ozzythecat

One tenant sends you a flood of traffic, that you might not be scaled to handle. Let’s say your application servers are scaled for this traffic, but your single, shared database is not. All that traffic could cause an outage on your database. If this happens, the impact won’t necessarily be on one tenants but all tenants.

There are ways you can mitigate this. Strong isolation is one. Throttling tenant calls could be another.

We don’t know your specific use case enough, but it’s something to think about now.

This is generally referred to as the noisy neighbor problem.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected/latest/saas-lens...

Ads = revenue = promotions.

I was at Amazon for over a decade. Show YoY growth in terms of revenue, you’ll get a bigger empire. Sr. Managers become Directors. Directors become VPs. The senior engineers who worked on the low latency performance optimization becomes principals. The tech program managers become principals as well.

All the other cogs in the chain either get burned out, managed out, or they bounce to AWS, maybe Alexa.

All the analysis and commentary in this thread is interesting, but there’s nothing complex here. It’s basic incentive structures incentivizing undesirable outcomes.

If one tenant misbehaves and takes down your database, how will your other tenants feel?

What do you have to keep synchronized across tenants?

And is consistency across tenants really a hard requirement? Would an eventual consistency model work?

How does migration factor in? Do you mean migrating one database vs multiple databases?

What exactly would you be migrating? And if it’s written in code, migrating individual tenants one at a time, at your pace or when a particular tenant is ready to migrate, might be a feature and not a bug.

1. My grandchildren

2. Everyone else in my family and their good health. My children are happy in the marriages. Spouse is as energetic as ever and still has the enthusiasm and love when we met back in college

3. Quitting my last job before my physical and mental health completely shattered. Tell you what, if you’re also in the Amazon rat race, get out before it eats you.

4. Not doing too much over the past year, aside from reading, light travel, and participating in some online communities

I’m convinced this a bit overblown.

I don’t know enough about twitters infrastructure, so I’m only speaking at the application layer.

If the code isn’t changing, things should be extremely stable and resilient. Presumably, Twitter had already made significant investments in resilience, fault tolerant services that function independently at scale.

I’d think the more risky parts are server/hardware failures, hardware load balancers, etc.

One of the key services my big tech org owned was in support-only mode with no active feature development. Despite 500k requests per second, it had just a one person on pager duty.

The majority of support issues were OS level updates and application level dependency updates/fixing vulnerabilities. But not doing that work wouldn’t take the service down, so much as be corporate policy violations for not keeping software up to date. You could also definitely swing by exceptions.

The people in small town Northern Germany went so far as to criticize and attack you for your achievements that far surpassed what they have accomplished.

Isn’t this a salient feature in US culture? We attack the wealthy, celebrities, politicians. I’m not saying these people are saints by any means or it’s completely unwarranted, but the US seems to have an increasing victimhood culture. It manifests in different shapes and forms, but the outcome is more or less an attack on some person or group of people who we consider to be relatively more “privileged”, and we use that to dismiss their actual accomplishments or whatever good they may have also done. The root of the issue is always about comparing yourself to someone or some group and their accomplishments and justifying one’s or short comings.

Many of the diversity, equity, inclusion initiatives, regardless of good intentions, are spin offs from this.

To be clear, I’m not taking a swing at the social justice movements. But what I am saying is that in US culture, there’s definitely massive resentment of those who are successful.

This is an interesting thread :)

I see lots of conjecture on the nature of voice assistants, or why they haven’t taken off.

As someone who was at Amazon, and close to this area, let me offer a simpler explanation.

Alexa has stagnated because its leadership has little to no direction. The incentive structure driving the product teams and tech falls under two categories: 1. rest and vest 2. or write documents to build your promotion portfolio and get promoted. Then leave the org to find a job in AWS.

In fact, Alexa could be used as a text book study in empire building.

* Myriad teams that maintain or increase head count each year, with absolutely no meaningful deliverables.

* Services that could be maintained by a 2-3 person on call that have an entire team of 6-8 engineers.

