Hacker News Reader

Pirate-of-SVon British Columbia is permanently adopting daylight time

What is your latitude, longitude, current time zone?

Pirate-of-SVon Swedish union declares strike for Tesla employees

120 auto mechanics employed in the 9 Tesla service centers are affected.

Pirate-of-SVon Scientists Reconstructed a Pink Floyd Song from Brain Activity

It's because you're using Cloudflare DNS (1.1.1.1) which Internet Archive return an incorrect IP for. There's a bazillion threads about this on HN for more detail

Pirate-of-SVon The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Sequence Diagrams in MermaidJS

Github Markdown supports Mermaid OOTB, really useful.

Pirate-of-SVon So this guy is now S3. All of S3

Any domain on the public suffix list should just be ignored I suppose. https://publicsuffix.org/list/

Pirate-of-SVon Haskell in Production: Standard Chartered

Writing parsers and tokenizers probably.

Pirate-of-SVon Extremely Linear Git History

Very good! I use this hack every day in winter to heat my apartment (charging laptop at work, run git brute force at home).

Pirate-of-SVon Kubernetes Cordon: How It Works and When to Use It

If only one node is being drained then yes.

If you want to drain 3 nodes as fast as possible it's best to start by cordoning all 3 of them and after that run drain on each respectively. This will cause minimal unnecessary interruption of pods. What we want to avoid is that new pods start on nodes that we soon want to remove/drain.

Pirate-of-SVon The State of AWS Security

Ah yeah for IAM the defaults seem sane, true! The things that I've come across recently is that encryption at rest is usually disabled ( EBS, SQS, S3, SNS, Kinesis, Cloudwatch log groups, Cloudtrail). Some of these have server side encryption and then it's easy to just check that box, other require you to set up KMS keys etc.

Audit logs are in many cases disabled by default (RDS, S3, OpenSearch, ELB).

S3 does not require TLS requests by default. ECR does not have image scanning enabled by default.

Also new accounts almost all regions enabled and a default VPC in each (and subnets, route tables, security groups, internet gateway, dhcp option set). Unused VPCs are not recommended to keep around but I suppose it makes onboarding easier.

Pirate-of-SVon The State of AWS Security

I think it's problematic that most security features (configurable by the user) are switched off by default and require some effort to set up. This is getting better though and for S3 buckets specifically a lot of additional features have showed up lately to "solve" this.

Pirate-of-SVon Asking for help: Please encourage Microsoft to add AAAA records for artefacts

Not only a record, the record needs to point to a ipv6 also. If that is missing it is not as trivial as you make it.

Pirate-of-SVon GCP releases Spot VMs, the next generation of Pre-emptible VMs

Nice, one step closer to AWS. Next up I'd like to see an increase to the 30 second termination notice. 120 seconds would be good enough :)

Pirate-of-SVon Show HN: Ots – share a secret via one-time URL

For the last couple of years my org has been self-hosting Yopass https://github.com/jhaals/yopass. We use it to share secrets (with one time URLs) with each other.

Pirate-of-SVon Anatomy of a Linux DNS Lookup

In Kubernetes you can also add NodeLocal DNSCache [1] as a DaemonSet that injects iptable rules to cache DNS locally to offload the in-cluster coredns.

[1] https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/administer-cluster/nodeloca...

Pirate-of-SVon OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

It's nice that they announce it and that there's some sort of future effort promised. From my perspective we might not upgrade the elastic-stack (with current Elastic projects) too far to not bacome accidentally incompatible in case we want to make a switch.

Pirate-of-SVon Writing a Kubernetes CRD Controller in Rust

HATEOAS I suppose. https://restfulapi.net/hateoas/

Pirate-of-SVon A terminal-based presentation tool with colors and effects

What tool(s) did you use to record the example gifs in the readme?

