griffordson

This thought is the one I keep coming back to over and over again in 2020.

It's almost like the people complaining the loudest don't have a profitable software product that justifies regular ongoing maintenance or something.

Gotta say those machinations were much less troubling than the multiple times they pulled the rug out from developers during the '90s. Anyone who survived the '90s who didn't internalize those lessons deserves what they got, but I do fear there is a generation which doesn't appreciate just how lucky they are to be able to build an entire career dependent only on OSS platforms.

Yes, it is throwing 503s and we're also getting general network failures in other calls to the SQS APIs. As is typical, not a peep from AWS or any indication of what is going on.

[Edit 1] And we're seeing the issue in us-east-1 too FYI

[Edit 2] They are now reporting the issue in us-east-2 with SQS and Lambda

[Edit 3] After looking harder it appears I was wrong about us-east-1. I thought we were seeing failures there but it does seem to be confined to us-east-2 only.

[Edit 4] AWS is reporting it is back up and it appears the errors stopped for us at around 1:10pm Central

Every day I see young people dreaming about owning a Tesla someday instead of the ICE dream cars of the past (Ferrari, Porsche, Lamborghini, etc.) I don't know what the value of that is, but it ain't nothing.

Google also kills entire niches in the short term by doing this stuff. Almost nobody is going to try to compete with them head on so if they are in a niche with a product that eventually gets killed, all progress stops in that niche for potentially years.

The DVR is critical. And hardware DVRs I've used are horrible. Maybe I haven't tried the right one, but the ones I've tried are less than worthless and I've finally given up on them. I also despise the network specific apps for my devices. Some are great, but most are garbage and constantly require me to authenticate over and over again.

And the cost is not a major driver for me.

Sorry, just saw your reply. I suspect you are overestimating the work. I just added some Rack middleware to handle request logging. Then plugged into the Rails model callbacks to record the CRUD events into a different Kinesis stream. And we're a 3 dev shop and I did this on my own over a few weeks part-time.

As far as retention goes, I just dump to it to S3 for permanent storage. Kinesis Firehose makes that dead simple. I also push each event into AWS hosted Elastic Search and I could theoretically purge older data, but for our volume of data, I'll likely retain it there for years.

Edit: Also, I generate UUID in the Rack middleware and set a Thread Local Storage variable that I can pull out in the CRUD logging so that I can always see what Rack request caused the CRUD model event.

I would love to have something that competes with YouTube TV but respects privacy and doesn't funnel even more data to Google. The other live TV services all have absurdly arbitrary DVR limits.

Not that Apple's streaming service will compete with YouTube TV, but I wish it would. Also, YouTube TV doesn't work all that great on Apple TV and I'd hope Apple could get that right too.

I'm now pushing application logging into a Kinesis Stream that gets firehosed to both S3 and Elastic Search. This includes both request logs and logs of any CRUD operation on my models (including all changed attributes with their old/new values.) There are separate logs for each, but the CRUD events get tagged with the ID of the request that triggered them so it is now trivial to see everything that happened to a given record and which request caused it and which user did it. And since all request logs have the session ID, I can also easily see everything that user did during that session both before and after the event in question. I've been wanting this sort of logging solution since the early 2000s and I now have it and it is even more incredible than I imagined.

It's always entertaining to look through the older Zillow listings for moderately to very expensive houses. Without fail they are testaments to bad taste. They'd cost a sizable percentage of the purchase price to renovate. Yet, the owners just keep holding out hope that someone with equally bad taste will eventually come along and snap it up.

What was your salary, and the salary of additional people to increase the bus factor to an acceptable level? There is a lot more than raw perf numbers that go into these calculations for any responsible business owner.

Add replication across regions into the mix and things swing even further in favor of AWS. Dealing with cross datacenter replication of MySQL was eating our lunch and preventing us from getting anything else done before we moved to an early version of RDS.

Thanks for sharing abetterrouteplanner.com. Planning a couple long distance trips that I commonly take seems much less odious than I would have expected. Although the last time I seriously considered buying a Tesla their network was much less well developed. I'm two years away from making that decision again and it seems much more likely that I'll consider a Model S or X then. Although there are still many aesthetic intangibles that make Teslas less appealing to me. But at least range anxiety seems more manageable.

Thanks for sharing the Ruby links.

Every once in a while I feel exactly what many Trump voters claim to feel when I see/hear this attitude. If a guy like Musk gets shredded for being authentic and at times a bit manic seeming, then it's no wonder polite society is such a sham. Real people who do stuff in the real world have off days. They make mistakes that they genuinely regret not because they got caught, but because those incidents represent them at their worst and they strive to spend more time at their best. Let's all cut everyone a little slack. Hanlon's razor applies when dealing with humans, no matter what their IQ and accomplishments.