* Tech directors, Sr. SDMs, and SDMs in a race to build their empire to get promoted to the next level. SDMs solemnly hiring head count for the sake of having more reports. Other SDMs hiring SDMs below them, even though there’s no need for additional management (team is idle), so they can show a larger footprint and get promoted to the next level.

Voice assistant tech may as well be hitting a brick wall for technical or human computer interaction gaps that need to be thought much more in depth. But saying this was just an insanely hard technical problem is misleading and missing the bigger picture.

If you build an organization as a pet project and then throw money at it to do whatever the hell it likes, with practically no accountability, of course you won’t get meaningful results.

In recent years, Alexa became a place to chill and wait for your RSUs to vest. I personally know great engineers in Alexa, who are now stressed out of their mind about their work and visa situation because of the layoffs. But look - you decided to join a team where you basically just hang out at work, have a series of useless meetings, or half the time, your manager is complaining for some reason that his team doesn’t all show up to daily stand ups. A ton of extremely talented folks became extremely lazy, and so here we are.

To root cause: misaligned incentives, lack of accountability and a poor work ethic, shockingly poor given at least some other parts of the company are still on the other, opposite extreme.

As global sales for new cars have fallen in recent years, car manufacturers have pivoted toward selling software updates and features as subscriptions to generate a continuous revenue stream long after a car has been purchased.

Are we surprised here? MB’s leadership has one primary goal: satisfying shareholders and the broader market.

We’ve been in a race to the bottom for a long time now. Inferior construction, cheap parts, overseas labor (or for the car market, labor in the US, Canada, or Mexico but also because of cost optimization).

This is the latest in a long line of cost cutting measures and patterns where the customer ultimately loses. I’m not even mad at Mercedes Benz. They know the game they’re playing, and this is what it takes I suppose.

My son in law bought a new C Class a few months ago. He and my daughter were very pleased. Now me, I’m an old goat, and so when I saw a massive iPad on the center console instead of buttons, I’d tell you that car wouldn’t be my first choice. And they had me sit in it and try it out. It is certainly a nice looking interior, but I pressed on the passenger side dashboard area and on the armrest between the front seats. I heard plastic crackling noises. It’s all plastic, even though it looks like some much superior metallic material. It was just some skin/vinyl on top of plastic.

How well will it hold? Time will tell, but it goes to show you the generation gap. I think he said he paid upwards of $50k for the car. With all the plastic, I can never see myself paying that much money for a vehicle. But hey, Mercedes Benz has a market for these things, and so it’s reasonable to believe that no matter what I think of the $1,200 subscription, there’s a market for that too.

The other striking news of the week is Elon Musk's epic flaming death spiral at the helm of Twitter.

I am old, and admittedly, my oldest grandchild cares more about Twitter than I do.

Maybe one of you here can enlighten me. Why does Musk get so much attention? Why is Twitter so important? Perhaps this is incredibly ignorant to say, but why not let people who want to use Twitter use it, and those that don’t, don’t use it?

I keep hearing about freedom of speech, toxicity on social media. Is it unreasonable for people who don’t like Twitter to just not use it anymore?

I feel the loudest voices are anti Twitter. Or they hate Musk. And Elon Musk seems to rather enjoy trolling these people.

Mainly, it feels like Twitter and FB have somehow become the defining issues of our time. Maybe I’m just stupid, but I don’t understand why. Why this obsession with Musk?

I’ve gone through layoffs several times in my career. As has my older son, as has my sister, my wife. So Musk bought a company, took it private, and fired a ton of folks. Has corporate America never had layoffs? Have we never had layoffs where honest, hard working people were needlessly fired, because of market conditions, short sightedness and greed on part of their business execs, or some combination of both?

I worry that this country is hyper addicted to needless drama, and it’s self imposed and obfuscating bigger challenges we have as a society.

