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karlkatzke

1,282 karma · joined April 4, 2013

Linux Infrastructure/Operations Systems Administrator. Former PHP developer. Big proponent of Do It Right. 15 years in IT (and counting...)

email: katzke at gmail; twitter: kkatzke

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karlkatzke··on Slashing data transfer costs in AWS
Data has "gravity" -- as in, it holds you down to where your data is, and you have to spend money to move it just like you have to spend money to escape gravity.
karlkatzke··on Slashing data transfer costs in AWS
This isn't a loophole. This is by design. AWS wants you to use specific services in specific ways, so they make it really cheap to do so. Using an endpoint for S3 is one of the ways they want you to use the S3 service.

Another example is using CloudFront. AWS wants you to use CloudFront, so they make CloudFront cheaper than other types of data egress.

karlkatzke··on Ask HN: 40yo adult learning to drive what is different vs. learning young?
In my teens, I had so much ability to process all kinds of stuff that I would pay attention to too much and get too distracted, and as a result, I would turn up music loud enough that it consumed the rest of my attention so that I'd stay focused on driving.

As an adult, I find myself turning off music and other distractions because they take up too much of my processing ability, because my ability to process that much is significantly lower than it was when I was a teenager. Keep this in mind as you're reading other advice aimed at teenagers, and understand how much of driving training is teaching someone to pay attention when there's so many things going on around them to watch but they mostly need to watch what they are doing.

karlkatzke··on Researchers have discovered magnetic monopole quasi-particles
Magnets. How do they work?!
karlkatzke··on Starship will attempt a launch this Friday
We believe that babies' lives should have rights after birth, too, and if you look at infant mortality rates in states that whose politicians are against abortion, you see that obviously a fetus's right to live ends at birth.
karlkatzke··on *@gmail.com
I’m apparently still known for my snark during a reply-all storm at TAMU on an internal mailing list, 15 years ago.
karlkatzke··on Revealed: WHO aspartame safety panel linked to alleged Coca-Cola front group
There's a lot of other things I'm going to die from before I die from artificial sweeteners.
karlkatzke··on The Great Electrician Shortage
> Meanwhile, HVAC guys near me charge $700 to run a thermostat wire 5 feet.

Yes, in many areas that’s what it costs for a worker and helper to not be able to work on another more profitable job to do the job for you that only takes fifteen minutes. He still has to spend 30 minutes driving and maintain the same liability insurance and van lease and helper pay.

Part of the problem people don’t want to go into the direct to consumer trades is that the jobs are physically demanding, intellectually demanding (keep up on code changes, lots of esoteric knowledge about situations rarely encountered, and then there’s the customer service angle with homeowners that insist “it shouldn’t cost that much to run a wire five feet.”

karlkatzke··on Starship launch debris landed 6 miles north, residents report broken windows
Turns out some of those things that got broken outside of the company were important and people cared about them. Funny how things that work great in software development don’t work great when applied to the real world, eh?
karlkatzke··on More students are turning away from college and toward apprenticeships
Good. Needs to happen. Was talking to our HVAC repair dude. He makes as much as I do with a high school education and two years of trade school. Adjusting for age, he definitely makes more than I did at 34.

No reason to send kids who want to work with their hands to four year colleges and saddle them with 100k in debt when they can work through a trade school, be done at 20, and have no student loan debt.

karlkatzke··on Apple: The only big tech giant going against the job cuts tide
A bunch of Google’s lack of focus is their internal management culture and nothing will change (and google/alphabet will not be worth being a customer of or being investing in) until the culture problem is fixed.

Google only promotes engineers when they are part of a program launch. No credit is ever given for feature launch or program maintenance. If you are not a part of a program launch within a few years at google/alphabet you are managed out.

This doesn’t create a company that I’d find it worth investing my limited engineering hours in long term. A GCE sales person called me last week and I couldn’t help but laughing when I told them that I’d just agreed to five year terms on an AWS private pricing agreement the previous week. Google’s recent actions made me unsure GCE would still be a product in five years.

karlkatzke··on How to own an airline in 3 easy steps and grab the TSA nofly list along the way
Also seems to have gotten a crew list from the CommutAir’s CASS or possibly from other airlines as part of the shared deadheading crew list, which includes crew addresses and employment information.

There were also prod AWS credentials in the files exposed in Jenkins.

karlkatzke··on Southwest cancels 5,400 flights in less than 48 hours
> calling a staffing emergency saying all hell is about to break loose

That memo is specifically about ground operations at DEN, and specifically because of the arctic weather conditions and a high number of sick calls and ramp agents that outright quit. You can earn more flipping burgers in Denver than you can as a SWA gate agent with five years of experience. Failing to pay staff is also a management failure.

The scheduling software crashed due to the number of pilots and flight attendants that were out of position and the number of changes that were made to the schedule. I would imagine that there was an overflow in some situation -- i.e. "the number of changed schedules should never exceed 65535" that worked every year until this one. But this system was already known to be unstable, another Reddit comment said that "there are settings you don't change for fear the entire thing will crash." Which it has before in 2016. Not expecting that history will repeat itself and doing something about it is also a management failure.

> Also its pretty much an airport thing and not an airline thing

Absolutely incorrect. While the airport runs the automated conveyance system that gets the bag from where the rampers drop it to the baggage claim, the people that handle the baggage at every manual step in between are SWA employees. If there aren't enough of them, the bags don't make it on the plane on time.

Notice that the people doing this work for Southwest Airlines are all wearing Southwest uniforms.

