Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide - ashitlerferad
https://haydenjames.io/home-lab-beginners-guide-hardware/
======
m0xte
I had a fairly large home lab once. I had a fully topped out SPARCserver 1000E
and a disk enclosure in my bedroom. I also once lived with an E450 on the
kitchen table for a month. But they’re noisy as hell, inconvenient, expensive
to keep running and expensive to feed with power and take up a lot of room and
thus are not compatible with family and general sanity over time. They become
needy balls and chains.

So roll on to now I’m using a silent build Ryzen windows desktop with 64Gb of
RAM and a couple of mundane SSDs that I fire up VMs in virtualbox as required.
At night it gets turned off. I’ve got a $5 digitalocean box that runs all my
persistent linux stuff. If I want to play with networks it’s done with GNS3.
Office 365 runs my email and all my stuff is sync’ed with onedrive and a
couple of offline SSDs occasionally when I get nervous. My network is the
fritzbox my ISP gave me plugged into the back of the desktop via Ethernet.
That’s it!

My life is better for this. I hope people grow to realise this is much less of
a mental burden over time which gives you more head space and a clean context
switch away if you need it.

~~~
zouhair
Your conclusion is wrong, you just found out homelabs is not a hobby for you.
People have way more expensive and time consuming hobbies.

~~~
m0xte
My conclusion is that my home lab was a learning exercise that comes to an end
and that having physical hardware was actually detrimental to it.

I still have a home lab. It's just virtualized.

~~~
zouhair
Whatever works for you, just don't generalize it.

------
neilv
One of the reasons I still run some servers and play with networking gear at
home, even when SaaSes, Linode, and EC2 are so affordable, is as an exercise
in being somewhat more self-sufficient, than depending on "other people's
computers" for everything.

Especially since my entire industry seems determined to see how far it can
push spying on its users, leveraging power over them, etc. (All evidence is:
no real limit yet.)

Also, it's just fun to play with gear.

Currently, I want to engineer for reliability, audible noise, power
consumption, and price. (Will a RasPi with its SD card and wallwart be
reliable enough? What about an Atom box, with Noctua fans, and mirrored 2.5"
drives? Do I really want a pfSense box and some external WiFi APs, or can I
make OpenWrt on plastic home routers do everything, and isn't Ubiquiti gear
pretty but closed? Remember the price doubles if I want to have cold spares.
Has the novelty of the big blue Palo Alto Networks box worn off yet? Can I
discreetly mount my rack console in my living room IKEA, without a deep 4-post
cabinet, nor the official rails kit?)

Toys get traded on /r/homelabsales, craigslist, and eBay.

~~~
maxioatic
> Also, it's just fun to play with gear.

Exactly my reason as well. RaspberryPi k8s cluster of some old Pi 3's I had
lying around - why not? Hardware seems to generally last longer than you
expect, and can be repurposed for, at the very least, a fun Sunday morning.

> Do I really want a pfSense box and some external WiFi APs, or can I make
> OpenWrt on plastic home routers do everything, and isn't Ubiquiti gear
> pretty but closed?

Just went through this too. The research and rabbit-holing down different
hardware paths is so much fun. I ended up with Ubiquiti over pfSense; it is
pretty, hot dang.

------
num
Don't forget the amazing content on:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab](https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/HomeLabPorn](https://www.reddit.com/r/HomeLabPorn)
(SFW)

And the more fringe but OCD-pleasing
[https://www.reddit.com/r/cableporn](https://www.reddit.com/r/cableporn) (SFW)

r/homelab has been a source of great inspiration since 2012.

~~~
bostonvaulter2
[https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/](https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/)
is an adjacent interesting subreddit

------
ocdtrekkie
Mostly skimmed over here, but a key point is that you should be trying to
build a cheap version of what you'd use at work. The closer you are to your
work environment, the more you can applicably "try things" at home, and bring
them to work with you. And since most of us are pretty busy, it's nice to not
have to learn a whole new skill set just for maintaining our home networks.

~~~
lallysingh
I don't get why we'd pay for and maintain the test environment the employer
should have. Should I bring my own printer and laptop to the office too?

~~~
mynameisvlad
I think this misunderstands the point of the parent comment. They're not
saying "replicate your work environment so that you can test your things at
home", they're saying "replicate your work environment so you can learn best
practices and apply your learnings at home when you're at work".

There's a stark difference in that the things you host and do with your home
setup are your own, but the learnings and technologies can be applied more
broadly.

~~~
bregma
Yes, you should subsidize your employer by investing in your own specialized
training and your own specialized equipment. With all the cutbacks the
government isn't doing that for them any more so it's up to you to deliver
solid value to the shareholders and quarter-over-quarter growth.

~~~
mynameisvlad
Either you're exceptionally dense or you're purposefully ignoring the point.

If you're setting up a homelab, you might as well use industry best practices
for it.

------
Havoc
>Think of a home lab as a place where you can fail in the privacy of your own
home.

This is the exact opposite of my thinking.

I want my experiments to happen on a remote server I don't care about...not on
my home network that I really don't want to compromise/open up by accidentally
misconfiguring something.

VPS are cheap - I'm paying like 7 bucks for a 16 gig / 4vcore. (Admittedly a
once off deal). 7 bucks to have the blast radius of my networking noobness
somewhere else seems like a bargain.

