holman

Did you know that the first release of Rails was actually closer to when the Pyramids were first built than they were to us today?

To be fair, Rails 2.3.18 was released two days before Docker itself was, so OP might have some general issues to fix up first, hah. :)

Super stoked to see you launching after working on it for so long!

I still think Hubot (and bots in general, a la GitHub's internal usage) is severely undervalued. GitHub's usage of internal chat was pretty groundbreaking, which I think led to the movement behind Slack's growth. But there was a missing point in the rise of chat- namely, scripting automated processes and debugging collaboratively in public (internally). Which makes sense, since Hubot was a pain to set up and build a company around. So yeah, really excited about Abbot to jump in that hole in the market.

I'm a pretty big fan of it, too. Kind of like that bouncier rubberized feel. That said... it really needs an escape key, hah.

His HN response is pretty baffling to read. Saying he's "no longer the struggling kid from Jordan" who now needs to "be kind and model better behavior" is oddly focused on him, but it also kind of points to... people from Jordan are incapable of being kind?

The whole approach he took here is just very poorly thought out.

I run a decent chunk of heavy work loads, and tbh the main things I notice on the new Air are all of the other niceties: instantly awake, ludicrous battery life, no fans. I think those aspects are going to be much more noticeable than many expect.

Thanks! Really appreciate it. :)

> SpaceX loses another Starship prototype

Not true. They know exactly where most of the pieces landed!

Not sure there's a particular spreadsheet or anything of investors on HN, but it could be a fun idea.

For what it's worth- I'm an angel investor (past life: early GitHub, advisor at GitLab). I'm also starting an angel syndicate for former GitHub employees, too, so that might be a good option for you if you're in the devtools space and want a bunch of experienced Hubbers on your cap table.

If you're using Home Assistant, Room Assistant is a lovely project to repurpose Raspberry Pis to handle BLE tracking as well:

https://www.room-assistant.io

fwiw, the healthcare joke was tongue-in-cheek for the discussion which, ironically enough, was also about Republicans in 2014. They were discussing how many on the right compared Obamacare to Nazism and how disgusting it was to make that comparison.

Yeah, definitely. When I was at GitHub we were seeing secrets getting lifted from public pushes and tried within 7 seconds or so, if I recall correctly, and this was five years ago. This was a big reason why there’s a real scanning API now for service providers to be informed if a secret leaks.

By the time a human discovers their mistake it’s usually far too late.

The “crapper” is actually not named after my 5x great uncle Thomas Crapper; “crap” has been around for ages as slang. Interesting nonetheless, though!

> I'm not sure who invented [fenced code blocks], but I definitely know that it is widely used because GitHub Flavored Markdown made it so and I am grateful for that.

I’m pretty sure Vicent Martí (@vmg) was the originator of them. I remember we spent a number of weeks internally at GitHub debating the syntax, since no one really fell in love with any of the proposals for various reasons. Eventually the triple tick won out and that’s worked out fairly well, I think.

This is a pretty interesting writeup, even though I don’t necessarily agree with everything. Makes you think, at least.

I’ve been out of version control for a bit, and GitHub itself for quite a bit longer, but this part was interesting to me:

> Because: It isn't really about Git anymore. GitHub used to be a Git repository hosting company. But now, they are about providing other software development and management infrastructure that augments the version control. They might as well change their name to Hub at this point.

Just for added color: starting around 2010 or 2011 or so (around when we added Subversion to GitHub), we had a pretty solid idea that version control wasn’t “the thing”. Mostly because Mercurial was a strong alternative, and there always felt like there might be something new in the wings that could dominate in the next few years. Version control felt really dynamic, and deeply susceptible to change. And if something was better, we’d totally ditch Git for the new thing. The name was a bit of a misnomer, from that perspective.

I think that changed over time — I had a hell of a time trying to get movement on basic version control improvements back in 2014 — and now they’re clearly much more about the ecosystem rather than version control itself. It’s where the money is, of course, but it’s also where the bigger innovation is, at least for the time being.

I think the author is right to say that Microsoft is targeting a different area than version control specifically, though you could argue if the outcome of that is good or bad. It’s certainly different, though- they’re especially growing headcount right now, and the company makeup is wildly different than what many customers tend think it is today, imo.

I’d be interested if the fit is better when it comes to running. I actually don’t have much of a problem with AirPods now that I got some Earhoox ($10 little silicon arms that wrap into your ear, which sounds skeevy when I type it out right now but it’s really changed my whole run experience). I only use them while running, though, and maybe these would be a better fit. OTOH, I don’t want noise cancelling while running in the city, so might not be worth the added dough.

Interesting part about the IPO: they've been very public for years about IPOing, and about the specific date: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/being-a-public-company/

Really love this post. My favorite line is:

> Every month of less than 20% growth should have been a red flag.

I think that's pretty insightful. 20% growth is great for a normal business, of course; for a VC-backed startup it can show some warning signs about future hard decisions you might have to face.

I think there's certainly lots of discussion that has been had — and should be had — about "should I or shouldn't I raise money?", but there still are plenty of companies and founders who will raise VC, and paying attention to those early warning signs are important if that's the choice you make. It's important to worry about it each month and each week rather than the two months surrounding the raise of your next round.

Withdrawal is a really crap thing to go through, but I also want to point out that sometimes it can be a fairly non-event, too. I tapered off of Zoloft for weeks, and I really didn’t feel much of a change. Going slow and deliberate (if you have the freedom to do so) will help, as well as having lucky genetics.

