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mbu

6 karma · joined March 31, 2018

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mbu··on Docker-slim: Minify your Docker container image without changing anything
This looks pretty amazing, thanks for sharing. I've just been playing with this on a couple containers. The first went from 197MB to 71.5MB - not bad! I did some testing and it didn't work without including a few extra pieces but pretty painless.

The second container went from 176MB to 4.7MB!! I've not really tested that so there's a pretty good chance things aren't going to work too well in practice (but we'll see).

If it all continues as well as it's started then we'll definitely be using it.

mbu··on Airtable raises $100M at a $1.1B valuation
In addition to the comment re Notion I'd like to throw out coda.io. Notion is more developed but I think coda has some really promising stuff too. I'm considering both for my current project. I certainly agree that Notion is better than airtable (which I already decided against), I think coda had potential to be even better (but then Notion will improve too).

In short, from my usage so far, I like that everything is a document in Notion. Coda is more capable in other ways - I can summon up chats of my data and define new formulas. I love that buttons let me effectively create a little webapp that also works beautifully on mobile.

One thing I'm trying out with the qa guys (keep in mind very small team) is a list of test cases with buttons for pass/fail/dnt for each. Clicking pass or fail updates the status and test date for that row. You can also have actions in coda trigger integrations. So one thing we were discussing was notifying slack immediately when a test case fails.

Don't know where it will go - both products seem excellent so far.

mbu··on The mysterious heart of the Roland TR-808 drum machine
Wasn't there a study where wine tasters couldn't distinguish red wine from white wine containing red food coloring?
mbu··on Docker Considered Harmful (2016)
Can you expand on the crazy stuff you've seen?
mbu··on Ask HN: Have you shipped anything serious with a “serverless” architecture?
That looks like a nice tool! Will check it out.

Have you tried anything like iopipe for helping debug lambdas?

mbu··on Elon Musk emails employees about 'extensive and damaging sabotage' by employee
Second one definitely seems wrong to me.
mbu··on Cracking the Tapplock Smart Lock
That's a much happier story in that Ring seemed to understand the issue and had a rapid response with a fix. I guess we will see what Tapplock actually does but it seems far more fundamentally terrible.
mbu··on Ask HN: How will it go for Raspberry Pi in the coming years?
Fwiw I don't think it's even possible to order anything from them at the moment. I can't figure out how to (but also have heard other stories of late or non-delivery). Seems like a cool product until you realise it doesn't exist.
mbu··on Ask HN: What did you do to recover after a herniated spinal disc?
Similar to what some others have said - I found a good therapist (in my case I was referred to a very good exercise physiologist by a physio who checked that I was basically otherwise healthy).

I learned to fix up some movement patterns. Some changes were surprisingly small - just a few degrees difference in how I held my pelvis made a huge difference. I had to learn when to "tighten" my core when moving and lifting and when it is safe to let it relax a bit. The difference has been dramatic. I had back pain even as far back as highschool basically just because of bad mechanics. I do somewhat wish I'd learnt better biomechanics sooner but I can't really complain - I've never been in less pain since my early teens.

mbu··on Ask HN: How do you work with AWS?
I've experimented with a few different things and there really are lots of valid ways to work depending on context.

Terraform: at some point you will probably end up here. It gives you so much control, it's fast and (mostly) easy to work with. It gives you a good idea of what it is doing and why.

Cloudformation: mostly I've used this embedded in some other tool. For example we have a fairly small Elastic Beanstalk app which uses SQS and SNS - nice to be able to extend the basic infrastructure easily inline with your app definition. Similar situation with serverless.

Awless: this is a really nice (scriptable!) CLI alternative. Nothing wrong with the normal AWS CLI but this does some things simpler/nicer. If what you are doing is simple enough you can script infrastructure with these tools.

Console: I really use this alongside the other things as I'm building automation or to explore some new service I've not used before.

Ansible: for configuration management (post terraform apply) we are using ansible. So far we set up an admin box inside the infrastructure and run ansible from there. We've experimented with having ansible build the inventory but currently looking at a bash/jq/awless combo to build it dynamically.

Edit: not ever used ansible to modify AWS infrastructure. We keep infrastructure separate with a configuration management separate from setting up the infrastructure.