GitLab Master Plan - <AUTHOR> https://about.gitlab.com/2016/09/13/gitlab-master-plan/ <comment><USER3> It's interesting to me how much effort is being spent on adding tools like issue tracking, build pipelines, deploy management, etc. vs just providing good hooks for standalone tools that do all those things.

We have discussions about Jenkins vs Concourse, where to keep ansible vault passwords, should documentation live in Github wiki or in Confluence (apparently "tech" documentation in the form, "business" documentation in the latter - what if it's both? Who decides?), and so on.

There is something nice about being able to go to a single place and saying "OK, it's all here in this box". Github has made inroads with some of this stuff, but not quite enough. Gitlab could try and do all this, but then people will moan ("I prefer JIRA/Trello/whatever").

Most of the pain around developer/business workflow around us at the moment actually comes down to the fact that nobody has _really_ thought about providing a great unified UX for all of this.

Part of the concern is people want to be "flexible". No, dictate, just make sure what you dictate is a better solution to what people have.

If GitLab get it right, github could be a minor player (unless they keep up) in a few years time.

<comment><USER4> > nobody has _really_ thought about providing a great unified UX for all of > this.

Isn't the Stash-Jira-Bamboo-Confluence stack a unified UX for doing all of this (source control, pull requests, deployment, docs, issue tracker, build pipeline, etc)?

It may not be a _great_ UX, but can we at least give Atlassian credit from probably having _thought about_ it having a great UX?

<comment><USER5> That's funny, because you're right, and Atlassian has an enormous head start. And it's hard to explain why I like GitLab so much more.

I used the entire Atlassian suite for 3 years at my first web development gig, when I started over 7 years ago. I just have all these memories of things being ugly, slow, and hard to customize. Although I had a mostly positive experience with Confluence. Bamboo was just not nice to use. BitBucket does most of the same things, but it just didn't feel nice to use. Maybe it's the UI, or the dark blue theme. Maybe it's purely psychological, like GitHub was the place where all the cool developers hang out, and BitBucket is the corporate nerd who just wants to fit in so they give away all their private repos for free. So I dumped my private, personal stuff on BitBucket, until GitLab came along.

And honestly, up until the last few months, I actually really disliked GitLab. I kind of saw them as just rip-offs who were blatantly copying GitHub, and stealing their customers. But then I realized that GitHub hasn't really done anything interesting for years and years, while GitLab is working on all these awesome features and integrating things that GitHub should have been doing years ago. So now my opinion is that GitHub had their chance, and they blew. GitLab is the new cool place to host your code.

<comment><USER6> > And it's hard to explain why I like GitLab so much more.

In my case having the Atlassian all tools look the same seems to have backfired; every time I go to BitBucket it makes me think of Jira, which makes me cringe and wish I were on a different web site.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> We are currently on Github and are using CoreOS' Quay.io private Docker registry with Github hooks for automated build creation. Total cost: $50/month for Github for private repos, and $100/month for CoreOS' managed service that includes Quay.io.

Years ago, I did set up our own private Docker registry and build server, but it was a lot of work to setup and maintain, so I killed it. Hopefully and probably, that's become easier to do today.

However, last night, I decided that I had had enough with our current setup (it's slow, expensive, and cumbersome), and moved to GitLab. Here were the steps:

1\. Create an account.

2\. Create a repository, and select the option to import from Github.

3\. Connect my Github account, and import all of our private repositories.

4\. Ensure Container Registry was enabled for the repositories.

5\. Create a .gitlab-ci.yaml file in each repository to build our Docker images. ([https://docs.gitlab.com/ce/ci/docker/using_docker_build.html](https://docs.gitlab.com/ce/ci/docker/using_docker_build.html))

6\. Decide that I didn't want to use the Shared Runners.

7\. Spin up an EC2 Ubuntu instance, install GitLab's multi-runner. ([https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ci-multi- runner/blob/ma...](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ci-multi- runner/blob/master/docs/install/linux-repository.md))

8\. Add the new runner to each repo.

9\. Start a build to ensure Docker image gets built.

In less than 10 steps, I was able to migrate all of our code and CI to GitLab, in less than 2 hours. With the repository mirroring, Github can remain synced to GitLab, so that I have time to modify our deployment scripts to use the GitLab URLs instead. I'll be cancelling our GitHub and CoreOS subscriptions this week.

As our team grows, we will likely host GitLab on our own servers, and I expect that will go smoothly. I'll be happy to pay them at that time. Right now, I'm really happy with this migration.

<comment><USER8> I've pretty much done all the steps you've listed. My problem now is how to get those build docker images onto servers somewhere.

What services are people using for that?

<comment><USER9> You can also deploy from GitLab, see [https://about.gitlab.com/2016/08/26/ci- deployment-and-enviro...](https://about.gitlab.com/2016/08/26/ci-deployment- and-environments/) for an introduction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Right now, Gerrit and Phabricator give an almost unrivalled code review experience - the ability to queue multiple comments up and submit them at once, mark previous things as fixed, keep track of a patch as it evolves along with the comments that were made against it. However the Github/Gitlab PR flow is easier for most occasional contributors.

My question to Gitlabbers following this thread: do you have anything in the works for improving code review to better match some of the use cases which are handled so well by the Gerrit/Phabricator approach?

<comment><USER11> Phabricator is a really solid GitHub alternative. Some of the largest open source projects are using it and lots of companies.

I believe that the GitHub pull request workflow and issue tracker does not scale to large projects and very much prefer Gerrit/Phabricator. Phabricator was created at Facebook for a large development team (mobile apps) and it shows. They have solutions for issues which only appear at scale (code ownership in monorepos, for example - the owners/herald mechanism). It's also very performant, has almost no dependencies and is extremely easy to deploy.

GitLab is a great GitHub alternative, but it's also copying its flaws.

Great writeup here: (not mine)

[http://cramer.io/2014/05/03/on-pull-requests](http://cramer.io/2014/05/03/on- pull-requests)

HN discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7697132](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7697132)

Good quote from that discussion:

> As far as code reviews go, this is pretty spot on. I was part of a a startup > that was using GitHub pull requests for code reviews. As the team grew, it > became more and more intractable, although not simply because of > notifications. Side-by-side diffs and checkpointed diffs (so that you can > see what changed since the last round of review and whether/how your > comments were addressed) are handled very poorly by GitHub. We ultimately > switched to Phabricator, and while there was a little friction as folks got > acquainted with the new tool, it made code reviews a much more pleasant > process. Recently, I had to go through a full code review back on GH pull > requests, and it felt like pulling teeth in comparison. They're fine for > interacting with contributors to an open source project, but compared to > working with a tool like Phabricator that's built for a code reviewer's > workflow (and for teams of engineers working together on a project), they > just don't hold a candle, in my opinion.

<comment><USER12> We have many requests to improve our code review and make it more like Phabricator and Gerrit.

We want to strike a balance between light-weight and powerful, but fully intend to give you all the power of a Phabricator or Gerrit in GitLab. We're working on several [0] initiatives towards this goal.

If you are interested in seeing these improvements in GitLab, please let us know what is important and what we're not seeing!

[0]: [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab- ce/issues/19049](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/19049)

<comment><USER11> I'm not a GitHub user myself, only have experience with GitHub. The article I linked outlined it very well.

Essentially, what I need is code ownership (like Phabricator's "Owner" feature or Chromium's OWNER file: [https://www.chromium.org/developers/owners- files](https://www.chromium.org/developers/owners-files)) and essentially what's outlined in the article I linked (diffs instead of heavyweight merge requests).

