Google's Android Update Alliance Is Already Dead - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2397729,00.asp

<comment><USER3> When I was debating whether or not to keep or return my Galaxy S (the most recent Android phone I owned), the crux of my concern was whether or not I had faith that Samsung/Google/T-Mobile was going to fix the laundry list of problems I was having, and if so, how long it would take.

I ended up deciding to return the phone, because I didn't actually believe that it would be upgraded in a timely fashion, and it was sort of my breaking point. I felt like an idiot for buying something that was a POS on the promise that eventually it would be fixed and would be great.

Over the years, I've amassed piles of kit that at the time I bought them weren't very good, but would be made "better" over time (drawer full of Maemo tablets; I'm looking squarely at you).

I've had to become more cut-throat now. I don't buy something unless it actually works and does what I want it to at the time I buy it.

If the thought of your Android phone (or any device) never being updated (or not being updated quickly) makes you not want to buy it, then don't buy it. I know it's made difficult by the fact that presently there's an arms race in mobile phones, and things are still getting better frequently; but I really think you'll be avoiding frustration if you just base your decisions around what the device does here and now.

Odds are; they aren't going to stop drinking, or get in shape, or resolve their childhood issues, or become a dog person. If you don't love them as they are, you're just setting yourself up for disappointment.

<comment><USER4> It's a bit after the fact, but 2 things to keep in mind with regards to Android phones:

1\. If you can, when you are shopping for an Android phone, opt for a Google Experience Device whose software is vanilla Android and is managed directly by Google.

2\. If you already have a phone with a crappy Android build, the best solution is installing a custom ROM like CyanogenMod. Most custom ROMs remove all the manufacturer junk and also tend to work well. When there are bugs that need fixing, the custom ROMs have release cycles that are measured in days or weeks, rather than months or years.

That said, I do realize that not everyone has the time, inclination and knowledge to fiddle with their phone's ROM.

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure there are any Google Experience phones for sale.

The Verizon Galaxy Nexus does not appear to be a pure Google phone -- it comes preloaded with Verizon software and I have seen no statements from either Verizon, Samsung, or Google regarding when updates will be released, or who will publish them, or if they will first have to go to Verizon. (Here's one article discussing the issue: <http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2397377,00.asp> \- How CDMA is killing the Galaxy Nexus)

Even the imported GSM Galaxy Nexus is being questioned as perhaps not a google phone as it seems to have shipped with substantially different roms that may have different update policies. ([http://www.xda-developers.com/android/is- the-galaxy-nexus-st...](http://www.xda-developers.com/android/is-the-galaxy- nexus-still-a-nexus/) <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3341959> )

I am very interested in this question of when/where/who will publish the Galaxy Nexus updates -- I want to replace my Nexus One with a Galaxy Nexus. But much of the value I perceived of the Nexus One is that the updates came frequently and came directly from Google.

<comment><USER6> > The Verizon Galaxy Nexus does not appear to be a pure Google phone

If Google publishes the base firmware (which is the case for the Verizon version), it probably counts as a Google experience device.

[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/android- building/mpRKT...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/android- building/mpRKTbyNI8U/XRq0yScuAPYJ)

<comment><USER5> Yes, thank you, but even in that thread Jean-Baptiste Queru doesn't seem able to say where the OTA's will come from.

It seems to demonstrate that at least the Verizon hardware will take the pure AOSP builds, but perhaps not that the OTAs will come from Verizon in a timely fashion and that they will be pure AOSP or AOSP + Verizon stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This fragmentation is already causing issues for myself and many other developers. I work at a small startup doing gov't work and we develop Android applications that talk to massive server based backends. Yay cloud!

On 2.2 we were seeing issues with the GC not firing enough, especially after shutting down a thread and no longer requiring the data allocated therein and thus we would run out of memory (heap size being set to 24 MB), on our 2.3 devices we were not seeing that issue because 1, the heap size was set to 32 MB, but 2, because our app used much less memory, from what we could see when a thread went away the GC properly cleaned up the memory associated with it, not only that but the same functionality had a difference of almost 5 MB of heap size. The 2.3 VM was more efficient compared to the 2.2 VM.

We have also found many issues with BouncyCastle, the default Android encryption/decryption library that we couldn't reproduce with Java JCE, we filed bugs with BouncyCastle and they said they were features/that we were using it wrong/that they wouldn't fix it. We ended up writing our own CTR block mode (no, we didn't rewrite AES) to fix one of the many issues we found with BouncyCastle.

Also, the SQLite version on the 2.x line of Android OS allows certain constructs that are technically not legal in the versions it claims to be but it accepts and ignores that bad input. The developer had taken output from MySQL workbench and put it in as SQL directly into the SQLite stuff on Android no realising some of his stuff was being ignored because it wasn't valid, no errors were thrown though. As soon as we ran our APK on an Android 3.0 tablet the app would crash because the SQLite there DOES throw errors. Yes it was a simple fix, but it shouldn't have been allowed in the first place!

We also found a whole range of issues with various different keyboards that you can download from the market. Some were causing our app to crash, others would cause the text entry field to show random characters yet when reading back the text from the field in code just the user inputted stuff was there. We'd have our software designed to have a button in a certain location but with certain keyboards up the button was no longer a clickable target and you had to first exit the keyboard. Looking at our bug tracker keyboard related issues are HUGE and there are plenty. It is even worse because the same keyboard on one device may work just fine but move to another device from a different manufacturer and it may be completely broken making it hard to verify bugs do exist.

We now have almost 20 test devices that we have to manually test our software on to make sure it looks right, that nothing is overlapping, and that it works correctly. Designing for multiple different sizes of screen, and then for landscape mode on those screens is absolutely horrible. On some screens elements get so stretched in landscape it just looks terrible and on others everything is so squashed together in portrait mode that it makes it hard for the user to accurately hit a target.

Fragmentation is driving me personally insane. I wonder how much of my work related stress is from having to deal with that kind of crap.

<comment><USER8> Just out of curiosity, how was CTR mode broken? Were you using the JCE provider or "direct" API?

<comment><USER7> The CTR mode in bouncy castle does not allow one to do partial block encryption. So if you want to encrypt 4 bytes you need to pad it to the full 16 bytes. It will always want to do a full block.

This also means that you can't do a partial offset into the CTR. You can increment the counter correctly, but you can't start encrypting from within a partial block.

Lets say you need to encrypt 17 bytes and write them to a file, which later can be opened in append mode to append more data to it using AES-128/CTR-BE mode:

      1234567890ABCDEF\0

C-style terminated string.

That is 2 blocks in CTR mode (1 full block used, 1 partial block (1 byte out of a 16 byte block)).

The next time you open the file you want to append data to it, what you would do is this:

      1. Load your previous key, and counter into AES-128/CTR
      2. Increment the counter by the full blocks already used
      3. Update the location into the current block by encrypting a random byte
      4. Provide the rest of your plaintext which will now be correctly encrypted for appending to an already encrypted segment

Now you can read your file back using the following:

      1. the AES key, counter for the start of the file
      2. Use CTR to "decrypt" the content from start to finish

So that would look something like this in Java code with JCE:

      Cipher c = Cipher.getInstance("AES/CTR/NoPadding");
      SecretKeySpec keySpec = new SecretKeySpec(aeskey, "AES");
      IvParameterSpec ivSpec = new IvParameterSpec(iv);
      c.init(Cipher.ENCRYPT_MODE, keySpec, ivSpec);

I've left out some stuff like creating the iv (really the counter), so now if we wanted to advance into the first block what we could do (and this works with JCE) is this:

      c.update(new byte[count]);

Where count contains the amount we want to offset into the next block.

On JCE this does exactly what I described above, it moves forward "count" characters into the next block and then you can do:

      CipherOutputStream cipher_out = new CipherOutputStream(output, c);

where "output" is DataOutputStream(new FileOutputStream("filename", true)) which is a file opened in append mode. Now you can write stuff to the file using the normal functions used by an OutputStream. This will then correctly append your new data to the end of the file so that if you start reading at the beginning of the file you can read through the end and get valid data. (We are using this to encrypt log files that are opened in Append only mode).

