Ask HN: Which newsletters do you think are indispensable? - <AUTHOR> Hi guys,
I'm compiling "great newsletters, mailing lists and periodical blogs" for a side project I'm working on for the new year.
I was wondering what newsletters / mailing lists are you subscribed to that you think they should not be missed, I'll be sharing what I built shortly around here.
Examples of what I'm looking into are (they don't all have to be about entrepreneurship, they just have to be interesting)
Tim Ferris newsletter
Mattermark newsletter
a16z newsletter
Benedict Evans' weekly
Paul Graham's Essays (though he doesn't have a newsletter, he doesn't blog ofter but when he does it feels like a periodical that you might not want to miss) objc.io
Scott Hanselman's Newsletter of Wonderful Things Quartz Daily Brief
appreciate the help! <comment><USER2> Great list here. I also love:

\- Things That Have Caught My Attention by Dan Hon - [http://tinyletter.com/danhon](http://tinyletter.com/danhon) (He's the content director for Code for America and writes beautiful, thoughtful and personal commentary. Very smart.)

\- Taylor Davidson's Newsletter - [http://taylordavidson.com/letters](http://taylordavidson.com/letters) (Writings at the intersection of tech and photography. Similar to Benedict Evans' format.)

\- Deb Chachra's Metafoundry - [http://tinyletter.com/metafoundry](http://tinyletter.com/metafoundry) (An engineering professor who writes a combination of personal notes and smart commentary about tech/science.)

\- Weekly Gold by David Sherry - [http://davidjsherry.com/](http://davidjsherry.com/) (A nice reminder to step away from your computer and take the world in + a cool startup recommendation every week.)

</comment><comment><USER3> I like my weekly email from Medium about what's popular.

As a hardware startup, my favourites are the HAXLR8R newsletter and the Bolt/Dragon Innovation blogs.

I also like blogs by VCs Gil Dibner [http://yankeesabralimey.tumblr.com](http://yankeesabralimey.tumblr.com) and Charlie O'Donnell [http://www.thisisgoingtobebig.com](http://www.thisisgoingtobebig.com)

</comment><comment><USER4> I'll bit and plug my own, cuz it's killer. Musicgeeks: One song + a dancing GIF every weekday. Great music discovery if you're into that sort of thing:)

[http://www.musicgeeks.co](http://www.musicgeeks.co)

Edit: formatting

</comment><comment><USER5> Perhaps you would get better responses if your title wasn't so childish.

<comment><AUTHOR> childish, yet practical :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The keys a,e,y and o seem to be intermitently broken on your keyboard. I could advise you to a good DasKeyboard or Elite keyboard.

<comment><AUTHOR> yeah, they went missing in action when HN limited the title to only 80 chars :)

<comment><USER7> Ask HN: Which newsletters do you think are indispensable? (58 characters, who can do better? :)

<comment><AUTHOR> changed :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Bruce Schneier. His are without fail a royal wealth of thoughtful information.</comment>


FCA UAW corruption scandal - <AUTHOR> https://jalopnik.com/ferraris-37-500-pens-and-disney-tickets-how-the-fca-1830994749 <comment><USER2> What are the current tactics for labor to combat corruption or crony capitalism?

Back in the summer, I was listening to a radio interview with the union head talking about their latest negotiations with Fiat, and I was surprised to hear that they were on personally amicable terms. So much so that the union rep mentioned getting to see Marchionne's personal car collection, and 'negotiating' over fancy dinners.

I know there's an answer for this in raw labor economic/game theoretic terms, but is it ever possible to for labor to treat the owners of capital as anything other than amicable? I'm not saying hostile, but it seems that the point at which the line blurs between labor working for the workers, or just being another arm of corporate executive leadership, seems like something we should've fixed with modern corporate practices.

<comment><USER3> Corruption is a thing. The specific organizational model really doesn't seem to matter much. In a game theoretic sense, I think the only option is to make whistleblowing optimal.

I like rules. Weird shadow rules that aren't written down make me unreasonably angry. Corruption likes having two sets of rules.

I don't know the mechanism. Automatic immunity for alleged whistleblowers _seems_ reasonable. There are ways to exploit that. But for an institutionalized system, maybe the losses are worth it.

<comment><USER2> Did a quick skim of literature, and it seems accountability in structures is the check on two sets of rules. Whistleblowing, but also shorter terms, punishment, and trust seem like good strategies.

Alas, defensive complexity should be the answer, but the appearance that it's not is what is confusing to me.</comment></comment></comment>


Man Sues Feds After They Target Him for Photographing Rainbow Art - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2014/07/five-sue-gov-over-targeting/

<comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8034320](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8034320)</comment>


Google Sheets was down - 1-6 http://sheets.google.com <comment><AUTHOR> " Google Drive service has already been restored for some users, and we expect a resolution for all users within the next 1 hours. Please note this time frame is an estimate and may change." per their status page about 7 minutes ago

</comment><comment><USER2> Same for me. Getting 'backendError' from the sheets api.

        data: {
          error: {
            code: 503,
            message: 'The service is currently unavailable.',
            errors: [
              {
                message: 'The service is currently unavailable.',
                domain: 'global',
                reason: 'backendError'
              }
            ],
            status: 'UNAVAILABLE'
          }
        }

</comment><comment><USER3> I just want to say as someone in Finance who works in Spreadsheets all day that Google Sheets is just NOT a replacement for Excel. All the functions, size, and some of the external tools built for Excel are just not in Sheets. I know some of you say "well of course not for what you do" but there are Microsoft haters who just wont believe me when I say that.

<comment><USER4> I work at the Google office in Chelsea, New York. One day, my old manager and I were talking about the future of GSuite and how entrenced MS Office is. We were next to a south-facing window and he pointed out toward all the buildings in downtown Manhattan: "all those buildings run off of Excel."

I think the collaboration benefits of Google Sheets is high enough that it can be the default for most employees. Perhaps MS Excel should be used only by specialists, like how only a fraction of any company uses Photoshop.

<comment><USER5> Collaboration was certainly my driver for using Google Sheets, but most, if not all, of that functionality is in Excel Online now.

<comment><USER6> Is Excel Online still as slow as it used to be a couple of years ago? I remember reading (perhaps here on HN) about how it basically spun up a headless Excel instance for each user since they couldn't extract and decouple all the functionality necessary to run some of the more advanced features.

EDIT: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17304660](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17304660) (June 2018)

> Excel is a different world and a big-big elephant that won't likely be > rewritten any years soon. Think of a code that is maintained over 30 years. > Literally, developers are still maintaining code written in the 90s. Trying > to bring Excel to the online world made MS create an architecture of html > frontend which communicates with a dll session behind the scenes. As weird > as it sounds, this dll lives as long as the browser has the spreadsheet > opened. Think of it as MS raising VM for every excel file that is opened > over the internet. While this is not very cost effective (saying the least) > and not very performance friendly (hey ma! I made an understatement) this > allowed them to move forward with Excel online very quickly by having a UI > communicating with the bloatware dll that runs on the background in Azure. > Summarizing Excel, it probably won't also be rewritten in js.

<comment><USER7> I have the utmost faith in MS being able to do JS/Web optimizations after what they've been able to do with Visual Studio Code.

<comment><USER8> The difference is that VS Code was built ground up entirely separate in every way from Visual Studio.

There was zero compatibility to maintain, zero code to port, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Did anyone else initially misread the title as "Google Sheets is shutting down"?

Or was that just me?

<comment><USER10> You can be forgiven for that, considering how often "Google $GSERVICE is shutting down" appears on HN's front page.

<comment> j-james Currently on HN's front page: Google's App Maker is shutting down

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22160891](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22160891)

</comment></comment></comment><comment> 1-6 [https://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=status](https://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=status)

</comment><comment><USER11> Thought for the day: spreadsheets have done more computing related to how business (and government and non-profits and schools) run, than any other programming language, including heavy lifters like COBOL or Java. Can I back that up with data? Of course not. But, having worked as a contractor in manufacturing (three different industries), university, advertising, magazine, real estate, gene sequencing, finance, and edutech, I have little doubt.

My preferred tool is python, I use javascript and/or SQL when I need to, I have dabbled in R, I have programmed in legacy applications on mainframes. Spreadsheets are more widely used than any of these, for doing computing that impacts how organizations actually run.

<comment><USER12> Would it be wrong to say that the language which the spreadsheet software is implemented in is also doing computing related to business?

