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Thoughts about computer technologies
Personal blog · lethalman.blogspot.comprogrammingsystems
Thoughts about computer technologies is a personal blog at lethalman.blogspot.com about programming and systems. Since 2015, 9 different Hacker News readers have linked it 11 times, most often “Cheap Docker images with Nix”. The last post was in 2024, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (8) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog for its Nix posts, especially the "nix pills" tutorial series for learning Nix and NixOS. Other comments discuss Nix against Docker for building container images.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 8 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- /2014/07/nix-pill-1-why-you-should-give-it-try.html4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2015-05-18
- Cheap Docker images with Nix3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2016-04-15
What Hacker News says?
> Sounds like this solves a similar problem to Docker. Can you comment on what the differences are, and the relative strengths and weaknesses of each approach? NixOS committer here. Docker attempts to achieve reproducibility by capturing the entire state of a system in an image file. It also attempts to conserve space by taking a layered approach to images, so when you base your Dockerfile on some base image, your r…
Comment linking /2016/04/cheap-docker-images-with-nix_15.html
on “What is Nix and why you should try it”Submitted Cheap Docker images with Nix as a story · 171 points
HN discussion> Not that: enterprises and other businesses know someone will handle their problems now and later with Red Hat, SUSE, and Ubuntu. Is there assurance of that for Nix? No. For this reason alone nothing big is about to happen. Some consulting shops might prescribe this, or may just use it internally. Other places I know its in deployment they have an employee whose a power user or contributor who probably evangelized…
Comment linking /2014/07/nix-pill-1-why-you-should-give-it-try.html
on “Infrastructure Software is Dead”Submitted NixOS, Consul, Nginx and containers as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI found this blog really helpful: http://lethalman.blogspot.com/2014/07/nix-pill-1-why-you-sho... It's a series that walks you through setting up and using nix. It found it really simple and satisfying - I now use nix on Ubuntu.
Comment linking /2014/07/nix-pill-1-why-you-should-give-it-try.html
on “Yum is dead, long live DNF”Submitted Developing in golang with Nix package manager as a story · 2 points
HN discussionOne thing they don't talk about is using non-docker tools to build images. e.g. nix: http://lethalman.blogspot.com/2016/04/cheap-docker-images-wi... or jib: https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/jib These may not fit every use case, but they can minimize the size of the image by making really precisely defined containers.
Comment linking /2016/04/cheap-docker-images-with-nix_15.html
on “Reducing Docker Image Size”> its way too hard to create new packages Perhaps it is hard to discover how to, but I was about to post here and say one of the best things about nix is how easy it is to hack and add packages. It does require a bit of learning about how it works, but once you do the whole system is quite understandable. It's also very easy to test out things locally, overriding and extending the nix package collection. It is fairl…
Comment linking /2014/07/nix-pill-1-why-you-should-give-it-try.html
on “NixOS 16.09 released”So recently the haskell package infrastructure was overhauled. This is great! But, it means that many resources are out of date. I really recommend you first read about nix with http://lethalman.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/nixpills . Once you've done that, the simple instructions at http://wiki.ocharles.org.uk/Nix should get you going. You can try to skip to the wiki page, but in the likely case something doe…
Comment linking /feeds/posts/default/-/nixpills
on “Functional Programming in Haskell by Examples”I'm a Haskell contractor who currently works with a tech stack that looks like PostgreSQL, Haskell (backend), Haskell (frontend), and Nix. Stuff gets deployed to AWS. things i hate about nix: 1. The nix language isn't haskell. It's a very spartan functional programming language. errors can be unhelpful and it is difficult to find thorough documentation. There's not much sugar and it has few abstraction facilities be…
Comment linking /2014/07/nix-pill-1-why-you-should-give-it-try.html
on “Deploying a Haskell Web Service with Nix”https://lethalman.blogspot.com/2016/04/cheap-docker-images-w...
Comment linking /2016/04/cheap-docker-images-with-nix_15.html
on “Crafting container images without Dockerfiles”