Hacker News: antoncohen

New comment by antoncohen in "Pride Versioning 0.3.0"

antoncohen — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 15:41:40 +0000

Oh, but what about Ruby's versioning policy, which they call "Semantic Versioning", but the semantics are:

> MINOR: increased every christmas, may be API incompatible

That's right, the semantic meaning behind minor versions is that they are released on Christmas Day. They may or may not be API compatible, who knows.

https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/news/2013/12/21/ruby-version-po...

DocumentDB: Open-Source Announcement

antoncohen — Mon, 27 Jan 2025 04:04:55 +0000

Article URL: https://opensource.microsoft.com/blog/2025/01/23/documentdb-open-source-announcement/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42837303

Points: 9

# Comments: 0

Redis Switches Licenses

antoncohen — Fri, 22 Mar 2024 14:56:31 +0000

Article URL: https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/21/redis-switches-licenses-acquires-speedb-to-go-beyond-its-core-in-memory-database/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39791344

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

New comment by antoncohen in "The Fed is behind the Capital One/Discover merger"

antoncohen — Fri, 23 Feb 2024 03:44:16 +0000

The debit card behavior is probably bank specific. I had fraudulent transactions on my debit card. The bank caught it after a few transactions, alerted me, and shutdown the card when I told them it wasn't me. I didn't get charged for any of the fraudulent transactions. I also had a restaurant charge my debit card for my bill and another customer's bill (honest mistake, not fraud). The restaurant wouldn't refund the transaction, so I disputed it with my bank, who reversed the transaction. The bank was fully set up to dispute debit card transactions from their website.

New comment by antoncohen in "My rude-ass car"

antoncohen — Thu, 02 Nov 2023 03:40:38 +0000

> can anyone explain why in the US if I click unlock on the remote, it just unlocks the front door? This keeps happening on rental cars. You have to click twice on unlock to get all the doors to open.

This is likely configurable. Instructions should be in the owner's manual. It is configurable for both my and my wife's vehicles, one via the touchscreen and the other by pressing and holding unlock for 5 seconds.

New comment by antoncohen in "My rude-ass car"

antoncohen — Thu, 02 Nov 2023 03:30:47 +0000

This is vehicle specific. Not all 2023 vehicles behave this way. I have a current generation vehicle (same generation and tech as 2023).

- Doors stay unlocked. Eventually the engine won't start without pressing unlock on the key fob again, but the doors remain physically unlocked forever.

- Trunk is manually operated.

- It doesn't ding when starting the engine if my seatbelt it on. And I have a programmer that lets me disable the dings when my seatbelt it off. There are no dings when turning the engine off.

- Blind spot warning is configurable: Off, lights, lights + chime. The chime warning doesn't seem annoying.

- No lane keeping assistant.

- Tire pressure monitors work well. They are accurate (same pressure as multiple physical gauges I've tried). Tire pressure increases slightly when driving due to heat. They have never triggered a warning.

- I don't recall ever having to accept terms of service. It certainly hasn't happened multiple times.

I have physical knobs for volume, fan speed, and tuner. Physical buttons for everything else. No controls use resistive touch buttons. No controls are via touch screen (touchscreen has information and setting like blind spot, but not actual controls that don't have physical buttons).

I also have a 1990s vehicle, with an aftermarket touchscreen installed to support Android Auto and Apple CarPlay. The current generation vehicle is no more annoying than the 1990s one.

My wife has a 2023 model year vehicle. Many of the complaints in the post are enabled by default (auto re-lock, blind spot chime that gets confused by multiple lanes). But many of the annoying things are also configurable, including auto re-lock and blind spot.

So it is possible to pick a vehicle that isn't annoying. And I suspect most of the annoying things can be disabled.

Infrastructure Manager: Provision Google Cloud Resources with Terraform

antoncohen — Thu, 14 Sep 2023 04:56:06 +0000

Article URL: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/management-tools/introducing-infrastructure-manager-powered-by-terraform

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37505131

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

Compensation at Publicly Traded Tech Companies

antoncohen — Wed, 10 May 2023 21:52:49 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/compensation-at-tech-companies/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35894012

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by antoncohen in "Microsoft Creative Writer (1993)"

antoncohen — Tue, 19 Jul 2022 02:11:19 +0000

Microsoft open sourced 3D Movie Maker a few months ago:

https://github.com/microsoft/Microsoft-3D-Movie-Maker

New comment by antoncohen in "Google slowing hiring to “technical and critical roles” only"

antoncohen — Wed, 13 Jul 2022 05:43:41 +0000

In my experience the recruiters are great about helping you prep. They have a PDF called "Google Interview Prep Guide Site Reliability Engineer" that talks about SRE-SE vs. SRE-SWE vs. SWE, and links to books and topics to study.

Kirk McKusick's "FreeBSD Kernel Internals" course[1] was recommended to me, and it was excellent. But not cheap at $1495.

