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ansipunkon Ask HN: Why was Terraform created?

Then I guess it's a question to the startup I'm working at - why in the world did they overcomplicate so much stuff when in fact we have constant number of environments, workers, load balancers? In fact, every engineer in the company is very much aware on how our system operates and (I believe) could easily imitate whatever Terraform does with simple scripts.

ansipunkon Ask HN: Why was Terraform created?

But using Terraform with $CLOUD implies that you are familiar with $CLOUD - then if you know $CLOUD and bash why would you need to use Terraform to work with that cloud?

Also, as stated in a sibling comment, all the commands, expressions and capabilities of Terraform differ based on your $CLOUD, so in the end it's not that universal.

In fact, it's not different from bash - bash is always the same, you just type `az` instead of `aws-cli`.

ansipunkon Ask HN: Why was Terraform created?

>That is a good and useful thing

As long as you manage to pick it up, which I'm struggling with - you have to approach the problem from an entirely different angle with an entirely different paradigm. I'm struggling with adopting Nix on my personal machine for the same reason - I get `dnf install foo bar` but I don't get `I want foo and bar installed on my machine.` I want my machine to do the stuff only when I explicitly ask it to do stuff and only when I explicitly tell it when to do it.

UPD:

>If you ever watch terraform deploy a complex (10+ dissimilar resources) infrastructure it comes close to magic how it discovers what already has been done and what still needs to be done and in which order.

But why would you have half-ready environments you aren't even aware of state of? Isn't our job about having as little magic, mysteries and unknown variables as possible?

I'm a big opponent of magic and, probably, one of bigger fans of KISS - simple implementation, not simple usage.

ansipunkon Epic Games to pay $520M to resolve FTC allegations

Hopefully FTC is eventually taking action against Adobe as well.

ansipunkon Ask HN: How is your company training you to become a better developer/engineer?

>What skills?

When I've been through the interview process, it's been very obvious that I have strong backend skills but lack on cloud and DevOps stuff, so that's what I'm focusing on now.

>Training frequency?

As of now, most of my tasks are related to cloud and CI/CD and, to be honest, I'm enjoying it a lot, it's more fun than backend to me as there's plenty of new things to explore and learn. I even feel like I might switch from backend development to Developer Experience Engineer, exploring new ways to make development, testing, deployment and initial setup faster, easier and more enjoyable, since I like to think that I know how developers feel about our current processes and what can be improved.

>How is your next set of skills decided?

I just tell my manager that there is some stuff I'd like to learn and tell them what is it.

>Is it personalized?

Yes.

>Are you involved in the discussion?

I start it.

>What are the biggest obstacles to your training?

Sometimes, when I meet a new task I have no clue how to even approach it, I feel a bit overwhelmed and unmotivated, so I take my time preparing for it and asking around for initial problem study.

I know it's not very productive, but it's an enjoyable pace for me and my company promised me a raise if I get better at cloud, DevOps, Docker and AWS stuff while I'm on my probation.

ansipunkon Considering C99 for Curl

I think I can see why, I never tried C or C++, but Zig was a pleasure to learn and play around with.

ansipunkon Considering C99 for Curl

I don't really get why Daniel decided not to go with C99. Doesn't C99 compiler produce the same machine code for ANSI C source code? They could start writing new code in a newer standard and fixing old code in a newer standard gradually, so most of `curl` and `libcurl` source code would have slowly, but steadily transitioned to a newer standard. Or am I missing something?

ansipunkon Ask HN: Advice that changed your life?

Never be humble. Business does not care about you, it’s not the world to be humble in.

ansipunkon The Curious Design of Skateboard Trucks

Not on topic, but the author uses an annoying mix of inline links and footnotes. Why aren’t they consistent on it I wonder

ansipunkon Lose weight the slow and incredibly difficult way

So I wondered if I could lose some weight if I teleported on top of Everest and started searching for formulas. Apparently, this question is already answered and the answer is yes - I could lose half a pound.

https://www.quora.com/On-top-of-Mount-Everest-is-the-force-o...

So yeah, if you have resources to shave off that much of Earth surface, then you have resources to construct a high enough building to lose those 10 pounds which would have been a lot easier.

ansipunkon Rewriting my blog in Rust for fun and profit

It's kind of ironic and uncool that DocPad's website is made using GitBook.

ansipunkon Rewriting my blog in Rust for fun and profit

On the other hand, having single binary is good because you don't have to install the runtime to tinker with the tool. Yet I do agree that tinkering options are very limited in comparison.

ansipunkon Rewriting my blog in Rust for fun and profit

You’re welcome! Just wanted to share what did I come to in the end following the same route.

ansipunkon Rewriting my blog in Rust for fun and profit

Sounds cool, I hope one day I stumble upon your article that utilizes those very custom hard-coded knobs. Yet I wouldn't make a tool like that since tools should be KISS.

