pardner

Aaaaand... still down a day and a half later. Moved to another provider yesterday but was curious and checked back. No acknowledgement of the issue, no status update, no blog post, no twitter post.

It says "connectivity issues" but our cluster is down hard.

In early 80s when I was a wee nerd in college a gentleman named Ray who owned Laboratory Microsystems was nice enough to give a poor college kid a copy of his excellent Forth implementation for the then-nascent IBM PC.

I breadboarded a little EPROM programmer (driven by a parallel printer port with the programming code done in Forth because I couldn't afford a real one). Then breadboarded implemented a little Z80 system with a bunch of general purpose I/O and a Forth "OS" in EPROM.

Used that little setup as the basis for a number of projects, including a home alarm system with phone-based control plus voice synthesis phone-based alert calling (which a couple silicon valley VCs were gracious enough to take a meeting about).

Forth gave me wings. Despite it's reputation as a "write-only language". Good times.

Darn, on Heroku even the "maintenance mode" (redirects all routes to a static url) won't kick in.

Saw your link, did your test and here's my feedback.

No "share" or "download" button in the app? Sure, "apps are cool" and all that - but what about folks who want to archive or share their health data? AFAIK literally no provision to share all those nifty biomarkers with my doctor (except many, many screenshots)?

Nowhere in the "how to get blood test" email instructions does it bother to mention a urine sample will also be needed. Kinda useful to know if you should not pee right before heading to the lab.

Can we talk about hacking, this being hackernews?

A few comments claim the sensors can be triggers by non-smoking events such as hairspray, nail polish remover, perfume...

If that is accurate it seems to me one could exploit that sensor flaw by purposefully triggering a false positives with some benign action - and video record doing so - perhaps a couple of times.

Then if and when smoking is alleged, obtain a log of the alleged event times, then provide video evidence that debunks at least one alleged smoking event.

A relatively small number of activists could probably create a viral nightmare for Hyatt and anyone else implementing this system.

Yet more glossy 'form over function' nonsense from Apple in my opinion. Was hoping '26 would be the release that tackled their massive technical debt around broken/reduced functionality. I did see a Reddit post that summarized it nicely, a screenshot of a Youtube video where the play button overlaps the name so it reads Liquid*ass

Nicely implemented screen layout. Curious if you've thought of reporting metrics showing how many guesses it's taking people? (I got 'volatile' in 9)

Their hosted Exchange email has been having "issues" since December.

But today their "Rackspace Email" (hosted Webmail/IMAP/POP/SMTP) has been disrupted since 2pm ETS.

Yes, cant even access https://dashboard-next.heroku.com/ so the problem seems broader than what they describe on their status page which seems to imply only issues related to updating DNS settings.

Email received today: "One of our updates involves how disputes are resolved between you and Amazon. Previously, our Conditions of Use set out an arbitration process for those disputes. Our updated Conditions of Use provides for dispute resolution by the courts."

And in the conditions themselves: "We each waive any right to a jury trial."

Seems like yet more "let perfect be the enemy of the good" thinking.

If you want a cut-me-off set to $X, and some lag might allow charges to reach X+Y before the cutoff took effect, which is the customer-centric answer:

a) don't offer ANY cap, simply let the customer's out of control charges just keep racking up to catastrophic levels that put them out of business?

b) cut it off as soon as you DO detect it exceeded their cut-me-off threshold even if by that point it has reached X+Y?

There ought to be a "emergency shutoff" threshold, period. And there's just no customer-centric excuse for not implementing it after these many years.

Here's how to implement it:

"Amazon, what do you do today if my credit card fails and all the retries fail?"

Do THAT if billing hits <my emergency off switch threshold>.

Will it disrupt the heck out of all my AWS services? Of course. That's the point, if something went so seriously wrong that my billing hits an absurd level that will put me out of business, I'd rather have downtime.

Best general explanation I've seen so far, thanks for posting the link.

Unfortunately, it still completely sidesteps any discussion of the relative risk of a vaccinated person (who is protected from a severe infection themselves) still a) getting infected and b) causing a severe case in someone else who is not yet vaccinated.

