hgl

I recently build an open source nix project and I want to share it with people in r/NixOS.

I have an account I made in 2023, but I don't really use it and I don't really like the user name I previously picked, so I made a new account and posted the project to r/NixOS, but my post was immediately removed and my account shadow banned. I created a bunch more accounts and they were all shadow banned after posting.

I later learned that most subreddits require you to have a certain karma before they consider you trustworthy, which makes sense, but the practice of not showing the karma requirement and simply deleting the post with shadow banning is just so hostile.

I tried appealing with the new account, 2 months after, no response and the ban is still not lifted.

I later started to reuse my 2023 account, and this time paid attention to the karma. I mostly just commented and made one or two posts to subreddits that don't require a high karma. One post got a lot of upvotes and replies, and gave me 24 post karma, I thought that was enough to prove I'm not a spammer. So I made a post in r/macapps, releasing a Mac app I recently built. It immediately got removed too, but didn't get my account shadow banned. Later, I was surprised to find out the post was restored, and I started to get replies from redditors. One redditor messaged me saying she is a student and has found my app useful and asked if I have a discount code. I replied since she is the first one who asked I will just give her a free copy. But right after I sent the redeem code, my account was shadow banned again. My final message saying I'd appreciate it if she could leave a review couldn't be sent to her.

It was such a terrible moment for me.

I tried appealing immediately yesterday, and today I found out I can't even log in the account, saying my username and password are invalid. Resetting password doesn't work.

Is reddit a living hell for new users now? I wonder if others share the experience?

I have a personal VPS for my blog and side projects. Recently I noticed something fishy is going on on my server: some bins are gone, ssh last login IPs belongs to a docker container even if it’s me, etc. I currently have no way to confirm if my server is compromised, and if it’s, how it’s compromised. The only security measure I have is disallowing ssh login via password.

I wonder if there are books or resources on how to:

1. Monitor the security of a Linux server, e.g., successful ssh logins, files written to where shouldn’t be any writes, etc. 2. Alert when intrusion happens. 3. Some way of telling if the current server is compromised 4. If the server is compromised, a report on what the intruder actually did.

My knowledge in the server security area is pretty scant, if there are other things I should pay attention to, please let me know.

I’ve been running a few distributed web services, but except for a few rudimentary nginx access logs, I have no idea how they’re functioning.

I have the following goals and questions regarding implementing a logging & monitoring system to get better insights of them:

- What are the best practices to instrument source code to collect general logs and exceptions? - How to determine if the services and databases are performing efficiently? More specifically, what I can do to discover if they are doing unnecessary work or there are any hotspots? - Are the servers being run on overloaded? If so, what are overloading them? - How do I know if some one is trying to break into the servers? - How can I be alerted whenever a bad thing previously mentioned happens?

And then there is the business logic side of things. like how many users are online, how many transactions are currently being processed, etc. I don’t suppose directly querying the production database is a good idea.

My own research online surfaced a great deals of tools like prometheus, ELK stack, fluentd, Nagios, bugsnag, New Relic, Datadog, etc, which overwhelmed me, and I reckon without a good understanding of logging and monitoring in general, I’m likely to pick the wrong tools.

This feels like a really big topic. Any books/resources that have a comprehensive introduction?

I'm building a project that I'm quite excited about, but at the same time, I feel worried. I worry that if I release a MVP asap, but not techinically competent enough to quickly implement more features, once it's on the market, someone or some team will copy it and outmaneuver me because they're capable of pumping out new features more quickly. From what I read, time to market is really life-or-death for many product, and I believe for projects not that huge, it's mostly about features.

I have a feature list that I'd like to implement down the road, some of them are quite technically challenging. Should I overcome such challenges before releasing the MVP?

I know people keep saying you might build the wrong project so you should release early. But what if I'm building the right project? What if it turns out to have market fit but because I'm incapcable of releasing new features quickly enough, users turn to competitors because they couldn't wait?

I guess some people might say I should release the product asap, and then hire people to deal with technical challenges once the product turns out to be vaulable. But I don't think I'm good at building a team, and I can't trust myself for finding the people that are really capable of solving these challenges. The hiring just becomes another "technical challenge" I have to overcome (and probably a much harder one). It's not reassuring.

I have a hunch that such thoughts are naive, but currently I can't come up with good arguments. And this possible false sense of urgency is tormenting me.

Do you worry about such things when building projects? How do you deal with it?