~~~
2OEH8eoCRo0
There's been a lot of failure over here. I'd break my home server almost daily
while tinkering. Now that it's been rock solid for about a year I kind of wish
it would break and give me a problem to solve.

~~~
ashitlerferad
Hahaha I know that feeling!

------
harha
Any recommendations on home networking?

I couldn't figure out what the established approach would be to having access
to the infrastructure over a consumer internet connection and without exposing
the rest of the network. All resources I've seen so far don't give enough
background to seem reliable.

~~~
reincarnate0x14
Seconding that Ubiquiti Edgerouter if you want a mostly GUI guided config.
They're solid enough for gigabit internet in the better models and the builtin
firewall and tunneling options are good enough for most purposes -- the recent
releases also let you install Wireguard, which is getting to be the preferred
low-effort VPN solution for most platforms if you have a limited set of remote
clients.

PFSense or OPNSense, which are based on FreeBSD, are also great if you have
any remotely modern spare x64 computer lying around with two network ports.

IPv4 is purely outbound NAT, IPv6 I have several subnets carved off that will
allow IPSEC traffic to certain local hosts for some of my remote office setup
but I've mostly switched to using Wireguard from basically everything that
hits the Edgerouter and drops me onto a private v4 and real V6 space.

Works great for my phone and laptops from basically anywhere and tunnels all
my traffic back to my homelab and then out to the internet again. I have
Wireguard uses UDP port 443 on v4/v6, which now that QUIC is common enough can
tunnel out of every network I've tried, even normally hyper-anal corporate
ones.

Locally I have a Microtik switch with 10G fiber between my work machines and
gigabit ethernet to the rest of the house, then a few Ubiquiti Unifi "semi-
pro" APs for the house and back yard.

Primary storage host is running FreeBSD serving iSCSI from local zfs raid with
consumer NVME SSDs as cache on top of generic and easily replaceable SATA
drives. I still have this IPV6 accessible with IPSEC so I can basically treat
it like local storage from all over the world, but I'll probably turn that off
now that I'm using wireguard nearly all the time (IPSEC is faster since the
tiny EdgeRouter processor isn't having to handle it).

It's pretty neat being basically "in your home office" from almost anywhere
with decent internet.

~~~
reilly3000
Great write up and nice setup! I’ve been running Unraid on a fast box for my
local storage host and using NFS and SMB with dismal performance. I’m looking
at 10gbe and building up my cache pool, but as it stands it takes 40+ seconds
for my laptop to mount and browse even a small share. I’m intrigued by zfs +
iSCSI- do you think it would give me some improvements over SMB?

~~~
reincarnate0x14
Probably highly dependent on what you're doing with it and whether or not your
SMB implementation supports the direct RDMA extensions.

In my case its mostly because I tend to run VMs on various older semi-retired
machines with limited or slow local storage that I only turn on when I need
them, and VMware's VMFS is cluster-aware, so it really doesn't matter which
hypervisor is the one I end up spinning it up on.

I haven't dealt with Unraid specifically but there are a lot of caching and
network parameters that can wildly affect performance -- VMware for example
wants to do synchronous writes on network storage for obvious reasons, and
having a safe write-cache and large transfers with enough in-flight commands
can make a night and day difference.

If you're primarily just using NFS/SMB as file shares then getting iSCSI
working probably isn't going to be a good use of your time versus figuring out
why the existing setup behaves that way -- Samba and SMB performance tuning
can be a frustrating experience but iSCSI is far more opaque and inscrutable
on Windows particularly.

------
t0astbread
Maybe a bit off-topic but what do people actually use for monitoring/intrusion
detection on small-scale to hobby projects that are internet-connected? I feel
like the "established" monitoring frameworks require too much maintenance work
and care to really be effective but the operating systems generally used for
this kinda work have a way too large surface area to just leave running on
their own. (Hello Unikernels?)

~~~
system2
I am using Sonicwall NSA2600. Works well, has 300mbit SSL filtering, very
robust rules and nat configuration. Most small/medium size companies can use
the model I am using. Has a very nice web interface too. Comes with SSL VPN
and Global VPN.

~~~
brendawalsh
What do you pay for licensing the services?

------
bregma
The author of the article can afford all this stuff because he keeps a 'little
woman' locked in his basement ironing his shorts.

Sure, the article if full of techporn but I haven't read anything so
unabashedly sexist in nature since the late 1970s. It was truly cringeworthy.
Reminded me of reading Popular Mechanics from the 1950s or a pulp SciFi novel
by Murray Leinster or something.

~~~
stryan
Source? The only time the author mentions his wife in the article is that
she's working full-time and would dislike some server placements.

------
arthurcolle
PLEASE BACKUP YOUR STUFF NO MATTER WHAT YOU DO!

I lost 50GB of options data going back 4 months yesterday + 2.5TB of currency
data going back 20 years because I never checked that my backups were running.

Please don't let this happen to you.

EDIT: Literally just write a script that backs up flat files or binaries to S3
every N intervals.

