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bkruse

185 karma · joined February 23, 2012

email me : brandon@bkruse.com
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bkruse··on Waymo Premier
I used Waymo about 10 times in Austin - it was great. I wish they'd accelerate the rollout to other cities. I wonder what the major technical hurdles are for launching in a new city?
bkruse··on Ferrari vs. Markets
You can absolutely walk into a showroom and buy one. Not a rare model but you could walk in with no relationship and buy a 296 now.

I'd suspect many of them are - almost all go through new jersey if I remember correctly - with many going to Ferrari North America (FNA)

bkruse··on AWS us-east-2 outage
Lots of issues in us-east-2 for instances for us but also other regions when connecting to RDS
bkruse··on [dead]
Yes - our service is down right now from connectivity issues (can’t reach RDS)
bkruse··on Shopify to lay off 10% of workers in broad shake-up
I worked with Kaz at Facebook - he's the reason I would want to work at Shopify.
bkruse··on How we built a $1M ARR SaaS startup
Without doing the sales pitch, it's using comments as the medium for indicating purchase intent instead of clicking on a link

"Oh, you like this item you see on your facebook feed? Comment sold and your size to order it"

bkruse··on How we built a $1M ARR SaaS startup
Love Canny

We use them at CommentSold for feature ideas, bug reports, and even top 1% feature ideas. The ability to tie it into our product and see the features voted on from an MRR aggregate not a vote-aggregate is phenomenal

bkruse··on The TikTok War
Having used tiktok for a total of 10 hours now, I get programmer humor, car videos and funny animal videos - exactly what I want

That's the whole point - the ability to curate content that you will like is phenomenal, especially given the non-obvious inputs to their model. Like a video? Sure you'll see more of that kind of stuff. You may not think about scrolling up/down to restart the video, watching it multiple times, sharing it, opening/closing the comments (and I'm sure 10,000 other inputs) all feed into it's ability to curate

bkruse··on A N.Y. Nurse Dies. Angry Co-Workers Blame a Lack of Protective Gear
"very fit" - not from a purely medical perspective. He had a pre-existing and related respiratory condition - asthma
bkruse··on Beware second waves of Covid-19 if lockdowns eased early: study
This is entirely incorrect

The ultra-rich will have a variable level of "decreased performance in their portfolio". They're still rich, especially if not over-levered. They are also well positioned to take advantage of any hyper-inflation event.

The average american, with the loss of their primary income and no real UBI is going to feel it the most.

bkruse··on Red Hat contributes etcd to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation
It was a lot of fun watching the project and community evolve. I think you and the team did an excellent job. I remember a huge spike in users around when discovery.etcd.io launched. It was really a game changer for us building large-scale multi-data center telecom systems. I still remember bootstrapping the first cluster in a 24 data center test and having things blow up, particularly in higher-latency environments (cross-DC)

Fast-forward 4 months, the project had grown and scaled to support the influx of new curious devs and use-cases that stretched the bounds of what was possible at the time. At the end of the 4-months, we had a 128 node cluster that stayed up for years and still powers all of the emergency notifications in a few states in the US!

bkruse··on Adobe to Acquire Magento
"We want to buy Shopify but we can pay 1/10th of Shopify's valuation"

I think Magento is "fairly priced" priced at ~10% of Shopify's valuation

bkruse··on Jan Koum to leave after broad clashes with Facebook
Are you sure? They were adding 1 million users/day

http://www.thefactspeak.com/whatsapp-adding-one-million-user...

Even at $1/year - their 1.5 billion active users should be an equal amount of revenue. I'd say that's enough to cover the cost of servers and bandwidth.

bkruse··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2018)
CommentSold (https://commentsold.com) | Lead UI/designer | Full-Time | Remote or Onsite | Huntsville, AL

CommentSold is a social selling platform, where people order products through Facebook and Instagram via commenting "sold". Currently have a couple thousand customers after launching in April of 2017. You can make a huge impact in a small company (7 people total). Vanity metrics: hundreds of thousands of customers use our system daily to shop and just over million use it monthly

Founder here: brandon@commentsold.com

bkruse··on Blackbird: Bitcoin arbitrage
I'm surprised this comment isn't #1!
bkruse··on Brown University raising $120M to eliminate all student loans
They should just do an ICO

/troll

bkruse··on Comparing Bandwidth Costs of Amazon, Google and Microsoft Cloud Computing
I mentioned this in the price reductions of S3 announcement

People fail to realize the true cost of operating on S3, specifically when hundreds of TB of usable data is in play

"By putting the "tax" on bandwidth, a lot of these business cases are solved. I see why Amazon does that. AWS is great, but as you get into high scale (specifically in storage - 2PB+), it becomes extremely cost prohibitive."

bkruse··on Amazon Connect – Simple to use, cloud-based contact center
This is a fantastic move for Amazon and I'll tell you why. The cost of long distance is nearing 0 and application providers are making bank. The pricing is also extremely disruptive. Most contact centers price minutes/DIDs just like Amazon but ALSO charge a per-agent per-month fee. [1]

All of the contact center solutions mentioned so far were customers of mine at MagicJack. We did wholesale long distance for them. The one trend in the industry is that long-distance continues to fall fast, but the pricing of telecom-related apps stayed the same.

