GitHub Satellite Livestream - <AUTHOR> https://githubsatellite.com/ <comment><USER2> Blog post here: [https://github.blog/2020-05-06-new-from- satellite-2020-githu...](https://github.blog/2020-05-06-new-from- satellite-2020-github-codespaces-github-discussions-securing-code-in-private- repositories-and-more/) (via [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23093100](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23093100), but no comments there).

The main threads are:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23092904](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23092904) (GitHub Codespaces)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23093091](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23093091) (GitHub Codescanning)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23092966](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23092966) (GitHub Insights)

</comment><comment><USER3> I remember considering paying thousands of dollars + travel + SF hotel to watch this last year. There's some silver lining in everyone being locked down - we can now watch all the good content from GitHub, Apple, you name, all virtual, remote.

<comment><USER4> I don't know about Github, but Apple and Microsoft have both run their major events live online for years (and at least the last two WWDCs have been streamed live by Apple in their entirety).

The really interesting thing here will be how these virtual conferences replicate some of the face-to-face aspects of the real-world conferences: labs, workshops, networking with other developers, etc. Github appears to be using this as an opportunity to introduce and trial Github Discussions, for example.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> That keynote from Nat Friedman an hour ago looks interesting. How do you play past segments in this thing? (All I see is this: [https://i.imgur.com/KR6UMgu.png](https://i.imgur.com/KR6UMgu.png))

Also: I've got to say, seeing things from this particular Nat gives me a nice late 90s throwback feeling. He along with Miguel ruled the Linux desktop universe back when we we're all hopeful that the Linux desktop would win over the Windows desktop.

Edit: The FAQ implies recordings are manually uploaded at some later time. (Meh!)

<comment><USER6> > That keynote from Nat Friedman an hour ago looks interesting. How do you > play past segments in this thing? (All I see is this: > [https://i.imgur.com/KR6UMgu.png](https://i.imgur.com/KR6UMgu.png))

Yeah, took me some time/clicks to "solve": go to the live stream and click at the red line (I guess later the will cut the segments as separated videos). [https://youtu.be/FhZTPM9ysWk](https://youtu.be/FhZTPM9ysWk)

<comment><USER5> Doh! Thanks!

(Also, nice of you to come out from 8 years of silence to post this! ;) )

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The live coding set from Sam Aaron was awesome. I'm looking forward to tuning in to his set again once the people stop talking. Lots of other acts in the schedule---looks really interesting!

</comment><comment><USER8> Codespaces is very cool!

<comment><USER9> Codespaces discussion happening over here [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23092904](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23092904)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> x-linking to insights discussion [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23092966](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23092966)

</comment><comment><USER10> codespaces!

<comment><USER11> This is amazing. I've been using VS Code Server ( [https://github.com/cdr/code-server](https://github.com/cdr/code-server) ) to self-host a browser-based editor I can access from my tablet and code on the go, but it's been a hassle to keep it all running smoothly..

As long as pricing is reasonable, Codespaces seems like my future solution.

<comment><USER12> As an alternative to VS Code Server, you can install the vsonline CLI which is distributed via .deb and other package mechanisms. Once installed, it installs the backend side of VS Code Remote and it's distributed by Microsoft.

You _don't_ need to register your machine, you can set up your own authenticating reverse proxy over it and run it on port 8000 like so:

        $HOME/.vscode-remote/bin/[some hash here]/server.sh

I just wish they open sourced all of this. For compliance reasons, I'm leery of running data through Microsoft unnecessarily and so I only use CodeSpaces and VS Online for personal project.

<comment><USER11> Interesting, I'll look into that..

I run VS Code Server on a headless mac mini at home, and I map a subdomain to my home IP (because it needs SSL for the web workers I believe), and then I can connect to it over https from my tablet on the go. I use basic auth on the nginx proxy, and it works for my needs.

That part is working fine.

The hassle is the DNS mapping because my provider doesn't officially support dynamic DNS, and doesn't have an API, so I am using a variety of unofficial workarounds to automate this part and it's not always reliable, although thankfully my home IP does not seem to change too often.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Thanks for the share. Streaming it</comment>


Ask HN: How do I talk to 2nd graders about code? - <AUTHOR>

In a few weeks, I will be talking to my son's 2nd grade class about what I do: coding, with a focus on building web sites. What should I talk about?
I'm not as interested about them knowing what I do, though I will talk about that some. I will probably talk about a web site I created (www.animalcrossingcommunity.com), mainly because it's about a video game franchise that many of them may have already played, and thought that is at least something that I do that they can truly connect with.
But I'm more interested in planting an age-appropriate seed about the world of coding, so that if this is something they're inherently interested in (but may not realize it yet), this will help them realize that and pursue that interest.
I historically have a hard time connecting with younger kids -- or other people, in general -- that are on a different level, particularly when it comes to code. So I thought I would seek out the help from the HN community.
Particularly, I'd like to talk about things that might be interesting to them. I also would like to give them something to take home, like a list of sites (just a few to get them started) that talk about coding on their level.
What have you guys seen that would be good to share at this age? What suggestions do you have?
If it matters, I have 30 minutes or less to talk to them. <comment><USER2> I think I would talk to them about what the work is like behind the scenes. Coding is a lot like coming up with a recipe. You have to think really hard about what goes into a cake and when, or else when someone tries to follow the recipe the cake will burn or will taste wrong.

But computers can't think, so you have to be really specific. If you need flour for your recipe, you have to tell it where to get the flour, how to open it up, and how to measure it. You need to tell it how to mix everything together and bake it so you can eat it in the end. But the best part is, even though coming up with a recipe for vanilla cake is really hard the first time, once you have that, it's easy to come up with chocolate cake, or a really big cake for a birthday party or cupcakes you can put in your lunchbox. So you have to learn a lot about cakes upfront, but then you can make all kinds of different cakes- cakes that say 'Happy Birthday' or 'Thank You' are pretty similar to make once you know about cakes in general.

</comment><comment><USER3> A robot demo would be my choice. You need to have a machine, a program they help construct, and a simple goal. The program needs to respond to observed state and make decisions (umm... that means an if statement). There can be all sorts of hidden mechanism, but the exposed mechanisms have to be very simple and clear.

You need to actually have a program and a machine to run it on because the magic comes from having the abstract algorithm they help construct run without human intervention. That's the take-away from the whole exercise.

You will be surprised how much 2nd graders know. They are from the generation who knows how to login to a laptop and find their favorite videos with no help from parents. And when you get stuck playing a game on your smartphone, the quickest and most correct answer usually comes from asking the local 2nd grader.

</comment><comment><USER4> Kids are familiar about game sites like discoverykids and many others. Talk to them that they have the power to Create.

I'd advise having prepared quick demos: i.e.: 1.- Their own website "I like" my grandmother, my pet, my school. Hope you get the idea.

2.- A game demo (Scirra Construct 2 has templates included, Scratch too), showing something simple that will use your Funny face (ready to insert) and show it off.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good tips. I don't think I will have available resources for demos -- i.e. this is a generic "career day" talk, not something for computer class. So I may be limited to what I can show on an iPad.

