https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We try not to delete entire account histories because that would gut the threads the account had participated in. However, we care about protecting individual users and take care of privacy requests every day, so if we can help, please email [email protected]. We don't want anyone to get in trouble from anything they posted to HN. More here <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23623799>.

<https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html>

completely fair game to shortcut an outdated hostile process with your own hostility, not really an unexpected result (e.g.: web scraping VS using an inaccessible API). it's an unacceptable approach in a modern context.

The process is not, by any reasonable interpretation, "drawn out".

Anyone from HN saying I did not make a formal request is lying! Delete my data at once!

Edit: look ma! I’ve been unbanned! Listen HN mods. I’m cool with a ban. Just delete my data first.

Edit 2: (looks like I’m kinda banned again IDK) Lol. Please delete all my comments, posts and account dang. I don’t want to be here anymore and I feel trapped. Please just delete my data. Please!!!

There are a few circumstances which might suggest hesitancy, e.g., has your account been compromised and the person requesting deletion isn't the original owner? But barring that, if you're requesting deleting your content, and you're clearly exercised over it, HN should delete your content.

An alternative might be to rename the account to something that's not traceable to you, though how effective that is will depend on what you've included in earlier comments or posts, and whether or not that's archived somewhere. (I don't know what or if you have done this, I do note that your account dates to 2011.)

I'm aware that accounts get renamed. I've run across a few instances, most recently through my front-page activity analysis. IIRC there are some glitches, possibly with Algolia still referring to the old name, or the old name showing up othewise in some archives.

I also strongly suspect there's an independent (and immutable, or at least more durable) userID value that's not the semantic name, which is kept internally to HN, and isn't publicly exposed (at least not that I've found).

All of this took a single email every time.

I don't know what "Hacker News does not allow users to delete comments"-person wants or what they did or didn't ask at hn@, but it's completely valid to NOT nuke entire threads just because one person has a hissy fit. Reading old Reddit threads (and sometimes even recent Reddit threads) can be a real pain because of this. If they want their content anonymized or their account disabled they can do that easily, if they want some specific post altered or removed then I'm sure Dan will be accommodating.

The posts were almost all flagkilled by users, which is a strong community reaction.

You can't go on contributing in that setting.

Their account was made in 2011... Did they just create it back then, and come back to it now to spam?

No, I say that when the account appears to have been created for that purpose, or if there's reason to believe that the same user is creating multiple accounts to abuse HN. I might have just gotten this wrong in this case. Thanks!

You can see more on our approach here: https://www.systeminit.com/open-source/

Let me preface this by saying - if this works well enough to give devs confidence in the tool, this could be revolutionary. It would combine implementation, documentation, visuals and deployment into a single view simple enough for everyday devs to grok.

I couldn't find any documentation - if there is, that answers these questions, please link me to them.

1. How does authentication work? Is it handled by the tool?

2. Can it support non-AWS resources, such as Grafana?

3. How does version control work? Can you review changes, roll back, etc?

4. In the demo on the main site, the security group was not attached to any VPC, what's going on there?

5. Does this remain maintainable when dealing with very large configurations, for example, a multi-account AWS setup with tens of thousands of resources. If so, what mechanisms are available in this tool to facilitate this maintainability?

Thank you

1. Authentication works through Auth0. We're building towards multiple deployment models, where your account works across all of them. That said, it's all open source, so if Auth0 doesn't work for someone, we're happy to make it pluggable.

2. You can model anything you like. Under the hood it's a hypergraph of Typescript functions - so you would model Grafana, and then make calls to its API when actions are needed.

3. It's built in to the model via change-sets. As you do change the model, we show you whats changed, and what actions we would take. The design is heading toward letting you have comprehensive reviews based on which portions of the entire model are impacted. Roll-backs aren't really a thing in infrastructure land, but you can see old versions of the model and decide you want that to be the current one.

4. We model the upstream 1:1 - so that configuration uses the default VPC in the AWS account (which has likely been deleted if you use Terraform, for example.)

5. It's too early to have very large configurations yet. But there are techniques we can borrow from other domains - nesting, for example, or layers. We're working on the fundamentals first, and then we will deal with scale.

Great questions!

One of the great things about it is that our CI system uses BXL to automatically generate pipelines on the fly from impacted code, taking into account dependencies. So things generally move as quickly as possible through the system.

It's been real work to adopt, but the upside for us has been worth it.

It might be adopted by people who already do ClickOps or aren't comfortable with the CLI, but I'm not sure about the rest of us. Looking forward to seeing how it progresses.

Personally, as an infrastructure engineer, I still prefer CLI and everything as (text) code. But I'm open to change if this "second wave" could take off.

The problem isn't that everything should be text, it's that there are no tools out there that work with other content types. Semantic diff tools would be incredible honestly, and text is a poor representation of code. It's just the best we have right now

If you shift to an application developers perspective, and zoom out a level most medium/large org still require interaction with multiple teams to spin up an application. Testing and deploying this stack end to end is expensive and time consuming.

I’m not sure what the optimal solution looks like, but certainly open to tools that force us to think more about building interfaces around infra components and wire it together without navigating PRs in a dozen different repos. PR should be the process to create a new version of a component, but not an API for users requesting an instance of that component.

IME crossplane has been a "much better terraform" and also borrows from some of tf's open source provider code. Seems to be one of the best IaC pattern for k8s centric shops.

Pros: - adoption of k8s core engine, state mgmt

- model everything as a CRD, consistent definition pattern both infra and app

- open source

- great UI when layered with argoCD

- declarative

Cons:

- steep abstraction learning curve (for me anyway)

- docs lacked key context for newbs (also getting way better, big efforts here)

edit: formatting

Of course today it's early - so you have to look at what we're building as a foundation for the future. But it's a solid foundation to build on!

Did that die? Is that not even what crossplane is? Once again, I'm 6 clicks deep and havent seen a single actionable example. I wish I could get inside some people's heads and wonder wtf theyre thinking when marketing this stuff.

Edit. Wow OSB and Service Catalog are dead. Is there a obituary?

Based on the terse reply to my question, it seems they really want you to create an account and go through their onboarding tutorial after agreeing to an absolute telephone book sized ToS. Hell, it's possible I'm violating one of the paragraphs by even talking about the process. I appreciate that's likely not what you had in mind, but it seems to be what they have in mind

I'm impressed.

My understanding of the setup was that this would be typescript code that would live in the database (could have definitely got that wrong, though).

That signaled to me that this was going to be "company data" and proprietary.