<comment><USER11> Hey, it's all Assembler if you go down far enough.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It wasn't just me!

Though it was interesting that googling "google sheets down" and clicking News returned 3 results regarding winter weather bedding and 0 results about Google Sheets.

<comment><USER14> Too many people enter "google" in every search they do...

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> up for me now. Google SREs must be busy today!

<comment><USER16> Maybe they accidentally shut down the wrong product.

<comment><USER17> They just announced AppMaker is shutting down (soon). So...maybe?

<comment><USER18> Maybe something was connected that nobody thought of

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Drive is down as well.

</comment><comment><USER20> Seems like they got it up quickly. But would still love to read a post-mortem.

</comment><comment><USER21> So were portions of Google Slides. I could not open some slide decks, while others were unaffected. This made me sweat as I was 15 minutes away from a very important presentation.

<comment> m-p-3 I always export my slides before an important presentation just in case, not gonna get burned by the cloud!

<comment><USER22> > not gonna get burned by the cloud!

Surely if the problem is "the cloud disappeared", that's more a case of sunburn? ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Google Docs, Drive, and Photos all seem to be affected.

Currently have to download my files from Google and work on them in Excel and Word to get work done.

<comment><USER24> class action coming up

<comment><USER25> I'm not aware of there being any SLAs for these services?

<comment><USER26> I'm hoping that was a joke. Most people don't even pay for it.

Did this affect gsuite as well? Either was I'm sure the TOS would never allow it. While you're at it suing google, might as well get a precedent set making TOS unenforceable.

<comment><USER27> This did affect us on gsuite. We were receiving an error telling us we were blocked due to unusual suspicious activity coming from our ip. It was pretty misleading and took a little bit to realize that wasn't the case.

<comment><USER28> Did you have retry logic that triggered when Sheets started failing requests? Maybe that looked like a DDoS attack while the problem persisted.

<comment><USER29> Google internally use the DDos blocking system to block requests to reduce load on critical systems during outages. (It's common for systems to require reduced load during startup because caches are still filling and user requests after an outage are often more expensive to process)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Google Docs is having some issues too.

</comment><comment><USER31> I'm having issues with web version of Google Calendar as well.

</comment><comment><USER32> hmm I had assumed it's our firewall freaking out. Got warnings about unusual traffic that looked more well FW like.

Drive stayed up for us though

<comment><USER33> Same. Gave me a good sized shock for a moment when I read it was saying the IPv4 address I was sourcing from wasn't one assigned to our company. Then I realized it was just the IP of our cloud security proxy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> An aside, but what do you do when your Google Sheet becomes too big?

I find things break down very quickly (based on number of collaborators or file size), and I'm writing (yet again) some type of Flask-Admin server. Retool ([https://retool.com](https://retool.com)) is another option I've considered.

Any others?

<comment><USER35> I'm currently working on [https://LightSheets.app](https://LightSheets.app) \- it's going to be a high performance spreadsheet application. Today I managed to successfully import a 5 GB CSV file with ~50 million rows of data (around 10x more than Excel or Sheets can manage). Next steps will be a serialization format for spreadsheets this size, not sure exactly how this will work yet.

What kind of limits do you find you hit regarding the number of collaborators?

<comment><USER36> Love how fast your site loaded on my mobile phone. Props man.

<comment><USER10> 2.39 KB landing page? A blurb above the fold not only addressing the purpose of this product but also the context that it's addressing? A digestible list of features and improvements over alternatives?

An exemplar to aspire to, for sure. Bravo!

<comment><USER35> Really kind of you, thanks. Now my challenge is to make an app that lives up to the landing page - some of the things are definitely challenging!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I dont remember Google's Search Engine had outages. ( May be once in the past 10 years ) Why is it all the other products, from GCP to Google Sheet had more outages?

And Google was suppose to compete with Microsoft Azure or Office 365?

<comment><USER38> From Google's Site Reliability Engineering book[1]:

> SRE's goal is no longer "zero outages"; rather, SREs and product developers > aim to spend the error budget getting maximum feature velocity. This change > makes all the difference. An outage is no longer a "bad" thing—it is an > expected part of the process of innovation, and an occurrence that both > development and SRE teams manage rather than fear.

I suspect Search has a lower error budget than Sheets.

[1] [https://landing.google.com/sre/sre- book/chapters/introductio...](https://landing.google.com/sre/sre- book/chapters/introduction/)

<comment><USER39> > An outage is no longer a "bad" thing—it is an expected part of the process > of innovation, and an occurrence that both development and SRE teams manage > rather than fear.

As a user, outages are _always_ bad things. That Google's SRE team thinks otherwise is chilling.

<comment><USER40> Of course outages are bad. But if the choice is "our service occasionally goes down" and "we never release new features", you may accept the risk of occasionally going down.

So yeah, outages are always bad, but the alternatives can be worse.

<comment><USER39> > if the choice is "our service occasionally goes down" and "we never release > new features", you may accept the risk of occasionally going down.

I don't think that I would, because I don't accept the premise of that being the necessary choice. It's just the choice that the providers deign to offer for economic reasons.

But my objection isn't that there should be zero downtime. My objection is the idea that a service provider considers any downtime to be acceptable.

<comment><USER40> > My objection is the idea that a service provider considers any downtime to > be acceptable.

If you don't view any downtime to be acceptable, the logical thing to do is invest all of your resources into reducing downtime. This means solely investing in reliability infrastructure, redundancy, and making few or no changes to the system, since change introduces failure.

Since no service does that, the logical conclusion is that very few people actually consider any downtime unacceptable. Broadly speaking, I can think of literally no service that advertises "zero downtime". Cold storage gets close, but even they offer a measly 12 or 16 9s of reliability.

In other words, reliability is a business goal, much like any other business goal. Trying to achieve "perfect" reliability with limited resources isn't a good time. So looking at error budgets empowers SREs. You can go to leaders and say "hey we're exceeding our error budget, so we not making any more changes and only working on reliability until we're back within our agreed reliability."

<comment><USER39> I think I have utterly failed to successfully convey the point I was trying to make.

My point was not that I expect zero downtime or perfect reliability. My point is that I expect that companies don't consider downtime to be an acceptable and normal thing.

<comment><USER40> > My point is that I expect that companies don't consider downtime to be an > acceptable and normal thing.

And my point is that if a company isn't doing this, they're idiots. SRE is entirely about planning for downtime. You have incident response procedures to minimize downtime when problems happen. You have tools like error budgets to make explicit your organizational goals. But all of these are predicated on the assumption that incidents (and downtime) are a "normal" thing that will happen.

Again, if SRE's goal is _solely_ to minimize downtime at the cost of other organizational priorities, there's a very simple way to do that: disallow all new features and maintain the same app today. That would easily cut outages for most apps by a factor of ten.

> My point is that I expect that companies don't consider downtime to be an > acceptable

So you think its unacceptable to have an SLA? That's a very common way of making explicit the amount of downtime the organization feels is acceptable. This kind of error budgets is just a non-public SLA that's used to guide development, as opposed to pay people. I'm curious what companies you use that publish 100% uptime guarantees, or similar SLAs.

<comment><USER39> > So you think its unacceptable to have an SLA? That's a very common way of > making explicit the amount of downtime the organization feels is acceptable.

Perhaps we mean different things by "acceptable". SLAs are a promise that downtime won't exceed certain levels. They are not a declaration that downtime is "acceptable", only that it's inevitable and is an attempt to characterize that inevitability.

What I mean is that when downtime happens, nobody at the company should be think "this is fine". They should be very concerned and engaging in urgent and speedy resolution to the problem.

The idea that a service is expecting and accepting downtime as part of normal operation and, even worse, as part of some sort of tradeoff with regards to developing new features is just bizarre and unacceptable to me.

It indicates a level of unconcern about customer needs and experience that renders the service untrustworthy.

<comment><USER40> But again, this just acknowledges reality. You only have a finite number of employees. If you aren't devoting all of them to reliability and stability, you're making a trade off with feature velocity.

Being aware of that trade off is more organizationally mature than not

> What I mean is that when downtime happens, nobody at the company should be > think "this is fine". They should be very concerned and engaging in urgent > and speedy resolution to the problem.

If you think this, you've entirely misunderstood. Error budgets aren't about outages when they happen. Individual outages should be dealt with quickly and without delay. But when making planning decisions for the next year or quarter, that's when error budgets matter.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Netdata, static binary builds available for any Linux system - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/firehol/netdata/wiki/Installation#x86_64-pre-built-binary-for-any-linux <comment><AUTHOR> bash <(curl -Ss [https://my-netdata.io/kickstart-static64.sh](https://my- netdata.io/kickstart-static64.sh))

For any 64bit Linux system. Check the wiki if bash is not available on the target system.

