dpritchett

I found myself in need of a way to test my HTTP client timeouts in a Rails app I'm working on and I thought it'd be fun to build a configurable listener.

The crossplatform binary distribution is a nice perk of writing in Go.

Surely there's room on HN for original content in the form of comments? My top comment in this thread is a decent starting point for a discussion of what was actually down and what it meant to users. I'm sure Heroku's inside story will be even more interesting if they choose to blog it.

edit to add: Thanks for the transparency in moderation! I had thought this thread was poorly titled too.

Good point. Internal IT teams have a completely different set of incentives. Heroku's status timelines are important in keeping old customers as well as getting new ones. Internal IT doesn't really have that sales/retention problem, but they definitely have an "I might get fired if someone gets the wrong idea about an outage" problem.

Heroku is up. My production application on Heroku is up.

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

Postmortem edit:

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

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

[1] https://status.heroku.com/incidents/633

It's not even showing up in the top 200 for me.

Last time I checked the flagging penalty was about 40 spots. Maybe it's more nuanced and now it's 70 spots. Maybe dang knows.

Edit to add: I imagine this has some interesting overlap with YC's "tell us about the time you hacked something other than a computer" and sama's "Founder Ethics" advisory.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/s2014form

[2] http://ycombinator.com/founderethics/

Exactly! To elaborate, the $20 might not work if the desk clerks were paid twice as much, had benefits, and had occasional meetings with management reminding them not to take tips.

Were you using the same dns servers?

I've not noticed untoward behavior in the office.

The more overtly unwelcoming behavior seems to crop up outside of the office at networking events and conferences (and IRC and twitter and the bottom of this page).

I will point out that of the various direct and second-level managers I've had since entering the industry in the early 2000s only three (out of a total of fourteen) were minorities.

Thanks for elaborating. I didn't really know what to think after your first two posts.

Gobot also has sister libs in Ruby and Node! I have used the Ruby one a bit and it's a ton of fun. I've had a bear of a time with the bluetooth support under Ubuntu though. I guess I need to try Gobot with my Sphero ASAP.

Ron Evans (One of the gobot devs from the blog post linked in beliu's post) was also named a Ruby Hero a few days ago. He was tremendously inspiring in this podcast on teaching kids to program [1]. I dug it so much I wound up demoing a sphero and a "talking fruit keyboard" at a local career day a few months after I heard him.

[1] http://rubyrogues.com/141-rr-teaching-kids-with-ron-evans

For what it's worth there are a ton of details in a blog post that keeps being killed in HN's new thread queue. Probably autokilled by hostname. https://twitter.com/nrrrdcore/status/459405044920500225

Yeah, I went with the `ln -s` method. Thanks Solomon!

PSA to anyone trying this on Ubuntu 14: the docker command seems to be "docker.io" now.

I'm pretty sure if you're using herokuapp.com then you're not using your own cert and Heroku will update it for you. If you're using ssl:endpoint then you will have had to submit your own cert, and that will need replacing.

Before you run to flag this as a dupe, note that it has lots more behind the scenes info than the comparatively dry first-party announcement.

HN has seen bigger stories: http://www.mattbearman.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/hn-s...

The biography is an excellent read: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38840.Boyd

IT is usually the catchall infrastructure/support function. For some companies (like Netflix) you probably also have a product engineering group.

Terrible. I hope this wasn't exarcerbated by a high-speed pursuit.

That, and competitive admissions mean that you can get outsized returns by investing in a bit of high-grade test prep. A 90th percentile student who takes test prep might wind up getting the same score (and the same Ivy League appeal!) as a 98th percentile student who didn't.

Doubly funny (in a dark way) due to Michael's turbulent relationship with YC via HN.

It's probably something to do with my being a developer rather than a salesperson, but I find this level of zero-sum internal competition a bit terrifying.

I'm a Rubyist who likes to play with Go.

Boy oh boy do I ever miss collection-level constructs like map and reduce in Go. I just don't think of them as 'generics' because I'm not very well-versed in statically typed languages.

I still bite the bullet and use Go anyway when it feels appropriate, because I can get fast type-checked programs with a reasonably quick prototyping cycle.

I think it's occupying a nice spot on the spectrum between say C and Ruby. If you're implementing some CRUD app with a few hotspots, maybe you'll implement the whole thing in Rails, then break it out into an SOA with golang services powering the hotspots. Finally if you really need to you can hand-tune the hottest spots with some C code inside of your Go services.

One thing I've been enjoying out of the Go community is narrowly scoped command line tools. Heroku's CLI client runs on Ruby, but there's an `hk` variant written in Go that offers 90% of the functionality with a fraction of the runtime. More of that, please!

Google's profit is a few hundred thousand per employee per year. Let's call that an anchor for how much room there is to give in salary.

Hopefully the attacker didn't back up a decades' worth of his emails.

It's a compensation for opportunity cost. Even if it may be really fun to build things that make others rich I'll still need food, a roof, and healthcare.

Thanks! I couldn't quite wrap my mind around a school with 60% per-period attrition.

What happens to the 60% who fail? Do they retake the class or drop out and look for a job?