Live data from Hacker News

GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016

bloomberg.com

481–490 of 594 posts

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

#481
post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similar to Twitter. I do not understand why the hell they get political.

The mountain does not go to Mohammed, Mohammed goes to the mountain. That is, politics is not something you can opt out of. Choosing to do or not do certain things impacts certain individuals and groups. The result is politics. It comes to you. If you operate any system by which humans can communicate, politics is inevitable.

Twitter is very politicised though.

The ban hammer is not wielded impartially.

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

#482
post #384
post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't follow when github started getting political. What happened?

Opalgate: https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/941 TLDR: Some possibly transphobic person said something on the internet that got traced back to his github account. Some person not connected to the project complains and get's transphobic person removed from github. Github hires complainer to "improve diversity". That and a couple of other things like their code of conduct have indicated that github wants to be the PC…

[deleted]

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

#483
post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Opalgate: https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/941 TLDR: Some possibly transphobic person said something on the internet that got traced back to his github account. Some person not connected to the project complains and get's transphobic person removed from github. Github hires complainer to "improve diversity". That and a couple of other things like their code of conduct have indicated that github wants to be the PC…

i wonder how Linus would have responded, and if linux were to be born today, considering's Linus' abrasive tongue, would survive. some of these people have a point - their small minority though is pretty rabid and off point. i've never seen "RESPECT ME!" ever not backfire, on any scale and for any group. it'll be interesting how we will resolve this kind of emergent social angst - before too much of our future falls…

  i've never seen "RESPECT ME!" ever not backfire, on any scale and for any group.
Perhaps you mean something different than what I'm understanding you to have said, but demanding respect seams like it was a key part of women's suffrage, the American civil rights movement, and the more recent push for marriage equality [1]. It is true that there are still plenty of people who do not respect those groups, but they currently receive vastly more respect than they would if they had not stood up for themselves.

[1] clearly not meant to be an exhaustive list

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

#484
post #438
post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never said she was responsible for it, but the same line of thinking behind that is what allowed a professional bully to get hired in the first place.

Professional bully? She's a Ruby developer, and a damned good one at that by all accounts. Even if you choose to categorize her as a "bully," it's very evident that "bullying" is a hobby of hers and not related to how well she does her job (programming). If her contributions to community management software are valuable, what does it matter her politics? I reiterate that if you are looking for a place to host your co…

> Even if you choose to categorize her as a "bully," it's very evident that "bullying" is a hobby of hers and not related to how well she does her job (programming).

Yeah but GitHub isn't a meritocracy remember...

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

#485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've been working hard to remove features, introduce bugs, and decrease quality throughout the year.

Phabricator definitely has a superior sense of humor. (If anyone reading this hasn't checked out their website, I highly recommend it) I was, of course, not trying to say that Phab was regressing but rather that GitHub had picked up the pace. There have absolutely been good improvements to Phab this year too!

In the case of Phabricator, I wonder if that sense of humor works against them. The first time I followed a link to their site and read the description[1], I was convinced that it was a joke poking fun at how ridiculous overwrought do-everything enterprise systems tend to be.

[1] https://www.phacility.com/phabricator/

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

#486
post #384
post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't follow when github started getting political. What happened?

Opalgate: https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/941 TLDR: Some possibly transphobic person said something on the internet that got traced back to his github account. Some person not connected to the project complains and get's transphobic person removed from github. Github hires complainer to "improve diversity". That and a couple of other things like their code of conduct have indicated that github wants to be the PC…

You sometimes hear stuff about how github has all these internal problems now, since they got rid of their special rug or whatever, but is there any evidence of this spilling over into the projects they host?

As far as I can tell projects are still managing themselves as they and their leaders see fit. Seems fine to me.

The spectre of spooky SJWs haunting silicon valley shouldn't be the thing prompting people to consider redundancy in their source code management.

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

#487
post #133
post #19

I can't find the blog post, but some blog wrote a while ago why VCs invest in companies like Github. TL;DR -- basically it provides infrastructure for other startups. The business itself may not be a great business due to the amount of cost it takes to run it -- but it's necessary for the running of other ventures. Sort of like highways and non-toll bridges.

> basically it provides infrastructure for other startups The good news for them, is they can become much more. GitLab learned earlier on, the value of selling to Enterprise as opposed to startups. They (GitHub) really should have gone on a hiring blitz a few years ago, to find people who understood Enterprise. GitHub, way over estimated the value of "social programming", when it comes to Enterprise. I would say 80%…

more like 100%. But the better solution may be to reverse than instead of coping with the system in place.

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

#488
post #3

The thought of losing Github to the startup graveyard is kind of scary. It was bad enough to lose Google Code and when SourceForge had their "great purge" of inactive projects.

> It was bad enough [...] when SourceForge had their "great purge" of inactive projects. What purge? I'm personally aware of some projects which are still on SourceForge which haven't been touched in >10 years. If there was a purge, it must have been limited to projects with no activity whatsoever.

http://www.infoworld.com/article/2929732/open-source-softwar...

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

#489
post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ignoring the fact that the VCs want to get paid and GitHub's employees want to keep working, how big of a skeleton crew would it take to keep a site like GitHub running in "maintenance" mode?

Can you really put something in "maintenance" mode without killing it? Maintaining the app and not moving forward with new features and adding value (because of lack of resources), I would assume it would just die eventually.

...it's a source control company. What additional features could I possibly want? They serve their purpose just fine.

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

#490
post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ads, they are making good money from the ads that they removed paid plans and gave all the features to everyone.

Keep in mind that also have a superior product to just about every image host that came before them (other than Flickr), they are the de-facto favored image host for Reddit, and to top it off have their own social networking features with non-trivial market adoption. With that many eyeballs on your site it's no surprise that even their subtle advertising style [1] is profitable. I'd personally much rather see sponsor…

> they are the de-facto favored image host for Reddit

Not any more - https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/25/reddit-image-uploads/

Post reply on HN