skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Show HN: We help companies take back money from AWS
Hi HN community, my name's Kaveh; I founded www.usage.ai to help companies reduce their AWS bills.

Before I started working on Usage, I saw this problem first-hand at the last job I was at. Our team was overpaying by thousands of dollars per month on AWS, and I found out that other teams within the company were overspending by a similar amount. I then dug deeper and after some time, set up budgeting controls and saved our teams thousands of dollars per month. We had an AWS optimization company that wasn't able to find these savings and AWS's trusted advisor only found marginal savings.

So I decided to start a new kind of optimization platform. We're driven by data (we ingest hundreds of thousands of data points from CloudWatch) and our dashboards are completely automated. We support optimization for EC2 and RDS. We do our optimization in two main ways: we search for the best combination of RIs and Savings Plans, then we bundle our RIs with guaranteed buyback so you can sell your RI early. All the savings with nearly none of the risk. Next, we found that many of our customers have non-prod EC2s and RDS instances that sit idle on weekends. We automatically create policies to shut them down to save you money.

Every Friday, we send an email with the savings our system found and all you need to do is hit accept or reject.

We just helped a company save 30% ($8.5k/year) in less than 30 minutes (the time to register for an account + action savings).

What do you think HN community?

URL: www.usage.ai

p.s. we have an upcoming AWS Cost Optimization Immersion Day coming up next Friday, December 18th from 1:00 pm to 2:00 pm EST. Here's an invite!

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdhELeO1VS42hLXri0OqqsDCm_lyRPoJh_Co3WxljmLQeRm_A/viewform
Rabois is a clown, an arrogant jerk who isn't worth taking seriously. Even if you ignore his multiple sexual harassment scandals, it's very clear that he's a hypocrite on this issue and therefore should not be taken seriously on this or any issue. After all, he claims to want to solve big problems, and ostensibly there is no bigger problem in his world than this. And yet, he wants to cut and run; why?

Well, it starts with the fact that he's only got one hammer, and that hammer is to give the white kid from Stanford $10 million, and then backup that investment by subsidizing losses in a race to monopoly. If and when it works, Rabois then takes the credit. But this is a problem that he can't solve, certainly not in the way he solves things, and even if he did, it would run up against the libertarian fantasies that infuse every tweet he writes. As opposed to admitting failure and admitting that his narrow-range expertise doesn't apply to everything, he runs to Miami instead, proving that he's simply a rent-seeker fraud there to sap the area of its resources until the resources are dry, complaining the entire time about how unfairly he's been treated in that he hasn't been getting his ass kissed in the manner in which he's become familiar.
I am so ashamed of my comment, thanks for pointing that out.

>Spreading incorrect information about biology is contributing to disinformation and fake news.

Really, it is incredible how a one line comment changed the whole universe of fake news and disinformation.

I can also only assume that you are not the average reader here, but some one with higher knowledge in every aspect of life and Science.

Thanks for you comment. I am starting to clean my social media activity and in the next day or two, I will probably kill myself. Thanks for letting me see this, I cannot live with the drastic contributions I made to spread disinformation online.

As a higher being, can you tell me the easiest way to end my life? I am looking for something not painful, and something that would not traumatize my son, as we live together and I work from home.

Again, thanks to make me see the light. Without you, the world would have to endure another fake news spreader. Be assured that my family will send you part of my life insurance, as soon as we get your name and address.
I don’t disagree. It’s not a song I like but my point was just that I think it’s in the genre of “hurt people sometimes lash out” rather than a sincere call for genocide, and that it doesn’t pack the punch of being associated with decent ability to actually cause harm.
I mean this in the best possible way, try punching "529 Plan" into Google.

The point of the comment, which I'm not sure why it was being downvoted, is why something might sound newsworthy (14 college funds?) when it really has a simple, logical explanation if you're sophisticated with money. And in the same breath, in applause of a guy performing a tax optimization, the original poster shits on the state - did it create this tax loophole? Do you think the people running government want college to be expensive?

Rich people, really everyone with heritable wealth, love the 529 plan. If you understood that it is used to create multi-purpose, heritable investment accounts tax-free in vast excess of the actual cost of tuition - that anyone who would have a hard time paying Harvard's tuition goes for free anyway - you would detect some insincerity in "14 college funds" too!

And maybe consider that this 529 plan remains the status quo, this total tax dodge, because of people who have this romanticized picture of it being used to pay expensive college tuitions. We're talking about a family so sophisticated that it's probably going to change legal guardians on those very same children in order to benefit from free tuition anyway.

It's a great story. We certainly want our brainiacs spending resources "hacking" some shitty institution like the lottery. On the other hand, you think he doesn't take beyond his measure from the government too?
Wouldn't say its the go-to. There are a lot of cool JIT's around that can be used as the backend to something.
But this is one of the most simple, small and embedded that i'm aware of.
Sure, but that has nothing to do with ignition - the blower won’t run even if you get it lit.