Wiki: [https://github.com/firehol/netdata/wiki/Installation](https://github.com/firehol/netdata/wiki/Installation) Home: [https://my-netdata.io/](https://my-netdata.io/)

<comment><USER2> The link doesn't really explain what Netdata is or why I might want to use it.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. The front-page gives more data:

[https://github.com/firehol/netdata](https://github.com/firehol/netdata)

It looks like a thing that stores and visualises "metrics".

But it looks like it runs only upon a single host, which makes it less interesting than collectd/prometheus/etc, even if the visuals look a little nicer than grafana, etc.

I certainly wouldn't have the patience to open ten pages if I wanted to see the stats on ten hosts. I want all my metrics in one place - so I can graph "top five busiest hosts", etc.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Non-US company and Inc - <AUTHOR> A question for non-US companies: why did / didn't you decide to create Inc? What does your corporate structure look like now? We're trying to figure out what's the best approach for us. <comment><USER2> I don't understand your question. Do you mean why didn't you decide to incorporate in the United States?

I'm not American, and I don't want anything to do with American taxes. That rules out any US LLC or corporation. My market is also Asia and the Middle East, so I opted for a Hong Kong company. No resident director requirement, and no tax on profits earned outside Hong Kong. There's no tax on salaries if earned outside Hong Kong, which leaves you with personal income tax in the country you're resident in.

Creating a Hong Kong company took about 1-2 days. I went to Hong Kong for a weekend to open a bank account. KYC rules require you appear in front of a bank officer to open a bank account.

You can consider Singapore as well, but Singapore has a resident director requirement.

What is your market, and where are you trying to sell?</comment>


What is happening at reddit? I'm trying to log on but I can't - <AUTHOR>

What is happening at reddit? I'm trying to log on but I can't <comment><USER2> I hope it's back soon. I have inane jokes to make and trolls to dispute.

<comment><USER3> I bet I could dispute 100 trolls.</comment></comment>


Safe Retirement Spending Using TensorFlow - <AUTHOR> http://blog.streeteye.com/blog/2016/08/safe-retirement-spending-using-certainty-equivalent-cash-flow-and-tensorflow/ <comment><USER2> I was actually paid to build something like this once.

A financial products company wanted a visualization tool that would let a customer enter their wealth, pick a variety of investment strategies, spending strategies, and retirement durations, and then see how it all played out over historical data.

You could scrub a timeline back and forth to change the starting year, and see your weath and spending charted out over the course of that retirement.

It was best retirement savings education I've ever seen. Almost every retirement planner just shows you averages, and life looks simple and predictable. Reality is very, very different.

Things I learned:

1\. The stock market will probably crash at some point during your retirement, and you will loose half of any wealth you have in it.

2\. In spite of the big drops, the higher compounding rates of stocks mean that a bond heavy retirement gives you way less money, even in the worst market retirement years. 30 years lets money grow for a long time.

3\. Attempting to spend as much money as possible drastically increases your odds of running out of money, or suddenly having a lot less to spend. (Seriously, what is up with people attempting to run out of money exactly on their 95th birthday?)

4\. Any retirement planning should take into account that you could end up with way more, or way less money that you thought.

(Sadly, the web app was never released by the company.)

<comment><USER3> Planning financial investments for a 50 year time horizon when mass-market finance has really only been around since ~the 1970s is crazy. An entire retirement system predicated on long term financial returns > GDP growth, likewise insane.

There is insufficient data regardless of modeling technique to derive decent simulation-based conclusions about asset classes that literally didn't exist 50 years ago. There are decent datasets for precious metals, real estate, and government bonds, but the results aren't super encouraging for average investors.

<comment><USER4> You're making a weird distinction by saying "mass-market finance" as if the fundamentals of asset classes change radically depending on how they are marketed.

Stocks, as an asset class, have been around a lot longer than the 1970s, and they have on average grown a lot faster than GDP over that time.

That makes sense since stock prices measure a form of wealth, and GDP measures income. Big difference.

<comment><USER3> "as if the fundamentals of asset classes change radically depending on how they are marketed"

More like the fundamentals of asset classes change radically depending on how they're regulated & taxed, who is willing / able to buy them, what the composition of that asset class is, and how much money there is flowing in and out of that asset class.

And we're not even really talking about "fundamentals", since there is so much path dependency, especially in the context of drawing-down of those assets to finance retirement. A rise in variance would be bad enough.

Stock prices in the long run represent a time-discounted income stream (as do all securities) (plus a bundle of legal rights, which is mostly irrelevant for individuals). It is not mathematically possible to have the stock market growing by 4% and GDP growing by 2% ad infinitum; you would have the value of the stock market exceed the discounted value of all future economic activity.

There is a cogent argument that the inflation in stocks has been due to 1) more economic activity falling under the umbrella of publicly traded corporations (private blacksmith displaced by Ford), 2) capital inflows driven by privatized retirement savings, interest rate manipulation, etc. 3) a legal & economic regime that encourages "paper assets" in general.

None of those are perpetual forces.

<comment><USER5> > It is not mathematically possible to have the stock market growing by 4% and > GDP growing by 2% ad infinitum

Yes, it is.

First, because there is no _necessary_ mathematical relationship between the aggregate market cap of firms and economic output (future or otherwise). There are _rational expectations_ that can be stated, but those aren't actual constraints, since irrationality is a real thing.

Second, the economic universe from which the stock market draws value is not limited to the domestic economy, so even if there was a constraint based on economic output, it wouldn't be GDP.

<comment><USER3> "Maybe the future will be perpetually irrational about asset prices" is not really a compelling economic story. There is indeed a mathematical relation between long run asset prices and the income generated by those assets. In the short run you can do whatever you want, but the long run constraint is predictably enforced by arbitrage.

(it is left as an exercise to construct the most entertaining arbitrage play in a world where stock prices diverge indefinitely from the value produced by the underlying assets via some magic.)

<comment><USER5> > "Maybe the future will be perpetually irrational about asset prices" is not > really a compelling economic story.

Perhaps, but then we are getting into _rational expectations_ and not _mathematical constraints_. (Though, really, given that rationality requires perfect knowledge of future utilities, "the future will be perpetually irrational about asset prices" is pretty much guaranteed to be true except for intermittent times when it isn't momentarily largely by chance; even a consistent divergence in a particular _direction_ from rationality isn't surprising, given what we the particular ways in which people tend to be deviate from economic rationality in practice.)

> There is indeed a mathematical relation between long run asset prices and > the income generated by those assets.

No, there is a mathematical relation between _reasonable_ asset prices and _expected_ income streams that the assets will generate.

> In the short run you can do whatever you want, but the long run constraint > is predictably enforced by arbitrage.

"In the long run, we're all dead" \-- Keynes

Even granting your point for the sake of argument, what must _ultimately_ be true in the long run assuming an infinite time horizon need never _actually_ be true in the physical universe we inhabit. Irrationality in prices can be maintained _indefinitely_ , even though not infinitely -- but then, the market can't actually exist infinitely, anyway.

<comment><USER6> Betting that the market reverts to 'rational' pricing in any short time frame is a risky bet, but I'll claim it's much, much more reasonable than assuming that _irrationality persists indefinitely_.

OTOH, there's another story to why equity returns are higher than GDP returns: equity investors are being compensated for the higher risk.

<comment><USER7> > _OTOH, there 's another story to why equity returns are higher than GDP > returns: equity investors are being compensated for the higher risk._

This gets mentioned very often in such debates, but the implied causal connection is wrong: There is no guarantee that higher risk leads to higher returns. It's not like the stock market says "We should keep up increasing stock prices so that equity investors are being compensated for their risk."

Over long timespans, stock prices are coupled to the performance of the underlying companies (mostly their income streams), not to risk. So far, there has been a correlation, but there has never been a guaranteed causal relation between risk and stock returns.

<comment><USER6> > There is no guarantee that higher risk leads to higher returns. It's not > like the stock market says "We should keep up increasing stock prices so > that equity investors are being compensated for their risk."

The mechanism is much simpler: asset prices of risky assets _today_ will fall because willing buyers demand a higher return for the risk.

