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Comment by sytse | Hacker News Reader

It gave me a job, a company, and a sense of purpose. In 2012 I did a Show HN for GitLab.com https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4428278 Today we are 1800 contributors and a company of 220 on a mission to ensure that everyone can contribute.

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You have definitely constructed a great piece of software. GitLab has been a godsend for development workflows at our organization, and I’ve been watching it since that same Show HN so congratulations! That’s a very inspiring example.

We did that. Thanks for using GitLab!

I interviewed with Gitlab for a business development position. I enjoyed writing the pre-screen essay questions, but received no feedback. The recruiter yawned through the interview and then provided no feedback as to why I was denied.

Perhaps this is par for the course in sales, but what I've learned from HN is that the value of my expected income from poker and stock gambling is higher than from interviewing with startups.

Thank you though for running a cool company

Thanks for your comment. We get over 1000 applications a month and we want to make sure everyone has a good experience. I'm sorry to hear yours wasn't. I've asked the peopleops function to comment. We monitor what score people that applied give us, it has improved from a low 3 to a 4.3 out of 5 in January.

@anoncoward111 Thank you for your comment, we always appreciate feedback. If you reached back for further feedback, kindly keep in mind, in this instance, we work with the BDR Hiring team, before proceeding, as we have an exceptionally strong pipeline of candidates for this role and it takes a little longer than usual to reach back. @sytse comment below is spot on in terms of how we measure during each interview. You are welcome to email us directly at jobs@gitlab.com, to get the recruiting team's attention, so we can reach back with further feedback right away.

No worries! I appreciate you writing to me and do not wish to cause any trouble or problems in the system.

I think my comment is moreso reflective of the problems that persist in hiring today- massive candidate pipelines, subjective differences in candidates, ambitious growth targets vs a need to stay lean.

I wish GitLab and all startups the best in the future. I don't know where I fit into the startup world anymore, but I really support tech companies that make such awesome contributions to the world.

Thanks!

Great reply, thank you!!

You only got ~60 upvotes?

Interesting, I always thought the number of upvotes for a Show HN post correlates to its future success.

I believe 60 upvotes at the time is probably equal to >150 upvotes today.

Yeah, I felt it was pretty good at the time. BTW my comment here has 110 upvotes, many more people on HN then in 2012.

Upvote inflation, interesting!

Somebody should mine the data and calculate year-over-year inflation rate, we have a mini economy on our hands! :)

You wouldn't even need to mine it - https://github.com/HackerNews/API

Sorry, I meant analyze. I actually am writing a blog post right now on this (this thread was very inspiring). Should be up in a day or two at https://applecrazy.github.io/blog

Good luck downloading 16 million records...

You could do that with the Algolia API: https://github.com/minimaxir/get-all-hacker-news-submissions...

But as noted, BigQuery is more pragmatic.

Why? 16 million isn’t much, maybe 10 to 20 gigabyte if compressed.

I’ve seen IRC bouncers that have more messages stored for a single user (270 million, in fact).

I have a script running on aws right now.

Even easier: All Hacker News posts are ready to be analyzed in BigQuery.

- https://medium.com/@hoffa/hacker-news-on-bigquery-now-with-d...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2120887 my estimate was 200% a long time ago

20 upvotes got me on the front page one time. It was the most views I've ever had on my blog. It got me a job interview! Nothing came of it, but still a wild ride.

I was once on the front page too, but sadly, no HS internship or job of any kind came out of it :(

Dropbox had about 60 if I remember right (109 now) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863.

Wow, those comments are awesome.

"For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software."

I wonder how many other ten-figure business models can be developed from comments that begin "For any Linux user, this is totally trivial," or "Um, have you looked at the pricing for Amazon S3?" or "LOL, this problem was solved 20 years ago by XXXX at YYYY."

This is such a classy HN comment. "For 0.01% of the population, this is trivial to do by X, which is extremely complicated, and does not work at all, and evidently even the commenter himself had never done that"

It should be noted that HN in 2008 was a lot different than it is now.

Nah. Just the other day there was a big thread on how easy it is to run your own VPN on AWS and why should one ever pay for a glorified web proxy? :facepalm:

it's a weird metric.

Obviously a TOTALLY different league, but I have a small text editor plugin that got < 10 upvotes, and how has 500,000 installs. don't think I ever posted.it anywhere else.

My gut says low number of upvotes are probably indicative of a "thing people don't know they need" opportunity.

Can't imagine there are too many 100+ upvote use cases that don't already have substantial competition.

So 10-100 is probably a sweet spot in terms of "people are interested" and "there's an unfulfilled opportunity."

We're evaluating Gitlab for use at my company and I'm really struck by the overall quality of the software. I've already started contributing to the codebase. Hope to contribute at least a few medium-sized features (currently working on web terminals for troubleshooting CI failures) over the next few weeks, and who knows, maybe more! Love getting back to Ruby after so many years, and Golang is interesting :)

I just switched our small company over to gitlab over the last couple weeks. So far the experience has been great. It seems like a really solid piece of software.

Yay! Thanks for using GitLab. Every month we're trying hard to make the installation, the performance, the security, and the interface better. Still a lot of work to do but we've come a long way from our beginnings being based on gitolite.

Thanks for the free private repos. Thats what sold me on moving from GitHub to Gitlab.

Also, I dont like GitHub's political posturing nonsense, so thats a major reason too.

I'm happy you did, GitLab is fantastic! I've been extremely impressed by GitLab CI and the install and update experience with Omnibus. Upgrading from 8.x to 10.x was smoother and went quicker than I imagined. Kudos to you and the team behind it!

I really enjoy GitLab and I've used it for five years now. I really like what GitLab is doing with the community version: free with all the features that makes sense for small to medium sized companies, or just a group of people.

Thank you for an awesome product! :)

Awesome, your comment means a lot to me. Deciding what functionality to open source is very hard and it is good to hear you like what we are doing.

But how is it going with the HN-dream - passive income? :)

Right now it is active income since I'm a full-time ceo.

Yes, I guess the most hard is to be successful and stay small.

Gratz, man

gitlab is great, thank you for your amazing work

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