I found some cool sites/apps for making games and building models:

<http://scratch.mit.edu/>

<http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/>

<http://gamestarmechanic.com/>

From these sites:

<http://techkimgames.blogspot.com/p/game-tools.html>

[http://www.nanny.net/blog/10-ways-to-teach-young-kids-to- wri...](http://www.nanny.net/blog/10-ways-to-teach-young-kids-to-write- computer-programs/)

Not sure how much I can demo of these, but at the very least, can talk about them and send them home w/ a URL of a site that I'll throw up to post and summarize these URLs.

<comment><USER5> I wouldn't mind seeing a live demo with Scratch if you can get your hands on a projector. It's a bit hands on but I think it's your best bet.

What I would do is, I would spend 5min giving a brief overview of what you do, then 25 minutes doing a live demo with Scratch.

You can have a basic plan in mind and then call on random kids. Ask them stuff like "ok, we have this person... should we make him jump up and down?", stuff like that.

Then go through the rules of what needs to happen to make it jump and down and eventually close the session tying in that you give a computer instructions to create things and solve problems, etc..

If done well I think you could motivate them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Pretend to be a robot. Have a kid "program" you to do a simple task, like drink a glass of water (maybe filled with confetti), by giving you commands to move your arms and legs.

You will end up dumping the glass of water on yourself, for sure.

This isn't about web programming per se, but it is about breaking a complex task into simple, clear steps. This feels age-appropriate for six year olds.

</comment><comment><USER7> It's your enthusiasm that they will pick up. More so than any resource you can direct them towards. It's your attitude and charisma which will affect their attitude towards coding.

At that age LightBot is the best resource: <http://www.addictinggames.com/puzzle-games/lightbot.jsp>

</comment><comment><USER8> Try LOGO. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_(programming_language)></comment>


Richard Feynman's Extraordinary Letter to His Departed Wife - <AUTHOR> https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/10/17/richard-feynman-arline-letter/ <comment><USER2> Such a sweet read, thank you. It's strange how the story would be so different if just a few more years had passed since the work on the compounds from fungi and bacteria had begun. Feynman's hope was totally on the right track.

[https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Crude-death-rates-for- tu...](https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Crude-death-rates-for-tuberculosis- in-the-United-States-1900-2014-Note-that-with-the_fig1_307084755)

I also found this interesting from the wiki for TB since it is thought Arline got TB from unpasteurized milk-

"Robert Koch identified and described the bacillus causing tuberculosis, M. tuberculosis, on 24 March 1882. He received the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 1905 for this discovery. Koch did not believe the cattle and human tuberculosis diseases were similar, which delayed the recognition of infected milk as a source of infection. During the first half of the 1900s the risk of transmission from this source was dramatically reduced after the application of the pasteurization process."

<comment><USER3> in fact we got the FDA and milk, food inspections via Upton Sinclair's expose on working in the Chicago stock yards and passing tb via untreated milk was one the things highlighted

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This style of writing is becoming more common and it is frustrating. The author seems hell bent on making their words the focus rather than a window through which you view a story.

<comment><USER5> I've always been annoyed by this, but now that I know the term "classic style", it annoys me even more.

For those who haven't heard of it, "classic style" is explained in the recent book _Sense of Style_ by Steven Pinker, and there's a nice diagram here:

[https://philosophicaldisquisitions.blogspot.com/2014/09/stev...](https://philosophicaldisquisitions.blogspot.com/2014/09/steven- pinkers-guide-to-classic-style.html)

It's in opposition to academic style, legal style, self-conscious style, etc.

One distressing thing I've noticed is that some of my adult colleagues write in "high school book report style". They seem to want to fill up a certain number of words rather than getting straight to the point.

<comment><USER6> Similar advice from Olin Shivers: [http://web.cs.ucla.edu/~palsberg/shivers.html](http://web.cs.ucla.edu/~palsberg/shivers.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Thanks for posting this. It was a super enjoyable, lil heart throb, lil sweet story about true love.

</comment><comment><USER8> A nice article and a lovely read. Maybe some folks would view the fact that he had two other wives later as sad, but it gives me hope that even when some of the worst kind of heartbreak happens to you, you can eventually get better.

</comment><comment><USER9> > You, dead, are so much better than anyone else alive.

Look at Feynman! Who knew!

I wonder what happens to our bodies, physically/chemically when one is in love to that degree. I know only very superficially. Anyone to suggest a book on this topic? Preferably one that backs its statements.</comment>


Ask HN: Anyone been bitten by aws "free tier" charges? - <AUTHOR>

aws requires a credit card to sign up for the free tier (ugh).  It looks like you can still get charged for a variety of things unless you really watch out.  Hooking up a faucet to a credit card with the risk that who-knows-what charges might hit is worrisome. Relying on alerts after-the-fact does not solve this, imo.
But maybe I'm alone in feeling this way, and was wondering if anyone has really had a problem with this before.  thx <comment><USER2> Yeah, Amazon charged me for $0.41 that they're still trying to collect upon because the credit card I used to sign up was canceled. I had a friend complain about getting a bill for I think $0.01 that caused a bunch of administrative hassles.

I think the risk of super-high bills is pretty minimal because if you're using the free tier you're not doing stuff that will incur super-high charges anyway. Still, I hate owing money and I hate the administrative hassle of being billed for tiny (sub-$1) amounts a year after signing up.

<comment><AUTHOR> yes that is small, and an interesting hassle I hadn't thought about. I would think you could have the option to set a cap so that it stops using services when you hit it, but they don't allow that. A labyrinthine pricing model, coupled with the forced hookup to the credit card for the free tier (that apparently they'll keep trying to charge against and come after you for if the card is cancelled, or you try to self-cap by only having a certain amount on the card), makes for a big distraction, afaic. It is a hypothetically essentially infinite potential suck of your $$... that you will be at the mercy of Amazon customer service to resolve. Now, this has not apparently happened (or I assume we would have heard about it), but the mechanism is in place. Maybe it's just usually a few hundred dollars - curious how often it happens.

I must be about the only one to be concerned about it. Lots of folks obviously seriously rely on the services aws provides, and do not lose sleep over the possibilities here given the benefits they enjoy from it.</comment></comment>


Where In Our Solar System Are We Most Likely To Find Life? - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/ethansiegel/2015/09/25/where-in-our-solar-system-are-we-most-likely-to-find-life/ <comment><USER2> Earth

Sorry. Couldn't resist :)

<comment><USER3> Nah. It's an incredibly stupid title.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Spoiler: Mars is at number 3.

And we know that Mars is slim pickings as far as life goes.

<comment><USER5> What we should be doing is terraforming Mars with life from Earth, not sterilizing everything we send there.

<comment><USER6> Compared to Earth, we know very little about Mars. Purposefully contaminating our craft (or worse, starting any sort of terraforming operations now) before we fully understand the planet would make efforts destined for failure at best, and produce unforeseen consequences for the planet at worst.

We've attempted similar things here on Earth in the past without fully understanding the consequences, with the ecological disasters to show for it.

Better for us to more fully understand that planet first.

<comment><USER5> I doubt a better understanding can happen without sending humans, and there's no way to put humans about Mars without also releasing Earth life. Do you oppose a manned mission to Mars?

Besides, there's still zero evidence of life on Mars. There's no ecology to disrupt.

<comment><USER7> That's been trivially falsified by the tremendous leaps in our understanding of the planet from each successive probe we've sent. For example, we only recently got indications of the likely presence of significant quantities of perchlorates in Martian soils, which has dramatic consequences for any possible effort at terraforming.

As for 'no ecology', we're a very long way from being in any position to say that.

