Top all-time · #8719
Amir Chaudhry
Personal blog · amirchaudhry.comprogrammingstartups
Amir Chaudhry's personal blog at amirchaudhry.com covers programming and startups. Since 2011, 9 different Hacker News readers have linked it 41 times, most often “The Bitcoin Piñata”. The last post was in 2016, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (3) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Commenters link Amir Chaudhry's posts as background to the 'Bitcoin Piñata' HN story. The comments only point to the post for context and don't assess its writing.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 3 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Amir Chaudhry's website
Most-linked posts?
- The Bitcoin Piñata5 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2015-02-10
- Unikernels for everyone2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2015-01-19
- Towards Heroku for Unikernels: Part 1 – Automated Deployment2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-03-31
What Hacker News says?
Things like Sandstorm are really important as they allow people options without becoming a full-blown sysadmin. Just look at how many crowd funding ideas are based on 'personal cloud' concepts. However, we also need to work on the fundamental problems to make it easier to build decentralised products in the first place (not everything is a web-app). Namely, how such apps are built, how they store/sync data, and how…
Comment linking /brewing-miso-to-serve-nymote/
on “Sandstorm – An open source platform for personal servers”Submitted Towards Heroku for Unikernels: Part 1 – Automated Deployment as a story · 29 points
HN discussionMirageOS is useful for creating single-purpose appliances. That fits well with how the cloud is used today (where you typically end up with one service/app per VM anyway). The autoscaling piece is only one aspect and is only in the early stages, so you shouldn't dwell on it. The overview page and the ASPLOS paper (linked upthread) and the ACM article [1] will help explain the benefits and trade-offs of the unikernel…
Comment linking /unikernels-for-everyone/
on “The Bitcoin Piñata”Submitted Towards Heroku for Unikernels: Part 2 – Self Scaling Systems as a story · 24 points
HN discussionI should also have mentioned that Mirage is a core component of the stack for distributed personal clouds. We need to have resilient, scalable infrastructure if we want to own a piece of the cloud for ourselves. http://nymote.org/blog/2013/introducing-nymote/ and http://amirchaudhry.com/brewing-miso-to-serve-nymote/
Comment linking /brewing-miso-to-serve-nymote/
on “The Bitcoin Piñata”Submitted Did Google+ Hangout just kill Skype video? as a story · 20 points
HN discussionThere's some additional context at http://amirchaudhry.com/bitcoin-pinata/
Comment linking /bitcoin-pinata/
on “The Bitcoin Piñata”Submitted Towards Heroku for Unikernels: Part 1 – Automated deployment as a story · 15 points
HN discussionHere is some context: http://amirchaudhry.com/bitcoin-pinata/
Comment linking /bitcoin-pinata/
on “The Bitcoin Piñata”Submitted Unikernels and Modularity as a story · 4 points
HN discussionAmir Chaudhry has explained the background to this in his blog post: http://amirchaudhry.com/bitcoin-pinata/
Comment linking /bitcoin-pinata/
on “The Bitcoin Piñata”Submitted The Bitcoin Piñata as a story · 4 points
HN discussion> "It's like a mechanic running around screaming at people they are using the wrong oil in their cars or a lawyer running around acting crazy about people not suing everybody." These are awful analogies. A better one might be people (a long time ago) jumping up and down telling you that smoking is linked to cancer/death. Imagine being that guy during a time when smoking was considered healthy! Now, of course, everyb…
Comment linking /brewing-miso-to-serve-nymote/
on “Get your loved ones off Facebook”Submitted Unikernels for everyone as a story · 3 points
HN discussionYes, users care about this but like most things you have to segment the market appropriately. I meet more and more people who are wary of putting all their trust/data/etc into only one provider, be that Google, Apple or anyone else. It's not just a privacy thing but a growing awareness of the sheer dependency on that one company. (Aside: I have to say FB is being pretty clever by buying up apps and letting them stay…
Comment linking /from-jekyll-to-unikernel-in-fifty-lines/
on “Amazon Cognito”Submitted Feedback requested on the OCaml.org redesign as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI think OCaml is doing pretty well for itself. For example see the graph of package-growth at [1] and the recent news from people at Facebook about Hack and Flow (both in OCaml). Not all repos are on GitHub and it's not really fair to expect them to be — especially for the sake of vanity metrics, such as this visualisation. In addition, some of the repos that have OCaml code may not be recorded as such. Repos where…
Comment linking /towards-governance-framework-for-ocamlorg/
on “GitHut – Programming Languages on GitHub”Submitted My thoughts on the Seedsummit Term Sheet as a story · 3 points
