Only 1.7? I got $55B up from 41 cents.
I literally almost had a heart attack today.
AWS: Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data – $1.7 billion
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Re: AWS: Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data – $1.7 billion
#502Just pay it and move on. No need to cause a scene.
Re: AWS: Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data – $1.7 billion
#503Lol, Friday deployment is a bad omen even with LLM. Some things are just unchangeable facts of life.
Re: AWS: Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data – $1.7 billion
#504I got 3 consecutive emails warning that my budget crossed its $18 threshold. Opened it up: cost was 78 million. Thought it was a phishing attempt, logged into my actual account, and... still 78 million. EMOTIONAL DAMAGE.
Yes, I am taking legal action, no doubt.
Why? What's the damages? They showed you a wrong number, then later acknowledged it and fixed it. Just because the number was "very big" to you doesn't mean you were actually aggrieved in some way.
Re: AWS: Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data – $1.7 billion
#505Re: AWS: Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data – $1.7 billion
#506Earlier quoted context omitted.
You overestimate how much people give shits at big techs like Amazon. When literally everything is driven with sticks instead of carrots, the work culture does not invite employees to proactively care about product quality. You'd be better off letting the heart attacks happen and take the 3am on-call and be the hero instead. It would be good promo doc material, and being a hero is extremely good insurance against get…
Are you speaking from experience or simply making things up? I know a fair number of former AWS engineers and managers. None of them think like this.
"Former" seems to an important detail here.
Re: AWS: Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data – $1.7 billion
#507Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that this might reflect more on Amex to be honest. Amex realises that threatening would hurt their business trust more than anything. During the great depression, Amex accepted checks from other banks which were falling and paying through their own wallet as a matter of integrity. Amex has always been built around this idea of trust and prestige. They make most of money from what I have heard on the transacti…
Interesting. And hard to square with my perception of banks as completely mercenary and ruthless. I had a decade-long personal boycott (I know, LOL) of Amex after they, because, with otherwise perfect credit, I forgot about a $30 department-store card bill and got a 30-day-late mark on my report, Amex got spooked and abruptly closed both my never-late accounts with them (which were at or close to 0 balances). This wa…
Most banks are completely mercenary and ruthless unless its in their incentives to other outcomes. Incentives lead to outcomes and mostly AMEX's incentives are in being the most trustworthy because their real targets are mostly billionaires/heavily influential people.
This does feel a bit silly for amex to do from what I've heard. Probably 2008 were a weird time in general where trust in systems itself were mostly eroded, whether of people to banking institutions and also vice versa.
> (I eventually admitted to myself that Amex isn't a person and thus not really capable of insulting my honor, but it took a while!)
haha :-)
Re: AWS: Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data – $1.7 billion
#508Ive dealt with this error at AWS. It’s a unit error. In my case we _meant_ to charge like 5¢/GB, but missed the unit (GB), and then the billing system defaults to bytes. 5¢ per Byte of data transferred meant some customers were seeing MM bills within hours. Got paged by support around 2am, had it fixed and amendments issues by 3-4am, apology emails shortly after. Services emit metering values that arent directly tied…
Had it been half a million dollars or something or say like a few hundred dollars?
Re: AWS: Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data – $1.7 billion
#509Re: AWS: Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data – $1.7 billion
#510Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow: In this role you will: - Design and build agentic AI systems that analyze, generate, and validate... - Build agentic architectures that compose specialized AI agents dynamically... - Build AI-driven continuous validation frameworks powered by agentic workflows and large language models that autonomously manage... This is invoicing? If ever there was a domain that was purely deterministic, you'd hope it was invoi…
I’m not so sure about that. I can see a real rationale for creating sanity checks using AI to more quickly/proactively catch pathological billing issues before they become HN nightmare stories. They wouldn’t replace billing code, but there are many ways that stupid customer mistakes can cause real costs to Amazon that either have to be refunded and absorbed by Amazon or paid by the customer causing a negative opinion…
> I can see a real rationale for creating sanity checks using AI to more quickly/proactively catch pathological billing issues before they become HN nightmare stories
Right, so invoicing is still a deterministic problem. You can bolt whatever on but in the end it's just product x price x units