~~~
dang
_Please don 't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or
phrase, put asterisks around it and it will get italicized._

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

(Sorry about your stuff.)

~~~
arthurcolle
Whats the markup format? I've tried the common MD shortcuts but they never
work, maybe I'm just a trog

~~~
dang
[https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc](https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc)

------
Animats
For people who are _really_ into system administration.

~~~
j45
The work has come much down by many orders of magnitude. It's possible to have
digital ocean/cloud type experiences locally.. pretty reasonably.

~~~
fermienrico
How can you do that? Don't you need a proper static IP from the ISP unless you
have some sort of a mega business connection?

Edit: thanks for the responses, I didn't know this was even possible.

~~~
henryfjordan
In my experience, your ISP will only give you a new IP address if your modem
disconnects for a while. You can easily use the same IP address for over a
year.

You can also use something like DuckDNS to have a backup in case you are away
from home and your IP changes, you can still find your server. You could even
theoretically write a script that then checks DuckDNS for your IP and updates
the record with your Domain Registrar automatically (assuming they have an
API)

~~~
syshum
There are also prebuilt Docker images that will update duckdns for you if you
are using docker in your lab

------
tjbiddle
What I'm most fascinated by is that this is a solo blog that has sponsors and
plenty of affiliate links, and has over 4 million readers. Very curious what
kind of revenue it's pulling in. Can't seem to find a search function to see
if the topic was already covered.

~~~
xupybd
i'd be interested if it comes close to covering the cost of the setup. It
looks beautiful but I bet it comes at a price.

------
abfan1127
as a hardware engineer, I got all excited it would talk about budget friendly
oscilloscopes, dmms, and power supplies. Still a fun read.

------
heisenzombie
I currently have a home server with a bunch of USB hard drives hanging off it,
which I pool using ZFS.

That was fine when I only had 2 drives, but now my "USB Octopus" is getting
silly.

What's the next step in hardware if I want my server to access a bunch of
disks?

~~~
SteveNuts
Synology is really high quality stuff and will pay for itself in reduced power
usage. Any ancient rackmount gear you buy will guzzle electricity

~~~
j_walter
Their hardware is great, but pricey. Used server can be had for a lot cheaper
and you can get the same functionality with Xpenology. Not sure the
electricity savings outweighs the upfront hardware costs.

~~~
Tijdreiziger
> Is Xpenology Stable?

> As a person interested using Xpenology you should keep in mind, that this is
> not an official Synology release. Although it’s based on the official
> Synology DSM which is the same as whats found on the actual Synology
> devices, it’s not officially supported by Synology. You could get support
> from the community for this software, but not from the company itself.
> Typically once you’re up and running things are very stable without any
> issues but just know that calling support is not an option when you’re not
> running on an official Synology device.

~~~
j_walter
I'm sure everyone has different experiences, but it's been super stable for
me. The biggest issues come with the software upgrades and certain
configurations may have issues, however the Xpenology forums have massive
support and everyone lists how their upgrade experience went across multiple
platforms (VM and bare metal). It was worth it for me.

------
system2
Router =/= Firewall.

If you are planning to host stuff, or even just to protect your own things,
you better get something like Sonicwall or similar.

At my home I have a sonicwall, synology nas, 2 dell servers, power supplies.
Not in a single closet though. To me, the server security is far more
important than the looks. Spend the most money on firewall, rest is just for
looks. Patch panel for home setup sounds excessive because I am not going to
run all my cables thru my garage. Have individual switches in every room if
you want. Most living spaces need only one or two ethernet cables, rest of the
devices can be wifi easily.

~~~
twicetwice
Maybe a noob question, but why do you need a dedicated firewall appliance?
What is it doing for you that just closing all ports and then selectively
reopening as needed (my current solution) won't do? What kinds of threats is
it protection your network from?

~~~
reilly3000
Also mostly a noob, but my understanding is that most of the value comes from
having a subscription to the firewall vendors threat database, and using the
box’s deep packet inspection to verify gnarly stuff isn’t coming over port 80
or other common protocols. You want it in an appliance so that you can be
assured of isolation from the rest of your network. You can run firewall
software in a VM, but you would still want that VM’s host physically isolated
or with dedicated NICs for the VM.

------
tuananh
i'm temped to buy the used enterprise equipment but in the end, i ended up
buying small Intel NUC machines for my homelab.

power consumption of these NUCs is almost negligible while one Dell R620 with
dual CPU takes 150-200W at idle.

~~~
flipbrad
I looked at NUCs and settled for a used ThinkPad. Integrated keyboard,
monitor, mouse and battery, and potentially even more judicious with power
consumption, but oomphy enough to run image recognition on my photo collection
while hosting lots of dockers. Backup to a local NAS that I only switch on
during the backup window, and backup remotely to backblaze B2.

~~~
tuananh
i bought used NUCs too. new one cost way too much :D

------
MivLives
Kinda curious what the noise level is with those fans. I know there's no
proper rack mount servers there that need the fans running full blast, but I
imagine 4x120mm fans is still loud.

