
Ask HN: $8k on AWS in August for you, any interesting computations? - adhambadr
for reasons too long to write here I have around $8k of credit on AWS from my last failed venture that will expire end of this august. Id hate to let those credits go in thin air and I don&#x27;t have the time to build the stuff I imagined myself building to use them, so I thought Id give it to the HN community if they come up with a really cool &#x27;demanding&#x27; computational task to use this kind of server power.<p>Comment on how you&#x27;d like to use it and if you impress us they&#x27;re yours.<p>p.s id be super happy if somehow the computational power is used to build&#x2F;crawl some kind of data that would directly&#x2F;indirectly help anyone for free. Second to that would be if hackers in the comments come up with an idea and do it together.
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simonebrunozzi
Give it to Watsi, a non-profit that is making extensive use of AWS. It would
probably equate to donating the entire sum to them.

~~~
philip1209
Bayes Impact is another YC nonprofit that may be interested!

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katharas
I am doing my thesis (in the general area of video classification) as an
electrical engineer in a Greek University and I am currently running some
experiments that try to learn a video representation from local features
(kernel codebook encoding) using an SVM variant and stochastic gradient
descent.

I could use a couple of c4.8xlarge instances to run the experiments trying out
learning parameters. I am currently "competing" for time in the lab's cluster
so I end up running the experiments in whatever computer I find available.

Anyway, thanks for the opportunity, it is really generous of you.

~~~
plicense
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.

~~~
katharas
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.

~~~
cheald
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.

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firloop
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/](https://aws.amazon.com/awscredits/)

~~~
nadams
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.

~~~
deadmik3
> 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...

~~~
wernercd
> 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.

~~~
deadmik3
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...

~~~
adhambadr
-yup its a promotional credit (started at 10k), i didnt really buy it -nope I can't transfer it -yes my approach was simply to give the person/people access to my account -Its my fucking server and I can run whatever script I see fit .. but ok realistically maybe its not the best idea to give it to a commercial startup/project that has a legal entity to be sued. but I don't think its really that big of a deal to run some crawlers

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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](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.

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the_economist
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 for, profiting billions) :)

~~~
ranman
(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.

~~~
kretor
Not spending the credits is like giving them back to Amazon

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j0hnb
I donate to
[http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/](http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/) when
possible. Right now I'm donating my monthly $100 MSDN Azure credit. I would do
more through AWS but I don't have the budget to do so at the moment.

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joshstrange
You could spin up a large number of ArchiveTeam warrior images

~~~
pjungwir
Are they a 501(c)(3)? If the OP's marginal combined tax rate is, say 50%, then
donating $8k in credits would be like $4k in their pocket.

EDIT: Of course OP should talk to an accountant first. . . .

~~~
JoshTriplett
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.

~~~
sirsar
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

~~~
JoshTriplett
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.

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smt88
If someone wants you to do webscraping, even for a good cause, I wouldn't
waste my time if I were you. Most AWS IPs have been long-since blacklisted by
the most interesting sites (e.g. craigslist).

~~~
adhambadr
TOR ?

------
jacek
I work on deep learning methods to analyze electronic medical records.
Institution I work for (high ranking university in the US) has some outdated
GPUs I can use to crunch some numbers, but I cannot use really use them to
experiment to learn new things or use them for my own projects. $50-100 credit
would help me a lot to rent a GPU instance for many hours and learn a few new
tricks. I could start with applying Convolutional Neural Nets to play with
this: [https://www.kaggle.com/c/grasp-and-lift-eeg-
detection](https://www.kaggle.com/c/grasp-and-lift-eeg-detection) .

------
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](https://github.com/cinquemb/hackedteam-email-index-mining)

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

------
jdimov9
That's very generous.

Not sure if this matches your criteria, but I've been wanting to run some
extensive benchmark tests on the most multi-core EC2 instance that I can get
for this Elixir project:
[https://github.com/a115/exmatrix](https://github.com/a115/exmatrix)

I probably don't need more than a couple of days of uptime to complete this,
and the results will of course be made public, with proper credit for your
support. jdimov at a115 co uk

------
madchops1
You are so aweosome for doing this. I built GoReturnMe.com single handedly
with my own php framework Tatanka. It needs an update but we could use some
credit :) I love building bands/musicians/artists websites. And I host them at
no charge on AWS, credit would help there :) I also an an engineer for label
insight.com :) we could use some credit too.

Bands/Artists: [http://www.deathbyicon.com](http://www.deathbyicon.com)
[http://www.deannadevore.com](http://www.deannadevore.com)
[http://www.theivorysband.com](http://www.theivorysband.com)

GoReturnMe: [http://www.goreturnme.com](http://www.goreturnme.com)
LabelInsight: [http://www.labelinsight.com](http://www.labelinsight.com)

You're awesome!

