seldo

As is often the case, their Twitter stream is a backup for news:

https://twitter.com/nodejitsu

This is one of those perennial problems: if you're spending engineering time making your "we're down" screen look good, you're really optimizing for the wrong thing, but on the other hand, some downtime is unavoidable and you don't want to look unprofessional.

An HTTP 500 would definitely be more appropriate in this case, but it seems a 400 is accurate -- it's down because it has somehow forgotten where the apps are (their Twitter stream says a problem with load balancers).

Or possibly "don't follow instructions from people you don't trust", regardless of what they tell you to do.

I'm seeing a lot of tweets about this from people who are just tuning in for the first time. This is par for the course for North Korea; they have been doing it for literally decades. Nothing to see here. A good analysis of likely outcomes in here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/mar/29/north-korea-atta...

I'm honestly really surprised to hear that anybody thinks there is still stigma attached to online dating. I don't know what it's like for straight people, but online dating definitely has zero stigma for gay folks. I mean, compared to Grindr -- where all criteria for meeting somebody have been reduced to "I don't want to have to walk more than a couple of blocks" -- online dating like OKCupid is staid and respectable.

I think one of the core assumptions underlying people who adopt Bitcoin is "Inflation is bad". I'm no economist, but I don't think this is always the case. Currencies being able to rise and fall relative to each other allows governments to stimulate the domestic economy by increasing the value of exports, or cool down an overheating economy by doing the reverse.

Meanwhile, there are some other basic features of the currency which seem undesirable to me. In particular, the built-in (and ever-increasing) scarcity of coins means that the value of the currency will always, continuously, rise. That seems great, except that an economy built entirely on Bitcoins would therefore have an economic disincentive to investment -- if you can make 5% return by just sitting on your coins, why would you invest in a new business and create jobs and risk getting less than that?

Bitcoins do seem pretty attractive on an individual level, but at the macro scale they worry me, and I'd love to hear somebody with an economics background chime in on these points.

"By contrast, a person that creates units of convertible virtual currency and sells those units to another person for real currency or its equivalent is engaged in transmission to another location and is a money transmitter."

If you mine bitcoins and then convert them to real money (i.e. not buy goods or services with them) then you will be regulated.

I'm not sure how much you know about the drug business, but no part of the chain of illegal narcotic production, from the farmers to the chemists to the smugglers to the dealers, is quick or easy. The barons get where they are by taking enormous risks, and are constantly under mortal threat from other drug cartels, backstabbers and governments. If it were easy, drugs would be cheaper.

Stick to ducks, is what I'm saying.

Obligatory reference explaining why I read this as "big ass-display": http://xkcd.com/37/

I note that when Twitter released their breach notice on a Friday afternoon there were comments accusing them of trying to "bury" the news:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5154502

While there are (so far) no such comments about Evernote releasing this stuff on a Saturday morning. I think security breaches are just discovered at inconvenient times.

This sort of fake-loader animated GIF is pretty common; it's just a slightly more advanced version of a spinner GIF. I don't think it's really that bad.

What would be bad is if this page would accept a parameter to redirect you to somewhere, but it appears it doesn't do that -- it just closes itself. Presumably this page appears in an overlay that then closes itself.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems there's still no offline permission to share on a user's behalf. It seems to be a deliberate design decision, but it makes life tricky for somebody wanting to make a social media management platform (ahem) since there's no mechanism for scheduling future posts, etc.

Right! So imagine how much slower it would be if the process involved getting the Linux community to agree with Microsoft on a standard. I realize it's not quite the bad old days anymore, but still.

I think the real, but unhelpful answer is "supply and demand". Most filesystems are used by only one operating system at a time.

If two operating systems need to share files, they're usually on different machines, so it's simpler to copy the files or provide a network interface to them, rather than share disk-level access.

Getting different OS makers to standardize (and therefore slow innovation) on something as performance-impacting as the file system isn't worth the benefit.

