Hacker News Reader

lukebennetton GitLab Container Registry

Fantastic, Gitlab are absolutely nailing it at the moment. Don't think there's any other hosted service offering so many CI/CD features for free under one roof.

It feels like what Github did for SCM, Gitlab are doing for CI.

lukebennetton The Fourth Facebook Goldrush Just Started

Maybe - though interesting that Twitter just beat them to the NFL rights[0], suggests they have a way to go yet, and a clear fight on their hands.

[0] http://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-beats-facebook-amazon...

lukebennetton Subscription Pricing Is for Stagnating Products

I share the sentiment that there are plenty of products going the subscription route without any meaningful justification. However, one argument the author doesn't account for is the increasing prevalence of apps that involve cloud services - which, even in the case of something lightweight like a sync mechanism, will still incur ongoing costs for existing users indefinitely. This situation does go some way to justifying subscription pricing - though plenty of apps use subscription pricing without any cloud involvement (looking at you Parallels).

That said, one counterpoint to this is that too much software depends on the cloud unnecessarily - in many cases there's no need to use the cloud, what the user wants to do should be perfectly possible locally and therefore the lack of any ongoing expense would remove the need/justification for subscription pricing.

Edit: Here's a perfectly timed example of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11439001

lukebennetton PriceZombie is shutting down

Google Shopping requires vendors to pay for inclusion so it isn't a fair comparison of what's actually available. What makes matters worse is that they don't make that clear so people think it's fairer than it is.

lukebennetton Web Page Performance Death by a Thousand Tiny Cuts

I think that's a bit unfair. He's not saying you are required to commit your own time in order to meet performance requirements; he's just saying that the business needs to take a balanced view on priorities in order to ship. So if you care enough about a deprioritised issue that you can't sleep, and the company is unable or unwilling to change its priorities, feel free to fix it on your own time. Or don't. Your call.

Now if the company demanded certain perf issues be resolved ahead of shipping and didn't provide company time for it, that would be a different matter and I'd agree with you.

lukebennetton The Sign Up with Google Mistake You Can't Fix

3 days to do a bank transfer, ouch, that's a blast from the past. Sounds like you desperately need the Faster Payments system we have in the UK - allows you to transfer money between accounts (at different banks) instantly. Other than collections at church and the occasional business that doesn't take card, I hardly ever use cash these days.

lukebennetton Why We Chose Kubernetes

I'm equally curious to be honest :) It's not something we do ourselves, I just mentioned it given the context of this thread.

lukebennetton Why We Chose Kubernetes

Agreed, we've been trying out Rancher since its early days and we're currently in their beta program, we've really enjoyed using it - hits that sweet spot between power and simplicity. Biggest frustration is the lack of a CLI which is preventing us from being able to proceed to production as we don't want to manually handcrank API calls.

You'll actually be able to use Rancher to manage Kubernetes clusters[0] in the next few weeks, if you want the best of both worlds.

[0] http://rancher.com/introducing-kubernetes-environments-in-ra...

lukebennetton Dotcloud Is Shutting Down on February 29

I take your point, though in fairness many who follow Docker will have noted the sale at the time as it was all over HN etc. Followed not all that long after by the acquisition of Tutum interestingly, getting them right back into the PaaS space again.

lukebennetton ES6 Cheatsheet

Using ES6 here most of the time as well, there's very few reasons not to these days. Some of the changes may only be syntactic sugar but you very quickly find yourself not wanting to go back.

lukebennetton Hugo – Golang static site editor

Useful insight, thanks. Heads up your business website has an invalid link - "Products" is missing a slash and currently points to http://www.optimojoe.comproducts

lukebennetton Ask HN: Which VPN service do you use?

Keep meaning to write a blog post, one day I'll get round to it :)

My setup is based on docker-openvpn[0] which has quite a detailed readme, along with a Digital Ocean community tutorial[1]. My script basically wraps up some of the config and makes the various commands a bit easier to remember.

[0] https://github.com/kylemanna/docker-openvpn

[1] https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-run-...

lukebennetton Ask HN: Which VPN service do you use?

Yep same here actually. Docker certainly helps with the "simple to setup" bit, along with a script I wrote - http://github.com/lukebennett/ovpn

lukebennetton Ask HN: Which VPN service do you use?

Self-hosted OpenVPN server on a cheap VPS in whichever country I want/need it. Simple to setup, full control, and the cost of the VPS is lower than most paid services (and can be used for hosting other stuff too if I want).

lukebennetton Google introduces 'Customer Match' – target web ads to email addresses

Few third parties have the potential to do with your data what Google can - Facebook perhaps being one exception. I'd say this represents a significant step up in terms of data collection. I've certainly never worked with a supplier that could offer anything like Google could.

lukebennetton Google introduces 'Customer Match' – target web ads to email addresses

This is going to require merchants to update their privacy policies, surely. Sharing personally identifiable information with Google (which could be subsequently joined together with data from other merchants to form an even bigger profile about you outside of your control) is entering a whole new (terrible) world.

lukebennetton Alda: A music programming language

I get the thinking behind this, and seems a neat little tool. However, I can't help thinking that the problem the author cites with modern GUIs being too distracting to use is more likely to be solved long term by the likes of StaffPad[0]. This allows you to physically write your notation on a blank digital canvas, meaning the only difference to writing on a blank sheet of physical paper is the tactile contrast of using a stylus rather than a pen/pencil - something that is improving all the time.

