In the bigger picture, there are a whole lot of interesting things that would need to be built to allow for non-batch processing on a cloud like this... a smart web proxy / front-end that could cope when your instances go down being #1 on the list.
It was slow but it appeared at last after 5 tries.
yes the website is down for me too
As a demonstration of their capabilities, I'm underwhelmed.
I think it's a demonstration of how popular the post is, not their capabilities.
Ha! Well said!
So we're supposed to trust these people with our data?
No, it says it right on the page. It's for non-privacy-sensitive applications.
Presumably you are using the results of the distributed system's work for something. Can you trust those results from people who can't keep a web server alive?
I'm not sure what you mean by "can't keep a web server alive" but I think the answer to your question is to run your computations on multiple instances at once to validate your results.
Give them some break. Probably they are still building it. Frequently people post to HN before things are ready so that friends can review it and post feedback.