~~~
Cieplak
Any rackmount server will be a nuisance. I ran rack servers at home for years
but recently replaced my servers with ATX form factor machines, which are
super quiet, ventilate much better and still stack nicely. There are plenty of
ATX Xeon motherboards that support ECC ram.

~~~
j_walter
Depends on your storage needs. More than 6-8 hard drives and getting an ATX
form factor machine is near impossible, while many brands/generations of rack
mount servers fit the bill for cheap.

~~~
fomine3
Now it's possible thanks to Fractal Design's Define 7 XL.

~~~
j_walter
So for the just under the price of a used 4-5 year old server you can get that
case...not really practical for someone on a budget.

------
gog
Anybody knows if those kinds of power strips mentioned in the article are
available for the Europian market
([https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00KFZ98YO/](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00KFZ98YO/))?

I've been searching for something like that a few months ago but couldn't find
anything that has schuko sockets on the other side.

~~~
j45
You can search for PDUs (Power distribution units) in North America to get you
pointed in the right direction.

[https://www.amazon.com/s?k=pdu](https://www.amazon.com/s?k=pdu)

------
a_imho
I was expecting how to genetically modify yeast in the kitchen or something.

------
tilolebo
I'm trying to remember the name of these really small, nearly portable homelab
servers.

They're quite expensive but looked like a good homelab alternative for people
lacking space for a proper rack.

Someone knows it?

~~~
commotionfever
I am very happy with my proliant microserver gen10 plus. holds 4x 3.5" drives,
is absolutely tiny, good at virtualisation, quiet-ish, upgradeable

~~~
tilolebo
Very nice! I configured my NAS a few weeks ago, went for a fractal design core
500.

Now I'm looking for a smaller, more beefy machine with less storage capacity,
for some @home experiments.

------
bradly
One note... the modem recommended is only DOCSIS 3.0, not 3.1, so it will not
support gigabit networking.

------
tomc1985
Great, now the time-honored nerd practice of running shit out of your
closet/garage has been picked up by hucksters as "homelab"ing. If it's
anything like the damage that YouTube did to computer building, next thing you
know this practice is going to suddenly turn into aesthetics and bragging
rights.

I am SOOO SICK of watching this highly technical and aesthetically
inconsiderate hobby turn into an issue of neckbeard Modern Living. A new
generation of boutique providers selling storage racks at silly markups.

Pretty soon you're going to have the worst kind of hipsters -- keyboard nerds
-- obsessing over the material used in rack standoffs or something. Because
you know that aged Persian rubber dampens vibrations +.03db better...

Yay.....


Ask HN: How do you find a mentor? - aryamaan
I think, the role of a mentor in our life is understated and another issue is finding a suitable mentor.
One can learn things on their own (after job/school) but a mentor can help you narrow down the things you want to learn and supervise your journey.
Please note I am not talking about spoon feeding but someone who helps accelerate your learning.
======
dozzie
Whenever I hear about searching for a mentor, I imagine some guy that simply
waits for illumination to happen, by osmosis, I suppose. I see searching
specifically for a mentor as a kind of fashion or supersitition of these days.
(Mind you, this is merely an association, a first impression that I have when
I see such questions.)

Do you have a plan how to use this "mentoring" thing? A concrete idea what you
want from a mentor and how your work would look like? Do you have anything to
show him/her, so the mentor has any foothold for comments?

This is a good piece of article about exactly that:
[http://pindancing.blogspot.com/2010/12/answer-to-will-you-
me...](http://pindancing.blogspot.com/2010/12/answer-to-will-you-mentor-me-
is.html)

------
onion2k
Find someone who you think you'd like to be mentored by and ask. Obviously you
need a bit of realism (Mark Zuckerberg isn't going to mentor you), and it
helps to have an existing relationship on _some_ level, but seriously, you
just have to make the first move.

------
exolymph
Yup, what onion2k said. Email people you admire and ask if you can help them
out.


Perils Of Credentialism - MIT Example - helwr
http://blogs.adventnet.com/svembu/2007/04/26/perils-of-credentialism-mit-example/

======
pgbovine
From the end of TFA: _Bill Gates could never have been the Dean of Admissions
at Stanford, but the Computer Science building at Stanford carries his name._

sigh, i wish people would stop using Gates, Zuckerberg, and other drop-outs
from elite colleges to rally up salt-of-the-earth populist propaganda like "oh
you can come from humble down-to-earth roots and be a college drop-out and
still be a billionaire!" many of these guys came from highly-educated, upper-
middle-class families and went to elite private high schools and colleges. the
true populist heroes are lurking here amongst the HN readership ... people who
have successful autonomous small businesses that are making a good living.

~~~
dabent
I think that's a really good point.

\- Gates, Allen: Harvard

\- Bezos: Princeton

\- Page, Brin, Yang, Filo: Stanford

\- Zuckerberg: Harvard

All these had the brains, drive and position to at least get accepted by a
top-notch school. But that got me thinking, what exceptions are there? I
thought of Jobs/Wozniack, but what other big hitters out there went somewhere
besides and A-list school? I know they are out there, especially the multi-
million dollar hits, but naturally, the press doesn't mention someone's
school, unless it's a big name.