I saw a Twitter conversation between Democrat and Republican House members. Absolutely shameful how these people hurl insults at each other, try to respond with sly, “witty” insults. Maybe I’m the one being the drama queen, but it feels like Rome is starting to burn and we have no one to blame this time but ourselves.

End of rant from this old goat.

Is your goal to turn your calculators into web interfaces? Are you wanting to learn how to do that?

If the goal is purely providing something functional to others on the internet, just create a simple page. Describe your calculators. Add links to download your calculators as excel spreadsheets.

No need to over complicate and build a spreadsheet in a browser.

If you don’t want to do that, just create some HTML pages with forms and use some JS to chain together input boxes and spit out a calculation.

Many of the suggestions here will take you the route of complicated layers of abstraction. Unless your goal is to learn these abstractions, you can avoid that complexity.

I’m a layman with no knowledge of how ICUs work, because (thank God), I’ve never had to visit one.

I found this article informative, and not cynical at all. No system is perfect, and so with all of the significant benefits they provide, ICUs have some things they aren’t best for.

Continuing to say that is reason "you" have to wait for getting a slot and asking whether or not the observed sotuation is actually hood is cynical.

I see you bashing the author, but you haven’t made a coherent argument at all. In fact, I’m not sure if this is even English.

If there’s something op got wrong, help us understand and make it a teaching moment. Just bashing them isn’t productive.

Gah! I’m a big fan of Michael Lewis. I feel he could write a book about nothing and still make it a page turner.

But at the risk of coming across arrogant, I don’t care for crypto or anything related to its celebrity frontmen.

Crypto, it’s obsession, and entire culture, in my mind, is like “Keeping up with the Kardashians” meets tech culture.

The article says Michael Lewis hasn’t written a word of the book yet. Perhaps he’ll reconsider and write about something else entirely.

The judge should not view Theranos as "a house of cards," but as the "ambitious, inventive, and indisputably valuable enterprise it was," they wrote. "The court's difficult task is to look beyond those surface-level views when it fashions its sentence."

I’m trying to stay level headed and reason about this. I am a layman when it comes to the US justice system, but I find this insulting and making a mockery of the justice system.

It was absolutely a fraudulent, house of cards. The courts task is to actually carry out justice, and keep in mind the fact that Elizabeth Holmes carefully concatenated an imagine of success, even dressing like Steve Jobs.

Forget the investors. This crime defrauded actual patients. An 18 month sentence? Ha! Why not just abolish the entire judicial branch of government? What’s even the point?

The way this works today, a person is competence at raising children is untill social services prove otherwise. Kinda like innocent until proved guilty.

Nobody is talking about 16 year olds or abortions. Are you sure you’re not deliberately changing the topic and really are debating in good faith?

Why do you believe it’s appropriate to compare a random 16 year old with a convicted criminal, who is awaiting sentencing?

a person is competence at raising children is untill social services prove otherwise. Kinda like innocent until proved guilty

And no one is arguing against that. You’re making a straw man argument.

Holmes is the mother of a young child and punishment for her is simultaneously punishment to the innocent child.

If we make the case that a criminal should receive a lessor sentence because it impacts their child, does that mean that any single mom or dad who robs a business should be able to get the same treatment? A reduced sentence for armed robbery, for example?

Continuing to play devils advocate here: how do we know such a criminal would create a safe and nurturing environment for the child? Or how do we know they don’t end up raising another sociopath in their own image?

My own 2 cents: from the literature I’ve read about Elizabeth Holmes, it would not shock me that having a child was part of the defense’s strategy.

I recommend picking up a JVM language. Either Java or Kotlin.

Then I recommend picking up C++.

A lot of people say C++ is dead, but there’s so much reliable software written in it. Once you use JVM and understand garbage collection, then C++ feels like a leap deeper into really having to understand how stack vs heap memory works, thinking about memory management, safety, and performance (passing by copy vs reference).

I think with this trifecta under your belt, you’ll be able to easily expand your tool kit further in the future.