Edit: I can't reply to WalterBright's comment, so I'll reply here. I didn't talk about having to prove anything. It's a matter of balance of evidence. What percentage of the possible biomes on Mars have we tested and how thoroughly did we test them? I'd argue less than 10% of the most life-hostile biomes and those only cursorily. That's way too low a fraction to have any confidence that Mars is dead. Sure, we can't test every grain of sand on the whole planet, we have to draw the line somewhere, but for now we've barely scratched a small part of the surface.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> These are the definitions of the Drake Equation:

       R* = the average rate of star formation in our galaxy
       fp = the fraction of those stars that have planets
       ne = the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets
       fl = the fraction of planets that could support life that actually develop life at some point
       fi = the fraction of planets with life that actually go on to develop intelligent life (civilizations)
       fc = the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space
       L = the length of time for which such civilizations release detectable signals into space[8][9]

I think the most interesting thing is as a sort of a map of human knowledge. Fill in the blanks with your best answer at this point.

We know some stuff about some of these, but very little about others. I think we can make sensible guesses at the first three, and the last two and Drake's Equation allows us a large margin of error. The likelihood of life developing and the likelihood of intelligence developing however… we don't have much. A weird thing about both these things is that we are the only example we know of. Even earth, which has demonstrated an ability to develop both, seems to have done both only once. All life on earth shares an ancestry. Intelligence is debatable, but by a definition that carries the potential to build technology proving its intelligence to extra terrestrials we are the only example.

We can be reasonably certain that if we start from Eukaryotic life, eyes will evolve. Technology building and intergenerational knowledge accumulation is less certain. Even if you start with humans, it's not obvious that technology will evolve. Homo existed for quite a while, even with individuals very similar to us before getting on this technology curve. Thousands of generations (or tends of thousands, depending on your definitions) of being smart, social bipedal apes anatomically similar to us with no apparent evidence that the invention of pornography-capable smartphones are forthcoming.

We have similarly little evidence about life's chances of emerging. Some sort of replication process that has evolutionary potential would be a decent definition in this context. How likely is that? Do we actually need the "ingredients" common to Europa and Earth? Is Earth's "ingredient list" even ideal? Is organic chemistry the only way to do things? I think our ongoing invention of complex machines is, perhaps, a counterexample.

Back to the Drake equation, I think any time we can fill in one of the variables, tighten up our margins of error or otherwise add knowledge to this knowledge map, we are making interesting progress.

TLDR: At this point in time the existence of both life and intelligence must be assumed to involve ancient, god-like extraterrestrials.

<comment><USER9> >TLDR: At this point in time the existence of both life and intelligence must be assumed to involve ancient, god-like extraterrestrials.

Surprisingly, that assumption (and that it must be assumed) is a touchy subject at this point in time.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: A better alternative to flippa? - <AUTHOR>

Just read a comment on HN about flippa - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3714938
I have few questions for HN Community :
1. Are you happy/satisfied with flippa? If not, why?
2. Is there a better alternative? If not, do you want one?
3. Why isn't anyone from HN coming up with a better solution?
If there is a demand, I would like to come up with a better solution. <comment><USER2> Flippa is just really noisy. It seems like the majority of listings are short- lived scraping sites with no revenue, or sites with revenue being sold for outrageous amounts of money.

As a buyer, I'd like to see a Flippa-like site that only sells established, legitimate sites and businesses. Basically, the high-end antique shop alternative to the flea market that is Flippa.

<comment><USER3> If it was truly legitimate, and raking in cash, not many people would sell.

<comment><USER2> 'Legitimate' in this context is not intended to be synonymous with 'raking in cash'. I'm talking about profitable businesses with sustainable revenue models - not someone with a niche, keyword specific domain they registered three months ago that's benefiting from some temporary adsense luck.

My business partner and I sold a business a couple of years ago because our hearts just weren't in it anymore. It was profitable, but not enough to offset the pain in the ass of running it. We sold it to a group with a collection of complimentary businesses, and they've had great luck with it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I listed one of my site on the site(to sell), I set BIN(buy it now) price to a reasonable one, considering the revenue and the effort required to maintain the site. The site is a legitimate one, making passive income, a good domain and more than 2 years old. I decided not to reduce the price even if I couldn't sell the site. (I spent around $60 to list the site).

I couldn't sell it. For me it looks like buyers assume that reported income and traffic of any listed site is higher than the actual figures. So they expect a ridiculously lower price for sites.

There are so many listings that wants to sell for 2 - 3 times monthly earnings. Why would anyone want to do that? Can't they just keep the site themselves for another 3 months and earn that money.

</comment><comment><USER3> Actually I am happy with Flippa. I bought a lot of bargain sites there. I haven't sold anything, but that's because I get people to approach me privately (better offers that way).</comment>


Nobody Ever Gets Credit for Fixing Problems That Never Happened (2001) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://web.mit.edu/nelsonr/www/Repenning=Sterman_CMR_su01_.pdf <comment><USER2> And the matching rule: badly designed projects that blow up end up getting a lot of attention and resources, their engineers end up looking like heroes.

I remember the worst module of a very large J2EE website getting all the attention, got more developers, got 10x more hardware than planned... And in the end the lead was promoted. While several other modules did their work flawlessly and went unnoticed.

This is what you get when business people make decisions on technology projects.

<comment><USER3> From 'Software Requirements & Specifications' [0], by Michael Jackson (not _that_ Michael Jackson, and not the other one either), published in 1995, a parable [1]:

 _' What do you think?' he asked. He was asking me to tell him my impressions of his operation and his staff. 'Pretty good,' I said. 'You've got some good people there.' Program design courses are hard work; I was very tired; and staff evaluation consultancy is charged extra. Anyway, I knew he really wanted to tell me his own thoughts._

 _' What did you think of Fred?' he asked. 'We all think Fred is brilliant.' 'He's very clever,' I said. 'He's not very enthusiastic about methods, but he knows a lot about programming.' 'Yes,' said the DP Manager. He swivelled round in his chair to face a huge flowchart stuck to the wall: about five large sheets of line printer paper, maybe two hundred symbols, hundreds of connecting lines. 'Fred did that. It's the build-up of gross pay for our weekly payroll. No one else except Fred understands it.' His voice dropped to a reverent hush. 'Fred tells me that he's not sure he understands it himself.'_

 _' Terrific,' I mumbled respectfully. I got the picture clearly. Fred as Frankenstein, Fred the brilliant creator of the uncontrollable monster flowchart. 'But what about Jane?' I said. 'I thought Jane was very good. She picked up the program design ideas very fast.'_

 _' Yes,' said the DP Manager. 'Jane came to us with a great reputation. We thought she was going to be as brilliant as Fred. But she hasn't really proved herself yet. We've given her a few problems that we thought were going to be really tough, but when she finished it turned out they weren't really difficult at all. Most of them turned out pretty simple. She hasn't really proved herself yet --- if you see what I mean?'_

 _I saw what he meant._

[0] [http://www.amazon.co.uk/Requirements-Specifications- Software...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Requirements-Specifications-Software- Principles-Prejudices/dp/0201877120) [1] [http://www.win.tue.nl/~wstomv/quotes/software- requirements-s...](http://www.win.tue.nl/~wstomv/quotes/software-requirements- specifications.html)

<comment><USER4> I've noticed over the course of my career a fairly severe corollary, which is that making the best technical choices for my _employer_ can often be bad for _me_ in the long run.