~~~
mwerty
Paul Allen went to Washington State University.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Allen>

------
mkrieg
"To maintain intellectual honesty and consistency, MIT should announce that it
would henceforth stop requiring formal credentials in evaluating candidates
for this and other similar jobs. In other words, future candidates like her,
who feel confident in their ability to perform the job, shouldn’t feel the
need to invent degrees on their resumes. Come on, you may say, how are they
supposed to find out who is a good candidate and who is bad. Well, they hired
her based on an invented degree, didn’t they? Didn’t she work out OK for 28
years?"

I'm not following the line of thinking here. A single instance of a high
performer with fake credentials does not negate the fact that credentials tend
to be a rough indicator of performance in many jobs.

~~~
mistermann
The same point that jumped out at me from the article. Which one of the
documented logical fallacies is this?

------
hacer
I entirely disagree with this article.

[First a factual correction: the original job she applied for (some
administrative job) did not require the high-level credentials she faked.] Now
my opinion: Whether or not somebody is fit for the job is not for the
applicant to judge but for the employer. You cannot fake something in order to
seem well-fit. For the same reason that a student, who feels she is capable of
doing PhD level work, can't inflate her GPA. For the same reason that a
student who feels she can make it through MIT can't add additional honors and
awards to her MIT application. It is not about who can make it and do an OK
job. For many positions, there are many more qualified applicants than slots.
The faking of the credentials is extremely immoral and pretty much nullifies
her worth to me. Human frailty, you say? More like human greed? It's not like
she got caught faking credentials during her first year of employment. She was
at MIT for 20 years. At some point she must have realized what she did was
immoral. 20 years is more than enough time to quit the job, without a public
spectacle, just giving a personal reason, and going into some other business
without faked credentials (maybe her own business, like she does now). Money
must have been too good to take the right path. PS: I am not bitter against
MIT or MJ in particular; I actually was an MIT student admitted under MJ's
leadership.

------
trun
First of all, this article is three years old. Second of all, Marilee Jones
blatantly lied about her credentials for 28 years. Yes, she did a fantastic
job while she was at MIT, but that doesn't change the fact that she lied. This
is not an issue of credentialism, it's an issue of trust and integrity. As far
as I'm concerned, what she did is on par with the kid from Harvard who was
recently charged with fabricating his life story...

[http://www.boston.com/news/local/breaking_news/2010/05/by_gl...](http://www.boston.com/news/local/breaking_news/2010/05/by_globe_staff_60.html)

~~~
flatline
Everyone makes mistakes - this was certainly worse than some but really, I
don't see how she would ever have had an opportunity to honestly correct the
mistake after getting hired without this happening, so she had little choice
but to live with it. It does raise the issue of why she had to fake her
credentials - or even feel pressured to - to be considered for the job if she
was a good candidate without them.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
She could have honestly corrected her "mistake" by saying "I don't have a
degree; I lied on my resume."

~~~
SapphireSun
Many organizations have a policy that you can and will be terminated at any
time for lying on your application. If she admitted it, bam.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Which has precisely Zip to do with being honest. Honesty isn't a sliding
scale, where you say one thing if its good for you, and another if it harms
you.

------
gjcourt
MIT is a beacon of intellectual integrity. As such, it is the duty of the
institute to let her go. Condoning her actions would be condoning fabricated
information, and thereby undermining the entire scientific research community.
They punish students with the same sort of rigor, why not the faculty?

~~~
iamdave
This comment has said more than all others so far in this thread, and I agree
with it. While I'm of the camp of individuals that think the job market, and
society as a whole should be more performance and output oriented versus what
a degree says (because for what it's worth, I should never have so much as
graduated high school yet here I am working for Samsung USA), allowing her to
stay would have compromised the ethos of what MIT represents. Well stated
gjcourt.

------
jrp
The point of firing her isn't to get rid of a bad worker; it is based on game
theory. The firing hurts both MIT and the dean, but it should dissuade people
from lying in these kinds of situations.

~~~
houseabsolute
Dunno if they sent the right message. "You will be able to get away with it
for half a lifetime but will have to pretend to be sorry when we find out."

~~~
endtime
>but will have to pretend to be sorry when we find out."

Uh, they fired her. So the message is "you'll get fired when we find out".
Which seems like exactly the right message, given their goals.

------
rhettinger
Too often, I see bloggers willing to give executives and public officials a
pass when they are caught in a lie. The rationale is that the people are
otherwise doing a good job, but the bloggers ignore the irony that part of the
job was enforcing the rules and imposing judgments on others.

If you're a Dean who has ever kicked a student out of school for an honor
violation, I have no sympathy when you get called-out for lying. Too many
students get kicked out of school and have permanent black mark on their
record for similar offenses; why should the Dean get a pass.