------
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](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/](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!

------
autotune
How about building an Einstein@Home lab with some of those credits? Help
discover some neutron stars.

~~~
Debogue
Or Folding at Home for protein folding

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

~~~
sp332
Wow, 20,000 GPU cores for 20+ days wouldn't help much?

~~~
cing
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](http://fah-
web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=osstats2)

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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.

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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](http://apps.goodereader.com)

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mahouse
I can send you some WPA handshakes for you to decrypt them. ;P

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botw
Immediate idea is that scraping current complete product listing from amazon,
ebay, alibaba and saving into database for public use. I am not sure one month
is enough or those sites have anti-robots policy.

Another is crawling and indexing the internet to make another privacy-
respected or specialized search engine(how to continue the effect one month
later is an issue).

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kauffj
If you're a FOI supporter, I'm one of the founders of
[http://lbry.io](http://lbry.io) a startup launching this month that could
absolutely put those to good use. We're creating a fully decentralized market
for information, with an emphasis on consumer-friendly names.

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adhambadr
op here: to clear up I can't really 'donate' or transfer 8k or any amount to
your account. I will just give you ssh access to the machine(s) you need. The
8k will also be gone if we don't use them before end of august, so whatever it
is you wanna build it needs to be written and executed before that date

~~~
wyldfire
Do you plan to follow up when you've made a decision?

~~~
adhambadr
op: i planned to, but up till now everyone is either telling me to donate the
transfer to an ongoing project (ignoring the fact they only get to use it in
August) or stuff people want 'to start' building or want me to start doing.
Still no solid lucrative suggestions, do you have a favourite suggestion here
?

~~~
wyldfire
yeah, my favorite's the "fuzz testing python" one. Mine. ;)

It's ready to rock and roll right this minute.

security FTW.

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justizin
Can you spend the credits on reserved instances? If so, they shouldn't have to
be used by end of august.

~~~
mikebabineau
In general, no:

[https://aws.amazon.com/awscredits/](https://aws.amazon.com/awscredits/)
(Section 1.1)

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

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

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DanielTrustLeaf
Step 1: I would use a chunk of it for Alexa web services and ranking very
large lists of small business and non-profit org URL's from open data sets,
and use it to identify sites whose traffic far exceeds their reasonably
predicted popularity. Step 2: ____ Step 3: Profit

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pmiller2
I'd use it to make progress on some unsolved conjecture in graph theory (for
science!). I don't have a specific one in mind right this second, but there
are certainly a few where massive computer searches can help.

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globalhealthmd
I am working on a project to mathematically model the elimination of
tuberculosis in California. We will need extensive use of AWS... would really
appreciate any donation of time.

-Alex alexgoodell@gmail.com

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geyang
I am working on a real-time collaborative notebook for code and mathematics.
We are trying to upgrade to a small ec2 from a micro tier. Some AWS credit
would be helpful for us to try this out!

www.escherpad.com

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noreasonw
I should like to learn to use AWS without risking being overcharged (a guy
went from 200$ to 50000$ next month). You could make a web like try AWS
anonymously without risk.

But that is a risky endeavor.

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wyldfire
I've been fuzz testing python modules on some whimpy local computers, I'd love
to give AWS a try!

I hope to find security problems w/CPython which would likely help the world
at large.

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dimino
Is it just me or has this post been made before here on HN?

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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 :-)

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crb002
Contact any computational chemist. They will use that overnight. Make sure to
get documentation for a tax write off.

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agnes49
Amazon and other vendors must not drop fixed pricing and availability for AWS.
Unpredictable pricing or resource availability will be a major barrier to
cloud computing adoption by enterprises.
[http://www.besanttechnologies.com/training-courses/web-
desig...](http://www.besanttechnologies.com/training-courses/web-designing-
training)

------
metral
how about donating it to some sort of intern/mentorship program? i have a
friend attempting to start one with gov't support and is in the trial'ing
phase of it now at his company. he may find it useful. I could put you two in
contact

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wc-
If you are into baseball and advanced sabermetric stats, there's a bunch of
c3.8XL and g2.8XL instances out there cranking through data to train various
neural networks. The results can't be published to the public but I'd be happy
to add you to the distribution list of results and future projections.

~~~
icelancer
Hmm? First I've heard of it, and I work in professional baseball and have been
active in the SABR community. Can you add me? mike.anon@hotmail.com

~~~
wc-
Unfortunately it's been caught up in the classic proprietary closed-source vs
public source political debates... Pretty much zero chance anything we do gets
added to the public domain.

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api
Ethereum GPU mining?

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sbhavnani
I would use it to find 1,000,000,000 digits of Tau.

------
gargarplex
Donate them to a cracking team at DefCon

------
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.

