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Tell HN: Azure outage

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Re: Tell HN: Azure outage

#521
post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

50% of sales? what do you think the gross margin is on average for each item sold?

it's retail. the margin is 30-50% for sure. EDIT: their last quarterly was 36%. they lost $3.7bn in 24Q4 -- the christmas quarter. sold to PE in Q1.

All my limited knowledge about retail is that losing money in Q4 means you’re dead. Are they fundamentally different than retail?

Re: Tell HN: Azure outage

#522

It still surprises me how much essential services like public transport are completely reliant on cloud providers, and don't seem to have backups in place. Here in The Netherlands, almost all trains were first delayed significantly, and then cancelled for a few hours because of this, which had real impact because today is also the day we got to vote for the next parlement (I know some who can't get home in time befor…

Voting days should be a national holiday.

In Germany it is always a Sunday.

Re: Tell HN: Azure outage

#523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is voting there a one day only event? If not, I feel the solution to that particular problem is quite clear. There’s a million things that could go wrong causing you to miss something when you try to do it in a narrow time range (today after work before polls close) If it’s a multi day event, it’s probably that way for a reason. Partially the same as the solution to above.

In europe, voting typically happens in one day, where everyone physically goes to their designated voting place and puts papers in a transparent box. You can stay there and wait for the count at the end of the day if you want to. Tom Scott has a very good video about why we don't want electronic/mail voting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI

UK is a one day affair with voting booths typically open like 6 am to 10 pm

Re: Tell HN: Azure outage

#524

"Front Door" has to be the worst product name for a CDN I've ever heard of. I used to work for a CDN too.

I wonder if many Germans are eager to sign up for AFD. But seriously I thought it would be the console, not a CDN.

Front Door (tm), with Back Door access for the FBI included free with your subscription! ;)

Re: Tell HN: Azure outage

#525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Washington State having full vote-by-mail (there is technically a layer of in-person voting as a fallback for those who need it for accessibility reasons or who missed the registration deadline) has spoiled me rotten, I couldn't imagine having to go back to synchronous on-site voting on a single day like I did in Illinois. Awful. Being able to fill my ballot at my leisure, at home, where I can have all the research m…

As a Dutchman, I have to go vote in person on a specific day. But to be honest: I really don't mind doing so. If you live in a town or city, there'll usually be multiple voting locations you can choose from within 10 minutes walking distance. I've never experienced waiting times more than a couple of minutes. Opening times are pretty good, from 7:30 til 21:00. The people there are friendly. What's not to like? (Excep…

So, if you have a minor emergency, like a kidney stone and hospitalized for the day - you just miss your chance to vote in that election?

If so, I see a lot to dislike. As the point I was making is you can’t anticipate what might come up. Just because it’s worked thus far doesn’t mean it’s designed for resilience. There’s a lot of ways you could miss out in that type of situation. I seems silly to make sure everything else is redundant and fault tolerant in the name of democracy when the democratic process itself isn’t doing the same.

Re: Tell HN: Azure outage

#526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many countries in Europe have advance voting.

Off the top of my head, I can't think of an EU country that does not have some form of advance voting. Here in Latvia the "election day" is usually (always?) on weekend, but the polling stations are open for some (and different!) part of every weekday leading up. Something like couple hours on monday morning, couple hours on tuesday evening, couple around midday wednesday, etc. In my opinion, it's a great system. You…

Ireland doesn't have it.

Re: Tell HN: Azure outage

#528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Dutchman, I have to go vote in person on a specific day. But to be honest: I really don't mind doing so. If you live in a town or city, there'll usually be multiple voting locations you can choose from within 10 minutes walking distance. I've never experienced waiting times more than a couple of minutes. Opening times are pretty good, from 7:30 til 21:00. The people there are friendly. What's not to like? (Excep…

In the US, hours-long lines are routine. Not everywhere, but poorer places tend to have fewer voting machines and longer lines. We've been closing a lot of polling places recently: https://abcnews.go.com/US/protecting-vote-1-5-election-day-p...

We have early voting, nobody has to wait, they choose to wait

Re: Tell HN: Azure outage

#529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a Family Dollar by my house that is down at least 2 full days per month because of bad inet connectivity. I live close enough that with a small tower on my roof i can get line of sight to theirs. I've thought about offering them a backup link off my home inet if they give me 50% of sales whenever its in use. It would be a pretty good deal for them, better some sales when their inet is down vs none.

You'd think any SeriousBusiness would have a backup way to take customers' money. This is the one thing you always want to be able to do: accept payment. If they made it so they can't do that, they deserve the hit to their revenue. People should just walk out of the store with the goods if they're not being charged. Why doesn't someone in the store at least have one of those manual kachunk-kachunk carbon copy card re…

Then they would need to get the little booklets of invalid numbers to keep by the register to check (yes, I am old).

Re: Tell HN: Azure outage

#530
post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS' UI is similarly messy, and to this day. They regularly remove useful data from the UI, or change stuff like the default sort order of database snapshots from last created to initial instance created date. I never understood why a clear and consistent UI and improved UX isn't more of a priority for the big three cloud providers. Even though you talk mostly via platform SDK's, I would consider better UI especially…

It’s more than just the UI itself (which is horrible), it’s the whole thing that is very hostile to new users even if they’re experienced. It’s such an incoherent mess. The UI, the product names, the entire product line itself, with seemingly overlapping or competing products… and now it’s AI this and AI that. If you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, good luck finding it. It’s like they’re deliberately tryi…

100% agree. I've been working in the industry for almost 20 years, I'm a full stack developer and I manage my servers. I've tried signing up for AWS and I noped out.

AWS Is a complete mess. Everything is obscured behind other products, and they're all named in the most confusing way possible.

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