Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

GitHub isn't fun anymore

jaredpalmer.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 623 posts

Re: GitHub isn't fun anymore

#321

Post by Cthulhu_ »

lqet wrote: post #288
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #100

I’ve never considered GitHub to be “fun.” It’s a great tool , though. Most of my GH interaction is through my desktop system, not a browser (pushing and pulling checkouts). I’ve been using some form of source control for nearly 30 years (since Projector, in the 1990s). It’s a tool. A very, very important tool. I appreciate many of the “glossy” features of GH, like hero images and GH Pages, but this shows how “out of…

Tangential: what is up with this inflationary expectation that everything should be "fun" and "exciting" and "thrilling"? I feel like western society as a whole is thinking more and more in terms of a six year old. For adults, there lies incredible satisfaction in mastering any but the most exploitative professions or jobs and fulfilling them dutifully, even if they are be no means "fun".

I think ultimately Sourceforge fell from grace because it wasn't "fun", whatever that may mean; it was lacking the social features, poor UX, etc. Many things that make it boring or "not fun".

I've looked at some tools used by Google - mailing lists, Gerrit, etc - none of those look fun. For a casual like me, fun is important.

I don't do much with open source because I don't have the headspace, willpower or persistence to contribute much so the discussion is a bit wasted on me, but I've used both Github, Gitlab and Stash (Atlassian) for work projects; the feedback loop that tools like this give is super important to me.

Re: GitHub isn't fun anymore

#322

Post by xwdv »

schwartzworld wrote: post #316
xwdv wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The master and slave debate was dumb, and reflects a creeping of political correctness into coding and software over the years that I do not look forward to. React’s keywords have been similarly attacked for promoting a “bro” culture with use of words like props or mount. And man-in-the-middle attacks are increasingly being described as person-in-the-middle, at the expense of alliteration. So many other examples out…

> bro culture...props and mount who has made this accusation?

Saw it on the forums for MeteorJS some time back.

Re: GitHub isn't fun anymore

#323

Post by conradludgate »

chrisan wrote: post #254
fxtentacle wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yay! There's one thing I would absolutely love about having a blockchain in GitHub: The transfer fees. If everyone had to pay $1 to submit an issue and/or a pull request, open source projects would get a lot less "support spam" :) Also, it would certainly help if people need to wait 10 minutes for their last comment to be accepted into the network before they're allowed to comment again.

> If everyone had to pay $1 to submit an issue and/or a pull request, open source projects would get a lot less "support spam" :) I dunno, that seems odd. Do you not want to know about bugs in your project to make it better? I realize people will submit a bug b/c they can't figure out how to implement something but that is worth being aware of real bugs in the code. Now if you could "tax" the "+1" spam culture, I'd b…

Do people still do that? How long has it been since they added reactions?

Re: GitHub isn't fun anymore

#324

Post by arghwhat »

Carpetsmoker wrote: post #229
gspr wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't sound abrasive at all to me. It's just a normal technical disagreement. What am I missing?

You don't think it's strange for a service provider to tell people that "mercurial isn't suitable for this" (even though it clearly works, and has been working for many years) and "you're writing your program wrong"? It's fine to not support certain use cases because it's too much effort or otherwise too expensive. It's not fine to, as a service provider, tell people that their programs are (and I quote) "wrong". If…

No, because mercurial really isn't suitable for this. Nor is Git for that matter.

Similar thing happened on Github with CocoaPods: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11245652.

Re: GitHub isn't fun anymore

#325

Post by geofft »

This complaint makes no sense. (It may still be true - fun is subjective - but the article offers an objective argument for it that doesn't hold up.)

> The Trending page used to be a straight-up list of the projects with the most new stars in the last 24 hours across the whole site (and by language).

...

> In this era of Developer Relations, VC-backed open source, and the endless developer-content-bullshit machine, the old Trending page was one of the few places left on the web where it seemed like the best ideas still won.

