HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

Tomdarkness

665 karma · joined August 28, 2012

https://tom-pryor.co.uk
submissionscomments
Tomdarkness··on 'Clean your desk': My Amazon interview experience
This is something similar, except they run test centers rather than just renting out office space for that use:

https://home.pearsonvue.com/

Tomdarkness··on Most drivers who own cars with built-in GPS systems use phones for directions
The reason I have it built-in is it integrates with the head-up display meaning I don't have to take my eye off the road to see directions.
Tomdarkness··on Hosting My Static Site
You do realise CloudFront (https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/) and CloudFlare (https://www.cloudflare.com/) are not the same?
Tomdarkness··on AWS Elasticsearch Service Woes
We've looked into using Elastic hosted Elasticsearch ourselves but what really put us off is that even if your whole cluster fails the only support method you get is a forum. You have to purchase a support package for the whole of Elasticsearch at some unspecified price just to get proper support for the hosted service itself. We don't want support for using Elasticsearch just for the hosted service we're paying for.
Tomdarkness··on GitLab Container Registry
Looks great. One thing that does not appear to be clear though is if you build multiple docker images from the same project.

Our deployment workflow at the moment builds two docker images, one for the web app and another for the background services. Both share the same code.

It would appear you can only have one docker image per project?

Tomdarkness··on Bad USB-C cable destroys laptop
Surely this product should be removed from sale by Amazon until the manufacturer can investigate?
Tomdarkness··on AWS Database Migration Service (Preview)
Excellent, will look forward to testing it out when it's available in eu-west-1. We'd like to use some of the new features in postgres 9.4 but our production DBs on RDS are stuck on 9.3 at the moment.
Tomdarkness··on AWS Database Migration Service (Preview)
Wonder if it's possible to use this to upgrade Amazon RDS instances?

At the moment you can't upgrade an existing postgres 9.3 RDS instance to 9.4 without dumping all the data and importing it into a new 9.4 RDS instance.

Tomdarkness··on Under the Hood of the Amazon EC2 Container Service
I've not done any measurements in terms of latency but from my experience an agent on the host will ask the docker daemon to start a new container in the order of seconds after making an API request to ECS that calls for an additional container to be provisioned.

I'd recommend setting up a private registry within EC2 though, otherwise you'll have a fairly significant delay while it pulls the image from wherever and incur bandwidth charges for doing so. You'll still have some delay while it pulls the image from your registry running on EC2 but not as significant if it were externally hosted.

Tomdarkness··on Under the Hood of the Amazon EC2 Container Service
We've been using EC2 Container Service for a few months now and at first glance it appears great but we've ran into quite a few problems using it:

- You can only bind 1 port and 1 ELB to a service. This means, for example, if you have nginx listening on port 80 and 443 you need to manually configure the ELB and can't take advantage of automatically generated port numbers on the host (So you basically can only have 1 HTTP(s) server on a host)

- There is no way to cleanly decommission a host from a cluster. Say if you want to reboot or replace a server in the cluster you can't tell ECS to drain connections from the ELB and move the containers off the host

- Unable to specify rules for which hosts services should run on. For example you can't say that the service needs to make sure it has instances in X AZs or don't run multiple instances of the same service on the same host.

- No easy way to implement any kind of service discovery, you have to roll this yourself or set up loads of internal ELBs as a sort of service discovery.

- Worst of all the ecs-agent is very buggy. It has releases where it just keeps crashing [1] and leaving untracked running containers just hanging around to an issue where they released a new version with a newer docker library that changed how it handled certain parameters causing our entire cluster to fail until they hot fixed it with a change to how their API sent data to the client.

We're currently looking at alternatives for our docker infrastructure.

[1]: https://github.com/aws/amazon-ecs-agent/issues/156

Tomdarkness··on Ask HN: Do you use Vagrant or Docker for active development?
Why not both? We use vagrant to create our docker environment - a 3 machine CoreOS cluster. This is so we accurately represent our production environment.

We then use our production docker image(s) with some more development appropriate configuration options. Vagrant mounts the user's home directory at /Users/<username>/ inside the CoreOS machines. Then we mount the appropriate folder inside the docker container at where the container would normally expect to find the app's code. This way the developers have live updates without having to rebuild the docker image or anything.

Tomdarkness··on Ask HN: Why use Docker and what are the business cases for using it?
We use vagrant on our dev machines to spin up a CoreOS cluster. Could use something like boot2docker but we prefer the dev environment to mirror production as close as possible.
Tomdarkness··on Windows 10, coming July 29, free to Win7 and 8.1 users
What is the purpose of reserving your free upgrade? Is there any advantage or is it just some kind of capacity planning tool for Microsoft?
Tomdarkness··on Project Fi by Google
3 offer the ability to use your allowances in 18 countries at no extra charge:

http://www.three.co.uk/Discover/Phones/Feel_At_Home

It's not as many countries, but with 3 you can get unlimited data at a fraction of the cost (I currently pay £15/month with 3 for unlimited data, 5000 3 to 3 minutes, 5000 texts and 2000 minutes to other networks).

