Live data from Hacker News

I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA

reddit.com

41–50 of 210 posts

Re: I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m more willing to believe the openly viewable GitLab migration tracker, which shows several thousand projects migrated. Just another way Gitlab is nice is the openly viewable statistics versus a generalization. https://about.gitlab.com/2018/06/03/movingtogitlab/

a few hundred thousand repositories of the 85 million reported Github repositories is really not much, see https://github.com/ten at the bottom for the number.

[deleted]

Re: I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA

#42
> Is there any truth to the rumor that Clippy will be joining your team? I think "You appear to have a merge conflict. How can I help you?" is a good fit for Github.

> His name is actually Clippit, and you will address him as Mr. Clippit.

Classic

Edit: https://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/8pc8mf/im_nat_friedman...

Re: I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA

#43
post #11

> That said, the GitHub team reports that the set of users who have migrated or closed their accounts is extremely small, and this is more than made up for by the surge of new signups and new interest in GitHub this week. It's interesting to hear this. If you were on HN the past week, it might have seemed from all the front page articles that GitHub was about to implode due to an an exodus to GitLab.

Interesting, and also...a lie? Or he thinks the 250,000 projects migrated to gitlab within 24 hours of the news that Microsoft was going anywhere near GitHub is a small number.

That IS a small number. Consider the context.

Re: I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA

#44
post #24

Ever since I heard of "Monaco" the online code editor which is used in VSCode. I always assumed Microsoft will eventually come up with a completely online IDE >> deploy toolchain like a GitHub on steroids. I think this acquisition is pretty much all about that. Nobody seems to have mentioned this yet though, at least not that I have read of.

An online toolchain would be a nice concept in theory, but at least on my laptop, performance is still an issue.

Online IDEs still eat up a lot more resources.

Re: I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA

#45

Why was the AMA posted on /r/AMA instead of /r/IAMA? Certainly the future CEO of GitHub is notable enough for the latter subreddit.

I assume that's just an embarrassing mistake on the part of Github's PR team. There's really no reason that a CEO currently making headlines should be on /r/AMA instead of r/IAMA (70x more users).

It's worth noting that until the deal closes, Nat isn't actually part of GitHub. That would make it the Microsoft PR team or his deal -- not GitHub's.

Re: I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA

#46
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a few hundred thousand repositories of the 85 million reported Github repositories is really not much, see https://github.com/ten at the bottom for the number.

of those 85 million how many are actually active and not just placeholder empty repos or automated mirrors for wordpress/jquery plugins? Not on anyones side here but if the top 250k repos switched, that would be really bad news. I think it's more important to compare size and popularity of the repos than just what the % is.

i assumed that only small repositories that nobody except the author is using can be moved in such a small timespan of a few hours. Heavily used open source projects have issues indexed in Google with permalinks, their users probably hardcoding git urls, connections to package managers, heavily customized Travis CI integrations and the like.

Re: I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA

#47
post #6

Nat is being really smart here. It should not backfire unless he acts pedantic or insults Redditors intelligence. I think that both are unlikely. Maybe Nat is trying to counteract any PR damage to GitHub, or maybe he just wants to see how much can skyrocket his account's karma. If I was in his situation I will be happy doing it for both reasons.

Maybe he also wants to connect with the user base and answer questions on a moderated popular platform.

He may even be interested in taking the pulse of some of the community and learning from interesting questions.

I know I would.

Re: I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA

#48
post #11

> That said, the GitHub team reports that the set of users who have migrated or closed their accounts is extremely small, and this is more than made up for by the surge of new signups and new interest in GitHub this week. It's interesting to hear this. If you were on HN the past week, it might have seemed from all the front page articles that GitHub was about to implode due to an an exodus to GitLab.

My sense is that any projects willing to move from GitHub to gitlab on a Sunday evening because of a rumour that GitHub was going to be sold were not really serious projects and losing them isn't a big loss for GitHub.

Re: I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA

#49
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume that's just an embarrassing mistake on the part of Github's PR team. There's really no reason that a CEO currently making headlines should be on /r/AMA instead of r/IAMA (70x more users).

It's worth noting that until the deal closes, Nat isn't actually part of GitHub. That would make it the Microsoft PR team or his deal -- not GitHub's.

That makes less sense as Microsoft has done some excellent AMAs with the Excel team:

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3rid26/we_are_the_mic...

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/777mb6/we_are_the_mic...

Re: I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA

#50
post #27
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I think most people Based on... what exactly? That's a big claim to make without any data.

its a reasonable expectation. You don't need any data to understand that most people will care about certain things in a given situation. (and actually, in making such a generalization, data is being used to make that, its a bit difficult to present that data since its more of a soft 'life experience and understanding of what positions others might be in and choices they might make in such positions' kind of data.)

>its a reasonable expectation. You don't need any data to understand that most people will care about certain things in a given situation.

I don't even know what that means; it's so vague and lacking in detail as to be useless. Of course "people care about things in situations". but we're talking about _what_ they care about, and that depends on the situation. For example: "are Nazi's bad?". I don't need to see hard numbers to believe that the answer from most people will be "yes". "Is MS buying GitHub bad"? That's a whole other story. The vocal minority often doesn't represent the majority in things like this.

I think it's pretty clear that most people in fact _don't_ care about the things the-dude cares about. Privacy, lock in, using services provided by "evil" companies... these are things a tiny fraction of people care about. You know how I know that? All of these companies you don't like are _insanely_ successful.

Post reply on HN