Like most complicated failures, this was failure with multiple causes and contributing factors. The core of the problem seems to be that management was rent-seeking without making appropriate structural changes to keep up with system load.

karlkatzke··on Air Force, FBI raid homes in probe of Area 51 website
Funny, I’m not a police officer either, and I’ve somehow managed to go my entire life without being in ANY situation where a gun was pulled. Maybe you should re-evaluate your personal risk level and reconsider choices you’ve made in your life instead of defending shitty authoritarian practices of a government that wouldn’t give a shit about you.
karlkatzke··on Air Force, FBI raid homes in probe of Area 51 website
More delivery drivers are murdered every year than police officers, but you don’t see people rolling around with “thin bread line” bumper stickers.
karlkatzke··on American Airlines is trying to stop a popular app used by flight attendants
They don’t. Employees are responsible for checking the math of the scheduler. in the case of pilots, the employee has liability in this situation as well as the airline. Especially in situations where there is bad weather nationwide, employees can be and absolutely are scheduled incorrectly by schedulers and employees have to maintain several sets of numbers (rest time, etc) besides the flying hours that are logged in the airline’s app.
karlkatzke··on Factorio is coming to Nintendo Switch
I liked DSP but it was a bit lacking in complexity once you got past the point of dedicating entire planets to pumping out, say, sphere structure. There's only so large you can build a sphere.

Now, Workers & Resources, Soviet Republic still stays challenging...

karlkatzke··on Ask HN: I'm disabled and out of money. Now what?
Lots of good advice already, but if I can make another one -- find a different type of company to work for/with. Not all companies are, can be, or need to be the go hard get big get out YC companies. I don't really like or work for those companies anymore. They chew people up and spit them out.

There's tons of small companies that have real products and that are profitable but are structured with much more realistic growth expectations and targets. I work for one that is largely homebound or disabled people. We work when we're able to, we don't stress much when we can't work, and we do good work.

karlkatzke··on Electric fan car shatters the Goodwood hill climb record
It's scary enough in a 400hp/3600lbs RWD car. Even with traction control enabled, the car likes shaking it's ass any time you tap the gas and turning the wheel on anything remotely slick with power in will break the traction wheels loose.
karlkatzke··on Land Gained and Lost: A Fermi Estimate
It also glosses over that arctic land isn’t usable for agriculture. There’s nowhere near enough fertile soil in former permafrost. The areas that did have fertile soil are now deserts or covered in salt water. It really comes off as disingenuous to me in that regard; it’s a quantitative analysis without any of the qualitative measures that are necessary.
karlkatzke··on How Zillow's homebuying scheme lost $881M
What’s funny is how much property values and rent have risen in the US in 2020 to 2022, when population growth has been flat due to Covid. (Population has increased 1 million in that time, from 331.5 million to 332.5 million.) obviously, newborns aren’t buying houses, but the excess deaths (not to mention early retirements requiring around the clock care) were entirely due to Covid and should have opened up a number of properties for first time homebuyers.
karlkatzke··on Aeroflot to Halt International Flights from March 8
Imagine trying to pay for fuel with a cargo hold full of Rubles.
karlkatzke··on Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai has almost disappeared
Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai had already almost disappeared before the eruption.

A picture taken two hours before the widely publicized explosive detonation showed that the 2015 eruption products, which is really the north north west side of the much larger caldera that isn't even fully shown in this picture, had already disappeared. https://denvergazette.com/news/nation-world/a-planet-skysat-...

karlkatzke··on Five fold increase in Cardiac deaths of FIFA athletes
Considering that the link is an anti-vaxxer, probably bias.
karlkatzke··on Where have all the insects gone?
People aren't as densely packed in most parts of Texas, so it might be explainable that way. A lot of the state is also hay fields instead of food crops that are more intensively controlled for pests.

But I've noticed a big change in Texas in recent years. The last two years I haven't had to use pesticide in my residential vegetable garden. I've had to control for mold/fungal infections, but not for insects. And I live up against a nature preserve and try to keep most of my property as natural as possible.

karlkatzke··on Restaurant workers quit at record rate
The #1 career field that died of COVID during the pandemic is restaurant cooks.
karlkatzke··on US bans dog imports from more than 100 countries
No. Wrong. Incorrect on all accounts. A rabid bat absolutely will bite a human, will fly into a home seeking water, will be down at a human level because they no longer fly well, and most bats are so small that the bite won’t be noticed if it happens while sleeping.
karlkatzke··on Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
One of my funniest work experiences comes from a coworker who had a question about an obscure RHEL 5 thing long after RHEL5 should have been abolished, him googling it, and finding an answer I had posted about a decade before when RHEL5 was in beta and I had experienced and answered the same issue.

Through the “asking and searching” phase, he was sitting next to me on a rooftop at a really stressful job, we were drinking daily on the job, and I had no idea why he suddenly started smacking my left arm and laughing to the point he couldn’t speak. He finally turned his laptop towards me and I just saw my StackOverflow profile with the icon I use at work and on GitHub and everywhere else, the picture of my first dog. He could have just spoken up (but I’d probably forgotten the answer) … he googled instead and got the answer of the person he was sitting next to.

When occasionally I have worked at big companies, now people know my dog’s face more than they know me as a person.

karlkatzke··on Chad Strings – The Chad way to handle strings in C
<sarcasm> Well, I don’t know about you, but I personally try to give all my workplace memes creepy incel sexual overtones. I kind of have a thing for the head of HR . . . </sarcasm>
karlkatzke··on Midair Collision over Denver
At the point a pilot is considering declaring an emergency, they should do so. Once they have declared an emergency, the insurance company owns the airplane, and the pilot should be focused on preserving as many lives as possible. This is as true for a mechanical emergency like a gear up landing as it is for every other kind of emergency.
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