FatalBaboon (u/FatalBaboon)

FatalBaboon commented on Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone ai.googleblog.com/2018/05... · Posted by u/ivank

indemnity · 7 years ago

What is installed when using a SaaS solution?

FatalBaboon · 7 years ago

Well there is initial setup at the very least. Hooking up whatever landline the client has with the SaaS solution.

Then whenever a significant change is required, you need to call back your "expert". New location? xk$, etc.

But I think the biggest concern is that suddently the owner does not understand how his reversation system works. He used to be able to call Joe and know what's going on...

FatalBaboon commented on Ask HN: How do you document and keep tabs on your infrastructure as a sysadmin? · Posted by u/redsec

petepete · 8 years ago

I'm no expert but doesn't Ansible Tower do that?

FatalBaboon · 8 years ago

Ansible Tower lets you execute a playbook via a web GUI, and keeps a log of who executed what.

I'm not sure if it also shows some infrastructure graphs, but I'm talking about knowing if links are up, how they are firewalled, where the config for each thing is, etc.

When you host tens of services on hundreds of machines, this information is hard to get a grasp on, no matter what you do or how well you documented everything, because it takes a while to read through it.

FatalBaboon commented on Ask HN: How do you document and keep tabs on your infrastructure as a sysadmin? · Posted by u/redsec

FatalBaboon · 8 years ago

Like many here, I keep it described in ansible and documentation inside a git repository.

But I feel like it's lacking. After a while you have so many ansible playbooks and roles that they cannot give you a birds-eye view anymore.

I think I would MUCH prefer to have some sort of HTML representation, where adding an instance/service starts by adding to that representation, and you could click on every link or node to show its golden image setup, ansible configuration, etc.

THAT, I could show to a newcomer and he'd get it.

FatalBaboon commented on Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself mtlynch.io/why-i-quit-goo... · Posted by u/mtlynch

Infernal · 8 years ago

So I'm asking this not to move the goalposts, but because it's the situation I'm in - what do if your manager is too weak/distracted/uncaring to actually act on this information and/or the projects in wait state on you are not actually within your manager's sphere of influence?

FatalBaboon · 8 years ago

Unless something is keeping you there, just find a new job, here are some reasons:

- If you reach this situation, you're more competent than the rest of the group. Nobody to learn from, time to go.

- "Management" is a big machine, with its own insider culture and politics. It does not change overnight, do you want to wait 6 months minimum for things to get better?

- Changing job is good for just about everything: career, money, knowledge... as long as you don't do it too often.

- Meta-bonus: getting into a job with better peers means tighter work-friends. It's not fun to be around people overdesigning object-oriented projects when you understand functionnal programming and low-level debugging.

FatalBaboon commented on Dropbox saved almost $75M over two years by moving out of AWS geekwire.com/2018/dropbox... · Posted by u/shaklee3

dzdt · 8 years ago

AWS sells optionality. If you build your own data center, you are vulnerable to uncertain needs in a lot of ways.

(1) your business scales at a different rate than you planned -- either faster or slower are problems!

(2) you have traffic spikes, so you to over-provision. There is then a tradeoff doing it yourself: do you pay for infrastructure you barely ever use, or do you have reliability problems at peak traffic?

(3) your business plans shift or pivot

A big chunk of the Amazon price should be considered as providing flexibility in the future. It isn't fair to compare prices backwards-looking: where you know what were your actual needs and can compare what it would have cost to meet those by AWS vs in house.

The valid comparison is forward looking: what will it cost to meet needs over an uncertain variety of scenarios by AWS compared to in-house.

The corallary of this is, for a well-established business with predictable needs, going in-house will probably be cheaper. But for a growing or changing or inherently unpredictable business, the flexibility AWS sells makes more sense!

FatalBaboon · 8 years ago

I would bet they still burst-out to AWS.

For me the logic is more like: get cheapers machines (be it in-house or with cheaper alternatives), that run kubernetes for example, and monitor them with Prometheus.

If you run out of capacity, defined by whatever metric you fancy from Prometheus, start EC2 machines for the burst.

Every month, re-evaluate your base needs.

FatalBaboon commented on Alphabet's earnings miss profit estimates as spending grows reuters.com/article/us-al... · Posted by u/daegloe

clay_the_ripper · 8 years ago

Yes this is a big problem. Particularly for google searches. Now that there is so much money at stake for being the top of google results, the best information often gets buried because the people who stand to make the most money have the biggest budgets and are able to spend thousands on SEO. I’m not really sure what the solution is. Google has become “the internet” for billions of people and its utility for finding information has gone down (in my opinion) not up. Now everything at the top is sponsored, or a big aggregator like TripAdvisor or yelp.