Since I am no longer under NDA, the average cost of long distance (US Domestic) at MagicJack when I left in 2013 was $0.0017/minute!!

For those saying contact centers won't move over because the investment - I will tell you that we lost and gained 1,000 agent operations over 10% cost savings every single month.

[1] - http://blog.kunnect.com/2014/10/how-much-does-cloud-based-ca...

bkruse··on Amazon Connect – Simple to use, cloud-based contact center
It's worth noting that, at that scale, you actually get PAID for inbound calls. At MagicJack, the cost of our went into the negative because of access fees. Even though Amazon is not a carrier (yet), they will likely work a deal to get paid.

Vonage does the same thing. They receive a revenue share of the access charges from level 3.

bkruse··on Ask HN: Is S3 down?
Openstack Swift - easy to get setup and reliable. Takes a little expertise but was well worth the investment in learning it!
bkruse··on Ask HN: Is S3 down?
This is one of the times that I am glad to be running my own distributed object storage. I'm sure it's not as robust as Amazon, but......
bkruse··on Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2016
Yes, I run about 800 of them now. They have not been as reliable as the 6TB archive drives. I think this was related to a bad run that seagate had while manufacturing. Our numbers, overall (with 6,000+ drives now, if I remember correctly) are much lower than Backblaze's reported failures.

We also classify a drive as failed when it throws ANY SMART error, then it's diagnosed with Seagate's internal tool (which I believe they are open sourcing, if they haven't already) and put back into production

Seagate has given us good warranties on these drives as well. Yes a higher immediate failure rate (first 1 month) with the 8TB drives was annoying, but they more than made it right replacing the drives.

bkruse··on Amazon S3 and Glacier Price Reductions
(repost)

Sorry for the delay - yes it's ploid.io - nothing up there yet. We've been in stealth mode while we've been building the system for our first client - HudsonAlpha institute for biotechnology Feel free to ping me at brandon at ploid.io - happy to share any insight we've gained!

bkruse··on Amazon S3 and Glacier Price Reductions
Sorry for the delay - yes it's ploid.io - nothing up there yet. We've been in stealth mode while we've been building the system for our first client - HudsonAlpha institute for biotechnology

Feel free to ping me at brandon at ploid.io - happy to share any insight we've gained!

bkruse··on Amazon S3 and Glacier Price Reductions
Yes - I think it directly applies to EC2 as well. Still an underlying commodity
bkruse··on Amazon S3 and Glacier Price Reductions
That's exactly why I started Ploid.

A consulting customer came to me a year ago, with a growth from 200TB/year in data production to over 6PB/year and their budget couldn't sustain that jump (or anywhere close to it)

Having come from the mass-facilities and data center space with MagicJack, I knew the wholesale cost of bandwidth, power and drives were continuously falling.

There are certain clients and use cases that need access to their data all of the time and the very bones they are built on is based on collaboration (Genomics).

For example, this client is now storing 6PB of data with us, 3 copies in separate data centers. We are half the price of S3, and we include all the bandwidth for free, but limited to a 10GigE per PB stored. This has worked out extremely well - we were about 20% (!!!!) the price of Amazon after you factor in bandwidth.

There are lots of challenges we faced, like over zealous neighbors in the environment, storing lots of small objects and high usage of ancillary features like metadata but for customers of any size. By putting the "tax" on bandwidth, a lot of these business cases are solved. I see why Amazon does that.

AWS is truly great, but as you get into very high scale (specifically in storage - 2PB+), it becomes extremely cost prohibitive.

bkruse··on AT&T, Apple, Google to work on 'robocall' crackdown
That's not true, the carriers are compensated through CABS (carrier access billing) based on number of minutes, not number of connected calls.

Carriers have to accept traffic from other carriers, even if they have not paid their CABS bill.

Right now, no one is paying anyone. That's why fair cross-carrier compensation and flat-rates are a big talk in the FCC instead of what's called "Tariff rates" which vary by carrier and by destination.

Freeconferencecall.com exists because of CABS and having very high tariff rates. They do NOT want lots of short duration calls. That doesn't help them at all.

bkruse··on AT&T, Apple, Google to work on 'robocall' crackdown
The problem with the laws it that they are specific to the US. Many of these scams are coming from the Philippines.
bkruse··on AT&T, Apple, Google to work on 'robocall' crackdown
You can set the CallerID name to whatever you want.

We once had a customer that set their callerID name to "DEAD" to signal that the phone number was no longer in use. People thought they were issuing threads on their outbound calls.

bkruse··on AT&T, Apple, Google to work on 'robocall' crackdown
That's correct and could cause the opposite problem (where a legitimate callerID gets blocked).

Smaller telcos restrict the outbound callerID to only CallerIDs (DIDs) that you own. This would be very difficult to enforce for a wholesale carrier - where their customer is an aggregate of thousands of customers.

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