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holman

5,782 karma · joined November 14, 2009

cofounder: workon.co. investing: tifo.com. formerly: github, gitlab.

http://twitter.com/holman + http://zachholman.com

submissionscomments
holman··on Have an LLC
That's specifically the $100 of the $500/year fee; you pay for a registered agent to handle all that for you (and shield your address).
holman··on Have an LLC
"Everything" doesn't need to make money so bad. But if you're interested in making money on the internet, this is good advice.
holman··on The Cold Email
Cheers! That era of the internet was such a fun chunk of time. All the little design tricks and bite-sized approaches people shared… it was a lot of fun.
holman··on The Cold Email
These little stories, though not my original intention with the post, are very lovely to read!
holman··on The Cold Email
See, it all worked out!
holman··on The Cold Email
That's been my biggest annoyance lately. Everyone's trying to AI these sorts of things, but for people who get a lot of these frequently, it's pretty easy to spot. Talk like a human and you can go pretty far, though.
holman··on I Could've Rickrolled the FIFA World Cup. All I Needed Was My ID
Really amusing to read this one. I did something similar for Qatar 2022 and got access to roster submission (https://zachholman.com/posts/hacking-fifa). To their credit they patched it pretty quickly, but their promised "token of appreciation" never came. (Although on the other hand, they didn't sue me, so I guess that's a win.)
holman··on Red Squares – GitHub outages as contributions
Happy and definitely gone, haha. Not my circus not my monkeys.
holman··on Innocent woman jailed after being misidentified using AI facial recognition
Me: Whoa, cool, my hometown is on atop Hacker News!

Also me, reading further: Uh-oh.

The chief of police also resigned today; wouldn't be shocked if this was part of the reasoning.

holman··on GitHub: A case study in link maintenance and 404 pages (2013)
Hah, no, that wasn't a thing at the company back then. 220k is large; not sure what snapshot of the page they were looking at at the time, but in any case "performance" in this context means server-side perf.
holman··on GitHub: A case study in link maintenance and 404 pages (2013)
404s were designed for performance, as OP says here, but also to be as simple as possible.

Part of the difficulty was info leakage; early on there was a lot of concern that a 403 would imply the existence of a repo that the org might otherwise not want known publicly. This was a little trickier in practice, really: early versions of the page took slightly different pathways as it went through auth, so based on the duration of the page to render you could make some assumptions about whether the underlying repo existed or not. It was annoying to sort out, so it wasn't touched very often.

Certainly a lot could have been done with 404s over the years; they've only gotten worse. I put ultrathin font weights on the error pages move than a decade ago, when they were en vogue, and it kills me every time to see them still there. And, of course, the parallax effect has been removed, so now it's just sort of a dorky Star Wars or Looney Tunes reference without a lot behind it. Weird.

holman··on Doing Rails Wrong
(fwiw, GitHub switched to Rails 3 sometime around 2011-2012 or so).
holman··on My startup banking story (2023)
Amusing to read this and think back on GitHub's seed round ($100M). At the time we just had a small business account from Bank of America... going from relatively thin cushion in the account over the previous few years to suddenly dropping in $100M was pretty amusing. I believe we moved to a more sophisticated setup quickly thereafter.
holman··on Dotfiles feel too personal to share
I have like 7500 stars on my dotfiles over the last 15 years or so; it's definitely weird. It's kind of a different open source project entirely; the goal isn't really to make good software... it's to make good software for me. Most of the time in open source those overlap completely, but with dotfiles I'll get pulls that make sense, that can be helpful, but... at the end of the day they're my dotfiles and I don't really make large changes to them anymore. It's just a lot different from my other projects I manage.

That said, mine also started before things like Oh My Zsh popped up, which are better frameworks to share and collaborate on these things. I think frameworks like that are great, and I think seeing someone's more "intimate" dotfiles is helpful, too- you get a look at how someone sets up their environment, which tends to be private unless you're doing a lot of pair programming. So yeah, just interesting all around.

holman··on Ruby on Rails: The Open-Source Blueprint
Things were going quickly on the run-up to Rails moving over, but even so, Rails was pretty aggressive at jumping on GitHub when they did, and it was one of our first real "major" open source projects on the site, in hindsight. There was a huge difference pre-Rails and post-Rails.
holman··on Nontraditional Red Teams
I'm a huge Newsroom sucker, but that one just felt weird. The whole "we used [clip] sarin" felt really drawn-out and kind of weird. On the other hand, my partner and I constantly say "we used sarin" to each other so maybe it has a way of sticking in your brain regardless. (And it might mean our relationship is... odd.)
holman··on Apple acquires Pixelmator
> FCP was outstanding in its time, but was neglected.

