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dmlittle

600 karma · joined November 16, 2014

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dmlittle··on Ask HN: Has anybody shipped a web app at scale with 1 DB per account?
I'm not sure if they were using it at the time Keith gave his presentation but today Slack is using Vitess[1] to handle MySQL clustering. There are a few KubeCon talks about it you're more interested in it. If I remember correctly they're on the tail-end of the Vitess migration and should finish sometime this year.

[1] https://vitess.io/

dmlittle··on Ask HN: Who regrets choosing Elixir?
Elixir and Go both have similar performance (although Elixir tends to use a lot more CPU). Here's a pretty good blog post comparing Go, Node and Elixir: https://stressgrid.com/blog/benchmarking_go_vs_node_vs_elixi...
dmlittle··on Ask HN: Who regrets choosing Elixir?
I think within the rails community there's enough people that want to give elixir and phoenix a try but if you're not using phoenix the application pool drastically shrinks.
dmlittle··on Ask HN: Who regrets choosing Elixir?
An extra point is that finding Elixir developers (or people who are willing to learn it) is also much harder.
dmlittle··on Ask HN: In Microservices, How updates/upgrades of software tools are handled?
> Which means they rapidly update to newer versions and/or change their design completely with breaking changes.

Do you have any examples? Most tools should provide a transition path that should ideally be painless but provide thorough documentation on how to upgrade when major changes do occur (which shouldn't be often). If you're seeing constant change you're probably using tools that aren't stable yet.

dmlittle··on Some views on having your system timezone set to UTC
A lot of systems let you choose what timezone you want to use in their UI and you can choose to use your local timezone or UTC. We log everything in UTC but I can still filter or even display logs with my local timezone without any issues or major complications.
dmlittle··on Some views on having your system timezone set to UTC
Not sure about all different databases but Postgres, for example, always stores datetimes in UTC and converts them back to a display timezone when outputting the values[0].

> For timestamp with time zone, the internally stored value is always in UTC (Universal Coordinated Time, traditionally known as Greenwich Mean Time, GMT). An input value that has an explicit time zone specified is converted to UTC using the appropriate offset for that time zone.

[0] https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/datatype-datetime.ht...

dmlittle··on Stack Overflow reduces global workforce by approximately 15%
This blog post illustrates the nuances of changes at the scale of StackOverflow (really all of StackExchange) https://nickcraver.com/blog/2017/05/22/https-on-stack-overfl...
dmlittle··on Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
If you have a small hobby project you could use AWS Lightsail[0] which has starting prices of $3.50/mo

https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/pricing/?opdp1=pricing

dmlittle··on Apple Mac Pro Wheels Kit
No locks. https://twitter.com/MKBHD/status/1232708514625310721
dmlittle··on Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls
It takes courage to remove the touchscreen.
dmlittle··on Show HN: Japan's mask culture saves lives. The West needs to adopt mask culture
> wearing a mask is not a 100% protection against getting infected

Most things are never 100% safe. Wearing a seatbelt does not guarantee you won't be injured in case of an accident, it's still something everyone recognizes it's a good thing to wear. I wonder what the tipping point is in terms of something being silly to do vs. it makes sense to do it for the general public. I would guess that social stigma plays a big role in it.

dmlittle··on Erlang or Java (Reactor)
The answer will probably depend from person to person. In the end choose whichever _you (and your team)_ feels more comfortable with.
dmlittle··on Markdown is an excellent choice for documentation
Do you have any examples where MDX is better than regular Markdown? I don't think I like the idea of needing a JS engine + browser to read documentation.
dmlittle··on Show HN: Soap Dispenser that ensures the CDC 20sec of hand washing
I think the stamp will encourage the wrong behavior of scrubbing the spot where you got stamped.

My understanding is that it's not that you need to wash your hands for at least 20 seconds and you're good to go but rather that if you're truly washing your hands thoroughly it will take you at least 20 seconds to do. Most of the time people don't fully wash their hands but just their palms, there's also your thumbs, behind of your hand, in between fingers, etc. There are few videos floating around showcasing how to properly wash your hands with gloves and paint. Here's a one I found on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbX0xwKORjk

dmlittle··on Show HN: A Better redis-cli
Nice work! I have a similar "better" redis-cli that I unfortunately never cleaned up enough to release but the two features that I built this tool for you have also added: 1) the ability to connect via TLS to a Redis instance and 2) the ability to add aliases (or DSN in your case) for easy accessibility.

On the topic of TLS connections, taking a super quick glance at the source code [1] and the documentation it looks like you've added support for this but I couldn't get it to work. I think it's failing silently and defaulting to 127.0.0.1. I tried using `--url` and dsn_alias in an `iredisrc` file. Unfortunately you don't have a flag to toggle TLS so you can't connect using TLS using only individual flags (`-a`, `-h`, etc.)

