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Ask HN: $8k on AWS in August for you, any interesting computations?

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Re: Ask HN: $8k on AWS in August for you, any interesting computations?

#51

Post by kretor »

ranman wrote: post #49
the_economist wrote: post #36

Amazon was generous enough to give you the credit trying to help your company, and in general is extremely helpful to the startup community as a whole with AWS credits. Maybe you should just give it back to them so they continue to be so kind in the future. (On the other hand, the main reason AWS gives out these credits is to get startups hooked on AWS, then charge borderline outrageous prices once the credit is done…

(former AWS employee) You can't give the credits back or transfer them to another account (at least not in a short period of time). Best to spend them. There's just no infrastructure to support that scenario.

Not spending the credits is like giving them back to Amazon

Re: Ask HN: $8k on AWS in August for you, any interesting computations?

#52

Post by cheald »

katharas wrote: post #50
plicense wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know it pains me to see you ask for resources. Everyday at work, my team uses a couple r3.4x large and c4.8x large for trivial tasks. My team does not realize how valuable a resource they are accessing(and wasting) everyday. I wish I can donate those to you, but company policy forbids me to.

Thanks for the thought! I hope I didn't sound ungrateful... There are resources in the university but they come with overhead and not as much freedom as a VM on which you can do anything. That said our cluster is about as big as two c4.8xlarge vms.

FWIW, you can have 2 cc2.8xlarge spot instances for about $0.50/hour. $12/day isn't nothing, but it's pretty affordable. Stick your data on an EBS instance attached to the spot so you keep your data if the spot instance gets nuked and you have a functioning cluster for around 13% of the on-demand price.

Re: Ask HN: $8k on AWS in August for you, any interesting computations?

#53

Post by JoshTriplett »

sirsar wrote: post #26
JoshTriplett wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Internet Archive is indeed a 501(c)3, and this is a great idea. It also fits very well with the request in the PS.

The Internet Archive is a different entity than ArchiveTeam. I'm skeptical that running AT instances (which scrape websites into archives which then get hosted by IA) counts as a donation towards the IA. From archiveteam.org: Archive Team is in no way affiliated with the fine folks at ARCHIVE.ORG

Granted, but you could contact archive.org and ask how $8k of AWK credit could be donated and used productively. I'm certain they'd have a valuable use for it.

Re: Ask HN: $8k on AWS in August for you, any interesting computations?

#54

Post by nadams »

firloop wrote: post #32

I'm pretty sure what you're trying to do is not allowed under Section 1.3 of the AWS Promo Credit agreement. Personally, I would be wary accepting "free" credit that I may end up being on the hook for. https://aws.amazon.com/awscredits/

IANAL but I don't see that a violation. As long as he isn't selling or renting it out for a price then he is fine. I have a feeling that provision is there to make sure people don't try to sell credits, screw over the buyer, then the buyer tries to complain to Amazon.

Steam has a similar stipulation - and a lot of people are pissed about it. Basically you can't buy or sell steam accounts - and if you are caught Valve will suspend the account. I personally think it's completely stupid and if actually challenged would not hold up in court (I think the first sale doctrine fits perfectly because if you sell your steam account then the games are no longer accessible to you). But again - I get why, they don't want to put up with scammers or stupid people who try to sell an account and disappear before they send the credentials.

Re: Ask HN: $8k on AWS in August for you, any interesting computations?

#55

Post by dchichkov »

If you are Bay Area local and would like to support soaring pilots community (Glider, Hang Glider, Paraglider), I'm maintaining local soaring forecast and run relatively computationally expensive NOAA WRF model. It is free, no ads, I've been maintaining it for ~7-8 years and for last couple of years it runs at about $700/year using spot/auction Amazon pricing. Available at http://norcalsoaring.org (my e-mail is HN user id @gmail)

edit: after reading a link describing Watsi (current top comment), I would support donating credits to Watsi as well.

Re: Ask HN: $8k on AWS in August for you, any interesting computations?

#56

Post by alan_si »

For my Master's Project (UC Berkeley), I'm working on sports analytics and furthering in-game sports prediction. We are building off some initial work out of MIT that you can find out more about here: http://www.sloansportsconference.com/?p=6137

To start, the goal is to perform real-time MLB pitch prediction. To facilitate this we will be building a crawler to curate MLB data from http://gd2.mlb.com/components/game/mlb/ as well as testing some Machine Learning algorithms. We'd like to use the credits to facilitate this and potentially put together some crawlers for other sports data (NBA, NHL, etc.) before the end of the month!

Re: Ask HN: $8k on AWS in August for you, any interesting computations?

#57

Post by airza »

rajington wrote: post #12

I'd like to use Riot's official API ( https://developer.riotgames.com/ ) to scrape a BUNCH of game data, specifically "timeline" data, and see which players do things the best.

Their rate limiting is laughable compared to the amount of data they produce (even on prod apps) so good luck :/

Re: Ask HN: $8k on AWS in August for you, any interesting computations?

#58

Post by cing »

sp332 wrote: post #40
jcoffland wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be a waste since this would contribute very little to F@H. I'm the lead dev at F@H.

Wow, 20,000 GPU cores for 20+ days wouldn't help much?

g2.8xlarge is 4 GPUs and costs 0.6945/hr on spot instance. You could contribute 120 GPUs for 2 weeks, which would be pretty insignificant: http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=osstats2

Re: Ask HN: $8k on AWS in August for you, any interesting computations?

#59

Post by cinquemb »

I'm working on a tool[0] using LSA [1] to mine the emails from Hacking Team so that people could use it to get more relevant results compared to what wikileaks has available (a lot of stuff to sift through to not know how each message might be related to ones queries outside of just mentioning the word in an email).

Right now I have to break up the term-message matrices by person to do before doing partial eigenvalue decomposition, to generate inverse(sigma) * transpose(u) and inverse(sigma) * transpose(v) and the lower dimensional space representation of each message for each message, but it would be cool to not have to do that if I had more computing power available (a friend let me use his 12 thread/ 6 core machine which has helped a lot while building things).

Ideally it should it hosted somewhere eventually, because the project it self might be a bit complicated/tedious for most people to set up themselves, that would allow people to search it using these indexes as well as enabling (independent) journalists to be able sift through everything in an arguably better way.

[0] https://github.com/cinquemb/hackedteam-email-index-mining

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_semantic_analysis#Deriv...

Re: Ask HN: $8k on AWS in August for you, any interesting computations?

#60

Post by tempestn »

jcoffland wrote: post #30
Debogue wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or Folding at Home for protein folding

That would be a waste since this would contribute very little to F@H. I'm the lead dev at F@H.

Can you explain in more detail why the contribution wouldn't be proportional to the value of the credits?
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