Hacker News Reader

erik_landerholmon Science Fiction Books Everyone Should Read

Nothing by Alastair Reynolds?

erik_landerholmon Ask HN: I feel so shallow and dumb when I see what other smart people are doing

I’ve started companies and done some pretty cool technical things, but stuff like wrote a game like that in assembly does the same thing to me, in terms of feeling less than. I don’t find making a game as much of a “higher calling” so it doesn’t bother me in the sense of worthiness, but in terms of technical skill…it’s humbling, but that’s ok.

erik_landerholmon An Engineer's View of Venture Capitalists (2001)

The world is so different now and a lot of that change was spurred on or created directly by YC. super thankful, raising money still sucks, but it really sucked back then.

erik_landerholmon Michelin Airless

https://tractoraddict.com/tractor-tires-filled-with-water/

Beet juice is interesting! lol

erik_landerholmon Gitlab from YC to IPO

While anecdotal, we see a lot of development environments for a lot of companies and the amount using github vs gitlab is like 5 or 6x to 1. So, in that sense I get what the CTO of github is saying.

erik_landerholmon Releasehub.com (YC W20) – Announcing $20M Series A Led by CRV

We are super excited about partnering with CRV to bring Environments as a Service (EaaS) to every development team out there. We have been working super hard to make something useful, that people want. If you have any questions or want to know more about Release hit us up! We are hiring too: engineering, product, marketing, sales, almost everything!

erik_landerholmon Everyone Wants to Be an Influencer

Yeah, no.

erik_landerholmon To H-E-Double-Hockey-Sticks with Facebook

It’s too late IMO. I left that cesspool of Facebook a long time ago. If people haven’t left yet, I don’t know what would convince them.

erik_landerholmon Crazy Conclusions in Early Childhood

I felt the same way. I never buy it when people say they remember anything when they were two. I have 5 kids, one is only 2, but none of the other 4 remember anything from when they were two. I guess people can be different but I have a hard time believing it.

erik_landerholmon ReleaseHub Environments as a Service Gets 2.7M Seed from Sequoia

I’m not an expert in platform.sh, but when looking at this https://docs.platform.sh/languages/ruby.html It looks like platform.sh has to add support for specific kinds of languages and frameworks. Release doesn’t work like that.

Ours is all based on K8s and containers. We use buildx to build just about anything and we then orchestrate the deployment of multiple services into our customers cloud accounts. We have a full Ci/cd platform from build to production to even managing on-prem deployments following our customers business rules. Our goal is to “virtualize” your entire environment to be cloud agnostic over time. We have customers now that have chosen to have their ephemeral environments and production in different cloud providers and that is something we enable.

We have a workflow engine that allows you to run terraform, migrations, tests, anything you can think of as part of your deployments. You can customize the config for every environment from replicas to liveness probes to adjusting memory for every pod, or you can ignore all of that and just deploy away!

Hopefully that helps. Sorry I’m not to knowledgeable on their platform.

erik_landerholmon ReleaseHub Environments as a Service Gets 2.7M Seed from Sequoia

You can use heroku, but as your app grows in complexity, (say static javascript frontend, backend, queue, and maybe a few AWS or GCP native services) you have to stitch something together with heroku + vercel + ?? + can't use RDS, but wish i could. :)

Heroku review apps are analogous to our ephemeral environments, but we can deal with much more complicated environments, which reduces complexity in your CI/CD platform, production deployments or on-premise deployments if needed.

erik_landerholmon ReleaseHub Environments as a Service Gets 2.7M Seed from Sequoia

We used docker-compose as a starting point because we were thinking along the same lines. In order to orchestrate the deployment of a complicated app, docker-compose became a much smaller part of solution; docker-compose is helpful for getting some partial service definitions created, but there is so much more to deploying environments.

We are a full CI/CD platform with the ability to do static javascript builds, build-x builds, installing in our customers clusters, installing in their customers clusters, dealing with routing for ephemeral environments, creating pools of resources for ephemeral environments to attach to, deploying and monitoring production environments, a workflow engine and we are just getting started!

We do run into objections along the way like, "can't a couple of people do this pretty easily", but depending on what you want to do, it grows in complexity quickly. A lot of time teams don't realize that until they are way down the path of trying to create a system like this.

If you have any specific questions about how ReleaseHub works let me know, happy to answer anything!

erik_landerholmon ReleaseHub Environments as a Service Gets 2.7M Seed from Sequoia

Hey, Erik (Co-Founder) from ReleaseHub! We are very excited about announcing our Seed Round led by Sequoia, but even more importantly we are excited about delivering on our mission to free engineering teams from bottlenecks created by the lack of environments.

