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Comment by jtdev | Hacker News Reader

I've made the same changes in recent months and agree that it's improved my consumer experience significantly. I didn't realize just how much time and energy I was spending sorting through cheap Chinese made junk and counterfeit garbage on Amazon trying to find quality products.

In terms of cloud providers: the major three (Azure, GCloud, AWS) seem to be cut from the same cloth... maybe IBM or Oracle cloud are better options (I don't have any experience with either, but both companies obviously have skeleton filled closets)?

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Well at least one of the latter definitely has skeletons... [0]

But in all seriousness, Oracle at least has very good free tier to get started. You basically get two free okay-provisioned VMs (lite on the CPU to say the least, but mem and desk okay). Very good for self-hosted your own stuff for free!

[0] https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/b/bl...

Oracle's administration interface is horrible. It's an obtuse nonsensical hierarchy, probably specified by someone non-technical writing a requirements document in a vacuum. It'll take you an afternoon to figure out how to get your instances set up, upload your initial image etc. Also your instances will always be behind NAT (having internal IPs), which is odd.

Its redeeming feature is having a free tier that isn't Google. The problem with using Google's cloud is that if someone hacks your account and runs up infinite charges as a personal user, you can't file a credit card dispute without disrupting your entire relationship with Google.

The cloud market still has healthy competition - eg Linode, DigitalOcean, Vultr, and innumerable smaller companies. Patronize them, rather heading than to a different behemoth.

Oh yes, I wasn't saying Oracle was good. It was the usual mess of conflicting systems (e.g. two different ways to do network ACLs...that conflict?).

I personally wouldn't consider them for anything serious. If folks need a free box for something lightweight, those free tier VMs on Oracle are pretty much the only good thing about it. (I have a VPN and a few small services running on it for my own consumption)

Same here! I pay for servers that I care about, but having another vpn bouncer / exit node is nice. Once you've got some sort of devops setup, it's easy to add more machines. The main bummer was finding out the "two instances" have to be in the same datacenter.

One thing I have noticed is their network seems to have high jitter.

Haha yes they certainly do. One great thing they have is unlimited bandwidth (though I'm sure they throttle after some point), whereas the free tier on Google starts charging you after you reach the 5GB egress mark iirc.

IBM’s cloud platform is laughably bad. Avoid at all costs!

Turning to IBM or Oracle for moral reasons is about the funniest thing I've read in a long time. One enabled the holocaust and the other made 90s-era Microsoft seem downright communist.

Amazon is doing some rather creepy stuff with the CIA [0]. Can you elaborate on what Oracle did that was so bad? Is charging for software and enforcing license terms somehow worse than what Amazon, Microsoft, Google, etc. are doing?

[0]https://www.theregister.com/2018/05/22/aclu_amazon_aws_rekog...

I don't really see how selling facial recognition tech is "rather creepy". Facial recognition has legitimate uses, and the CIA/FBI using it to track criminals seems to be a legitimate use case to me. The article you linked seems to be making a hypothetical leap to "well what if they choose to use it nefariously in the future??" And to their credit, Amazon at least seems to be interested in trying to limit its use to good causes: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/10/amazon-bans-police-use-of-fa...

And of course, Microsoft, Google, and others have their own facial recognition software and they all have large contracts with government entities, too. This article mentions the CIA using AWS, but the CIA also has multi-billion dollar contracts with GCP, Azure, and even IBM and Oracle: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/cia-awards-multib...

Yeah, that's all incredibly troubling to me. I'm shocked that so many people fail to see the parallels to historic misuse of technology by states, e.g., IBM and the holocaust as outlined above:

"Mankind barely noticed when the concept of massively organized information quietly emerged to become a means of social control, a weapon of war, and a roadmap for group destruction." [0]

Is it unreasonable to desire that your dollars don't go to organizations involved in war, oppression, corruption, etc.?

[0] https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/b/bl...

There are legitimate use cases for technology like facial recognition, and I see nothing wrong with using it in that way. Of course society should be cautious about unwarranted uses of such technology. But decrying all uses of it, even legitimate ones, because of a hypothetical "what if someone in the future uses facial recognition to start another holocaust?" is just a slippery slope fallacy.

I know Oracle has a bad rep and is generally perceived as a corporate monstrosity, but honestly what is actually so bad about their business model? Sure they make a ton of cash fleecing other enterprises but at least it doesn't seem like they're mistreating workers or tracking users. Honestly, it always seemed kind of old-fashioned but not necessarily bad compared to the 'new era' internet giants

Think pragmatically: who would we help by trying to "get back at" an abstract corporate entity for bad things "they" (not even the same people) may have done nearly 100 years ago?

What we're talking about with Amazon is taking steps to actually fight transgressions that are happening right now.

Where do you guys shop now? Genuinely curious.

Buying direct from producers, Costco, Costco.com, and I'm consciously buying less stuff that I don't actually need (stuff that I would have previously purchased from Amazon).

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