Hacker News: cothomps

New comment by cothomps in "Dr. Don Gurnett, U. Iowa Space Physicist Retires"

cothomps — Thu, 30 May 2019 01:27:03 +0000

Dr. Gurnett is one of the principal investigators on the Voyager I & II projects; his group was the one to discover the heliopause boundary.

Dr. Don Gurnett, U. Iowa Space Physicist Retires

cothomps — Thu, 30 May 2019 01:25:29 +0000

Article URL: https://now.uiowa.edu/2019/05/gurnett-retirement-story

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20047495

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

New comment by cothomps in "Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian"

cothomps — Thu, 26 Jul 2018 21:03:12 +0000

I was curious whether or not the Sride project was failing. We were about to do a migration once some key integration things were done; doesn't look like they'll finish those.

New comment by cothomps in "Amazon Elastic File System – Production-Ready in Three Regions"

cothomps — Wed, 29 Jun 2016 13:21:53 +0000

Or scenarios where you can use EFS to stage data 'for something else' (i.e. shared image / upload content that stages to a CDN, etc.)

Keep in mind (and this comes from hard experience in 'traditional' NFS web server architecture) - if you mount everything on an NFS volume, you ensure that

1) If something goes wrong on that NFS mount, everything goes wrong. (bad code deploy? All nodes are down!)

2) If you rely on an NFS mount to store everything (e.g. trust keystores for JVMs,etc.) your entire infrastructure is dependent on the I/O capabilities of that NFS mount.

3) No matter how clever you are (or how much you trust NFS clients/versions) you will deal with file locking if you are doing a fair amount of read/write from multiple nodes to a single NFS mount.

Short story - EFS will make some of the 'hard' things with distributed nodes possible, but don't make the easy things impossible to troubleshoot.

New comment by cothomps in "AWS is inappropriate for small teams because its complexity demands a specialist"

cothomps — Sat, 11 Jun 2016 21:22:55 +0000

.... kind of. A reservation is all about planning capacity. If you know (e.g.) that you need two web servers "hot" all the time to serve a base level of traffic, you can pay for that up front either partially or in total (a reservation) at some pretty significant savings. You can add hourly (or spot) capacity as needed - but paying for what you'll be using up front can make AWS very economical.

If you're paying for X1 servers for an extended period of time on an hourly basis, you should be entitled to a thank you note from Jeff Bezos.

New comment by cothomps in "The Art of Monitoring"

cothomps — Sat, 11 Jun 2016 16:43:04 +0000

To the "free chapter" idea - I think the website has a pretty good prospectus, and compared to other tech books / publishers, it's certainly well worth taking a flyer on it for a maximum of $20.

New comment by cothomps in "In Defence of WordPress"

cothomps — Fri, 15 May 2015 01:11:36 +0000

Nice!

As much as Wordpress gets bad pub, there is certainly the open ways in which security is handled and patches are distributed. Far better in most ways to commercial CMS (and even some open source) where systems seem to run unpatched until a system upgrade or a security incident.

New comment by cothomps in "Ask HN: I just got $100k in AWS credits, how should I use it?"

cothomps — Fri, 15 May 2015 01:05:21 +0000

Use it to build web scrapers hunting for AWS Keys on GitHub, to spin up more instances to scrape for AWS keys to..

New comment by cothomps in "Usenet, updated in real time as it was thirty years ago"

cothomps — Mon, 22 Dec 2014 05:08:34 +0000

The great thing about USENET was (and well, is) that news is a protocol so you could choose from a few different clients if the UX for one was horrible. Not a panacea, but it was nice to have that kind of competition.

New comment by cothomps in "Ask HN: What was the job market like during the dot-com crash?"

cothomps — Mon, 22 Dec 2014 05:04:15 +0000

... And at this point "Internet" companies are far more ingrained in the mainstream economy than they were in 2000. There will be some companies that will be hit, but things won't be as bad as it was when nearly anything net related took a hit.

New comment by cothomps in "Ask HN: What was the job market like during the dot-com crash?"

cothomps — Mon, 22 Dec 2014 04:49:55 +0000

It seems that by the time a career path / financial instrument is widely talked about as a "lifestyle", it's time to get out.

1999: "The dot-com lifestyle", everyone is an HTML/Flash developer. 2005: Flipping houses, adjustable mortgages - Mini Donald Trumps abound.

2015 seems to be lining up to be an energy industry crash.

New comment by cothomps in "Ask HN: What was the job market like during the dot-com crash?"

cothomps — Mon, 22 Dec 2014 04:14:48 +0000

I'll note that one positive in the industry is that people put some serious thought into working in a way that was more productive than dot-com crazy and we all took Agile methodologies seriously.

New comment by cothomps in "Ask HN: What was the job market like during the dot-com crash?"

cothomps — Mon, 22 Dec 2014 04:10:48 +0000

1) I was fortunate enough to be in a good place where my wages were not hit terribly hard, but there was a big slowdown in wage growth.

2) I did take a pretty dull "and stressful for being that dull" job with an insurance co. as a senior developer after the startup (probably closer to 'small biz' at that point) I worked for had a major restructuring. The dull job did allow me to focus a bit more on some other freelance/networking opportunities.

3) As a few have noted, the biggest thing afterwards seemed to be the outsourcing wave. That plus the sudden glut in the market seemed to nearly wipe out entry level opportunities. There was a period of time where I (being only 6-7 years out of college myself) don't recall working with a single new graduate.

New comment by cothomps in "AWS Cloudfront down?"

cothomps — Thu, 27 Nov 2014 01:02:42 +0000

Doesn't seem global - the CF domains I hsve in us-east seem fine

New comment by cothomps in "MakeMeASandwich.js"

cothomps — Tue, 07 Oct 2014 18:41:33 +0000

I decided to load test the app and am now receiving 500 sandwiches / s.

New comment by cothomps in "Oregon sues Oracle, claiming fraud over failed Obamacare website"

cothomps — Sat, 23 Aug 2014 03:42:34 +0000

You'll get to see more XML metadata than you thought possible.

New comment by cothomps in "Oregon sues Oracle, claiming fraud over failed Obamacare website"

cothomps — Sat, 23 Aug 2014 03:41:35 +0000

^^ Oregon deciding to have Oracle consulting engage on a time and materials contract is the big problem.

Hint: always, always do these on bid. No one ever saves money/budget on consultants working time and materials.

New comment by cothomps in "GitHub monoculture"

cothomps — Sun, 04 May 2014 03:55:48 +0000

It helps that ad-driven SourceForge seems to be doing its best to shove people off the platform.

Securing Digital Ocean / Linode Instances With Dome9

cothomps — Tue, 29 Apr 2014 04:05:41 +0000

Article URL: http://chadthompson.me/2014/04/hardening-cloud-virtual-instances-dome9-lite-cloud/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7664877

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by cothomps in "How 'DevOps' Is Killing The Developer"

cothomps — Wed, 16 Apr 2014 02:58:45 +0000

... this is right on. I've seen my own role in "DevOps" as being one that is less task-oriented and more toward bridging skill sets. The drive toward specialization (mentioned by the author) is leading us toward having "Ops" administrators that are completely incapable of understanding how an object-oriented system is constructed and "Devs" who seem almost oblivious to how computers (web servers, middleware containers, databases, etc.) actually work.