Writing a Redis client in pure Bash - <AUTHOR> http://digitalserb.me/writing-a-redis-client-in-pure-bash/ <comment><USER2> Arguably not _pure_ bash, in that it calls out to external executables. I'm pretty sure all the head/cut/tr invocations could be easily replaced by appropriate parameter expansions though, and the `read` builtin could probably supplant `dd`, so it should be doable.

<comment><USER3> Bash doesn't exist in a vacuum. It's designed to make use of and interact heavily with those external commands. An environment missing dd, head, cut, and tr is probably not going to provide a usable /dev/tcp filesystem, either.

Ultimately the point is that a Redis client is possible using just a standard Unixish userland, and sysadmins who interact with Bash all day can easily make use of redis directly and integrate it into existing scripts without installing special client libraries or writing wrappers in Perl or Python.

<comment><USER2> Sure -- but my point was merely in regard to the (mis)use of the word "pure" here. Avoiding calling out to external executables and remaining purely within the shell itself is also frequently a good way to improve performance (sometimes quite dramatically), so being aware of the difference is worthwhile.

(Also, /dev/tcp isn't a filesystem, just a simulation of one constructed purely within bash itself, so it wouldn't in fact depend on anything but the relevant networking syscalls.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Reminds me of cronlock[0] which is a bash script that uses Redis as a global lock that you can use across multiple servers. Needing to just download a single bash script makes it easy to drop into an existing project.

[0] [https://github.com/kvz/cronlock](https://github.com/kvz/cronlock)

<comment><USER5> I use Redis as an IPC lock for our applications, too - it's quite good at it, especially since you can have atomicity guarantees with a Lua script.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have been using/administering GNU/Linux based systems for 15 years and have yet to see where the Bash built-in /dev/tcp was enabled, so any shell script I write that requires sockets I reach for netcat or socat.

<comment><USER7> I think you are mistaken. /dev/tcp is not visible in /dev or devtmpfs, however it most definitely works.

$ nc -l 8080 &

[1] 13694

$ echo hi >> /dev/tcp/127.0.0.1/8080

hi

[1]+ Done nc -l 8080

I just tried it on a relatively diverse set of distros. Depending on the version of netcat, if it is an ancient one on an older distribution such as say RHEL4, you have to do:

nc -l -p 8080

However, the same echo command works in all of them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Exactly. Its been available for a while now on most distros, I even used it on some legacy AIX systems running Korn shell.

Btw, the reason why this works even if you dont see anything in /dev/tcp is because when you try to open a socket in bash using /dev/tcp it doesn't talk with the pseudo-filesystem of /dev. Bash actually intercepts the command and issues a connect() to the remote host.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: ReactNativeAutoUpdater – support dynamic updates for React Native apps - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/aerofs/react-native-auto-updater <comment><USER2> There are also two alternatives: [https://apphub.io/](https://apphub.io/) and [https://microsoft.github.io/code-push/](https://microsoft.github.io/code- push/). Works for me in the real app very well, even in a synchronous mode in some cases.

<comment><AUTHOR> One difference between this library and the two you linked to is that ours is fully self-contained -- no accounts/3rd party hosting required :)

<comment><USER3> The AppHub client is also open source [1] and can be configured to point to any backend [2]. We also support asset updates, and the client has been tested in many production apps.

With CodePush, AppHub, and this, it would be nice to have the community converge on a shared auto-updating client. Perhaps down the road we could see this functionality integrated into React Native itself.

[1] [https://github.com/AppHubPlatform/apphub- ios](https://github.com/AppHubPlatform/apphub-ios)

[2] [http://docs.apphub.io/docs/self-hosting](http://docs.apphub.io/docs/self- hosting)

Disclosure: I created AppHub

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The most interesting part is that Apple seems to be cool with this:

> Does Apple permit this?

> Yes! Section 3.3.2 of the iOS Developer Program allows it "provided that > such scripts and code do not change the primary purpose of the Application > by providing features or functionality that are inconsistent with the > intended and advertised purpose of the Application."

I really, really hope this doesn't go away.

<comment> maz-dev I use this feature with a Meteor app and it's really nice. Just be sure to not load a corrupted or crashing bundle, else your user will need to reinstall the app.

Apple is allowing this because JS is sandboxed, so I guess it's here to stay.

<comment><USER5> I wouldn't be so sure. If this starts getting real traction then it is a _huge_ leap over the native development process. Which ironically is all Apple's fault for it taking so long for them to approve updates.

Having said that Apple seems slightly more chilled now Cook's in charge.

Also, this is react native, so it is only sandboxed in the way any other app is. The JS->ObjC bridge can do pretty much anything a native app can do so I don't think the JS thing makes much difference.

I think really it's in there so people can update webviews of content without having to resubmit the whole app. I don't think this is the spirit of that rule. Would be pleasantly surprised if not though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As somebody building my first react-native app at the moment, and planning to submit to the app store this week - thank you!

2 questions:

1\. If you don't ask the user to update immediately after it is downloaded, when will the update apply? The next time the app is opened?

2\. Is it possible to handle events around the update process from from Javascript? (For example an `onBeforeUpdate` or `onAfterUpdate` event.)

</comment><comment><USER7> This is great, I guess that Apple is now deciding what to do with your app.

<comment><USER8> From the link:

        > Does Apple permit this?
        > Yes! Section 3.3.2 of the iOS Developer Program allows it "provided that such scripts and code do not change the primary purpose of the Application by providing features or functionality that are inconsistent with the intended and advertised purpose of the Application."

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Just use a webserver with correct 304 handling (like s3) and publish your bundle there. It works both for React Native and Cordova.

</comment><comment><USER10> Android support ? :(

<comment><USER11> Seems like codepush supports react-native android at least.

[https://github.com/Microsoft/react-native-code- push/blob/mas...](https://github.com/Microsoft/react-native-code- push/blob/master/README.md#android-setup)

<comment><USER12> Yep we do! We don't support updating assets on Android yet but we will as soon as the necessary platform support is released (should hopefully be in RN 0.19.0)</comment></comment></comment>


Intel Identifies Chipset Design Error, cost of repair and replace will be $700M - <AUTHOR> http://newsroom.intel.com/community/intel_newsroom/blog/2011/01/31/intel-identifies-chipset-design-error-implementing-solution

<comment><USER2> See also [http://www.electronista.com/articles/11/01/31/intel.cougar.p...](http://www.electronista.com/articles/11/01/31/intel.cougar.point.desktop.chipset.has.sata.bug/)

apparently it's only the desktop chipset. Still, it's not entirely clear what does the bug actually cause-will there be errors on the disks? Or just slow down? Or will it outright kill the SATA device under certain conditions?

<comment><USER3> Sounds like it could cause slowdown and eventual inability to communicate with the drive, but would not damage the drive or cause data loss.

<http://www.pcper.com/comments.php?nid=9689></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do I get work underage? - <AUTHOR> So, odd situation here. I'm 17, have good frontend skills, already work professionally in a different field (video production, specializing in political non-profits, and I'm looking to switch over to web development. I obviously can't get a normal salaried job, and can't get an answer back once they guess my age. What can I do? <comment><USER3> If your 17 and not already a dot com superstar, you're not going to land a job at Google, you'll probably have to do it the hard way like everyone else.

But if you're lucky and don't "need" (ie your parents feed you and put a roof over your head), then I'd think more about getting cool experience than getting a good salary.

Call up professors and lab-techs at nearby universities and ask if they need help with basic web/data tasks. They always need custom coding for weird experiments, and you're constantly surrounded by smart people.

If you have a relative/friend in local government, offer to work for cheap/free and improve their (likely) horrible website/IT systems. You'll see how the government (sluggishly) works and will come out with a better understanding of bearucacy.

If you or your parents know a doctor, painting company, landscaper, coffee shop, or any other small business, offer to improve their website or online presence. You'll see the daily struggles of trying to make a buck as the small guy.

Any of these would teach you techincal skills as well as some good life ones. Sorry, but because you're 17 they probably won't trust your skills (even though they probably should). Deal with condescension in stride and blow their socks off with what you can build.

Wish more teenagers had the drive you do, it sure beats mowing lawns or working at Chipotle.

</comment><comment> a-saleh Ask your friends for work. When I was growing up, few of my friends were helping with their family businesses, and some of those were IT related. These were my first jobs, like setting up a server for friends fathers business, or rewriting a perl-script to python for other friend (apart from cleaning up the lavatories in a small publishing house) You might have access to some sort of freelance-agreement.

If I remember correctly, in my country (Czech republic) you can't legally work when less than 15 (you are legally required to be in school before that point), but after that you can enter certain freelance-agreements. No full- time employment, as far as I remember? And you might need some sort of confirmation that your legal guardian is OK with that?

Another thing, RedHat started to have some sort of intern-ship/shool-project for high-school seniors. Not sure if that was only in Czech Republic though, but if you have a local corporation you'd like to work for, showing at their doors and asinkg for work might actually work :D I might want to wait for an open-house or something like that.

</comment><comment><USER4> 1\. Create a website for your services (you can start with WordPress - <USER2> will be name.wordpress but free)

2\. Design three fake sites for three fake clients (you can link to site1.wordpress.com etc - also free) and display "testimonials". This will be your portfolio.