Everywhere we have worked we have had to build some kind of machine to create environments for our development, marketing, sales teams, QA, you name it. Whenever we would talk to other companies they either built something to deployment environments or were having issues because they couldn't. ReleaseHub is the culmination of the learnings over our careers and we are really excited to share it with the world.

erik_landerholmon How to Destroy the Earth (2006)

Just remove like half the electrons in your body at once. Honestly, that’s probably overkill.

erik_landerholmon Ask HN: Why DevOps is still complicated in 2021?

I wouldn't say Swarm is much easier. You have to caveat 'easier' too. K8s is easier to do complicated things that were basically impossible before. It's the same with everything in software engineering. As we move up the ladder in abstractions, what's possible becomes more complicated, so it doesn't get any easier.

Graphics are good example. As people developed abstractions the ability to make more and more complicated graphics became possible. Now A+ games are more expensive and take longer to make then ever before, but they are also doing things that could of never happened before.

Our company is trying to make K8s much simpler to get into for the avg company, so another abstraction, but specifically done to make it simpler. This all feels very normal to me as someone that started back in the day managing 1000s of blade servers, now it's just containers. Was hard then and is hard now.

erik_landerholmon 90% of Everything Is Crap

I didn't know this was a "law", but i've been triangulating on this same feeling for a long time now. I would say it's 1%-10% of anything is actually good. You can basically apply this to almost any category, but for most things it doesn't really matter. I would guess while no two people would agree if asked to pick their top 5% of any one thing, if you tallied up all the votes and had enough participation, you could probably put together a list that would generally include the best of whatever that category is.

erik_landerholmon We are sending more foster kids to prison than to college

100% agree. I think because it’s hard enough to discern between what I would call first order (dna caused personality traits) and second order (immediate family and early childhood experiences) contributions to personality and what experiences a child had, that most people ignore third order, friends, bad luck, basically everything else. Then, you throw in luck ...I mean who knows why anyone does anything bad or good.

I’m not religious, but the saying often attributed to Christ saying, “forgive them, they know not what they do,” is probably totally, 100% accurate. I would add we don’t really know why they do what they do either. Christians want that to mean specifically about the crucifixion, but I believe whoever wrote that down was trying to say something more general about human experience.

I know from personal experience, just how much which kids you sit next to from 1st-5th grade, as they are often the same in the US, can influence your life in extreme ways.

All this says to me, we should probably go easier on everyone, even the “worst” of us...

erik_landerholmon Show HN: The Agora – an experimental social network

anyone else have no idea what is going on here?

erik_landerholmon BLC1: A candidate signal around Proxima

I don’t think so. I love the idea of aliens and if it is, we will figure it out by eliminating everything else. Seems the best way to approach it to me.

erik_landerholmon Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform

What are you talking about?

erik_landerholmon Elon Musk moves to Texas

Lived there for 4 years, your last couple of sentences made me laugh. People would drop racist statements in conversation as if it was normal, and I guess it was for most people, but not for me, coming for Portland and now living in LA.

erik_landerholmon AirPods Max

I bet you are fun at parties.

erik_landerholmon [dead]

Wow, what a step backwards. How could Macron always speak out against Trump and fascism in general and think this is a good idea?

erik_landerholmon Apple's M1 MacBook Pro scores 7508 multi, 1498 single in Cinebench

tl;dr, sell your intel stock.

erik_landerholmon ‘It’s a superpower’: how walking makes us healthier, happier and brainier (2019)

What’s with the walking vs owning a car? They are in no way mutually exclusive. I walked about three hours yesterday and it was easy (and I own a car too). I download things from YouTube I don’t need to watch and just start walking/hiking.

You will burn anywhere from 75-200 calories/mile walking/hiking. I did like 14 miles yesterday. I will take weight off of you or allow you to eat whatever you want the easiest vs perceived exertion.

Side benefit, the world is strange and people are weird and you get a good dose of that. Saw a ground squirrel running down a trail carrying a severed rabbits head the other day, fun!

erik_landerholmon Roof blows off new Tesla Model Y

The corvette c6 z06 lost a bunch of roofs when it first came out circa 06, like a bunch. Didn’t really hurt the sales or the brand at all.

erik_landerholmon Coinbase offers exit package for employees not comfortable with its mission

Sorry, I probably wasn't clear. Coinbase is saying it is an amoral middleman. In my mind there is no next step. And if you look at the history of money processors, this is the default and probably the only way they ever operate.

erik_landerholmon Coinbase offers exit package for employees not comfortable with its mission

What do you mean next step? You can process anyone’s money, it good for business. Name one money processing entity that’s ever taken a stand against...anything?

erik_landerholmon PG and Jessica

Seriously, you can't google? And what does Paul or Jessica have to do with the 'VC mindset'?

erik_landerholmon PG and Jessica

Paul told me directly back in 2009 that YC had to be in SV and he had a bunch of reasons for it. Whether those reasons are still true today could be debated, but it was clear to him, at least that location mattered. Like most things it's a combination of factors that give the best result.