ansipunkon Rewriting my blog in Rust for fun and profit

That's exactly why I never used Jekyll and don't really understand people that use it nowadays. It is AWFUL. Not only it uses greatly outdated Ruby, you also HAVE to install outdated Ruby on your machine to play with themes, serve, compile and are forced to use RVM. I know GitHub Pages can compile the page for you, but when you want to customize a theme you have to go through all that hell. It's just a terrible experience. And installing plugins is another hell.

ansipunkon Rewriting my blog in Rust for fun and profit

I've been trying to make a cool static site generator numerous times. Well, yes, it actually is a quite fun thing to tinker with, but I've found myself struggling to decide on what do I want to see in the final app and what I do not; what features might be needed by other users and what features might be an overkill. So I ultimately went with Zola[1] and encourage you to try it too! Aaaand it is written in Rust, too. It's available in Alpine Linux's repos so it's trivial to set up a CI/CD to compile your blog.

[1] https://www.getzola.org/

ansipunkon Use TouchID to Authenticate Sudo on macOS

https://github.com/boltgolt/howdy

Never heard of similar stuff for Macs, this is Linux software. Worked fine on my ThinkPad laptop running Fedora.

ansipunkon Use TouchID to Authenticate Sudo on macOS

It is just an additional authentication mechanism to a list of various ones. If the client (COM port terminal, KVM terminal, SSH client, bare /dev/tty or any other client you can think of) does not support this mechanism, it will go for another one.

UPD: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_PAM

ansipunkon Use TouchID to Authenticate Sudo on macOS

Fun fact: if your laptop has an IR camera, you can also use face recognition for that purpose.

ansipunkon Met Police UK Live Facial Recognition

I used to work in a company that made similar tech for some other country. And boy, did I both hate and love my job! I wanted to quit a lot of times, but every time my manager would stop me. “If you ain’t gonna do this job, some other engineer will pick it,” they said. And it is true. I loved my coworkers, I loved technical challenges and all the features we were implementing. How blown off I was seeing results of facial search I made myself. Just imagine — I take a picture of you right now or find it somewhere in your Facebook or Instagram, upload it to the system and a second later I’ll be already knowing what exactly, where exactly and when exactly you were doing or going. Tech-wise it was amazing. But I betrayed myself and everyone around me. I hated how I worked against myself and my fellow citizens. And I have no idea how to prevent others from working against ourselves.

ansipunkon Ask HN: What does your mother tell people about your work or employment?

I don’t know, but she’s constantly pushing me, throwing me articles about huge companies hiring, about investments, savings, getting a mortgage. She constantly asks me if I got a job in that huge company I was applying to. It’s a lot of pressure.

ansipunkon Migrating from SQLite to PostgreSQL

There’s only one reason I keep using PostgreSQL instead of SQLite for my pet projects and it is the “RETURNING” statement

UPD: I know it’s there, but the library version shipped with interpreters and compilers are often outdated

ansipunkon Twitter accounts dropping “.eth” from usernames

Boy, am I proud of my wild guess

ansipunkon Twitter accounts dropping “.eth” from usernames

PnD? Pump n dump?

ansipunkon Show HN: Koda, a typesafe functional toolkit for Python

Now this is an answer I was waiting for. Thank you for explaining the real benefits of sticking to koda style. I guess this would be obvious if I used statically typed languages since there is no try except clauses in most of them

ansipunkon Show HN: Koda, a typesafe functional toolkit for Python

a) do Optional[Union[foo, bar]] b) why do you expect this from a duck typed language? None of options you listed or the library is offering saves you from mismatched types. Mypy is still as good as it can possibly be using only vanilla type hints

ansipunkon Show HN: Koda, a typesafe functional toolkit for Python

How is this different from match case ok case err or from if result.val?

ansipunkon Show HN: Koda, a typesafe functional toolkit for Python

Please provide links so I can read on this

ansipunkon Show HN: Koda, a typesafe functional toolkit for Python

I let myself do a little bit of thinking and I guess this might be helpful when you are doing functional style pipes/chains but you can wrap the whole chain into a try except block. But the question is still there: why would you do that? Why the one would write functional code in a language that ain’t very good with maps and filters, has no lazy calculations and has no constants on language design level? Why would you set `Maybe[int]` type for a function argument? That’s an obvious overcomplication imo. Go and write some F# or Haskell. Well, the variety of options and flexibility is always good, but the language is fundamentally not meant to do it. From what I can see, it only makes sense in recreational programming, making some eye-pleasing code, but it all is just a workaround on a language that would not benefit from that code style.

All above is strongly imo of course since I only write Python and am just learning Zig.

ansipunkon Show HN: Koda, a typesafe functional toolkit for Python

Why would you write Python like it’s Rust? I really fundamentally do not understand the purpose. Ain’t `is Null` checks and try except good enough?