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nickbpon Launch HN: Opstrace (YC S19) – open-source Datadog

That's the plan! The incumbent SaaS providers are effectively charging a premium over the underlying storage. Their business is really reselling storage. Removing that premium via a self-hosted system then greatly reduces the need to structure your applications to fit the cost of monitoring it. This also means that any negotiated discounts and features they may use (e.g., S3 Standard-IA) are also applicable to data in Opstrace.

We will also have a blog post about bad UX in a couple weeks… stay tuned. What are some of your biggest gripes about UX?

nickbpon Launch HN: Opstrace (YC S19) – open-source Datadog

Just to answer the question about what metrics are included, you can write and read any kind of custom metrics and log data from your applications, and have to build useful dashboards yourself. When first deployed, the user tenants (you can create any number of tenants to partition your data) are empty (you start with a clean slate) and ready for you to send any metrics/logs to it. You also have to add your own dashboards to interpret the data you've sent.

Opstrace does ship with a "system" tenant designed for monitoring the Opstrace system itself. This tenant has built-in dashboards that we've designed to show you the health of the Opstrace system.

Incidentally, having sharable "dashboards" across people/teams/organizations is something we are also working on, so people don't have to re-invent dashboards all the time.

We also have some guidelines for you to ingest metrics from Kubernetes clusters (https://opstrace.com/docs/guides/user/instrumenting-a-k8s-cl...) and are building native cloud metrics collection. Feel free to follow along in GitHub: https://github.com/opstrace/opstrace/issues/310.

nickbpon Launch HN: Opstrace (YC S19) – open-source Datadog

Yeah, anytime I hear "on-prem" deployment I think of my previous experience with getting a product deployed across a lot of different K8s environments. At the surface there are ostensibly common APIs, but the underlying components (networking, storage) are not necessarily interchangeable. There may also be custom policies around e.g. labels, SecurityContexts, or NetworkPolicies. In my own K3s cluster I generally just manage the YAML specs for the deployments by hand, since I’ll often need to e.g. specify the arch constraint to run against, or ensure that it’s running a multi-arch image. It’s a really interesting problem though, and it’s something that we’re targeting.

nickbpon Launch HN: Opstrace (YC S19) – open-source Datadog

Hi, this is Nick Parker from the Opstrace team. I personally have my own on-prem arm64/amd64 K3s cluster, including a basic 4-node Minio deployment, so I’m very interested in getting local deployment up and running myself. We’re a small team and we’ve been focusing on getting a couple well-defined use-cases in order before adding support for running Opstrace in custom and on-prem environments. It turns into a bit of a combinatorial explosion in terms of supporting all the possibilities. But we definitely want to support deploying to custom infrastructure eventually.

nickbpon State Machines in Go

Ragel supports Go output. There's been some recent fixes according to the mailing list, so you may need to get a recent version straight from git: http://www.complang.org/pipermail/ragel-users/2013-February/...

nickbpon Why I’m not leaving Python for Go

So, I rarely see eg Java code that actually handles the exceptions it receives. Usually its just "Oh, I got an exception, so I'll print an error (or silently fail) and blindly keep going".

Given this, I don't see how Go is any worse with respect to sloppy programmers. They'll Always Find A Way.

Also, why couldn't your second example be nested? It seems like either of those two examples could be structured identically to the other.

nickbpon Rackspace accused of patent infringement for hosting Github

I would not be surprised if the patent office itself used this method for filing patent information in various DBs.

nickbpon A Mutual Fund Master, Too Worried to Rest

An investor is best served by keeping things as simple as possible. The most they should be concerned with is the simple ratio of stocks/bonds/cash that meets their risk tolerance and time horizon. This can be easily determined through some simple survey questions[1] or comparison charts[2]. Most fund companies even offer target date funds, which make this simple decision even easier. And by keeping things so simple, the investor is discouraged from doing harm to their investments by repeatedly transferring it between the latest fads, something which advisers are definitely prone to do.

Basic investing is only made to look complicated by people who depend on selling expensive advice and guidance that most people don't need. Paying an adviser 1% per annum means you lose 30% of your balance in 40 years, not including any bad decisions they make with your money in that time.

[1] https://personal.vanguard.com/us/FundsInvQuestionnaire [2] http://www.mymoneyblog.com/choosing-an-asset-allocation-step...

nickbpon Raspberry Pi gets a Firefox OS port

I dunno, you can buy 5 $35 raspberry pis for the price of one $200 pandaboard. $200 approaches the territory of being plausibly enough to build or purchase a full PC.

nickbpon Are graphical calculators pointless?

I love my TI-89, which I got ~7 years ago for college physics/astro classes, and still use fairly often when the need arises, typically once or twice a month. I find the interface of a physical calculator to be far superior to a more general purpose machine when facing the tasks its built for.