[0] http://staffpad.net

lukebennetton Netflix to Shut Down Last Datacenter

Thanks for the heads up on CFG - sounds useful, though it doesn't seem to work for me.

lukebennetton Mattermost: Open-source, on-premises, Slack alternative

Whilst I take your point, worth noting that Slack does offer an IRC gateway to allow for use via an IRC client. Not quite the same thing as basing everything on IRC, but better than nothing?

lukebennetton Js.org Subdomains for GitHub Pages

I think so - ICANN prohibit the creation of 2-letter TLDs. From http://newgtlds.icann.org/en/applicants/customer-service/faq...:

2.12 Can a New gTLD name be 2 letters?

Applied-for gTLD strings in ASCII must be composed of three or more visually distinct characters. Two-character ASCII strings are not permitted, to avoid conflicting with current and future country-codes based on the ISO 3166-1 standard.

lukebennetton Js.org Subdomains for GitHub Pages

I've often thought a .js TLD would be useful but given it would be dependent on a new country being formed and taking that as its ISO country code, I guess it's unlikely.

So perhaps this is the next best thing. Though would be nice to have a bit more transparency about who is behind it.

lukebennetton Phusion Passenger Docker

I realise all this now. So do you - more so than most people as you're intimately familiar with the image.

I'm explaining the impression that it gives, rightly or wrongly, to those not as intimately familiar with it as you; those less familiar with Docker who may read through the README and come away thinking that it's ok to mix roles without appreciating the unwritten use cases you actually had in mind; those newer to Docker who have a Node app and a Ruby app and think "hey, this passenger-full image looks convenient, I'll use that" without appreciating the implications.

> It's even better than that: Redis and Memcached aren't even INSTALLED by default. Thus, no warning is needed. If you don't explicitly choose to use them, you do not pay any price.

Doesn't say that in the README, just says they're disabled. The fact they're not installed doesn't impact on the impression that's given.

lukebennetton Phusion Passenger Docker

This is an area where there's a lot of growth in tools/services/approaches.

A couple to start you off with are Fig[1] (acquired last year by Docker themselves) and Shipyard[2].

[1] http://www.fig.sh/ [2] http://shipyard-project.com/

lukebennetton Phusion Passenger Docker

I didn't say that it came with a database, I said that it advocates multiple roles per container - skim down the list of what's included and you see multiple languages, web server, app server, aux services and tools. First impressions are that this image is one-size-fits-all (Whilst I can perceive a distinction myself, I can understand why others in this thread have taken this to be an attempt at emulating a VM).

I take your point that there may be situations where it's pragmatic to have memcached/Redis in the same container as your app, and that they are disabled by default, but I still feel the balance of the README is wrong as it doesn't sound any kind of warning that you probably don't want to do that in most cases.

I'd suggest the README could be improved to better communicate the intended use cases of the images.

lukebennetton Phusion Passenger Docker

Generally it's best to have one role (some would say one process but that isn't always pragmatic) per container. This approach advocates having multiple roles within the same container (e.g. app, db).

I can appreciate the benefits of the underlying phusion-baseimage for addressing some common pitfalls and hurdles, but this layer on top takes things too far in my opinion. Ok, you have the option to customise it, but that comes across as an optional extra rather than an advised approach.

lukebennetton No More JavaScript: An attempt to build a replacement language

Hard to tell if somebody genuinely thinks this is a good idea or if it's just a major trolling exercise. For their sake I hope it's the latter.

lukebennetton Final – A credit card built for the 21st century

This is no longer necessary in the UK - you can send money via a phone number instead of an account number.

lukebennetton DigitalOcean Partners with CoreOS for Large-Scale Cluster Deployments

"Deis is the best thing I've seen come out of Docker's DevOps gold rush."

I have to agree - Deis fills a lot of holes, although it still has some way to go.

lukebennetton Innovative UI

I appreciate the purpose of the site is to demonstrate technical skills, and in this respect it clearly demonstrates a grasp of the underlying technologies.

However, any suggestion or implication that this represents good UI reflects poorly on him (or maybe on the person who posted this, not sure if they're the same person). The words "innovative" and "UI" should never really go together as the best UI leans heavily on established practices so as to minimise cognitive overhead. Any innovation should be subtle and carefully thought through and tested, and involve evolution rather than revolution otherwise it becomes completely counter-productive.

lukebennetton Responsive v3 Released

I'm totally with you on this - I hate seeing column/row references etc in CSS identifiers. With the ease of use of Less/SASS etc, there's no reason not to have the grid rules in a mixin and reference those from semantic identifiers.

We do it this way, it was a piece of cake to set up the initial mixins and we haven't had to think about them since. Just reference something like .column(3) and bam, that element spans 3 columns.

That aside, this looks like a nice alternative to Bootstrap/Foundation.