dlenski

We have similar taxes in major cities in Canada (including both metro and provincial taxes here in Vancouver).

Housing is still massively squeezed and unaffordable for many in the Vancouver metro area, but the taxes definitely have encouraged some homeowners to sell or rent their properties, especially foreign investors, and their seem to be few or no downsides for people of middle-class and even moderately-affluent incomes.

I doubt that NYC will lose too much sleep over the protestations from extraordinarily wealthy people who own multiple extraordinarily expensive homes, and where NYC isn't their primary residence.

I worked there.

Even if I were the stupidest and least curious engineer around (and I was far from it), that's basically irrelevant to what you're scolding me for here…

As part of a team with both software development and operational responsibilities, like most teams at AWS, I had to deal not only with the consequences of my own imperfect knowledge, but also with the imperfect knowledge of my coworkers past and present.

You're right of course to distinguish the control plane and data plane, and it sounds like you know more about this than I do for IAM.

I disagree, though, that my post was "highly misleading" despite this omission.

As a practical matter, some services fail to achieve the "static stability" you describe, in terms of not depending on other services’ control planes.

And also, many on-calls ops and firefighting tasks (to say nothing of canaries and other automated tests) depend on other services’ control planes.

And above all, many AWS engineers (myself very much included even after years there) don't have a clear understanding of the boundaries of other services’ control planes. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48078254

> > During us-east-1 outages it's sometimes possible to continue using existing auth tokens or sessions in other regions, while not possible to grant new ones.

> This is just plain wrong! The IAM Security Token Service (STS), which grants IAM tokens, is a data plane-only service and runs independently in each region.

I didn't mention STS in the service to which you're responding. The service that I worked on the most, RDS, required ssh'ing into live instances to solve basically all non-trivial problems (I'd guess 80% of the tickets that I saw actually resolved required it). And I have no idea if it how STS was involved in generating the ephemeral Midway-signed ssh keys required for it… but whenever there were us-east-1 IAM outages we'd have big problems opening new sessions, while less-capable web-console-based ops tools with long-lived credentials would keep working.

Yes, you're right, but in my experience the boundary between the data plane and the control plane is not always clear, and especially unclear on these foundational and basic services.

There were enough "surprisingly control-plane" IAM operations in the AWS services that I dealt with, so we had to exercise extreme caution during outages.

> Call it an oh shit bar.

Amazon's equivalent of this (sort of) was the "andon cord."

Not only was the physical metaphor that led to this name never properly explained (it's basically an "emergency stop" string in a Toyota factory), but the actual use of this mechanism was so heavily discouraged that I never saw it used in 4+ years at Amazon. except once very performatively by a VP who had already been paged awake at 2am or something like that.

In my experience, a lot of the AWS engineers live in continuous fear of screwing up by using the huge array of extremely powerful, dangerous, poorly-explained, and ever-changing tools that they have access to.

Yes, I'm certainly aware of the other partitions. That's why I said all the public cloud regions outside China.

Yeah, "govcloud" is technically available to the public, although there are other partitions reserved for government use that are not, and the naming is a big hairy mess. Many service teams don't have any US-citizens-in-the-USA working for them, and they cannot in any way adequately support these regions.

My on-call experience improved significantly when I moved from the US to Canada, and I got taken off the (extremely thin!) list of engineers eligible to ssh into RDS instances in Govcloud. There were so few USA-citizen-in-USA engineers that I had been getting tickets for services and instances in Govcloud about which I had only the very thinnest knowledge… and then I was limited in my ability to consult with others who were actually experts. The customers in Govcloud paid a premium to be there, I got paged for a bunch of tickets which I was ill-prepared to handle, and it was generally a bad experience for everyone.

Working with the airgapped secret/top-secret partitions was even worse. You would get paged incessantly and then someone who was cleared for access but knew almost nothing about the service in question would have to go to a SCIF in the DC area, and you would exchange screenshots and text instructions with a turnaround time of hours or days.

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Yes, I concur.

Sometimes the circular dependencies get almost cartoonishly silly.

Like, "One of the two guys who has the physical keys to the server cage in us-east-1 is on vacation. The other one can't get into his apartment because his smart lock runs into the AWS cloud. So he hires a locksmith, but the locksmith takes an extra two hours to do the job because his reference documents for this model of lock live on an S3 bucket."

