgrace. human rights are inalienable -- and we are close to the line in the USA. We can do better.

</comment><comment><USER63> "The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons." \- Dostoyevsky.

</comment><comment><USER64> My own preferred solution: ankle bracelets with GPS for felons convicted of non-violent crimes.

</comment><comment><USER13> This article should be accompanied by another New Yorker piece from a couple of years ago:

 _Hellhole: Is long-term solitary confinement torture?_

[http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/30/090330fa_fact_...](http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/30/090330fa_fact_gawande)

</comment><comment><USER65> First we should only be comparing the statistics of large countries when counting prisoners per 100k. Small and third world countries have an entirely different culture and/or little law enforcement. (Yes I know that we would still be at the top of the list).

Race (and all the complexities it encompasses) is at the center of this whole issue. I am black so don't start calling me a racist OK.

Remove blacks from all prison and population statistics when comparing the USA to other countries' people in prison per 100,000 and we will fall to the middle of the pack of countries.

I am not suggesting in any way that we deport all of us. All I am saying is that we need to find a way to teach the black population how to make better choices in life and give them the opportunity to be rewarded for those choices. Throwing more public assistance at them is certainly not the answer, it has only made the problem worse.

We can still do better even then middle of the pack though and this article brought up some through provoking things.</comment>


Insultron: Automated classy insults using Twilio - <AUTHOR> http://twitter.com/insultron

<comment><AUTHOR> My latest creation: Insultron insults people for you, and he does it with style. Just text any phone number to him at (910) 225-5771. Or simply call (910) 225-5771 to sample some classy insults yourself.

Built with Twilio!

</comment><comment><USER2> This is a cool idea but it doesn't seem to work with my English phone number.</comment>


The best customer support software? - <AUTHOR>

I work for a small early stage start up and our customer service is getting overwhelming (good sign!). We've been splitting email and phone duties but it's distracting us from anything else. We're currently just using gmail, and it's working just fine, but we want to hire someone in the Philippines to help out, and we figured it's time to switch to some more serious software.
What software do people recommend? We need a way to organize the emails, track communication with customers, build a bunch of canned messages, etc. We'd like a way to divide responsibilities with our Philippine help (e.g., they take the standard emails and we take the bug reports).
I've checked out salesforce but it seems too heavy duty. I've also heard good things about zendesk. What else is out there? What are the pros and cons?
Major thanks for any input. <comment><USER2> I am with PhaseWare, Inc. We are currently offering a free trial of our SaaS offering of customer support software, plus we have the same software for on- premise with several very helpful addons. <http://www.phaseware.com/test- drive>

main Tracker page: <http://www.phaseware.com/tracker></comment>


AWS S3 Outage - <AUTHOR> Seeing huge numbers of 503s from the S3 API in us-east-1. Anyone else having problems? I only found one other on Twitter: https://twitter.com/cperciva/status/630641484677558273 <comment><USER2> I'm seeing it as well - majority of connections are being dropped for us atm

      The Amazon S3 team recently completed some maintenance
      changes to Amazon S3's DNS configuration for the US STANDARD region on
      July 30th, 2015.

      You are receiving this email because we noticed that your bucket
      is still receiving requests on the IP addresses which were removed
      from DNS rotation. These IP addresses will be disabled on August
      10th at  11:00 am PDT, at which time any requests still using
      those addresses will receive an HTTP 503 response status code.

      Applications should use the published Amazon S3 DNS names for
      US STANDARD: either s3.amazonaws.com or s3-external-2.amazonaws.com
      with their associated time to live (TTL) values. Please refer to
      our documentation at:
      http://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/rande.html#s3_region
      for more information on Amazon S3 DNS names.

Something to do with that perhaps? AWS sent us that last thursday

<comment><USER3> Java by default can cache DNS forever, which may be why many people are seeing problems. Set networkaddress.cache.ttl to adjust this.

[http://javaeesupportpatterns.blogspot.ie/2011/03/java-dns- ca...](http://javaeesupportpatterns.blogspot.ie/2011/03/java-dns-cache- reference-guide.html) has more detail.

<comment><USER4> Reading this article, it seems that starting at 1.6 the default TTL became 30s.

<comment><USER5> It's not true as far as I can tell. You need this flag set or it keeps DNS entries forever, at least on the JVM we run (Oracle, 1.8u51).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wonder what it would take for amazon to show one of the yellow icons on their status page? Has it ever happened? Would a datacenter have to fall in the ocean?

<comment><AUTHOR> Ya, it bothers me that their status messages for major outages are simply "elevated error rates".