Where BouncyCastle breaks down is that you can not use c.update() to move forward into the block, thus appending is not possible because if you don't end on a block boundary your next write is going to have overlap. The only thing you can do in c.update() is provide it the amount of bytes that is the same as the block size. So you have to pad all input into c.update() to 16 bytes. Basically instead of being a stream cipher that allows seeking it has become yet another block cipher.

<comment> X-Istence I've written code for this before, I have it over at Github:

<https://gist.github.com/fd98541dd158d7e7be9e>

So if anyone wants a full example they can run and play with themselves. Your example stuff looks like it was pulled from the code I wrote above...

<comment><USER7> Yes, I found your stuff through a Stackoverflow post you created.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What's really frustrating is that a clear open source strategy would just plain fix this with no cost to Google or the carriers at all. The Nexus phones (and a handful of others) get Cyanogenmod updates with new features all the time.

But almost no one wants to ship a phone that the community can modify. And even Google treats CM like crap: they get no visibility into the process, so have to scramble to synchronize with each major release needlessly.

<comment><USER10> It's not just that they treat CM like crap, they treat all their vendors the same way. Only the nexus team at Samsung had access to ics before launch.

<comment><USER11> They do not[1] treat all their vendors the same way. It has been documented that Google provides early access to particular vendors, in order to suit their own desires for the launch of each version of Android. It has been going on at least since the original Droid launch on Verizon.

[1] <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14836102>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Samsung took a really long time to update Galaxy S to Android 2.3

To make matters worse, not all countries / mobile operators benefited from the update at the same time. The update for my mobile carrier was released on Sep 26th - less than 2 months ago.

So after almost a year (since December 2010) waiting to get the update - <USER2> finally tried upgrading. It doesn't work. I probably have another version than the mobile carrier's norm (it was on sale, maybe that's why). Now I have to go through their service department and yell at them. And they'll probably pass the blame (mobile carrier blaming Samsung, Samsung blaming the mobile carrier).

So if Samsung does update the S line, then maybe they'll surprise me for next year's Christmas.

<comment><USER13> The international Galaxy S was actually the first non-Google phone to receive 2.3. It seems that the carriers are more at fault in the SGS's case.

<comment><USER12> That could be the case, I'll don't really know. All I know is that nothing came through Kies for me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I thought that the update alliance agreement was once the carrier released an ICS phone they had to keep it up to date, not that they had to update all their phones to ICS.

</comment><comment><USER15> This is one of three facts why I prefer other mobile OS's over Android.

Other reasons - there are so many Android phones which for me water downs the excitement for the platform. The issue that all apps are not available on all Android phones and there is no Android/Google store to take my device to for a quick fix.

Hopefully they solve these issues when Google/Motorola starts releasing phones; force other manufacturers to follow same UX/UI. Also, possibly open stores as Sony & Microsoft has done following Apple's lead.

</comment><comment><USER16> People like to analogize the Android vs iOS battle of today with yesterday's Mac vs Windows battle to make gloomy predictions about the long-term market share prospects of iOS. But would Windows have been so successful with a host of meddlesome third parties deploying major updates out of sync according to their own various incompatible agendas?

<comment><USER17> Sorry, but I'm not really parsing your post correctly.

You're saying that people are comparing iOS with Android, and drawing parallels to Mac vs. Windows, and saying that in the end the more open, free- form platform will win (i.e. Windows triumphant over Mac).

But Windows _did_ (and still does) have a host of meddlesome third parties all deploying major software out of sync with each other according to their own whims. It's succeeded despite that. Think: graphics drivers, browsers, office suites, etc etc.

I don't think this is really the issue, the issue is that most Android users have _no_ ability to upgrade their phones. Even if you buy a store-configured Dell box, when Windows 8 comes out, you can drive to Best Buy, get a copy of Windows, come home, pop the disc in, and bam, you've got all the new hotness.

Android would be a lot more compelling if users _could_ do this. I'm sure a significant segment of the market would even _pay_ for such upgrades. As it is though, regardless of willingness to pay, the average Android user _cannot_ install new versions until their OEM allows it.

This actually reminds me more of old graphics drivers. In the old days, no matter what graphics chipset you had in your laptop, you couldn't get drivers directly from NVidia/ATI/etc. You had to wait until your OEM (Dell/Toshiba/Lenovo/etc) ported the reference drivers and released them to you. Suffice it to say, they didn't do this. At all, and mobile graphics chipsets were a nightmare of incompatibilities, bugs, and general misery.

At some point NVidia started requiring all their vendors make their hardware compatible with the reference driver, and started offering drivers themselves. The situation improved dramatically almost overnight. Maybe this is what Google needs.

<comment><USER16> That's exactly what I'm saying. With Windows, you could follow as close to the cutting edge as you wanted. With Android, your hands are tied unless you want to hack your phone. For the hacker types that have so far pushed Android adoption, this is a big deal.

<comment><USER18> Windows users were still beholden to multiple parties for current hardware drivers.

I remember trying to install a late beta of windows 95 on then recent, but not cutting edge, hardware and being stymied. A few days later I installed RedHat on the same box and it all just worked.

Much more recently, I was looking for an ExpressCard USB3 adapter, but it seemed like most of the options didn't have working drivers for 64-bit windows 7

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> seems a tiny bit early to declare it "dead". the crux of the article is that some manufacturers didn't respond to their emails yet or haven't made up their minds. most of them only got the ICS source a couple of weeks ago - it doesn't seem entirely unreasonable that they are still figuring out which devices they can support.

</comment><comment><USER20> So in the end, pick a Stock Android phone.

I recently upgraded my iPhone3G to an iPhone 4. Hopefully, I'll get the latest updates for the next 2 years. Hopefully.

</comment><comment><USER21> The stumbling block is not OS customization ...

Let me explain..OEMs give a price to MOs on the update services. These OEMs have consistently underestimated the number of upgrades and work required to get updates to the MOs.That under estimate impacts the resources at the OEM brought to bear on the problem.

<comment><USER22> If you're right, then most OEMs are really missing the boat by not engaging with the Android ROM development community more seriously. Cyanogenmod (and other community projects) have already done (for Gingerbread) and are already doing (for ICS) most of the non-customization work (including many of the tedious parts) required to produce OS updates for almost all devices with an unlockable or hackable bootloader, including many of the phones that currently fall through the cracks.

If OEMs focused on resolving key roadblocks (like binary graphics drivers and the 911 issue that made Cyanogenmod drop a few phones) and getting updated phones through carrier certifications, they'd spend less money and get more phones upgraded and would have a more customer-friendly, transparent process to boot.

<comment><USER23> The development part of upgrades is not a problem, neither resources or time- wise. The real problem are certifications. Alternative firmware developers like Cyanogen or MIUI do not have bother with this, they are not selling products based on their software, but phone vendors have to go through them. This is the big sink of money and time.

Recently, there were articles by Motorola and Sony Ericcson, that shed a little bit of light on this topic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Why would the device manufacturers and carriers offer automatic upgrades if the new OS makes the users want to buy new devices? This is also a factor to be considered.

</comment><comment><USER25> I use DroidX. Moto/Verizon combo seems better than alternatives in US for Updates.

</comment><comment><USER26> In order to ensure our security and continuing stability, the Republic will be reorganized into the first Galactic Empire, for a safe and secure society which I assure you will last for ten thousand years.

<comment><USER27> <lil jon>Hwhaat??</lil jon></comment></comment>


Show HN: A Simple JavaScript Speech Recognizer - <AUTHOR> https://dreamdom.github.io/speechrec.html <comment> ng-user It would be neat if there was an Open Source DB that hosted all of the 'known' words so that everyone using the tool can contribute to the growing list of vocabulary.</comment>


Coronavirus: India will play a major role in a Covid-19 vaccine - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-52363791 <comment><USER2> What's going to happen when 2020 perverse incentive 'evidence-based' medicine demonstrates mildly positive results on limiting symptoms from initial covid-19 exposure and then mandates hundreds of millions of people to take these vaccines in order to be removed off quarantine then tens of millions develop auto-immune lung pathologies?