3\. Ask family + friends if they or anyone they know needs help putting together a site, then refer to them your site. May try to get you to do pro bono work but they'll serve as initial clients to add to portfolio.

4\. Post same screenshots of sites and create an ad for your services on Craigslist (USA) or Kijiji (Canada) or any classifieds site - also free. Link this ad to your portfolio. This will increase your audience reach.

5\. Have fun.

I did something very similar when I was 14 and getting started

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm not sure where you are, but you definitely can and will get a salaried job in Europe. You need a good portfolio, explain your choices, showcase some source code as well, that's it. I had a salaried job since I was 15 (lowest legal age), and I was working even before (under business license of my father). If you're near Prague, Czech Republic, I have a job for you.

How do they guess your age? Stopping talking about things that point to it (e.g. "I'm in high school" \- just don't mention it) might be enough; working part time is normal and doesn't require an explanation.

</comment><comment><USER6> Why not work on UpWork & co? I don't think they ask you anything about your age (cough real age cough). After all, On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog [1] ;)

Additionally, you can work on various open source projects (either by your own or just contribute to existing ones) and build some brand awareness too.

\-----

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_you%27re_a_dog)

<comment><USER5> Upwork is not a job, Upwork is a business platform. You need a business license to work through it (legally, I wouldn't advise to fake a business license because it leads to tax issues on Upwork side and they will come after you, might even report you). That might and might not be possible for OP depending on their location.

<comment><USER6> > You need a business license to work through it

Actually you don't.

<comment><USER5> Actually you do, depending on the location (and thus local laws). You definitely don't get an employment contract, and that means that e.g. in the whole EU, you need a business license (self employment or a company); some EU countries allow that from 16 and some (most) from 18; it's illegal to make an invoice if you don't have a license, and Upwork requires you to do so.

You're right that I could've worded that better, that's what I meant with the last part of my comment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> You could look for internships. You could pick up freelance work. You could probably start doing web work for the nonprofits you're already doing video work for, or ask for referrals to other organizations that need help with their web presence.

Focus on establishing a portfolio and legitimacy, and the pay will come eventually.

</comment><comment><USER8> When I was 17, the world didn't work the way I assumed. Don't be your own gatekeeper. Just go look for a job. Good luck.</comment>


How We Made The Animated A/B Testing Guide - <AUTHOR> http://engineering.wingify.com/posts/making-of-abtesting-scrollmation/

<comment><USER2> Kind of reminds me of this [nsfw language]:

[http://mccreavy.com/wp- content/uploads/2013/02/owl.jpg](http://mccreavy.com/wp- content/uploads/2013/02/owl.jpg)

<comment><AUTHOR> Our talented intern tried to explain the technology and what it took for him to create that page. The post was never intended to be a tutorial, but feel free to comment - what you want to know :)</comment></comment>


What Is Wrong With Cutting Taxes? - <AUTHOR> http://baselinescenario.com/2010/12/09/8372/

<comment><USER2> There are only two camps in this debate: cut taxes (to grow the economy and increase gov revenue) vs. increase taxes (to directly increase gov revenue). There is almost no talk about the underlying problem: spending.</comment>


Show HN: A Remote Recruitment Solution - <AUTHOR> http://volubilis.in

<comment><AUTHOR> A new way to hire developers and designers across the world. Its very hard to find developers where your company is and very hard to set up remote offices. We hire people in India, Vietnam, Lithuania, Egypt, Malaysia, Lebanon, etc and give them offices and most importantly HEALTH INSURANCE. Whats better, developers can travel and work from our other locations if they feel they need a break!!!! We</comment>


Instapaper's backup method - <AUTHOR> http://www.marco.org/1630412230 <comment><USER2> Anyone else find this scheme completely atrocious?

1\. Relying on a home computer on the critical path for data backup and persistence for a business

2\. Relying on a high latency, low quality networking path between the slave db and the 'home mac' rather than a more reliable link between two machines in a datacenter.

3\. A poor persistence model for long lived backups

4\. No easy way to programatically recover old backups

What's even more disturbing is that this isn't a new problem. Its not like we don't know how to backup databases. This solution seems very poorly though out.

<comment><USER3> Regarding point #1 - Marco's "Home Computer" is a Mac Pro (per other posts he's made) - it has Xeon proceesors, ECC RAM, etc. Much closer to a server than what you can pick up at Best Buy for $399.

<comment><USER4> It's not about performance nor price, but conditions in which the machine operates. Many servers used nowadays are cheaper than high-end desktop machines.

<comment><USER3> Obviously most people misunderstood my GP post...

The point wasn't that his system was in some way adequate because he happened to be using one good piece of kit, but that that particular piece of kit was better than average.

Additionally, the GGP post makes some assumptions about acceptability of backup procedures that may not be correct - for example, that in Instapaper's case anything but the most current backup copy would be useful, and therefore long term storage of older copies isn't of primary concern.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The scenario he presents of being able to recover from an unintentionally broad delete or update query would seem to only work in the simplest of databases. He says:

 _\- Instantiate the backup (at its binlog position 259) \- Replay the binlog from position 260 through 999 \- Replay the binlog from position 1001 through 1200 And you'll have a copy of the complete database if that destructive query had never happened._

This only works if the changes in positions 1001-1200 were unaffected by the undesired changes in position 1000. Seems rather unlikely to me, but maybe in the case of his particular schema it works out.

</comment><comment><USER6> on delicious, we had a thing that would serialize a user to disk for every day they were active. inactive users were not re-serialized.

this let us have day-to-day backups of individual users. this was necessary when broken clients would delete all the user's items. so we could easily restore an individual user (or do a historical recovery.)

<comment><USER7> thats why I never have a DELETE in any query, only UPDATE and a state field (ie. deleted)

performance advantage here as well since indexes aren't rebuilt and no table lock

<comment><USER6> Indexes cab certainly update. Pretty sure innodb does not table lock for delete either.

Also from a privacy perspective you can't keep people's data around forever.

<comment><USER8> Maybe this is overly pedantic, but you can do whatever you want with people's data, so long as you inform them of your policies and they agree to them.

<comment><USER9> I doubt that's true, at least in the UK. Terms and conditions cannot trump your personal rights. We have these terms laid out in the Data Protection Act and I doubt you can sign this away be agreeing to a website policy that contradicts them.

<comment><USER10> Same Thing in Germany. The Law always has priority over whatever you write.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It seems unnecessarily exposed to an event affecting Marco's home - fire, burglary, natural disaster etc. It would appear more prudent to back up to a cloud location. Either, as he mentions, S3, or a VPS somewhere.

<comment><USER12> The problem with backing up with S3 is that if you ever stop paying for S3 you lose your backups. If you get sick for a month and your bank balance goes negative, or the IRS takes control over your account for something, there go your backups. I find that to be way more scary and likely than losing all of my DVD backups.

<comment><USER13> The cost of storage on Amazon is very low - roughly $3 per month for Marco's 22GB.

I imagine most people running a company would have a separate corporate account linked to a credit card, so that personal circumstances have less of a major effect month to month.

<comment><USER12> It doesn't matter how much it costs. I still don't want to lose my backups due to financial circumstances. I would say a fire destroying multiple safe places to store a backup (i.e., leaving a flash drive or DVD at my partner's home) is a lot less likely than financial mishap.

<comment><USER14> The solution to this then seems to be that Amazon should allow for you to prepay for AWS credit so one does not need to worry about their bank accounts suddenly being frozen, or some other mishap, just that they have X months of runaway in AWS credit for typical S3 charges.

<comment><USER12> That would be fantastic. They could also give you a discount for large deposits; i.e., deposit 3X your average monthly usage and save 5%.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't think backing up the entire db to a laptop is a good idea, since laptops can get both lost and stolen. As somebody who uses the service, I am not super-comfortable with knowing that a full copy of my account and everything I save is sitting on a laptop somewhere.

It would be much better if these dumps were made to S3, or somewhere else that is actually in a secure datacenter (and a step that includes the word 'encryption').

<comment><USER15> It's not explicitly stated in the article, but in the tweet that started it all[1], he mentioned it was a Mac Pro, rather than a laptop. So that's somewhat less likely to be stolen than a laptop that is taken out of the house regularly.

That said, I agree with you, and I hope it's at least encrypted.

[1] <http://twitter.com/#!/marcoarment/status/6035374438621184>

<comment><USER7> ye not much better

there is a reason datacenters were built

thinking about this after I left my comment, having all that data on your local machine is just crazy - you are one browser exploit or break-in away from having it fall into somebody elses hands. It isn't professional for a web service to be doing this - esp one that is now charging some customers.

<comment><USER16> In principle, this is true, but we're talking Instapaper here. The only sensitive data that could be in a list of URLs is if you were making a bunch of porn or subversive literature to "Read Later." It's not on a par with financial info or even personal notes.

<comment><USER17> Who are you to say what conclusions can or cannot be drawn between a persons name and a list of URLs they chose to read? I can think of many, undesirable and potentially erroneous conclusions that could be made.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> [Disclaimer: Instapaper fan here, so my opinions might be biased. It is probably the application I love the most on my iPad and iPod Touch. Thanks Marco!]

Marco has recently left his position as the CEO of Tumblr; and I think concentrates on Instapaper much more than ever (I assume it was mostly a weekend project before, requiring simple fixes); therefore I have no doubt he will be making the service more reliable and better in the future (switch to S3 or similar).