E.g. you have a stock and a bond both at $100 with the same expected return. Investors aren't happy with that, so they refuse to buy the stock until its price falls and its implied return rises.

<comment><USER7> Okay, so let's assume that the stocks are traded with a 10% risk discount ($90). Ten years later, the bonds are about to mature and are valued at $150 (50% profit). The company belonging to the stocks has also become 50% more valuable (because its fundamentals improved, e.g. 50% higher revenue and profit), but its stocks are still just as risky and still trade at a 10% discount, for a price of $150 * 90% = $135 (also 50% profit).

So despite the higher risk, and despite the fact that the stock's price is discounted, the investor did not make more profit from the stocks than from the bonds.

In practice, companies should grow faster than bonds (because they can reinvest their profits to increase their profit – although many companies fail at that), yielding higher returns. My point is, that those higher returns result from the different mechanisms underlying different security types, not from differences in risk.

<comment><USER6> You arbitrarily fixed the bond return to match that of stocks, but that's not how bonds get their prices set.

Bonds are fundamentally less risky than stocks because in the event of bankruptcy bondholders are paid first. Real recovery rates are around 40% usually.

> Ten years later, the bonds are about to mature and are valued at $150 (50% > profit)

No, the value of of the bond is mostly independent of how much the company's future revenues are (as long as they don't go bankrupt). There are few future paths where someone will pay you $150 in the future for a bond that you bought for $100 today.

Bonds mostly have downside risk (you can lose everything), but limited upside participation. OTOH, equity has worse downside risk (if a company has $700m in debt and $300m in equity, it only needs to lose $300m in assets to go bankrupt --but in that case, bondholders would still get paid), but full upside participation.

Another way of looking at this is that if a company triples in size, your equity stake also triples because you now own the same percentage of a much larger company, but the bond cashflows did not change because bonds do not have that upside.

<comment><USER7> Why are you fixated on bonds? My argument is mostly independent of bonds, I only included them because you mentioned them originally.

Your reasoning was:

> _The mechanism is much simpler: asset prices of risky assets today will fall > because willing buyers demand a higher return for the risk. [...] Investors > aren 't happy with that, so they refuse to buy the stock until its price > falls and its implied return rises._

I showed that this is not a valid argument, because if the market discounts the price of a stock by x% due to higher perceived risk, then it will discount its price by x% ten years later as well (unless there was a major change in the company's fundamentals, which is another story and not relevant here), meaning that the discounting of risk did not result in higher profit (compared to the return on stocks of a company which is deemed less risky).

<comment><USER6> Bonds are the natural comparison _because bonds represent relatively riskless cashflows_. Bonds tell you how much you get paid in the future, stocks don't.

Otherwise, how can you measure the return to risk?

> then it will discount its price by x% ten years later as well

That doesn't follow because you're missing a free parameter. Let's say a piece of stock _ought_ to be worth $110 in 1 year if people weren't risk averse (based on how we think the company will do, etc.), but it'll only be worth $100 because of the risk. It can still be worth $91 today, implying a 10% return, for example.

 _For any path of future expected equity values, regardless of what future discount you apply, there is a price today that will imply an equity risk premium_.

FYI, people have empirically measured the implied equity risk premium over long periods of time. The general consensus is that equity returns around 5-10% more per annum that a risk-free asset, but it varies greatly from decade to decade:

[https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/staff...](https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/staff_reports/sr714.pdf)

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

<comment><USER7> Those are some good points, thank you. I'll have to think about this for some time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> nappy-doo Anyone who's interested in this kind of thing would do well to visit [http://www.cfiresim.com/](http://www.cfiresim.com/)

I think it's probably one of the best historical modelling simulators out there, allows you to save/share your sims, and models all kinds of neat things like inheritances and expected large expenses.

</comment><comment><USER8> What are the units of spend_mean, spend_min and spend_max in the table, and what exactly are these referring to?

The post says:

>The mean amount you would have been able to spend by year if you had followed this plan, you retired in years 1928-1985 and you enjoyed a 30-year retirement.

But I don't really follow... in year 1, spend_mean is 4.567. Does that mean on average I spend $4.57 in year 1? Is this in addition to the constant spending?

Is variable spending in addition to constant spending? Or is this the % of the portfolio that I am drawing from by spending my const_spend target?

<comment><USER9> I'm assuming it's all dollars. There is no $4.57, it's actually $4,567 (but I guess the actual number doesn't matter if you treat them all the same).

spend_mean, spend_min, and spend_max are probably the amounts you'd spend if you were in the mean, min and max respectively. For example, according to this data, the mean amount you have saved up is ~$667,459 (I calculated this backwards) - so for the first year you'd spend 2321 + 0.002102*667459 = $3,724. Likewise if you saved the max in the dataset you'd spend $5,358 instead (total, not in addition to anything).

And yes, the var spending is in addition to const spending, it's explained a bit lower in the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Fun article.

> "That being said, this optimization seems to run 4-5x faster on CPU than > GPU."

I'm guessing it is a question of throughput. GPUs are becoming almost like vector processors, and so if you do not 'feed the beast' then throwing hoards of threads at the problem will just increase contention, versus improving scalability.

Sort of embarrassing, as I am a Bayes guy, but I've not seen much MCMC performed on GPUs. Given the parallelism, I would expect it could nicely scream with lots of threads (if you also had lots of chains) but this is a guess.

</comment><comment><USER11> Interesting example, but the model is unappealing to me. The CRRA assumption is definitely untrue for most people, including me.

<comment><USER9> I agree. I feel that the only reasons to choose an outcome with a value lower than an expected value are ignorance, or aversion to gambling risk (when taking a one-time risk rather than averaging over time), neither of which should be applying here. I'd love to see some counterpoints.

<comment><USER12> Being risk-adverse with retirement spending is perfectly rational. Most people will have to take into minimum expense amounts. Pursuing a strategy which will have the more likely outcome of not being able to pay your minimum expenses would not make sense for many people. Comparing only the expected values without including the volatility is an incomplete comparison.

The critique is aimed at the assumption that your risk aversion is scale invariant. i.e. you behave the same when the values are in the 10s of dollars, or the 10,000s of dollars. I might be perfectly fine with taking the coin flip when the outcomes are either $10 or $15, but if the outcomes are $10,000 or $15,000 I might rather take a lower guaranteed amount of $12,000 because that will meet my expenses but the $10,000 won't.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fair enough, but for this retirement problem you're comparing outcomes within 1-2 orders of magnitude. If you don't have scale invariance you'll get a different answer if you put in $100K, $1m and $10m starting portfolios, but that difference wouldn't tell you anything useful.

IMO best way to look at γ is an arbitrary tunable smoothing parameter, just tune it until it looks like what you're most comfortable with, trading off smoothness for maximizing cash flow.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Lust for public Wi-Fi trumps security concerns - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/article/lust-for-public-wi-fi-trumps-security-concerns/ <comment><USER2> Guess I'm the odd one out then, I have never and will never use public wifi networks. I don't even trust connecting through client's office wifi networks. On the rare occasion I have no other option in work situations in client offices, I'll use a VPN through a virtual machine completely isolated from my host environment. It's just not worth the risk. Always wear digital condoms folks.</comment>


GitLab 8.15 Released - <AUTHOR> https://about.gitlab.com/2016/12/22/gitlab-8-15-released/ <comment><USER4> @Gitlab: The features are great but the interface setup is shocking. That whole video assumes you have a K-cluster going already, and is a maze of this- thing, that-thing, auth-thing, copy-thing, etc. Have you guys ever tried interviewing users who are new or maintaining a Gitlab instance over major version upgrades? It's painful.

The 'quick fix' for setup these days is supposed to be to use a docker image... but the docker image most people use is unofficial, the maintainer is swamped and has a policy of ignoring problems, and although it runs it doesn't work well with real IPs/DNS/SSL/etc. for common cases (eg. email setup silently fails for many and has for ages - <USER2> [https://github.com/sameersbn/docker- gitlab/issues/596](https://github.com/sameersbn/docker-gitlab/issues/596) and [https://github.com/sameersbn/docker- gitlab/issues/1005](https://github.com/sameersbn/docker-gitlab/issues/1005) which I recently opened) and adds the docker-is-a-moving-target complexity issue to the potential user's stack.

Normally I am based in China. Given that Github access is not super fast or stable there, you guys have a great opportunity to take that market. I'd personally love to use Gitlab both for my own business and those I consult for, but I can't get past go with mail on real infrastructure, and experiences with upgrades to date have been terrible.