They tried corona virus vaccines already after the first SARS outbreak. When patients were re-exposed to the virus they had severe auto-immune lung pathologies. Sounds super problematic. [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3335060/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3335060/) [https://jvi.asm.org/content/85/23/12201](https://jvi.asm.org/content/85/23/12201) [https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23563-threatwatch- cou...](https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23563-threatwatch-could-a-mers- vaccine-make-people-sicker/)

<comment><USER3> >They tried corona virus vaccines already after the first SARS outbreak. When patients were re-exposed to the virus they had severe auto-immune lung pathologies. Sounds super problematic.

You're talking about a candidate vaccine, there are thousands of those at any given moment. My company is currently working on 9 vaccines, and there are dozens of different formulations of each that we're testing for. Vaccines that fail safety do not get manufactured. Vaccines with documented adverse affects do not get manufactured. No regulatory body is going to give license to manufacture such a product when there is substantial evidence that it harms people. I think you need to understand more about the process before leveling such accusations.

<comment><USER4> > Vaccines that fail safety do not get manufactured. Vaccines with documented > adverse affects do not get manufactured

All good in theory, except you only find rare side effects like autoimmune disorders during postmarket studies.

So again, "no plan survives contact with the enemy"

This is the reason why old drugs are generally safer than new drugs: they have been "tested" on millions of patients.

<comment><USER3> Well if anything serious is found post-sale then like any medication, a recall should be issued. But like you said, all good in theory :) If any vaccine manufacturer engages in fraud and massages the data, then that is a human greed issue, not really unique to our industry. I do make a distinction between pharmaceutical and biologics though. But on the whole I would say that due to the strong regulatory framework in place, and the active role that the FDA plays, we have less of that compared to other industries like finance/markets for e.g.

<comment><USER2> There are so many awful drugs still in use that have taken decades for people to rile up enough of a backlash for the FDA to do something about it. And even then they're bought out to do things like "blackbox warnings" instead of take drugs off the market. These warnings basically are 'we should take the drug off the market because it causes serious problems' but it never happens. Take fluoroquinolones for example. In use since the 70s. Studies since the 90s knew about serious toxic adverse effects. Took until just this last decade for their use to become limited, with an unknown number of people whose lives have been likely ruined or terminated by the drugs.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Our Design Guidelines for Teaching Programming Talkthroughs - <AUTHOR> http://cs-blog.khanacademy.org/2013/08/our-design-guidelines-for-teaching.html

<comment><USER2> Just as good at teaching teaching as you are at teaching. Really enjoyed the read.

</comment><comment><USER3> your blog doesn't have a clickable link to the KA homepage.

<comment><USER4> Good catch, I've added a description that links to the Khan Academy CS landing page. Thanks!</comment></comment>


We got hit by a wave of deprecation on Twitter yesterday - <AUTHOR> http://threads2.scripting.com/2012/october/unbreakingOurTwitter <comment><USER2> So you're crying foul because something marked as deprecated for quite some time was taken offline? That's completely and entirely your own fault. Twitter has done nothing wrong actually.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yesterday I found that twitter wasn't working for my simplified posting interface and example node.js application <https://justtweet.herokuapp.com/> so I set out to fix it. The first thing I did was add logging of the error. When I tried pushing it back to Heroku I found that something else broke, because I didn't specify versions for my dependencies in my package.json and it got newer versions with a slightly different API. When I got it working I had refactored my code and changed the API url to https and to specify the version number as 1.1. Thanks to Dave's work note I found out why:

> "All non-versioned API endpoints, such as > <http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline>, will cease functioning."

[http://worknotes.scripting.com/october2012/101112ByDw/unbrea...](http://worknotes.scripting.com/october2012/101112ByDw/unbreakingOurTwitter)

Mine was api.twitter.com without a version, not twitter.com.

[https://github.com/resources/justtweet.herokuapp.com/commit/...](https://github.com/resources/justtweet.herokuapp.com/commit/100dda50a34a51455e6cad553e07a28e66723646#commitcomment-1981403)

I see why they felt the need to break twitter.com to simplify their deployment but I don't see why they thought it made sense to break api.twitter.com urls without a version number.

<comment><USER4> It isn't just deployment. Every version requires extra code paths for developers to maintain.

<comment><USER3> I didn't mean to say that it would be effortless. What I'm saying is that having the API on twitter.com can complicate twitter's web app, which should ideally be a separate service from their API. That might be a change worth making, even if it caused problems for some API users. I don't think keeping a non-versioned url at api.twitter.com would complicate things enough to justify turning it off, unless they didn't care about small API users.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Me too. Was just emailed by a client complaining that their Twitter feed had gone down. I was using the JSON API too but needed to change from <http://twitter.com/..>. to <http://api.twitter.com/1/..>.

</comment><comment><USER6> Dave, I really like RSS. I signed up to play with early functionality for radio2 when you let folk do that, and I agree with everything you're saying about twitter.

Why aren't you trying to replace it with the very decentralized thing you wish for? The various tools you're creating are either clients for the existing social networks, or aggregators/combiners/distributors -- none of which make us (or you, actually) any less reliant on Twitter. The fact that you're as vulnerable to Twitter's whims -- you, who's enmeshed in this world and understands more about it than I'll ever hope to, and has created formats to allow us to work apart from silos -- means I have no chance.

Is there something I'm not getting?

<comment><AUTHOR> Of course we're trying to replace it.

My feed is out there for anyone to follow.

<http://links.scripting.com/rss.xml>

What else can I do? The press doesn't want to write about this, presumably because I'm not going to pay any money to sponsor their conferences.

I just don't have the power to get everyone to provide feeds, if I did, I would.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Did they _completely_ fail to notice the API was still in use, or just not care? Thou shalt not break working code.

<comment><USER8> The now-deprecated API probably wasn't working for Twitter, so they got rid of it. Developers were warned before this happened, and your code is your responsibility, not Twitter's.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> i could be wrong, but deprecation != removal (which is what this sounds like)

<comment><USER10> It sounds like they had been previously deprecated. Which implies eventual removal. The guy even says: "I admit I wasn't paying attention to their deprecation".

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Better than a wave of defecation...</comment>


Who made flapmmo.com? I am suprised no one else seems to be asking - <AUTHOR>

They made a server in C++ that can handle nearly 1000 users concurrently, in what looks like under 3 weeks.  Any information on how they did this would be appreciated! <comment></comment>


How to Wake Up Ready to Rock - <AUTHOR> http://www.pickthebrain.com/blog/9-ways-to-wake-up-ready-to-rock/

<comment><USER2> Whenever I see an article title that indicates a list of X things that might interest me, I always find myself wanting just the bullet point list without the surrounding content (at least until I decide whether or not the bullet point list merits reading the rest of the article). So:

1\. Exercise During the Day

2\. Stop Work in the Middle of a Task

3\. Avoid Caffeine in the Evening

4\. Set Out Your Clothes the Night Before

5\. Don't Eat a Heavy Dinner

6\. Journal or Read Before Bed

7\. Know What You're Doing First Thing

8\. Get to Bed On Time

9\. Visualize Sleeping Well

<comment><AUTHOR> The article can indeed be digested into this bullet points. But number 2 requires some more explanation as it can't stand on its own like that. Maybe "At the end of the day, stop working in the middle of a task, to make it easy to start again the next day". But this is rather too long for a bullet point.

<comment><USER3> Another way to put it might be, "Stop before you reach a 'stopping point'." Supposedly this is one of Haruki Murakami's writing tricks.

<comment><USER4> or in a positive sense:

"leave a task opened"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> We need less of these "how to be great in the morning" posts and more "how do you get through 8 hours of a mind-numbing day job and then kick-start your brain at 8pm when you can work on something interesting" posts.