Also, don't forget that Instapaper web service is currently free, although the iOS applications are not (There is a free lite version too.) There is a recently added subscription option (which AFAIK currently doesn't offer any additional thing); and I hope it will only make the service even better.

About security, I do not consider my Instapaper reading list as too confidential; so I don't have much trouble thinking the backup computer being stolen. Of course, your mileage might vary. As far as I know, even some accounts do not have passwords for Instapaper, you just login with your email address.

<comment><USER19> He was actually the CTO of tumblr.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> FYI You could run either tarsnap or SpiderOak directly on the server for a prompt offsite backup. Both have excellent support for archiving many versions of a file, with de-duplication of the version stream, and no limits on how many historical versions are kept.

Also, "gzip --rsyncable" increases the compressed size by only about 1%, but makes deduplication between successive compressed dump files possible.

(I cofounded SpiderOak.)

</comment><comment><USER21> Are the primary and backup DBs in the same data center? If so, how would you restore from an "unplanned event" there? I ask because I faced that situation once years ago, and very quickly learned that uploading 10's of GB of data from an offsite backup will keep your site offline for hours.

In the end I ended up _driving_ a copy of the DB over to a data center. Adding a slaved-replica in another location is pretty easy these days.

<comment><USER5> "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway" -- Andrew Tanenbaum

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Would the people who are upset that Marco is using his 'home' computer feel the same if he instead said it was at his office? Offices get broken into or have equipment stolen too - I'm not sure why people think this is so irresponsible given that he works from home now.

</comment><comment><USER23> That's really an amazing system. Super redundant.

A relatively easy boost, which he briefly mentioned, would be to also store the data in S3. That should be easy enough to be automated, which could provide a a somewhat-reliable off-site backup.

However, Instapaper has the benefit of a (relatively) small DB. 22GB isn't too bad.I don't know how well this would scale to a 222GB DB with proportionally higher usage rates. It'd be possible, but it would have to be simplified, no?

<comment><USER24> I'd call S3 super-reliable rather than somewhat-reliable:

"Amazon S3 is designed to provide 99.999999999% durability of objects over a given year. This durability level corresponds to an average annual expected loss of 0.000000001% of objects. For example, if you store 10,000 objects with Amazon S3, you can on average expect to incur a loss of a single object once every 10,000,000 years. In addition, Amazon S3 is designed to sustain the concurrent loss of data in two facilities."

It's slow as a result...but that's the trade-off you're looking for in a backup.

<http://aws.amazon.com/s3/faqs/#How_durable_is_Amazon_S3>

<comment><USER25> Yes, unless there is a billing problem with your account, someone is causing a problem with your account, etc. As an Amazon S3 and AWS user I would say they are fairly reliable overall - nowhere near super-reliable!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I upvoted this not because I think personal laptops and Time Machine are a good process for db backups, but because making backups is still a huge pain and problematic area, so the more attention it gets, the better.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Marco has now updated his system with automatic S3 backup: <http://www.marco.org/1630412230>

</comment><comment><USER27> are those binlogs timestamped? what wonderful graphs you could make!

</comment><comment><USER28> I just dump data into Venti and dump my 4gb Venti slices encrypted to DVD and keep an encrypted copy of my vac scores distributed around my systems.

If you're doing full dumps every few days, you're doing it wrong.</comment>


Determining User Need Through Innocent Questions - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/2010/11/a-hack-for-managing-business-relationships.php?

<comment><USER2> I've started doing the basic version of this: in my case, before I quote something, I'll ask for a detailed written explanation of what it is, even if I will still meet with them to discuss it further and think through my part of the estimate. You'd be surprised how many people don't have the energy to even summarize their thoughts on paper.

But I wonder how he uses this technique with his specific examples. He asks for an introduction to someone else _before the first meeting_ , or after business has been conducted? As a means of weeding out the nonserious, you'd have to introduce the "ask" early on in the process..

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I thought this was a really simple, powerful idea with a lot of merit.

Even if you don't follow the premise that people who have a need will reply rapidly, you can still discard their request (with discretion) because clearly they're not good customers... They Want but won't work with you to help you Give, they just want to Take.

Ooo, Metaphoric.</comment>


Ask HN: Is anyone using a posture shirt for posture correction? - <AUTHOR>

I'm talking about:
http://www.alignmed.com/products/posture_shirt.php
and
http://www.intelliskin.net/
This is mostly made for sports, but can be used at the office as well, as a constant reminder on how to keep your posture.
Anyone using it? What is your experience? <comment><USER2> [http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2008/05/08/article-0-012B17C3...](http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2008/05/08/article-0-012B17C300000578-896_468x600.jpg)

Have you considered trying these?</comment>


Geeks-need help to catch the Animal - <AUTHOR> In our community, there are a bunch of coyotees showing up unexpectedly especially in the mornings, biting women joggers and overall scaring people to go out at dawn. Is there anyway we can help the local cops using technology? Few ways I can think of: 1) Drone enabled animal recognition system?
2) Cameras watching neighborhood that would alert when it sees the animal? <comment><USER2> \- Depending on how big the neighborhood is, you might need lots of cameras to get coverage. Drones may not be practical since someone would need to fly them, and to recharge them after a few hours of flight. (If a drone crashed and harmed someone or something, who would be liable? Would the noise of the drones frighten the coyotes, who would move away from the drone and not be detected?) Fixed cameras would be expensive, since they'd need to be mounted securely and have a way of communicating with a monitoring station.

\- There are privacy issues. If you put your entire neighborhood under video surveillance to spot coyotes, how will people be assured that their privacy isn't being compromised? Who will have access to the video, under what circumstances, and for what period of time? Would someone be able to subponea the videos in a divorce case? In a police investigation?

\- It seems that software that would be able to tell the difference between a coyote and a dog from a distance would have to be pretty sophisticated. (Is that a coyote pursuing a runner, or a runner running with her German Shepherd?) I don't know if you'll be able to find that capability without paying lots of money for a customized solution. The cops wouldn't be happy if they got an automated alert every time a dog passed by a camera.

It seems like a low-tech solution might be the best: people keeping an eye out for coyotes and calling the cops if they spot one.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you greenyoda. The low-tech solution is what we are doing now. It seems we are reacting to the situation and living in fear than solving the problem once and forever.</comment></comment>


Issues in Structuring Relationships Among Members of the Founder Team - <AUTHOR> http://web.mit.edu/e-club/hadzima/founders-memo.html <comment><USER2> I disagree that most ventures fail because of problems between founders. That is fairly common, but the commonest cause of failure is that the product is a dog.

<comment><USER3> This guy is a senior lecturer at Sloan, called his point "the reality" and even underlined it. You gotta admit when you're beat, pg.

Next you'll be saying founders' primary concern is whether the startup will survive, when the reality is that equity allocation is their primary concern. It's right there in the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think this is as hard as you make it. Only key for me when I start a venture with multiple people is how trustable and logical the partners are. That way you know if you ever have to re-do the ownership at any point, you might not get exactly what you want but you will still get something very close to fair.

</comment><comment><USER5> This memo is very enlightening!

I've just read a book where the author is a successful entrepreneur, but a greedy sod too. He stresses that ownership is not the important thing, but the ONLY thing that matters. Taking into account that he started up in the 70s and it wasn't a technology company, he got away with owning 100% of the company's equity - and still does today.

I've never heard of this happening: all the best technology companies (Google, Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo, HP etc.) split the equity at the very beginning fairly evenly.

Is this even possible today to own a company outright with web startups, or is it even a good idea?

<comment><USER6> "Equity is like shit. If you pile it up, it just smells bad, but if you spread it around, wonderful things will grow." - Jerry Kaplan talking at Stanford

<http://edcorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?author=22>

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Can't read the article but it sounds interesting</comment>


Wunderlist API - <AUTHOR> https://developer.wunderlist.com

<comment><USER2> We'll be releasing Objective-C, Java, C# open source SDK libraries for this soon. We already have JavaScript and Python plus a command line tool (wlist) out at [https://github.com/wunderlist/](https://github.com/wunderlist/)

<comment><USER3> How about PHP?

<comment><USER2> We aren't working on it now since we don't use PHP internally but we'd be happy to support a developer who wants to build support!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> We worked with it for @Scanbot, fast implementation, well documented, worked flawlessly. Thanks 6W Team!

<comment><USER2> <3

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Great looking forward to it, especially Slack Integration!

</comment><comment><USER6> We're excited and looking forward to it!

</comment><comment><USER7> hardly can't wait ;-)</comment>


The World's Largest Battery to Power the Permian - <AUTHOR> https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Renewable-Energy/The-Worlds-Largest-Battery-To-Power-The-Permian.html <comment><USER2> One full screen popup ad: annoying

Two full screen popup ads: tab closed, never visiting that domain again, back to HN to warn the others.

<comment><USER3> Came here to share the same sentiment, saw your comment at the top.

This is the sort of website that reinforces my lazy habit of reading the comments first, instead of looking at the comment itself to form my own unbiased opinion about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This article fails to make the distinction between battery capacity (in MWh) and battery power in MW.

That's very bad. It's a bit like mistaking miles for miles per hour.

Though in that case it's megawatt times hour.

