HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

historynops

754 karma · joined August 27, 2021

submissionscomments
historynops··on Ancient Statues Emerge from the Egypt's Coast, Where They'd Been for 1000 Years
We’re uncovering a past lost to climate and geology, even as we confront similar challenges today
historynops··on Brother's Home: Korea's Auschwitz
And speculated as inspiration for the track suits of Squid Games
historynops··on OpenTofu may be showing us the wrong way to fork
My question is, how do Env0, Spacelift, and other Terraform automation and collaboration tool vendors make money if they make OpenTofu so good that it's preferred for 95% of folks out there? Do they fight over the support money scraps?
historynops··on Cloudflare R2 IA storage tier
A fairly unrelated point, but its so strange how companies that underpin a lot of the internet struggle in the stock market. While we all wish we had sold our tech stocks in 2021, Cloudflare still hasn't recovered.
historynops··on How We Use Terraform At Slack
A lot of the things they've built on and will maintain through (I imagine) many engineering hours, are already features in Terraform Cloud. The implementations in TFC are better than the competitors as well.
historynops··on Implementing a Zero Trust Architecture
The problem with "implementing a zero trust architecture" is that it's framing an ongoing process as an end state. You'll see the same disappointment that people saw when they decided "we're going to do DevOps".

I thought that "Shift Left" was going to be the new DevOps buzzword for security groups, but I liked that because it implied an ongoing process, not a "we're going to become perfect and fix this once and for all".

Google's BeyondCorp - the precursor to zero trust architecture - said you need to secure three things: users, devices, and application policies. Your security teams are probably already aware of many of good tools available to secure the users and apps, but the device security piece has very weak tooling even today. You may have heard of MDM software. No one wants to use it.

historynops··on “Who Should Write the Terraform?”
Thank you for the plug. Surprised such an open commercial promotion got top comment.
historynops··on James Webb first images – complete set of high resolution shots now live
A lot of the pictures have some bright stars with 6 long lens flare like points coming out of them in a consistent pattern. Is that because of the hexagonal shape of JWT's lenses/mirrors?
historynops··on Ask HN: Is SEO still a thing in 2022?
I agree on the agency advice. If you're in a very technical topic space, they can't be relied on to write good content for you.
historynops··on About 200 years ago, the world started getting rich. Why?
"The simplest answer is that economic growth occurred only after the rate of technological innovation became highly sustained. Without sustained technological innovation, any one-off economic improvement will not lead to sustained growth."

I'm also thinking about the future here and even with a deceleration of innovation, as long as more countries start declining in birth rate, it still means better standard of living for the rest of us. Population growth can drive an economy, but it also eats up the money flowing out to people.

Of course there's also the very-unequitable distribution of wealth in societies to consider too.

historynops··on How our free plan stays free
There's also HashiCorp Boundary, which deviates from the traditional VPN or jump box based approaches such as a VPC. https://www.boundaryproject.io/
historynops··on China has a fateful choice to make
It doesn't seem like a fateful choice, unless they think Russia might go nuclear (bad for everyone). Assuming they don't, Russia just becomes more economically dependent on them and they have a new vassal state. When two superpowers become so economically dependent on them, they can pretty much do what they want.
historynops··on Attacks exploiting the Log4j vuln haven’t been as bad as initially feared
I've probably heard 5-6 different opinions in my org as to why this wasn't as prevalent.
historynops··on “Open source” is broken
"everyone rushes to support a project the moment it hits the news, that's not sustainable."

This is exactly how a lot of things function, especially in government and disasters. So apparently it is sustainable. It's just not ideal, but this element is always going to be a part of human nature as our collective consciousness can only focus on fixing a few things at a time.

historynops··on Researchers are hoping to “hear” dark matter using a super-cooled experiment
We've been trying to detect dark matter for so long now I wonder if we're just thinking about it in the wrong way.
historynops··on A pitch deck that is music to the ears
A great book about the prodigiousness of Max Martin and other Swedish producers: "The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory". Lots of industry tales about artist who did and didn't take the advice of their producers. Kelly Clarkson, for example, stopped taking Max Martin's advice after her breakout album and slowly declined with fewer recognizable hits.