<comment><USER6> Take a 25 minute nap. Seriously, try it.

<comment><USER7> I usually tend to turn the 25 minute nap into 2 or 3 hours. My body just doesn't want to get up in 25 minutes.

<comment><USER6> Then I think you're doing biphasic sleep, something I want to try in the future

<comment><USER8> I did this the last time I had a full time job. 3-4 hours at night before work, 3-5 hours when I got home from work. It worked just fine except about once every week or two I would take my post work lap and accidentally sleep for 12 hours through the night.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Try getting a toddler in the house. There will be no more sleepins after that.

Seriously, the most important thing in this done is getting to bed on time, and having a routine in the morning. That, and don't berate yourself for a sleepin, just make an extra effort to get up on time the next day.

I honestly think that getting out of bed early and getting on with your day accounts for a large variance in personal productivity.

<comment><USER10> Exactly. Not only do my young kids help with getting up in the morning (they rise at 6-7 AM) they sufficiently wipe me out during the day to the point where sleeping isn't a problem either. Problem solved.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Nice advices. I can agree with nr. 1, but I have to admit that I break nr. 2 quite a lot of times. There's nothing like a coding session til the early morning hours! For me it's really difficult to stop in the midst of an unfinished coding task. :)

I have another advice, although it has _indirectly_ something to do with the wake up process: Assumed you can make it to the shower, try to take a James Bond Shower ([http://artofmanliness.com/2010/01/18/the-james-bond- shower-a...](http://artofmanliness.com/2010/01/18/the-james-bond-shower-a- shot-of-cold-water-for-health-and-vitality/)). I do this every morning, and it really helps :)

<comment><USER12> I think _stop working in the middle of a task_ really should mean _leave some task unfinished_. Thy way, you'll know clearly where to start when you begin again. I think this was posted on HN as a hack by Hemmingway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> One point I have found really helps for me, which is also mentioned in one of the comments, is always getting up at the same time. No excuses, and this counts for weekends too. You can go to bed when you are tired, but always get up at the same time. It's hard the first few days, but after that it gets easier and easier, and I feel much "fresher" in the mornings.

</comment><comment><USER14> Best advice is not eating anything at least 3 hours prior to bed time. Your body will do the rest and makes sure you're ready to rock in the morning.

<comment><USER15> You should also eat breakfast early and at same time each day. Don't eat breakfast when you wake up too late, so your body will remember that. ;-)

I.e. don't eat after 7:00pm, eat breakfast only between 8:00am - 8:15am, don't eat after 8:15am.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> My key to waking up ready to rock is to no "hack" your biorythum.

If you are a start up and/or not working 9-5 for the "man" go with what your body tells you, sleep when you are tired, work when you are inspired, rest when you need a break.

I know "easier said than done" but is it really?

<comment><USER17> This actually does NOT work for me. I try it sometimes in the weekend, I sleep as long as my body "tells me", but then I get up at 9am and feel totally tired. I feel much better when I set my alarm clock to get up early.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> What helped me was waking up at the same time every day. So if I decide 7 am is the time, no matter what time I get to bed, I wake up at the same time it really helped me not feel tired (trick credit goes to my calculus teacher in high school).

<comment><USER19> I do the same after reading an article on zenhabits.net. Of course, I get up at 5:50 am, but only because it allows me to get a seat on the bus and train.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> If anyone is really interested in how sleep works and how to manage your sleep, you should really read William C. Dement's conclusive work "The Promise Of Sleep". He's a pioneer of sleep science from Stanford with a great experience and thousands of helped patients. His book is as exciting as it is useful and full of research data, analytics and explanations. A real pleasure to read. After this book, all articles would seem a drop in the ocean.

[http://www.amazon.com/Promise-Sleep-Medicine-Connection- Happ...](http://www.amazon.com/Promise-Sleep-Medicine-Connection- Happiness/dp/0440509017/)

</comment><comment><USER21> My personal favorite is still the dawn simulator I got as a present 2 years ago:

<http://evolvingworker.com/2008/5/5/how-to-wake-up-easily>

</comment><comment><USER6> I just started (today) a 30 days experiment of waking up at 5 every morning and I'm recording it on my blog. I think that going to bed early will be a key factor for this experiment, but I'm also going to try some others of those points.

<comment><USER22> Please do hang on to the experiment & keep your blog updated. I have changed my habits so that I now _can_ get up at 5am to get an extra 3 hours of coding before heading off to work. Not every day, but when I need to, at least 3-4 days a week. I plan the days when I will wake up early in advance & go to bed early accordingly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Rule 10: for the wintertime, invest in an electric blanket. That way you don't lose the first 20 minutes of sleep having to warm up the bed.

Coming next week: the 12 rules for helping you to remember all the other rules you learnt :-)

<comment><USER15> Buy cheap Polyester fleece blanket - they are warm like wool but easy to wash, allergy free, and very cheap (about $10). Don't torture yourself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I think he omitted the single biggest part of helping me wake up: eat breakfast!

</comment><comment><USER25> I use a daylight lamp this winter, which works wonders. It results in less sleep and I'm not so tired.

Locally in Scandinavia, the shops generally charged ca 200 Euro for such a lamp. I got a cheap one for 70 Euro from a net shop.

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you post the link where you found it?

<comment><USER25> Sorry for not adding that from the beginning, I didn't want to look like I was doing advertising. :-)

<http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B001P1DX3Y>

It only has 7000 LUX, but that was enough for me (ymmw). Read the manual about how to start using it carefully... a too large dose too fast might give headaches. (I think they have raised the price a bit since I bought mine in November.)

The same page had these links, which _might_ be better deals. (Amazon wouldn't ship some other models outside Britain when I was going to buy.)

[http://www.amazon.co.uk/SAD-Light-000-High- Lamp/dp/B000YSDHZ...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/SAD-Light-000-High- Lamp/dp/B000YSDHZ8)

[http://www.amazon.co.uk/Full-Spectrum-Lighting-LitePod- Light...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Full-Spectrum-Lighting-LitePod- Lightbox/dp/B00117X37I)

[http://www.amazon.co.uk/Philips-HF3330-Seasonal-Affective- Di...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Philips-HF3330-Seasonal-Affective- Disorder/dp/B002G1Y8S6)

Disclaimer: I have no relationship with Amazon, except being a satisfied customer. But I'm starting to think of them as the Microsoft-of-stores.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I bought Philips "Wake-up-light" and I am happy with it.

<comment><USER7> for $200, does this thing actually work well?

<comment><USER21> I bought something similar (see my other comment in this thread) and I find it very useful (after 2 winters).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Don't _real_ rockers wake up with a couple of groupies and do a few lines with a fifth of Jack?</comment>


Ask HN: How does a typical day in the life of a app startup marketer look like? - <AUTHOR>

Hey guys, I'm planning to write a blog piece titled "A Day In the Life of an App Marketer/Growth Hacker", I'm planning on compiling all these info and sharing it back out with you in a blog post while I learn a whole bunch along the way.<p>Any of you venerable marketers/growth hackers out there care to share how you spend your day? <comment><USER2> Have you asked this question at: [http://www.growthhackers.com](http://www.growthhackers.com) ?

<comment><AUTHOR> nope i haven't.. i don't have an account there yet.. i will i will.. thanks so much!

<comment><USER2> yep, you'll probably get a better response there</comment></comment></comment>


Factiness - <AUTHOR> http://nathanjurgenson.com/post/152938927255/factiness <comment><USER2> It's entertaining to read an article which simultaneously recognizes it's sources are deeply wrong about some things, and then _immediately_ parrots information gained from those very same sources:

 _It shouldn't have surprised you that the United States is a deeply racist country. And because that fact is more obvious now, you shouldn't be surprised what will happen when open bigotry is given even more permission, legitimacy, and empowerment._

It's almost completely impossible to comprehend the possibility that many Trump supporters aren't racist, because the very same media that got the election wrong told us it was true.