<comment><USER9> Interesting, I created [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab- ce/issues/22141](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/22141) to discuss.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> We (NVIDIA) recently moved away from Quay/Github/Jenkins to Gitlab for our deep learning automation and the experience so far has been truly amazing. We were able to automate our most complex DL container pipeline in a matter of days. We still have to workaround some Gitlab limitations (e.g. issues [CE]17069, [CE]18994, [CE]18106, [EE]224) but overall it's great to see everything working in harmony (i.e. Docker registry, CI pipelines, Git repositories, Runners on-premises). On a personal note, I would like to see more storage on Githost.io instances considering the fact that you can't easily delete pipeline traces and that Docker images can quickly add up.

<comment><USER9> Thank you so much for commenting. It is great to hear that the deep learning automation department of Nvidia is using GitLab and is happy with everything working in harmony.

Regarding your suggestions:

I asked to prioritize [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab- ce/issues/17069](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/17069)

We're already actively discussing [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab- ce/issues/18994](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/18994)

Not sure about [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab- ce/issues/18106](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/18106)

[https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab- ee/issues/224](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/224) looks interesting

Please comment in the issues if you have additional details about the use case or questions.

The costs of GitHost.io correlate with the storage since they are Digital Ocean instances. Not sure how to solve. Maybe by allowing to use their networked storage, but this seems complex. Consider emailing email@example.com if you have any questions or suggestions.

<comment><USER14> You can also switch your container registry to use S3, which might be more cost-effective. I'm not positive if GitHost.io supports that, but it likely does.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> We use heavily gitlab-CE for VideoLAN (VLC, x264) on our hosted infra, and so far we're very happy about it.

The only part blocking us from moving completely to gitlab and deprecate everything else is mostly the limited issues tracker (compared to trac, for example).

<comment><USER16> Great to hear you're happy with GitLab CE. What features do you need in issue tracker that we don't currently have? Would love to learn more.

<comment><USER15> Well, mostly, I believe we need support for custom fields, so we have for each ticket, the Platform, Component, Branch, Type, etc. And those fields can be queried or made mandatory.

You can get then queries like: [https://trac.videolan.org/vlc/query?status=assigned&status=n...](https://trac.videolan.org/vlc/query?status=assigned&status=new&status=reopened&component=!Bindings%3A+LibVLC+%28native+API%29&component=!Web+plugin%3A+Mozilla&summary=~asf&summary=~wmv&summary=~wma&summary=~mms&group=component&col=id&col=summary&col=component&col=status&col=type&col=priority&col=milestone&report=32&order=component)

And no, tags are not enough.

<comment><USER12> We have a few requests for custom fields [0], but we're worried with the complexity that it adds to the application.

We might start to look into this again after we've shipped better issue filtering, so that custom fields can actually be used effectively. [1]

[0]: [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab- ce/issues/8988](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/8988)

[1]: [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab- ce/issues/21993](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/21993)

<comment><USER15> > We have a few requests for custom fields [0], but we're worried with the > complexity that it adds to the application.

I'm not surprised, but for us, it's mandatory to replace trac (or bugzilla)

<comment><USER17> If you could chime in on one of those threads with your use-case and a mention of the VLC project it may help get the ball rolling a bit faster :)

Even better if you have examples of useful fields you've used!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Just a few years ago I was in love with Github and felt nothing could ever displace it. But as time went on, they just fell asleep at the wheel. I've been using Gitlab for the last six months and there is no chance I would ever go back to being a paying customer of Github. I'm so glad to hear GitLab raised more money to keep going!

<comment><USER19> Using both, I notice GitHub _has_ moved, but GitLab has moved in _precisely_ the direction we need internally, especially the latest release.

<comment><USER12> Great to hear! What exactly did we do well? What can be better?

<comment><USER20> As a customer, I love the integrated CI and how easily I can now run tests for each commit and show pass/fail and coverage information right on the commit. We used to use Stash and Jenkins, but it was pretty hard to get the integration to work reliably.

Another thing I love is the gitlab-runner, which lets me spin up a machine and have another server to run tests on.

What I really don't love is how limited issues feel compared to JIRA. Namely, the following workflow is so hard it might as well be impossible:

* Issue gets opened by a user/assigned to a developer. * Developer has a view that's only issues that they haven't worked on or that they're working on. * After the issue has been worked on, the developer can assign it back to QA. * QA retests and closes.

This was very well served with JIRA's open -> in progress -> resolved -> closed pipeline, as well as with the views that could filter things like "show me issues assigned to me or nobody, that are not resolved or closed, ordered by priority".

We tried to do something similar with labels and the board, but it's really inconvenient, because we can't filter for "show me issues that are NOT <something>". We used a "new" label instead, but the board doesn't know that "new" is the backlog and that that label should be removed when the issue moves out of the former.

In general, we've been having problems with issues, although the milestone view is pretty fantastic.

<comment><USER12> Thanks for the awesome comment and details.

> show me issues assigned to me or nobody, that are not resolved or closed, > ordered by priority

Right now, GitLab orders by priority out of the box on the board. You can filter for yourself or assigned to nobody. Not both, but we're working on improving the filters (including the option to do "NOT X OR Y". [0]

> We used a "new" label instead, but the board doesn't know that "new" is the > backlog and that that label should be removed when the issue moves out of > the former.

Just create a list with the 'new' label and you should be good, right?

We're thinking about having different types of lists in Boards, such as 'Milestone boards' and 'Status boards'. Something like that could solve some of your requests as well.

[0]: [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab- ce/issues/21993](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/21993)

<comment><USER20> > Just create a list with the 'new' label and you should be good, right?

Yes, but then you have a "backlog" and a "new" list, which are no different, and yet distinct :/

> Not both, but we're working on improving the filters (including the option > to do "NOT X OR Y". [0]

That's fantastic, logical operators would be a great feature.

> We're thinking about having different types of lists in Boards, such as > 'Milestone boards' and 'Status boards'. Something like that could solve some > of your requests as well.

I think that, if you have powerful filtering functionality, then everything could just be a filter. E.g. a board would be a list of filters with two actions or an associated label (i.e. "show me all issues that are X AND Y (OR NOT Z)", and assign label B when an issue is added here and unassign it when removed). Issue lists could similarly just be a filter view ("show me the issues with assignee=me or assignee=none and status=new or not status=closed"), etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Honestly, installing and maintaining GitLab is still not a pleasure. The Omnibus package was too unsafe for us because we wanted greater control about versions and stuff; and the bundled pre-configured applications in it (e.g. nginx) cause a lot of problems with existing installations.

We were basically not able to create a stable deployment on a machine also running other services. But none of use really likes Ruby and rvm, maybe that's also one of the reasons why we struggled.

<comment><USER12> I'd love for you to explain your motives behind not using Omnibus further.

Nowadays we provide images / containers for most major platforms, so there should definitely be a good solution for you there.

That said, we make the Omnibus packages as that's the easiest and best way to maintain GitLab. It takes all the work away from you. The vast majority of our customers use Omnibus, even secure instances with thousands of developers.

<comment><USER22> Not OP, but I dislike many things about your omnibus packages. I hate packages that install into /opt (thanks for the extra tld). I hate that it's 900+MB of completely redundant junk—nginx? check, postgres, check, and entire ruby? git? curl? _All_ of those are on my system already.

That said, I switched to it after maintaining a hand installed version and I love how I don't have to run rails schema upgrades by hand any more. I used to put off upgrading gitlab for months because it was such a pain and now I don't have to think about it at all. Rails devs could learn a lot from php devs in that regard (upgrading wordpress is absolutely trivial to upgrading gitlab).

So yeah, I love the omnibus package since it means I don't have to think about it any more; I hate the omnibus package because it's a huge redundant monolith and pure crap from the point of view of a Debian package purist.

<comment><USER23> Debian stretch will have a native GitLab package. [https://packages.debian.org/stretch/gitlab](https://packages.debian.org/stretch/gitlab)

Whether there are enough volunteers to keep it and its dependencies up to date using backports remains to be seen, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Conclusion from reading: Gitlab is just another open-source company that raised money and is now desperate to monetize it's products.