If you're a former President whose job as chief executive is enforce the laws
of the country, then I have a hard time having sympathy when people find-out
you've lied under oath. Too many people go to jail for perjury; why should the
President get a pass.

If you're a former New York prosecutor famous for corruption cases, then I
have little sympathy when you've been caught hiding funds to pay a prostitute.
Too many people are vilified for this; why should an Attorney General get a
pass.

All that being said, I don't judge this Dean, the former President, or the NY
Attorney General. Instead, I judge the bloggers who have a double standard for
people they like.

------
DanielBMarkham
The reason she was let go had nothing to do with her lying, it had to do with
her doing a good job for so many years.

Some first-year employee with little visibility might be forgiven for lying
about academic credentials on her resume. Sweep it all under the rug. No harm,
no foul. The Dean of Admissions with a wonderfully effective career and lots
of praise could not.

(Actually, after I wrote that I had second thoughts. The fact is that _any_
challenge to the idea that college credentials are critical to job performance
in an academic setting must receive the most severe punishment.)

I think there is a bit of populist rabble-rousing going on, but that doesn't
detract from the fact that there is a serious point here as well. In my
opinion, after that much service to the university, somebody should have cut
her some slack. Surely MIT is big enough to let in the occasional person of
competence sans degree.


Hustle 101: How to Make Any Startup Want to Hire You - seanjohnson
http://www.onedayonejob.com/blog/hustle-101-how-to-make-any-startup-hire-you/

======
pekk
Apparently (per the article) startups only employ people for customer
development, copywriting, analytics and growth hacking. I wonder what happens
when they decide to build a product or a piece of software. Or is it too old-
school to actually build something now?

~~~
pavel_lishin
I think the point was that these are positions that are easier to "hustle"
your way into with a minimal investment. ("Read the books above for 30 minutes
a day, and you'll be an expert in 90 days!") Compare this to becoming an
expert in C - 30 minutes a day for 90 days is not going to give you enough
experience to waltz into a startup and demand a job.

(Also, in my mind, the word "hustle" occupies the same bucket as "scam", and
"30 minutes a day for 90 days" sounds like a late-night informercial for
weight loss.)

------
mobweb
Does anybody have another reading suggestion about growth hacking?

------
malachismith
Partial Cliff Notes for the works of Eric Ries.


SourceTree for Windows beta - bencevans
http://blog.sourcetreeapp.com/2013/02/14/sourcetree-for-windows-beta-signup/
======
homosaur
That's good news for Windows users, their development tools really seem to be
getting simpler and better lately. I'm a huge fan of SourceTree in general.

I formerly thought, "why would anyone want to use a GUI for Git? It's just a
crutch so you don't have to use the CLI."

Then I started actually using SourceTree a bit. I've changed my tune
considerably. I think there's great benefit to using a quality GUI for Git now
even though you still need to use the CLI.

First, I became stuck in this intermediate user hell where I could do all the
basic stuff but didn't know the commands or quite how to get it done.
SourceTree allows a very good way to get that done right now with the
understanding that you just executed a command under the surface. It allows to
explore the capabilities of Git a little more than the CLI would and lets you
punch over your weight in the meantime.

Second, I think having a high quality graphical representation of your Git
tree in front of you helps you understand the structure of your tree and
enables you to make more informed, better choices on the structure it takes.

Third, I like using it for pushes, pulls, and merges simply because this is
the one place in Git I tend to make a typo and screw up data. Generally that's
no big deal but once in a while you push something really dumb onto the origin
remote and then feel really stupid about it. If it's yours one forced push and
you're good but if it's collaborative, you can cause someone a major headache.

I do wish it were open source so I could rely on it going forward a little
more but clearly Atalassian has a decent business model and they view this app
as a great tool into it. It even has a nice cataloguing feature where you can
throw in your Github and Bitbucket usernames and see all your online repos in
a list. I find this nice when needing all my git stuff on a different computer
than my primary.

~~~
vor_
> I formerly thought, "why would anyone want to use a GUI for Git? It's just a
> crutch so you don't have to use the CLI."

Honestly, I can't stand Git on the command line and always interact with it
through a GUI. I feel like source control in general is unnecessarily
complicated, but Git even more so.

~~~
bhauer
Agreed. I've often made a point among colleagues that source control, because
it's built by programmers for use nearly exclusively by programmers, has
enjoyed very little user interface attention through its lifespan. Unlike
other applications that have experimented and evolved their user interface
relatively rapidly, source control like build tools, is an area where there is
little demand for UI improvement (and hence, little value in doing so).
Putting aside proprietary and very expensive source control systems, the open
source options seem to align to the way we used computers generally in the
following decades.

1970s: CVS

1980s: Subversion

1990s: Git (shifting Git to the 1990s even aligns it with the batch of
distributed OS research from that era).

This is especially reductive and somewhat mean-spirited, but my point is that
using Git gives me the feeling of using other types of applications from the
1990s. Source control remains stuck in an era where computer programs appeared
to be designed in part to appeal to the curiosity of developers who take pride
in mastering complex systems, not for being eminently usable.

When I say Git "feels 1990s" a retort is that I am a Git hater and should just
use Perforce or some other crummy commercial product. That misses the point.
It just feels like a tool from the 1990s, which to be clear, feels a heck of a
lot better than a tool from the 1980s. But I live in the 2010s. I want a
source control system that does its job and gets out of my way. Again, to be
reductive and mean, just like build tools, source control systems are a time-
sink that captivate the attention of people who enjoy fussing with tools. It's
not that I don't like Git versus its real-world contemporaries, but I want Git
+ 20 years.