Shocking fact: I know a number of Trump supporters and only one of them is white. White supremacists, all of them? Including the African woman who's literally never been in a social setting that was majority white?

Shocking fact #2: you probably also know a Trump supporter or two who are simply afraid to tell you.

<comment><USER3> The author might point out that you are getting caught up in factiness.

I don't think anyone has figured out exactly how important white nationalism was to Trump's victory (he carried most of the traditional Republican coalition), but it is clear enough that he got support from white nationalists in a different manner than any recent president, and that he was doing things to court that support.

<comment><USER4> My problem with this is, if there is a coalition of white supremacists powerful enough to propel a President to a decisive victory, where were they 4 years ago? 8 years ago? Why did they vote for Obama? It doesn't make sense. They suddenly care enough to go out and vote in large numbers, but they didn't care 4 years ago to vote against an African-American president? That doesn't add up. The only conclusion is that Trump's win is due to something other than racism.

I'm not saying there aren't racists who support Trump. There undoubtedly are. But that's not why he won.

<comment><USER5> You don't have to go so far as "supremacy" to have one good explanation along these lines, unless it's axiomatic that it's racist and supremacist for whites, _but no other group_ , to join the game of identity politics.

That could be what changed in the very people in the Rust Belt who voted for Obama in 2008 and then gave the election to Trump in 2016.

I don't consider it to exactly be a good thing (among other minor details, absent e.g. Trump building that Big Beautiful Wall, it will inevitably lead to civil war and ethnic cleansing), but I think it's hard to argue it's not inevitable, unless whites just collectively decide to commit suicide as so many are individually.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> FiveThirtyEight did not dismiss Trump, in fact it kept saying that Trump had a very real chance of winning. The last prediction was a 29%, and a 29% chance is quite a lot. If you interpret a 29% chance as 'dismissing' then you are misreading the numbers, and besides the numbers, they never said/wrote that Clinton was anywhere close to a sure thing.

Regarding election day coverage, 538 did report that some districts in Florida were doing very well for Clinton, compared with 2012. But they quickly reminded people that this could just mean that the votes were distributed differently.

<comment><USER7> He also caught a lot of crap from the media for giving trump that high of a chance including a fucking embarrassingly stupid and uninformed attack from Ryan Grim at Huffington Post.

<comment><USER8> It's the _downvoting your comment because I disagree with an opinion you don 't hold, but recognize as being held by some people_ of media commentary.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> _" As I type this, Trump's crowd is chanting for Clinton to be jailed. It's horrifying."_

What is horrifying to me is the prospect of living under a government that is not bound by its own laws. It's fairly obvious that Clinton knowingly broke the law, despite others advising her not to. There are people in prison "as I type this" for similar, but far less serious offenses. Why should Clinton be above the law?

<comment><USER5> The only horrifying thing about it is if it's viewed as a punishment for losing the election, that sort of thing quite reliably kills Republics.

But so does the end of the Rule of Law in them....

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Nate Silver made a rather good analysis of his own failings with respect to the primary: [http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-i-acted-like-a- pundi...](http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-i-acted-like-a-pundit-and- screwed-up-on-donald-trump/).

I agree substantially more with his own analysis than I do with this blog post. He even mentions that the introspection may have gone too far. Why is it that Trump's victory has been seen as a "another failure of the pollsters"? Fivethiryeight had him at 35% chance. Betting markets were at around 4.1 the day before IIRC. In my view it's just another narrative to sell to people - laughing at other "stupid" people, here, read our newspaper instead.

<comment><USER11> The day before the election, Nate Silver took a lot of heat from the left because he rated Trump's chance of success as being much higher than most other prognosticators. The day after the election, he took a lot of heat from the same people because he didn't rate Trump's odds highly enough.

<comment><USER12> This has been fascinating to watch.

Conjecture: before the election, liberals wanted reassurance, so he took heat for not being reassuring enough, afterwards they wanted someone to blame for their shock.

Also relevant: people (other than gamblers) have no sense of what 70% means, so they round up to "Hillary".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I much prefer Richard Feynman's term of "cargo-cult science" for what is basically the same idea.

But I think it's misguided to apply it to this situation. 538 had Trump at a chance of 1/3 on election day. Not because there were any polls that pointed at a possible Trump win, but because their model was excellent enough to detect the uncertainty in the polls (mostly the high number of undecideds and volatility).

Regarding the "mainstream Media" I fail to see what they did wrong. They showed Trump for what he is (after some hesitation). We now know that 30% of Americans are willing to throw millions of people under the bus, either because they're racists, or because they're willing to empower racism and an assortment of other hate just because some caricature of an imagined "coastal liberal" made fun of them. Another 50% can't be bothered to vote at all. Are people expecting the media to take its clues from these voters and triangulate their morals? Luckily, minority rights aren't actually subject to popular approval, even in a democracy.

<comment><USER14> _Regarding the "mainstream Media" I fail to see what they did wrong._

From what I've been reading and my own anecdote it's that they didn't follow Trump _enough_. They didn't hear his true message, and that was one that appealed to many. You don't have to be racist to buy into it.

My anecdote: One fine afternoon, in fact it was the afternoon after Trump won the NH primary, I found myself at home for some reason far too early in the day. I flipped on the TV and came across a news network that I had never seen before. It's called the One America Network. The mission of the One America Network is to bring a conservative viewpoint to the masses through media. Fox, it seems, has become nothing but a bunch of crybaby liberals and for Real Americans (TM) OAN is the new place to be.

OK. Let's see what these dipshits have to say.

On comes Trump. He is at a rally in (IIRC) South Carolina. OAN had him budgeted for an hour of air time, but _stayed with him until he finished_.

He talked about ObamaCare. It was a horrible system. It was made by Obama but he was in the pocket of the pharmaceutical industry ( _sic_ \- most would say insurance, but- _truthiness_...). He was going to throw it out _and replace it with something better_.

Did you catch that last part? Had you heard that before? His appeal to his supporters was that ObamaCare wasn't working because it was written for big business by corrupt politicians and not for everyday Americans. And he was going to have a better plan. For them.

You don't have to be a racist for that to resonate. And for the mainstream media to miss the nuance in these messages (I'm _guessing_ there were more) is to not understand what the election was truly about. And, as everybody on this board knows, when you don't understand the fundamental concepts the Final Exam is a crapshoot.

<comment><USER15> Your anecdote supports the truthiness vs. factiness argument. Trump avoided making statements, such as what his improvement would be, so that didn't get reported. He only made claims about at issues he considered needing intervention, leaving the specifics to implementation. One set of people assumed he wanted to undo progress, while another assumed he wanted to advance it. One statement, two conclusions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What an excellent word. "thruthiness" is an awesome word to describe what's happening out there now, so "factiness" as its corollary should also join the popular lexicon.

However, "factiness" as a concept has been recognized for much longer. The most popular expression expressing it would be the quote that Twain attributes to Disraeli: "lies, damned lies and statistics".

Thruthiness probably grew up as an antidote to factiness. Proper math education and recognition that most preliminary scientific studies are bullshit is probably a better antidote, but trusting your gut is an easier antidote, and often effective. It's just that when your gut is wrong, relying on your gut makes it almost impossible to change your mind.

</comment><comment><USER17> The author is assuming media have a sacred mission of objectively informing us. Media ethics haven't been honored in a long time, if ever.

If the Second Amendment is the last line of defense against tyranny, a skeptic and inquisitive mind is the first and most important one.

</comment><comment><USER18> Nowadays you can have reality your way with relatively little work. In fact, you have to work hard to get other perspectives. You can even lie to yourself about your own viewpoint. You could be a left leaning liberal ready to say all of the right things on all of the right topics and then feel uncomfortable when a person of color enters the room. Or joke with your friends in "Ebonics" when everyone in the room looks the same. Ever done a triple take when an interracial couple sits near you at a restaurant? I see it all of the time.