Meta observation: At least on Mobile Safari, this page breaks the back button. I had to spam press the back button like 10x in order to come back to HN. I absolutely despise websites that do this, and immediately feel a bias against whatever the site is selling or trying to convince me to believe.

RE: the article itself

I’ve been on projects where we eventually shipped the most poorly written code (variables with ambiguous naming, methods that are several hundreds of lines, classes with 5-10k lines, little or no test coverage). This code was baked into a consumer device, and we shipped over 16 million units over almost the span of a decade.

I’ve also been on projects where the code was practically a work of art. By the time we were “done”, the market had changed from under our feet. What we were doing wasn’t so interesting or novel anymore. We never shipped.

It doesn’t surprise me that more code == more bugs (or an increasing probability), but it’s good to keep in mind that value is what we care to produce. Everything else is a cost, and spending too much on any particular cost can take the whole enterprise down the ravine, regardless of good intentions.

Millions starved to death in collectivization, even more millions displaced from their homes and sent to gulags. Intelligentsia eradicated as a class. The biggest and potentially richest country in the world collapsed due to planned economy.

Communism didn’t work, for sure, but I’m not sure how this takes away from the things that the Soviets did accomplish, which op listed above.

I also find it interesting the standard we judge the Soviets by. Millions have starved under capitalism, but in comparison to what? the Western world where we’ve been constantly at war with some country in the world, treating brown people as less than humans, causing refugee crises in the millions and civil wars?

I know the typical response to this comment is something like, “Oh but that’s whataboutism”. Well the reality is that as an American, I we should have the self awareness to recognize that we’re like a skunk complaining about the stench from another skunk.

Back to the original topic - the anti Russia frenzy is in full swing. This much should be clear to anyone, based on the tone of this article.

Regardless of how you feel about him as a person, this statement is a long stretch. Tesla, SpaceX, and his other companies have been able to accomplish pretty amazing things. To add to that, Musk wasn’t just some investor or people manager, but he’s been actively involved in engineering decisions, at least at SpaceX.

I feel like posts like this are pretty low quality and better suited for Reddit (or maybe even Twitter).

I’m personally not a fan of Musk or any other celebrity/billionaire buying out companies just because they feel like it, and potentially gutting what many hard working people probably put their soul into building. On the other hand, there’s a more nuanced, stimulating discussion that can be had instead of “bankrupting him would give me infinite joy.”

I was going to call it a puff piece, but as far as Boeing is concerned:

Boeing won't touch these things due to shareholder conservatism

My spouse worked for Boeing. My son currently works for Boeing. Change is the slowest and most difficult thing to bring about at Boeing. It’s part of Boeing’s DNA.

The cost of eliminating some deadweight loss is making some people feel awkward or shame when they get to the tip screen.

90% of the places I’ve recently visited displayed a tip screen, and I’ve tipped maybe 5% or even 0%.

I’m alright with tipping properly if I sit down at your restaurant and you serve me food, with reasonable service.

I will not tip you 25-20%, if I drive in and picked up my food myself, and all you did was hand me the food at the counter.

Unfortunately, nearly every restaurant and eatery has this expectation in my area. They give you no service other than literally just giving you the food, and then they want a tip. I should feel pressure or feel bad I’m not paying you extra? Nah.

If anything, I find this behavior appalling, and we avoid eating out. The food isn’t great for my blood pressure and diabetes anyway, and we’re better off saving or investing it for our grandchildren.

How is being on h1 relevant here? Visa or no visa people will act according to incentives designed by company.

P.S I am on H1 visa. For sure I am offended.

Most of these PMs are Indians on H1Bs. The incentive designed by the company is extracting a certain output, under specific work conditions, and it requires bringing employees to the US, at scale, and having their visa situation hanging over their head.

If you’re offended that Amazon is able to do that, at scale - I don’t fault you.

If you’re offended that I’m openly discussing this, then I would say I don’t agree with censoring what’s in fact reality.