Pirate-of-SVon Cloudflare Package Repository Mirrors

I ran rankmirrors (from pacman-contrib) on the mirror and the 5 upstream i got on https://cloudflaremirrors.com/archlinux

rankmirrors test the time to download core.db from each mirror. Basically this:

  curl -s -m 1 -w "%{time_total} %{http_code}" -o/dev/null https://cloudflaremirrors.com/archlinux/core/os/x86_64/core.db.tar.gz

The results vary a lot sometimes cloudflare mirrors is the fastest, sometimes it's the slowest. Getting anything between 0.07 and 0.30

  $ rankmirrors -t ./ml
  Querying servers. This may take some time...
     *   *   *   *   *   *
   Servers sorted by time (seconds):
  https://ftp.lysator.liu.se/pub/archlinux/$repo/os/$arch : 0.113249
  https://ftp.acc.umu.se/mirror/archlinux/$repo/os/$arch : 0.120371
  https://mirror.osbeck.com/archlinux/$repo/os/$arch : 0.127601
  https://archlinux.dynamict.se/$repo/os/$arch : 0.180493
  https://ftp.myrveln.se/pub/linux/archlinux/$repo/os/$arch : 0.248406
  https://cloudflaremirrors.com/archlinux/$repo/os/$arch : 0.302824
  
  $ rankmirrors -t ./ml
  Querying servers. This may take some time...
     *   *   *   *   *   *
   Servers sorted by time (seconds):
  https://cloudflaremirrors.com/archlinux/$repo/os/$arch : 0.070069
  https://mirror.osbeck.com/archlinux/$repo/os/$arch : 0.081506
  https://ftp.lysator.liu.se/pub/archlinux/$repo/os/$arch : 0.098763
  https://archlinux.dynamict.se/$repo/os/$arch : 0.125846
  https://ftp.acc.umu.se/mirror/archlinux/$repo/os/$arch : 0.127948
  https://ftp.myrveln.se/pub/linux/archlinux/$repo/os/$arch : 0.136529

Pirate-of-SVon How we use HashiCorp Nomad

I recall that there's been some improvements to CFS to fix this since 2018.

Pirate-of-SVon In-person DEF CON 28 cancelled

This was going to be my first DEF CON to attend in-person. See you next year!

Pirate-of-SVon Ask HN: How would you improve this bash oneliner for deleting tweets?

    jq -c -r '.[] | .id_str'
    # Can be rewritten to
    jq -r '.[].id_str'

    jq -c -r '.[] | .id_str' | head -10 | tail -1
    # Can be rewritten to
    jq -r '.[9].id_str'

Pirate-of-SVon Talk write-up: How to build a PaaS for 1500 engineers

Don't be anxious!

Every company and team operate under different circumstances that might not be in their control. It's a company effort, not only engineering, to get in to a position where using public cloud or buy it of the shelf products is possible.

Having both skilled legal and sales + business colleagues is key but a luxury in these situations.

Pirate-of-SVon Talk write-up: How to build a PaaS for 1500 engineers

We provision database access through Hashicorp Vault. It's excellent, short lived credentials provided by Kubernetes service accounts (lots of glue here!).

After the RDS instance is created we need to manually create credentials so that Vault gains access to control it though, this is our mission to automate soon.

With credentials in place teams need to maintain schema creation and migrations themselves. We provide wrapper scripts go gain access with Vault credentials mysql shell or Perconas pt-inline-schema-change. Some teams create pre-deploy jobs or init-containers so that their service can run migrations automatically.

Pirate-of-SVon Talk write-up: How to build a PaaS for 1500 engineers

Spot on!

Resonates very well with me, working at a scale up in a "platform team".

Business wise we're set to out engineer competition. Biggest challenges are definitely to get engineers on board on training and transitioning into new "cool" technology. Should we help highly skilled advanced teams run fast or focus on getting everyone on board the cloud native train?

Pirate-of-SVon Mirantis acquires Docker Enterprise and Docker raises $35M

Does anyone have a background story of Mirantis? Where's the money coming from?

Pirate-of-SVon Show HN: Instantly pass your passwords securely

It's like yopass[1]?

[1] https://github.com/jhaals/yopass

Pirate-of-SVon Culture Fit Interview Questions

> 1. Why do you want to work for our company?

I don't feel comfortable asking this question. Many of the people I interview are "headhunted" into an interview by an talent acquisition team. Are they even looking for a new job?

Pirate-of-SVon Post-mortem of March 12 Google outage

Nice post-mortem. Being in a smaller engineering org. these write ups feels really premium and something to strive for to provide to our customers when things hit the fan.

Pirate-of-SVon Volvo Promises Uber Fleet of 24,000 Self-Driving Taxis by 2019

The meaning of self in self driving and self checkout is different. They are more or less the exact opposite. In the first case the machine is doing something itself, in the other case you do something yourself.

Pirate-of-SVon Persisting state between AWS EC2 spot instances

To make this even more streamlined you'd tag the volumes and discover the volumes with `aws ec2 describe-volumes` and filter unattached volumes with the magic tag.