As an example, for about the last 10-15 years, I've tended to choose Python over C++, for projects where it seemed it would produce a better solution (e.g., cheaper/faster to implement, easier to maintain and alter, performance sufficient to the task at hand). Because Python is actually quite adequate these days for large swaths of the task space, this means that my Python chops are quite good, but that my C++ is a little rusty.

In itself, this isn't exactly a problem, but in an interview scenario, it can look quite bad. "How much template metaprogramming have you done lately?" "Not much." "So, you're more of a junior programmer then?" "No, I just haven't hit a problem lately that needed that, and I prefer not to introduce unneeded complexity and maintenance nightmares into my employer's codebase." "How much work with GDB automation?" "Very little, since the code I write pretty much just works." "Ah, so weakness with the debugger as well." Etc.

Not really sure what to do about this. I don't really want to write tens of thousands of lines of unnecessary C++ just to impress future employers. But I have to acknowledge that that's really how the rewards are set up.

<comment><USER5> This dynamic is part of why I feel like programmers should really just stop resisting the pull to move into management. You might think about programming as the most amazing thing ever, to be agonized over with a fine-toothed comb and the 'best tool for the job' elevated to a nigh-religious consideration, but to your employer, it's one line item on a budget.

<comment><USER6> It might be 'easier' in a certain sense, and possibly a way to optimize for your paycheck, but 'resisting the pull to move into management' for me is about wanting to do high quality engineering, having a sense of professionalism and pride in my work, and feeling good about what I'm doing at the end of the day, even if my management doesn't understand it fully. If I'm a "line item on a budget", I want to be the best damn line item I can be. I am an engineer.

<comment><USER5> You can do high-quality engineering in management. You're just doing it with other people's code, as well as your own if you choose to continue programming.

<comment><USER6> What activities would you expect to be doing in such as scenario? For me, if I was doing it "with other peoples code" rather than "with other people", I would expect to be doing things like large scale architecture, developing tools such as domain specific languages, and investigating new technologies for possible adoption, setting the stage for the rest of the engineering team to write good code and solve hard problems. I would consider this engineering, and "working with other people's code." I would feel some secondary 'ownership' of the rest of the teams code in this scenario.

On the other hand, if I was working "with other people" as in a managers potions, the most technical things I would expect to do would be making hiring decisions, considering the skill sets and training needs of a team, and helping a team make good technical decisions, as well as other less technical manager duties. I see this as a separate management role, that doesn't really involve engineering, and working "with other people" rather than the code they produce. Importantly, I would NOT feel much ownership in their code in this scenario. I would feel ownership in their success coding, but not in the product itself.

You could, possibly, do some of each although I find the two work styles severely interfere with each other, so focusing on one at once is far more effective. If you are an amazing person you might get away with sneaking in some engineering time while being an passable manager as well. If I was in a managerial role, I would focus on that to allow myself to be more effective, and get my engineering satisfaction elsewhere.

Note that some large tech companies recognize this difference, and have explicitly create two distinct promotion tracks, one through management, and one through engineering.

I feel it is a tragedy that many companies feel that "engineering is the thing you do first, they you get promoted out of it into management to continue your career," and structure their org chart with engineers at the bottom.

I think this comes from people who enjoy and are good at management not recognizing that there are people who are not like them, and building a hierarchy that reflects their world view. If more companies realized that there are people who want to be good engineers throughout their career and could relate to them better, more amazing engineering would happen, and it would be well managed too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Nassim Taleb provides a good example in his book Fooled by Randomness. Imagine that a politician passed a $1 billion requiring all airline cockpits to be locked prior to 9/11\. That politician would probably be criticized and then voted out of office.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is what I think about government in general. People complain about it but we live in country (if in US) where most stuff works, most stuff is safe. We don't have ferry disasters, we don't have serious virus outbreaks, the power almost never goes out, and the water is drinkable. This is because people work everyday to keep this up.

<comment><USER9> To be fair, nobody really complains about the CDC or the local water treatment plant, and none of that stuff consumes an inordinate amount of tax dollars.

Most of the things people complain about are at least nominally legitimate. We spend too much money on healthcare (and thus medicare), and too much money on the military, and in consequence the taxes on the middle 80% are too high. The Department of Education micromanages local schools excessively. There is too much bureaucracy in general. These are legitimate complaints.

<comment><USER8> I don't disagree there is waste. I would say there are people who complain about non military spending though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Sun Tzu talked about this 2500 years ago in the Art of War:

""" What the ancients called a clever fighter is one who not only wins, but excels in winning with ease.

Hence his victories bring him neither reputation for wisdom nor credit for courage. """

</comment><comment><USER11> In my experience this goes way beyond productivity. I know you have clients and projects and feature requests and bugs to fix and meetings to attend, but how about that backup scheme for that new project, the one that was bumped to "post-golive"? Or the lack of free disk space monitoring? Or that everything for these three services run as root and use someone's primary AWS keys?

In software dev or ops, these are the things in my mind that sit in the gulf between "producing" and "improving". Actually, they sit on the other side of improvement, because given a free hour, I'd rather spend it learning something than fixing a logging service.

</comment><comment><USER12> An extremely good primer on quality at the organizational level. Even if it's your "job" to make quality products, the visibly rewarded metrics are often counter to the desired result.

The assumed management strategy is to individualize results, punish poor behavior (often directly related to errors or defects) and reward perceived good behavior ("hard work") at an individual level. In reality, this causes a complex wash of quality-undermining behavior: politics, infighting, de- motivation, perceived unfairness, and worse. Despite the well-proven and scientifically understood reality, managers and even employees are entrenched in the surface level, when in reality the problems are deeper and higher level.

This is the wisdom of W. Edwards Deming and his contemporaries. The fundamental epiphany is that quality is the result of _how companies are managed._ That it is a result of four things: an understanding of knowledge itself (primarily, that our prior assumptions about work are incorrect) -- an understanding of psychology (behavioral science and real motivation) -- knowledge of statistics (for the ability to optimize process, and the knowledge that all behavior has a random element, even that of individuals) -- and finally, a deep understanding of systems and their effects.

This thinking brought Japan out of its post-WWII recession. It was the origin of the Japanese quality economy—of Toyota, Honda, Sony, Panasonic, and more Japanese companies with quality products at the core of their success. The Deming prize is still given to companies which embody the values of quality.

It worked in Japan because of a cultural readiness for a systemic worldview. It does not gain traction in the US for exactly the opposite reason: we are a culture of rugged individualists, who, despite scientifically proven truth, will not drop our core idea that individuals are the cause of both our successes and our failures. This is especially true for upper management.

To be successful, as companies and as a nation, we need a major cultural shift toward systematic quality. We need companies that understand that most of the deficit in the quality of products comes not from poor individuals themselves, but poor links between them, poor management of them, and the poor systems within which they work. Simply lack of attention to systems and process in general causes a standard of organizational chaos, where we truly do rely on the excellence of individuals to keep companies afloat. This is familiar to all of us, but surely there's a better way.

If every "whose fault is it" question would be translated to "what, at its core, caused this fault"—every company would benefit—and that's true even if some fault can be found with an individual. Display extreme restraint, as the better course of action is _still_ systemic. And this isn't a strategy of simply "blaming management"—instead, every person in the company needs to work together to improve the system surrounding them, and when every person understands why that view is important and why they're a part of it, then the improvement will begin to multiply.