The thing about SETI is that it is not really a search for intelligent life, it's a search for "intelligent life that broadcasts radio waves of a frequency and power that we can detect in a pattern and on a timescale similar enough to our own communications that we can recognize it".

Fermi's paradox basically boils down to: if intelligent life is at all common, it should be everywhere we look, and yet we don't see any. The traditional position is that therefore if we don't see intelligent life, it must be because it's too rare, or communication across interstellar distances is impossible. But the other possible answer is that intelligent life is everywhere, and we just don't understand or even recognize it as such.

The fact that we've been living with dolphins for millions of years and actively studying them for decades and have only just worked out a pretty basic fact -- they have names for each other -- despite the fact that they share most of their genes with us and live under the same environmental conditions exactly, suggests that we are probably really really bad at recognizing intelligent life that isn't exactly like our own.

This is our current list; I'm ignoring ones we've stopped using or haven't really started using properly yet.

Github - obviously

AWS - obviously

Ylastic - easier AWS management

Sendgrid - mail delivery

Stripe - payment processing

Pingdom - external uptime tracking

PagerDuty - ops alerting and scheduling

Xero - accounting

JIRA - task management (the hosted version at Atlassian)

Desk - support tickets

Crashplan - personal machine backups

Google Docs/Mail - everything else

Others have been mentioning Fabric, Puppet, Graphite, Nagios -- we use these but they're not hosted services, so not sure they fit.

Not to be too harsh, but I'm not sure whether "we had no idea it was so bad" is better or worse than "we knew it was bad, but didn't tell anybody" for a platform company. The tone of the post is appropriately apologetic, but this does make you wonder what other problems they're missing.

We offer new employees Apple hardware, on which they are free to use OSX or Linux. Apple hardware is the best hardware out there, so that's a no-brainer. We avoid Windows for security and compatibility reasons.

What, no "Denial"?

The main site itself was very unlikely to be vulnerable, but support apps, internal apps, etc. are all vectors.

There is another possibility, which is that they didn't work out what was going on until Thursday.

And anyone whose account has been compromised has received an email, a far more likely way of seeing the message than relying on everybody to occasionally check Twitter's blog for news.

The timing of this hack, and the fact that Twitter was (at least at one point) a Rails app, and still uses Ruby on the front end, makes me think this is likely a YAML vulnerability exploit. Can anyone confirm/rule this out?

I know that's what you meant. Regarding male-only traits as prestigious implies that they are superior to female-only traits. That implication is sexism. Whether or not you think sexism is insulting -- and it appears you do not -- it was definitely sexism. And other people find sexism insulting.

Complimenting a woman by saying she's like a man is pretty much the definition of sexism.

Shhh! Americans are blissfully unaware that everyone in Europe is legally entitled to 2-3x more vacation than Americans get.

25 days of vacation is the biggest thing I miss about working in London :-p

"Unlimited vacation" translates to "no vacation".

What does "as long as you're getting your work done" mean? There's no point in the year when nobody would be happier if you got something done sooner. There's never a time when taking vacation doesn't mean that some work you might have done doesn't get pushed to somebody else, or never done. The point of vacation is that you should be able to relax, but if you're worrying that you're screwing the company by not getting your work done, how can you relax?

Unlimited vacation sounds nice, but in practice it doesn't work.

Previous coverage of DRACO on HN:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3771214 (March 2012)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2847675 (August 2011)

I believe there were some earlier threads as well but I'm not finding them in a cursory search.

I regret that I have but one upvote to give.

It is never my intention to troll, as I hope my commenting record attests. Which of my statements do you consider unjustified?

Immigration rights are not tax breaks, and they are a hugely valuable benefit of marriage. Marriage gets you a green card within two years; attempting to do the same as, say, a 25 year old with a bachelor's degree could take upwards of 7 years. (Marriage is also much cheaper)

There's other rights, like hospital visitation, legal indemnification, etc. that also don't fall into that category.