~~~
MatthewPhillips
Before git (and DVCS in general) every company had a source control manager.
You could get a degree (and presumably still can) in revision control theory.
This was necessary then because a developer couldn't completely grock it _and_
get real development done at the same time. Today I don't know if any git
shops that have a full-time source control manager.

So, if the worst thing about this generation of source control systems is an
unflattering UI... I think we have awhile until the next generation takes
over.

~~~
jules
The UI is an important problem, but also the needless complexity and leaky
abstractions. This isn't limited to version control either, but is pervasive
in all programming tools (IDEs/editors, build systems, programming languages,
platforms, etc.)

This is caused by extreme conservatism and dogma.

"GUIs are for noobs, CLI is better"

"Everything should be text like the Unix gods intended" (code in particular)

"Keyboard is faster than mouse"

"Autocomplete? That just causes you not to learn anything"

"Who needs semantic code navigation when you have grep?"

"WYSIWYG? Use markdown or latex."

"What's wrong with the web? This canvas API is so cool."

etc.

------
stickydink
Despite some people in my office proclaiming themself "too hardcore" to use a
git interface, I believe SourceTree is fantastic. When I used to work with
windows, I used TortoiseGit -- which is decent, but lacks some of the more
advanced niceties.

Committing portions or single lines of a file, remembering to push that pesky
submodule, all becomes an order of magnitude easier and quicker with a decent
GUI. The response to "but it can't do everything, so I'll stick to CLI", is
simple. The 5% of the time the GUI doesn't cover exactly what you need, the
terminal is sitting right there for you... it doesn't disable it.

~~~
tiziano88
git gui allows you to do most of the advanced operations you mentioned
(partial commits), and it has the advantage of coming preinstalled with git
itself, which means that if you master that tool, you can find your way in
pretty much every other situation (new machine, deployment server, etc..)

------
imjared
This is great news.

I was introduced to SourceTree for Mac when I started at my new shop and I've
gotta say that I love it. I don't consider it a crutch so much as a part of a
faster workflow. I enjoy the ability to quickly see diffs, to pick and choose
what files I want to commit with just a click+drag, and generally moving
through simple git things (push, pull, commit, merge, rebase, resolve merge
conflicts) with the click of a button or a keyboard shortcut.

It's not as powerful as using CLI (you can't perform an interactive rebase,
for example) but for the most part it fits my workflow of branching, merging,
and pull requesting pretty nicely.

~~~
jstepka
An interactive rebase is coming in the next version of SourceTree for Mac (~1m
out)... the Windows version will have the functionality a few months later.

Cheers, Justen -- Bitbucket and SourceTree product manager

------
jiggy2011
So git was developed specifically for development of the Linux kernel, but
Linux users are the only people who only get GUI clients that look like warmed
feaces?

~~~
Ironlink
SmartGitHg is free for non-commercial use. I've only used it from Windows, but
it supports Linux and Mac as well. I've been enjoying it, but I am by no means
an advanced user. I just started working with branches, and as far as I can
tell, the branch management SmartGitHg offers seems excellent. I'd love to
hear what someone more experienced thinks about it, though.

<http://www.syntevo.com/smartgithg/index.html>

------
city41
Our main git repo at work is huge (in just about every aspect: size in
megabytes, number of commits, number of branches, number of tags, etc) and
SourceTree is incredibly slow. 20 minutes later I'm still waiting for
SourceTree to load the main view for the repo. So is gitk on OSX (which
launches Wish). Somehow IntelliJ has no problem with our repo and its git
related functionality is snappy as can be.

------
mgkimsal
Sourcetree having the git-flow model built-in now is great - I'd really hoped
tower would have added this, but they seem to have stopped any major feature
additions. I've moved to sourcetree for most day to day work and will be happy
to point Windows-using colleagues to it soon.

------
hydrozen
I am not the biggest fan of SourceTree's UI, but the killer feature that makes
it really useful for me is that it makes it pretty easy to stage specific
lines of a file or to discard some lines. They've done a pretty good job with
that and I use those features all the time now.

------
contingencies
I have been a SourceTree customer since before the Atlassian acquisition. I
made some feature requests and they were completed quite promptly and with no
hassles. Since then I had the good luck to meet some of the Atlassian security
team in Sydney, who also put my faith in their suite.

The biggest thing I use SourceTree for over command-line git is cherry-picking
bits of different versions of a file to merge. Also, if you have loads of
repos it can auto-announce changes on the remotes when you open it, which
saves a lot of command line hunting to stay on top of things.

Great tool, good team. Glad you're expanding.

