Tablet's been on and offline all day, I'd imagine from server overload--- Michael Moynihan, the author, was the one who originally broke the story with his investigations.
The "What we are doing" section seems pretty weak. The only substantive thing they say is "we have produced new tools which enable us to more expediently relocate database services from a failed availability zone."
How exactly are they planning to deal with the larger Cedar difficulties? Are they going to eliminate their dependence on ELBs? Go multi-region? Developers need to know this to decide whether to continue with Heroku or build their own platform.
Compare/contrast to https://status.heroku.com/incidents/151 where they did talk about moving to multiregion, etc., but then never executed on it, which is probably worse. Maybe they will underpromise and overdeliver.
Personally, I'd shitcan EBS to the extent possible, RDS I never would have used, and it looks like ELB is non-viable as well.
If you're a large site (particularly a PaaS) on AWS and care about availability, you need to have spare capacity in your region (using RIs, like Netflix does) to cover when a single AZ disappears, and your own external to AWS load balancing (not dns based), with your own per-AZ subsidiary load balancers (nginx or whatever) running within EC2. You need a robust database layer, ideally multi-region or AWS+nonAWS, but that's more site specific.
Going multiregion is the next step, and the above is an essential part of getting to that point.
I was disappointed to read that their solution didn't involve switching to TAI. The kernel should use seconds since epoch and leap seconds should be a user space issue, just like timezones.
This method lets you isolate the changes to this level of the stack; everything up top can make the convenient, if slightly incorrect assumptions about time.
Hmm, looks like they're competing directly on price:
1 virtual core, 1.7GB RAM, 160GB disk for $.055/hr (Google)
1 virtual core, 1.7GB RAM, 160GB disk for $.08/hr (Amazon)
Amazon is still much cheaper if you use reserved instances or spot pricing, though. And for these sorts of compute jobs, I'm not sure why you wouldn't use spot pricing.
This is part of what I find amazing. Google and Amazon and every other 'EC' vendor looks to 'lock in' the price per 'equivalent compute unit'. What that means is that when Intel gets 50% more performance the EC vendor gets 50% more profit as they don't lower their price. For a user of cloud services it means that your cost to deliver your product will only go 'up' with features. In the past a large number of players have been able to deliver additional features at the same cost because they just upgraded to faster hardware.
The economics of this move starts pouring dollars into the EC providers and puts upward price pressure on web services. This 'price ratchet', if widely adopted, it going to put a huge kink in the productivity gains we've seen over the last 10 years as folks have ridden the commodity compute bandwagon. We've seen previews of that when people who used AppEngine got bit by the big price increases. Its like commuters who are forced to give up their income to the the gas pump, elastic compute resources are the 'gas' of the 21st century.
Hopefully competitive forces will sort that out. There will be an incentive for price per 'equivalent compute unit' to be lowered as the underlying infrastructure costs decrease.
I think the competitive forces will have some bearing here, although gas prices are an example of something which gets regulatory barriers put in place of expansion (you can't easily get approval to build a refinery). Given the 'cyber war' type mentality I am keeping a close eye on the regulatory environment growing up around providing 'cloud' services, be they compute, storage, or web front ends.
In particular, I'm pretty sure Stallman (like most Americans) is in favor of taking from the rich and giving to the poor, so trying to persuade him that free software is a bad idea because it's like that seems pretty clueless.
I think it was a useful, informative article. Why do you say she runs a shady company? Electrolysis, as far as I know, is a legitimate hair removal technique.
I understand Yelp filtering out what they may see as astroturfing reviews, but on the other hand I can certainly understand a business owner getting customers to submit positive reviews to counter negative effects of Yelp. Finally, is paying $350 a month to Yelp now considered a normal cost of running a bricks and mortar business these days? Unbelievable.
Agreed. Not to say there isn't a problem with Yelp's practices (as have been documented elsewhere), but this article does not make a good case against them.
From an algorithmic standpoint, filtering out reviews from new users makes sense. Otherwise you'll get the owner and friends stuffing in good reviews.
Just look at what the data might look like for the 17 people.
-They all sign up in a period of a few weeks.
-They all review this one place and nothing else.
-16 of the 17 never sign back in again.
It's pretty clear that it's a blatant rating stuff, so filter it out. Again, I'm not saying that the algorithm is perfect, but it makes sense to at least filter out these reviews.