<comment><USER2> Whats frustrating is when you have customers who are also down because of the outage - but when you say Amazon is experiencing severe outages causing 50% of our requests to be dropped and there's not much we can do, it makes us look pretty bad when they they go to the amazon dashboard and only see "Elevated Error Rates."

<comment><USER7> "Elevated Error rates" probably does not qualify as breach of their SLA

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Latest Update from [http://status.aws.amazon.com/](http://status.aws.amazon.com/):

1:52 AM PDT We are actively working on the recovery process, focusing on multiple steps in parallel. While we are in recovery, customers will continue to see elevated error rate and latencies.

<comment><USER9> The icon got yellow. I repeat: YELLOW

<comment><USER10> It only goes red when a nuclear event occurs, obliterating most of humanity and only the machines remain.

<comment><USER11> That would actually turn it green again, I think.

<comment><USER10> maybe true – but if a server gets no requests, does it really exist?

or would the inter-machine chatter continue ad infinitum? would they run out of IPs or successfully transition to IPv6?

So many questions.

<comment><USER12> Cory Doctorow's When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth touches on this - what happens to the internet activity during a global crisis?

[http://craphound.com/overclocked/Cory_Doctorow_- _Overclocked...](http://craphound.com/overclocked/Cory_Doctorow_- _Overclocked_-_When_Sysadmins_Ruled_the_Earth.html)

<comment><USER10> this is excellent, hadn't seen it before! thx

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Next update is live

      2:38 AM PDT We continue to execute on our recovery plan
      and have taken multiple steps to reduce latencies and error
      rates for Amazon S3 in US-STANDARD. Customers may continue
      to experience elevated latencies and error rates as we
      proceed through our recovery plan.

</comment><comment><USER13> Can't pull docker images from the hub either, and their statuspage currently shows S3-problems: [https://status.docker.com/](https://status.docker.com/)

<comment><USER14> [http://status.docker.com/](http://status.docker.com/) \- they are "Investigating issue with high load", now yellow, but was red before.

Can't pull any images either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Seeing the same thing. Got back from vacation an hour ago, probably related. :)

<comment><USER16> At least it didn't happen while you where on vacation. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Could this be a reason why Heroku is misbehaving? [https://status.heroku.com/incidents/792K](https://status.heroku.com/incidents/792K)

<comment><USER18> I can't help but be a little surprised that Heroku's entire build system is disabled by an S3 failure in _one_ region. Now I'm unable to add a notice about the issues to my site's HTML...

<comment><USER17> True. Given the business Heroku is in, they should have redundancies in multiple regions if not multiple service providers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> "1:08 AM PDT We believe we have identified the root cause of the elevated error rates and latencies for requests to the US-STANDARD Region and are working to resolve the issue."

looks like the cavalry are coming

</comment><comment><USER20> GitHub is having release download issues, possibly due to this. [https://status.github.com/](https://status.github.com/)

<comment><USER21> Mapbox and Hipchat too [https://www.mapbox.com/status/](https://www.mapbox.com/status/) [https://status.hipchat.com/](https://status.hipchat.com/)

<comment><USER22> Feels like internet is not anymore distributed thing that if one website/node goes down others keep working...

Feels like in future... If cloud provider goes down... All internet will stop working :)

<comment><USER23> This is pretty much the case. Years of evangelising the idea that (a) everybody should be on Amazon and (b) everybody should be on the cheapest regions of Amazon mean that while the underlying datacentres are probably much better managed, individually speaking, than the tapestry of colos that made up the world a decade ago, an outage has much more wide-ranging effects than you'd get at that point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24>
      [3:25] AM PDT We are still working through our recovery plan.

Man, I'd love to see that plan.

<comment><USER25> I'd also love to see a post mortem on this, but I highly doubt they'll release anything about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Seems Hasicorp is maybe affected by this as well.

        $ vagrant up
        Bringing machine '...' up with 'virtualbox' provider... ==> ...: Box 'debian/jessie64' could not be found.
        ...
        ...: Downloading: https://atlas.hashicorp.com/debian/boxes/jessie64/versions/8.1.0/providers/virtualbox.box
        An error occurred while downloading the remote file. The error message, if any, is reproduced below. Please fix this error and try again.
        The requested URL returned error: 500 Internal Server Error

EDIT: _not_ Markdown.

<comment><USER27> VagrantCloud, now known as Atlas, is merely a redirector service for Vagrant box management. I host all my own boxes (on S3), but still use them for an easy means of sharing without having to remember a long-ass URL.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> As of 10:29:33 UTC, everything is back to normal as far as I can measure.