This is true in software as it is in manufacturing, and I think the industry is ready for a new body of work to translate Deming's ideas to the software field. Skip Six Sigma, skip TQM—too dogmatic and heavy. Focus on Deming's core ideas: the importance of systems, understanding of key underlying concepts, and the implementation of them with good leadership from the top. It's a new old way, it is a better way, and we need it now.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming)

</comment><comment><USER13> It's famous: "The wheel that squeaks gets the grease."

Well, the title says something similar: Wheels that don't squeak don't get the grease.

At least in the US, a fairly strong norm is to be _rock solidly practical_ which can mean operating close to the line of actual irresponsibility and following "Never do today what can delay until tomorrow." Is such thinking common? In the US, yes. Good? Not really.

Or, wait until there is a really bad passenger airplane disaster before implementing some new safety procedures.

Wait until there are actual sick people with a threat of an epidemic before implementing the long well understood public health measures.

Do much the same for desktop computer security, auto seat belts, actions against smoking, and dozens more.

</comment><comment><USER14> There is a video presentation on the topic from the author: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCkyPc72XNQ#t=97](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCkyPc72XNQ#t=97)

</comment><comment><USER15> The scientific term for work needs to get into the general culture. You can expend a whole lot of energy without doing any actual work. "Working harder" is actually "expend energy" while the actual work done is the same.

</comment><comment><USER16> The pdf seems odd to me --- all "fi"'s are invisible, e.g., "fi"rm, signi"fi"cant, bene"fi"t...

<comment><USER17> You probably need a font that covers the relevant ligatures. Does "fi" display for you? That's the Unicode codepoint U+FB01.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Futurama said it well: "When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all." (2002)

</comment><comment><USER19> Isn't that called a "paycheck"?

<comment><USER20> I suppose that's not a terrible metric in theory, but by that token the people who make mistakes are, in the general case, still taking more credit since they are also are paid to fix the problems.

<comment><USER12> But one example of the dysfunctional situation present in that case. Many other examples of individualistic politics exist.</comment></comment></comment>


Movie made by animating individual atoms - <AUTHOR> http://vidinterest.com/video/3812/movie-made-by-animating-individual-atoms

<comment><USER2> The "Making of ..." feature at the end of the video is also worth watching. Apparently they have no love for lawyers, however.</comment>


Reddit AMA with Chris Daniels, VP, Internet.org (Facebook) is on - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/3ya52q/vp_internetorg/ <comment><USER2> Lots of questions asked. Only 4 questions answered.</comment>


What's Hindering Cloud Adoption? Try Humans. - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/cloud/whats-hindering-cloud-adoption-how-about-humans/?utm_source=gigaom&utm_medium=recent-posts <comment><USER2> I don't buy this article. Nothing is "hindering" cloud adoption, per se; the question is, _what problem does cloud adoption solve?_ For me, the answer is "relatively few:" I have Mail.app for e-mail, Word / Mellel for word processing, NetNewsWire for RSS feeds, Textmate for text editing / blog posts, and so on. None of these will be particularly improved by cloud computing.

But some of them will be harmed by cloud computing: I don't want to have to have Internet access to access my files; I don't want other people to have access to my files; I don't want to have to learn a whole new set of tools that aren't improvements on my old set of tools.

In short, the benefits outweigh the costs. When/if the benefits exceed the cost, I'll start using the "cloud" more. The advocates of "cloud" computing aren't empathizing with their users.

Personally, I imagine that we're heading more towards a place where we have more Dropbox-style local / network integration.

</comment><comment><USER3> Reading that it seemed as if OM considers it a given that cloud computing is automatically "better" and squishy humans are just getting in the way of progress.

Cloud computing is in many ways more efficient, but that's really not the only metric that matters, is it?

There is value in independence, privacy and security - none of which cloud computing can ever really compete on. There are also many applications where proximity of data or proximity of processing matters, and the cloud can't touch those either.

So much hype...

</comment><comment><USER4> There's also cost. At certain scales (such as Grooveshark's scale) it can be significantly cheaper to do infrastructure in-house. Try negotiating bandwidth prices with Amazon.

<comment><USER5> the big advantage the cloud brings is speed of spinning up new servers, for which it's nearly unbeatable. If you need 1000 servers tomorrow and want to get rid of them on Friday, there really is no other option. However, if you can forgo that speed, if it's okay to take some time to get the servers up and if you plan on keeping them online for a few months, owning starts to make sense around the time you need 16-32GiB ram, which really isn't very much.

<comment><USER6> You're assuming either/or. I have a mostly in-house IT infrastructure but I use EC2 not only for projects that I need to get up and going quickly but also for traffic spikes. Using a dynamic DNS like Nettica allows you to blend quite easily.

<comment><USER5> I think that a mixed setup like you describe can allow you to get the best of both worlds, if all your servers don't need to be in the same place for latency reasons. "the cloud" is also awesome for backups. you can have a full backup cold spare system, test it once a week, and pay almost nothing for it. (this is what those 'micro' instances are for. you have a micro instance updating your DB on an EBS backend. when it comes time to fail over, shut down the micro instance and bring up the ebs mount on something beefy.)

my point was just that most systems are on most of the time, and for those systems, owning saves you a lot of money over using "the cloud"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What's hindering adoption of my product? Customers!

<comment><USER8> That's why it helps to make something they want. I just wish I could figure something out.</comment></comment>


GitLab 8.5 released - <AUTHOR> https://about.gitlab.com/2016/02/22/gitlab-8-5-released/ <comment><USER2> Looking at this thread here, Gitlab seems to be much more open about their development than Github, and has a real sense of community, yet Github (still) remains the popular option, despite their more community-hostile traditional board-meeting decision process.

Is there a gradual shift in the FOSS community towards Gitlab (which in all honesty would make more sense), or am I just seeing the enthusiast in this thread?

<comment><USER3> Github's shortcomings only really came to the fore in the last couple of months, due to a combination of factors. GitLab is working hard to exploit the current window of opportunity to make waves. I'm slightly surprised BitBucket is not doing the same, but their Atlassian masters seem more interested in pushing irrelevant features at the moment (like SSO across products I don't care about).

It's too early to talk about a shift away from GH, but increased variety in the ecosystem can only be a good thing, compared to the dangers of a GH monoculture... especially considering git migrations are literally just one push to a new origin.

<comment><USER4> Atlassian is going after the enterprise market. They don't care about free software developers.

<comment><USER5> That's a poor strategy. All developers start out as free software developers, then gain employment. I persuaded my work to purchase Gitlab EE licenses, due to ease of use and it's excellent features & support. I can't imagine I'd say the same of Atlassian products.

Capture awareness / interest early.

<comment><USER6> You'd be in the minority. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'd bet you're at a small company where a low-level employee's opinion was taken into account when making the decision of which product to use for 10-50 people.

In medium to large sized companies, Atlassian will usually win out when you have a CTO that manages 100+ developers. Enterprises _really_ like to stick with the "safe bet", where there are expensive licenses and dedicated account managers from the service provider.

Jira in particular is extremely popular with the modern addiction to Agile. Once you're on Jira, you just start to fall onto connecting all the related products like Confluence for wiki and Bitbucket Server (formerly Stash) for git. I'm not saying it's the best thing to just ignore all other offerings, but in my experience CTOs do exactly that and just go straight to Atlassian for everything.