Unfortunately for them. The market is already saturated with CI tools, including good ones.

\- If you want good self-hosted CI, you use teamcity (jetbrains) or bamboo (atlassian). Side note: They cost money, you get what you pay for.

\- If you want good SaaS CI, you use travis-ci (linux), circle-ci (linux) or appveyor (windows).

\- If you want to suffer endlessly, you use Jenkins (previously hudson). It's shit, it has a Bad UI, it's an aggregation of poorly maintained plugins, it lack even the most simple features, the list goes on...

\- If you want to go exotic, you can find dozens of other [partial] CI tools.

There is no room for gitlab. Teamcity already has a free edition offering 20 projects and 3 slaves. All the aforementioned tools are free for open-source projects.

Disclaimer: I have used all the tools mentioned above.

\-----

The reason the good tools are not popular is:

1) they cost money and people are bitches when it comes to spending even $10

2) most people start with the old well-known shitty tools and then they're locked in... and the efforts required to move away just increase over time (sadly, nobody got fired for choosing Jenkins in the first place :( )

<comment><USER25> > There is no room for gitlab. Teamcity already has a free edition offering 20 > projects and 3 slaves.

GitLab offers unlimited private projects, and unlimited runners for CI right now.

<comment><USER24> I find that worrying for the future of Gitlab.

It's really hard to charge money, especially against a truckload of both free AND paid tools which do the job.

They decided to NOT charge money on the number of projects or the number of runners. They've made a product with no incentive whatsoever to pay for it.

We could say it's great, we get get another free tool! but how are they going to make this work on the long term?

They have no business model and the investor funds will eventually run out at some point. Then, we'll be left with another free open source abandoned projects, just like jenkins?

<comment><USER26> Their business model is the enterprise edition which comes with better support and newer "enterprisey" features first. It seems to be doing really well given their comments here. Gitlab.com is a loss leader to get their potential users excited about gitlab so they convince the potential buyers to pay for it.

<comment><USER27> "enterprisey".

Perhaps I'm in the minority but I have actually setup my home system to use SSO (backed via LDAP).

It annoys me no end that all these services seem to think that charging to maintain my userbase is a way to get me to think they care.

What it means is it invariably the SSO support is barely tested and poorly documented. For a number of products, I've tried out the "enterprise" version and realised that their features (e.g. SSO, audit, etc.) are just not useful.

Largely because there are not enough people looking at the thing or attempting to use it.

<comment><USER9> I think you'll be happy to hear that LDAP SSO is part of GitLab Community Edition (CE). It is well tested and used by more than 10k organizations. For more information please see [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab- ce/blob/master/doc/admi...](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab- ce/blob/master/doc/administration/auth/ldap.md)

Please note that LDAP group sync is part of Enterprise Edition, but I assume your home system doesn't need that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Congrats guys! I'm curious if you are going to change directions in technology - ruby is fairly unsuited for on-premise deployment.

Before I get flamed, of course you guys have made a great build and deployment system... but nothing can beat a " java -jar start.jar" or "./golang" . And I think it comes a fair bit of performance for free.

Wonder what are your thoughts around that ? I keep thinking that Gitlab could be the "killer app" for a new fangled java framework like SparkJava or something.

<comment><USER29> Ruby, compared to some compiled languages, is indeed harder to ship, which is why we've got the gitlab-omnibus package.[1] Thanks to our packaging team the install and getting GitLab up and running shouldn't take over 10 minutes. Maybe not as easy as compile and run like Go offers, but I urge you to try it, it is really simple.

Now, we use more and more Go within GitLab. For example, gitlab-workhorse[2] and the gitlab runner[3] are written in it. But converting our main app, gitlab-ce and gitlab-ee, to another framework and language would makes us unable to ship new features for at least a year. Even when we would gradually rewrite this would hurt our ability to consistently ship new great features.

Also, please don't forget that Ruby and Ruby on Rails are very mature, stable, and so far have served us very well and I expect it will for the next years.

We might, as we've been doing for some time, let workhorse handle more compute expensive operations, but again, other than that I don't see it happening any time soon.

[1] [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/omnibus-gitlab](https://gitlab.com/gitlab- org/omnibus-gitlab) [2] [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab- workhorse](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-workhorse) [3] [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ci-multi- runner](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ci-multi-runner)

<comment><USER30> > converting our main app, gitlab-ce and gitlab-ee, to another framework and > language would makes us unable to ship new features for at least a year

This would be quite a good argument for not tying oneself so deeply to a particular framework.

<comment><USER31> What?

How would a transition to go be easier if they had used ruby without rails?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> We would seriously consider GitLab if they supported Mercurial. I am so annoyed with atlassian (another company that perhaps could pay attention more to developers). I like git for OSS but we love hg for our internal projects.

<comment><USER12> It would severely hurt our velocity if we'd decided to support Mercurial, whilst the benefit is only for a small group of potential users. We're not planning to support hg.

Would a migration tool or something similar help?

<comment><USER33> A git migration tool would be terrific: I'm on a svn project with a 20Gb history, 3Gb working copy, with TONS of versioned binary assets. The migration story to git is a nightmare with lots of different tools and utilities that reportedly do some part of the migration, but don't play well together.

I'd like to see a _simple_ conversion tool that lets me configure everything (branch filters, user conversion, wildcards for what assets must go to LFS) that lets me convert a repo in TFS/SVN/HG into git _with_ LFS.

The key here is integrated LFS. Without it, git is a complete no go for any shops that does lots of large versioned binaries. Git+LFS still seems like black magic to me, so it would be nice to see someone make a friendlier front for it.

<comment><USER34> > Without it, git is a complete no go for any shops that does lots of large > versioned binaries.

Git is source control. It's for versioning source, not binaries. Built dependencies or artifacts or whatever else should be stored somewhere else like FTP.

<comment><USER35> For some of us, binaries _are_ source. For example, anyone developing in Unity or Unreal Engine has large binary files that represent the game levels, blueprints, and other assets. These aren't generated files, logically they are source code that should be versioned along with the textual source code.

(Tip for Unity users: The very first thing to do when you start a project is to go into the project settings and change it to Text Assets. That way the scene files and such will be text instead of binary. It's still a fairly opaque YAML format, but at least they will be more diffable.)

<comment><USER36> For every legitimate use of binaries in source control there are dozens of idiots checking in build artifacts.

<comment><USER33> Build artifacts aren't necessary to bring over to git in a conversion from hg/svn. I archive installers and other artifacts in svn, but if I moved to git I'd just archive those somewhere else. The binaries that are actually part of the build (a few binary dependencies, lots of graphics, test in/out data etc) must be next to the source however because those are needed to reproduce a build.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Maybe I just haven't been following the news, but since when does Y Combinator do Series B rounds? I thought they (you?) were exclusively seed funders.

<comment><USER38> YC Continuity invests later-stage money: [https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc- continuity-fund](https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-continuity-fund)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I've been using the GitLab Community Edition for about ~1 yr. It's an amazing experience so far. Even the upgrade is really simple (just a apt-get upgrade!). Best of luck to you guys.

<comment><USER16> Thank you! Happy you're enjoying GitLab CE

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> GitLab has made a lot of great inroads and will continue to do so. It's all about momentum. Of course people are going the tools that are familar to themselves. However as more and more start to adopt GitLab (probably as a github replacement or small personal projects), they are going to ask for that more in the corporate world.

It's also a matter of developing the maturity of the integrated tools. CI for a example. Does jenkins have a shit load more features? Yes. Does Jenkins do scheduled tasks? Yes. But jenkins is also a massive ugly, unwieldy behemoth. Some issues like the Cronjob portion can be worked around in GitLab (webcron to build trigger APIs) but it's not as nice... yet. The CI feature is barely an infant compared to the age of Jenkins. However for 90% of what I need? Works great. Well worth it to me.