As someone who works in advertising I try to do my part by only taking clients that I trust sell something quality and do business with integrity. I could make a lot more money if I just sold anything and everything. I know people that market tobacco products on Facebook, for example. Those contracts are extremely lucrative, but I simply could not feel good about promoting those products.

I would not be able to do what I do (from a moral standpoint) if I just advertised for everyone. I enjoy what I do because I am able to promote people and companies that do something positive. There are a lot of scammers in my business, and I was tired of watching the least honest people get the best results (because they can afford top agencies) and the smaller clients actually doing something positive get screwed by dishonest marketing people.

FatalBaboon · 8 years ago

Do you still make a buck? Aren't you drowned by big players?

FatalBaboon commented on Alphabet's earnings miss profit estimates as spending grows reuters.com/article/us-al... · Posted by u/daegloe

clay_the_ripper · 8 years ago

There is a lot of anti-ad sentiment here but as someone who runs ads on google and Facebook for clients, I find that google and Facebook have leveled the playing field in some respects for small companies. Now I can definitively show a client that they pay me X dollars per month and my ads for them generated X*5 revenue for them that month. The attribution for these platforms is quite robust, and if you know what you’re doing you can produce positive ROI even on small budgets. Previously when advertising was done on an awareness basis (billboards, newspapers) small advertisers might be shut out of the market because advertising is expensive and they can’t reliably say whether their ads are working.

I work mainly in the health/wellness space and I’m able to effectively target people who will be legitimately interested in the services the companies we represent sell. There seems to be this idea that advertising is “shoved down our throats” and while I certainly agree in some cases, people who buy from our clients are buying because the products or services improve their lives in some way and they only buy because they want to. I think that google and Facebook (whatever your feelings on their other practices) do provide an unprecedented avenue for small businesses to find customers efficiently and profitably.

FatalBaboon · 8 years ago

I find that there is often a problem of quality in products advertised.

It may be products floating in Amazon searches because of fake reviews, sites with great SEO, and most ads online really.. none of those correlate to quality of product.

Then entire point was to make finding things easy, but I find that advertising just makes that harder.

In September I was looking for a Volleyball club in Paris for people in their 30s, as I wanted a fixed team with whom I'd share interests. My searches failed me horribly. Google and Duckduckgo mostly fed me news articles, competition stuff and some big club websites. Then my local mayor's office site had a totally out of date page, and did not list clubs closeby but outside its district.

Eventually I went to a local sports fair to meet up with clubs, but almost none of them offered adults teams, because that's typically a young people's sport.

I the end, I did find a place for me, by talking to people at the mayor's office, and random players at the fair.

And often when I look for an object, it takes a very long time because quality products rarely float above the rest. It's excrutiating.

So now I hate advertising, and I hate ratings. They are noise designed to mess up with human psychology.

FatalBaboon commented on Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day (2014) righto.com/2014/09/mining... · Posted by u/dvt

mseebach · 8 years ago

Smart money has always been on selling shovels to the gold diggers.

FatalBaboon · 8 years ago

On the bright side, maybe the cryptoworld is merely investing on better GPUs by metric-tons of cash.

FatalBaboon commented on Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web neustadt.fr/essays/agains... · Posted by u/livatlantis

fiddlerwoaroof · 8 years ago

Mining cryptocurrencies while the current tab is in the foreground. (supposing a suitable GPU/ASIC-proof cryptocurrency is available)

FatalBaboon · 8 years ago

This is going to be very easy to block: disable processing after page-load, block the most popular cryptomining JS scripts...

FatalBaboon commented on Being Thankful for Free Software Developers fosspost.org/opinions/peo... · Posted by u/ashitlerferad

jasonkester · 8 years ago

I like to think of Free Software Developers as rational actors. So while they certainly deserve my gratitude, I disagree that we owe them any other compensation that they didn't specifically ask for.

As the author notes, developers, doctors, lawyers, etc. know their value and charge accordingly. A developer who charges $0 for his work product must, therefore, be making up that value elsewhere. Most major Open Source projects certainly are.

Chrome, Linux, MySQL, and lots of other big names all have corporate backing. Large companies paying people to build software to advance their agenda. Commoditize the Operating System to sell more servers. Control the Browser to keep the rug un-pulled from your web empire. There's really not a lot of pure charity to be found.

True, you do find the occasional artiste working away for no money, living the officially sanctioned stereotype for what an open source developer is supposed to look like. But I tend to hope that he knows the score and is therefore looking out for his own interests.

There are lots of good reasons to develop open source. But I don't consider "charity to big companies" to be one of them.

FatalBaboon · 8 years ago

Usually the difference between Free and Open Source also shows in who backs it.

Free Sofware comes from NGOs, whereas Open Source is either corporations looking to make a convoluted buck or developers looking for recognition.

In that regard, Free Software Developers definitely deserve my gratitude.