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Comment by prawn | Hacker News Reader

I follow an acquaintance on Twitter who set up an auto-tweet while he was alive. Now, after his death, he still tweets whenever the weather drops below a certain temperature in Scotland.

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Now I'm wondering what your acquaintance's tech stack is, and more generally, what the most reliable way to keep running scheduled jobs after death is - since Twitter won't remove accounts that still log in, I kind of want to set up a cronjob to keep my username active for as long as I can. (Assume that the job itself doesn't change, i.e., there's no need to move away from a deprecated API.)

Maybe Lambda + CloudWatch Events? AWS probably won't go away for decades.

Does your credit card automatically close when your death is reported to the financial system, or can you direct it to stay open in your will + set aside a bit of money to pay off the couple-cent bill in perpetuity?

There was a case of a military veteran recently in the States who lay dead on his kitchen floor for up to three years. He was still getting some sort of pension/payment and the rent was getting auto-paid from that. They only found him because of a check on tenants in a building/area who weren't drawing any water.

In a case like that, I suppose a debit card or credit card with an automatic transfer would stay active for some time.

> They only found him because of a check on tenants in a building/area who weren't drawing any water.

Wow. Some leaky faucets or automatic plant watering system would have kept him undiscovered for even longer.

It’s rare but not unheard of for people to be found decades after death.

https://elpais.com/elpais/2019/10/29/inenglish/1572340728_79...

More humorously I remember reading about a German guy that forgot where he parked his car and it sat in an office garage for 20 years or something.

There was a building in my city that was constructed in the 70's to be a shopping mall, but the owner got bankrupt in the meanwhile, and the building was repurposed into a parking lot that run for a couple of years.

By 2014 is was imploded. There were around 30 cars still parked there.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/man-forgets-...

Similar very recent case in Sweden:

https://www.thelocal.se/20191119/man-found-dead-in-stockholm...

Not sure it would matter if the CC was closed or not. If you're running a Lambda a few times a day you would fall into the free tier for... ever until they change the free tier.

So the question would be does your account stay active despite an expired credit card which is never invoked cos you never put your account into debt?

"The AWS free tier will expire 12 months from the date of when you first sign up."

Some AWS usage is part of the free tier even after 12 months. "The Lambda free tier does not automatically expire at the end of your 12 month AWS Free Tier term, but is available to both existing and new AWS customers indefinitely." - https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/pricing/

I made some Alexa skills years ago that are still up running on Lambda. They've never been used enough to get me charged.

What if AWS changes their privacy policy

What sort of change?

Any change that prompts you to re-accept?

Just like twitters in this instance.

I think in the case of AWS, your services would continue to run as long as your bill is settled. It would only affect you if you logged in.

So if you fell under the free tier then I'm curious if it would continue to run indefinitely.

He probably used IFTTT.

I've tried ifttt. The Twitter recipes will stop in a few months for me. Have to go in and turn it in manually every so often. Just trying to repost from Twitter at a location to WordPress. ymmv

If you setup IFTTT then until that stops running which could be never??

Unfortunately, API tokens are not the same as user logins, and very easy to separate out from user activity. Depends on some policy whim to be counted or not as user activity. Not dependable afterlife.

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