Basically, if your company is using Exchange... expect to be forced onto Atlassian. Welcome to the enterprise.

<comment><USER7> I've used plenty of other options- we even ran an internal GitLab instance prior to moving to BitBucket at my last company. Atlassian's suite of products are a safe bet because they're generally good products.

I like the GitLab feature set more than BitBucket but when I went started my own company it was generally cheaper for my team of 5-8 to use hosted JIRA, BitBucket, and Confluence then it would be for me to pay AWS/Rackspace/Azure/Digital Ocean to run the F/OSS equivalents in our cloud environment. BitBucket integrates just fine with Jenkins and the new Project organization was much needed.

We may someday move to GitLab or something else, but there isn't anything wrong with choosing Atlassian in any way. It's not like they're an Oracle/SAP type company that just abuses their customers and has awful products.

<comment><USER8> Great to hear you're using JIRA, Bitbucket and Confluence together. How is the integration between the tools? It's definitely a use case we're hearing more often where teams need more than just storing and working on code.

<comment><USER7> They're getting better. BitBucket and JIRA work together quite well. With "Smart Commits" in the JIRA hosted version that allow us to move a ticket's status, comment on it, log time, or just show activity towards a ticket via Git commit messages. I use the heck out of it and the team is following quickly behind.

JIRA follows the feature branching workflow pretty well, so if you branch from dev/master with the ticket number as the start of the branch name you can click through to that branch straight from JIRA, which is generally pretty nice.

Confluence isn't nearly as tightly integrated with either. There are some reports, widgets, and stuff you can grab out of JIRA and make some dashboard type reports. Nothing special- we use Confluence to document architecture, deployment procedures, etc. We're definitely not Confluence power users.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> We're super excited with GitLab 8.5. It's much faster, no matter the size of your instance (but especially for larger instances).

The Todos, ability to revert commits and CNAME support for Pages, are things that have been much requested and we're happy to have now.

As always, we're here if anyone has any questions about anything.

<comment><USER10> Pages are an EE feature, but one which is useful for open source projects. Would you accept a pull request for a community implementation of Pages? or would a fork be needed in this case? How do you see this sort of issue playing out?

<comment><USER11> This is a very good question and something I'm always concerned about when it comes to open core products.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've moved all my private repos to Gitlab based on the chat on here and other places recently RE Github, Gitlab, and other solutions.

I'm very happy overall, the interface is great. It's a bit slower than github currently (the web interface) as I'm using the online version rather than self hosted, but apart from that it's really bloody good.

I'll be recommending it to others going forward and using it for all new repos that I want hosted.

<comment><USER13> What procedures did you follow to move your private repos over? I have been using private, self hosted git for years now. Were you able to move things over and keep commit history? (since I guess that's the only feature I currently have.)

<comment><USER9> If you move your repository by importing it (in GitLab UI, under new project) or just by clone + pushing it yourself, you will always retain your entire commit history.

<comment><USER9> If you import from GitHub, your issues, PRs, wiki and all code will be imported.

<comment><USER14> It would be really cool if GitHub stored issue, PR, and wiki information in the main Git repo. That way all of these things would be very easy to keep in sync across different services.

I've had this idea for a while now. I wonder if it would be practical and if anyone has ever tried something like this.

<comment><USER15> As a separate root branch, it would work nicely. There are huge benefits also in that you get an inspectable history of issues. From GitHub's perspective, it would be more difficult to authenticate issue changes—they'd need signed commits and pre push validation, right?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Their performance graph shows response timings up to 25 _seconds_ [1]. GitHub's mean web response time goes up to 200 milliseconds. The difference is two orders of magnitude. Is GitLab really that much slower?!

[1] [https://about.gitlab.com/images/8_5/issue_timings.png](https://about.gitlab.com/images/8_5/issue_timings.png) [2] [https://status.github.com/](https://status.github.com/)

<comment><USER17> That's the 95th percentile, not the mean. This means that 95% of all transactions completed _within_ the time, with only 5% exceeding it. Right now our 95th percentile hovers between 1.5 and 2 seconds, the mean hovers between 500 and 700 ms.

<comment><USER18> GitHub's 98th percentile is still just 414ms though. So you still have a lot of catching up to do.

<comment><USER9> We're aware. GitHub did an amazing job on scaling GitHub.com. We'll get there!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> When I met Gitlab, 3 years ago, I didn't expect this. The product is so much mature, the UI is so much better and the feature-set increased too. I respect these guys. The competition is though out there. Github is _the_ place where many git users started and is the _de facto_ standard for open-source/show- cases or even tech blogging, these days.

There are a few things that annoy me as a Gitlab user (UX things __), apart from the search /responsiveness of the application. Moreover, they improved _a lot_ the installation/upgrade process over these years. I'm expecting big things from you now :)

Anyway I need to say that these guys have been working a lot and deserve much credit. Kudos for you, guys!

 __One of the things that annoys me most is that the homepage of the repository, where you have the README is not the same where you have a file browser (Perhaps this is Github-biased, but is soooooo much better. Think about it :)

<comment><USER20> The only thing preventing me from using Gitlab is that someone registered my username. I'm "echelon" on Github, Twitter, Gmail, and dozens of other services. I guess I missed the boat. :/

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I love GitHub, I'm loyal and grateful to them for all they've done for us, but GitLab is significantly more agile these days and loyalty easily can be reassigned. Even Bitbucket is picking up development, so, if I was GitHub, I'd really seriously reorg and ramp up development and innovation!

</comment><comment><USER22> Nitpick:

 _> GitLab no longer loads large Git blobs (e.g. binary files) into memory when browsing a Git repository. This prevents timeouts and memory leaks._

Nope. Not loading something doesn't prevent memory leaks. It might make existing leaks not as bad (because you're leaking less).

Either you're not leaking at which point it doesn't matter how big the thing you load is, it will get freed once it's not used, or you're leaking at which point, yes, if you only load small things, you get to run for a longer time before you die, but you will still die eventually.

Only loading smaller things doesn't plug leaks.

Aside of that: This looks like a very impressive release. Congratulations!

<comment><USER23> Nitpick on the nitpick. If the Git blobs were the source of the memory leak then this would, in fact, fix the memory leaks.

Pretty aggressive stance when you may, in fact, be wrong.

<comment><USER22> > If the Git blobs were the source of the memory leak then this would, in > fact, fix the memory leaks.

no. Because they are still reading git blobs - just only for the smaller files.

> GitLab no longer loads _large_ Git blobs (e.g. binary files) into memory > [emphasis mine]

So if their handling of Git blobs is leaking memory, then not reading the bigger blobs just gives them more leeway before they crash.

<comment><USER23> Again, you may still be wrong. Many systems have different strategies for large blobs vs. small blobs (I know it's many because I've written several myself) including chunking strategies, separate memory pools etc.

I'm taking this stand because I've had the exact issue we are arguing about: my large file handler had a leak in the memory pool for large blobs. Basically it was shared memory space for multiple processes so large objects could be passed out of band instead of using IO.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Great job GitLab team! Way to go! Unfortunately I cannot use it for my projects till the issue [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab- ce/issues/12920](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/12920) exists. Hopefully, it will be resolved some time in the future.