I've been seeing corporate projects beg for stars (from either employees or users) for almost a decade now. Meanwhile, I have never asked for stars on my personal repos and I think most people don't. If you don't like companies putting their finger on the scale, stars are the absolute last thing to measure!

> The worst side effect of the new Trending page is that a lot project discovery has moved to other platforms, and more specifically, to Twitter. This isn’t good for the community. We went from a flawed meritocracy ... good ideas and good projects are getting lost, especially from newcomers.

How, exactly, are newcomers supposed to get stars on their projects without a following?

Re: GitHub isn't fun anymore

#326

Post by Cthulhu_ »

gdgtfiend wrote: post #320

> The old Trending algorithm was definitely flawed, but it was simple, objective, and ever so slightly ruthless. It heavily skewed toward JavaScript and web development, but under-indexed a lot of backend and AI stuff. Isn't that super contradictory? How is the old algorithm both objective AND skewed towards Javascript?

The author didn't say it was fair, they said it was objective; objectively speaking, JS projects get all the new stars compared to backend and AI stuff, therefore are the most popular.

Of course, a more fair algorithm - if your definition of fair is that multiple disciplines and specializations, and / or language get the same exposure - would be to show the top starred / most active repos in certain categories (back-end, AI, specific languages, etc).

Re: GitHub isn't fun anymore

#328

Post by [deleted] »

lqet wrote: post #288
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #100

I’ve never considered GitHub to be “fun.” It’s a great tool , though. Most of my GH interaction is through my desktop system, not a browser (pushing and pulling checkouts). I’ve been using some form of source control for nearly 30 years (since Projector, in the 1990s). It’s a tool. A very, very important tool. I appreciate many of the “glossy” features of GH, like hero images and GH Pages, but this shows how “out of…

Tangential: what is up with this inflationary expectation that everything should be "fun" and "exciting" and "thrilling"? I feel like western society as a whole is thinking more and more in terms of a six year old. For adults, there lies incredible satisfaction in mastering any but the most exploitative professions or jobs and fulfilling them dutifully, even if they are be no means "fun".

[deleted]

Re: GitHub isn't fun anymore

#329

Post by malwrar »

peteforde wrote: post #293
pickpuck wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of the “trending” page wasn’t that it always showed you React. It showed you tiny repositories that had exploded in popularity that day.

So what? Why would you drop what you're doing to check out something you don't need to know exists? I'm not trying to be an asshole: focus is both incredibly hard and the only way to build great things. There are a countless number of things you're better off doing than checking out new random shit. Those people have already had their success. What are you bringing?

I haven’t participated in this trend-hunting behavior the author describes, but it sounds like it has the main appeal of HN—see new ideas that other people with a similar mindset are talking about. There’s educational and entertainment value to that, and while you’re right time is better spent grinding on projects it certainly sounds appealing to have a window into stuff other people are working on that is also mildly curated.

Re: GitHub isn't fun anymore

#330

Post by blondin »

chrisandchips wrote: post #299
lqet wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tangential: what is up with this inflationary expectation that everything should be "fun" and "exciting" and "thrilling"? I feel like western society as a whole is thinking more and more in terms of a six year old. For adults, there lies incredible satisfaction in mastering any but the most exploitative professions or jobs and fulfilling them dutifully, even if they are be no means "fun".

TBF, I don't think the author is saying that Github needs to be fun, but rather that it used to be and now isn't. It's lost a nice quality that it had.

having a hard time understanding what the author is saying. i never considered github to be a place to have fun at. and i am surprised by this article and curious how other people see or use github...

by the way, the trending page is not everything about github!

i keep discovering and bookmarking github projects every now and then. for example, this repository where the author has implementations for trigonometry functions in k&r c: https://github.com/richgel999/triglib

i don't believe github has lost its quality either!

they recently pushed that new layout preview that made the app usable when my zoom level is at 150%. i was very happy about that. i can't wait for github to provide a better search engine. and i have the feeling that they are totally working on it :)

Post reply on HN