Every month they've been releasing improvements on numerous fronts and it's been amazing to see. The product has gone from "eh" to "wow" in about a year. I look forward to seeing if they can sustain this product growth (I'm guessing the 20mil will help).

</comment><comment><USER41> Congrats on the funding! Please hire (and learn to take seriously) a design team.

<comment><USER42> We actually do employ several UX designers at the moment (see [https://about.gitlab.com/team](https://about.gitlab.com/team)).

<comment><USER31> You could spike their creativity with this simple command:

sudo echo "127.0.0.1 github.com" >> /etc/hosts

<comment><USER43> I think you mean:

echo "127.0.0.1 github.com" | sudo tee -a /etc/hosts > /dev/null

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I realized recently that gitlab offers github based auth and i've been using it host my private repos.

I also use it at work and really like having the ci system built in.

<comment><USER16> Thanks! GitLab CI is getting better and better. Let us know if you have any feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> A few years ago I tried really, really hard to get an interview at GitHub, because I had the same vision and wanted to see them expand into new products like CI, and all the stuff that Gitlab is doing now.

Why has GitHub been so stagnant, even though they have so many employees?

<comment><USER17> If you're still interested in working on these things there are lots of positions open! [https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/](https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> It will be great if they add communication tool like slack/hipchat in their master plan.

Reason, I am asking for this, it that I see such tools have critical to do development these days. gitter has already shown initial success/value of integrating with SCM.

<comment><USER46> They actually already offer a tight integration with Mattermost: [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-mattermost](https://gitlab.com/gitlab- org/gitlab-mattermost)

<comment><USER45> Agreed but looks like GitLab is trying to avoid integration route in favour of building that component in the product itself.

<comment><USER9> We're not planning on building a chat client in GitLab. We think Mattermost is awesome and it is part of our Omnibus package. We're working on better chatops/chatbot integration with Cog [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/omnibus- gitlab/issues/1412](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/omnibus-gitlab/issues/1412)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Love gitlab, hopefully we will get more and more services start supporting Gitlab now.

<comment><USER16> Thank you! We hope that too :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> I like the integration of the Continuous Integration, Continuous Deployment, Continuous Delivery compares to GitHub.

<comment><USER16> Thank you! We're always trying to build great new tools that are helpful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> GitLab plan is "embrace, extend, and extinguish". And I hope they will fail on that, and then, they'll start providing standard integration APIs for third party.

<comment><USER9> Indeed our company strategy is modelled after MSFT. GitLab 9.0 will be renamed XP and we already have a Vista team in place. They keep demanding a higher expense budget to achieve a Ballmer peak, not sure what that is about.

Anyway, we want to make sure GitLab plays nice with others. there is an extensive API [https://docs.gitlab.com/ce/api/](https://docs.gitlab.com/ce/api/) and it includes a commit status api to play well with other CI solutions. Please let us know if there is anything missing in our standard integration APIs for third parties.

<comment><USER17> Skip GitLab 9.0 and go right to 10 :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Gitlab sounds better day after day. Still we are doing github, Jenkins and AWS ECR (as a container registry Just a quick idea of mine was:"So github is pretty centralized right now,so is gitlab as well.But I can run gitlab on my own machine. So would it be possible for gitlab to offer a sync service,where I could sync my gitlab server with gitlabs' server? " So if gitlab(github) is down I can ~~let~~ rely on my local copy?

<comment><USER9> You can use [https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/workflow/repository_mirroring.htm...](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/workflow/repository_mirroring.html) for this (EE/.com only)

<comment><USER43> Part of the discussion for the downside of centralization on GitHub is that it is also the issue tracker and wiki. Does GitLab offer mirroring for these services too?

If I understand OP's question, it seems syncing would involve more than just `git push` from the local gitlab server to remote.

<comment><USER50> Yes. That was my question. Sorry.no native English speaker.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> [https://youtu.be/KrF7jNfDSnI](https://youtu.be/KrF7jNfDSnI) <\--live, on air now.

</comment><comment><USER52> I'd pay the guy that has my github/twitter/gmail/hn username on GitLab $500 to give it to me. I don't think he's actively using it, but I can't figure out how to get in touch with him. :(

I really want to switch to GitLab given the focus on tooling and workflow. _edit:_ and also your super nifty tanuki logo, which would make a hip vinyl laptop sticker.

<comment><USER16> Hey there - we have a process for requesting usernames that aren't being used actively.

[https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/support/#dormant- usernames...](https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/support/#dormant-usernames-a- namedormantusersa)

<comment><USER52> Awesome! Thanks! I knew that there was going to be some discussion about this, but I hasn't seen the official policy yet.

> The account in question has no data.

Does this mean if the account has private repositories, even if unused / dormant, that a username cannot be freed? (Understandable policy.)

In any case, should I file a ticket, email support, or wait for automatic processes to kick in?

<comment><USER53> > Does this mean if the account has private repositories, even if unused / > dormant, that a username cannot be freed?

Correct. We understand that sometimes users will be dormant for a while and when they have data of any kind, we have to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Please send us an email at support at gitlab to start the process.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Just tried to set up the 2 factor authentication. Easy. But, would it be possible to provide a phone number fallback? The set of printed codes is nice, but the chances of losing them are far higher than losing your phone or having to deal with a corrupt authenticator app.

<comment><USER55> I like that they aren't providing a phone number as a backup. There has been a lot of discussion recently questioning SMS-based 2FA as a target for social engineering (and other attacks).

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12163046](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12163046)

<comment><USER9> Thanks. Phone number backups are hard to set up and there are concerns about the security. That is why we have not build support for it. BTW I recommend using 1password so that you don't have to reset 2FA when you move phones (like with Google Authenticator).

<comment><USER56> Another great alternative in the 2FA client space is Authy (free of charge).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Congratulations guys, it's well deserved :)

With the addition of trello like board, gitlab has come to a point where I just can't name a new feature I would love to see in it. But then again, like most, I would not have put so many things in it (good ol' unix philosophy) and have been pleasantly surprised about how everything added just fit in.

My only deception about the announcement: after the teasing last week, I would have expected more concrete features to be announced in the "master plan" article (what's the next feature?), but well, I'll wait and see.

<comment><USER57> Btw, this is certainly not magic. Would love to hear about your dev / product design tips to make something having so many features not being a bloated software.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> I don't see anything about Documentation in there? I would really like something better than Confluence woven throughout. Is there something that I'm missing?

<comment><USER17> Wikis do exist, and you can always have a `docs` directory and then use GitLab CI to package the docs up and/or deploy that directory as a static site.

We have this issue which I'm fairly fond of, though I'm not sure we'll ever actually implement something like this: [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab- ce/issues/17937](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/17937)

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> This is kind of off topic, but I hate that I cringe every time I read the words "Master Plan". Hitler kind of ruined those words for me.

Did my UC Santa Cruz education do this to me or do others ever feel the same?

Edit: Congrats to Gitlab. I need to experiment with integrating an instance with phabricator [0] at work.

[0] [https://www.phacility.com/](https://www.phacility.com/)

<comment><USER9> Please allow me to link to a obligatory XKCD to lighten the subject [https://xkcd.com/261/](https://xkcd.com/261/)

The master plan reference is inspired by Elon Musk. We can't compare us or our plans with him. But we're inspired that his master plans are public [https://www.tesla.com/blog/master-plan-part- deux](https://www.tesla.com/blog/master-plan-part-deux) just like ours.

Please let us know if there is anything we can do to help the integration. Please know that GitLab EE has a remote sync [https://about.gitlab.com/2016/05/10/feature-highlight- push-t...](https://about.gitlab.com/2016/05/10/feature-highlight-push-to- remote-repository/)

<comment><USER59> Haha that XKCD was hilarious. I'm was totally surprised my comment even made it through the spam filters. I was seriously considering spelling Hitler, H*tler or something.