However, I also think they're way overpriced for what they are. I think a lot of the price is just 'because we can'.

nickbpon Google Modifies HTTP, Makes Chrome 50% Faster

The result is a dramatically increased page load performance that only works between Chrome (as it includes SPDY support) and Google’s servers (which supports the features for Google sites.)

Reminds me a lot of MS's strategy of adding incompatible features to existing standards.

nickbpon Building a Startup - Defending .NET

You'll be much better off if you're well-practiced in ignoring those people. I think choosing your tools solely out of trends and peer pressure would also send a message, but it wouldn't be a favorable one.

nickbpon Poll: What language/framework do you hack in?

Contrary to what the echo chamber may sometimes indicate, not everyone is solely a web programmer.

(cpp w/ boost here)

nickbpon Building a Startup - Defending .NET

As far as I can tell the author's reasons for deciding to use C# can be summed up as "I'm used to it from previous work, and some useful libraries related to my project are available."

Those are perfectly valid reasons, but they aren't really much use to anyone who doesn't share those circumstances, and don't really have anything to do with upsides and downsides of the language itself. That would have been far more relevant to us outsiders.

Also, "I'm buying a MBP" translates to "I'm serious about startups"? Who says image isn't everything? Besides, everyone knows serious hackers use IBM-era Thinkpads!

nickbpon Why the Popularity of Unit Testing is Waning

This hasn't been my experience at all in my own work. While I don't subscribe to the extreme 'unit test every single function' mindset, I definitely find unit testing to be useful for checking the consistency of key functionality on a per-module basis. And that has the bonus side-effect of ensuring that I keep the code structured in easily-tested modules with well-defined interfaces.

nickbpon Pandora app found to be sending DOB, gender and location info to ad servers

Whenever I get one of those discount cards from a pharmacy/grocery store (CVS, Price Chopper, Safeway, etc), I hand out the duplicates to random people just to stick it to the man.

I do end up with 'interesting' coupons every so often. It's a little like hearing back from an estranged friend.

nickbpon Old-School Silicon Valley Company Logos ON T-SHIRTS

FWIW the author claims this in the FAQ:

This is cool and all, but you aren’t the owner of any of these logos. Aren’t you going to be in deep trouble?

Trademarks need to be renewed fairly often. Even old logos from companies still in business get abandoned and die. Everything on this site is legally kosher as far as public records are concerned.

nickbpon Old-School Silicon Valley Company Logos ON T-SHIRTS

These look great, though I'm not sure I can justify $25 each on tshirts..

Also, I think this is the first time I've seen a .biz that wasn't spam-related (or is it?!?!)

nickbpon The Big Vote Is Today: Will San Francisco Hang on to Twitter?

They're not seeking to modify the code for everyone, only to get a special exemption for themselves.

nickbpon The Big Vote Is Today: Will San Francisco Hang on to Twitter?

I think the degree of special treatment Twitter is seeking from SF is disproportionate to the number of jobs they actually provide.

nickbpon [dead]

Machined brass? That's gonna be heavy, and wouldn't any scratches through the finish eventually develop tarnish?

When seeing the headline, I was hoping for something more like "John's Phone", except minus the flaws with its switches and buttons[1] and perhaps minus the physical address book which makes it thicker than necessary.

[1] http://www.engadget.com/2010/12/06/johns-phone-review-the-wo... -> direct video http://www.viddler.com/player/c6a25174/

nickbpon Last year, 25 hedge fund managers earned a combined $22 billion

These days it's just a label which allows them to largely avoid the SEC.

nickbpon Last year, 25 hedge fund managers earned a combined $22 billion

Yet they still manage to under-perform year after year.

nickbpon Too Much Entrepreneurship Is a Bad Thing

Yes, due to the problems of health care here in the US, you're forced to choose one or the other.

nickbpon Apple Fails When It Comes To “Basic Durable Product Design”?

So if you want something disposable, pay a couple hundred extra for a Mac.

Right.

nickbpon Portable C Compiler 1.0 released

With regard to 2, I don't care so much about compile speed (within reason) as I do about the speed of the produced binary. How fast is the output?

nickbpon Dear Old People

"If it seems like I'm being a brat"

Don't worry, you are. Not even sure what you're attempting to address.

- Fellow young'n

nickbpon Tesla loses plot, sues Top Gear

"I would but you'd sue me if you lost."

nickbpon Poll: Do you work for "the Man"?

In my opinion, someone truly living an amazing awesome life wouldn't have time to advertise it on Facebook. But it might be that I have a different definition of such a life.

nickbpon Twitter Kills The #Dickbar

When Google first introduced their text ads, it was in an era when other ads were commonly popups, huge banners, and flash with sound. Their text ads were quite nice compared to the competition.

They've loosened up a bit since then, though..