Just offering my own recent experiences as a point of reference.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the honest feedback, it's genuinely useful for improving the product.

Out of curiosity, why use the Docker image over our Omnibus package? Omnibus is generally what we recommend, but if that's not good enough we'd love to know how it can be improved.

<comment><USER4> Even if I trusted it not to munge other things (doubtful), IIRC omnibus does not support my distro (Gentoo), and setting up another distro I have to (remember to) maintain just to support one application does not appeal medium term versus using a popular docker image which has done that for me already in a pre-tested fashion and should handle maintenance smoother.

Basically I'm at this point: 'what's the easiest self-contained box to run and maintain', with conditions 'I have an IP but it's not dedicated (ports 22/80/443 unavailable)' and 'there may not be existing DNS/SSL for this server but I can set it up' and 'SMTP from this IP is not desired/desirable, but I have an existing offsite ISP allowing relay with credentials'. This doesn't strike me as particularly weird, except that in the latter case Google is not an option (GFW'd from China).

<comment><USER6> I don't think your concerns are founded, I just deployed GitLab for personal use on a virtual machine with the omnibus image (gitlab-ce:latest) and it worked flawlessly. And since they released an update today, to upgrade all I had to do was:

        docker pull gitlab/gitlab-ce:latest
        docker stop gitlab
        docker rename gitlab gitlab-old
        docker run --detach --publish 60100:80 --publish 58432:22 --name gitlab --restart always \
             --volume /var/volumes/gitlab/config:/etc/gitlab \
             --volume /var/volumes/gitlab/logs:/var/log/gitlab \
             --volume /var/volumes/gitlab/data:/var/opt/gitlab \
             gitlab/gitlab-ce:latest

        # after verifying the new image works, docker rm docker-old; docker rmi [old image].

It took less than an hour to configure it for external SMTP relay, external auth with two factor authentication, etc.

I did just get started with it, but I have to say the omnibus install was fairly easy.

<comment><USER4> Great, I'm glad it worked for you. It didn't work for me and other people, as per the issues linked. When it doesn't work, there's no clearly defined debug path, and very little response.

<comment><USER6> Respectfully, it seems like you are using the wrong Docker image, and that's the source of your troubles. Others have commented similarly, and I think that you are too easily dismissing them.

<comment><USER7> I think you're right Aaron.

The Sameer docker image used to be the only way to run GitLab with Docker but we don't recommend it and it is no longer listed on our installation page [https://about.gitlab.com/installation/](https://about.gitlab.com/installation/) to prevent confusion.

Also see my answer in [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13243443](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13243443)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I love gitlab! We just deployed our review app deployment to Kubernetes (create a new subdomain in route53, create a new namespace in k8s, create all kubernetes manifests in that namespace, create ingress manifest, boom!).

Here's some thing I wish for gitlab:

1\. On merge, run "stop_review" so that we don't end up with a lot of old review apps.

2\. I wish you could take over [https://github.com/sameersbn/docker- gitlab](https://github.com/sameersbn/docker-gitlab) or offer something similar. I find it a little crazy that you have a single docker image for redis, gitlab, postgresql. There's multiple reason why we don't want to use this, but the simplest is: we already have mysql running (and feel no need to move to pgsql), and we already have experience in running redis.. I kinda like my containers to do 1 thing and 1 thing well.

Merry Christmas, thanks for this patch!

<comment><USER7> Glad to hear you love GitLab and are using the review apps [https://about.gitlab.com/features/review- apps/](https://about.gitlab.com/features/review-apps/)

Thanks for the wish list!

1\. Automatically stopping the review on merge makes a lot of sense. The issue for that is in [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab- ce/issues/22191](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/22191) and it got added to 8.13 if I'm not mistaken [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab- ce/merge_requests/6669](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab- ce/merge_requests/6669)

2\. As you know we already have official docker images with [https://docs.gitlab.com/omnibus/docker/](https://docs.gitlab.com/omnibus/docker/) so we won't take over Sameer his work. If you want to have separate containers for the datastores (totally a good idea) I recommend you use the Helm Chart [https://github.com/kubernetes/charts/tree/master/stable/gitl...](https://github.com/kubernetes/charts/tree/master/stable/gitlab- ce) It has separate containers for Redis and PostgreSQL [https://github.com/kubernetes/charts/blob/master/stable/gitl...](https://github.com/kubernetes/charts/blob/master/stable/gitlab- ce/requirements.lock)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Participate in an Interview on Experience with Different Git Tools

My name is Angela and I do researches on user experience for different Git tools on the market. I'm kicking off a round of discussions with people who use Git tools. Ideally, I'd like to talk to people that sit on a team of 3 or more.

If this is you, I would love to talk to you about your experience with <using> Git tools, or just some of the pain points that are keeping you up at night when doing your jobs. I'll just need 30 mins of your time, and as a token of my thanks to those that participate, I'd like to offer a US$50 Amazon gift voucher.

If you're interested, just shoot me an email with your availability over the next few weeks and we can set up a time to chat for 30 minutes. Please also include your timezone so we can schedule a suitable time (as I'm located in San Francisco). Hope to talk to you soon!

Cheers, Angela Guo email@example.com

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm curious how you guys build features for EE. Is it a completely separate Rails project you handle manually to keep base features in sync with the community edition?

EE is open source but requires a license. Do you just trust companies won't download the source code and run it. Do you have heartbeat code injected somewhere to ping servers that are running EE to homebase?

I'm thinking of starting a project, charge money but also open-source it. Curious what your strategies are, especially since the project is still greenfield.

Thanks!

<comment><USER11> >EE is open source

It is _not_. You cannot distribute it. That makes it not open source.

<comment><USER12> yeah, the term I'd use is source available? anyway, I agree with the idea that "open source" is a dirty term, an attempt to subvert the free software movement. But that is a battle for another day.

Someone else put it better than I could:

> Likewise a Source Available is not necessarily Open Source, but Open Source > is necessarily Source Available.

[https://haacked.com/archive/2006/07/26/CodeAvailableVsOpenSo...](https://haacked.com/archive/2006/07/26/CodeAvailableVsOpenSourceVsFreeSoftware.aspx/) (requires you to accept github cert because https is difficult for some reason)

Blog github at [https://github.com/Haacked/haacked.com](https://github.com/Haacked/haacked.com)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Holy hell this is amazing! Gitlab all the way! You release often and there is always something awesome in there, I love reading your release notes.

One thing I find strangely lacking (seeing as you bundle it) is notifications from gitlab to mattermost when builds fail or issues/mrs are opened. Apparently I have to run some strange 3rd party application to process webhooks?

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure I understand why you're under the impression that you need a 3rd party application for that, as far as I know it's possible with just GitLab and Mattermost. If there are any confusing docs we need to improve I'd be happy to do so :)

Build failures can be sent to Mattermost using our Pipeline webhooks described here: [http://docs.gitlab.com/ce/web_hooks/web_hooks.html#pipeline-...](http://docs.gitlab.com/ce/web_hooks/web_hooks.html#pipeline- events)

And then the Incoming Webhooks in Mattermost described here: [https://docs.mattermost.com/developer/webhooks- incoming.html](https://docs.mattermost.com/developer/webhooks-incoming.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> As a paying gitlab ee customer, we love to use gitlab. I just have one gripe with review apps. We would really like you to open it up with an API.

Allowing us to create the infrastructure outside of gitlab-ci and setting the reviewapp url/domain etc using the API would be extremely valueable for us, as we are stepping off of the gitlab-ci, but would very much like the UI interface upgrades review apps provides.

We are stepping off of Gitlab CI because of: * Only a single pipeline allowed per repository. We have a monorepo as we have a lot of small artifacts that make no sense to split out to multiple repo's and have to manage using gitsubmodules or having a separate code review process (we use merge requests a lot!) * Gitlab-ci's "stages" and not allowing dependencies on cross-stage is not helpful * No "skipped" status that can be supplied during the pipeline. E.g., we want to ignore changes to our documentation .

<comment><USER7> If you have specific functionality that is now only in the interface in an API we'd be glad to have a look. But it sounds like you want to replace functionality in .gitlab-ci.yml with an API, this would be hard.

Instead we would gladly word with you to make GitLab CI better so you can keep using it.

1\. Single pipeline => I understand using a monorepo. But I don't understand yet why you need multiple pipelines. Does the pipeline work different depending on what file is updated?

