Hacker News: coleca

New comment by coleca in "AWS North Virginia data center outage – resolved"

coleca — Sat, 09 May 2026 13:26:40 +0000

Sometimes you need capacity and you have to choose where the capacity is not where you would like it to be. Unfortunately, the days of cloud bursting, and thinking of the cloud as an unlimited resource where you can spin up and spin down machines at will is vanishing. Power availability and supply chain lead times combined with unprecedented demand are the reason for this. That's why you see all the hyperscalers recently reporting on their "backlog" in their earnings reports.

New comment by coleca in "Can you slim macOS down?"

coleca — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 20:33:07 +0000

The needless processes / bloat still burn electricity though. I'd have to guess that given the millions of installed macOS machines it's a non-trivial amount of wasted electricity. Long gone are the days of ruthlessly optimizing software for the limited hardware.

New comment by coleca in "Stewart Cheifet, creator of The Computer Chronicles, has died"

coleca — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 02:15:48 +0000

Such sad news. As a kid growing up in RI I used to love watching Computer Chronicles on our local PBS station each weekend. Stuart and Gary were the best. RIP to a legend

New comment by coleca in "Replicate is joining Cloudflare"

coleca — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 15:20:23 +0000

Great match up of technologies. Congrats to Ben and the team! I had the privilege of working with Replicate when I was at AWS, such a great team.

New comment by coleca in "Two billion email addresses were exposed"

coleca — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 13:29:25 +0000

I was thinking the same thing. Can you imagine the headline?

"Forget Hackers! Phone Company Delivers Your Private Info—Including Your Home Address—Directly to Strangers!"

New comment by coleca in "We saved $500k per year by rolling our own "S3""

coleca — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 12:36:57 +0000

That's a great point. Sometimes we look for architecture or technology solutions for a problem that could be easily solved at the sales level by negotiating a PPA (Private Pricing Addendum) with AWS.

New comment by coleca in "AWS multiple services outage in us-east-1"

coleca — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 12:59:10 +0000

That is for S3 not AWS as a whole, AWS has never claimed otherwise. AFAIK S3 has never broken the 11 9s of durability.

New comment by coleca in "The fight between doctors and insurance companies over 'downcoding'"

coleca — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 13:31:33 +0000

Good startup idea would be to work with medical practices to use AI to automate the disputing of the "downcoding" by insurers.

New comment by coleca in "Building the heap: racking 30 petabytes of hard drives for pretraining"

coleca — Wed, 01 Oct 2025 19:05:48 +0000

For a workload of that size you would be able to negotiate private pricing with AWS or any cloud provider, not just CloudFlare. You can get a private pricing deal on S3 with as little as half a PB. Not saying that your overall expenses would be cheaper w/a CSP than DIY, but its not exactly an apples to apples comparison of taking full retail prices for the CSPs against eBayed equipment and free labor (minus the cost of the pizza).

New comment by coleca in "How to negotiate your salary package"

coleca — Sun, 22 Jun 2025 19:07:14 +0000

Yes, the lottery has rules and governance. It's a much safer bet. Startups can decide to devalue their employees' shares. I'd venture that the odds are at least stated on the back of the ticket with the lottery. Employees of privately held startups are often sold a dream of future riches that rarely happens. Even where there is an exit, often even founding employees get taken for a ride.

New comment by coleca in "Ask HN: Should you reply STOP to unwanted texts?"

coleca — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 15:45:34 +0000

Look up "pig butchering" (seriously). That is what those texts are all about. John Oliver did a whole segment on his show about it this summer.

TL;DR they are scams

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLPpl2ISKTg

New comment by coleca in "Never ask a candidate to rate themselves out of 10"

coleca — Mon, 08 Jul 2024 18:45:44 +0000

I do the same thing at AWS, except use a 100, 200, 300, 400 level scale. I am just looking to see what the candidate thinks they are strongest on and weakest. If the candidate says they have never heard of AI/ML topics, there's no point in quizzing them on it. Not everyone can know everything, it wouldn't be fair to judge someone based on not being able to answer questions for a domain they don't claim to have any experience in. Or worse yet, waste valuable / limited interview minutes on fruitless questions.

New comment by coleca in "Hertz Charging a Tesla Renter for Gas Was Not an Isolated Incident"

coleca — Mon, 20 May 2024 02:33:50 +0000

Hadn’t rented from Hertz in many years until last week. Made sure to fill the tank back up as high as it would go just in case. Get thru security at the airport and already had a $26 charge for fuel. Still working on getting this fixed. Funny how they can charge within 5-7 minutes but they take 5-7 business days to process a refund.

New comment by coleca in "How the XZ Backdoor Works"

coleca — Wed, 03 Apr 2024 12:19:13 +0000

This may be a dumb question, but is law enforcement investigating this? Is it even technically a crime?

New comment by coleca in "America's shoplifting problem, explained by retail workers and thieves"

coleca — Fri, 03 Nov 2023 15:14:32 +0000

After having worked in retail for 20+ yrs, both in the field and in IT, what I saw as the largest cause of shrink was always just simple accounting errors.

For example, I saw all the time a store would receive a case of merchandise from a vendor containing 100 toothbrushes, the computer says it's a qty of 100 for $2.99, but the receiver scans in the barcode for the whole case instead of the individual toothbrush and puts in a qty of 100 received. Now the retailer thinks they should have 10k instead of 100 brushes on hand, which gets picked up as a loss. I've seen similar things where the case pack sizes or prices were fat fingered by the corporate buyer and wrong in the system causing massive perceived shortages.

New comment by coleca in "Internet Artifact Museum"

coleca — Wed, 25 Oct 2023 17:08:23 +0000

No "Punch the Monkey"?

https://twitter.com/meyerweb/status/1454563559577370635?lang...

New comment by coleca in "The IBM mainframe: How it runs and why it survives"

coleca — Mon, 24 Jul 2023 13:53:08 +0000

I've always heard that as "scheduled uptime" or "unscheduled outages". When I worked in a mainframe shop, they used to IPL (reboot) the mainframe every Sunday morning. That down time was never considered as part of the SLA.

New comment by coleca in "Power companies fight Maine’s proposed non-profit utility"

coleca — Mon, 19 Jun 2023 20:37:07 +0000

I have a similar experience here in MA. Our town owns the power company as a non-profit and we have amazing service. We never lose power unless someone crashes into a pole or something, and even then it's only out for a short amount of time. When we have a big winter storm and all the surrounding communities on the large providers tend to be dark for days or longer, whereas here any outages are fixed quickly. They actually go around and trim trees off the lines to prevent future outages.

New comment by coleca in "Show HN: Oblivus GPU Cloud – Affordable and scalable GPU servers from $0.29/hr"

coleca — Tue, 16 May 2023 15:26:51 +0000

I always thought there were license restrictions from Nvidia preventing the use of their consumer grade GPUs in datacenters / cloud environments. Is this not the case?

New comment by coleca in "After defending false data, Comcast admits another FCC broadband map mistake"

coleca — Thu, 23 Feb 2023 19:32:44 +0000

Is there any decent tool to determine areas where symmetric broadband coverage in a given area is available? From what I can see on the FCC map it just using their "broadband" definition of 25down/3up which is akin to dial-up for most of the folks on HN.