</comment><comment><USER12> Should be back to normal now. The latest update is:

3:46 AM PDT Between 12:08 AM and 3:40 AM PDT, Amazon S3 experienced elevated error rates and latencies. We identified the root cause and pursued multiple paths to recovery. The error has been corrected and the service is operating normally.

</comment><comment><USER29> Open-source library request: A library that lets you use S3 and Google Storage Cloud simultaneously and fail-back to another if one have problems.

There are many use-case when paying 2x for storage is a reasonable tradeoff for higher availability and also be provider independent.

<comment><USER30> What's stopping you from writing it?

<comment><USER29> Time and priorities. There is a difference between "I wish this thing existed, so I can use it/contribute to it" and "I need it so badly that I'm willing to spend a lot of time to make it production ready".

So far S3 seems to be reliable enough...

<comment><USER31> Might be something to integrate into Libcloud [1] instead of rolling your own.

[1] [https://libcloud.apache.org/](https://libcloud.apache.org/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Looks like I picked a bad week to stop sniffing glue.

</comment><comment><USER33> Looks like this brought down typekit too. "Font Network is experiencing issues caused by an outage at our storage provider." [http://status.typekit.com/](http://status.typekit.com/)

</comment><comment><USER34> From [http://status.aws.amazon.com/](http://status.aws.amazon.com/):

12:36 AM PDT We are investigating elevated errors for requests made to Amazon S3 in the US-STANDARD Region.

</comment><comment><USER35> That would explain why my console was not performing well even if [http://status.aws.amazon.com/](http://status.aws.amazon.com/) says "Service is operating normally", good thing their api seems to be functioning during that outage, for me at least

</comment><comment><USER36> Good thing I built myself a local game streaming server instead of putting that in a remote GPU instance.

</comment><comment><USER37> I started receiving lots of alerts from my side project [https://StatusGator.io](https://StatusGator.io) which monitors status pages. It's astonishing to me how many services depend on AWS directly or indirectly.

<comment><USER38> The most ironic thing I've seen in a while: Their homepage features icons of services they monitor. Many of them 503-fail - they are hosted on cloudfront.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> As it has happened before, Amazon AWS status page is lying to us.

S3 is in yellow, which means "performance issues". But not being able to download files from many buckets it's clearly a "service disruption" (red).

<comment><USER40> It is actually possible if you keep trying.

<comment><USER39> It has to be many times, because I have not succeeded and I still keep trying.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> This happens a couple of times, specially when replacing files frequently! I submit things to S3 everyday, if you're uploading a chunck of files you'll get errors every now and then when replacing files.

</comment><comment><USER42> It seems to have come back now for me. Could someone else confirm the same ?

<comment><USER42> Update: We are beginning to see recovery in error rates and latencies for Amazon S3.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I'm assuming this is also why I can't start any instances.

> 12:51 AM PDT We are investigating increased error rates for the EC2 APIs and > launch failures for new EC2 instances in the US-EAST-1 Region.

<comment><USER44> Same here

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I'm also having issues connecting to buckets based in Ireland (eu-west-1). Just hangs at authentication stage. Tried from 3 different internet connections, all having the same problem.

<comment><USER46> Ditto. API does not answer at all, latency is high and customers are not amused. Outage has lasted for hours already.

edit; does not seem to affect all the buckets though. Only one of ours is experiencing this, others are fine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Looks like it's getting better on our side now

</comment><comment><USER47> Now updates about ELB scaling and Lambda failures.

</comment><comment><USER48>
      3:36 AM PDT Customers should start to see declines in elevated errors and
      latencies in the Amazon S3 service.

Fixed ?

</comment><comment><USER49> We are seeing lots of 503s, empty response bodies, and peer reset / dropped connections.

</comment><comment><USER50> I'm also getting problems with Cloudfront attached to an S3 bucket

<comment><USER51> Same here, first it only affected some dev deployment (s3+cdn), now it spilled over to other buckets :-/

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> I see this thread as a list of services depending on S3 being healthy.

<comment><USER8> Also a good list of developers and devops people not getting any sleep tonight :-/

<comment><USER53> Yup!

3am "Dry Run" Staging on Heroku...fail 7am Deployment to Production....fail

Now: "We have confirmed elevated latencies affecting our SendEmail, SendRawEmail and SendSMTPEmail APIs in the US-EAST-1 Region and are working to address the problem."

Which is perfect since most of our PO orders are being placed between 6am-10am.

Tonight, adult beverages will be needed after everything is resolved.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> same here. our s3 services are reporting similar 503's and network timeouts. a few of our partners are already down as well with their own 500s. another stormy night in the cloud.

