Very cool! I'll definitely check this out for auto-research like experiments, esp. with GPUs
Yes, it's ideal for this!
Show HN: machine0 – Persistent NixOS VMs You Control from the CLI
31–40 of 40 posts
Re: Show HN: machine0 – Persistent NixOS VMs You Control from the CLI
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks! Yup, one of the benefits of defining your VMs as code using Nix, is that you can take that code to any supplier, and you're guaranteed exactly the same build.
Come join us at https://tacosprint.org/ We have more availability! (Also sponsor maybe )
Seems application deadline ended a month ago?
Re: Show HN: machine0 – Persistent NixOS VMs You Control from the CLI
#33> Every VM gets its own static IP
How does this interact with per-minute pricing?
If I have a machine that's on for 1 minute per month, do I retain an IPv4 address for the whole month?
Or is it IPv6-only?
I recall exe.dev addressed this by not having static IPs, and instead only allowing SNI/SSH proxying to hosts.
Re: Show HN: machine0 – Persistent NixOS VMs You Control from the CLI
#34I'm happy to see this, and I have lots of thoughts about this. Building declarative services on Nix is a far superior way of distributing Linux to VMs than most any other way I've tried. I am working [1] on very similar things, but I've been leaning more on the self-hosted path, my VM template targets libvirt and Proxmox VE with a single CLI api. I even have an experimental branch that targets DigitalOcean. For VMs e…
I tried out NixOS a few years ago but recently transitioned back to Rocky Linux and Ansible. I know that Nix is treasured by some but it always came across as an esoteric tool for functional programming idealists. I found the community to be split between people who were genuinely helpful and people who were just... not. I found Nix just really hard to work with. The documentation was just so poor and every aspect of…
I do think the community recognizes this to be an issue and is steadily working on improving beginner-friendly docs. I am about seven years into using Nix for various things, and can mostly solve most problems, but I won’t deny that the learning curve at the beginning was brutal. The real and most meaningful unlock is learning to read the nix language well enough to follow what is happening, then checking out nixpkgs locally to look at crate derivations and such to understand what idioms exist in “real code.” The module system also took ages to click for me, but was a big unlock.
Anyway, I hope the community continues to make the onboarding process more welcoming and easy. Personally, I am hopeful that guix will really take off at some point, because even though I get it now, I’d way rather read lisp than nix.
Re: Show HN: machine0 – Persistent NixOS VMs You Control from the CLI
#35> Every VM gets its own static IP How does this interact with per-minute pricing? If I have a machine that's on for 1 minute per month, do I retain an IPv4 address for the whole month? Or is it IPv6-only? I recall exe.dev addressed this by not having static IPs, and instead only allowing SNI/SSH proxying to hosts.
You retain the IP as long as you keep the VM. If you delete it, you'll loose the IP.
Re: Show HN: machine0 – Persistent NixOS VMs You Control from the CLI
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Come join us at https://tacosprint.org/ We have more availability! (Also sponsor maybe )
Seems application deadline ended a month ago?
You can still apply. People dropped out.
Reach out to me if you want. My email is in my website (see profile).
We leave Saturday to hack on Nix !
Re: Show HN: machine0 – Persistent NixOS VMs You Control from the CLI
#37This looks really good. NixOS is a great operating system for reproducibility. I like also that you can spin up VMs via the CLI just as a convenience part too. This looks great for an individual developer. From the team perspective, if I create a golden snapshot of a dev env, is there a way within the product to sharae the image with others so they can spin it up instantly?
Re: Show HN: machine0 – Persistent NixOS VMs You Control from the CLI
#38Excellent idea. Is there a nixpkg available for it?
Re: Show HN: machine0 – Persistent NixOS VMs You Control from the CLI
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
I tried out NixOS a few years ago but recently transitioned back to Rocky Linux and Ansible. I know that Nix is treasured by some but it always came across as an esoteric tool for functional programming idealists. I found the community to be split between people who were genuinely helpful and people who were just... not. I found Nix just really hard to work with. The documentation was just so poor and every aspect of…
Yea, I totally get it. The thing is agents change the game. You no longer need to worry about the learning curve or how best to implement. Just point your agent at a machine0 VM and say "make a machine that does X", then you get code you can use to build on any nix box and you'll always get the same result. Once you experience this, it's hard to go back to a "traditional" OS, you'll want to nixify everything :)
I could say the same about Atomic distros and reproducible builds. Nix no longer has an exclusivity here. I find Ansible w/ Alma 10 Atomic (there's an rpm-ostree driver, cargo, pipx, etc.) gets the job done with less tokens, and less cognitive load on my team, that already doesn't want to work on configuration. Does Ansible have perfection? No, but neither does posix. Papering over this bump with a perfect abstraction isn't as useful in our imperfect world.
All that being said, I'm glad people like you are pushing Nix forward. Competition here is a good thing.
Re: Show HN: machine0 – Persistent NixOS VMs You Control from the CLI
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yea, I totally get it. The thing is agents change the game. You no longer need to worry about the learning curve or how best to implement. Just point your agent at a machine0 VM and say "make a machine that does X", then you get code you can use to build on any nix box and you'll always get the same result. Once you experience this, it's hard to go back to a "traditional" OS, you'll want to nixify everything :)
I could say the same about Atomic distros and reproducible builds. Nix no longer has an exclusivity here. I find Ansible w/ Alma 10 Atomic (there's an rpm-ostree driver, cargo, pipx, etc.) gets the job done with less tokens, and less cognitive load on my team, that already doesn't want to work on configuration. Does Ansible have perfection? No, but neither does posix. Papering over this bump with a perfect abstractio…
Ansible is a different tool than Nix. It's been specifically designed to fit your exact use case. If ansible works for you and your team, there's no reason to drop it.
I've never had a moment using nix where I've felt "wow I couldn't do this with any other tool". That's not really the benefit of nix. The benefit is the flexibility of the idea and the tooling.
It's a flexible enough platform where I can use one config to manage 5+ computers in my house with various operating systems. I can use it to easily setup all my dependencies for my work projects. I can use it to build my work projects. I can use it to create vms to test those projects on. I can use it to build 3rd party projects without any instruction.
All that required was a few months of pain learning the fundamentals of nix and I've received the rest for free pretty much. It's the epitome of upfront work for long lasting benefit in my opinion.