This doesn’t apply to gas fireplaces or smaller room sized radiant gas heater though.
If you don't want to watch Philip Morris brand heroin addicted prostitutes being voluntarily violated and eaten alive by wild beasts, you can turn your TV off. Your argument seems to be "well someone might have hobbies" -I'm sure that's someone's hobby. Defend it; or begin to think of why maybe your allegedly "liberal" views are not such a good idea.

Meanwhile, the Danes have done nothing obviously good by legalizing filth. Mind you, at the rate we're going my proposed entertainment will be on Danish TV soon. And they'll brag it was broadcast using green energy.
The best way to appreciate it is to learn the history and immerse yourself in the culture.

Contemporary art is not typically created for instant gratification or understanding but rather for an audience familiar with the world within which it sits.

Like Free Jazz or heavily peated whiskies there is a path into appreciation that isn't necessarily short. Also it just isn't for everyone. I love much of those things but struggle to get anything from contemporary dance. Precisely because I haven't invested much time or effort into it.

Finding a local contemporary artist scene and socialising with these people can be extremely rewarding, especially if you yourself are not a full time artist.
That’s a ridiculous take. There’s a lot of technical talent trapped in the Bay Area and I welcome it in my region. Treating every resident as if they agree with the repressive SF politics is over generalizing.

And who’s full? The main thing the flyover states need is more people.
Could you clarify the "one of five" statement please? Are the other 4 vulnerabilities still unfixed, or they are fixed but a write-up is still pending?
If there are still 4 unfixed RCE bugs in Teams I'd rather people uninstall Teams than wait for the fix...
I think that’s the “typically” portion, and the comparison was against Intel anyways which does seem to follow that.
While you may well be correctly reading between the lines, you are reading between the lines -- the article doesn't say anything about future "Mac Chips," as the headline puts it, definitively being SoCs. There's nothing about a unified memory architecture that requires the GPU and CPU to be on the same die, let alone requires the RAM to be in the same package as both processing units. (People may no longer remember that Silicon Graphics was using UMA in their workstations a quarter century ago!) I expect all their portables, and probably all the iMacs to be SoCs, but I'm not sure the Mac Pro -- and the iMac Pro, if it continues -- will follow that path.

> We are back to TrashCan Mac Pro again... we would have reached the thermal ceiling again...

This is kind of drawing new lines to read between. :)

Apple almost certainly developed their current uber-expensive, trypophobia-triggering Mac Pro design knowing that they were also working on Apple Silicon processors. While it's possible they intend that whole case design to be a one-time thing, it doesn't seem likely to me -- and if that wasn't the intent, then it's also not likely they want to ship a teeny tiny Apple Silicon logic board in that huge case with the rest of the space going unused. I think they're going to do their best to make an Apple Silicon-based Mac Pro that can be upgraded and expanded. (With all respect to Mark Gurman, I think that "half-sized Mac Pro" is going to be a different product entirely if it ships, with a different branding. Mac Mini Pro?)
I think there's some truth in the synthesis of this dialectic.
Yeah, I thought it was somewhat due to Stanford's handling of IP. The argument I heard was that if you're researching at Stanford and make a productizable discovery you can spin off a company no strings. I was at Cornell when I heard this, where any company built off on-campus research had to sign over 20% of the company up front. Makes those initial pitches to VC that much harder.
As Saul Griffith explains at Rewiring America (https://www.rewiringamerica.org/), massively switching to all existing electric technology (cars, stoves, heat pumps, electric hot water heaters, rooftop and community solar panels, etc) and powering them by clean electricity will:

- decarbonize 80% of US energy by as soon as 2035
- create up to 25 million new jobs
- save the average household $1000-$2000 every year
- massively reduce pollution-related health effects

All without downgrading the size of our homes and vehicles (which probably should be done anyway though). Electrification is the way to go if we want to stay under 2 degrees of warming.
TTO Strategic Communication Tactics with VCs
The money isn't as good, but the benefits are quite a lot better, especially for families. Universal healthcare is an enormous simplification of life (I really wish Americans who get mad about "socialized medicine = evil!" could experience it first hand; its clear there is no such thing as a free market in healthcare anyway). Universal education, even pre-K, is an enormous benefit if you have kids.

But yeah, total comp for devs seem to top out at around 100k, no matter where you are, and usually is more like 50k. (Evidence is anecdotal). Also, since the epicenter of the internet is still the SFBA they wonder why you are in Europe, when all of them want to move to the SFBA! I suspect this last one will start changing.
Exactly.

