karlkatzke's comments

Data has "gravity" -- as in, it holds you down to where your data is, and you have to spend money to move it just like you have to spend money to escape gravity.

This isn't a loophole. This is by design. AWS wants you to use specific services in specific ways, so they make it really cheap to do so. Using an endpoint for S3 is one of the ways they want you to use the S3 service.

Another example is using CloudFront. AWS wants you to use CloudFront, so they make CloudFront cheaper than other types of data egress.

In my teens, I had so much ability to process all kinds of stuff that I would pay attention to too much and get too distracted, and as a result, I would turn up music loud enough that it consumed the rest of my attention so that I'd stay focused on driving.

As an adult, I find myself turning off music and other distractions because they take up too much of my processing ability, because my ability to process that much is significantly lower than it was when I was a teenager. Keep this in mind as you're reading other advice aimed at teenagers, and understand how much of driving training is teaching someone to pay attention when there's so many things going on around them to watch but they mostly need to watch what they are doing.

Magnets. How do they work?!

We believe that babies' lives should have rights after birth, too, and if you look at infant mortality rates in states that whose politicians are against abortion, you see that obviously a fetus's right to live ends at birth.

I’m apparently still known for my snark during a reply-all storm at TAMU on an internal mailing list, 15 years ago.

There's a lot of other things I'm going to die from before I die from artificial sweeteners.

> Meanwhile, HVAC guys near me charge $700 to run a thermostat wire 5 feet.

Yes, in many areas that’s what it costs for a worker and helper to not be able to work on another more profitable job to do the job for you that only takes fifteen minutes. He still has to spend 30 minutes driving and maintain the same liability insurance and van lease and helper pay.

Part of the problem people don’t want to go into the direct to consumer trades is that the jobs are physically demanding, intellectually demanding (keep up on code changes, lots of esoteric knowledge about situations rarely encountered, and then there’s the customer service angle with homeowners that insist “it shouldn’t cost that much to run a wire five feet.”

Turns out some of those things that got broken outside of the company were important and people cared about them. Funny how things that work great in software development don’t work great when applied to the real world, eh?

Good. Needs to happen. Was talking to our HVAC repair dude. He makes as much as I do with a high school education and two years of trade school. Adjusting for age, he definitely makes more than I did at 34.

No reason to send kids who want to work with their hands to four year colleges and saddle them with 100k in debt when they can work through a trade school, be done at 20, and have no student loan debt.

A bunch of Google’s lack of focus is their internal management culture and nothing will change (and google/alphabet will not be worth being a customer of or being investing in) until the culture problem is fixed.

Google only promotes engineers when they are part of a program launch. No credit is ever given for feature launch or program maintenance. If you are not a part of a program launch within a few years at google/alphabet you are managed out.

This doesn’t create a company that I’d find it worth investing my limited engineering hours in long term. A GCE sales person called me last week and I couldn’t help but laughing when I told them that I’d just agreed to five year terms on an AWS private pricing agreement the previous week. Google’s recent actions made me unsure GCE would still be a product in five years.

Also seems to have gotten a crew list from the CommutAir’s CASS or possibly from other airlines as part of the shared deadheading crew list, which includes crew addresses and employment information.

There were also prod AWS credentials in the files exposed in Jenkins.

> calling a staffing emergency saying all hell is about to break loose

That memo is specifically about ground operations at DEN, and specifically because of the arctic weather conditions and a high number of sick calls and ramp agents that outright quit. You can earn more flipping burgers in Denver than you can as a SWA gate agent with five years of experience. Failing to pay staff is also a management failure.

The scheduling software crashed due to the number of pilots and flight attendants that were out of position and the number of changes that were made to the schedule. I would imagine that there was an overflow in some situation -- i.e. "the number of changed schedules should never exceed 65535" that worked every year until this one. But this system was already known to be unstable, another Reddit comment said that "there are settings you don't change for fear the entire thing will crash." Which it has before in 2016. Not expecting that history will repeat itself and doing something about it is also a management failure.

> Also its pretty much an airport thing and not an airline thing

Absolutely incorrect. While the airport runs the automated conveyance system that gets the bag from where the rampers drop it to the baggage claim, the people that handle the baggage at every manual step in between are SWA employees. If there aren't enough of them, the bags don't make it on the plane on time.

Notice that the people doing this work for Southwest Airlines are all wearing Southwest uniforms.

Like most complicated failures, this was failure with multiple causes and contributing factors. The core of the problem seems to be that management was rent-seeking without making appropriate structural changes to keep up with system load.

Funny, I’m not a police officer either, and I’ve somehow managed to go my entire life without being in ANY situation where a gun was pulled. Maybe you should re-evaluate your personal risk level and reconsider choices you’ve made in your life instead of defending shitty authoritarian practices of a government that wouldn’t give a shit about you.

More delivery drivers are murdered every year than police officers, but you don’t see people rolling around with “thin bread line” bumper stickers.

They don’t. Employees are responsible for checking the math of the scheduler. in the case of pilots, the employee has liability in this situation as well as the airline. Especially in situations where there is bad weather nationwide, employees can be and absolutely are scheduled incorrectly by schedulers and employees have to maintain several sets of numbers (rest time, etc) besides the flying hours that are logged in the airline’s app.

I liked DSP but it was a bit lacking in complexity once you got past the point of dedicating entire planets to pumping out, say, sphere structure. There's only so large you can build a sphere.

Now, Workers & Resources, Soviet Republic still stays challenging...

Lots of good advice already, but if I can make another one -- find a different type of company to work for/with. Not all companies are, can be, or need to be the go hard get big get out YC companies. I don't really like or work for those companies anymore. They chew people up and spit them out.

There's tons of small companies that have real products and that are profitable but are structured with much more realistic growth expectations and targets. I work for one that is largely homebound or disabled people. We work when we're able to, we don't stress much when we can't work, and we do good work.

It's scary enough in a 400hp/3600lbs RWD car. Even with traction control enabled, the car likes shaking it's ass any time you tap the gas and turning the wheel on anything remotely slick with power in will break the traction wheels loose.

It also glosses over that arctic land isn’t usable for agriculture. There’s nowhere near enough fertile soil in former permafrost. The areas that did have fertile soil are now deserts or covered in salt water. It really comes off as disingenuous to me in that regard; it’s a quantitative analysis without any of the qualitative measures that are necessary.