Hacker News Reader

bfirshon Orchard and Fig are joining Docker

The nice thing about using Docker is that everything is drop-in compatible. You can push your images to a provider such as Tutum or Google Cloud and they'll be able to run. If you've written any software that used the Docker remote API on Orchard, you can just point that are your own Docker daemon and it'll keep on working.

bfirshon Docker container breakout?

For more details: https://docs.docker.com/articles/security/

bfirshon Fig: Fast, isolated development environments using Docker

A few things:

- System configuration is managed for you using Docker (you don't need to figure out how to hook up Puppet/Chef/shell scripts)

- You can aggregate log output from all of your containers

- You can model your application as a collection of services - starting, stopping, scaling them etc

- You can ship exactly the same Docker image you use in development to production

More importantly, all this stuff works out of the box by default. Some of these things are possible with Vagrant, but you need to learn and piece together other tools (Puppet, Foreman, etc) to get it all working.

bfirshon Fig: Fast, isolated development environments using Docker

In essence it's letting you store the options you'd pass to "docker run" in a configuration file as a collection of services. You can then start your whole application using one command instead of starting the individual containers and linking them up.

Services can also be controlled as if they were whole units – you can say "start my database" instead of "start this image with these ports, these volumes, etc".

bfirshon Fast and easy installation of Docker VM on OS X

Yep, just added folder sharing:

https://github.com/noplay/docker-osx/commit/a7470f9f583cfdad...

We're interested in using boot2docker for docker-osx too. Ubuntu is unnecessarily heavyweight for just running Docker.

bfirshon Show HN: Hosted Docker-as-a-Service on SSDs for $5

We're doing a similar thing called Orchard:

https://orchardup.com

We give you a standard Docker instance in the cloud - all the tools work exactly the same as they do locally. You can even instantly open a remote bash shell, like the now-famous Docker demo!

bfirshon Introducing government.github.com

Ah - missed that page. My bad.

bfirshon Introducing government.github.com

Seems pretty US-centric. Governments outside the US are doing great things with open source too. The entire UK government website is open source, for example:

https://github.com/alphagov

bfirshon Javascript apps can be fully crawlable

This is a similar thing, but is far faster because it uses Zombie instead of Phantom: https://github.com/bfirsh/otter

bfirshon Host your Docker containers in the cloud

Nope – not at the moment.

bfirshon We've Open-sourced Rendr

Or Zombie, which is way faster than PhantomJS: https://github.com/bfirsh/otter

bfirshon Ask HN: Tools of the trade, 2013 edition

Here are a few that we use.

Airbrake (http://airbrake.io/) - Exception logging.

Campfire (http://campfirenow.com/) - Chat.

Librato (https://metrics.librato.com/) - Hosted graphing.

Mixpanel (http://mixpanel.com/) - Analytics, people tracking.

Pagerduty (http://www.pagerduty.com/) - Monitoring alerts.

Sendgrid (http://sendgrid.com/) - Sending emails.

Sprintly (https://sprint.ly/) - Project management.

Tarsnap (http://www.tarsnap.com/) - Offsite backups.

As well as all the obvious ones - GitHub, Google Apps, Dropbox, etc.

bfirshon Our take on RethinkDB vs. MongoDB

This just reads like marketing speak. What are the disadvantages of RethinkDB?

bfirshon How Lanyrd moved from AWS to SoftLayer and MySQL to PostgreSQL with no downtime

We're looking for hosting which has both dedicated and virtual servers on the same network. SoftLayer and Rackspace seem to be the two big players who do this. Does anybody have any experience with them both?

bfirshon GOV.UK: new government site built with open source software, £70 million cheaper

(Reposting a comment from yesterday for background)

This is part of a larger government initiative to curb outsourcing of IT projects. Traditionally these sorts of things would be built by large software companies at enormous expense to the taxpayer. Gov.uk has been built by a (relatively) small in-house team, by people who genuinely care about what they are building. They embrace the fact that they are building tools for the good of society rather than just satisfying a contract.

Also as a citizen, I love that I can open a pull request on my government's website ( https://github.com/alphagov/calendars/pull/1 ). We've got the ball rolling in opening up government data on the internet, but this is a great example of how technology can enable citizens to get involved in government.

bfirshon Pull Request: Launch GOV.UK

Here's a list of technology they've used to build gov.uk: http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/govuk-launch-colophon/

bfirshon Pull Request: Launch GOV.UK

For background, this is part of a larger government initiative to curb outsourcing of IT projects. Traditionally these sorts of things would be built by large software companies at enormous expense to the taxpayer.

Gov.uk has been built by a (relatively) small in-house team, by people who genuinely care about what they are building. They embrace the fact that they are building tools for the good of society rather than just satisfying a contract.

Also as a citizen, I love the fact that I can open a pull request on my government's website ( https://github.com/alphagov/calendars/pull/1 ). We've got the ball rolling in opening up government data on the internet, but this is a great example of how technology can enable citizens to get involved in government.

bfirshon Marco Arment on Dropbox: Don't use it for anything valuable

I haven't used either, but http://sparkleshare.org/ and http://owncloud.org/ seem to be the best open source options. I may give them a try soon - I'm getting more and more concerned by Dropbox.

bfirshon The 501 Developer Manifesto

Not everyone who programs loves programming, but everyone needs to make a living. You are lucky that what you love also makes money.

bfirshon Backbone.js Fundamentals

http://spacelog.org

bfirshon Dear Github, please fix the Watch-Button

Facebook have nailed it.

On GitHub, watched projects could show up in your feed by default, but you can hide them if they turn out to be too verbose.

bfirshon Teens Photograph Lego Minifigure at Edge of Space for $400

If you're interested in high altitude exploration, take a look at UKHAS:

http://ukhas.org.uk/

There's a beginner guide and information on current projects. Cambridge University Spaceflight is of particular interest - they're working on amateur rocketry in space, not just near-space.

bfirshon Teens Photograph Lego Minifigure at Edge of Space for $400

Every day hundreds of weather balloons around the world get launched for weather forecasts. There have been reports of sightings by planes, but never any collisions.

Air traffic control are aware of the locations where balloons are launched. In the UK at least, you must notify them before a launch.

bfirshon The Guardian's HTML5 iPad app released

It's a native app for native animations and so on, but all the pages themselves are HTML.

bfirshon A JavaScript NES Emulator

Oops - fixed. Thank you!

bfirshon Developer open-sources 200+ hr project after client refuses to pay

http://www.gyford.com/phil/writing/2006/10/26/a_beginners_gu...

bfirshon What technologies are under your site

Also at http://probe.ep.io/

bfirshon DjangoCon EU 2011 Videos

I wish the lightning talks were split into separate videos so they could be linked to.

bfirshon PDF Reader in JavaScript

I expect PDFs could be rendered client-side with @font-face by using data URIs.

bfirshon SpaceX aims to put man on Mars in 10-20 years

"We're going all the way to Mars, I think..."

Compared to:

"I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth."

Doesn't sound like they have a whole load of confidence.