I made that example up, but only barely.

It wasn't heavily utilized when I worked at AWS, until 2024.

If your customers are clusterrd in Toronto and Montreal, it probably makes a lot of sense to use ca-central-1. If you've got a lot of customers in Western Canada, us-west-2 is gonna have better network latency.

Other than a couple regions that had problems with their local network infrastructure (sa-east-1 was like that), there's little or nothing to differentiate the regions in terms of physical infrastructure and architecture.

Yep. All of the identity and access management services for the non-China public cloud are in us-east-1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48071472

The idea that AWS's services are fully regionalized or isolated has always been a myth.

All the identity and access services for the public cloud outside of China (aka "IAM for the aws partition" to employees) are centralized in us-east-1. This centralization is essentially necessary in order to have a cohesive view of an account, its billing, and its permissions.

And IAM is not a wholly independent software stack: they rely on DynamoDB and a few other services, which in turn have a circular dependency on IAM.

During us-east-1 outages it's sometimes possible to continue using existing auth tokens or sessions in other regions, while not possible to grant new ones. When I worked there, I remember at least one case where my team's on-calls were advised not to close ssh sessions or AWS console browser tabs, for fear that we'd be locked out until the outage was over.

> there is no age at which I will stop being embarrassed by the things I do not know.

I'm with you on that!

An additional fun (?) fact is that Nebraska has only senators, not state representatives, due to having a unicameral legislature unlike all the other states and the federal government. The members of Nebraska's single-house legislature are customarily called "senators," and they're also officially non-partisan, though in the modern era this is just a fig leaf and their partisan political affiliations are clear.

Agreed. There are a lot of companies with a few to a few thousand employees which are not aiming for the kind of rapid growth that attracts VCs, but at the same time doing interesting and challenging and productive work.

Many people reading this headline will initially assume, as I did, that it refers to one of Utah's two US senators.

Why not add the word "state" and immediately clarify this?

Problems with the title:

1. The story is not about one of Utah's 2 US senators, but about one of its state senators. The title should probably say "Utah state senator."

2. There is a missing apostrophe in "reporter's"

I've worked for two huge tech companies.

At one (Intel from 2010-2015), I was on the hardware and manufacturing side. I was one of the hamsters keeping the Moore's Law Treadmill spinning. It was a great place to work. Almost without exception, my colleagues and managers were smart, well-intentioned, hard-working, good communicators, conscientious. We were "extracting value" as you put it, but we were doing rational and systematic things to produce great products: lower energy consumption, more capabilities, and more reliable with each new generation of semiconductor process.

At the other (Amazon 2020-2024), I was working on cloud service software. The internal processes were a mess, and the quality of the products--particularly in terms of reliability and documentation--was frankly horrible. AWS seemed to be coasting on its existing near-monopoly status in a lot of areas. With a few exceptions, I found the managers to be terrible. It was difficult to develop new things and to advance career-wise, and everything got tangled up in internal politics and poor communication even though Amazon claims to be averse to such things unlike "legacy" companies.

> They’re currently selling for $942.72 on Amazon.

The price graphs of these are wild, wow. https://camelcamelcamel.com/product/B0CHGT1KFJ

Looks like prices for NAND spiked at the end of last year, a couple of months behind DRAM.

Happy not to be building or buying any new computers these days.

I've returned (?) to the semiconductor industry, which is where I was working before I became a software developer at AWS and then at a scammy-but-VC-funded scientific computing startup.

I've been writing software for ~35 years, have taken exactly one course in CS (graduate machine learning while getting my PhD in physics), and did it professionally for about 5 years… that said, "writing software" has been a big part of other jobs I've had, even if not the headline description.

Okay, so that 122TB drive costs about $330/TB.

I haven't bought a hard drive or an SSD in at least a decade (I get stuff for free, basically) but…that seems a bit high, right?

Seems like well-rated consumer-level SSDs cost around $250 for 1TB right now.

What accounts for the premium price/TB of these extremely high capacity enterprise-targeted drives?

> If software development is treated as a vehicle for self-exploration, rather than just a means to a financial end, this makes a lot more sense. From my experience, it also generally produces better software that doesn't come with user hostile (value extracting) actions or features because there's no expectation of a financial return.

I strongly identify with all of this. I started programming computers when I was about 7, so now I've been doing it for decades.