2\. Do you mean cross project pipelines? [https://gitlab.com/gitlab- org/gitlab-ee/issues/933](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/933)

3\. Do you mean setting criteria for build skipping in .gitlab-ci.yml ? What would be an example criteria?

Since you are a paying customer feel free to work with our support team to have the features you need prioritized. We want everyone to be able to use GitLab CI.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'd usually refrain from "+1" style comments, but you guys rock!

Its great to finally see some improvements in the interface, but its still rather far from being as user-friendly as GitHub.

I've got some very specific aspects in mind. Are contributions to Gitlab's interface accepted?

<comment><USER16> Can you share what these items are? I have used GitLab quite a bit and GitHub just a little, and I so far have enjoyed using GitLab much more. I had a hard time finding my way around on GitHub.

The main parts I've used in both are creating Issues and Merge Requests, and in GitLab I've accepted them and managed teams/projects.

<comment><USER15> Sure, some things off the top of my head:

\- On the main project page, the file list/table cells have too much padding. The same project's file list, with 22 files, on GitHub fits on my screen comfortably. On Gitlab, the whole table sits at 928px in height. Reducing the top/bottom padding in cells to 5px, without a loss in usability, yields a much nicer 708px height

\- The two panels above the file list (the branch, and the latest commit) could be streamlined and merged

\- Frankly, the whole area with the project name and the buttons below is incredibly and unnecessarily convoluted. Some important links are grayed, some others are not relevant for every project (e.g. I don't need a contribution guide for my private project)

\- A _lot_ of links are indistinguishable from text

<comment><USER17> Hi chmin, thanks a lot for your suggestion. We will look into it. Please feel free to open an issue regarding that if you want. We are also considering about the line length in a file so that people find it more friendly to read. [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab- ce/issues/13680](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/13680). Thanks again for your suggestion :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> angry-hacker Are there notable projects or organizations moved to gitlab.com?

On top of my head I only know f-droid that is there. I use it for personal use and love it, would love if more projects moved away from github.com, especially open source.

<comment><USER18> I talked about GitLab and how they can compete against GitHub in this past comment

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11155293](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11155293)

and at the present moment, they are still pretty far from being able to convince notable projects to leave github.com for gitlab.com The biggest issue right now, is there is a measurable difference between gitlab.com and github.com, which is, it's much slower.

GitLab is working on this and I have no doubt this will become a non-issue in the future, but they still have to deal with the fact that you can't compete with being "as good as". Even if gitlab.com becomes as good as github.com, they will still have a difficult time, to convince others to leave github.com for gitlab.com

I guess my point is, since github.com is the incumbent, the only way that gitlab.com can become the next place to collaborate, is they have to make it clear, that they are better than github.com They can't strive for equality, since you can't compete with "as good as".

<comment><USER19> If they get to "as good as", they have the advantage of being open source. This could convince _some_ projects.

<comment><USER20> Note that gitlab.com runs on GitLab EE, their commercial product, which is not FOSS. This is why the GNU project hosts their own instance of GitLab CE for themselves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Wow, that is an amazing release. Seems you actually managed to complete your goal right before christmas! This whole year has been quite impressive, I can't wait to see what you will do in 2017.

<comment><USER22> Thanks! We are super happy to have completed our vision on Idea to production this year. We'll keep improving and innovating in 2017, you can count on that :-)

<comment><USER7> One of the things we'll do is to make sure everyone can replicate the idea to production flow, see [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab- ce/issues/25986](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/25986)

I'm also excited about adding Prometheus monitoring for apps you deploy [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFPGtbQfL1A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFPGtbQfL1A)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I love how easy the integration with Openshift is. Does anyone have any resources to get a Openshift Kubernetes cluster setup?

<comment><USER24> Actually, it's incredibly easy, especially in tandem with CentOS Atomic Host. Here's my setup at work I just deployed last month:

osm01-03 - OpenShift masters, don't run anything other than OpenShift services (Atomic host)

osn01-03 - OpenShift nodes, actually run the apps (Atomic host)

osnlb - Load balancer for the master (CentOS 7)

oss - NFS server providing storage for OpenShift docker images (CentOS 7)

On your storage node make sure /exports is on a separate filesystem with adequate storage to store your container images, it will be set up automatically from there.

Once you have these couple servers spun up (You can skip the multiple masters + load balancer if you don't care about HA, though I recommend it) from a CentOS box you want to deploy from make sure you push an SSH key out to all the servers for root access then run the following.

        yum install centos-release-openshift-origin
        yum --enablerepo=centos-openshift-origin-testing install atomic-openshift-utils
        atomic-openshift-installer install

Walk through the installer, making sure you pick "OpenShift Origin" to install the upstream (non-commercial) build, say "container-based" for every atomic system you have, and tell it which are your HAProxy (load balancer) and Storage servers, plus what your default domain will be (I recommend using either a subdomain of your existing corporate domain, or buying a new one for openshift use). After you're done specifying your configuration it will generate an ansible playbook and stash it in ~/.config/openshift and start building your cluster out. Once it's done you just need to set up your DNS entries (whatever your master hostname is should point at your load balancer, then I recommend you add a wildcard DNS entry for whatever domain you chose and point it at all of your nodes). The last thing you'll need to do is configure authentication [1] as by default it will take any username/password combo, and setup the default builder images [2]

[1]: [https://docs.openshift.com/enterprise/3.0/admin_guide/config...](https://docs.openshift.com/enterprise/3.0/admin_guide/configuring_authentication.html)

[2]: [https://docs.openshift.com/enterprise/3.0/install_config/ins...](https://docs.openshift.com/enterprise/3.0/install_config/install/first_steps.html#creating- image-streams-for-openshift-images)

Sorry for the wall of text, I spent two days figuring this out myself - <USER3> after a month in production my team is loving OpenShift and we've already deployed three greenfield apps on it. It's getting a lot more love than I ever expected, and I'm already looking at needing to give my node VM's more resources. Feel free to email me at the address in my profile if you have any questions.

<comment><USER25> Thanks for the write up. It sounds like a great setup.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> As always, we're here for any questions and welcome feedback and other comments.

<comment><USER7> People mentioned that seeing the video made their jaw drop, they didn't expect such an integrated experience. I would like to know what people think, both good and bad. Currently the plan is to improve the idea to production experience every release to make sure everyone can replicate it [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab- ce/issues/25986](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/25986)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I recently registered to try gitlab. I received unprecedented large amounts of spam from them daily with no unsubscribe button. I finally emailed them to stop the spam and they did but not completely I received more but had unsubscribe this time. Unsubscribed so lets see what happens. One more spam and I will close my account and never try them again

GitHub is great, does the job incredibly well, doesn't get in the way and have never been spammed (tip for you gitlab here).

[update] Please don't forget to downvote me for giving honest feedback :-)

<comment><USER28> Hi, thank you for bringing this to our attention. If you wouldn't mind getting in touch with Mitchell (commented below) or myself at jennifer [at] gitlab [.] com, we can look at your particular situation.

To share a little background, our marketing automation system does have a limit to the number of emails a person can receive: max of 2 per day; 5 per seven days; and no limit to operational emails. Operational emails are things like a signup confirmation, EE trial license key & initial download instruction.

There are a certain periods of time that have the potential to create a "perfect storm" of emails to be sent/received in short succession.

Example of "perfect storm": If a person signs up for GitLab and download an EE trial the day or two before the bi-weekly newsletter email is sent, they could receive 3 operational emails and 1 marketing email in the first 24 hours.

Please let me know if you have additional questions or if I can explain something more clearly.

<comment><USER29> What can Gitlab possibly mail me 5 times per week?

I don't understand why this is not max 5 times per month.

<comment><USER28> Thank you for your feedback. We work very hard not to bombard the community with messages and actively work to balance our marketing, information, education and operational emails.

The 5 emails per seven day limit is not something we expect to ever utilize but allows for flexibility in our communication strategy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Oh man, oh man, global hooks! Thank you!

The other features are awesome, but this is the one that will get us to upgrade right now! We use dozens of repositories, and it's been a pain to manually configure and update hooks.

<comment><USER7> Glad to hear that, and thanks for posting. Happy holidays!

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> This may be a silly question. How did Github manage to burn 66M a year while Gitlab manage to be open source, offer an Free GitLab.com Hosting and continue a Rapid pace of improvement in multiple domain?

<comment><USER32> Probably by concentrating more on the product than on politics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Thanks for another update! I've been running gitlab-ce for over a year now for my sideprojects and random small backups. I don't use any of the more advanced features like ci, but the core has been really great to use.