This country is out of touch with itself and we are out of touch with ourselves. We worry about what others think of our opinions and bury the parts of us that don't align with the right opinions. But they stay there, latent until they are triggered by something that is outside of the script that we prepared for. As one of my friends put it, "I'd rather know who is racist than not know and have people pretend they are not". It starts there. By knowing who we are and who others are. By being honest with ourselves. And then looking outside of the bubble we created for ourselves and understanding the other perspectives that exist and why they exist.

Personally, I listen to a wide range of podcasts from far left to far right. I am uncomfortable with the intolerance I hear on both sides of the spectrum but I would rather know what the perspectives are than not know and be surprised and completely unable to understand when someone like Trump wins.

</comment><comment><USER19> I don't understand what this article is saying?

<comment><USER20> He wrote it at 2:41 am, Nov 9th.

People are just trying to understand what happened and for some this involves exercises in thinking out loud.

<comment><USER21> > People are just trying to understand what happened and for some this > involves exercises in thinking out loud.

i think that every eight year the pendulum swings between Democrats and Republicans; people get tired of one side and choose the other one. In about two years we will know more...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> My theory is that everybody thought Trump winning was so "out of reality" that they just didn't care in doing the count right.

I was keeping tracking in the NYT real-time dashboard and all started 80/20 for Hilary and then it suddenly changed 80/20 to Trump (I guess Pareto is happy with that).

</comment><comment><USER23> Smart people find very elaborate and clever ways to be wrong.</comment>


AWS is down due to an electrical storm in the US - <AUTHOR> http://status.aws.amazon.com <comment><USER2> By what stretch of the imagination is this icon suitable for representing a total loss of availability due to a power outage?: <http://status.aws.amazon.com/images/status2.gif>

Is this not a 'service disruption' situation? At the bottom of the page, the yellow icon is associated with 'performance issues'.

If there's one thing that's shocked me about AWS, it's the total failure to acknowledge the severity of service disruptions. Like the above case, or the fact that a 3-hour loss of connectivity is displayed on the service history as a green tick with a small 'i' box: <http://oi46.tinypic.com/x5qtch.jpg>

<comment><USER3> Or that there is absolutely no way to deep link to an ongoing outage, and users must reload, then expand the link every single time, or subscribe to an RSS feed.

AWS needs to blantantly copy Heroku's status system, which is worlds better for people needing fast updates on their infrastructure.

<https://status.heroku.com/> vs <http://status.aws.amazon.com/>

<comment><USER4> Wow, that is so beautiful! I am in awe.

<comment><USER5> The whole Heroku site is phenomenal. I am constantly amazed every time i see it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> AWS is not down. Only US-East. If your app is down, it's only because you don't care about the availability of your service.

It's pointless to complain. We've all seen before that Amazon can't keep whole regions up. If you rely on a region being up, you will have downtime and it's your fault.

<comment><USER7> According to the AWS status page, only one availability zone within US-East is down, not the whole US-East region. Running a highly-available service exclusively from US-East is a reasonable strategy as long as you're spread across multiple availability zones.

I'm not an AWS customer, just reading their docs; please correct me if I'm wrong about any of this.

<comment><USER8> We're across availability zones and definitely ran into an outage across zones tonight.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Be careful. Nothing is as it seems right now. Do not trust any API output, nor should you do any API operations that are non-recoverable. Things are up that are reported down and vice-versa.

Wait for the dust to settle. We're all just going to be a bunch of Fonzies here.

EDIT: Looks like API access has been restored, so I'm cautiously optimistic about things working. Note though that some instances may have rebooted or be otherwise impacted so check your error logs.

EDIT2: Nope, ELB is still hosed. Continue to be skeptical.

</comment><comment><USER10> There's another comment thread going over at (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4180339>), if, like me, you got extremely lucky and picked today's lucky availability zones, and have time to read HN instead of scramble to get things back up.

Good luck, friends.

</comment><comment><USER11> I commented along the same lines during the last AWS/Heroku outage, but Rackspace still is giving me amazing value and uptime, and every time I try to move away (as I did this week with my lastest project, on Heroku) I get hit with a massive service disruption that pushes me back to Rackspace.

<comment><USER12> Hi, I work at Rackspace. If you don't mind me asking, what makes you initially want to move away?

<comment><USER13> Funny to post this here, but I'm actually planning on migrating from Rackspace to AWS purely because of price.

Rackspace's prices are insane. $1,314/mo for a cloud server with 30gb of ram, compared to $657/mo for 34gb on AWS.

Plus with AWS you can use reserved instances to get that cost down to $286/mo. Rackspace has no way to get the cost down.

That makes Rackspace cost over 4.5x more when comparing based on ram.

<comment><USER14> If you're that price sensitive/need big RAM and can use RIs you should really be looking at dedicated servers, too. (for which Rackspace is expensive as well, but actually provides a service level to justify it in many cases)

<comment><USER15> I disagree. The markup does not simply justify cheery service folks. I want knowledgeable. When they don't have support for Nginx, to me, that's not knowledgeable.

Rackspace prices are insanely high and I can't wait to move off of them.

<comment><USER14> I'm ok with a dedicated server provider being good at the physical and network without much focus on applications on the host. You can use a third party for host level sysadmin, but you don't have a third party choice for the infrastructure.

<comment><USER15> For the cost that Rackspace charges (and what they claim to provide for said cost) I want both.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> If you're interested in information on the storms themselves and the destruction they caused in West Virginia, there's good coverage here: [http://www.foxnews.com/weather/2012/06/30/state-emergency- de...](http://www.foxnews.com/weather/2012/06/30/state-emergency-declared-in- west-virginia-after-powerful-storms/)

<comment><USER17> Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin in a statement: _With temperatures near 100 degrees expected this weekend, it's critical that we get people's power back on as soon as possible._

So let me get this straight: the critical issue with not having electricity after a huge storm is that the A/C isn't working? And 100F/38C isn't even _that_ hot, right?

<comment><USER18> 100F with high humidity will result in a number of preventable deaths due to heat exhaustion, heat stroke, dehydration, etc. So yes, it is the most critical thing, along with power to hospitals and emergency services.

<comment><USER19> Several hospitals in this area are running on generators right now b/c of these storms. They are flying in additional generators too. It was pretty bad. Six deaths in VA so far directly attributed to the storms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The status page seems to really underplay the severity of the situation. Netflix and Heroku are down, yet these are just side effects of 'performance issues' instead of a 'service disruption'. I wonder what it would take to cross that threshold.

<comment><USER10> AWS has historically been both slow to update and heavily optimistic with their status page.

When I got the frantic texts when EC2 first dropped offline, sure enough, the AWS status page was all green, but twitter was alight with people talking about it.

I suspect a service disruption would have to be Godzilla.

<comment><USER20> According to other HNers, their RSS feed seems to be fairly accurate (someone please verify this), which makes the whole thing that much weirder.

<comment><USER21> Not weird at all. Companies the size of Amazon are practically bound to be schizophrenic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Must be the same storm that took several of my trees down (east coast Virginia USA) last night. It was a violent storm. 90 MPH winds. Made 80 foot tall oaks bend like straws and they were almost touching the ground. I spent the morning running the chainsaw just to clear the downed trees from the driveway.

AEP (local power company) says about 65% of customers in this area are w/o power. May be days before it's fully restored. Hope no one from the HN community got hurt.

Edit: I posted this from a computer in town. No power at my place so I can't respond to follow-up posts.

</comment><comment><USER22> According to Colin Percival on Twitter[1][2], the US East-1 AZ has more IP addresses, and thus probably other resources, than the rest of AWS put together. It casts comments about "limited to one availability zone" into some relief.

[1] <https://twitter.com/cperciva/status/219067641023840257> [2] <https://twitter.com/cperciva/status/219067963356098561>

<comment><USER23> > the US East-1 AZ

us-east-1 is a region, containing multiple AZ's.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Pardon my rant, but I am frustrated. It seems there is always an excuse with Amazon cloud. Is Google similarly disabled?