I sort of accidentally made it a career for a few years, because I was really good at it, but I didn't like being a professional software developer for a huge tech company.

I still like writing code though, and view it primarily as a means for exploration, figuring out how things work and explaining and systematizing them for myself and for others.

While this is interesting and newsworthy, especially for those of us who live in Canada and have to deal with Canada’s Telco/Internet monopolies… this "article" itself appears to be a crappy LLM summary of some other piece of information.

Anyone have the original source?

> If you believe in remote work, then why should it matter from where that work is delivered?

Okay, well that's easy then.

In general I am highly concerned about the negative social and productivity costs of remote work, in industries ranging from tech support to software development to medicine.

The article is full of interesting examples of linguistics differences between NK and SK, but…

As someone with a degree in linguistics, I question whether the author of this article has a sufficient grasp on the subject to put it in proper context.

One of the clearest indications of a superficial understanding of the subject matter is in the section describing "words with different meaning but the same spelling" or "homophones." The examples given are word pairs like "service" and "volunteers," which are obviously related in meaning; these are what linguists would immediately identify as examples of semantic shift (or perhaps polysemy), not of homophony.

Basically every language with more than a few thousand speakers in close proximity has internal dialectical differences. Americans and Brits experience linguistic difficulties similar to what's described in the article ("nappy"…?) when newly-exposed to each others' English. Having lived in various parts of the US and Canada, I know that the same thing happens even among people without easily distinguishable accents.

Judgments and assumptions about other subgroups’ use of language is also pretty universal. Stereotypical Southern accents are often perceived as uneducated in the northeast and west of the US; Québec French is perceived as degraded by the influence of English in France, although in some ways it's extremely conservative (in the linguistic sense) and retains words and other features of 18th-century French.

Anyway, this is all to say that the article is interesting, but the linguistic barriers it describes are unsurprising and not in any way unique to Korea. Without a more informed take on the subject, I'm skeptical that language differences are such a huge barrier to integration of North Koreans into SK society, any more than a British or Australian is Nigerian accent is a barrier to integration into (say) Seattle or Vancouver.

Agreed. I usually hate on Apple, and its terribly ancient utilities and gratuitous incompatibility with modern Linux utilities, motivated by hatred of the GPL license.

But in this case, I think what it's doing is… basically fine? "Tar should faithfully reproduce the semantics of the source filesystem" is a perfectly reasonable starting point.

Ideally there would be a documented way to turn off the Apple-specific metadata with Apple's own tar, though.

Same. This is the kind of HN content that I'm here for.

> But as any parent knows, changing nappies is really one of the easier parts of looking after babies and toddlers.

Agreed. I tell friends that, for me, changing diapers is much less frustrating and gross than watching my toddler feed himself.

> Kudos to Rivian for making this a supported user privacy feature.

Same. This is the first thing that I've ever read that makes me think I might be willing to buy a modern vehicle.

> Yes, indeed it does. I didn't feel this way until I worked for a YC-backed startup tho.

Same, same.

Nothing made me skeptical about the tech industry like working for a VC-backed startup. Ugh.

Yeah, I'm aware of warehouses that underreport their interior temperatures so that they don't have to give their employees adequate ventilation and breaks. Amazon in particular.

It's really bad, but it's not quite the same society-pervading incentive for data manipulation.

> The manipulation of weather sensors for profit has a history that long pre-dates prediction markets.

Okay, I'm intrigued about what I've missed. Give me more information about this history, please.

> Your argument is that people had no existing profit motive to use dirty tricks to influence scientific results/data?

No, that's way too broad. I don't believe that, and I didn't write that.

Oil companies indeed had enormous incentives to obscure and confuse the scientific record of climate change. But hiring thousands of Taskrabbits to go around the world blowing hot and/or cold air on weather sensors would not have helped them: some of them would have been caught, and it would've been exposed as a hamfisted and shambolic scandal.

Oil companies had to do larger-scale, longer-term stuff like funding think tanks, lobbying politicians, and writing op-eds.

Now, because of prediction markets, the "attack surface" for interfering with scientific data collection is much larger and more fine-grained. The incentives for big oil companies probably haven't changed much… but now any random amoral idiot or degenerate gambler has an incentive to go find unguarded weather stations or water quality monitors, etc, and mess with them.