Yeah, I should setup pushing to a remote repo, that could be really helpful. Phabricator can also be configured to push to remotes automatically I think. Either way, thanks for the great product!

<comment><USER9> You're welcome!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> I'm really excited for this master plan. I would love to have a just one tool to do most of the job (c9.io would be a better alternative to Koding btw). As of now, Gitlab seems to come the closest when it comes to that vision.

That said, Issue Tracker and Issue Board could be developed further to be more in line with Jira and Trello/clubhouse.io

Apart from that, I love gitlab and keep up the great work!

<comment><USER12> Thanks! We see lots of improvements all around and welcome any specific feedback / requests!

I can already spoil that we're working on many improvements for Issues and Issue Boards.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> Anyone know why GitLab insists on "Merge Requests", while BitBucket, Github & others have "Pull Requests"?

<comment><USER62> From [1]:

> Tools such as GitHub and Bitbucket choose the name pull request since the > first manual action would be to pull the feature branch. Tools such as > GitLab and Gitorious choose the name merge request since that is the final > action that is requested of the assignee

I think GitLab are right to choose 'merge request', it has an immediately obvious meaning compared to 'pull request'

[1] [https://about.gitlab.com/2014/09/29/gitlab- flow/](https://about.gitlab.com/2014/09/29/gitlab-flow/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> GL seems great and I'm glad it's evolving. About a year ago I tried GL and it was painfully slow. This was the main reason I chose Phabricator. Have there been any progress on this performance issue? I acknowledge I'm quite outdated here.

<comment><USER64> We moved to gitlab a couple of months ago (the public one) and it's really slow so we are thinking of having gitlab only for CI and do everything else on github.

<comment><USER9> GitLab.com can be slow, sorry for this, We're working on it in [https://gitlab.com/gitlab- com/infrastructure/issues/59](https://gitlab.com/gitlab- com/infrastructure/issues/59) and [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab- ce/issues?scope=all&sta...](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab- ce/issues?scope=all&state=opened&utf8=%E2%9C%93&label_name%5B%5D=Performance) and in the infrastructure on to make our infra faster [https://gitlab.com/gitlab- com/infrastructure/issues?scope=al...](https://gitlab.com/gitlab- com/infrastructure/issues?scope=all&state=opened&utf8=%E2%9C%93&label_name%5B%5D=performance)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> Nice to see it's going well. One thing that interests me as an NL-based entrepreneur (well, technically a freelancer for now): are you guys still based in Utrecht or did you have to move to the Valley in order to profit from the investment scene?

<comment><USER14> GitLab is a remote-only company, so really, we're EVERYWHERE! There's still a NL entity, but now there's a US entity, and maybe more countries coming.

I can't comment whether Sid _had_ to move to the Valley to reach investors, but it probably didn't hurt. That and YC.

<comment><USER9> During raising the A round I promised I would be in San Francisco the majority of my time to spend time with customers, investors, partners, and press. Being remote only allows me to travel back to the Netherlands 3 times a year for 3 weeks each apart from my vacation time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> Just started working on a sort of getting started mega blog post on CI/CD/CT—is there anyone at GitLab who would be up to review once ready and make sure I'm covering the GitLab offerings completely?

Can reach out at username at gmail!

<comment><USER9> Sure, please email community@ company domain for this, you can find this via the bottom of [https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/marketing/](https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/marketing/).

Of course we would be happy to host you as a guest post, please send a merge request to [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab- com/merge_requests](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab- com/merge_requests)

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> Does GitHub own any intellectual property that might require GitLab to licensing? or did GitHub totally miss the intellectual property piece of the puzzle?

<comment><USER9> Both are based on Git that is open source and trademarked by the Software Freedom Conservancy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> Github is great, I see no reason to switch. The competition should definitely accelerate development though, so that's nice.

</comment><comment><USER69> This is very exciting to hear - was so wishing github to go in this direction all these years!

<comment><USER69> I migrated to gitlab - the joy of CI, CD, runners and Trello like boards - <USER2> at one place has made my day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> I really wish they add mercurial support, albeit there seems to be no plan currently.

</comment><comment><USER71> Is gitlab profitable?

<comment><USER9> We're not profitable. We took investment to grow faster. Currently the majority of our costs are covered by GitLab Enterprise Edition.

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> Why is a corporate fluff-piece the top story on HN?

<comment><USER73> because

1\. github needs some competition

2\. gitlab hosts f-droid and some other awesome projects

3\. many of us use their enterprise edition at work (and loving it)

4\. they were funded by the very company that runs this forum

<comment><USER72> Ah it's an advert from our corporate sponsors. Understood.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> Is that Master Plan stuff a new fad?

Soon at a Hacker News near you:

Master Plan considered harmful.</comment>


Open-source bulk MTA for .Net - <AUTHOR> http://manta.io/ <comment><AUTHOR> We developed MantaMTA, a .Net MTA, for an email marketing product ([http://sentori.co.uk/](http://sentori.co.uk/)). We're delighted to announce that it's now available under the MIT licence. It's production-ready bulk-mail transport with some exciting reporting features.

</comment><comment><USER2> The project is actively seeking contributors, especially to work on mono support.</comment>


A Peek at A/B Testing in the Wild - <AUTHOR> https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/dreisman/a-peek-at-ab-testing-in-the-wild/ <comment><USER2> If the concern is over the general public being manipulated by corporate or political messages then A/B testing is the least of our problems. Practically every TV, print or digital ad has not only been concept-tested but is actually _designed_ to take advantage of peoples' innate biases and cognitive blind spots.

The solution isn't to bury a "We a/b test." disclaimer in a privacy policy that no one will read but rather to educate people on their blind spots. We do this already - in the U.S. at least - where high schoolers get a schooling in advertising techniques. E.g. the difference between $9.99 and $10.00 and the manufacturing of a "problem" so that the company can sell you their "solution".

<comment><USER3> > the manufacturing of a "problem" so that the company can sell you their > "solution".

Any examples of such problems?

<comment><USER2> Off the top of my head...

 __Problem __: Your clothes don 't smell 'fresh' when coming out of the dryer.

 __Solution __: Dryer sheets (Bounce, detergents with perfume)

 __Problem __: Your teeth aren 't white enough.

 __Solution __: Whiteners, toothpaste, mouthwash

 __Problem __: You 're not thin/good-looking enough.

 __Solution __: Diet supplements, make-up, shampoo w / conditioner, etc</comment></comment></comment>


Ballmer to Hu: 90% of Microsoft customers in China using pirated software - <AUTHOR> http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/012111-ballmer-hu-china-software-piracy.html <comment><USER2> I thought this had always been a MSFT business plan? Given that very few people in china are going to spend a years salary on a full copy of MS Office the alternatives are:

1, They develop their own local software

2, They adopt and localize some open source software

3, They pirate your software making you a defacto standard

Which would you prefer - long term?

<comment><USER3> They can't say that outright though. They have to pretend to want piracy to end in China, even if that's not the case. They probably know that there's little that will be done to stem the issue, at least at the present time.

<comment><USER2> If I were the chinese I wouldn't be able to resist the temptation to say -

"you're right we will introduce the death penalty for software piracy, ban the sale of imported software at below US list price - and we will put 100,000 programmers on a plan to produce OpenOffice for the people"

<comment><USER4> Actually, there's a Chinese fork of OpenOffice.org, it's called RedOffice. It also has a pretty good interface!

review: <http://www.johannes-eva.net/redoffice-review>

official site: <http://www.redoffice.com/>

<comment><USER2> I wonder what MS is offering in 'consultancy fees' to some government officials for that not to become a mandated standard?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So is the case with most asian countries. So I asked around - why arent you using Libreoffice ?