HN discussion> It's interesting, but isn't 10BTC($2500) prize too low to tell us anything about how secure is this ? No amount of prize money can ever really tell you how secure something is. We knew this before we announced it (see background at [1]). [1] http://amirchaudhry.com/bitcoin-pinata/
Comment linking /bitcoin-pinata/
on “Introducing s2n, a New Open-Source TLS Implementation”Submitted Brewing MISO to serve Nymote as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> "Is this time to admit we simply can't do manual memory management at this level and move to something else? I know the performance boost is tempting, but I think we can't afford the consequences." People have built a clean-slate TLS stack in OCaml and you can read about it on the MirageOS site [1]. There's also a Bitcoin Piñata built using this stack [2]. I'm told the performance is actually pretty good (though t…
Comment linking /bitcoin-pinata/
on “OpenSSL Security Advisory”Submitted From Jekyll site to Unikernel in fifty lines of code as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> "There's only one way to be safe. And that's to collect only minimal amounts of data for minimal apps." No. The only way to be really safe is to go live in a cave, not to have any friends and never go anywhere near any tech ever again. I'm sure you can tell that I don't consider that to be much of an option. It's unhelpful to label 'data collection' as the source of the problem as 'collection' happens everywhere i…
Comment linking /brewing-miso-to-serve-nymote/
on “Apple’s Tim Cook Delivers Blistering Speech on Encryption, Privacy”The push is that all devices will end up connected as commodity manufacturers continue to search for 'value-add' services (even if that value is dubious). In a few years, I wouldn't be surprised if 'smart TVs' were the only ones available. Security also becomes an afterthought as companies rush to get products in the market. This is mainly because the components used to build software rarely take account of security…
Comment linking /bitcoin-pinata/
on “Internet of Crappy Things”> "Is there a need for someone like me in any open source projects and if so, how do I contribute?" This is an excellent question. I doubt that anyone is going to turn you away but there are some things you should probably consider. I'm drawing this from my experience with MirageOS [1] and OCaml-related projects I've been involved with. 1. Why are you doing this? After you've figured out what you care about you shou…
Comment linking /brewing-miso-to-serve-nymote/
on “Ask HN: How do technical non-developers help with open source projects?”Not alone and I suspect there are more and more people becoming uneasy with 'the cloud' for myriad different reasons. Obvious reasons include privacy and security but there's also the ephemeral nature of such services (they can get bought/shutdown on a whim -- Apple is no stranger to cutting things that don't work for them). Also, it's not hypocritical at all to raise a concern even if you're a big user of such serv…
Comment linking /brewing-miso-to-serve-nymote/
on “Photos Preview”It's not clear to me and I don't have any experience with unikernels, so please accept my grain of salt and I apologize if I misspeak. If you're starting with MirageOS, then obviously makes sense to just run MirageOS a bare-metal hypervisor. But if you're starting with the assumption that you will be running in a JS VM, then you have two options: build a unikernel in JS, or compile one to JS. The later option (Mirag…
Comment linking /bitcoin-pinata/
on “Runtime.js – JavaScript library OS”If we want to do this in a way where everyone can run their own infrastructure then we've got to tackle some of the distributed systems problems. Specifically, life-cycle management of software/apps, how things sync/backup, and issues of identity and connectivity. One method is to take a clean-slate approach and build up a new stack (with its own trade-offs) e.g. Using unikernels as a base http://amirchaudhry.com/br…
Comment linking /brewing-miso-to-serve-nymote/
on “OwnCloud Server 8.0”You don't always require a shell if all you need is info about the system. Such a logging process can easily be compiled into the application and that data regularly pushed elsewhere. If you need to change what's being logged then adjust the code and recompile/deploy a new Unikernel. I have a version of my website being compiled as a Unikernel and the workflow is very simple [1]. My point is that the whole workflow…
Comment linking /from-jekyll-to-unikernel-in-fifty-lines/
on “MirageOS: A Unikernel For The Xen Hypervisor”Those interested in immutable data-structures might like to look into Irmin [1], git-like distributed storage (due to be released soon). It's also part of a larger stack [2]. [1] http://openmirage.org/blog/introducing-irmin -- prev discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8053687 [2] http://amirchaudhry.com/brewing-miso-to-serve-nymote/
Comment linking /brewing-miso-to-serve-nymote/
on “Immutability Changes Everything [pdf]”
