asciimike

When I was doing deprecations on GCP, it was minimum 12 months for any deprecation. Five seems shockingly fast!

As for the beta thing: GCP's definition of beta was basically everyone else's definition of GA, since the GA requirements were so insane (e.g. 99.999% internal availability) that getting there would take literal years (see the GCF beta to GA taking like 18 months?). I totally agree that it's weird that things would stay in beta for so long, as opposed to hitting industry standard levels so users can have confidence in them, but setting GA as far higher than the industry was part of Google Cloud's plan.

That didn't answer the question ;)

GCP does deprecate products (former App Engine PM here, deprecated many APIs), but it's definitely less frequent than the "Google deprecates everything" memers want you to believe, and there's a minimum 12 month deprecation period before literally anything is deprecated.

I disagree with this, as this is "false confidence." Correctness and humility go a lot further to true confidence, as being correct enables you to speak with authority on a subject (nobody is going to ask a follow up question that causes you to question your correctness and trips you up), and humility enables you an escape hatch to admit when you don't know (your audience will trust the things you correctly say even more, because you're not lying about everything).

Note that "correctness" isn't meant in an absolute sense--you can speak with confidence on something others consider morally abhorrent if you are 100% convinced of its correctness (which is potentially what you mean by "not being 100% correct"?).

http://www.realworlddivorce.com/ is a great resource on this subject

Ah yes, the classic Radio on Internet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo

NileRed has a video where he takes the caffeine out of Red Bull (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oY8tz1paj6o), though it's unfortunately not super practical :/

Fun anecdote: after a weekend of skiing a few years ago, I had a sore throat, went to One Medical and got a rapid strep test, and was charged $140 for what was a negative result.

The next day I was on a flight from SFO to Singapore, and it was extremely apparent I had strep. Upon landing in Singapore, I went to a clinic where they diagnosed the strep, gave me antibiotics, decongestants, sudafed (the good kind), throat lozenges, and ibuprofen. Total cost? $20 USD.

Have you seen the state of SF public schools lately?

- https://www.sfusd.edu/about/news/current-news/SF-Board-of-Ed... (which is clearly more important than https://www.sfusd.edu/services/health-wellness/covid-19-coro...)

- https://twitter.com/hknightsf/status/1359382113875755011

- https://www.sfgate.com/education/article/sf-school-lottery-L...

I think your idea of "rich parents funding SF public schools" would probably be rejected by the school board, so for most it's not even worth trying, given the proliferation of high quality private schools nearby. And even if the school accepts it, the community won't.

Say what you want about Zuck, but he donated $75M to the only public hospital in the city and they don't even want to keep the building named after him and his wife (who worked there no less!). Comically, they can't actually do anything about it, so they stick to meaningless non-binding resolutions.

Therefore, if given the choice, those who can are much more likely to spend 30-50k/year to send their kids to private HS than to try and go through the process of dealing with the city government. I assume that dealing with Cupertino/PA/etc. is frustrating, but not nearly as insane as SF.

I've seen a few variations on this that are less blatant but equally effective at gaming the system. Note that these all happened in college, rather than in HS--I never recall seeing this in high school.

The first is professors providing previous exams for students to study from, and then only changing the numbers, not the questions (e.g. the test is a template). This wasn't the norm, but it wasn't uncommon either--several professors gained nicknames to this effect, and you knew if you were in one of their classes how everything was going to work.

Even if the professor didn't provide the exam, fraternities and sororities usually kept prior exams from folks who had done well, and I believe the "learning center" also would keep copies, to the point where I am occasionally recognized when I come back to campus (mostly for recruiting) because one of my completed computer architecture tests has been given out as reference for the past decade.

The second is providing study sessions the day/night before an exam where professors would run through common scenarios that might appear on tests. When done correctly, students would ask the questions and the prof would get another student to demonstrate and they would help as necessary--when done poorly (and unfortunately, in my experience, the more common of the two), it devolved to the first scenario.

Neither are explicitly "cheating" in the way outlined in the parent (I don't know if they'd show up on accreditation, for instance), but they achieve the same end result.

As a bonus, I worked as a proctor in the learning center for a year or two, and while the majority of students came in because they were legitimately struggling with one concept and needed tutoring to jump the knowledge gap, there was a core group of frequent fliers who were there every day basically getting their homework done by others, and thus boosting overall grades (and ultimately graduation rate).