1\. Most cases - excel support is lacking. Yup, they did google for "cheap office" and try out OpenOffice.

2\. Local language support - nobody really has it. But Windows (not just Office) has nicer ways to find and install fonts.

Oh and the name "libreoffice" is REALLY, REALLY not working out in Asia. Even for english speaking ones.

<begin rant> Asiatic scripts (especially China and India) need smart fonts - <http://www.linux.com/archive/feed/52884>

However, the _default_ font technology in most open source stacks is Harfbuzz and not SIL Graphite. The attitude towards graphite can be summarized thus (<http://behdad.org/text/>):

 _This allows for developing fonts for minority scripts and languages without having to update the engine first. For established scripts though, there is not much reason to prefer Graphite over OpenType._

And by minority scripts we mean 1/5th of the world's population, the two fastest growing economies and open source friendly governments. </end rant>

<comment><USER6> _"Oh and the name "libreoffice" is REALLY, REALLY not working out in Asia. Even for english speaking ones."_

Huh, why in the world not? Is is a problem of limited vocabulary? Your double emphasis on 'really' makes it seem like they know what it means, but are actually opposed to the concept, is that it? This is just kind of a pretty weird comment without some supporting explanation.

<comment><USER5> It's not a question of understanding the meaning of "libre". Its about the pronounciation. I used to be able to tell people to go and download "Open Office" and they remember.

Phonetically, if you use "Librii Office" - they dont. "Libr Office" they dont. I am not sure why - but I have spoken to dozens in India (accountants, lawyers, etc.) and the name just doesnt have recall. Libre also is not a Commonwealth English word.

I'm sure everyone came up with that name with a noble intent - but it simply isnt working in India which is extremely Anglicized as compared to most other Asian countries. That name really needs to change.

On a curious note - in the U.S. have you spoken to a non-geek, say your pizza delivery dude, and have brand recall of "Libreoffice" ?

<comment><USER6> Can't say I have. I'm a FOSS fanatic but I don't hate anybody I know enough to suggest they use OpenOffice/LibreOffice.

Seriously, the name should be the last of that project's worries...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Given two super powers, one infested with patents and IP laws that limit progress, the other one with zero patent laws where everybody can further develop the work of others, which one do you think will progress faster?

If I was the chinese president I would be flipping the bird to the cameras with a smile in my face.

</comment><comment><USER8> Hu to Ballmer: Ha ha!

Could it be MS is estimating the Windows install base is much larger than it really is?

<comment><USER9> Wow, I had the exact same thought: "Hu smiles -- 'yes, and...?'"

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Similar situation in the Philippines. All the Filipino developers I know learned their craft with pirated copies of MSFT software.

</comment><comment> pb-add One more price differential "Western" workers are working against.

I recall when India was starting up its external-facing tech industry. There were a few conversations about how one way they kept costs down was by not paying for any software licenses.

I found and find it ironic, that the same companies that are so gung ho about IP rights in the "West", were (and are) perfectly willing to take advantage of their disregard when seeking lower prices by farming work out to "developing economies".

At this point, I respect IP inasmuch as it can break me financially or maybe get me thrown in the pokey. Morally, though? I'll make my decisions on an individual basis, but I find I have no respect nor regard for a great deal of claimed rights. The claimants are bald faced hypocrites.

</comment><comment><USER11> Why don't they make their most valuable features only work if a valid license was shown to a server within the last week?

Seems like there's no way Google Apps could have unauthorized users precisely because you do need to login to their servers.

There advantages to having Office installed locally, but surely this is a big enough problem to change how things work. 90% is a lot.

<comment><USER12> I'm sure somebody within the 1 billion people there in China could crack whatever protection they put on. Maybe even on day 1 :-)

<comment><USER13> Even still, assuming ludicrous 100% market penetration in the US and China. Microsoft would still be making 1/3 in China that it is in the US (assuming 0% piracy in the US).

I don't know a single person who has legal copies of Office or Photoshop that didn't come free and I've lived in the UK and live in Canada.

What MSFT has done in the Western world is to ensure that companies (who can afford to pay) can't have pirated copies. Essentially this is because corporations can be sued at the drop of an envelope. I somehow don't think China has the ease in filing suits for small amounts against companies.

<comment><USER14> Chinese lawsuits are said to be quicker, more document focused, and less witness-testimony focused than US suits.

Downsides? Not as much discovery (don't expect the court to force the company to do a software audit), and low damage (think money back, but no outrage).

No, I'm not a lawyer, and this isn't advice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Actually it's more than 99%.

</comment><comment><USER16> Related: Previously, on Hacker News: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1594521>

</comment><comment><USER17> Yes, because the Chinese are way to smart to pay for the crap that Microsoft produces.

</comment><comment><USER18> A little off topic, but now I'm very interested: How does Google docs make money? I don't recall ever being targeted for an ad by the content, and obviously regular users don't pay.

<comment><USER19> Business users pay $50/seat/year after the 100th user. _That's_ how they make money. Btw, Microsoft is similar. I bet that legit sales to individuals are tiny compared to corporate sales.

<comment><USER20> It's $50/seat/year, no matter how many users. The "Standard" version (they've renamed it to something else, now) has lower quotas and no (non-bulletin board) support. It also now has a cap of 50 seats (used to be higher). For a while, you could only do video hosting and some other things on the business/"Premier" plan; not sure about now.

Academic/non-profit is "free", but you have to prove your status somehow.

I still argue it's a bargain for the "average" business, compared to trying to host and manage this stuff yourself. I don't know how good the support is, though -- the rest of Google's individual / customer level support leaves me rather doubtful. I also don't know what happens when the subpoenas start flying.

If they ever establish HIPAA compliance/certification (I don't know whether it is worth their while), they may get a "bazillion" health care providers. Especially if that "whatever is currently their health records management offer" thing works out.

But that would put them in the middle, as the records holder, of an awful lot of litigation. From that perspective, it might be a real loser for them. (Maybe the lobbyists are already working on this vis à vis some favorable legislation.)

<comment><USER19> Hmm, ok. I just assumed that the Google Apps for Domains that I use for my personal domain could be used by for-profits too.

<comment><USER20> It can. But you have the lower space quotas, limited (more limited?) support, and a cap of 50 user accounts. After that, you have to go "Premier" (or whatever it's named, now), and then its $50/year/seat for _all_ seats, as I understand it.

For a small business with limited resources, the free "Standard" version may be fine. Especially if you're backing up and it's not a critical failure point. Of course, for most businesses, this would likely not be the case and it would become so.

But if you are small and only have a seat or three, $50 - $150 / year is pretty cheap for what they offer (including however many 9's of availability).

You can even get a public web site out of it (the property formerly known as Jotspot), as long as you can live with their templates and/or restrictions. And with that, a WYSIWYG editor that a normal mortal might actually manage to use mostly effectively -- especially for smaller changes to text after the site is established.

(And you know a random herd of traffic isn't going to take the host down.)