So while "efficacy" may not be relevant on one dimension (MY chances of severe infection) it still seems important in another dimension (the chances of ME nonetheless getting infected then giving a severe case to someone else).

Great little story!

It shocks me that so many people want to run Docker on a platform it was never built for.

Yet, it works, and well, your shock notwithstanding.

If your goal is a SINGLE portable, virtualized platform for your developers, which does not require a persistent internet/SSH connection, and which is "fast enough" for developers to be effective, Docker on Mac is a pretty swell solution.

Thats IF your local Apple store is even taking appointments; none on Oahu are. Plus there's apparently significant parts delay no matter where you get the repair done.

It took Apple 32 days to get my MBP 16" repaired, returned under Crapplecare.

Listening to the Cuban interview right now. Thanks for providing this. Look forward to more.

As annoying, to me, is that Godaddy lets you go through the entire transfer process without TELLING you it's going to be rejected.

So you have to the transfer get it rejected, THEN turn off privacy, then do it all again.

On the other hand, that just makes it that much sweeter once the domain finally lands at Route53 (etc) and you no longer have to play Godaddy Renewal Roulette and wonder if your next renewal will be 50% higher than normal.

(Oh, and BTW, I was happy to see that if your domain registration is a company, Route53 does quasi-private registraiton at no extra cost.)

I do blame Heroku, given that we spend $thousands with them.

(If they had different rules for freebies that would make sense.)

For completeness, full text of the note from Salesforce legal counsel (which made the original post too long) is: "Thank you for your email. We apologize for the difficulty this situation can cause, but unfortunately, because we are not in a position to determine the merits of trademark (or other intellectual property) infringement disputes, and because of our potential exposure to legal liability in such circumstances, we typically must require the customer to remove the allegedly infringing material within an expeditious time frame. When faced with such a situation in the trademark context, you are free to reach out to us to explain the situation, but in most cases, our ability to provide an accommodation may be limited to providing additional time where you intend to contact the claimant to resolve the claim and/or apply for a court order against the claimant within a reasonable amount of time."

Pity the geniuses at Google couldn't/wouldn't design their heavily replied upon APIs to keep functioning if their BILLING is broken.

If I use an electronic boarding pass, I temporarily make that my wallpaper so it is usable at the gate without unlocking my phone.

Currently it's better, but only a little. They do NOT offer you an option to cancel auto-renew... ONLY to cancel.

BUT after you cancel (as I did), they now popup a 'do you want to keep access until the expiration?' which you must affirmatively select.

I infer - perhaps because I'm leery of CR now - that hiding the cancel-auto-renew option right up front is a way to manipulate people into thinking 'gee i better wait until it's closer to expiry to cancel' in the (probably safe) assumption many will forget.

I did get a note back in response to my inquiry that they do not intend to reduce the conversions so dramatically, and indicated if I needed 150K (which I don't) they would allow that. Personally, the usual 3x or 4x more conversions than uploads seems fair.

Considering the widespread outages they caused this week with a 10am PDT maintenance, and the widespread complaint re: their timing, I'm going to chalk this one up to unvarnished arrogance.

Kim-1, all souped up with cassette interface

There is no reason they cannot perform maintenance for US zones and EU zones at different times and avoid M-F mid-day for everyone. So it's probably "just easier" for Heroku this way.

Compounding the issue of irresponsibly scheduling maintenance for US zones mid-day in the US, they ALSO broke ability to scale worker processes to zero, so there was literally NO way to wind your app down and prevent worker jobs from firing off.

When the platform started getting wonky we shut off our worker dynos so the system would not fire off emails while the system is in a known-screwed-up state.

The console said workers were set to zero.

But... in our logs we watched the (supposedly off) workers continue to fire off.

Nice FUBAR all around, Heroku.

We found Godaddy's free dns service was causing a noticeable number of random "website not found" errors. While it might have been mitigated by adding a secondary dns provider we decided to find a more robust primary dns solution plus a secondary dns provider.