An anecdote: I got an offer to leave my mid-level FAANG job to return to the Midwest for a VP role at a 200+ person company. The compensation was about 35% of my total comp, and it was maybe one of 3 companies in the area I would consider working for. Not to mention going back to cold winters, McMansions, and chain restaurants.

I don't think people fully appreciate the value of unenforceable non-competes + many companies congregated in one area. No where else in the world does the labor have this level of negotiating power and flexibility. Even if it can be replicated (and I hope it is!), it won't be overnight.
As you point out he could've chosen elsewhere to move. Seems likely the aforementioned developments helped him pick where he did.
If by real summers you mean multiple days over 100F then count me out. Enjoy your heat stroke. It gets hot enough in South Bay even near the water.
Beatles _seem_ overrated because of how much influence they have had. Every great musician after them has probably learned from them, imitated them and improved upon their techniques.

So, if you listen to recent artists first and then go back and listen to Beatles, they sound more of the same, even though in their time they were kilometers ahead of everyone else.
Since this comment was downvoted let me elaborate this with a personal experience (of course it is anecdotal).

In June of this year, my entire team was struggling after moving to a new Kafka cluster because of low throughout in one of the backend services (about 250k/min with approx 32 instances). This was causing issues for our downstream dependencies as we were not able to reply back within one hour of consuming the record from upstream and our L2 support was daily getting numerous pages which were also escalating to us. Then my manager asked me to take a look at what is going on and if we can improve the throughput somehow. After almost spending one week of banging my head against different theories and tons of experiments in QA I finally figured out that the new Kafka client we were using had a setting where it required acks from all brokers (which has increased to 5 in the new cluster from 3 in previous one) and this caused a huge increase in the blocking time even though we were using an Async framework. The async task just waited too long for completion and once completed could not get the threadpool back due competition with other threads. Solution: simple, I just changed the Kafka producer ack from "ALL" to "ONE" requiring acknowledgement from one broker only. Throughput with same 32 instance jumped from 250k/min to around 700k.

I ask the intelligent readers of HN - do you think that based on this I should be penalized since the change was only in one line of config code? Yes, that's all what it took to resolve this outstanding issue - one line of config change/one commit albeit one week of thinking and experimenting time!
iPhones are a 15 year effort by a trillion-dollar market cap company to produce secure hardware that retails for $1000, and still regularly gets hit with root exploits.

This is your model for securing electric meters?
Scoping is one part of the problem. Complex selector is another one. Design consistency is yet another one.

Tailwindcss is solving those 3 issues.
>Yes, Google has a better track record.

Do they? This is just from last month:
https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-patches-second-chrome-z...

>You brought open source and - totally unrelated - sendmail into it.

No, you brought the totally unrelated "Avoid Microsoft for stuff that is important, and don't install their software on your machines if you can help it." as if Microsoft is the only place to ever had a RCE...
> there is too much competition for women, and opportunities to date do not come by easily at all.

I can't agree more. Spent 5 years in SF single. I went down to Colombia to explore a different culture. I was unsingle in less than a month.

The average "unlovable tech bro" in SF is considered a catch almost anywhere else.
Many gas water heaters will definitely work. New tankless style ones may not if their thermostats rely on power, but the last 3 tanked water heaters I installed didn’t have any electrical hookups..
Is your next thought after having your curiosity piqued not, "I should look at what headers my browser is sending", or "I should type 'browser language headers' into a search engine"? I'm trying to understand what sort of things lead people instead to think, "I should type a question about 'browser language headers' into a comment box on an off-topic thread, wait for a response, and then go back and check what the replies say."
The weather is also overrated. SF weather in particular is boring and sucks!
Your anti-M$FT bias is showing. AMZN struck first... Microsoft was using the term Lambda for a prominent feature in its flagship language (C#) before AWS ever existed.

Here's a Stack question dated 2008:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/167343/c-sharp-lambda-ex...
If you're a subscriber they do full-text search and archiving.
A lot of people, myself included, have been quite hesitant to work remotely until now. I've been pleasantly surprised how well it's gone and would consider a remote position in the future but I think it'd have to be a fully remote team. When offices do return, being one of a few remote workers means you will likely be left out of a lot of teambuilding, conversations, etc.
Windows XP is still seen in the wild.
I can relate. I actually used to work at Artsy (the company who published this article), and before I worked there, I felt much the same way. What I learned after being immersed in the art world is that occasionally, art will "speak" to me immediately. But more often, it grows on me as I understand the context of the art and who made it. This is definitely the case for me with Basquiat, whose work can look like childish scribbles at first glance.

In my farewell email to my Artsy coworkers, I wrote that as I really began to engage with the art world in my time there, I realized I had gained a whole new layer of perception. I was seeing new references and callbacks everywhere in the world around me.