I am firm believer in FOSS and I am very glad with GitLab embracing it as much as possible without affecting their revenues. I have started creating my new repositories on GitLab from this month

<comment><USER25> Thanks! I see I already commented on your request 20 days ago and I've left a new one just now. Cool that you have started creating your repo's on GitLab.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Was 8.5 able to address either of these?

Large commits can't be viewed:

[https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab- ce/issues/10785](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/10785)

Users created via LDAP login continue to count towards the user-count even if the LDAP account is deleted:

[https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab- ce/issues/11844](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/11844)

<comment><USER25> Thanks for asking. For the first issue work is being done but we need more time [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab- ce/merge_requests/2705](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab- ce/merge_requests/2705)

The second issue seems more like something that could become a feature request than a concrete proposal. Consider leaving a comment in the issue with your proposal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I just upgraded and the diffs are WAY faster now. Thanks so much for all of the hard work!

<comment><USER9> That's great to hear. It's a big community that makes this happen.

<comment><USER27> Just curious, were there any new changes made to branch creation and protected branches? I'm getting a

Branch creation was rejected by Git hook

When trying to create branches via my gitlab instance and it seems to take a lot longer to process the request. Pushing via a command shell seems to work well.

\--update I just rolled back my version to the older version and see that all of the branch functionality via the gitlab site works okay.

<comment><USER25> I'm not aware of any changes that would explain that error, but that doesn't mean it can't be a regression in 8.5. If so please open an issue for it and link from [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab- ce/issues/13350](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/13350)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> > With GitLab 8.5, we're offering GitLab Geo as an Alpha to all our Enterprise > Edition customers. Once GitLab Geo has left Alpha / Beta state, a special > license will be required to use it.

I'm not sure I like this trend.

While I understand some features GitLab may feel its worth a "second license" fee, it sets a bad precedent.

Similarly, I don't want to give you $390/year for a GitLab instance with 2-3 users which keeps me from paying for the stuff I use for sideprojects. Although, tbh, if you are going the secondary license route for various features it seems I'm better off looking into an alternative and just implementing them myself.

I honestly was just using the post-receive hook, etc. for this sort of thing.

<comment><USER29> afaik there will be possibility to get a license for n users instead n*10 packs.

<comment><USER9> That's correct.

<comment><USER30> Thanks for that.

Can you give us details on when this change will happen?

<comment><USER9> We're not sure yet when it will happen, but we'll make it clear when we do.

Update: our aim is before Q1 ends.

<comment><USER30> Great, thanks for the update.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> When I go to github, there's a search bar at the top to search for the public repo I'm looking for.

I can't find the search feature at gitlab.com. How do I search for users or public repos of interest at gitlab?

<comment><USER9> Use explore to search for interesting projects (and the people that have them in their namespace): [https://gitlab.com/explore](https://gitlab.com/explore)

Press `s` to search for anything. However we only support search for people in places where you immediately need them, like when adding to a project.

I created a feature proposal to also search through people: [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab- ce/issues/13672](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/13672)

<comment><USER31> Ok. I followed the Explore link, but I cannot find the search field on that page. It seems to only allow me to browse by trending/most-stars/all. Hitting 's' key on my keyboard doesn't seem to change the page in any way. Am I missing the search field?

(Note, this is using Firefox/Iceweasel 44.0.)

<comment><USER32> I think you must be logged in to see the complete UI (with search field)

<comment><USER33> Indeed. The search field is currently only displayed for users that have logged in.

<comment><USER25> Thanks, that doesn't make sense so I made an issue to remedy it [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab- ce/issues/13676](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/13676)

<comment><USER9> Update: we'll ship this fix with 8.6. It has just been merged.

<comment><USER31> Great!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Still using redmine + gitolite here but have been watching Gitlab for a while, in fact I tried it yesterday and it's still quite resource hungry and slow(using DO's default installation with 1GB memory).

Redmine+Gitolite has nearly everything I need but Gitlab's code view interface is better. Redmine's backend seems running more efficiently but its interface is not modern enough at this point, especially on how to review git repos.

<comment><USER35> gitlabs minimum requirements are 2G of ram (although that's for 100 people).

Without trying to appear as if I'm defending gitlab itself, I've always been of the notion of "Do it right and then do it fast".

This is how postgresql is starting to beat the ever-loving crap out of mysql now, it used to be the slow option, now it's the one that wont eat your baby.

<comment><USER25> Thanks, we indeed recommend 2GB for all installations [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab- ce/blob/master/doc/inst...](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab- ce/blob/master/doc/install/requirements.md#memory)

I've made it a bit more clear in [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab- ce/commit/b31c68aa2afbb...](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab- ce/commit/b31c68aa2afbbcdb5459f156472fa44261de0a9c)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Much faster! I notice it's rendering large source files instead of displaying them as binary now, so great!

One issue: I'm getting a really weird animation/hover over effect on the Gitlab icon in the upper left corner. Is that meant to happen? Is there a way to disable this.

Other than that, everyone should upgrade to this version.

<comment><USER25> Glad to hear that the rendering got better for you.

That animation is our loading indicator introduced in GitLab 8.4. There is no way to disable it. However, it seems to have a lot of fans [https://twitter.com/jerbob92/status/692089402030460929](https://twitter.com/jerbob92/status/692089402030460929)

I hope it is less weird now that you know what it is for.

<comment><USER36> Rendering is flawless now.

I figured it was for loading, but I still don't like it (and it renders very strangely in Safari -- try mousing over it).

I would _really_ like the option to disable it. I'm sure others like it though, cool option to have.

<comment><USER9> We're bringing the option to customise the interface to CE. If you run your own instance, you can replace the logo to disable it.

<comment><USER36> Thanks, will do. Looking forward to the interface customization options.

<comment><USER25> Great! Docs for the branded login page are at [http://doc.gitlab.com/ee/customization/branded_login_page.ht...](http://doc.gitlab.com/ee/customization/branded_login_page.html)

The merge into CE is happening in [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab- ce/issues/11489](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/11489) and hope it will be in one of the 8.5 patch releases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I'd love to try GitLab out, but the OSX installation instructions [1] are a bit of a put off. I'm not even sure if that's the right URL, but it's where google takes me. The instructions refer to a "runner"; I'm not really sure I understand what that is, and it's not explained anywhere. The "ci" makes me think this is something to do with continuous integration, so I'm really not sure if this is the right thing to be looking at.

The instructions also say "(In the future there will be a brew package)"; this is sorely needed!

[1] [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ci-multi- runner/blob/ma...](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ci-multi- runner/blob/master/docs/install/osx.md)

<comment><USER38> It's a waste of resources but you could run it in a vm with or without docker.

<comment><USER9> Find the official Docker image here: [https://hub.docker.com/r/gitlab/gitlab- ce/](https://hub.docker.com/r/gitlab/gitlab-ce/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Can i use dnf update on fedora to update the gitlab package if I have the repo installed? I am on fedora 23 and doing dnf update doesnt upgrade gitlab. Also doing a dnf install gitlab-ce gives me a message that gitlab- ce-8.2.0-ce.0.e17.x86_64 is already installed.