<comment><USER5> The distinction between energy and power seems to mystify pretty much everyone apart from engineers and scientists. I consistently see it confused in articles in mainstream media.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It sounds like 495 MW will be the peak output of the battery, but I can't find anywhere information about the capacity, which is what I really want to know

edit: for comparison the Tesla Australian big battery has a 100 MW output and total 129 MWh capacity. The current largest grid battery in the world is in Japan at 50 MW output/300 MWh capacity

</comment><comment><USER7> What are we defining as a battery?

If it's purely energy storage I think the hydro energy storage facilities (Like Dinorwig in the UK) definitely qualify: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinorwig_Power_Station](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinorwig_Power_Station) which has a capacity of 1,800 MW

Tom Scott did a video on this here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Jx_bJgIFhI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Jx_bJgIFhI)

</comment><comment><USER8> Also of note: almost 25% of power generation capacity in Texas this year will be wind!

<comment><USER9> From the article it seems likely the power will go into making climate change even harder to stop though :/

<comment><USER8> The electrical infrastructure built will remain after oil demand and production declines.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Does anyone know if law mandates such largescale projects to co-operate with research? If one is going to make, install, use and monitor (within the same system, and thus using exactly the same metrics) huge amounts of batteries, it would seem useful to not make them all identical, but to arrange a hypercube of production parameters (concentrations of chemicals, purity levels, tolerances, ...) so that we can learn the most cost efficient utilization?

In the lab people experiment with sigma aldrich grade materials, but the cost efficiency is also a function of the cost of purification grade, manufacturing tolerances, ...

<comment><USER8> There is no such legal or regulatory mandate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> To power oil extraction, so that's probably a net increase for CO2 :(

</comment><comment><USER12> Not one but two popup adds on this site!

</comment><comment><USER13> Interesting how an oilfield in Texas is named after the city in Russia where I'm from.</comment>


Offer HN: Data extraction - <AUTHOR>

I'm testing a business model, and I'm offering up my service and my data extraction tool-chain.<p>For more details: http://blog.mathgladiator.com/2010/11/customer-1-without-launch.html <comment><USER2> Clickety: [http://blog.mathgladiator.com/2010/11/customer-1-without- lau...](http://blog.mathgladiator.com/2010/11/customer-1-without-launch.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Please, do change the font on <http://www.wheelbarro.ws/> as it's really not legible. And maybe you could explain with less jargon why and how people can use your service.

Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> I will; since I've switched my focus. I'm going get a cleaner design in place. My longbeard dream ( <http://longbeardstudios.com/> ) is fading. I'm just going to port <http://pilu.github.com/web-app-theme/> to node.js

Thanks for looking!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What's the advantage of this over using the many HTTP parsing libraries available?

Can I only extract data from 1 URL at a time?

<comment><AUTHOR> The advantage that I'm offering is a jQuery-like environment and I provide a JSON version of the HTML after it has gone through a rigorous normalization process.

For now, I'm writing the extractors to test it out in the field. Eventually, I'll open up the RESTful service which enables developers to parse one page at a time (or multiple up to a request limit).

After that, I'll open up the crawler which can crawl an entire web site.</comment></comment>


How many of you are musical? - <AUTHOR>

I watched a PBS special last night that looked at how music is ingrained in the human experience, and how our taste for music is mathematically integrated with the physics of music. Made me wonder: How many hackers play an instrument or are otherwise musically inclined? Please vote up a choice and post what, if any, instrument(s) you play. <comment><USER2> Music is quite literally the universal language. It brings people together, and allows now only the musician to express themselves, but also the listener. Music can be completely in a foreign language, but we listen, and can love it because the rythem and the beat are universal, and can be subject to interpretation. The same music can mean different things to many different people.

Many sites out there, myspace music, itunes, indaba and more, have developed successful music sites. But they have dropped the ball in numerous areas. And are not doing the musically inclinded or the musically interested justice.

<comment><AUTHOR> I thought one of the most interesting part of the PBS piece was a study where they took clips of classical music recordings to a tribe in west Africa that had never been exposed to music outside what they played in their tribe and asked them to identify whether it was happy, sad or scary. Despite never being exposed to western instruments, chords or rhythms, they were able to identify the emotion in the same way any western person would.

Music is truly universal, maybe more so than math as music and rhythm seems to be built-in to our physical makeup, whereas math must be taught.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I would like to learn to play an instrument/sing

</comment><comment><USER3> Also related: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=746708>

<comment><AUTHOR> Ha! Missed that. Thanks for the link.

Side note - I notice I gave myself negative points for trying to setup a poll- type submission. Is there a proper way to setup a poll on here, or am I just too much of a noob to be able to do that?

<comment><USER3> <http://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll>

There is a min karma threshold to create a poll, so you may not qualify (especially after this debacle :) ).

<comment><AUTHOR> Yea... lesson learned. Thanks for the link!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I do not play an instrument or sing

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I sing in the shower

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I play one instrument

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I play multiple instruments

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I play in a band/sing in a choir</comment>


Netflix launches Rs 199 ($2.80) mobile-only monthly plan in India - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/24/netflix-launches-rs-199-2-8-mobile-only-monthly-plan-in-india/ <comment><USER3> I've said this here before (though some seem to have disliked it). The Netflix UX and video quality are leagues ahead of Amazon Prime Video. Hotstar is a big laggard and far, far behind in every single aspect except for the amount of Indian content it has.

India is a highly price sensitive country, with absolutely no customer loyalty in most industry sectors. Nothing can beat free (which is where Hotstar is stuck, competing with YouTube).

It will be a tough act for Netflix to make anything from this plan. For this particular price point, restricted to mobile and a single screen at a time, what matters to this audience segment would be more Indian content. Netflix lags on that aspect quite a bit. It has some good Indian language originals, but India is a huge country with 22 official languages (and several hundreds more of unofficial languages), and these originals with a mix of Hindi and English may not appeal to a very wide audience. At the very least, it should voice dub shows in other languages. A better approach would be to use the diverse talent of content creators across languages and states, and provide those with a voice dub in other languages.

India as a country produces more than 1000 movies every year. While most are not worth watching (for movie buffs), there are several gems if one looks at all the languages and picks the best among those.

Netflix should focus strongly on licensing content produced by others and get recent releases if it wants to keep up in the Indian market. Amazon Prime is very quick in getting recently released Indian language movies on its platform. Hotstar may be similar too.

Edit and addendum:

Actually, on further thought, this plan doesn't make much sense at all by itself. Many people in India share Netflix accounts with friends or family and share the costs too. Such people would be much better off with the highest plan for Rs.800 a month while having five profiles, four simultaneous screens (shared with three other people), flexibility to watch on any device (not just mobile), using 4K quality if desired, etc. Sharing that with three others (four in total) brings the cost to Rs.200 per person, which is just one rupee more than this mobile plan for Rs.199.

It's going to be even tougher for Netflix to make money through this plan without more partnerships and incentives. Maybe this plan could push people to move to higher tiers and account sharing. I can only think of this as acting as a teaser and getting the foot in the door. Only time will tell. This plan is not meant to have many more subscribers than the other tiers.

<comment><USER4> Let me preface this by admitting that I'm a very poor judge of video quality since I generally think those 720p/700MB torrent encodes are swell. So I'm going to ignore the matter of video quality; by my awful standards they're both perfectly adequate.

I think Amazon has Netflix beat on UX. To search Netflix without using third party tools is a real nightmare. The user interface seems user-hostile, like it's designed to conceal from the user the true breadth of Netflix's library (I earnestly believe it was.) It wasn't always this bad, in the early days of netflix's streaming business the search wasn't bad, and back when they were a DVD service (which is when I first subscribed) the search functionality was pretty decent even.

But with Amazon video, you've got the search features built into the amazon prime apps, which admittedly usually sucks, but you've also got the option of searching on amazon.com itself, or on IMDB (which has been owned by Amazon since the late 90s.) Searching on IMDB is what I do. When doing advanced searches you can specify that you're only interested in movies that are free on amazon prime in your region.

E.g.: _Feature Action movies that are free on Amazon Prime in the US, and are in the IMDB Top 1000:_ [https://www.imdb.com/search/title/?title_type=feature&genres...](https://www.imdb.com/search/title/?title_type=feature&genres=action&groups=top_1000&online_availability=US%2Ftoday%2FAmazon%2Fsubs)

(Perhaps IMDB advanced search for prime videos is bad UX for casual users (although it was my non-technical mother who brought my attention to it, so I'd push back against that notion) but at the very least it's an option. While I've seen third party websites offering a good proper advanced search of Netflix's catalogue, as far as I know if you stick to Netflix operated search interfaces you're basically stuck up shit creek.)

<comment><USER5> >those 720p/700MB torrent encodes

Are those still produced for recent movies?

<comment><USER4> Sometimes, but it's becoming less and less common.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Indian consumer market remains value-conscious" \- this is the most important point here. But 200rs per month too seems very expensive. I'm not sure how this will play out. Let's see.

Hotstar has been killing it. They have the massive advantage of streaming live sports, especially IPL and other cricket matches.

I think Netflix will become the next Apple in India. They gotta think like an Indian company and not as an American company!

<comment><USER7> >> I think Netflix will become the next Apple in India. They gotta think like an Indian company and not as an American company!

Whats the difference between thinking like an Indian company vs an American company? You got me curious.

>> Hotstar has been killing it. They have the massive advantage of streaming live sports, especially IPL and other cricket matches.