As has been stated many, many times in this thread, incentives (staying accredited, getting some arbitrary US News and World Reports ranking, having a high graduation/job placement rate, etc.) push this behavior to the detriment of student learning.

This is the main reason I stopped using it. The benefit was too low compared to the risk. Once I started using 2FA and realized how it worked I noped right out of there...

Well, since the stock market only goes up [0], just put all your money in TSLA and you'll do better than 2% </s>

[0]: https://twitter.com/stoolpresidente/status/12685424540867502...

> That's hyperbole. Having a bird's eye view of every single account, transaction, investments, net worth, etc. is "totally useless"? No.

If you can get it to actually connect to things (I have 2FA on most accounts, and since Mint scrapes the sites and stores passwords in plaintext, it doesn't know how to handle this) and tag everything properly (MCC's vary pretty widely). I think that the promise of Mint is great, but in reality it falls apart as soon as you have more than a few accounts, or start using anything that wasn't originally built in (e.g. 2FA).

That all said, I follow the same general principles: autopay everything in full, invest money first, live within my means (with certain exceptions that are the "budget").

IIRC, Yotta Savings (https://www.withyotta.com/) is in this range. HN did the math on Yotta a few months back:

- founder's comments (claims ~3%): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23786893

- the math (~3.4%): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23781247

Note that it's likely to go down to get in line with other HYSAs over time (and it's fairly easy for them to change the winning probabilities to hit any interest rate). Currently they're just burning VC cash to get users...

Prizepool (https://getprizepool.com/) is another player in this space, unsure where they're at though (I know we could do the math, I just haven't).

For a while (maybe pre-2015?) Charles Schwab had users append the 6 character 2FA code to the end of your password (which itself was limited to between 6 and 8 chars), so they were either splitting it client side or storing everything in plaintext...

The G87 will be bigger, heavier, and more powerful (B58 or S58 likely), but will definitely lose the feel the F87 platform has. It's a shame :(

"Worth" I think is the key word here. Just like fiat currencies, it's only worth as much as people think it is, which is much more volatile than the Dollar, Euro, or Yen (or Yuan).

Per the David Graeber quote on the above, "It's more a speculative commodity than a viable currency." Which is generally how I view it...

I find that "Debt: The First 5000 Years" has the best overview of money (predominantly credit systems), though admittedly it's a much longer read.

Speaking as an M2 owner (and an E36 owner before that), can confirm it's an excellent looking and performing car--arguably the last "enthusiast" car BMW has produced.

I'm also pretty annoyed with the current direction, and if I get another car (performance or otherwise) it's very unlikely to be a BMW.

My similar "coming of age" moment was in a hotel in Tokyo.

I had been collecting whisky from a bunch of small liquor stores and had run out of clothes to wrap my bottles in when packing them in my suitcase, so I grabbed a towel from the bathroom.

Being a fancy hotel, I saw they had a price sheet for items that "unexpectedly" went missing, and I think the towel was like $60 or something insane. When I was a kid, I never understood why anyone would pay that much for a towel, but at midnight in my hotel, with a bottle of Japanese whisky worth far more than that potentially on the line, it suddenly clicked why someone might want to do that.

I think I put the towel back and went to the local Don Quixote (open 24/7!) and bought some cheap packing material, but in that moment I definitely understood the prioritization exercise that others I this thread have talked about (how much is my time/how valuable is this thing).

In the US I felt it with the opposite: not finishing my drink. When you're young, you'll finish whatever drink is in front of you because alcohol is expensive and you don't want it to go to waste, but I remember the first time I didn't finish a beer and realizing that that was perfectly reasonable (and arguably, the more mature thing to do).

Well, at least it's not EDI...

Every time I see another post like this I always wonder how many people would be willing to buy "cloud insurance" where a premium would cover overages due to your mistakes in dev, outages, etc.

I don't have an exact billing model worked out, and I assume the insurance provider would mandate certain practices (e.g. setting up billing alerts that go to them, allowing them to view/manage infra), but curious if people here would be willing to pay for such a thing.

(My assumption is that most people who fall into this are too small to be willing to pay a reasonable % of their infra spend or change their infra practices to prevent this, but I'd be curious if this is something CIOs of companies who are thinking of "moving to the cloud but are leery due to cost concerns").