I just want to underline that you shouldn’t be turned off to this possible solution because you’re nervous about the side effects or withdrawal. Definitely talk with your doc about them and see if it makes sense to go on them, and if there are ways to mitigate some of the side effects. But meds — in my case, at least — definitely have been some of the best decisions I’ve made in my life.

> Also, what is "success"? Taking $350MM in investment and not showing profitability

That's an odd thing to say. Most companies that take investment aren't profitable- that's kind of the point of taking VC: you want the cash in order to greatly grow the business more than if you were sitting within profitability the entire time. There's a difference between "unprofitable" and "choosing not to be profitable".

What's more, GitHub wasn't profitable the last ~5 years or so, from the day they took VC. But they sold for $7.5B, so it doesn't seem that Microsoft has a problem with their "unprofitability". That's how many solid, foundational companies are created.

Eh, the React team in particular is pretty even-handed when it comes to what goes into CRA. This release, for example, adds support for Apollo, which goes head-to-head with Relay.

I’ve been pretty happy with the team’s thoughtful approach to adding a dependency or not.

People.

Success breeds some weird shit, especially if you were close to people, which happens a lot in startups with a high work ethic. Friends turn into strangers, friends turn into enemies. Some make more money than you — a lot more — and some make less than you — a lot less. Brews some weird undercurrent sometimes. Money changes things. Even if you don't make real money... the perception of success changes things, too.

The road to a "successful startup" can be paved with a lot of bullshit. Burnout, depression, stress, mistakes. Regret. Employees locked in their handcuffs, even though they hate their work and their lives. Taxes. Paying people to advise you on all of these things. Trying to do something bigger the next time. Trying to move up and forward, bigger and better. Recapturing the lightning in a bottle. Dealing with yourself, and your reactions to all of this. Feeling uncomfortable about those feelings.

This book series fundamentally changed how I view the question of life in the Universe.

I really loved the series. I can see why some others weren’t into it, but I think it’s been my favorite books I’ve read in years and years.

Agree with both of those. The gender thing in particular I went back and forth with a few times until I settled on what made the most sense for me. I think it's something most people will want to think about.

The other thing I'd include is that it's helpful to realize you're not trying to find a best friend. You're looking for a therapist, and how they can help you is a lot different from other relationships you might have had with people in the past. Once I realized that, it made it easier for me to adjust and find someone that fit me best, rather than someone I had to like, or enjoy my time with, or other "normal" benchmarks you tend to look for otherwise.

If any of this is at all interesting to you, I'd recommend checking out the very excellent ESPN documentary "Broke": http://www.espn.com/30for30/film?page=broke

ESPN's 30 for 30 docs are really great, even if you're not particularly huge into sports. Broke is one of my favorites (after a "The Two Escobars"). It goes into a lot of detail about how ill-prepared many professional athletes are for the lifestyle, how they overestimate their net worth and their projected career duration, and digs into all of the different pitfalls new signees might face as they enter sport. It's easy to blow it off and say "whatever, they're all soft, tattooed millionaires anyway", but there's a lot of heartbreaking instances where people did the right thing and still ended up bankrupt.

Anyway, worth a viewing.

Details of fraud and chargebacks aside, I want to point out that this post really doesn't have to do with Stripe Atlas, insomuch as Stripe Atlas doesn't give you carte blanche to commit fraud on the Stripe platform.

FWIW, I'm a pretty happy Stripe Atlas customer, and it's pretty WYSIWYG, for better and for worse.

> Zach Holman made a point, way back in 2012, that they intentionally hide UI features to preserve simplicity and trust in their design.

Ehhhhh not quite. The point of hiding UI like how I mentioned in that talk was that those features in particular were for the 1% (or less). Basically, the finicky power users. Rather than cluttering up the UI with every single toggle and dropdown under the sun, we'd focus more on nailing the experience for the 80-90% of users that would see the screen.

I think that's quite a bit different from what's being discussed in this thread. The last few years in particular GitLab's been adding a lot more features across the whole spectrum of development (CI, packaging, monitoring, and so on), whereas GitHub has been mostly content to refine the existing platform. I don't even think it's really a question of simplicity (or at least not to the extent of what I was trying to mention in my talk from six years ago) — it's more of a matter of expanding into very large holes that the version control industry hasn't really tackled very much before (take a look at Bitbucket, or even some of the open source clones, which all kind of stick in the version-control-only perspective).

> I would say it's just a different set of tradeoff balancing.

That I'd probably agree with, though. I think GitLab's thoughts on what's helpful to a developer is much broader than GitHub's narrower definition. Each are making their bets with that, so it's more a matter of how you view your own problems and the future of these kinds of problems and all that. :)

There's a lot of really weird edge cases like that. A lot of the times you sort of have to make a judgement call.

There are cases where you have to make a judgement call, one way or another. Take the case where I invite you to a weekly meeting at 2pm. You live in a place with DST, I don't. DST happens and... is the meeting at 2pm, or 3pm, or what? Google Calendar (and many others) basically say whoever owns the event wins, so our "regular" meeting time would track however you go through life (at least in terms of DST), so times might change for you but not me, and vice versa.

Anyway, yeah, there's some really odd interactions once you start digging deeper.

I actually had something similar to this in my notes but didn't get around to adding it. Basically, 60 minutes seems kind of arbitrary for an entire system of time (at least to me!) and then I realized that once you split it down into half, thirds, quarters, etc., it's basically the best numbers to use for informal conversations about time. That was pretty illuminating when I read about that; thanks for pointing it out here!

I think it's one of the more recent changes.

It's actually pretty cool- all of this is discussed on the tz mailing list, so you can see how it all works yourself! https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/