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Comment by sandeepkd | Hacker News Reader

The devil is always in the details. Somehow I feel that when we offload the responsibility to some one else we get this feeling that the other person/entity would be doing full diligence and whatever else is required to carry out the job perfectly. However in reality most of the times they just do the bare minimum to pass your evaluation criteria to get the job.

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Especially with Amazon, who are well known for squeezing every last bit of profit from their employees, contractors etc., it doesn't really sound surprising. "Offsite backups?! Sure, you could have had that if you had found the right page in the AWS console and if you would have paid 50% extra!"

Oh sorry, you picked "AWS Backup" but you actually needed to use "Backup AWS" to solve that problem. Perhaps hop on a call with our sales engineering and cost magnification teams to guide you to a better, more solutioned, tomorrow?

I sounded all legit until the comma after "solutioned". I suspect that might be a fake.

Perhaps, cheapness is always an factor but I'm potentially reading it as the customers perhaps not wanting data to move outside of the country and with AWS only have one datacenter in said country produced this result.

but the general assumption is your data isn't going to get lost if you use Amazon. so once the trust is gone it's gone.

It all depends on how *off* off-site really is. You know, *off* isn’t a binary, it is a spectrum.

This is almost always the case. It's one of the frustrating things about the software industry; because everything is much more complicated than the customer is able to comprehend, a software company can promise anything and the customer can't actually verify.

So any software company/project which actually took the time and effort to fully handle the enormous complexity, they can't sell themselves based on that fact because every other company (who didn't invest the effort) is also claiming it and the customer has no mechanism to verify the claims until some major rare event occurs.

And most of the effort is required precisely to handle those 1% of rare situations.

That is why contracts are more than one page in length. The details matter. I can remember receiving a contract class in Afghanistan about something as simple as moving gravel. Yeah, use your imagination with that and whatever absurd cartoon like fantasy you could dream up regarding "moving gravel" is still probably less strange than the real events that occurred.

I don't write contracts for a living, at least yet, but my learning so far is:

* clear goals: where is the end point and what does the product look like once it gets there in all required details

* defined test criteria: this is where you get to sue when they fuck shit up

* measures: there must be predefined measures. These can be wildly unrealistic at the start and require changes as the work occurs, which is ok, but there must be defined performance criteria that all parties are held to before work completion. In other worlds this is rewarded with bonus targets and penalties

but aren't amazon contracts pretty one sided?

It's funny because this applies to children cleaning home bathrooms as a Saturday chore as well.

I think it applies to all humans of all ages in one way or another, these varying imperfections is what makes us what we are

its not true. If everyone actually did the bare minimum, everything would screech to a halt immediately. In fact people doing that imo is part of what causes the decline of empires. You can, in fact, trust people further than you can throw them.

Its a cousin of the mindset that the reason people don't steal is because they think they will be caught and rationally weigh up based on the value they gain and the chance of loss that its not a worthwhile action.

No, most of the time people steal because they think its wrong, and they dont want to do it.

Public trust is a real thing and varies massively by country. America is notably extremly low on this metric

One needs the state, the other needs intrinsic morals. One is a tax on all actions, the other forms working societies.

How are the behavior described imperfections ?

Huh, I was thinking US Congresspeople.

funny enough, there have been some huge problems involving congressman with both bathrooms and children in regards to moral diligence.

its also the fact that a lot of fundamental systems work in trade offs.

Do you want performance, or correctness.

Well, if you want performance you use write through caching and in the case of distributed storage: more nodes confirming the block before returning. Huge performance cost.

Outsourcing this just means someone else makes these tradeoffs, they will prioritise the general case- and they’re even more incentivised to move the needle towards things that are most visible to the end user.

In this case, performance.

You won’t notice that theres a third commit server off-site (unless that site is bombed), but you will notice slower writes- and the general case says that people will express comparative dissatisfaction with weaker performance and use it as a justification to use another provider.

if you want correctness* you use write through caching.

My mistake, if you want performance you choose write-back caching, and fewer nodes need to acknowledge the write. Sorry for clumsily typing the inverse when I was in a morning haze waking up :(

I would love if someone could tell me the name for this phenomena. FWIW, using an LLM incites this same undue assurance as well. No matter how much you know that an LLM might just be hallucinating, it still happens anyway. It's a hard instinct to fight.

This is so true. After 20 years in the tech business I have so rarely seen perfect execution. It's mostly scrambling and chaos and a miracle anything works in the first place.

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