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GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016

bloomberg.com

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Re: GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016

#141

Post by sidlls »

ForHackernews wrote: post #48
AceJohnny2 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People keep bringing that up, but that's missing the bigger picture: GitHub is more than just a git host, it's also a "social hub" where people can fork repos and offer changes back (pull requests), a passable bugtracker (issues), even wiki, and even web host (github.io). Many people have warned that using these added-value features makes you dependent on GitHub (Linus Torvalds has a kernel mirror on GitHub, but for…

There are plenty of replacements. Bitbucket, gitlab, etc.

I actually prefer bitbucket because I don't have to pay for private repos.

Re: GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016

#142

Post by hinkley »

sergiotapia wrote: post #14

>The new digs gave employees a reason to come into the office. Visitors would enter a lobby modeled after the White House’s Oval Office before making their way to a replica of the Situation Room. The company also erected a statue of its mascot, a cartoon octopus-cat creature known as the Octocat. The 55,000-square-foot space is filled with wooden tables and modern art. The Sillicon Valley episodes write themselves it…

When their customer base increases and they need to improve margins they can remove the art and add more cubes.

Re: GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016

#143

Post by st3v3r »

Longhanks wrote: post #47

That and their open racism (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11049067 ). Hopefully, they wake up soon enough and stop this bs .

I'm not seeing a shred of racism there. I'm seeing a white, straight male not being treated like he's special, and interpreting that as racism.

Re: GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016

#145

Post by koolba »

Taek wrote: post #134
annon wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except as pointed out in the article, the massive increase in spending was fairly frivolous. They spent crazy money on a new huge office, threw big parties, and sent their employees traveling everywhere. They also doubled their headcount, when I think we can all agree that they haven't had a surge in volume or features that merits that many new employees. There's no reason that GitHub couldn't be run profitably if th…

I have been using GitHub for maybe 4 years and I feel like the number of features rolled out this year blows away the other years. Review groups and Projets (kanban) have both been great. GitLab started applying pressure and I think GitHub responded well, staying competitive in the face of a competent challenger.

> GitLab started applying pressure and I think GitHub responded well, staying competitive in the face of a competent challenger.

Exactly. That's what drives features and improvements.

VC money lets you buy new sneakers but if you're looking to lose weight, a tiger chasing you is a much stronger motivation.

Re: GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016

#146

Post by robszumski »

tekklloneer wrote: post #91
OliverJones wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whoa. Dumb money, those VCs, if this is true. A scrappy low-budget startup can do just fine with a medium sized vm on one of the several places renting vms, running a simple source code control system server. Blowing dozens of megabucks to build a palace in a high-rent district to replace something that's close to free seems, well, dumb.

Github is better. It just is. You don't have to worry about backups, it has great tools built on top of the vcs to make working with it and project management easier. It makes it easier to manage the D part of DVCS, and it lets you easily put your tools into the community. I suspect they see it as a charity case, if true.

If you run an open-source project, the community is on Github and that's where they expect to file bugs. Most users/contributors already have their notifications tweaked the way that they like, understand the workflow and website, etc.

Re: GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016

#147

Post by bmelton »

DrJokepu wrote: post #99
jakub_g wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is more or less, if VC invests (or plans to) in 20 software companies, investing additionally in something like GitHub or npm makes it more likely that the other 20 companies will succeed. They don't invest just in GitHub from the goodness of their hearts.

I know nothing about investing but I feel somewhat skeptical about these arguments. How many startups actually failed because they were using a poor package manager or source control host?

This sounds more like a spin-off of the old investment adage: "Buy stock in the products you actually use." If you spin that argument slightly as a proxy purchase, it makes sense that VCs would be investing in the products that their other startups are using heavily.

As an super-small-time investor who only owns stock in companies whose products that I use and enjoy, I can't knock them for it. For me, the logic is that whenever I tire of using something or no longer find it valuable, presumably I'll have early insight to sell the stock before the rest of the world catches on. I don't know if that same logic applies to proxy buying, but I suppose if you're intimate enough with your companies to know if they're abandoning Github for something else, as I don't know if pulling venture capital is as easy as selling the stock.

Re: GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016

#149

Post by bootload »

"GitHub quickly became essential to the code-writing process at technology companies of all sizes and gave birth to a new generation of programmers by hosting their open-source code for free."

How much would you be willing to pay to store your open-source code at github?

Re: GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016

#150

Post by OJFord »

Longhanks wrote: post #47

That and their open racism (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11049067 ). Hopefully, they wake up soon enough and stop this bs .

I thought it would be a great place to work (was on my 'list' because their engineering blog is pretty consistently awesome) until that BS.

But hey - I guess that's good for them - I'm white and male, so they get what they want if I never apply...

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