I take it they are funding it with ads? Do you think they will fund everything with ads long term or are they just buying time to build market share before converting to a subscription model?

<comment><USER8> The difference is usually in the kind of customer you wish to attract - <USER2> India companies tend to focus on lower cost to acquire customers, and this works just because of the sheer size of the country. You have cities with populations in the millions, which have a sizeable population with access to high quality internet services. In the US, the focus would be on higher margins per customer, both because the total number of available customers aren't as high as in India, and an individual customer can afford a lot more than in India.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Still will be difficult for them to catch up, with Amazon prime working out to be rs85 per month, and hotstar having a massive multilingual catalogue+live sports including most cricket and EPL, Netflix limited catalogue is not exactly value at rs 199.

Only they do have some robust infrastructure like Amazon, hotstar service seems somewhat struggling under the load of millions of people watching at prime times.

<comment><USER10> Netflix was trialling the mobile only plans for a while and I have been using the weekly billed one (not sure if it's available with this update now) for RS.65. That's the best value for me - sign-up for a week for some new content once in a quarter or so. Otherwise, Netflix is way way behind others in India like you say.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Since the rise of Reliance Jio, Two things happened: 1\. Sales of Budget 4G Phone. 2\. Internet Content Consumption on Phone With that, This is a super- smart move from Netflix to fight Hotstar-like Indian Soap-Opera packed Streaming Services.

In fact, Indians were massively watching Netflix already - but using someone else's Account - which is a very common way of saving money. Now this is Rs. 199 is probably going to change that because it's more like a Mobile Plan Recharge.

I guess this is the power of introducing a price-plan using Data Science as Netlfix's teams must have found out the importance of Smartphone (Device) and the game Indians were playing.

<comment><USER12> hope to see those prices also in Europe

<comment><USER13> Id be interested to know if the downvoters think you're morally wrong, or whether they think its just never going to happen.

I'm reminded of a court case in the UK between Tesco and Levis. Tesco were importing Levis from the US where they retailed and presumably wholesaled for much less than in Europe, but were forced to stop distribution due to trademark rules. I wonder if you could avoid that by reselling debranded Netflix, I'd guess you'd fall foul of a load of other laws doing that though.

[http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/1261829.stm](http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/1261829.stm)

<comment><USER14> You could just use a VPN service

<comment><USER15> Netflix has VERY good VPN and proxy detection.. give it a try..

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This should help them somehow. Everyone knows about Netflix but only a few have a monthly paid subscription. Rs 650 is kind of expensive for one service with limited content.

I travel in the metro quite regularly, I see 30-50% of passengers consuming some sort of video content on their phones. There is demand for sure. Only time can tell if this new plan really helps Netflix getting more paid subscribers.

<comment><USER6> But how many in those 30 to 50% are consuming paid video content? That would be an interesting metric

<comment><USER16> Very less. Piracy is still rampant. I find it quite common people viewing cam rips on their mobile. Theatres are expensive in metros. I do feel this is a good move by Netflix. Local content is a problem though. Let's see how this pans out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It seems that Techcrunch's CMS cannot (perhaps) handle Unicode headlines: Rs = ₹

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_rupee_sign](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_rupee_sign)

<comment><USER18> It may just be for their American audience. I know Rs but have never seen the symbol until right now.

<comment><USER17> When I saw "Rs", given that I work in an academically-related field, I first interpreted it as relating to the R statistical language.

Then, during the parsing of the title, my second interpretation was that "Rs 199" was the model number of some sort.

The letters "Rs" do not, as someone from North America, mean a currency to me. IMHO, using a 'special' character like ₹ would help me interpret things better.

(But that's just me.)

<comment><USER18> If you work with R wouldn't it just be R? I've never seen R Studio abbreviated to Rs. If anything I could see a programmer interpreting it as rust but the capitalized R would be weird.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> So this was the reason netflix killed its airplay support?

[https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/6/18298146/netflix- confirms-...](https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/6/18298146/netflix-confirms-it- yanked-airplay-support-wont-let-you-beam-shows-to-apple-tvs-anymore)

<comment><USER20> Wow. Yet another Netflix update that antagonizes users.

Though I suppose this one isn't a deal breaker. Don't all airplay capable devices (Apple TV, newer smart TVs, etc) have their own Netflix client?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> 480p streaming which this plan offers will look absolutely pathetic in most Android phones (by this time has 98-99% share in India) which boast ever increasing screen resolutions. So I bet this plan has no takers for people who love beautiful resolutions on their phones which cost sub $300.

<comment><USER22> 480p isn't that bad, but then it depends upon what your used too. But way better than 640x480 resolution that many grew up with.

India consumers are really price savvy and look for value for money more than most people I know and with that, not as easily hooked into the fashion whims of society. Though that may well change as the average income rises.

I had a look at the best selling phones in India and [https://www.gizbot.com/best-selling-phones/](https://www.gizbot.com/best- selling-phones/) and it is most insightful, of note - not one single Apple product there. Though I do recall Apple looking at producing phones locally - which would help in price as would avoid import taxation saving around 20% of the price and allow them to pass that onto the consumer. [https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/apple- foxcon...](https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/apple-foxconn- iphone-mass-manufacturing-in-india-report-1502794-2019-04-16)

<comment><USER21> To add a counterpoint - think about a much bigger whale - Youtube - automatically upscales to 1080p when network and devices supports it. And Youtube in India is much much bigger over Hotstar and all other streaming providers. 80% of internet users of India use YouTube [https://gadgets.ndtv.com/internet/news/youtube-india- penetra...](https://gadgets.ndtv.com/internet/news/youtube-india-penetration- mobile-user-base-225-million-google-1828048). You can see that people know their 1080p when they see it.

<comment><USER23> 1080p Youtube is ~8Mbps and will go through the entire 1GB Jio daily data cap in 15-20 minutes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Is saying, "the mass consumer market remains value-conscious" just a polite way of saying that Indians don't feel like wasting their hard earned money when pirating is easy?

Or is it that regular priced Netflix is a large enough portion of a normal Indian's income that they don't feel like they get enough to watch for their money?

Most of the people I know in America basically shrug off the price of Netflix as the cost of a few cups of coffee per month

I'm not sure what the right interpretation is, but they kind of lead to different business strategies. The first (easy piracy) is not really Netflix's problem to solve, it's the government's problem. The second (content for money) is either that Netflix needs to invest in more Indian shows or lower their prices even more.

<comment><USER25> I think your second interpretation looks right. Media has this rather irritating habit of not simply saying that "Most people can't afford" these services. Instead they come up with bullshit like "value-conscious", "value/price-sensitive" "hard negotiator/bargain hunter" etc.

Poverty/Income level topics are reserved for UN or WHO type reports and research papers.

Regarding 'piracy vs content for money' I'd add in Indian context it is same thing. People pirate not because high idealism like "content wants to be free" but mainly because most people can't afford any better. If one reverse argument and say people will stop pirating if content is conveniently available like via netflix it will still not work because even 2 dollar/month is too expensive for people who would rather have rented pirated DVD for 5-10 cents and multiple families watch together.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Smart move - India has massive mobile data usage, and for many people it's their only form of internet access.

Huge, mosly untapped market - it will be interesting to watch their content strategy, will we see Bollywood Netflix originals?

<comment><USER27> There are a lot of Netflix Originals, mostly Bollywood, intended for Indian audiences.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Netflix should work out partnerships with Internet and Telecom Providers to get this working at a massive volume. If Netflix can club their billing, may not be necessary monthly, along with the likes of Jio/Airtel Recharge billings, it will be an easy access to the target subscribers they are looking for.

For the majority of Indian masses that this is intended for, it is not just the pricing but the payment method is one of the hurdles.

Lot of people still "recharge" their prepaid phone bills with cash.

<comment><USER28> > Lot of people still "recharge" their prepaid phone bills with cash.

Didn't India outlaw cash?

<comment><USER29> No. They withdrew the 500 and 1000 Rupee bills in circulation in 2016, which was around 86 percent of all the cash in the country, which is the 6th largest economy in the world at present. But cash circulation is almost back to normal by now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> In some ways Indians are like Americans. They like to be endlessly entertained with movies and sports(mainly cricket though). I think 200 rupees plan could add lot more users. Regarding what this media expert Shah claims about local content, I am not sure what kind of things Netflix can offer that local providers are not already doing in abundance.

<comment><USER30> I think the appeal of movies and sports is pretty universal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> The reason these paid services are successful in the US is because we have a fully functional and very threatening legal and corporate system that will find and punish people that steal their content and distribute it. This makes it inconvenient or risky to use free services (about ~13 years ago it was more convenient to pirate, with p2p sharing apps being very popular at US colleges and any music or film a click away, before enforcement ramped up).

Does India have the same level of legal enforcement? Why pay for a streaming service if they can pirate content?

</comment><comment><USER32> Yes considering hotstar which offers english tv serials like GOT, originals and live cricket matches for 999 / yr it's about time Netflix did something similar

</comment><comment><USER33> Will be interesting to see if any VPN streaming services pop up to resell this outside of India.

</comment><comment><USER34> Don't understand why the subscription is cheaper on a mobile phone, if the content and resolution is the same. Also, won't you be able to use something like Samsung Dex to watch this content on a tv anyways?

<comment><USER35> Resolution is not the same. It's limited to 480p.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Is this considered affordable in India?