EDIT: But I would definitely register the domain name somewhere else. Google will sell you a registration during set up, but IMHO that may be asking for trouble if you ever want to move it, particularly at the free/Standard level.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Anyone know the code behind the new Tumblr 'like' animation? - <AUTHOR>

Hi guys, so I noticed this new Tumblr 'like' animation (although it was around a few months ago) on the dashboard. Anyone know the tech behind it? I want to implement it to some of my projects. Thanks Here's the gif http://media.tumblr.com/4e16fe3161714c52a91c3dcc2b7a8261/tumblr_inline_mnoaselA2C1qz4rgp.gif <comment><USER2> Webkit only: [http://jsfiddle.net/nWKfr/1/](http://jsfiddle.net/nWKfr/1/) It's in the css files, so it is very easy to extract it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks so much</comment></comment>


Looking to set up "startup apartment" in San Francisco - <AUTHOR>

I just raised a $1m seed round for my startup (enterprise collaboration), and am looking for people founding or working at startups to live with in San Francisco starting around October 1st.
Why people involved with startups? Because I think that there will be a level of mutual understanding and support, and I'd like to have a social apartment setting where people of all types are welcome. I'm looking to keep a nice, clean, comfortable place to live, and am probably looking in price ranges that are poorly suited for bootstrappers (my guess is $1200-1600 per person).
Probably looking for a 3-4 bedroom. Email email@example.com if you're interested. <comment><USER2> What's your startup?</comment>


How I Made My Own iPhone in China [video] - <AUTHOR> https://strangeparts.com/how-i-made-my-own-iphone-in-china/ <comment><USER2> Thread yesterday about this video:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14100989](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14100989)

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow! My big takeaway is that I guess Apple (or somebody in the middle?) is making a lot of money on batteries. I know Apple routinely charges $70-80 for a battery replacement, but this guy got one for $5!

<comment><USER4> There is a many fake lithium batteries that have way less capacity than advertised. I have experienced it with a laptop battery. It might worth checking the real capacity of it. Also, when changing the battery, the time spent to disassemble and reassemble the phone without breaking anything might account for a lot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> What's astonishing is that the parts he ended up using cost him $300 [1], less than half of what a new phone would cost. The parts come from recycled / broken phones, so he effectively has a Franken iPhone. I'd take it.. wonder whether it starts creaking later sometime.

[1] [http://www.arykar.com/guy-builds-diy-iphone-6s-for-less- than...](http://www.arykar.com/guy-builds-diy-iphone-6s-for-less-than-half- the-price-of-a-new-one/)

<comment><USER6> It's worth noting that including purchases made for "dead ends" he ended up spending nearly $1.000

<comment><USER7> It's worth including but that's like including R&D into the cost of any device. Like saying an brand new iPhone 7 doesn't really cost $649 but really costs $100......0000 due to the R&D it took to make it. I have confidence that while the first phone cost him $1000 the second would cost him $300.

<comment><USER8> If we are looking at it like a business then your math makes sense. But as an individual, it would be cheaper just to buy a new iPhone because of the dead ends and time spent assembling the device. So yes if he did everything perfectly the first time then the cost was $300, not including labor or tools. But the actual cost is way above $1k including labor, tools, dead ends and research. A business can factor those costs as R&D as they will producing x amount of these but he is only going to produce 1 and who knows if those tools and parts will work on future projects.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This was great and very entertaining. Thanks for sharing.

</comment><comment><USER10> How much has he paid for all those parts?

<comment><USER11> He said he spent around $1000 on failures and tools. If he had done it perfectly the first time it would've cost him around $300.</comment></comment>


Is the BP Gusher Unstoppable? - <AUTHOR> http://motherjones.com/blue-marble/2010/06/worst-already-true-BP-well-now-unstoppable <comment><USER3> Short summary, the integrity of the well seems to be compromised below the layer we can reach. Therefore attempting to cap it will just cause it to leak out the sea floor below anything we can reach. The only choice is to let the oil out and try to catch it. However this will erode the already compromised well structure.

At that point it is a race between erosion and the relief wells, which hopefully will relieve the pressure on the existing well.

If the relief wells fail to get there in time, there is a real possibility of the sea floor collapsing and letting the entire oil pocket out. The potential oil spill if that happens could be up to 2.5 billion barrels.

<comment><USER4> If the sea floor above the pocket is so fragile, what was to stop this disaster from occurring naturally some day, without having ever drilled?

<comment><USER5> From my reading, it's flow that's causing the erosion. We've punctured the dam.

Consider an earth dam holding in a lake. As long as the water's sitting behind the dam, not much is going to happen but as soon as a little crack appears or a bit of water begins pouring over the top, it starts eroding - carrying away bits of the dam. As the hole gets bigger, the flow increases which accelerates the erosion.

Now picture the oil eroding a hole in the casing and surrounding rock/silt/etc.

Here's a visual from a recent _natural_ disaster: [http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/06/landslide_lake_in_p...](http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/06/landslide_lake_in_pakistan.html#photo38)

<comment><USER6> 74,000 psi can certainly cause erosion... :(

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> BP definitely understands, better than anyone else who pretends to what is going on. The problem is that what is really going on is incredibly scary proposition. The truth is that from the beginning the only real way to fix this is with relief wells which they are in the process of drilling. The problem with the relief well is that it takes about 6 months to implement. Do you really expect BP to come out with that to the American people?

I have this on good authority by a petroleum engineer in a rival oil company. Believe me or not but I think that the people in the oil industry probably no better about how to fix this problem than Obama or anyone else in government who are just going to get in the way. First, I do not at all agree with offshore drilling, however it bothers me that people assume that BP is holding out or that this is really an easy thing to fix. They aren't because letting the disaster continue will destroy their company and it isn't easy considering they are composed of people who studied petroleum engineering and actually no what they are doing. Johnny's silly, uninformed ideas aren't going to work either. Hell, the petroleum engineer I know also said that Russia's idea of nuking the leak would be the quickest way to fix but the government, or sane people, wouldn't allow that.

The bottom line is that we should never have been drilling in the first place. This spill is terrible but it happened and we have to deal with it. It bothers me though that people really think BP isn't doing the best they can and has the best people in the world working on this. The entire oil industry is helping them. The government and other entities should worry about supporting them and helping the people affected by this cope with the fallout. Leave the technical details to the professionals because everyone else ideas are uninformed, will slow things down, and will not work. Only a relief well will and thats 4 months away so why not worry about helping the people of the golf? The truly sad thing is that Americans will still get up tomorrow and drive their gas guzzling SUVs 2 miles to work instead of riding bike and those bullet trains and public transportation efforts are still decades away...

<comment><USER8> > ... Americans will still get up tomorrow and drive their gas guzzling SUVs > ...

Let's say that I'm an American with a gas guzzling SUV. For the sake of discussion, what would you suggest are my better alternatives (taking into account the money I've already invested in the SUV)? How would those alternatives help fix the current BP problem? I'm not trying to be contrarian. I would like to start a discussion here.

<comment><USER7> I don't think Americans really need to do anything personally. I think the primary issue is the lack of public transportation here in America. We need leadership on this from the top so that we can catch up to the rest of the world. You can go anywhere in Europe in hours on a train. I know America is big but we are still (perhaps) the richest country in the world and we can implement a quality public transportation system. It would even help the economy by providing jobs, just like all of the infrastructure projects of the new deal did.

Besides public transportation though, just working on our infrastructure would help with fuel saving. Sitting in traffic all day doesn't help MPG. Hell, sometimes I wish I had an SUV for some of the roads here in Pittsburgh, with the potholes its like I am driving through in Iraq. Also, my beef isn't really with all SUVs. I mean the Traverse gets what 33/mpg? I am talking about the people who drive Escalades to and from work and don't haul anyone around.

<comment><USER8> Yea, I for one would welcome fast, comfortable, ubiquitous trains. Also, it would be nice if America could really embrace ideas like work from home or Results Only Work Environment in jobs where that makes sense. In my current job, there's no reason I couldn't do 98% of my work from home, except that management is scared that they'd lose control, which is really ridiculous on many levels. This is a new era and some organizations are managing people using techniques from 50 or more years ago. Techniques that have been scientifically shown to be a bad idea in certain jobs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This MotherJones article is entirely based on an anonymous comment on another blog, which is sort of interesting in and of itself.

<comment><USER10> And that an article in MotherJones based on an anonymous comment on another blog is currently #2 on HackerNews is simply dispiriting.

<comment><USER11> Yep, especially since BP's presentation to Congress [1] would indicate that that anonymous commenter doesn't have a complete understanding of what's going on.