I'm more of a casual when it comes to Final Cut Pro rather than a daily driver, but it does seem like the last year or two they've started to get back into the fight again. Some of the 360 VR/AI/multi-iOS camera changes seem to go more hand-in-hand with "Apple gives a shit about content creation again", buttressed by Apple Vision Pro and spatial photography.

As someone who's still eagerly awaiting like... any reasonable prosumer device to shoot for Apple Vision Pro, I think all of this industry is going to really ramp up in the next few short years very quickly. Gonna be interesting.

holman··on Evolving GitHub Issues
Made me super happy to read that!
holman··on Evolving GitHub Issues
I built the last major update to GitHub Issues over a decade ago now, and I was... kind of hoping for more. Feels more like it's checkbox-driven development instead of sitting down and really planning long-term about what improvements could be made. Also it has React.
holman··on James Earl Jones has died
When this comes on in the Big House you immediately feel like you want to run through a brick wall for the team.
holman··on ESPN AI recap of Alex Morgan’s final professional match fails to mention her
Yes. It’s probably one of the most-watched games in NWSL this season. People who don’t even watch NWSL watched this game.

I mean, hell, even if it were just another game I’d probably find it relevant to include that Alex subbed off in the 14th, because that’s really eye-raising. This is a total miss by AI that would have never gotten past a real editor.

holman··on There Is No Antimemetics Division (2018)
I discovered it literally late last night and was going to start reading it today. I’m not really sure what it’s all about yet, but the fact that it’s number one on HN today is making me feel like everything is some kind of simulation for me and me alone and that the answers might be in the book itself.
holman··on Urchin Software Corp: The unlikely origin story of Google Analytics (2016)
I can't really explain how cool Urchin was. I think it was one of the first truly analytical software I used — not just from a web traffic point of view, but it was a site that used and presented data. The graphs, the maps, even the two-column UI was stuff a lot of web developers copied and riffed on back then. It really opened my mind up to a lot of things: design, software as a service (and installable software), even acquisitions in general. Strangely had a large impact on my future career.
holman··on Ask HN: Are you still using your Vision Pro?
I used it pretty regularly for non-work things (primarily really great TV or movies I wanted to watch, or live soccer games). Found I couldn't really use it for work stuff (the interactions, though not fatal, aren't in a state that I found a net benefit currently).

Am I using it now? Not at all. But I blame a new puppy in the household upending my schedule rather than the Vision Pro. Big fan of the puppy release, though, definitely one of my favorite innovations as of late.

holman··on A beginner's guide to making beautiful slides for talks
I’m doing not too bad these days, thanks for the well-wishes! :o)
holman··on Vision Pro teardown part 2: What’s the display resolution?
After using it since launch, the displays are still startling every time I step back to really look at them. They look so good. There's a few things that could be improved upon — let me look at my phone, or project a digital display over my phone screen — but the UI and virtual displays you see in Vision Pro feel just like reality. It's startling, and bodes well for future Vision Pro devices (and other VR handsets, too).
holman··on GitHub Actions Are a Problem
I wouldn’t deny that Microsoft brings a lot of friction and problems to things within GitHub, but you also shouldn’t underestimate that GitHub itself is doing a lot of this on their own merit.

Regardless of the parent company, the GitHub org is huge, with a lot of people and execs involved. Just wait until the next year or two of reimplementing all these existing features in React- that’s really going to be fun!

holman··on Rails Cheat Sheet
Ruby was never really the issue at GitHub; there were plenty of other concerns that ranked much higher on the list. Ultimately it scaled well.
holman··on GitHub to lay off 10% and close all offices
Definitely was- we didn’t have an office for the first few years. Picked up the first office in 2010, and it was a big component of work life since then (even though the numbers were primarily ⅔ remote throughout).
holman··on Gitlab to lay off 7% of staff
It was announced this morning- during the initial Microsoft layoffs they were told GitHub wasn't impacted.
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