oldjokes (u/oldjokes)

oldjokes commented on AWS costs every programmer should know david-codes.hatanian.com/... · Posted by u/dizzih

mgkimsal · 7 years ago

> If you make this mistake then the investors will swoop in and demand you spend more on marketing and AWS infrastructure

Would there be any "conflict of interest" issues is some of the same people requiring AWS spending were also Amazon shareholders?

oldjokes · 7 years ago

Dude. A bunch of billionaires just got away with completely tanking the economy and getting bailed out for it. Zero people ever even talked about the possibility of anyone going to jail. Everyone got their bonuses. Nobody suffered any consequences. Literally nobody.

If you think anyone cares about any conflict of interest among the investing class you're beyond naive, you're just delusional.

oldjokes commented on AWS costs every programmer should know david-codes.hatanian.com/... · Posted by u/dizzih

oldjokes · 7 years ago

I have worked at two startups now where we made the fatal mistake of being profitable. If you make this mistake then the investors will swoop in and demand you spend more on marketing and AWS infrastructure, because we're scaling up to 5 billion users of course.

Of course we started spending all the money on new people and AWS, and soon there was no money.

At one point we were dumping like $15K a month on AWS for a dozen unnecessary over-engineered toys that nobody was using. This is the real cost of AWS.

I'd love to see Amazon's data on money invested vs actual user traffic for small startups, that's got to be some of the most interesting and valuable data on earth. Forget companies, I'll bet Jeff is sitting around predicting when entire industries rise and fall weeks before anyone else based just on this data.

oldjokes commented on Cracks in nuclear reactor could lead to the evacuation of Edinburgh and Glasgow edinburghlive.co.uk/news/... · Posted by u/inflatableDodo

javagram · 7 years ago

The authorities quoted in the article are an “independent consultant on radioactivity in the environment,” and a “Reader in Energy Policy”.

While I am sure they are experts in their respective fields, is either actually an expert on nuclear engineering qualified to judge whether these cracks actually are dangerous?

BTW if the reactor is truly dangerous it should be shut down, but we need to keep in mind every reactor being shut down means more fossil fuels being burned and destroying our entire planet’s environment.

oldjokes · 7 years ago

One does not follow from the other. Many countries are vastly reducing carbon while not investing in nuclear at all. We're already at the point where the carbon impact of energy production is negligible in many areas, there are much bigger fish to fry if you're truly concerned about carbon.

oldjokes commented on U.S. Cities Strain to Fight Hackers wsj.com/articles/u-s-citi... · Posted by u/Bostonian

oldjokes · 7 years ago

Replace "cities" with "any organization that is not tech first" and you'll still find hundreds of win 7/vista/xp machines that have never been patched, and ad-hoc network closet/cloud hybrid rigged solutions for everything.

There is literally no way to fix all this dumb fragile infrastructure without a massive government program that accepts responsibility for doing so. You need thousands of smart people going through every machine, all the software, all the systems. These people are never going to work for Baltimore or for Maersk, not in a million years.

Instead let's create a new government agency or pivot the NSA from it's dumb paranoid reactionary posture to more of a proactive NIST-style advisory role on best practices, have them hack everything domestically and start fixing things as their core mission. Make sure nobody at state or DHS or justice can subvert this new agency, they need to stand on equal footing with any company or agency.

Then hopefully pillage all the miserable smart people who are currently working at mega corps and agencies who actually want to do positive, meaningful work for a change.

Problem solved someone hire me to advise on their political campaign.

oldjokes commented on Boeing Built Deadly Assumptions into 737 Max, Blind to a Late Design Change nytimes.com/2019/06/01/bu... · Posted by u/razin

throw7 · 7 years ago

"As part of the fix, Boeing has reworked MCAS to more closely resemble the first version."

Be very wary if pilot training is not part of the "fix" to getting the Max back up in the air. If MCAS is being "rolled back" then certain situations such as "The Max wasn’t handling well when nearing stalls at low speeds." come back.

oldjokes · 7 years ago

Anything short of admitting "we fundamentally screwed up, and are rethinking the poor decision to pair this engine with this airframe" as well as "we are reviewing all our design processes and how the FAA oversees every step of the process" is unacceptable. MCAS is just the horrific bloody bandage that is peeling away, it's not actually the problem here.

This probably won't happen of course, all they seem to want to do is fix as little as possible as quickly as possible while denying they ever knew anything.

If I were someone powerful like a pilot union leader I would start throwing conniption fits in public and refuse to let my people fly on Max's at all.

oldjokes commented on An examination of Uber’s economics americanaffairsjournal.or... · Posted by u/microwavecamera

oldjokes · 7 years ago

They are truly innovative in the sense that they finally exposed the fact that much of tech startup funding is just a ponzi scheme by pushing it all the way to the IPO with no plan to ever make money. That's a new thing, usually only microcap companies were able to pull off that scam in the past.

Get out between series A/B if you want maximum return, the only losers in these phony companies that never make money are the last round of investors who get left holding the bag.

And if you're an employee looking at stock options in a startup just say no. Stop surrendering real money for fictional money. Get a higher base salary instead. Employees with equity plans are always at the bottom of the list to get paid out.

oldjokes commented on Amazon Shopping for Office Space in Manhattan, Proving HQ2 Haters Right slate.com/business/2019/0... · Posted by u/ceejayoz

oldjokes · 7 years ago

I hope after the utter trainwreck that is Foxconn in Wisconsin every local government is being more skeptical of these corporate welfare deals.

I'm really tired of seeing fancy corporate lawyers outfox local politicians over and over again, somehow always getting a new record-breaking welfare incentive plan while structuring the contracts such that they have a hundred loopholes and never have to actually do anything for the money. This keeps happening at small and large scales all over the country, and it needs to stop.

oldjokes commented on Justice Department Is Preparing Antitrust Investigation of Google wsj.com/articles/justice-... · Posted by u/Despegar

aleister_777 · 7 years ago

Good. To quote an old friend who worked for Google:

"I'm worried that if the rest of America knew what we were actually doing here they would literally come here and kill us..."

oldjokes · 7 years ago

I wonder how severe the backlash is going to be, not just for Google but all the tech giants. Our anti-trust laws were mostly written around monopolies abusing pricing power to rip off consumers, but with the intersection of data and hosting and analytics and everything else the potential to abuse people is far greater than just raising prices. And they have expanded their ability to profile and experiment on individuals worldwide, regardless of whether you create a Google account.

It's just getting scary at this point.