The theme: Hits can't be planned or predicted. It's a numbers game where you keep trying to make a large number of them and eventually something breaks through.

historynops··on Cloudflare Uses HashiCorp Nomad (2020)
Cloudflare also did a talk on this: https://www.hashicorp.com/resources/how-nomad-and-consul-are...
historynops··on Nomad vs. Kubernetes
Kubernetes native secrets management is not very good, so you're going to end up using Vault either way.
historynops··on Explaining explaining: a quick guide on explanatory writing
> What will get you ahead is, instead, the ability to be convincing. That is, to pry people loose from their existing beliefs, and nudge them to adopt beliefs of your choosing. This, perhaps surprisingly, does not involve explaining your beliefs and hoping other people see the error of their ways. People don’t work like that.

Can you give an example of writing that does this? Is it more about making declarations (with sources I hope) to nudge the reader to your beliefs? I'm not sure how you convince intelligent people without some explanations.

historynops··on Explaining explaining: a quick guide on explanatory writing
100% the right takeaway. Even if it's just a couple of sentences of encapsulating "what I'm going to talk about", that should always come before starting into a long backstory.

I read a lot of blogs that make that mistake of starting off a post by droning on for paragraphs about the background, history, or context they want to set for the blog — but I need to know why I'm here in the first place. The title got my attention, but it still doesn't totally tell me what I'll get out of this.

A 'history of a problem' section also has to try and be concise and use really engaging language (it's hard) otherwise those background intros can feel like a chore to read and people will leave.

historynops··on Explaining explaining: a quick guide on explanatory writing
The advice is obvious to people who do a lot of blogging, but there's always someone learning who needs a resource like this to help them build their foundation.
historynops··on AI that reads and explains complex code naturally, like a human
Full disclosure I haven't tried this yet, but just looking at the homepage I can see that this is perhaps the more likely and better solution to be adopted widely by the programming world to help close the skills gap.

How do we accelerate learning and more fresh developers to meet demand? A tool like this could be a big part of that answer.

One problem I encountered when I enrolled in an online programming bootcamp was a mentorship gap — We had a mentor but they weren't always available and after the 3 months of camp was over, it was up to you to just find people on a forum who may help you (likely won't, or won't know how). A tool like this (if they become advanced and very understandable) could help you out 24/7.

While a cottage industry of "low-code" "no-code" vendors tries to abstract away a lot of development, I think a tool like Denigma is better in the long run. Low-code will always be limited by its abstractions and constraints (and how its users often won't be nurtured to grow and learn to dig in beneath those abstractions).

AI itself being the programmer is also a long way off and I don't see it getting over the creativity humps it would need to drastically reduce the need for human programmers.

historynops··on The Senate passed a bill to keep the government funded through early December
Seems like they just want to change the timing of their inevitable-yet-temporary government shutdown, maybe at the request of their corporate donors?
historynops··on How Big Tech Runs Tech Projects and the Curious Absence of Scrum
Is anyone else super-skeptical of SAFe? I've always heard it touted in some enterprise circles but I'm not sure I've heard much about it spreading and gaining popularity? Sounded like it was potentially just a consulting grift.
historynops··on Apple champions fighting climate change yet lobbies against its legislation
As an addendum, the only powerful force outside of laws for moving a company's position, is its own high-value employees. It's not boycotts, but sometimes its enough employees internally who can get a company to change its ways, but often the execs or some groups will try to band-aid grievances or create illusory changes to try and calm the uproar but still keep doing what they want secretly.
historynops··on Apple champions fighting climate change yet lobbies against its legislation
I don't think you're being too cynical at all. People need to stop believing the myth that "the market" (aka ordinary customers) will solve the problem by just boycotting companies into submission. I can't think of any instances where this actually happened or the threat actually had any meaningful impact on companies that they didn't internally want to enact already.
historynops··on Has Fusion Had Its “Wright Brothers” Moment?
Been waiting for fusion power plants since I built them in Sim City 2000. Maybe they'll be here by 2050 like the game predicted: https://sonatano1.wordpress.com/2014/08/20/retrospective-sim...