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Comment by ctvo | Hacker News Reader

I took a workshop class and was told to setup a track saw. The course didn't bother explaining how to utilize it properly or protect yourself. I ended up losing a finger. I truly hate Stanley Tools with a passion and if I ever need to use another track saw, I'll use someone else.

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This analogy would make sense if the saw lacked a basic and obvious safety feature (billing limits) because Stanley profited immensely from cutting your finger off.

What seems like a basic feature to you is a hindrance to me. I don’t want to have to disable “safeguards” all over the place just because of loud and rare complaints.

It's as easy as having a single option:

> Do you want safeguards to be enabled by default, so you have to disable manually those you want to resign from?

> Do you want safeguards to be disabled by default, so you have to enable manually those you want to be in place?

To then rebel against it and say "I lose seconds of my life reading this, I don't want to have to!" would be ridiculous.

Protect yourself how? Most cloud providers don't support any way to immediately abort spending if things get out of hand, and when running a public-facing service there are always variables you can't control.

Even if you rig up your own spending watchdog which polls the clouds billing APIs, you're still at the mercy of however long it takes for the cloud to reconcile your spending, which often takes hours or even days.

Yes, they do. You create resources and you delete resources and if you care about cost you creat alarms and tie them to scripts that automatically delete resources.

It’s basic stuff.

Those alarms can take hours to cut in, because AWS does not report costs in real time

It's true that they can but mostly they don't (particularly with "serverless" services).

> I ended up losing a finger

You forgot to mention Stanley Tools paid for the hospital bill.

No. Stanley Tools owns the hospital and would profit from the operation, but when you said you don't have the money they decided to let you go. Perhaps because legally they would have to anyway, or otherwise they would suffer various legal and reputational consequences.

This is a good analogy. When you use a tool you are responsible for what it does.

I'm a safety inspector. Of course this is much more nuanced than this. One crucial aspect of a tool safety is proper documentation. It's also important who the tool is targeted for. There are different safety standards based on user's competence. Some "tools" will be toys for children, some will be for disabled people including people with intellectual disabilities, some will be for general populace, and only some for trained experts.

If a tool is designed for experts, but you as the manufacturer or distributor know the tool is used by general populace, you know it's being misused every now and then, you know it harms the user AND YOU KNOW YOU BENEFIT FROM THIS HARM, AND YOU COULD EASILY AVOID IT - that sounds like something you could go to jail for.

I think if Amazon was a Polish company, it would be forced by UOKiK (Office of Competition and Consumer Protection) to send money to every client harmed this way. I actually got ~$150 this way once. I know in USA the law is much less protective, it surprises me Americans aren't much more careful as a result when it comes to e.g. reading the terms of service.

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