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Accident Forgiveness

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Re: Accident Forgiveness

#291

Post by wrs »

genewitch wrote: post #202
wrs wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Water billing is indeed nonlinear with no cap. I had a surprise $3000 excess water bill due to a broken connection at the meter. Followed by a $3000 excess sewer bill (!) because the assumption is if I used $3000 of water, it must have gone down the drain. However, if you demonstrate to an inspector that the water must have leaked below ground (as in this case) there’s a process for getting the second charge waived.…

So, when they read the meter, and saw that it was flooded at the meter or nearby, they didn't think to mention that to you? I ask because you said "surprise bill" - another comment i made explains my neighbor's water meters have a light on them that lights up if there's a leak, which the meter reader can see and the homeowner usually cannot - the only reason to not notify the homeowner of an issue is because of $.

If I recall correctly, we discovered and fixed the leak because the ground around the meter had become a mud pit, then the meter was read some time later. The size of the bill was still a surprise.

Re: Accident Forgiveness

#292

Post by genewitch »

wrs wrote: post #291
genewitch wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, when they read the meter, and saw that it was flooded at the meter or nearby, they didn't think to mention that to you? I ask because you said "surprise bill" - another comment i made explains my neighbor's water meters have a light on them that lights up if there's a leak, which the meter reader can see and the homeowner usually cannot - the only reason to not notify the homeowner of an issue is because of $.

If I recall correctly, we discovered and fixed the leak because the ground around the meter had become a mud pit, then the meter was read some time later. The size of the bill was still a surprise.

Oh, i see. I was wondering if it was a common occurrence that the workers noticed a leak and said nothing.

Re: Accident Forgiveness

#293

Post by genewitch »

idlewords wrote: post #289
genewitch wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

my well only costs me electricity and has no meter - well, i have a meter somewhere, i just never installed it. I know for a fact it uses 9A to run, so it would cost me 30¢ or so, all-in, to run it for an hour. it's somewhere around 10-12GPM, so 600-700 gallons for 30c I've wanted to put it on solar the entire time i've had it but the start current is 18A and an inverter that can handle that is (or maybe was, idk) re…

Inverters have gotten a lot more capable and quite cheap; you should take a second look. Also look up "soft starters", they're devices designed to reduce start current on motors. They get mostly used for solar and generator A/C, but would work with a well pump, and might put it in the range of your current inverter. Speaking as someone who has had to run a gasoline generator to pump well water and is about to move it…

thanks, what brand, if any, do you recommend?

Re: Accident Forgiveness

#294

Post by wokwokwok »

tptacek wrote: post #226
wokwokwok wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's not sugar coat it. The problem is 100% technical. Detecting unexpected charges, scaling and restriction in real time is hard. It's easier to just charge people money than come up with good ways to avoid charging them , and deal with edge cases as a manual process. Sure. I get it. What company has an internal team that's like "ooo... lets find ways to cap the amount of money people pay us". No one. That's why. >…

> The problem is 100% technical. Detecting unexpected charges, scaling and restriction in real time is hard. > It's just avarice. There's no other reason.

Yes. Not doing things that are hard because they’re being greedy, and don’t want to cap the amount people can be charged.

The problem is technically solvable, it’s good for customers.

All you need to do is prioritise actually doing it.

In what stupid world do we pretend this is somehow good for consumers? Racking up thousands of dollars in bills?

It’s just the status quo.

They’re not not fixing it because it’s hard; that’s just the convenient excuse; they’re not fixing it because they don’t want to.

Re: Accident Forgiveness

#295

Post by StimDeck »

maliker wrote: post #123
ToucanLoucan wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone else remember we had widely available and completely understandable options to rent everything from baseline web-hosting all the way up to private rack services for actual years before AWS came along and apparently all of that was forgotten, Warhammer 40K style? I've rented a VPS from a vendor for going on 20 years now (Holy fuck I'm old) and I've never once been surprised at the bill.

You know that book "JavaScript: The Good Parts"? There needs to be a similar one "AWS: just the good parts". It would probably talk about EC2 (VPS), S3 (cheap bulk storage), SES (emails), and that's about it. When folks get into the elastic-super-beanstalk-container-swarm-v0.3 products, that's when they really kill themselves on the bills. That said, yes, just using a VPS vendor is the easy way to stick to the good p…

Obviously subjective, but Lambda seems more cost efficient than EC2. And really gives cloud vibes.

Re: Accident Forgiveness

#296

Post by commercialnix »

filleokus wrote: post #157
commercialnix wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keeping everything, including mission critical databases, "inside" Kubernetes is smart. The smart people keep everything "in" Kubernetes. Everyone else can pay up.