What percentage of PC users has ever installed an OS of any kind, ever?

I have a single dependency on Google for my business and I would never take on another one voluntarily. All the horror stories you've heard about Google support have been true for the 10+ years I've been dealing with the Google Maps team. Every year they find some new way to screw up their customer support.

And that's before you even get to your legitimate concern about Google's long-term commitment to any of their offerings.

WSJ + WaPo is great IMO. My morning routine is WSJ, FT, WaPo, and sometimes NYT. The NYT is my least favored source partly because they skew too heavily toward my biases and I prefer reading high quality news from alternative perspectives more. YMMV.

In my experience, the amount of control you have over the time you spend working is a critical factor. If you can easily adjust your work hours down, at any time, then it isn't as bad. So try to avoid making hard commitments that require lots of work and you'll probably have fewer issues.

Luckily, they are still able to pay for food! It's like I'm an immigrant in my own country, sending money back to the old country. Just weird.

Well said. I don't have any answers, but wanted you to know that you are not alone in that feeling. It is incredibly disorienting to see the impact of income inequality so clearly in your own family in a single lifetime. It is even worse when you know that your children aren't interested in pursuing one of the few paths that can lead to financial security and are going to face a very difficult future if you aren't able to provide them with a safety net of your own.

What would happen if everybody would become Amish overnight?

How much land would that take? How would these new Amish afford the $10K/acre that the best farm land in the US can cost?

All good points. I should have been more specific. You can generate > $1M in profit with 1 or 2 devs, and in that case, AWS is a no brainer. In my experience, it is much more difficult to manage dedicated hardware in multiple data centers for high availability with only 1 or 2 devs. The opportunity costs alone in that case can kill you.

But I don't live in a world where runway is a consideration so YMMV. At the time I commented, the parent post was getting downvoted. I've seen that knee jerk reaction on HN multiple times, and that is what prompted my comment.

This seems to be an unpopular opinion on HN, but you are correct. It is possible to generate millions in revenue with 1 or 2 devs. If you manage to do that, paying a higher than average price for AWS is a no brainer.

And the idea that someone is going to poach a deer and throw it in the back of the truck on the way home from work is also laughable. The penalties for poaching are far too harsh for anyone who cares about ever hunting, fishing, or owning a gun for the rest of their lives. It's not something that happens in broad daylight for sure.

I know you mentioned 'some might object to the mouse use', but I would argue that a large number of people who prefer modal editors like Vi(m) do so because they can be driven completely by the keyboard and don't require you to use the mouse - which is disruptive and annoying (IMHO), obviously YMMV.

For some of us annoying is the least of the problem. Using the mouse to edit for more than an hour or two causes me crippling pain. Without Vim, or something else that would allow me to avoid the mouse 100%, I'm not sure I'd still be able to edit code at all.

Not every developer will develop RSI problems, but fewer would if they used a mouseless workflow.

I assume she's talking about the media used by her cameras. As in, the cameras store the raw data on SD cards in an unencrypted format.

Partner with proven ethical sales people rather than B.S. artists. As a technical person working a job, the best way for you to meet such people is to work with them in a technical capacity. If your current job doesn't give you opportunities to work with the best sales people in your company (including traveling with them to meet customers), find one that does.

And if you are a cofounder, whether technical or not, you are a business person first. If you aren't sharing your opinions on the best way to sell to your prospects you aren't doing your most important job as a founder.

It used to be hard to get insurance. That changes in a couple days. It is rude to claim the ACA does anything to help anyone, let alone business owners, but I'm certainly happy that I'll be getting oppressed by Obamacare in the new year.

> but the command line is no longer the most efficient way of doing everything

I agree with you, but the fact that most of the most gifted programmers I know usually gravitate towards some truly esoteric tools because of the complete control it affords them, negatively (sadly) impacts the rest of the programmers that look up to them

I spent years programming with Visual Studio and other IDEs that preceded it. I now work exclusively with "command line" tools because I can't physically use a mouse as my primary input device. I also use Linux now since it isn't possible to navigate OSX as efficiently as I can navigate using xmonad, tmux, and Vim on Linux.

It isn't an exaggeration to say that I owe my career, and my business, to the gifted programmers who maintained and improved the tools that I depend on now over the last several decades.

Is it possible the command line is the most efficient way of doing things and you just haven't discovered that yet?