So many questionable decisions were made, at least during my time at Amazon, because of a cut throat environment of fear. I had 1:1s where Indian employees would cry about the situation they find themselves in, where they often have to agree or do things they don’t want to do, out of fear of losing their job and having to relocate back to India.

Having worked at Amazon for well over a decade, here’s more or less what happened:

1. Product, in alignment with directors and VPs, have an overarching 3-5 year vision document

2. The document talks about “customer obsession” and a 2025 vision for “delighting customers”

3. Document has mostly fluff ideas, written by some MBA grad, on an H1B visa, who is feeling pressure to deliver a grand vision. Both to get promoted (eventually) and mainly to keep their job. If they get fired, they have 30 days to find a new company that will employ them with visa sponsorship. Or they have to move back to Hyderabad or whichever Indian city.

4. Document goes through several rounds of review, where this poor PM gets ripped a new one, many many times. In 1:1 with their manager, they are coached on having a thick skin and being able to handle verbal abuse and being made to feel small. Keep in mind, this person doesn’t really use Amazon Music themself. They just want to turn in their work, get paid, and go home.

5. Eventually, the product team aligns on increasing subscriptions X% YoY and increasing revenue Y%, by end of 2023 or mid 2024. Since we have some agreement already about to go in effect which will expand the music catalog, let’s leverage that. We’ll restrict the non-paid streaming option, and sell it as offering our premium customers (since that’s the metric we care about) more variety. Indeed we are “delighting customers” and “streamlining the music listening and discovery journey” <—- I shit you not. This is exactly how these docs are written.

6. This is reviewed and signed off by layers of directors and VPs. Keep in mind none of these people use Amazon Music. If anything, some of them might even have disdain for music.

7. The changes roll out. There’s an A/B test, designed in a way to not completely obscure reality but still give us what we want. End customers unhappy.

8. Product team works with technical team to look at specific A/B test results. Results show subscriptions are actually up. The measured increase is statistically significant. Music listening time is overall flat or increased slightly as well, but definitely not a regression.

9. Product team celebrates. Product team knows the product is worse off, customers are unhappy, etc. but the “metrics” we have show a win.

10. PM hangs out for several years. Realizes they can’t get promoted to a principal and leaves for another company, or they get annoyed with the whole visa back and forth process. They move to Canada and find some other Amazon team there, or they just go back to India once the initial stocks vest.

11. Cue the next round of MBA talent, looping through step 1.

I don't care and there was nothing in my comment that led to this segue about Obama.

Hold on a second. You’re saying that Republicans have been gridlocking since the Obama years. So clearly, you’re saying one side is at fault. But you don’t want to discuss the merits of Obama’s actual policy. Barack Obama did hypocritical things, but clearly your expectation is that Republicans just go along.

That’s not how a democracy works.

You brought up Obama and Republicans gridlocking, but the minute we dive deep into a more nuanced look, away from your binary/black and white narrative, you say this:

This is purely soapboxing around an issue that wasn't in discussion, thanks anyway.

Now you’re on a borderline personal attack. I’m not sure you’re here to discuss in good faith.

That's exactly the point, you are repeating this which is Russian propaganda.

Why should Russia dictate what Ukraine can or cannot do? NATO didn't expand eastwards, countries to the East asked to join NATO. Should NATO say "no, thanks, Russia doesn't allow us"?

I’m not sure if you understand what “propaganda” means.

Russia doesn’t want NATO at its doorstep, and it sees NATO as an existential threat. You don’t have to agree that this belief is justified. You can say those countries have a right to join NATO. That as sovereign nations, it’s entirely up to them to do as they please.

But that’s not the point here. The Soviets brokered a deal with us. We agreed NATO would not expand eastwards.

Again, Russia is doing what they said they would do, given the present circumstances. Whether you agree with what they’re doing or not, does not make it propaganda.

You could try to argue that the world has changed. That the US and Russia cannot single handedly make decisions in the 1990s and have them enforced on a modern day Europe, that those countries can decide for themselves.