------
DenisM
I use SourceTree as a Mercurial GUI on a Mac and it's been awesome. I bought
it back then when you had to pay for it, and it was worth every penny.
Developer behind the app is also super-responsive.

~~~
dgesang
Are there any features in SourceTree that TortoiseHg does not provide?

~~~
DenisM
In my experience tortoise does not refresh its view as changes are made, so if
you forget to push the refresh button, you may checkin too few files.
Subjectively, tortoise also feels clunky compared to ST.

I would also much prefer to use the same client on Windows and Mac, as I'm
using both.

~~~
dgesang
Thanks.

------
kamilafsar
SourceTree is the best Git client out there. The best thing is: it's free!
Don't know how long they'll keep it free though.

No more git hassle on Windows :-)

~~~
DenisM
It started as paid app, then was bought out by attlassian and made free to
promote their hosting services.

~~~
jack12
Interesting the way it has circled back around. ISTR it was deliberately
started as a paid mac-only app by Steve Streeting / sinbad after he switched
to macos and decided trying to do the added services thing wasn't his
favourite, after years of running a consultancy service for the (primarily
win32) open-source project he had started, ogre3d.org.

------
MichaelGG
I expect we'll see more of this kind of stuff, especially something from
GitHub at somepoint. Now that Microsoft is going full-out with Git support in
VS, you can bet there is going to be some top-notch support. I love Git
Extensions, and SourceTree looks great, but the appeal of being able to have
VS with work item, build, and Git all together is pretty strong.

~~~
ConstantineXVI
GitHub for Windows has been out for a few months now.

<http://windows.github.com/>

~~~
MichaelGG
GitHub for Windows is not really comparable to Git Extensions or other full
Git tools. It seems like it's point is just to help nudge Windows users onto
GitHub. I imagine GitHub will revamp this position, especially with respect to
their bug tracking integration and so on.

------
bhauer
Excellent. This looks especially well suited to my use-case.

However, I'm already on board with Github for Windows and unless that causes
me some unusual pain at some point, I'm loathe to bother changing just for the
sake of changing.

A big thank-you to both firms for investing the time to make Git more
"functional" and less "technical entertainment."

~~~
MattRix
In my experience, GitHub for Windows is great for basic commits, and that's
about it... Good luck doing a merge (or god forbid you actually have a
conflict). It's fine if you're a single user, but the moment you're working
with other people you need to drop down into the CLI a lot (which is fine, but
not ideal). I do like using it as an easy way to get an overview of all my
repos and a quick way to link into the CLI for each repo, and to quickly check
over commits.

------
darklajid
So far we're using Git Extensions in our deployment here, but this looks
promising.

Signed up for the beta. Most of our users unfortunately have a dislike for
everything CLI (.. =( ..), so in this environment it's either Git Extensions,
the upcoming VS 2012 native client or .. maybe this project.

------
programminggeek
I love SourceTree for the easy visualization of progress of branches as they
progress. Using git flow at work, SourceTree makes the whole git experience
better and more visual.

Now my co-workers will finally have a decent Windows git app.

------
mountaineer
Wonderful news. For the occasional contributors on my team, I can't tell you
what a pain it is for them to remember CLI switches and for me to have to
constantly remind them. I love SourceTree on the Mac.

------
bybjorn
Haven't used SourceTree but TortoiseGit is excellent, escpecially if you
migrated from SVN and were used to TortoiseSVN :-)

------
mariusmg
It's Git AND Mercurial. Looks nice but i kind of doubt it will be better than
TortoiseHg honestly.

------
jmtucu
It's better than GIT Extensions?

------
fidz
Anyone get the binary? Review perhaps?

------
gte910h
I love sourcetree on mac.


Ask HN: How to be more confident and people person? - codesternews
In the pressurized situation, I lose my confidence. I am not good people person but I think it is affecting me so much.
I am good in technology but could not explainand present ideas.
How to improve myself? Any books and suggestions are welcome.
======
kodz4
Practice. Practice. Practice. My prof set up a small reading group when I was
in college. 5-6 students would get together every week and discuss a
preassigned paper. I was like you, lacking in confidence, hesitant to
disagree, handling confrontation badly etc. But the group created an
environment where I could learn how to deal with these things. I could see
others fumbling about and realized it was not just me struggling. When I got
things right others encouraged me. All this slowly translated into increased
confidence.

So try and set something up like that with friends/people who want to see you
improve. Every week meet up and practice.

Also recommend Marshall Rosenburg's Non-violent communication. It really
helped me see certain things I was doing wrong and showed me ways to avoid
them.

------
steve_g
I think this book could be helpful. I've only skimmed it; I gave it as a gift
to someone. All the parts I read seemed realistic, affirming, and practical.

[https://www.amazon.com/Social-Skills-Guidebook-Shyness-
Conve...](https://www.amazon.com/Social-Skills-Guidebook-Shyness-
Conversations/dp/0994980701/)

------
guest__user
I think you can start by avoiding saying things like "I am not a good people
person" You can try to understand what your benchmarks are for performance.
Maybe you can say "Sometimes i feel shy" instead of "I am shy" . Do you see
the difference between the two?