<comment><USER25> If you mean GAE, its even worse...

<comment><USER26> I can only talk about my experience, but I've had zero downtime with GAE since we migrated to the HR datastore. Development is x1000 harder, but then everything Just Works.

<comment><USER25> I had used it before the HR, so it might have improved.

At the time It was like voodoo, and you had to triple-check your datastore actions, because they could fail for no reason at the backend.

<comment><USER27> App Engine's reliability massively improved with the HR datastore, and has gotten even better since the pricing change / SLA guarantee. It's actually remarkably good now, I recommend taking another look.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> You can use the EC2 API and ec2-describe-availability-zones to find out which availability zone is having issues: <http://alestic.com/2012/06/ec2-outage- availability-zone>

</comment><comment><USER29> Interestingly, this is a great time to see which of your favorite websites are rock-solid and which are kind of shaky.

I've been thinking about building a site with a Parse backend, and they're up, which is good to discover.

<comment><USER30> It's like looking for a house in the rain, so you can see where the water drains.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Is this the same EC2 zone that went out just 3-4 days ago??

Second or I believe third power outage/loss of service for AWS in the past 10-days if I'm not mistaken.

This is wild. I wonder what's going on at Amazon and if they're capable of handling this much usage in addition to having power issues, etc.

Instagram and Netflix servers are down from what I hear and have been down for a few hours. Now it makes sense that they're being hosted on AWS.

</comment><comment><USER32> If you have a load balancer you may have balanced across availability zones (Not regions) you'd still be up. So US-EAST didn't all go down, just one AZ.

<comment><USER33> But many people are saying that despite paying for multi-AZ for RDS, they were still down. Do you think they didn't also load-balance across AZs for their webservers?

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Do we know this is due to an electrical storm? Today had a leap second as well (The minute of midnight, June 30th lasted a second longer than normal).

<comment><USER35> This is the kind of weather conditions that spawn very electrically active storms. I don't doubt they could cause the issues. Last night was probably the most electrically active storm I've ever seen up here -- virtually non-stop lightning strikes for an hour or two, and there's another just like it over Virginia right now.

<http://i.imgur.com/d5pEP.png>

<comment><USER36> Would it help if they designed the building as a Faraday cage?

<comment><USER37> The problem is in the power network, not in the machines.

<comment><USER36> But is it the power network inside the building, or outside? Presumably, the problem wasn't a power _outage_ in the city's grid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> reading the linked page, "AWS is down" means "some N. Virginia AWS services are down"

</comment><comment><USER39> Just pay the extra money and get off US-East people.

<comment><USER40> Acts of God can happen anywhere.

<comment><USER41> You certainly mean bad weather, don't you?

<comment><USER42> Yes, that's what Act of God means in the US legal system. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Act_of_God>

<comment><USER41> My appologies. I still believe it's wrong to call it that way because it assumes too many things. Another way to word it is Force Majeure. <http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force_majeure>

<comment><USER43> No, it isn't another way to word it. Force majeure includes acts of nature _and_ acts of man. Acts of God is only acts of nature.

It's somewhat important to the original spirit of the comment since Acts of God might indeed happen anywhere (1) whereas acts of man might not. For example, disruption caused by on going war in Syria wouldn't be covered by an Act of God clause.

(1) I think that's BS though...there are definitely some places where nature is considerably more stable than others.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> how is it that amazon.com itself is never, ever, impacted?

edit: so basically, the businesses suffering outages (heroku, netflix, etc) don't value uptime to the same extent that amazon does. they got what they paid for.

<comment><USER45> Amazon.com does not run on the same EC2 that you and I use. It runs on a nearly identical system that is isolated and private to Amazon. I wouldn't be surprised if they were in entirely different physical locations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Cloud taken out by a cloud.

</comment><comment><USER47> It looks like this is affecting iTunes Match, possibly. I have two tracks just sitting there, waiting to upload and running lsof -i shows iTunes with a connection to an AWS machine.

</comment><comment><USER48> unfuddle is down also, can't access any of my repos. I was going to spend the day working too - oh well time for a long lunch.

This isn't the first time this has happened to AWS - we moved our app to linode last year after this happened to us and it seems to affect AWS more than any other hosting i've ever used, i'd be interested to know how their infrastructure is set up because it doesn't seem particularly robust.

</comment><comment><USER49> Would it be expected that Amazon will issue substantial refunds (e.g. no charges for June hosting for impacted users) due to the problems today?

</comment><comment><USER50> Ok startup people. It is worth it to host in a different zone than US-EAST.

<comment> k-mcgrady I host in Europe (Dublin I think). I'm from here and so are my customers so there's no latency worry for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> with storms getting worse each year, i'll likely be choosing either central or westcoast datacenters ... from now on.

<comment><USER52> Tornadoes in the midwest and earthquakes in the west. You're doomed.

Seriously though, as horrible as downtime is, I think most internet users aren't terribly surprised when they can't go to a specific website for a short period of time.

<comment><USER53> Any press is good press? Can't count the number of times I read about the Twitter fail whale.

<comment><USER54> I'd be interested in seeing someone polish this turd. How would you spin amazon being down into good press when people are looking for reliability. Only thing I can think of is people will be writing about you and that should increase your page rank but I doubt amazon is concerned about higher page rank.

Anyone else care to speculate how this could be good press?

<comment><USER55> It could be an opportunity to explain what reliability actually _is_ (it's not "pack one availability zone with all your stuff") and how AWS helps you achieve that.

<comment><USER54> That's awesome spin. So Amazon gives you the Chaos Monkey, whether you like it or not.

[http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/04/working-with-the- ch...](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/04/working-with-the-chaos- monkey.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Google Compute Engine anyone?

<comment><USER57> Windows Azure anyone?

<comment><USER58> Their current VM performance is incredibly bad. To be fair they are in some preview mode.

<comment><USER14> What's bad (disk? cpu?). It's on my list to experiment with, but haven't yet.

<comment><USER58> See this thread [http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en/WAVirtualMachines...](http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en/WAVirtualMachinesforLinux/thread/2d471010-cccd-4eef-9f35-5fc6b3aa6a1b)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> So cloud is not ready for storm? (troll face)

</comment><comment><USER60> Isn't that bastard operator from hell excuse #74?

</comment><comment><USER61> We're soooo screwed

</comment><comment><USER59> So cloud is not ready for storms? (troll face)

</comment><comment><USER62> I am getting tired of all of these outages.

I know outages happen all the time at hosts, and maybe as a result of either a) news is more accessible now, or b) Amazon is bigger than most other hosts....I feel like Amazon & Heroku are going down WAYYYYY too much.

I am starting to wonder if this "tell all" policy is really best.</comment>


Subjot: A Topic-Based Twitter, Without The Noise - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/31/subjot-a-topic-based-twitter-without-the-noise/

<comment><USER2> Since every thread on HN about google+ has a top comment about how google+ should have this (self-tagging, able to follow user+topic in addition to being able to follow user), I'm glad someone has written something like it. playing with subjot will give me a feel for how this concept plays out in practice-- well done!

<comment><USER3> IMO self-tagging fails in broadcast mechanisms, because people are massively incentivized to distribute things as widely as possible.

we're thinking about how to add categorization to jig, so i am thinking about this a bunch.

<comment><USER4> joshu I love your work and would love to talk to you more about this in general.

There is a disincentive to using a more generic subject and broadcasting out- of-context on Subjot, which is that people unfollow you.

I saw one user doing that in our private beta and I unfollowed him, since the entire premise of Subjot is having a feed of stuff that is interesting. We have a very unfollow friendly culture, so it's not a faux pas to unfollow a subject that you don't find interesting.

It is not a one size fits all solution but it has been working for us. Just like you wish you could unfollow your friend who live tweets the entire episode of Gossip Girls, on Subjot you can easily unfollow specific aspects including a broadcast subject.