But it’s besides the point. Russia sees NATO at their door step. The real terrifying thing is that our media paints Putin as a dictator, terrorist, a mad man. He probably is all three of those things, but why we’re playing fire with someone sitting on the worlds largest nuclear arsenal is beyond me.

Regarding Russia’s views: It’s the same way we (the US) instilled the Monroe doctrine, and you can bet money that if China gets real cozy with South American countries, we’ll be sending navy carriers down the Pacific.

Two other thoughts:

Your linked “sources” are well known liberal and left of liberal - progressive - organizations. To say this is a GOP specific problem is your ideology yelling out loud. The reality is that both parties are hyper polarized. Neither party has American interests at heart. The biggest ideas any Democrat or Republican has is on how to fan the fear mongering flame and divide people.

Again - the party of forward thinking and liberal ideas literally elected a dinosaur who probably doesn’t even know how to use e-mail.

I don't agree with your take that both parties are equally responsible though, one of them has consistently used political gridlock as a weapon, since Obama years.

Is political gridlock the root of the problem? Help me understand how only one party is responsible.

Interesting you mention Obama. He ran on an anti-war platform, which was fairly out of line with the media and general American politics at the time. That alone was a big reason to vote for him.

But what did he do? An unprecedented increase in drone attacks. By all measures, Obama let the military industrial complex grow.

I have a huge grievance with this line, it's literal Russian propaganda you are repeating.

How is it propaganda? Are you staying this IS NOT exactly what Russia stated, repeatedly since the early 2000s?

The point is to further political extremism, on both sides, and to create in fighting so that no united formation can stand against them.

So the question is how to fight against this.

I think our political parties and media are responsible for 99% of the political extremism, unwillingness to compromise, and placing their self interests over the well being of the country.

And frankly, I think posts like yours contribute to the problem. Rather than taking responsibility as a country for where we are, we constantly resort to blaming external actors. If not the Taliban, then now Russia. Or we blame China.

And the narrative from those in power is always the same. The Taliban isn’t attacking us for our freedom? Well you support terrorists then. Russia isn’t responsible for Trump getting elected? You must be a Russian shill. You say Russia did exactly what they said they would do if NATO didn’t stop expanding eastwards? Oh you’re a traitor or must work at a Russian troll farm.

No. Take responsibility for once. We’re in this situation because of our own fault. We elected leaders who divide us. In the last election, the party of liberal and forward thinking ideas elected a man who’s been in politics longer than my children and grand children have been alive. What new ideas does this man have? What’s he going to do now in the executive branch that he couldn’t influence his party to do over his many, many decades long career? Is all that Russias fault too?

To be frank: I don’t care for either party. I’m just tired of the constant blame game and passing on the buck to someone else.

We visited my granddaughter at a Midwest state school last week.

I was actually surprised with how beautiful the university grounds were. They likely spend a fortune on landscaping alone.

Our older grandson went to the same school studying CS and EE. I’d say he’s doing very well.

I agree education is over priced, much like any other investment or asset in this day and age.

Perhaps my world view is narrow, but what are examples of these “affordable” schools with spotty wifi?

I think the old buildings or drab dorm argument isn’t a huge deal. Call me old fashioned, but I’d prefer my grand kids being safe but having some challenges. Otherwise, we’re keeping them in a bubble. As long as their is climate control and cleanliness, I’m fine with them not getting a 4.5 star hotel treatment.

I don’t recall a similar announcement even at the height of COVID.

Do we know what’s now changed?

I don’t think this is entirely true. For sure, one could say “X” is bad because it conflicts with their view, and that’s something that has long existed before the concept of “echo chambers” became well known.

I think echo chambers are unhelpful in the sense that they reinforce a certain view without nuance or deep dive.

I had a friend recently tell me how a certain personality is crazy. I asked them why, and after pressing on them a few times, they admitted they had no real data points to say this person is crazy or attack them. It’s just what they’ve heard everyone else say, and so my friend was convinced that if enough people are saying something, obviously it must be true.