So what I would say is that if you feel like it's going over your head and want to invest the time, it can be extremely rewarding to go down the rabbit hole. You can do this by reading articles, watching documentaries, visiting exhibitions, and finding spaces inhabited by enthusiasts.

Some things to check out:

- The book The $12 Million Stuffed Shark

- The film Exit Through The Gift Shop
that electronSafeIpc API is actually not that interesting and a completely standard way to do things for ElectronJS apps.

No, I do agree - from my perspective C/C++ class bugs are more difficult. Maybe they see this as magic as well.

Still, it was painstaking work and in either case CountryX will easily surpass those difficulties.
Could you put that in the README, is what we're asking, as vague as it may be.

At the moment the 'has been fixed' is the only clue to this in terms of resolution, and it's tucked away; without it it looks like most of the README is attempting to capitalize on the shock/outrage factor.

Edit: Thanks, author has added some dates.

https://github.com/oskarsve/ms-teams-rce/commit/35eac619fdef...
I don't get this. Version control is essential. I've worked at places that didn't have it and it's absurdly unnecessarily unpleasant.

If you really don't like git try Mercurial. I haven't worked with it in years but it was very easy to work with
Meet links are all over the place in what until-recently-was-called-Gsuite, for instance, in the calendar and in the chat (the little camera icon). Usability could be better, that's a fact, but it worked flawless for me over the last 8 months or so and if people are used to MS/whereby/zoom/whatever then we typically get comments halfway into an interview day that the video hasn't crashed yet, that the audio still doesn't lag by 5 minutes and that nobody has been booted out for no particular reason yet. That's how used people are to these glitches.

I'm not a big fan of Google, but the video meeting software (and the little pc that you can buy with a dedicated setup including super good echo cancellation) is at the moment best of the litter.
I can't read this article because this site is blocking me from doing so.
Wfh will not stick. Managers hate it. If you are really talented you can work anywhere for whatever price you want, however most people are not like that and can only really function meeting often in person.
For me its the stance for Lockdown/restriction - seems to me blue state is more eager to lockdown.
> https://twitter.com/StateOfLinkedIn/status/10982208809147719...

Thank you for this ... Incredible 'suit joke'
don't forget non-competes and moonlighting. As the rest the world has proven there is [comparatively] no innovation and startups without these two. The things like for example Traitorous 8 can never happen.

Wrt. people leaving because of WFH - anecdotally people leave for other place where there are campuses of their companies. That suggests that there is not much trust in WFH. Once WFH subsides many of those people will still continue their comfortable work and life in those places. Those "stale blood" people - the highly paid employees of those large corps - aren't really drivers of innovation (making $0.5M+ at say Google as a programming drone one isn't going to drop it and make a startup - that is one of the points why Google is paying well :), and by leaving SFBA they provide the chance (by for example relieving real estate pressure a bit) for the "new blood" to come in.
Rich people don't want to live in your 100 year old apartment with 50 year old finishes. Unfortunately, in San Francisco, they don't have any other choice.
Afaik there are currently 4 x86 manufacturers. Intel, AMD, Via and I can’t remember the fourth one.
You can’t blacken a bell pepper or toast bread over an induction element...
Winds die down at night. No battery tech today can store the energy needs of millions and millions of home during the night. We do not have dam capacity to build water batteries at the scale needed.

Without nuclear or dramatic battery innovations, we will always burn natural gas for night time energy.
Note that I have no evidence to support this hypothesis, and I would love if someone would prove me wrong, but I suspect the following:

- The "Tech Elite" who are leaving are, by definition, the ones who have the financial freedom to go pretty much wherever they want. Anyone mentioned in this article could buy a house in Miami/Austin/Denver without worrying about any transaction costs if they turn around and sell it in 6 months.

- SF (and California in general) are being much more aggressive with anti-COVID policies.

- The cities that are being focused on (Miami and Austin) are overall pretending that COVID isn't a thing (I live in Austin, and this is my experience).

- Well-off individuals currently under lock-down are looking at people living "freely" in Florida/Texas and are jealous, because they think that the SF-lockdown rules shouldn't apply to them, because they are less at risk (this is a discussion for another day)

- They've now set themselves up with a plausible "I moved out of California. My reason was COVID." story to try to avoid paying California state taxes in the future, even if they still end up being back in SF the majority of the time for their business.

tldr; the "elites" leaving are moving for short-term quality-of-life improvements due to COVID, and will have no issue turning around and moving back in 6-12 months when SF is "open for business" again.

Update: I have seen the shift in Austin from watching stories/tweets/social-media of people who have been moving from SF -> Austin. I was excited at first of the prospect of Austin become a much larger tech city, but am now noticing that the overwhelming majority of this content (although I could easily be seeing a biased sample, of course) is that the vocal group of "I moved from SF to Austin" is the same group that is extremely excited to go out to restaurants and public events again.