[1] https://github.com/laixintao/iredis/blob/e0c690186c7e1875dee...

dmlittle··on Ask HN: I have an idea for a SaaS and need opinions
I think what amirathi is saying is why would someone use your SaaS vs using AWS. Using AWS on it's own is painful so I get your value prop but there are also some solution in this space already such as Serverless[1] or Apex[2] that make this process very easy. I don't think it's necessarily a bad idea and the fact that there are products out there shows there is a business for it. There is some competition and pricing is going to be tough (since Serverless is free)

[1] https://serverless.com/

[2] https://apex.run/

dmlittle··on Apple Weighs Letting Users Switch Default iPhone Apps to Rivals
How is it broken? (Legitimate question, I haven’t had any issues with it)
dmlittle··on Stripe refunds: fees from the original charge are not returned
For the curious here's the link without the period at the end for convenience https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8583
dmlittle··on Show HN: API for Sending Handwritten Letters
Nice!

The one thing that I didn't expect was to pay more per card in the bundled plan than the per-piece cost in that plan. The math still checks out so you're not leaving money in the table by having someone stay on a lower plan.

dmlittle··on Show HN: A open source Heroku-like PaaS that runs on your server
Convox does not manage the underlying Kubernetes cluster. If you're using EKS it's managed by AWS, GKE by GCP, AKS by Azure, etc. If you're using a self-hosted cluster, then it's up to you to manage it. The Convox platform runs as Kubernetes CRDS so it is cloud agnostic.
dmlittle··on Show HN: A open source Heroku-like PaaS that runs on your server
Correct, both the Convox ECS rack and Empire are AWS exclusive. Convox has a public-beta of their rack running on Kubernetes which is cloud agnostic as it only needs a Kubernetes cluster to operate in.
dmlittle··on Show HN: A open source Heroku-like PaaS that runs on your server
People at Convox[1] and Remind101 are doing similar open-source work.

Convox's business model is selling you the managed version of their open source rack. We've been using Convox in production for over 3 years now and we've had pretty good success with it. It's not perfect but the UX improvement for developers when building docker images, promoting new builds or rolling back cannot be understated.

Remind101 has built Empire[2] which is not a product they actually sell but rather the tool they use internally and have decided to open-source it. Empire is a little less managed and while it allows you to run services on it it requires you to have your own solution for building and hosting docker images.

[1] https://convox.com/, https://github.com/convox/rack

[2] https://github.com/remind101/empire

dmlittle··on Ask HN: Good forum where indie developer post about ongoing (non-game) projects
Checkout IndieHackers (https://www.indiehackers.com/); a lot of people are trying to make viable businesses and post regular updates but there are a lot of side projects too[1].

[1] https://www.indiehackers.com/products?commitment=side-projec...

dmlittle··on Show HN: I Built a SasS Using Vapor and Puppeteer
I think what mc3 was talking about is some SaaS companies advertising their products as $X/mo when in reality the monthly pricing is more than that and $X is the cost iff you commit to an annual plan.

For example you might see pricing for $100/mo but that is only if you commit to 12 months ahead of time. Otherwise you'll pay $120/mo with no annual commitment.

dmlittle··on iOS First Impressions (2018)
I had forgotten about that! While this is true, I find it a lot more difficult than the new mechanic since it's a lot slower.
dmlittle··on iOS First Impressions (2018)
Some things are arguably better[1]. If you have an iPhone without a home button you can swipe left on the bottom of the screen to switch between your apps (or back right if you passed it) without having to open the app deck (not sure what the name is, previously you would double tap the home button).

[1] Yes, this is my opinion and not everyone might agree with me.

dmlittle··on Ask HN: How do you manage logs for your backend services?
I just checked and we've got roughly half of the number you came up with (~11B). We store logs for 30 days instead of 7 which does increase the price.

Also it's worth noting that not all of the logs are necessarily our application logs but could also be audit logs of third party services we use (Okta, GSuite, AWS, etc.) to detect anomalies or potential breach attempts. We have a pretty comprehensive alerting pipeline based on our logs so we're unfortunately unable to pay that much for logging. I understand that this doesn't apply to everyone but we're able to run a self-hosted logging pipeline for a fraction of that cost without a dedicated team running it (the Infrastructure team, the team I'm on, currently maintains this pipeline along our other responsibilities).

dmlittle··on Ask HN: How do you manage logs for your backend services?
Both AWS re:Invent and KubeCon had Datadog booths
dmlittle··on Ask HN: How do you manage logs for your backend services?
From what I've seen at demo booths in conferences, Datadog's logging is impressive but also incredibly expensive. At the rate that we produce logs we'd be paying over $30k/mo. They claim that we can use log rehydration and not ingest all logs but then we can't really have alerts on them so what's the point in having them. Yes, I understand that you can look at the logs when things are going wrong but you can also know _from_ the logs when things are going wrong.
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