Tomdarkness··on Lookup by Twilio
Looks interesting but seems to be lacking a bit in the mobile number lookup department. The current service we use for mobile numbers can provide:

- Is the phone number not only valid in terms of syntax but a number actually registered to a subscriber?

- Is the subscriber currently connected to the network? (Normally indicates if their phone is switched on or off with the exception of not having a signal)

- Has the phone number or subscriber been barred or blacklisted in any way?

- Network that the number originally belonged to

- Network that the number is currently registered with. For example if they ported their number from another provider this will be different from the network the number originally belonged to.

- Network that the subscriber is currently connected to. So say if you were roaming in a different country this would return the network the phone is currently roaming on. Can be used to see if someone is out of the country.

This works mostly worldwide with a few exceptions. In a few countries we can actually determine if you are on a prepay or contract plan as well.

Tomdarkness··on Hundreds of Thousands of Google Apps Domains’ Private WHOIS Leaked
Sorry, made a typo. Nominet are not a registrar, they are the domain registry for .uk domains. Similar to how Verisign are the registry for .com domains.
Tomdarkness··on Hundreds of Thousands of Google Apps Domains’ Private WHOIS Leaked
I like the approach taken by Nominet (.uk domain registry). If you are an individual and you're not trading via your website you can hide your personal details from whois. However, companies and trading individuals have to display it.
Tomdarkness··on HSTS Super Cookies
Seems Chrome has addressed the issue with incognito mode - if you open the page in incognito mode you get a different code.
Tomdarkness··on Plastc Card
It claims to support Chip & PIN (EMV) but I don't see how this works. EMV is designed so that you can't clone a card and in practice is it impractical to attempt to clone a card that uses EMV.

The only way I could imagine it would work is if you have the support of the bank that issued the card. However, I doubt any bank would agree to a scheme to allow a 3rd party to generate a clone of an EMV card.

Tomdarkness··on Call me maybe: RabbitMQ
In relation to the second part of the article regarding lost messages it would be interesting to see the same test done but with HA queues:

http://www.rabbitmq.com/ha.html

I might be wrong but I'd suspect that it might solve the problem as while the partioned nodes will still discard the data it should be present on the master node.

Tomdarkness··on jSpy: Automatically detect user's history
The mirror does not seem to work just gets stuck on Calibrating.
Tomdarkness··on Google bows to EU privacy ruling
The only problem is now when you click on the submission link you can't view the article because you need a FT subscription. If you clicked the link that sends you via Google you can view the article due to the FT allowing limited free views via search engines.
Tomdarkness··on Parallax effect from Google Lens Blur photos
Works fine in Chrome on my Nexus 5.
Tomdarkness··on Introducing Opencall
There is a composer.json and composer.lock file in the repository. All you'd need to do to download all the dependencies is have composer installed and run "composer install".
Tomdarkness··on Google sued for data-mining students' email
My experience with Google Apps is when you create a new user the first time they log in they are presented with the T&Cs they have to agree to before they can use the account.
Tomdarkness··on Windows Chrome, why do my fonts look so bad?
Chrome Canary has experimental support for DirectWrite which should make your fonts, and text in general look much nicer.

See the issue here:

https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=25541

For details on how to enable DirectWrite in Chrome Canary. Might be worthwhile to see what your fonts look like using DirectWrite.

Tomdarkness··on Swatch Internet Time
Consider this. Suppose I want to phone someone who lives in Japan and I live in the UK. Japan is +9 hours ahead of UK local time (GMT). Therefore I know if I phone slightly before lunch then I'll be phoning them in the evening.

Now suppose we all had the same time. If I phoned them just before lunch, which would mean shortly before 12:00 in the UK then I'd have to try and figure out what Japan would be doing at that time. Would 12:00 in Japan be early morning, late at night, would they be eating a meal, would they be at work? Now I have to remember where in the day different times are for different counties. However, with timezones all I need to remember is a numerical value and I can easily figure out where Japan is in the progression of a day (i.e morning, evening, night).

Tomdarkness··on Ask HN: Sick of your bank? Want to build a open source, non-profit, online bank?
In the UK a Current Account is basically equivalent to a US checking account. So your average day-to-day account normally with a debit card, cheque book and easy access. It might also offer an overdraft facility. Typically you'll get zero or very little interest on any money in the account.
Tomdarkness··on BMW shows off 'drifting' self-drive cars
Does anyone know if it was pre-programmed with the course and made minor on the fly corrections or was able to complete the course independently in real time?
Tomdarkness··on The new Photosynth
That's not my point though, I'm talking about what you see when you visit for the first time.

If you visit the site for the first time, like I just have, you have no idea what it is. You are just looking at a large image with some additional photos in circles. Just a simple phrase, such as the first line from the Learn More page: "Capture [and view] the places you love in amazing resolution and full 3D.", and perhaps a "Try it, select a scene" on near the circles would make it much more obvious.

Or perhaps even better, when you visit for the time time give them a quick demo or walk through.

← PreviousPage 2 of 6Next →