[1]: [http://energycommerce.house.gov/documents/20100527/BP.Presen...](http://energycommerce.house.gov/documents/20100527/BP.Presentation.pdf)

<comment><USER12> Nothing that has occurred since the incident has given me the impression that BP has a complete understanding of what's going on.

<comment><USER13> Or, more importantly, the willingness to admit that fact, or to admit the truth. Initially they decried all the people who suggested the flow was much larger than their estimates. Then, more and more sources come out suggesting it. And just recently, they have admitted it might be true.

This seems to be modus operandi for companies these days. Deny everything, then weeks later come up with your own sources suggesting exactly the same thing, when the issue has died down.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Not so quick question: if this indeed does happen could more extraordinary measures possibly fix the problem? For example:

        Bombs          Bombs
        \\      |      //
        </comment><comment>--|</comment><comment>--
        ########|########

Or is it basically oil ocean forever? And: how catastrophic of a situation is this? Not, I would guess, an existential risk. Could it be measured in terms of percentage of world GDP that will be lost trying to fix or mitigate the symptoms? And if so, what approximate percentage would that be? Another nice thing would be if it could be measured in terms of the overall historical benefit of offshore drilling.

Edit: I'm not really suggesting bombs; that's just something off the top my head. The main idea is that I want to know if there is any potential mitigation if the story is true? And just how bad is it if there isn't?

<comment><USER11> I did a fair bit of research on the technical details of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. I, too, wanted to know why "they" didn't do X, Y, or Z, so I decided to find out. :-)

The first thing you need to know is that it's 5,000 feet from the surface of the ocean to the ocean floor at the well, and then there's another 18,000 feet of shaft below the ocean floor to the oil and gas reservoir. So, there's no clear position from which explosives can be used to "seal" it. If explosives were used, there's a pretty good chance it would blow up in our face, so to speak -- not only would the gas ignite (making the process somewhat unpredictable), but it would also likely create a huge number of microfissures that would lead to an even bigger oil geyser.

How catastrophic is it? It's ... well, not to be dramatic, but if this doesn't end up being one of the nastier long-term natural catastrophes of the next few decades, then I shudder to imagine what's coming next. Not only is this killing seabirds and mammals, it's also de-oxygenating a large portion of the Gulf rather nicely.

If BP does stick to their commitment to pay for the whole thing, I expect that they will file for bankruptcy next year. (In large part because their market cap is dropping like a rock.)

This particular incident is sort of the perfect storm of conditions for an oil disaster: it occurred at challenging depths, and when efforts have been made to stop the leak at those depths, something has gone wrong each time to stall or defeat the effort.

For further perspective: the US Navy's Seawolf class submarine has a crush depth of approximately 3,000 feet. At that depth, you're dealing with around 2,000 psi of pressure, but that's not the nasty part: the gusher is estimated to be at around 12,000 psi.

So, yeah. Explosives are probably not a wise idea here.

<comment><USER15> > How catastrophic is it? It's ... well, not to be dramatic, but if this > doesn't end up being one of the nastier long-term natural catastrophes of > the next few decades, then I shudder to imagine what's coming next. Not only > is this killing seabirds and mammals, it's also de-oxygenating a large > portion of the Gulf rather nicely.

Point of clarification, this is a man-made catastrophe.

<comment><USER16> It could have been an oversight, but I think that he also might have been referring to the damage to the ecosystem (i.e. 'natural' as in that it's a disaster that's affecting nature).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The largest two oil spills in recorded history:

Lakeview Gusher: around 9 million barrels, est. Gulf War Spill: around 6 to 11 million barrels

Deepwater Horizon has a ways to go. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_spill#Largest_oil_spills>

<comment><USER18> #1 On land, relatively easy to cleanup, but expensive

#2 On land, relatively easy to cleanup, but expensive

#3 5000 ft underwater....expensive

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> So the direct consequence currently is that millions of barrels are venting directly into the gulf. I'm not too clued up on crude oil, but as far as I'm aware, oil is less dense than water, thus rises. Gulf currents will dissipate this as seen from aerial photos, so without containment, oil will end up in a lot more places than just the gulf.

How is the oil flow being contained, and how effective is this - <USER2> there may be billions of barrels to be contained...

What percentage of the oil will be sub-surface - a lot harder to contain. And how can this be contained?

What are the flow-on effects of a possible sea-floor collapse and how much of an impact will this have on the structure of the gulf?

And then the overriding question of all - is it worth it?

If there is a relatively easy way to extract crude from the water, it may in fact be more economically feasible to extract the oil by destroying the well than to repair the well itself. Of course, none of this is taking into account the environmental impact...

<comment><USER20> The problem with the underwater plumes is that they can't be contained. While you may have the image of an underwater oilslick, it isn't - the oil can be measured in parts per million (you might not even notice if you had a glass of it).

The problem with those plumes is that bacteria eats the oil, and then breeds. Those organisms use up the oxygen in the water, leaving a dead zone unfit for life. There was already a decent sized dead zone from the Mississippi, but this has the potential to dwarf it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> 2.5 Million gallons per day. Years after the news stops reporting it in a couple months, the wildlife will never recover.

Relief wells must be made MANDATORY or we've learned nothing and it will happen again.

BP's deepwater Atlantis is poised to do the same thing in our lifetimes.

</comment><comment><USER22> Ok - I haven't been following this event that much so far. Can someone tell me why the simplest solution of limiting the leak effects is not possible - namely building a large tunnel going from the surface to the leak point, making a space where the oil can safely leak, while it's being transported away? Is it the depth? area? size of the flow?

<comment> brown9-2 The leak is 5000 feet below the surface of the ocean.

Water is heavy. 5000 feet of it is a whole lot of pressure that such a tunnel would have to withstand.

The "simplest solution" is often one that is completely impractical given the facts.

<comment><USER23> No, No! Neither "tunnel" nor well need to withstand the pressure of 5000 feet of water. Reason is that the well (tunnel) is always filled with either water or drilling mud (roughly the same density as water) so the inside and outside pressure on the drilling pipe are the same. The pressure differences are not significant until/unless drilling into an oil or gas pocket. Even then the pocket must have a pressure significantly greater than that of the 5000 feet of water to be any problem. But that's what blowout preventers are for.

<comment><USER24> Don't forget that it's not only the lateral pressure you have to deal with, you have to have pipes that can not crumple under their own weight and simultaneously withstand extremely high torques due to ocean currents.

<comment><USER25> Is this a fact based on actual calculation/experiments, or your personal theory?

I don't think the solution is practical in this case for various other reasons, but the fact that offshore platforms exist incites me to think that long, underwater pipes can in fact resist ocean currents. They will also be naturally buoyant so long as there's enough air pockets in the material (or just floaters as the other person posted).

<comment><USER24> Personal theory. I should have said that in the original comment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> this post seems to suggest that Dougr's ideas that oil is escaping into the surrounding rock are wrong: <http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6611#more>

</comment><comment><USER27> What does a well look like under water?

</comment><comment><USER28> What if we just sank something really big and made of concrete on top of the oil leak, like a cruise ship or an aircraft carrier? Just something really really heavy, and wide enough to cover the hole by a large margin.

<comment><USER29> I can't see that making a good enough seal with the seafloor to be a viable solution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> +1 for the use of the word "Gusher"

</comment><comment><USER31> It may be much worse than we thought. The well pipe is nearing collapse under the seabed and efforts to cap it from the top will eventually fail.

<comment><USER32> Interesting how it went from a wild guess, to an article, then "may be", and now "is nearing collapse" and "will fail".

Rumors.

<comment><USER33> Good point. But to be fair, a lot of what BP has seemed to be doing is making guesses. Educated guesses, based on some observations and known facts. But still, guesses just the same. At best, estimates.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> How about U.S. government finally uses some of it's many nukes for good of the world?

No, not on BP headquarters, but blast it in proximity to kill the well?</comment>