As the former PM, can confirm it's not Turing complete, and there's a reason many of those innocuous features haven't been added ;)

Starlark is Python (thanks Guido!), while CEL is designed specifically to not be Turing complete or have constructs like loops, etc.

"CEL evaluates in linear time, is mutation free, and not Turing-complete. This limitation is a feature of the language design, which allows the implementation to evaluate orders of magnitude faster than equivalently sandboxed JavaScript."

As mentioned, the goals are security policies (it was first used internally as the Security Rules for Cloud Storage for Firebase and the Cloud Firestore) and proto contracts (e.g. you could define addons to your proto to specify the data matched certain behavior):

I forget the exact syntax for the contract, but it looked something like this...

``` message person { @contract(matches(/* RE2 phone number regex */)) string phone_number = 1; ... } ```

That data could enforce client side checks as well as be used server side (in different implementation languages).

I always wanted to see it combined with the proto to Firebase Security Rules generator (https://firebaseopensource.com/projects/firebaseextended/pro...) to do client and server validation.

I'll let Tristan or Torin comment more authoritatively, but back in 2017/8 CEL partnered with OPA and I believe CEL was used as the basis for expressions in their new version of Rego.

I left the team about that time, so I don't know what exactly happened after that, but I wouldn't be surprised if the two are fairly close. My assumption is that's why CEL is polished up and OSS (I think we first published it a few years ago, why'd it get posted now?)

It may not be itself, but it's used in a number of them (e.g. Security Rules for Cloud Firestore and Cloud Storage for Firebase).

If the answer is "you have a dollar limit set of GCS GETs, GCS PUTs, etc." I guess I could see this working, but hot damn that'll be a horrific interface.

The other issue is that many large customers pay different prices, so billing and quota aren't really tied to each other, and it wouldn't be easy to reconcile this.

As for the button... having been on the product side of building this button, there is no right answer: people will say they never got the email (or it went to the wrong inbox, or their dog ate their phone...) or that they never checked the box to "shut down the site" ("I didn't think it would do X that made my app not work").

Minor nit: many non-billing metrics are near-real time, e.g. DB concurrents, cloud functions CPU/RAM usage; any metrics that require aggregation (storage, billing) are going to be batched less frequently. This is going to be true across all platforms of non-trivial scale (eventual consistency + batch jobs).

Second note: the number of people who actually do this is very low (a few a year, of hundreds of thousands of developers). The blog posts are scary, but in my ~five years at Firebase, I'm pretty sure we refunded every one. As my boss (James Tamplin, CEO of Firebase) used to say, "There are lots of bad systems, but rarely are there bad people."

Moreover, once API calls are locked, what next? You can't delete files, and even if you can delete them, you aren't able to retrieve them before deletion... If a platform allows you to do those actions, then it's rife for abuse, and at public cloud scale that ends up being a far, far bigger problem than the occasional blog post that ends up as a refund (because the other blog post is "I got free storage forever with this one weird trick").

It's really not a simple problem because the next action depends on the choice the developer wants to make: do they increase the budget or decrease usage, and no cloud provider wants to make this choice because no matter what the choice is it will be viewed as wrong. The best they can do is provide developers the best insight and tooling to make this choice themselves.

How does this actually work? It clearly can't be forever, since any non-zero dollar amount * infinity months is infinity dollars, which is going to reduce the budget below zero since any non-infinite number minus infinity is less than zero... thus locking it immediately.

Even if we say "you get N months of storage before we delete it" and subtract N * current storage cost/month, what happens after you're locked out of all actions because you added an extra GB? Storage APIs cost money to use, so you would get locked out of those too (note that if you're not, people would set arbitrarily low limits and get storage access for free) and couldn't retrieve anything. The only remaining actions are delete (which is free) or raise the quota and do the whole rodeo over again.

Abuse is impossible to ignore at public cloud scale, so "free storage forever" (or even, storage at a one time fixed price) as the fallback isn't a viable option.

Lastly, from an optics perspective, which blog post would you rather see on the front page of HN: "I did something dumb and spent too much money on Cloud" or "Google is holding our data hostage" (or "Google deleted all my data")?

Source: I launched Firebase Storage, which has a GCS bucket that has a hard limit.