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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?

#61

Post by deadmik3 »

nadams wrote: post #54
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…

> You may not sell, license, rent, or otherwise transfer Promotional Credit. Promotional Credit may be applied only to your AWS account, and may not be applied to any other account.

Seems pretty clear to me...

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

#62

Post by eudoxus »

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #17
[deleted] wrote: post #9

[deleted]

With 8,000$ worth of AWS credit, you would probably get a few cents worth of Bitcoin. Mining with computers or GPUs has stopped to be in any way profitable years ago.

You can certainly mine various altcoins that are still GPU mining based and see some return on it for 8K. Although AWS GPUs aren't that good at mining in general.

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

#63

Post by wernercd »

deadmik3 wrote: post #61
nadams wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> You may not sell, license, rent, or otherwise transfer Promotional Credit. Promotional Credit may be applied only to your AWS account, and may not be applied to any other account. Seems pretty clear to me...

> You may not sell, license, rent

He's giving it away, no money changing hands.

> or otherwise transfer Promotional credit

Is what he has "promotional" credit? He says he has credit... is there a difference? If there is, then that quote doesn't apply. If they are the same thing, and it's used on his account?

If there is no "sale" or "transfer", then yes... it is clear: He's fine to use it as he wishes.

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

#64

Post by deadmik3 »

wernercd wrote: post #63
deadmik3 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You may not sell, license, rent, or otherwise transfer Promotional Credit. Promotional Credit may be applied only to your AWS account, and may not be applied to any other account. Seems pretty clear to me...

> You may not sell, license, rent He's giving it away, no money changing hands. > or otherwise transfer Promotional credit Is what he has "promotional" credit? He says he has credit... is there a difference? If there is, then that quote doesn't apply. If they are the same thing, and it's used on his account? If there is no "sale" or "transfer", then yes... it is clear: He's fine to use it as he wishes.

Yes, if he bought $8,000 in AWS credits then he can use it as he wants, but I doubt this kind soul is trying to just throw out $8k.

This is very very likely promotional credit. They hand it out like candy.

Edit: Okay, I can see that if his approach is to use it on his own account, but for someone else's purposes, then it's probably fine. I don't think they even have any system to transfer AWS credits

Edit2: Then again I would be wary of publicly announcing that I'm actively trying to use my AWS credits for other people even though I'm not technically "transferring" them...

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

#65

Post by pc86 »

deadmik3 wrote: post #61
nadams wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> You may not sell, license, rent, or otherwise transfer Promotional Credit. Promotional Credit may be applied only to your AWS account, and may not be applied to any other account. Seems pretty clear to me...

If he does the computations and simply gives the results as a donation is that transferring?

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

#66

Post by yitchelle »

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…

If the credits ended up being donated to a non-profit org, and Amazon can't overlook it, then Amazon is just being a prick about it. Hopefully, I am jumping the gun a bit here..

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

#67

Post by stevebmark »

I just joined AWS to move some domains over from another host, specifically one site I'm trying to turn into a startup. I set up RDS thinking that "pay what you use" would mean I would have no bill since the site has no traffic yet. Turns out spinning up an idle "production" RDS instance costs $800/mo which I just found out when receiving my first month's bill. I emailed support but no answer yet. I still plan to use AWS and offsetting this bullshit with credits would be nice.

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

#68

Post by jkot »

I would probably try to use it for some publicity. Prove if NSA can do some stuff, like breaking SSL certificate.

Or you could recover perhaps 30% of your money by mining coins using spot instances.

Other option is to donate CPU time to Folding@Home (cancer research) or other similar project.

And finally my open-source project could use some stress testing :-). I have concurrent database engine. One of the way to catch concurrency issues, is to randomly insert delays around code, and hope it will trigger some rare race condition. I think single run will take a few years of CPU time :-)

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

#69

Post by nohat »

I'm doing text (both word and character) models based on Karpathy's char-rnn using Amazon's gpu instances. It's not very expensive, but I would like to do hyperparameter optimization which takes a lot more computing power. Specifically I'm trying to see if it can be useful for auto-completion or sentence rephrasing.

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

#70

Post by michaelkoz »

We run the largest independent app store in Canada and are fiercely committed to being indie. We store all of our images, icons and Android OBB files on Amazon S3 and sometimes our bills get totally unmanageable.

Having a least a portion of this credit would give us room to maneuver so we can polish up our Android and Blackberry 10 apps and with the money we save it would allow us to scale, rather than just get by.

you can check out our app store http://apps.goodereader.com

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