<comment><USER25> It worked with rpm so I assume dnf should work as well. Maybe you have to update your sources first since we have our own package server? If maybe you installed the package by downloading instead of adding the source server? Consider following the instructions on [https://about.gitlab.com/downloads/](https://about.gitlab.com/downloads/) (the main instructions, not 'select and download the package manually and install')

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Very easy upgrade from 8.4.3 to 8.5 on Ubuntu using the omnibus packages. I did have to install bundler in my system Ruby (I have RVM on the system; the install scripts executed via apt-get apparently doesn't care), but that was the only hiccup.

<comment><USER25> You should not have to install bundler on your system to upgrade to 8.5. If someone else encounters this please open an issue so we can diagnose the problem.

<comment><USER40> Here's my console buffer from the installation: [https://gist.github.com/cheald/6002dbe275a379a5f85a](https://gist.github.com/cheald/6002dbe275a379a5f85a)

tl;dr: apt-get install gitlab-ce failed with "bundler not found". rvm use system; gem install bundler, apt-get install gitlab-ce and it worked fine.

<comment><USER41> Just to be clear. All we need is the output from the console not the actual backup.

What I see from the result your getting is the actual backup command failing. From my experience this might be do to how its executed through the upgrade process and we can have a closer look at what failed when running the create command.

<comment><USER40> I sent an email, but it looks like if RVM is installed, gitlab-rake may be depending on bundler being installed in the currently-active RVM environment. It looks like RVM may be conflicting with gitlab's bundled Ruby due to RVM setting GEM_PATH and prevents bundler from being found, which causes the upgrade process to fail. Explicitly setting GEM_PATH for the gitlab_rake invocation may fix it.

If bundler is available in the active RVM environment, it works fine.

<comment><USER41> Correct the GEM_PATH is conflicting. Thank you for the information provided and your help through our support channel. Here is the public issue for future reference: [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab- ce/issues/13689](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/13689).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Another great release in an incredibly fast turn around time, well done to the team and everyone that's contributed.

</comment><comment><USER43> Are there any blog posts about techniques used to improve performance you guys would care to share? Thanks!

<comment><USER17> Not yet, but I've been thinking of doing so. The difficulty is that you basically have to write the blog post (or at least take a lot of notes) while solving problems as otherwise you'll end up forgetting all the intricate little details.

<comment><USER43> That's fine, I'm just curious because you usually learn a great deal. If anything the biggest performance changes could be nice, though it may mostly be small tid bits here and there (though large overall). Thanks for all you guys did!

<comment><USER17> I still have a bunch of notes laying around from the changes we made for 8.5 so I'll take a look at those. For future changes (except maybe small ones) I'll see if I can just write down 1 or 2 sentences what I did _after_ I did it, stringing together a blog post from that should be easier than doing it from scratch.

I created an issue about this so I won't forget: [https://gitlab.com/gitlab- com/www-gitlab-com/issues/568](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab- com/issues/568)

<comment><USER43> Thank you very much, learning from others is an invaluable way of learning to improve code and write code with a improved approach. Also a great way to try and avoid bugs when your code reminds you of a reported bug. Thank you again! Will look forward to reading future detailed development blog posts, it wont have to be every single little detail, but those small things that make a difference are handy to read over. Thanks again!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> > yes, _all_ important things for those of you that speak Spanish or > Portuguese

What do they mean by that?

<comment><USER45> I'm Brazilian and needed a few seconds to understand what they meant. I kept reading it like to-do(s). In the end they're just playing with the word:

[https://translate.google.com/#pt/en/todos](https://translate.google.com/#pt/en/todos)

<comment><USER44> Thank you for making me click. That's such a bad pun.

(I'm Brazilian too)

<comment><USER9> I'm sorry, I thought it was hilarious.

We wanted to acknowledge some people's frustrations with our chosen way of writing Todos.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Impressive release! Is there a guide on migrating from install from source to using omnibus? We currently upgrade from source but would like to move to omnibus.

<comment><USER47> Warning as someone who just did that. MySQL is EE only on Omnibus. I switched from Source (MySQL) to Omnibus only to find that MySQL was EE only.

So I had to go back to Source.

<comment><USER48> We recently switched from a source package using MySQL to the omnibus package and the migration to Postgresql was really easy and went without a hitch.

<comment><USER25> Glad to hear that, we try to keep the conversion instructions up to date and have tested them extensively.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Maybe a stupid question but is there a publicly hosted GitLab that provides free repo space (and the usual pay for private repos) or is it only self hosted?

<comment><USER50> [https://gitlab.com/](https://gitlab.com/) with free public and private repositories

<comment><USER49> Ok I didn't see that. The rest of the copy on the (particularly the pricing page) seems to indicate it's only local.

<comment><USER25> There is no pricing information there because it is free with forum support. But I agree it is confusing and made [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www- gitlab-com/issues/567](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab- com/issues/567) to remedy that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Two releases ago, updating was a bit of a pain for me, so I guess I'll wait until Friday with this one. Anyway, the new features sound really good!

<comment><USER9> What was painful exactly?

<comment><USER52> First upgrade for me (8.4 -> 8.5)

On a pretty small instance (1.7g ram google cloud) + 1gb disk swap the omninbus update failed with out of memory. Added some more swap space and it finished fine. It's probably not powerful enough to run it though.. Just a heads up.

<comment><USER9> I'm sorry to hear that. We advise a minimum of 2gb of ram, so I'd expect it run successful for you. I created an issue on the omnibus issue tracker about the memory requirement for upgrades, here: [https://gitlab.com/gitlab- org/omnibus-gitlab/issues/1135](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/omnibus- gitlab/issues/1135)

I'm glad you managed to solve it, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Still waiting for issues priority levels. Without it, the issues page is just a mess.

<comment><USER9> Thanks, I created an issue to discuss this. Would love to get your input.

[https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab- ce/issues/13673](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/13673)

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Nice, looking forward to the upgrade to GitLab pages on gitlab.com !

<comment><USER9> Thanks! Should be soon!

<comment><USER55> Will there be a possibility to use an apex domain ? Looking to switch from GH Pages.

<comment><USER56> Yes. Sure. Instead of adding the CNAME you need to add an A record. You can get the IP address with dig: $ dig a myuser.gitlab.io

Then configure your domain to point to that IP address.

We are currently working on documentation covering that part too.

<comment><USER55> Brilliant, thank you (and sytse below) for a prompt response. Looking forward to set it up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Awesome that theres a release.. but just as I'm migrating from one server that it has it built from source to a new one that uses the omnibus package.

</comment><comment><USER58> This comment is not meant to be the main judgment on what is otherwise an interesting update, but:

> To focus on your content

shows a screenshot with extremely long text lines that are far harder to read than than when the sidebar thing helps keep the lines to a still-too-long-but- not-as-bad length. How does nobody at GitLab realize that you need some max- width or a container or something to keep text line length comfortably readable‽

(the same can be said for Hacker News, but everyone seems to know that it's ugly already)

<comment><USER59> There's already a setting for that [http://imgur.com/GftE0Wx](http://imgur.com/GftE0Wx)

<comment><USER58> well, that's something but 1200px width is still way too long for optimal reading of lines at that font size.

<comment><USER60> it does look like it says MAX 1200...but i could be mistaken.

<comment><USER58> You're right. And that means the only way to set it to keep text contained less wide than that is to have a smaller browser window.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: An open source baseball statistics manager - <AUTHOR> http://generalmanagerstats.com/

<comment><USER2> Looks interesting! Link to source?

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://github.com/cms07/general-manager](https://github.com/cms07/general- manager)

It's all there.</comment></comment>