<comment><USER3> sure, that makes sense.

i feel like you will have to have aggregate topic categories (everything about topic x) to get enough traffic in that topic. remember that there is typically a 10:1 reader:poster ratio (or more!) and that is what will get spammed.

my gut sense is that if you make topic directories for people to sign up to you are adding transaction costs to get people into the system.

i'm not at all sure what the solution is, though.

on cluedb i made it so that multiple people had to use the same tag on an item before it showed up. cluedb has approximately zero traffic, however.

<comment><USER4> Definitely. We currently have higher level topic areas here - <http://subjot.com/explore#featured> but that whole system is still a work in progress.

We have been playing with some ML/NLP type stuff to cluster subjects that are the same. So we can tell if your post about Football is actually NFL or Premiere League... but we're a super small team and its a bit to early to put that stuff into production yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you want to try Subjot you could start with HN on Subjot: <http://subjot.com/all/hn> OR tell us about your startup: <http://subjot.com/all/startup> and the feedback tag is getting lively too: <http://subjot.com/all/feedback>

</comment><comment><USER6> I've been enjoying Subjot's the private beta for a few months now. A few of my friends are on as well. I'm very happy to not have to listen to them drone on about a couple of topics that usually dominate their twitter feeds.

</comment><comment><USER5> Been on the Subjot BETA for a couple of months and have only been totally impressed. May have a few scaling issues around topic tags but from what I have seen so far no reason why this team couldn't tackle it. Great work!

</comment><comment><USER7> I tried to use it for a while but gave up when I couldn't find a simple way of finding my twitter follows that also have a Subjot account. Did anyone tried/succeeded doing this?

<comment><USER4> This would be the url to use <http://subjot.com/explore#friends>

You can find it via Explore in the header and then People on the sidebar.

<comment><USER7> Thank you for your reply! ;)

It seems I don't have any twitter friends on Subjot, yet..

Congratulations on Subjot! I really like the idea. Are there plans for some kind of 'reputation' for people in specific subjects they talk about?

<comment><USER4> We don't have a solid design for that but we've definitely kicked around the idea. If I want to find the top jotters on NFL, it would be great to see some sort of ranked list.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Looks a lot like byteposts: a subject-oriented twitter/irc hybrid.</comment>


You're Not a Data Scientist - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@chuckrussell/you-re-not-a-data-scientist-f2a75e5abd55

<comment><USER2> And most Software Engineers never "engineer" a dang thing, but I'm not one to nitpick and rant about nonsense titles.</comment>


Washington State Man Drives 1,400 Miles Without Refueling - <AUTHOR> http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/09/home-built-car-drives-1400-miles-without-refueling/ <comment><USER2> It's not too hard to get good gas mileage on open roads. A few years ago me and my girlfriend drove a 2001 Honda Insight 1040 miles on one 12 gallon tank. (85mpg - fully loaded with luggage + nasty traffic.) In the Tour De Sol rally, we got 94mpg. Keep in mind it is a stock car and there was a lot of weight we could have removed. (AC, second person, interior, hybrid parts, spare tire, air bags, glass, etc.) We also only came in second place.

The car is truly light (1850 lbs), but weight mostly affects rolling resistance (unless you hit brakes). With a lighter car, you can use a smaller engine. Though, around the same time I drove an 80s sedan with a v8 engine several hundred miles on the open road and got 40 mpg. It was so loaded down I mostly drove 50-55mph.

For open roads, aerodynamics is everything. 80% of the energy is spent moving the wind at highway speeds. Even hills aren't a problem (they store energy like batteries). Perhaps cars could look more like airplanes? Then we could go 80mph and still get good mpg.

Also, I find it curious that you need to modify a car to make it "safe" for use on a race track. They have insurance policies that require cages, fire suppression, rigid seats, 6 point belts, air bags removed, etc. They still tend to be quite light.

<comment><USER3> Race cars are safe, but not comfortable or pretty. People want nice seats, powerful air, a quiet ride, loud stereo, leather, room for the dog, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> While I realise that the HN guidelines encourage keeping the original headline, knowing the size of the gas tank he used to drive those 1400 miles would be much more interesting than knowing the fact that he's from Washington State.

</comment><comment><USER5> Totally cool, but the car is made of fiberglass, so what happens when it gets in a crash? Does it have airbags?

I've heard (although have no good source) that we've made big leaps in fuel efficiency in the past 30 years, but much of it has been eaten by safety advances that make the car significantly heavier.

Can any gear head HN'ers comment?

<comment><USER6> Airbags are of no real use if you are wearing a seatbelt.

Cars have got bigger because everybody wants one of those nice safe SUVs with the special rollover feature.

My 1989 Citroen AX 1.3L diesel used to do >60mpg commuting and a factory tuned one did 90mpg on a run across europe - it weighted 650kg. A VW polo of the same era does about the same.

Of course they didn't have 27 cupholders or 7 speaker DVD surround - they are just cars, limited to transporting 4people at the highway speed limit. They can't climb mountains or make you irresistible to women.

<comment><USER5> Good point that it's not just safety advances making cars heavier...

It still seems strange to me that even hyper-small cars (by modern US standards) like the Mini Cooper or Smart still don't seem to break about 40mpg.

Is this related to the US' aversion to diesel? Or just the fact that all of our cars are comparatively luxury because our standard equipment includes big seats and air conditioning?

<comment><USER6> > hyper-small cars

The new mini isn't hyper small. The original mini cooper had a 2m wheel base and weighed around 600kg. The new 'mini' has a 2.5m wheelbase and weighs twice as much.

Cars tend to put on weight in middle age. The clearest example is VolksWagon. Originally the VW Golf was a small 650kg cheap sub-compact, then as it grew into it's current size they introduced the smaller Polo which was about the size of the previous Golf, then as the Polo grew with each new model year they introduced the Lupo - which was about the size of the original Golf...

Mostly this is economics, as you add more features you can charge more for the car, so every year it gains features (safety or entertainment) - all of which add weight.

Then there was the realization by somebody in the early 90s that you could take a dirt cheap truck chassis, add a cheap minivan body and create a luxury SUV with a 50% profit margin.

Not sure why the US has such an aversion to diesel. You would think that as a man's fuel (after all it's used by trucks and tanks) it would be preferred to the girly fuel you put in scooters.

<comment><USER7> The US passenger car market hates diesels because of the absolutely awful "LF9" diesel engines GM put out in the 1980s. They were plagued with problems and poisoned the market for years afterwards. This is far enough in the past that its influence may be waning; the VW TDI sells strongly and is often exempted from sales promotions as a result.

Currently, another roadblock to selling diesels in the US are the draconian emissions requirements by California.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Headline omits a critical piece of info. Semi-trucks can do the headline claim easily, provided the driver is male and from Washington state. It may take them 250 gallons to do it...

</comment><comment><USER9> MPG numbers mean less and less as they get higher. It's much more important to go from 10mpg to 20mpg, than it is to go from 20mpg to 50mpg.

It would be better to list fuel consumption in "gallonage" rather than "mileage". If you drive: 10k miles @ 10mpg = 1000gal of fuel burned, 10k miles @ 20mpg = 500gal (600gal less), 10k miles @ 50mpg = 200gal (300gal less)

The compromises you have to make to reach higher mpgs are generally not worth it to most drivers.

<comment><USER10> Yes. In Germany you usually give litres per 100 km. (Though the car companies tend to cheat, so you should only trust the `gallonage' as stated by, say, independent magazines.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> For a high school summer job, I used to work at the facilities which test the emissions on cars as per washington state law. I got to see a wide variety of vehicles this way. In particular, when I worked at some of the places in north seattle, a surprising amount of yuppies would come through in very old hondas with 3 cylinder engines. They were getting 50mpg regularly in city driving. It was surprising to me at that age to see how long we've been able to get cars with such good gas mileage, it didnt make sense to me why more city dwellers weren't driving these small cars, especially since so many people were spending so much money on newer expensive prius's...

<comment><USER7> Those early Hondas are deathtraps in a crash though.</comment></comment>