What is a considered 'good' salary in India?

<comment><USER8> For the vast majority of Indians - probably not.

For the Indians living in tier 1 - 2 cities, in their 20s - 30s, with access to high speed internet (4G, 1GB per day caps), definitely. For comparison the most popular of these mobile data plans (which also offer unlimited calls) come in at around 300-400rs per month. And there are enough Indians in this bracket for Netflix to carve out a good chunk of the market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Fuck you Netflix 480p Huh

</comment><comment><USER38> Moves like this really demonstrate the economics of most internet businesses. There is no real tangible link between what people pay and what it nearly costs to offer a service over a stream of bits & bytes.

Netflix started at $7.99 in 2010 and today for the same subscription you pay $12.99, which is a 62.5% price hike. That is particularly interesting, because it's considerably more than the inflation over the same period of time, which is at only 17.5% ([https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/](https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/)).

Content got cheaper through Netflix's own productions, engineering optimisations over the last 10 years probably also helped to significantly reduce infrastructure cost for the same service which someone paid $7.99 before and hosting got cheaper as well as Azure and Google Cloud have significantly started to compete with Amazon, yet customers pay A LOT more.

Now they want to capture a share of the Indian market and can basically offer a "reduced" service for only a small fraction of the price what a US customer pays, even though nothing changes in terms of what they have to pay their engineers and hosting, etc. in order to sustain the company. Yes there will be a little bit of additional infrastructure cost to also facilitate 480p streaming in India, but I doubt that has anything to do with the actual pricing.

I bet Netflix would happily offer HD streaming to Indian customers for the same price if there wasn't a risk of upsetting other paying customers from different countries.

Netflix customers will pay arbitrary made up prices always going up and never going down for as long as there is still enough people who just don't care to foot the bill every month. A sense of entitlement to be treated fairly or otherwise walk away, even if that means that you have to spend more time with friends instead of binge watching dumb TV is being lost in this world.

<comment><USER39> > Content got cheaper

Citation needed. Everything I've heard is that content is getting more expensive for them because there are more streaming services competing for content.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Which platform do you prefer and why, Ghost or Pelican? - <AUTHOR>

I am going to move my blog and want to start with something more fresh. If you had made that choice before I want to hear your story. <comment><USER2> I have blogs using both!

I went with Pelican before ghost came out to get off of Wordpress. I was tired of the constant security updates enough to try and migrate to something else. My first requirement was that it was able to import Wordpress content which Pelican had.

However, Pelican's wordpress importer was "bare-bones" to say the least and still is. I fixed it so that it at least preserves formatting (by translating Wordpress' insane parser thing for its own post format line by line). It won't preserve things like image links and stuff (or at least I didn't get to that part).

I'm still not a huge fan of it one way or the other but it does its job I guess. Development is fast and furious though and I haven't updated in forever. So ymmv there.

As for Ghost... same problems as Wordpress and harder to self-host by orders of magnitude. It has a catchy admin interface. Designers love this platform so finding a good template is pretty easy compared to Pelican (I had to write my own... again not as much fun as it sounds).

The bonus of both platforms is that they both parse markdown for post content so dipping your toes in and trying something else shouldn't be too painful.

<comment><USER3> Ghost has the same problems as WordPress? That's extremely hard to believe, since there is no way that Ghost is made out of ancient, often questionable PHP code that you have to interact with to get anything significant done.

<comment><USER2> I meant the specific problems _I_ was having with Wordpress: hosted, dynamic pages and constant upgrades. As Ghost gains popularity it will just become another target for spammers and will require constant vigilance to protect your blog if you're self-hosting.

 _Update_ : fixed an unclear anaphora.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Recently, I started using Ghost as personal note journal on my Mac. I reviewed several non-Wordpress self-hosted platforms and finally decided to test Ghost. Ghost was easy to setup, there are a few free good themes that you can use or create/ customize your own. I really like the markdown editor. It allows you to use markdown as well as HTML. Most of the time I use the editor to write my notes. Sometime I will use Mou to write, export to HTML and paste in the markdown editor. I believe Ghost platform is growing and has momentum so hopefully it will have more features like scheduled posts, tagging, comments etc.

I also run a web service on a LAMP stack. Initially I thought about using Ghost for blogging but due to complexity and lack of information on running Apache with SSL and Nodejs on same server decided to wait.

</comment><comment><USER5> Ghost is nice, but it doesn't quite fill the same niche. Its ease of use comes from its dynamic parts like the editor. Certainly can't use those if I only want static output without some steps inbetween and especially not if the server doesn't run any interpreter.

</comment><comment><USER6> I hadn't actually heard of Pelican until now but it looks like Ghost and Pelican aren't really comparable - they're two very different approaches to a blogging platform. Pelican looks more comparable to Jekyll.

Personally I've just moved to Ghost and I have to say that I love it. I wrote a longish post [1] on all the blogging platforms I've tried and how Ghost compares. The post also explains why I didn't go with something like Jekyll. Check it out, it might help.

[1] [http://mehdi.me/ghost-io-the-first-blogging-platform-that- ma...](http://mehdi.me/ghost-io-the-first-blogging-platform-that-makes-me- happy/)</comment>


GitLab 10.4 released - <AUTHOR> https://about.gitlab.com/2018/01/22/gitlab-10-4-released/ <comment><USER3> CI is fine and I am happy GitLab is offering it as it makes sense to integrate strongly with source control. But building a web-IDE?

Please don't go down this rabbit hole, GitLab - there will be dragons (in essence you will have to build an OS for the browser). Developers have their beloved editors that work very well for the most part (at least better than their JS counterparts).

<comment><USER4> I was at Google when they implemented something like this in their source code viewing system. If you see a typo in a comment, for example, you click the pencil icon on that line, which pops open an editor with your cursor on that line, fix the typo, and can create and submit for review a pull request right there. Less than a minute.

It is fantastic.

I'm so glad Gitlab is providing competition to Stash and Github. Nice work.

<comment><USER5> Someone in my twitter feed was just asking for this feature last night. I don't want to open an editor, checkout, fetch, edit, commit, push, open a PR to a PR when I can just do it in an editor. I don't use Gitlab but I agree, it's a brilliant feature.

<comment><USER6> This is not so much an argument for a Web IDE.

It is an argument against the cumbersome Git workflows, and the even more cumbersome GitHub Pull Request workflow on top of that.

Why can't I fix the typo in my editor, hit "upload", enter some commit message and be done with it?

<comment><USER4> I'd respectfully disagree. In a monorepo the size of Google's (or even Square's, where I work now), there would be a whole schlep to open the file in your editor. Much better to fix right there where you're browsing.

Also, at Google, it's not even Git, or a Git/Github workflow.

<comment><USER6> Please respect the context of a comment, and refrain from strawman arguments.

This was _not_ about whether or not this feature is good for the Google repo (of course it is, nobody disputed that!). This was about whether and how to apply this to other projects.

<comment><USER4> Please respect the fact that some of us actually read comments and reply to them thoughtfully. Throwing around trite accusations of "strawman" arguments doesn't help anything.

The comment I replied to was claiming that it was the git workflows (I assume for submitting, but am open to correction) that make this cumbersome. I was pointing out that in an enormous repository (and I did mention my current employer as an example too -- and we use Git, not Google's internal tooling), just getting to the point of having the latest version of some far-flung file that you usually never touch open in your editor is cumbersome enough to make this feature a win, regardless of whether the workflows for submitting the change disappear altogether.

<comment><USER6> Thanks for the clarification.

I would still see this as an instance of unnecessary complexity in the Git workflow - mostly the workflow for submitting, but not just that.

Of course, one could also argue that this is by design. Still, I don't see why a lightweight client that is feasible for the web would not also be feasible for the command line.

For example, it would be great to be able to have a checkout with reduced history. You could reduce in time and/or space, i.e. just a subtree and/or just the last 3 months. Even a distributed VCS doesn't need all history and all files as long as it has the relevant checksums.

<comment><USER4> I totally agree about the unnecessary complexity of the git workflow.

If you haven't seen it before, check out gitless: actual research-backed simplification of the git commandline workflow.

Reduced views of files and history are super useful, but unfortunately don't work in the case where you've browsed your way to a part of the code that you seldom work on, since you're less likely to have loaded them into your narrow slice: it's still nice to be able to fix spelling mistakes far afield, and the web editing helps nicely for that.

What _would_ help with the cases you describe, though, is a synthetic filesystem view, cache-faulted in as needed, like the one Microsoft is building. I'm pretty excited about where that's heading. [https://github.com/Microsoft/GVFS](https://github.com/Microsoft/GVFS) for the project, [https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/devops/2017/11/15/updates-t...](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/devops/2017/11/15/updates- to-gvfs/) for the announcement they're going to be working with Github. Pretty cool stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It looks like that GitLab got the Featuritis. Instead of adding tons of unready and half baked feature it should focus on stability and performance.

<comment> mh-cx Yeah, and they've promised to work on performance for ages now with almost no improvement.

I run a very small installation with only a couple of projects and some hundred issues on a 4 GB machine. It eats up 2 GB (sigh!!!) - and often still feels extremely slow. I mean 2 Gigabytes!! What for? That's a multitude of all the data I have in the DB there. And then it's not even used for something useful like caching. Some pages take several seconds to load. As a developer that's totally unacceptable to me.