For reference, i'm running gitlab-ce on a 2 core 2gb vm with 8gb disk and except for one out of memory error about 6 months ago it has been running great for a single user. For more serious use i'd give it way more resources, but for personal use it's humming along perfectly.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for posting, glad you're happy with the update.

2GB for a single user should be enough. To prevent the out of memory error since using the Omnibus package and configuring 1 or 2GB of swap space if you haven't done so already.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> This is nice and all but what about page load times? It can have all the bells and whistles but if you have to wait a minute for just one page to load, it's unusable.

<comment><USER5> We've spent quite a bit of time this year improving performance, GitLab.com is still slower than it should be but it's a lot better now than it was in January. Self-hosted instances that meet the recommended specs are already fairly performant, though we're always working to improve things regardless.

As mentioned in the blog post, this release we decreased page size a lot (from 1800kb to 718kb for a given Merge Request).

We're also working on moving to our own infrastructure, the reasoning behind that move is described here: [https://about.gitlab.com/2016/11/10/why-choose- bare-metal/](https://about.gitlab.com/2016/11/10/why-choose-bare-metal/)

EDIT: Strike that, we've decided against moving to bare metal for now due to the complexity. I somehow missed that decision.

<comment><USER35> This probably sounds like a strange comment/question, but one of the reasons I haven't moved over to gitlab is that I know that it is unlikely that I will every be a paying customer. I actually don't mind that much about the performance issues (because I really just want cloudy git storage), but I don't like to take something for free unless I know the person giving it really wants to give it...

So as strange as it sounds, are you happy with people like me moving to GitLab even though it may compound your performance problems?

<comment><USER7> We're very happy with people moving to GitLab.com. We just want to warn them that it will take us time to sort out the performance problems.

And over time we'll start monetizing it more, see [https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-com/#free- forever](https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-com/#free-forever) for more information.

<comment><USER35> Thanks for that. Your link was actually useful because I didn't realise that you do builds as well. It is entirely possible that at some point this will be useful to me, so maybe I will become a paying customer after all.

And if I can just say, the more actual services you add to your system (as opposed to SaaS features), the more likely I am to become a paying customer. For me, I really value free software. I'm not so interested in paying for proprietary SaaS features, and receiving free services. I'd much, much rather pay for services and use free software.

Whether you can build a business around customers like me, I don't know, but I just wanted to make sure that you know there are at least some of us out there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I love the work that GitLab is doing, though I'm personally using Gogs/Gitea since it's much much less resource consuming.

</comment><comment><USER37> Plan meets final execution, love it guys and gals, great work yet again, we upgraded today without a hitch, within 30 minutes I had devs making positive comments in chat about the upgrade. Thank you again for all your hard work and the passion that drives that.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for leaving a comment Sam. Glad to hear the upgrade went smooth and people are happy. People that experience problems are more likely to let us know about it so we greatly appreciate your comment.

<comment><USER37> and just upgraded to 8.15.1 flawlessly :)

<comment><USER7> Yay! And we got some great news coming out in the next few minutes: [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab- com/merge_requests/...](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab- com/merge_requests/4340)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Gitlab has too many downtimes for upgrading. When I got a failed push I was saying: Oh gitlab has a new version... :meh:

<comment><USER7> The downtime for upgrading is annoying. We're trying to get to a point where the database migrations don't require downtime. But the deploy of 8.15 caused 40 minutes of downtime, this is not acceptable. For the post-mortem please see [https://dev.gitlab.org/gitlab/organization/issues/1082](https://dev.gitlab.org/gitlab/organization/issues/1082)

<comment><USER7> Oops, that is not a public link. I've made adjustments to our handbook to move it to GitLab.com so it can be public [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www- gitlab-com/commit/7fc274a1...](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab- com/commit/7fc274a195b389c6442061494e41d3e7daf6357f)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Damn, Gitlab always crushing it.

</comment><comment><USER40> Great stuff! One thing that's been broken for me for a while now: Raw links. I just get an empty response. It's kind of an important feature for me (and I'm sure others) so would love to see it fixed.

<comment><USER22> I don't understand what you mean by that. Can you create an issue about it [0] so we can discuss it and fix the problem (if applicable)? Thanks!

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

<comment><USER40> When you're viewing a source code file, there are links to Raw, Blame, History, Permalink... The Raw link is broken (for me). I can create an issue.

<comment><USER22> Yes, please do file an issue with what you encounter, because I can't reproduce it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's a web calendar that doesn't suck? - <AUTHOR> I'm looking to pivot from Google Calendar and FB Calendar to a FLOSS alternative that, to put it simply, doesn't suck. These are the features that matter most to me:
- multiuser support - public or private events - tags, or at the least, categorization by location - RSS/ATOM feed output (for all, or specific tags) - iCalendar / hCalendar output
Can anyone help me out here? Otherwise I'm thinking of just biting the bullet and making one from scratch in Arc Lisp, but if anyone has experience here it would be a huge lifesaver!
Disclaimer: this is for non-commercial purposes :-) <comment><USER2> I don't know of any solution. I built a startup where a shared calendar was a key aspect and fullcalendar was the best option. I haven't examined it in a few years, but would expect that when it was paired with some server side work (especially around accounts), it might meet a lot of your requirements:

[https://fullcalendar.io/](https://fullcalendar.io/)

This might be worth looking at as well:

[https://alternativeto.net/software/google- calendar/?license=...](https://alternativeto.net/software/google- calendar/?license=opensource)

</comment><comment><USER3> Having just added a (simple) calendar view [0] to my tumblelog static site generator [1] I can tell that in my experience "from scratch" is quite some work.

[0] [http://plurrrr.com/archive/2019/](http://plurrrr.com/archive/2019/)

[1] [https://github.com/john-bokma/tumblelog](https://github.com/john- bokma/tumblelog)

<comment><AUTHOR> This is pretty cool. I've written a calendar generator with a listview for events; doesn't seem like it'll be so hard to add tags.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Arc Lisp! How is that going for you? Have you done other side projects in that?

</comment><comment><USER5> What about this one?

[https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/calendar](https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/calendar)

</comment><comment><USER6> what about this:

[http://k5n.us/wp/webcalendar/](http://k5n.us/wp/webcalendar/)

</comment><comment><USER7> What UI framework would be used with Lisp?

</comment><comment><USER8> An assistant.</comment>


Ask HN: Should paywall links get upvoted? - <AUTHOR> Should paywall links get upvoted? <comment><USER2> What dang said: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Yep. I can circumvent the paywall, or I might be a subscriber.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yes.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Nope. Not even if I can circumvent the paywall. Posting paywall links serves neither HN nor me nor the publisher.</comment>


Web standards secret sauce - <AUTHOR> http://www.zeldman.com/2009/07/12/web-standards-secret-sauce-webkit-in-iphone/ <comment><USER2> Intriguing observations about the potential for mobile Safari to provide a "Mobile 2.0" phase with new expectations about internet experience.

The post starts off with what seems to me like a strange analysis:

"...but Firefox and Opera were and are non-mainstream tastes. Most people use Windows without thinking much about it..."

I guess I perceived that FF & ( were non-mainstream _choices_ ...because 90%+ of PC were sold with only IE installed. :/</comment>


Paralyzed people are beginning to walk with a new kind of therapy - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2018/09/24/paralyzed-people-are-beginning-walk-with-new-kind-therapy/ <comment><USER2> Does anyone know what types of spinal injuries and circumstances this treatment is theoretically limited to? The article doesn't go into detail.</comment>


Valve: VAC does not ban you for having "catbot" in your username - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/7ndjdt/valve_will_vac_ban_you_automatically_for_having/ds2dulw/ <comment><AUTHOR> For the previous HN thread, see:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16045946](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16045946)

To understand how and why the falsehood of "catbot means an automatic ban" was perpetrated:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/7nkwb8/statement_fro...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/7nkwb8/statement_from_valve_employee_regarding_catbot/ds2m976/)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16050009](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16050009)</comment>


Park your bike. Stop worrying - <AUTHOR> http://vengecycle.com/

<comment><USER2> This is not insane enough to be a funny joke, but it is too insane to be real.

So which is it? Joke or real?

<comment><USER3> Booby traps like that are also, unlike what the FAQ suggests, completely illegal. Theft of a bicycle is insufficient grounds for injuring someone's hands.