[1] https://www.mckusick.com/courses/introdescrip.html

New comment by antoncohen in "How Google got to rolling Linux releases for Desktops"

antoncohen — Wed, 13 Jul 2022 05:30:42 +0000

Container-Optimized OS is based on Chromium OS and is more of a traditional Linux, in the sense that is runs on servers.

https://cloud.google.com/container-optimized-os/docs

Cloudflare config staging and versioning with HTTP applications

antoncohen — Fri, 13 May 2022 06:19:01 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.cloudflare.com/version-and-stage-configuration-changes-with-http-applications/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31363995

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Google Cloud launches AlloyDB, a new fully managed PostgreSQL database service

antoncohen — Thu, 12 May 2022 13:29:55 +0000

Article URL: https://techcrunch.com/2022/05/11/google-cloud-launches-alloydb-a-new-fully-managed-postgresql-database-service/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31353860

Points: 9

# Comments: 1

New comment by antoncohen in "Zero downtime migrations"

antoncohen — Thu, 05 May 2022 05:17:19 +0000

MySQL has some robust tooling in this space. Some of the tools use triggers to copy to a new table. GitHub's gh-ost[1] is probably the state of the art, and uses the binary log stream to replicate the data.

[1] https://github.com/github/gh-ost

New comment by antoncohen in "Google Compute Engine VM takeover via DHCP flood"

antoncohen — Tue, 29 Jun 2021 15:10:46 +0000

That is true, I was thinking specifically about the metadata and SSH keys. But DHCP can also set DNS servers, NTP servers, and other things that can either cause disruptions or be used to facilitate a different attack.

There might be a persistence issue, it seems like part of this attack was that the IP was persisted to /etc/hosts even after the real DHCP server took over again. But even just writing to /etc/hosts could open the door redirecting traffic to an attacker controlled server.

New comment by antoncohen in "Google Compute Engine VM takeover via DHCP flood"

antoncohen — Tue, 29 Jun 2021 13:38:28 +0000

While there are a series of vulnerabilities here, none of them would be exploitable in this way if the metadata server was accessed via an IP instead of the hostname metadata.google.internal.

The metadata server is documented to be at 169.254.169.25, always[1]. But Google software (agents and libraries on VMs) resolves it by looking up metadata.google.internal. If metadata.google.internal isn't in /etc/hosts, as can be the case in containers, this can result in actual DNS lookups over the network to get an address that should be known.

AWS uses the same address for their metadata server, but accesses via the IP address and not some hostname[2].

I've seen Google managed DNS servers (in GKE clusters) fall over under the load of Google libraries querying for the metadata address[3]. I'm guessing Google wants to maintain some flexibility, which is why they are using a hostname, but there are tradeoffs.

[1] https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/internal-dns

[2] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/instance...

[3] This is easily solvable with Kubernetes HostAliases that write /etc/hosts in the containers.

New comment by antoncohen in "A popular household fern may be the first known eusocial plant"

antoncohen — Sat, 12 Jun 2021 16:16:32 +0000

> Eusociality typically requires two other conditions. ... And since the ferns spread asexually on shared roots, they don’t actually exhibit an active system of resource acquisition typical of brood care.

> One key question is what defines an individual fern. If a colony can begin with a small plume of strap fronds sticking up from a few nest fronds and then spread asexually on the same roots, perhaps it is a single plant

There is a lot of talk about the amazing cooperation of these plants. And then they say it is actually one plant. Is it interesting if one plant grows different leaves at different heights?

New comment by antoncohen in "PolarDB, yet another open source database system based on PostgreSQL"

antoncohen — Sun, 30 May 2021 16:09:33 +0000

This is effectively required when open sourcing something that was previously internal. I've done it at a company. There could be company internal things that leak in old revisions of code and commit messages. Even if the latest commit on master is clean, it is really hard to know that every revisions, throughout the whole history is clean.

New comment by antoncohen in "Pulumi 3.0"

antoncohen — Tue, 20 Apr 2021 22:33:37 +0000

The Terraform provider for Google Cloud uses partial autogeneration, here is the repo that does the autogeneration for multiple automation tools:

https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/magic-modules

New comment by antoncohen in "Pulumi 3.0"

antoncohen — Tue, 20 Apr 2021 21:46:45 +0000

> Open Source SDK

> The SDK is a CLI and collection of libraries for defining and deploying cloud apps and infrastructure in code.

https://www.pulumi.com/pricing/

With Terraform the open source CLI and libraries for defining and deploying infrastructure are fully usable, even for large systems.

What I would like to know is, how usable Pulumi is without a paid subscription?

I thought when I first looked at Pulumi, the only non-local state backend was the paid Pulumi Service. But looking at it now, they seem to support the normal object store backends that Terraform does (https://www.pulumi.com/docs/intro/concepts/state/). Though the talk at lack of concurrency control seems to imply they don't support locking like Terraform does.