Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 50 posts.
Don't use Hadoop when your data isn't that big
"So, how much experience do you have with Big Data and Hadoop?" they asked me. I told them that I use Hadoop all the time, but rarely for jobs larger than a few TB. I'm basically a big data neophite - I know the concepts, I've written code, but never at scale.
Why I left Heroku, and notes on my new AWS setup
On Friday, we migrated Soundslice from Heroku to direct use of Amazon Web Services (AWS) . I'm very, very happy with this change and want to spread the word about how we did it and why you should consider it if you're in a similar position.
GoDaddy, Media Temple, and the Horrible World of Web Hosting
There’s potential for massive profits: most customers of shared hosting and VPSes never come anywhere near their resource allocations so the machines can be extremely oversold, and most dedicated-server customers keep paying the “new” price of the server every month for years after its value has plummeted through the…
Air Gaps
Since I started working with Snowden’s documents, I have been using a number of tools to try to stay secure from the NSA. The advice I shared included using Tor, preferring certain cryptography over others, and using public-domain encryption wherever possible. I also recommended using an air gap, which physically…
Why I Dislike EC2
EC2 is great if you need per-hour billing and instance provisioning. For everyone else, which is most, it's just really expensive and slow hardware.
Apple Developer Center still down
It’s now been almost three full days. I don’t know anything about their infrastructure, but for a web service to be down this long with so little communication, most “maintenance” or migration theories become very unlikely.
DigitalOcean Sucks. Use DigitalOcean
Published: 19-11-2013 | Author: Remy van Elst | Text only version of this article
Replace Dropbox with BitTorrent Sync and a Raspberry Pi
I like to take long running notes, jotting down an idea here and there when one pops up. I never know which devices I will have with me, so I like to have these notes synced across all of them.
ZeroMQ instead of HTTP, for internal services
A post by August Lilleaas, published July 22, 2013.
Securing Ubuntu
Table of Contents Initial Setup Setting up iptables and Fail2Ban Fail2Ban iptables rules Make shared memory read-only Setting up Bastille Linux Configuring Bastille sysctl hardening Setting up a chroot environment Securing nginx inside the chroot Extras Initial Setup Let’s login to our new machine and take some…
Go for System Administrators
{% blockquote %} If I never directly touch a Go concurrency primitive, I’m convinced I’m going to write all my cli apps with it just for ease of deployment. {% endblockquote %}
What are Linux containers and how did they come about?
Today's announced collaboration between Red Hat and dotCloud , the company behind Docker, is exciting for a lot of reasons. As the release n...
Building Clojure Services at Scale
At SoundCloud I’ve been experimenting over the last year with how we build the services that power a number of heavily loaded areas across our …
Marelle: logic programming for devops
In the past, walking the uneasy borderline of academia, I used to managed compute servers for my research group. New hardware was a rare godsend, configuring it by hand was natural. At 99designs, I’ve been privy to the opposite approach: machines should be disposable. This requires the entire setup of a new machine to…
How upgrading to Google Apps for Business killed my company's email for 6 hours
Entrepreneurship, Investment, Asia, Data and Food
Things I set on new servers
There are a number of things you can do to make a server more secure whilst protecting your hosted entities and their users. Here are just three of the many things I do on every new server I commission. I hasten to add that these are not necessarily the most effective or at the top of my list - they are just that: 3…
CDN vs S3
As I said in my last post: S3 is NOT a CDN. It is an amazing Simple Storage Service, not a Simple Delivery Service. Via AWS: Amazon S3 is storage for the Internet. It is designed to make...