Is ruby really such a mess that it's impossible to run an app with reasonable memory consumption?

<comment><USER8> > Is ruby really such a mess that it's impossible to run an app with > reasonable memory consumption?

Yes.

Any non-trivial Ruby app will quickly eat up 500MB, and any non-trivial Rails app will soon balloon to 1GB, with things getting worse over time due to memory fragmentation†. Since there is no parallelism your only option is to either have more unicorn workers, for which prefork and COW are hardly working to save you from duplicating memory, especially over time, or have puma threads and use JRuby, which is a memory hog of its own and often slower than MRI.

There have been arguments made that developer time trumps CPU time [0] but there are some workloads and problem domains and uncontrollable events for which this works at the beginning yet later on you find having yourself painted into a corner as suddenly things are not sustainable because you just can't throw more hardware at the issue without going belly up[1]. Once the low hanging fruits have been reaped you're being challenged just to make your app behave within established parameters with diminishing returns, which I'm sure you'd rather spend on solving _actual_ problems for your customers. At that point you might just as well spend the money on rewriting part or all of your app in a more frugal ecosystem and mindset[2].

† Switching to jemalloc may or may not help. Over here it did not.

[0]: [https://m.signalvnoise.com/ruby-has-been-fast-enough- for-13-...](https://m.signalvnoise.com/ruby-has-been-fast-enough-for-13-years- afff4a54abc7)

[1]: [https://twitter.com/migueldeicaza/status/950054181045440518](https://twitter.com/migueldeicaza/status/950054181045440518)

[2]: [https://twitter.com/lloeki/status/950079609051152384](https://twitter.com/lloeki/status/950079609051152384)

<comment> mh-cx Thanks. I was afraid to hear something like this.

Being a PHP developer myself it's really hard to believe that resource consumption is obviously treaded with so little priority in the rails/ruby world.

And some attitudes here like "who cares? memory/cpu is cheap nowadays" are in my opinion part of the problem. I'd say, well written software should use as little resources as possible. Probably a habit that comes from my early days on a C64 back in the 80s.

<comment><USER9> > well written software should use as little resources as possible

It's about priorities. IMO if using as little resources as possible is priority number 1, then something is amiss.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The security testing feature is definitely interesting but I wonder how it performs as that by itself is a non-trivial task. It can be done for sure but it takes a lot of resources and care to make it useful.

EDIT:

I would like to add that if this feature is in fact really useful and it works, the price for the GitLab Ultimate is justified if the license does not restrict you to the number of targets you can test. It can be used as a service and could potentially replace other infrastructure in a typical corp environment that is used mainly by the security team. But as I said earlier, this is a non-trivial task.

EDIT 2:

This is my last edit. We use GitLab CI internally and it is quite nice although it is not without issues. There are some really funky problems. But it works and I love the fact that it is integrated into the GitLab product. Except for TravisCI which makes it trivial, most other CI tools are very difficult to setup and maintain and for small teams this is yet another annoying thing to do. As a startup, I can say it is very useful.

<comment><USER11> The DAST feature uses ZAP under the covers, their integration is a thin trigger around that tool. You can already use it for free outside of GL.

[https://hub.docker.com/r/owasp/zap2docker- stable/](https://hub.docker.com/r/owasp/zap2docker-stable/)

[https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/examples/dast.html](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/examples/dast.html)

<comment><USER10> I was suspecting that. Thanks for sharing this info. It will be really nice if you guys implement ways to swap the built-in DAST tool. My startup is actually going to release something really cool and useful in the next couple of weeks and it will be awesome if we can provide features to be compatible with GitLab.

<comment><USER12> Interesting. If you want to integrate it there are instructions in the docs [https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/merge_requests/dast....](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/merge_requests/dast.html) (use gl-dast-report.json to send results back).

If your product is as cool as you say it is we would love to add it to GitLab by default and run both ZAProxy and yours by default.

<comment><USER10> Thanks. I will have a look. Btw, the tool will be a black-box vulnerability scanner but just like ZAP, it will be able to proxy as well - all nicely packaged with minimal dependencies and no framebuffer rendering - so it should be snappy.

<comment><USER11> Is there a repo I can follow along at? Sounds interesting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Are most if not all of GitLab's future CI and CD improvements going to be focused on using Kubernetes and/or containers exclusively?

We're not using that method of either hosting GitLab or deploying our software at my company for various historical reasons, and while GitLab has been good for us overall in its basic workflow, it's a bummer how much of the future roadmap and CD/Devops improvement seems not to apply to our setup.

<comment><USER14> We're definitely doing a lot with Kubernetes, especially within CD, but it's not completely exclusive. We usually provide powerful primitives that can be used for anything, but make it easier if you're using Kubernetes.

Take monitoring for example. You can add Prometheus monitoring to (nearly) anything. But if you happen to use it with Kubernetes, we'll grab a bunch of data automatically. If not, you may have to configure it yourself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> At my company, we use Gitlab only as version control system and it works very well for around 100 programmers. We run it on an EC2 medium instance, around 200 GB standard SSD storage.

We don't use Gitlab for CI. We use Jenkins.

For task and issues management we use JIRA.

Yes, it's 3 tools to manage but since each of the tools is really optimized for its task, it works really well.

<comment><USER16> Didn't even know gitlab has CI. At my office we have Jenkins plugged into our local gitlab instance.

<comment><USER8> GitLab CI is, for us, configurable in ways that CircleCI and Travis are not, by a long shot (but they both have other features that gitlab doesn't have, it's just that we don't need them)

I sure miss CircleCI step folding in the log output though.

<comment><USER17> this, step folding is definitely missing in gitlab-ci compare to travis, especially as it seems most CI product have it and (I think) it something that only require frontend developement ?

<comment><USER14> Thanks for the feedback. Here's an issue to track the request: [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab- ce/issues/14664](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/14664) and I added it to our Missing features section with [https://gitlab.com/gitlab- com/www-gitlab-com/commit/ddfc9ee1...](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www- gitlab-com/commit/ddfc9ee10a1fdd39dfabd7ec2bbcdabbbb2fdf61).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I had to use Gitlab several times in the past, mostly because the companies I was working for wanted free private repositories.

Though I appreciate to have a Github alternative with some really solid CI tools, it just feels like Gitlab cannot compete. Discussions and the UI in general are unreadable, everything feels slow (10 seconds to populate the asignee dropdown, come on...), updates and deployments every two days in the middle of work days ("sorry, I cannot push, Gitlab is down"), and the cringiest thing of all, seeing: "deploying Gitlab CE 10.4.0-rc8" [1]. Releasing Release Candidates?!

Maybe I should try to deploy Gitlab on some server of my own.

[1] [https://twitter.com/gitlabstatus/status/954491741322776582](https://twitter.com/gitlabstatus/status/954491741322776582)

<comment><USER19> What people don't understand about gitlab is that it's a absolutely monumental resource consumer.

I run one for a community of hobby developers and to keep my stuff out of github for ideological reasons, but it's running on what is, by _FAR_ the most beefy machine I run.

Normally I have machines that are a couple cores, couple gigs of ram, or single purpose machines with under 1G and a dedicated thread on the hypervisor.

Gitlab has a 32G DDR3/8 Physical core CPU machine to itself.

I consumes, at any given time, about 25% of that (before FS caches, which, you're going to want).

I had a friend running this before me on a VPS with 4G of memory and the thing was so annoyingly slow that we blamed the hoster and our users were turning back to bitbucket/github.

Since the upgrade, things are smooth as a babies butt.

Although it's hard to justify the SERIOUS expense of this server, it's certainly fast enough. I worry about larger deployments though.

Btw, you can get a taste for yourself if you like; [https://git.drk.sc](https://git.drk.sc)

Maybe it doesn't scale very well with many users/projects. We've only got a couple hundred projects and around 100 users. (and only a handful of CI runners)

<comment><USER20> Suggest gitbucket - [https://gitbucket.github.io/](https://gitbucket.github.io/)

blazingly fast (a single war file - just run "java -jar gitbucket.war" to get started) and has a very nice UI. A plugin system enables you to extend the functionality (including CI) ... and a very active dev community.

[https://gitbucket.github.io/](https://gitbucket.github.io/)

<comment><USER21> For anyone running this, can you comment? For example, one recurring criticism, before GitLab and the community managed to stamp out the expectation that it would be feasible, was that people were trying to self host a GitLab instance on a cheap SBC (e.g., a Raspberry Pi) or the smallest DigitalOcean plan and were surprised when this wasn't doable, while Gogs and Gitea handle this fine.

So to get a general idea of what sort of setup is expected in order to run a gitbucket instance, if you're running one, what are the relevant details?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > The gitlab Helm chart is deprecated, and will be replaced by the new cloud > native GitLab chart.

On the other hand

> Cloud Native GitLab Helm Chart. THIS REPOSITORY IS UNDER HEAVY DEVELOPMENT. > IT SHOULD NOT BE USED FOR ANYTHING EXCEPT DEVELOPMENT

So, what should I use now? also,

> A migration will be required to move from the current deprecated chart, to > the new cloud native GitLab chart.

Yet I don't see any explanation for how to migrate?