I don't think that really has been documented elsewhere. There have been lawsuits and allegations, but no proof, as far as I know, that Yelp has offered to compromise their reviews for cash. Yes, they give business owners willing to advertise some editorial control over their listing, but the extent of that control is fairly well-understood and not much more nefarious than Google's text ads. Correct me if there's documented evidence otherwise.
Instead, we get article after article of business owners complaining because their Yelp reviews suck and their obvious attempts to game them have been thwarted. But that's exactly what Yelp should be doing. They're useless if they can be gamed. They're also useless if it becomes well-known that they're pay-to-play, but again, I don't think there's actual evidence of that. They'd have to be pretty stupid to take that course.
>> Just look at what the data might look like for the 17 people. -They all sign up in a period of a few weeks. -They all review this one place and nothing else. -16 of the 17 never sign back in again.
Looking at the 17 filtered reviews, 16 of them are 5-star reviews from people with 0 friends and less than 5 reviews (mostly only have 1 review). There's also a 1-star review from a person with 0 friends and 1 review.
It seems like to me that their filtering algorithm is working pretty well.
Linkbait titles combined with the lack of ability to downvote stories. Even though I think restricting the downvote is a good idea, it contributes to this problem quite a bit.
And don't even get me started on the lack of ability to vote or comment on YC companies job posting spam (the reason for which I also understand)... I've spoken with a handful of these companies that end up listing multiple times, and even they have expressed interest in votes/comments simply to get feedback as to why their listings don't seem to work.
The article says she asked her customers to post genuine reviews. I don't know if that's true but if it is, I see nothing shady about asking your customers to post reviews. There is definitely a conflict of interest on Yelp's side, but I don't see a good solution to the spam problem.
Both things can be true: that Yelp has and exploits a conflict of interest, and that this article chose a pretty bad example of a business harmed by that practice.
Yelp specifically mentions that this would lead to blacklisting of comments in their help, for the reasons of resulting bias (you only ask customers who are happy, you might provide a discount or preferential treatment etc).
The unfortunate thing for Yelp is that there is a cornucopia of stories of similar things - but often it's because folks say they didn't pay Yelp for further advertising.
I'd never use Yelp for reviews. Either they are glowing when they shouldn't be, or they are rubbish when they should be glowing. Who would want to use a site like that?!?
It goes beyond that, though. I reviewed a local deli around a year ago. I had been using Yelp for a few months, and it was probably my tenth review. I hadn't been asked to provide a review. None of the reasons they cited in the article applied to me, yet my review was buried, and negative reviews from newer users were left unfiltered.
Obvious joke is obvious, but he could have called it the Unno Fish Shell?
Looks interesting. I expect my fingers will be even more confused than ever switching machines now (they've never learned that Alt-3 isn't # on linux or that middle-click isn't paste in Putty)
That one always bites me at other people's desks; I'd figure out how to reconfigure it if it was mine. But there's always something jarring like that when you switch between similar-but-not-quite-the-same environments.
i've gotten to the point where i can subconciously key off the window chrome to know how to paste. (half my coworkers use xterm, the other half putty.)
Polanski is also a different kettle of fish compared to Assange. Polanski has various friends in high places. Assange has few.
Also, Assange managed to piss off almost every single branch of the US government. Rather than merely shooting himself in the foot, he blew his entire leg off with a shotgun.
Not to say what he was trying to achieve wasn't noble. In my personal opinion state corruption still needs to be exposed, even if that state is the United States. However, the line he walks is a very very fine one. The US was quite happy with him exposing corruption in other nations, regardless of the human cost, but not their own it appears.
At the end of the day, although the backyard he shat in wasn't his own, it just happened to belong to a damn big nasty rottweiler.
I am, however, confused at how the US can charge him for espionage, given that he's not a US citizen.
It makes sense that he would be extradited to Sweden -- he's accused of committing a crime(well, 2) while he was present in the country. I don't see the same applying to what he's accused of in the US.
I'm not sure whether you have to be physically present in the US to be guilty of espionage. The game has changed somewhat. It used to be that you had send someone to sneak inside buildings in the middle of the night, taking photos of secret documents on James bond mini-cameras hidden in fake fountain pens.
These days, you just hack the computer network remotely, or write a computer worm that monitors the 'good stuff' and sends it home to 'mama' in Fort Meade.
I am not sure you have to be found guilty of anything by anyone. The game has changed somewhat. All it takes is for someone to decide that you deserve a spot on president's kill list [1] and one predator strike later you are no more.
They don't need to charge him. They can just extradite to USA for questioning at which point on USA soil they can do what they want with him even if it's not questioning.