There are legitimate reasons for people to move a bicycle without authorization from the owner, such as if it's blocking a fire hydrant during a fire.

The dependency on GPS and active power is its Achilles heel. How often do you need to charge the batteries? Can you store it in a covered bike parking area with bad signal? What if someone covers the handle with a can and it loses signal? Or glues the USB connector so it can't be recharged?

And of course, simply ride hands-free for the first 100 meters.

<comment><USER2> I'm really leaning toward it being a bitter joke.

It sucks getting your bike stolen, and some of my car-less friends have had it happen multiple times. What's worse is that there isn't a great, cost- effective way to prevent it.

I can definitely see this being someone's outlet for _wanting_ to blow the hands off a bike thief.

<comment><USER3> Searching now, I see this was covered in detail a few weeks ago at [http://www.reddit.com/r/bicycling/comments/2mtava/new_bike_l...](http://www.reddit.com/r/bicycling/comments/2mtava/new_bike_lock_is_designed_to_blow_the_hands_off/) :

> VengeCycle is not a joke, it is a very real product designed to make our > user's lives better and safer. We've been working hard on development of our > consumer version for the past 2 years and are very proud of what we have > accomplished. We believe our customers will be very satisfied with the > product.

It's signed 'Peter Moore Director of Sales & Customer Service, VengeCycle', who is also the contact for the domain's whois.

<comment><USER2> Yup, found a LinkedIn profile for him.

You're absolutely right that this is illegal in the US, and I'd imagine most modern countries would have similar laws against it.

Since it has a battery-operated device, including a beeping alarm, you'd think a better solution would be to just make a loud/obnoxious noise when the bike leaves the 50m radius.

But now I really feel like I'm wasting my time pointing out flaws in an idea from a Wiley Coyote/Roadrunner cartoon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> xkcd-sucks I hope this is real, if only for the entertainment value of the shitshow it would cause.

While it's obviously illegal in the US and most other civilized nations, maybe there's a legal market for it in places like South Africa. The testimonials on the website, while probably fake, are from people in Nicaragua and Poland.

No word about security, but I'm sure there's no possible way for it to detonate against the owner's wishes.

I wonder how it manages to use GPS from within a metal tube... or how it behaves when there's no signal.

</comment><comment><USER4> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w39o6eSI06Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w39o6eSI06Y)</comment>


Some Sequential Algorithmsare Almost Always Parallel (PDF 2017) - <AUTHOR> https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~guyb/papers/spaapodc17.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> Some algorithms, such as the famous Knuth Shuffle, are a sequential algorithm in the worst-case scenario. This slide-deck however, demonstrates that the Knuth Shuffle is in fact highly parallel in the average case.

In the average case, the dependency graph of a random shuffle is O(log(n)). An infinitely parallel machine would only need O(log(n)) steps to complete a Knuth Shuffle, on the average.

This, and many other "sequential" algorithms, arguably have a "parallel in the average" form waiting to be discovered.</comment>


Ask HN: Starting Game Development - <AUTHOR>

I've always been a developer on the Microsoft stack. I'm looking at getting into indie game development and was wondering what path to take. Is the time right for focusing on HTML5 and javascript for building games - or is building for a specific platform such as Win 7 Phones or iPhone still a better approach? I'm thinking of building simple platform and adventure games rather than crazy 3d racing car simulators :) <comment><USER2> I assume you have some knowledge of C# and .NET derivates, if that, you can first give a try to XNA [1], as it is more robust and resourceful than web frameworks are at the moment. And when you feel you're ready you can switch to browsers.

1\. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_XNA>

</comment><comment><USER3> iPhone\iOS best platform for indie development at now (best profit). Flash also is good. May be Android not so bad. HTML5, JS, Win phones, bada phones etc - is very depending on type of project.

</comment><comment><USER4> Have you tried Unity3D?

<http://unity3d.com/></comment>


UX design process for visualizing public cloud data - <AUTHOR> http://www.stackdriver.com/visualizing-public-cloud-data-ease-consumption-ux-design-process/

<comment><USER2> Hey...I like this. (I'd better...I wrote it!)</comment>


Computer Learns Game by Reading Manual - <AUTHOR> http://www.itproportal.com/2011/07/13/computer-system-learns-game-play-reading-manual/

<comment><USER2> The article is sparse on details, but the linked MIT news article goes into more depth. Of note, the algorithm was able to win 79% of the games it played. Without textual input, it only won 46%, and a more advanced machine learning algorithm without textual input only won 62%. Pretty cool.

<comment><USER3> Won those games against whom? Other copies of itself? The weakest built-in AI? The strongest built-in AI? A pseudo-random number generator?

<comment><USER4> Built-in AI. They didn't specify the difficulty level, but knowing Civ games (can't speak for FreeCiv though), difficulty levels only tweak handicaps and not the AI algorithms, so the correct choice would be the difficulty level that has no handicap or bonus for the AI.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It can read _and_ apply what it's read? This program is already more advanced than half my graduating high school class.

</comment><comment><USER6> Two things come to my mind:

1\. That's gotta be one helluva manual

2\. Reversing the procedure to automate documentation by examining variable and method names along various code paths would be brilliant.

</comment><comment><USER7> Good thing we're teaching them Civilization - they'll never get out of the server room.

Teaching ultra-intelligent AI Monopoly, though? - guaranteed robot overlords.

<comment><AUTHOR> One might argue that the algorithms used by Wall Street firms to trade the stock market learned how to play long ago... ;).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Does that mean if the program read additional texts on Civilization strategy that it would get even better? How about texts that may be somewhat related but not specific to the game (combat strategy, world history?!...)

<comment><AUTHOR> From the looks of it, the program merely learned the rules of the game by doing textual analysis of the manual, and maybe got a few strategic hints as well. As for actually learning to play the game _well_, my sense from the article is that the program then used more conventional machine learning techniques to test and adopt winning moves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm somewhat familiar with this work. (My advisor talked to the authors some. I could be misrepresenting it a little, but not nearly as much as the article.)

It's not learning to play the whole game. It's learning to cheese (in gaming parlance) the opponent. The strategy it learns is to build a warrior as fast as possible and go and attack the enemy's city. If that fails, it almost always loses. The manual gave it some hint in that direction.

</comment><comment><USER10> I am interested in the details regarding how the AI was able to map the manual to the game controls.

</comment><comment><USER11> Taking RTFM to the next level. Yes.

<comment><USER12> The problem occurs when you have to RTFM to your auto-RTFM machine causing the universe to collapse in some kind of recursive logical singularity.</comment></comment>


Twitter confirms paid pro accounts on the way - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-confirms-paid-pro-accounts-on-the-way-2009-3

<comment><USER2> Is this writer serious? He thinks Twitter _might_ charge a whole $100 to companies like Comcast and Starbucks... but only if the software is _really_ good! I mean, come on. What happens when you run out of those top 20, or even 500 companies who might be willing to pay for your best product? $50,000? Half a developer's salary? Probably a third or a quarter of what they are paying the product manager they hired to lead this effort? No, this writer has no clue, or I hope not, for Twitter's sake. Twitter has the capability to create far more value than that for its "pro" customers.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder how much revenue something like this would bring in...

<comment><USER4> I wonder how much _sustainable_ revenue something like this would bring in. I imagine any number of us on this site would throw down a couple of bucks ($25/year like flickr et al, $3-10/month, etc) in support of twitter... initially. If they compromise the API feature set for advanced account features, that will reduce the feel of twitter; if they do not, any twitter feature will be replicated elsewhere. Tough situation, except they've got a lot of good will right now (ie, I would pay today for an account without much more of a bonus than a supporter button).</comment></comment>


5 Tips for Building a Killer Consulting Business - <AUTHOR> https://www.inc.com/scott-steinberg/how-to-build-a-consulting-business.html <comment><USER2> if you ever only read 1 book about consulting, I warmly suggest Gerald M. Weinberg's "The Secrets of Consulting"

It's a bit like diplomacy for engineers.

for those not familiar with Weinberg: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17716098](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17716098)

[https://www.amazon.com/Secrets-Consulting-Giving-Getting- Suc...](https://www.amazon.com/Secrets-Consulting-Giving-Getting- Successfully/dp/0932633013)</comment>


Your Raise Is Now Based on Next Year's Performance - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-09/your-raise-is-now-based-on-next-year-s-performance <comment><AUTHOR> I think this hits close enough to home for everyone that we can together declare the idea of AI predicting anything as extremely stupid.</comment>