</comment><comment><USER55> +1 for us it's CDN (CloudFront) - only HTTP 503 responses

</comment><comment><USER56> Can't launch instances in EC2 in US-East-1 at the moment.

<comment><USER8> It appears EC2 is affected as well now:

12:51 AM PDT We are investigating increased error rates for the EC2 APIs and launch failures for new EC2 instances in the US-EAST-1 Region.

<comment><USER28> Probably just fallout from the fact that EBS snapshots are stored in S3. If you can't create an EBS volume, you won't be able to launch an EC2 instance from it.

<comment><USER47> It appears that s3 based AMIs totally fail to launch as unavailable as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Yep. Can't even get a response to a s3cmd command.

</comment><comment><USER58> AWS API still works while AWS web console is not.

</comment><comment><USER59> Why it is behaving like this each other day?

<comment><USER60> What is the last time that AWS gets two consecutive major outages within, maybe, 30 days?

<comment><USER61> Last one was 10 days ago.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9980222](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9980222)

<comment><USER59> +1, Also it was down on leap second. [http://mashable.com/2015/06/30/aws- disruption](http://mashable.com/2015/06/30/aws-disruption)

<comment><USER62> To be fair, that was not really AWS's fault, nor (apparently) a leap second issue:

[http://www.bgpexpert.com/article.php?article=167](http://www.bgpexpert.com/article.php?article=167)

[https://twitter.com/Axcelx/status/616058414746202113](https://twitter.com/Axcelx/status/616058414746202113)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Current list of additional services affected: CloudSearch

Elastic Compute Cloud

Elastic Load Balancing

Elastic MapReduce

Relational Database Service

CloudTrail

Config

Lambda

OpsWorks

</comment><comment><USER63> yep, we're seeing timeouts and 404s for images stored on s3 :(

good luck to the on-call engineers at amazon!

</comment><comment><USER64> even ec2 is down:

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (N. Virginia) Increased API Error Rates 12:51 AM PDT We are investigating increased error rates for the EC2 APIs and launch failures for new EC2 instances in the US-EAST-1 Region.

<comment><USER12> EC2 is not down.

<comment><USER65> It's up, but launching new instances doesn't work due to the S3 issue.

<comment><USER66> I can still launch new instances.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> loading fonts on aws pages is slow as hell because of this [https://aws.amazon.com/ses/](https://aws.amazon.com/ses/)

</comment><comment><USER68> What a wonderful beginning of a week! Thanks AWS.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Lots more complaints on Twitter...

</comment><comment><USER69> Yep, seeing the same.

</comment><comment><USER70> oh... seeing the same

</comment><comment><USER71> wtf, aws again

</comment><comment><USER70> まだ直らないねえ

</comment><comment><USER72> It's two hours. Luckily it happenned around 12:00AM otherwise we are having a bad day.

Whomever being a DevOps or SysAdmin probably cannot sleep tonight :(.

In our case, we put Fastly on top of our assets/images so that only a partil of request get errors. The cached object on Fastly is still fine.

<comment><USER73> Actually on some parts of the world it's not 12:00AM you know, and there are sysadmins/devops there too :-)

<comment><USER74> 11:40am: Currently can't push to Heroku :(</comment></comment></comment>


GitHub, Pastebin, Imgur blocked in India - <AUTHOR>

The Department of Telecommunications is blocking these sites through ISPs. Using Google DNS, OpenDNS or a VPN seems to be a solution for now.<p>https://twitter.com/search?q=github%20india&src=typd <comment><USER2> India is second most dangerous country for journalists, after Syria [http://www.trust.org/item/20130820143515-t7ap0](http://www.trust.org/item/20130820143515-t7ap0)

Why are you surprised at [http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/tech- news/Pastebin-D...](http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/tech- news/Pastebin-Dailymotion-Github-blocked-after-DoT-order- Report/articleshow/45701713.cms)

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/2pqz1n/github_blocke...](https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/2pqz1n/github_blocked_this_site_is_blocked_by_competent/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Quite ridiculous! Wikipedia goes on and off for me here and i was thinking some network problem. But now its pretty much related i guess.

</comment><comment><USER5> What's the point of blocking Pastebin? There are dozens of websites just like it.

<comment><USER6> Appearing to do something against cyber terrorism, as some list of usernames, passwords and credit card numbers have shown up there in the past.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> Feudalism + Voting in elections = India;

</comment><comment><USER7> pastie.org is blocked as well.

github is still up for me. using https + google dns

</comment><comment><USER8> it is accessible for me.</comment>