Like everything else it's a tradeoff. If you are running _everything_ inside Kubernetes you can easily move away, but I think you're loosing much of the benefit of being in the $big_cloud to begin with. If you have the staffing to provide your own db's, block storages, caches, IAM, logging/monitoring, container registries etc in a reliable way "as a service", the jump to some much cheaper bare metal hosting is not th…

Yeah, not _everything_, but almost or "pretty much" everything. The main exception to "everything" ultimately being S3, and some monitoring exceptions here and there that are purely cloud-side like monitoring AWS' Service Control Policies and using some cloud-side AWS tooling.

AWS has very nice one-to-one mapping of K8s serviceAccount with IAM roles.

We used some cryptography-centric GitOps patterns to eliminate any human hands beyond a dev environment which also helps IAM be easier (but of no less reasonable granularity and quality).

> the jump to some much cheaper bare metal hosting is not that far.

Heh, at a consulting firm I was at not too long ago, all the K8s nodes were sole-tenant on the cloud providers these K8s nodes were on. Intra-cluster Cilium-based Pod-to-Pod networking across cloud-based datacenter sites has been super smooth, but I have to admit I'm probably tainted/biased by that team's uncommon access to talent.

Re: Accident Forgiveness

#297

Post by commercialnix »

felixgallo wrote: post #253
commercialnix wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keeping everything, including mission critical databases, "inside" Kubernetes is smart. The smart people keep everything "in" Kubernetes. Everyone else can pay up.

Don't be ridiculous. To the nearest 9 decimal points, nobody keeps their mission critical database inside Kubernetes, and the K8s tax is excessive for essentially all cloud users anyway.

The last time I was involved in this kind of thing (long enough but not too long ago), we ran Postgres and other databases strictly in K8s per a mandate by our CTO. Using reserved instances are great for avoiding a lot of cost.

I think for that particular firm, "K8s tax" measured in fiat currency is negligible and anything on the human side their people upon hearing "K8s tax" would respond with some ridicule along the lines of "someone doesn't know how to computer".

To be fair, most of the commenters on HackerNews should use something like Heroku.

Re: Accident Forgiveness

#298

Post by donavanm »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #280
donavanm wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dont understand what youre on about. The post I replied to, and many others, use “caps” to refer to limits of service based on billing. This is an endless source of comments on every “cloud” topic. I provided a very brief overview of why large billing systems are more complicated than expected and have an impedance mismatch to the stated desire. But sure, tautological brain rot. Got it. Im sure you have a wealth of…

> if you have some _other_ proposal for how billing and service limits could function Im legitimately interested. Billing doesn't have to be so complicated you can't calculate it in less than a minute. That's a technical failure. Surely you can imagine a better way? If you really think it can't be better, then it's hard to argue against "brain rot". Also on most systems it will work perfectly fine to use an estimate…

Again, unless you have domain expertise I suspect you are drastically underestimating the complexity of reality. As I alluded to earlier metering, pricing, and billing are _at least_ three separate complicated problems in substantial systems. There are multiple metering dimensions that interact with each other, time, and periodicity at a minimum. Saying “do billing better” without either a thorough understanding of the existing system, or an actual concrete proposal, is not useful.

Re: Accident Forgiveness

#299

Post by Dylan16807 »

donavanm wrote: post #298
Dylan16807 wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you have some _other_ proposal for how billing and service limits could function Im legitimately interested. Billing doesn't have to be so complicated you can't calculate it in less than a minute. That's a technical failure. Surely you can imagine a better way? If you really think it can't be better, then it's hard to argue against "brain rot". Also on most systems it will work perfectly fine to use an estimate…

Again, unless you have domain expertise I suspect you are drastically underestimating the complexity of reality. As I alluded to earlier metering, pricing, and billing are _at least_ three separate complicated problems in substantial systems. There are multiple metering dimensions that interact with each other, time, and periodicity at a minimum. Saying “do billing better” without either a thorough understanding of t…

Being separate systems is fine as long as they can all calculate a number within the time it takes to make a cup of coffee. That's not hard if you actually make it a design goal.

I'm sorry that "prioritize it" isn't very helpful, but it's true. If the calculation takes longer than that, it's a management-induced problem.

If we're positing a system that can already do that, then you need to be more specific about the problem you're describing because it's not obvious.

Re: Accident Forgiveness

#300

Post by idlewords »

genewitch wrote: post #293
idlewords wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inverters have gotten a lot more capable and quite cheap; you should take a second look. Also look up "soft starters", they're devices designed to reduce start current on motors. They get mostly used for solar and generator A/C, but would work with a well pump, and might put it in the range of your current inverter. Speaking as someone who has had to run a gasoline generator to pump well water and is about to move it…

thanks, what brand, if any, do you recommend?

I recently did an inverter replacement and my solar guy recommended this model:

https://eg4electronics.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/EG4-18...

Max output is 50A, so it should be plenty for your pump and mine. You can also chain them together if you want huge battery capacity.

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