<comment><USER14> From [https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/install/kubernetes/](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/install/kubernetes/), the best way to run GitLab on Kubernetes today is the gitlab-omnibus chart:

[https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/install/kubernetes/gitlab_omnibus...](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/install/kubernetes/gitlab_omnibus.html)

It's in beta, with some limitations on it's production-worthiness - <USER2> that the Postgres Helm chart that it depends on isn't configured as well as the Postgres built into regular Omnibus.

I know it's confusing that we've got several charts, but we're trying really hard to reduce that down to one as quickly as possible.

<comment><USER22> That's the one I'm using, but based on today's release page saying the Helm chart is deprecated and I should use the cloud-native GitLab chart, and based on what your link to the Omnibus chart says:

> This Helm chart is in beta, and will be deprecated by the cloud native > GitLab chart.

I interpreted it as this being deprecated.

That said, great work on performance and startup times in the past months, for the first time my 2-user GitLab isn't maxing a full core and using 6GB RAM anymore, but instead using 60% of a core and 6.3GB RAM, while site load times have gone down significantly, and startup now completes actually within of the first 5 minutes (before, Kubernetes' readiness checker often killed GitLab before it managed to come up)

<comment><USER23> Hi Kuschku,

Sorry for the confusion, as noted we are trying to remedy this with a single chart as quickly as possible.

Currently we have two Helm charts that can deploy GitLab, "gitlab" and "gitlab-omnibus".

* The "gitlab" chart deploys only GitLab itself and is not recommended. This is the chart that has been announced as deprecated in the blog post.

* The "gitlab-omnibus" chart is what we recommend users to install today, and deploys everything you need for a working GitLab installation. (Postgres, Redis, an Ingress, etc.)

We still support and maintain the "gitlab-omnibus" chart, but it too will eventually be deprecated as well in favor of the upcoming cloud native charts.

The cloud native charts will have a significant number of advantages, including:

* Separation of components for improved horizontal scaling

* Improved resilience

* Faster startup time (current container runs `gitlab-ctl reconfigure` on every startup)

* No need for root access

Due to the significant architectural changes, migration will be via backup/restore.

<comment><USER22> > * Faster startup time (current container runs `gitlab-ctl reconfigure` on > every startup)

Oh my god, how much I'd love that.

On the topic of cloud native charts, can I use the new cloud native gitlab chart (if I run an external prometheus, postgres and redis already separately) today? And how would I migrate?

And one thing I'd love to see is building docker containers without having to give the runner access to the host's docker. How do other CI solutions do that?

<comment><USER23> > On the topic of cloud native charts, can I use the new cloud native gitlab > chart (if I run an external prometheus, postgres and redis already > separately) today? And how would I migrate?

The cloud native chart is still under development and breaking changes will occur, so I would not recommend using it for anything outside of testing. For example our current sprint is focusing on storage persistence.

For migration, you would perform a backup of the current instance and restore the backup onto the new cloud native based deployment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I still have 20 FPS when scrolling in a big commit diff.

I also wish they improve a bit the UI/UX in general. I've used Github for almost a decade and GitLab feels a bit messy.

<comment><USER25> Hi Jacob, Frontend Lead here. This is very high on my list. I have a team of 5 FE engineers (1 being me) focused on improving performance and this is one of the big things on our list of highest priority performance improvements.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Has the CI/CD > Environments table styling been fixed? All the environment names are cut off and the table isn't resizable/sortable/searchable.

It's basically unusable in it's current state.

<comment><USER27> Thanks for the feedback, I looked into it and it looks like neither of these problems have been fixed as of yet. I've asked the CI and UX teams if we can work on the Environments page.

Here's the issue for the table size: [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab- ce/issues/41594](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/41594)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The static/dynamic scanners are pretty cool; I just spent a couple days configuring the same functionality using the underlying open-source projects Clair (for Docker) and Bandit (for Python).

Doesn't seem worth the price bump from EES to EEU for me (which is a 4x per- seat increase), but this is a good feature for those willing to pay for it (or who already have another reason to buy the Ultimate edition).

Looks like my next task is to reimplement the DAST feature, which relies on the owasp/zap2docker-stable container under the covers.

</comment><comment><USER28> I like Gitlab a lot, but I still struggle with things that shouldn't be hard.

For example: I have a single build box with a VM for linux, a VM for Windows, and one for OSX. When I commit, CI queues up the runners. Great. Except that there is some hard coded value of 1 hour after which the remaining jobs in the queue will get dropped. That means if a single job takes over an hour the remaining jobs will automatically fail, _even if_ you up the job timeout limit. No error messages _at all_. Just failed jobs with blank logs.

You have to go in to a ruby configuration file and up the timeout to something big enough to accommodate your _total_ time executing all runners, which means you must know that value in advance. Each update of gitlab kills that conf file so you have to log in and change it back and the stop/start the Gitlab instance.

Edit: clarification

<comment><USER29> Thanks. We are aware of this issue, and we even know what is causing that, we also have ideas how to fix that. The plan is to release a fix with 10.5: [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab- ce/issues/38265#note_55...](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab- ce/issues/38265#note_55320316).

GitLab CI/CD Lead

<comment><USER28> What's frustrating is that is a regression-- I used to be able to queue up many jobs and never got the job failures (which, again, give no error message whatsoever).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Looks like HN loves to shit on Gitlab.

I will chime in with my experience. As a small startup, we have been using gitlab.com with a private CI server for over a year now. The UI performance has _most definitely_ improved. And their deployments do not cause outages anymore.

Great work team !

</comment><comment><USER31> I've started using gitlab for an open source project and I really like it. With respect to git repos it's indistinguishable from GitHub (or better?), _plus_ it has CI features integrated in.

The only thing that would be neater would be if they offered an OS X and/or Windows runner in their CI. But since I'm not paying for the service, I'm pretty happy with how it works.

<comment><USER27> We do have support for macOS and Windows in Runner, though you'll have to run them yourselves. We're looking into offering hosted macOS and Windows Runners for the future, but we have no solid timeframe for those right now. [https://gitlab.com/gitlab- com/infrastructure/issues/3183](https://gitlab.com/gitlab- com/infrastructure/issues/3183)

<comment><USER31> Yeah, sorry if I was unclear -- it's supported by the product but no runners are available for the gratis service.

I saw that issue before but it refers to "gold subscribers" which I'm not (just another freeloader).

Definitely keep up the good work, it's an awesome product and it's awesome that you offer an open source release.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> reminder: gitlab still has blatant false claims on their website.

> GitLab has 2/3 market share in the self-hosted Git market [1]

Their CEO admitted that it was wrong here many times but chooses to keep those blog post up without correction. [2]

1\. [https://about.gitlab.com/2017/06/29/whats-next-for-gitlab- ci...](https://about.gitlab.com/2017/06/29/whats-next-for-gitlab-ci/)

2\. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15703221](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15703221)

<comment><USER12> I stand by the claim we have 2/3 market share in the self-hosted git market. The claim is now linked to a page that contains the details [https://about.gitlab.com/is-it-any-good/](https://about.gitlab.com/is-it-any- good/)

<comment><USER32> buddybuild and bitrise are not representative of * all * self-hosted git market. Your claim is totally absurd.

See responses to your similar comment here [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15704055](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15704055)

Also discounting jenkins as "not modern"( whatever that means) and declaring yourself as number one is so dishonest. You "standing by it" means nothing.

Why is so important to you push these lies, I don't get it.

<comment><USER12> buddybuild and bitrise data probably has a bias in it. But we didn't find much else to go on. If you of anyone else knows of something we should use instead please let me know.

I think that since the blue ocean update to Jenkins they have added lot of the next generation features. I'll either specify the claim better or lange it later today.

<comment><USER32> > But we didn't find much else to go on.

Don't make claims based on unreliable data. I am not sure how else to express this.

see similar comments here [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15704407](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15704407)

<comment><USER12> No data is perfect, we consider the data reliable.

As promised I changed the wording of our CI/CD claims [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab- com/commit/64ce89fd...](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab- com/commit/64ce89fd740daf49580f1137d79b37af2e9cdc72)

<comment><USER32> > buddybuild and bitrise data probably has a bias in it.

> we consider the data reliable.

I give up!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I tried to sign up to GitLab the other day. OAuth for Google seems to be broken for me. I reached out on twitter, and it never got resolved. Just me shouting into the void, apparently. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

<comment><USER27> Hey, sorry about that. I just replied.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Just a reminder, as a GitLab reseller, I offer a 10% discount on GitLab Enterprise Edition to the HN community. My email is in my profile.

<comment> aaron-lebo Could you explain the reseller thing? The Gitlab people are on HN, why don't they just sell directly to the community?

<comment><USER34> Oh, they do. You can buy directly from GitLab at [https://about.gitlab.com/products/](https://about.gitlab.com/products/)

However, as a reseller and a member of the HN community, I can offer HN a discount on list price which comes out of my cut.

<comment> aaron-lebo Thanks. Good luck.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Who are competitors of Gitlab?

<comment><USER36> Hosted: GitHub, SourceForge, BitBucket

Self-hosted: Gitea/Gogs, Phabricator, Tuleap

<comment><USER37> Github Enterprise is on-premise, so I'd call it self hosted.

[https://enterprise.github.com/faq](https://enterprise.github.com/faq)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is the "Lean Startup" method really good advice? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> In contrast to "spend your money on lots of people's salaries before you have a product validated by the market" yes?

Which other options are you thinking of?</comment>