Live data from Hacker News

GitHub isn't fun anymore

jaredpalmer.com

421–430 of 623 posts

Re: GitHub isn't fun anymore

#421

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…

I’ve never considered GitHub to be “fun.” It’s a great tool, though. Yeah, seeing the headline of this article made me think of how I've never heard a carpenter exclaim what fun it is to use a cordless drill.

> Yeah, seeing the headline of this article made me think of how I've never heard a carpenter exclaim what fun it is to use a cordless drill.

Strange analogy. Many people go into carpentry because they like working with power tools. It's fun.

Programming is the same. Many of us were drawn to it because we like it. It's fun.

If you go through life doing a job that you don't enjoy a tiny bit, you're going to be miserable. Why not have some fun?

Re: GitHub isn't fun anymore

#422
post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saw it on the forums for MeteorJS some time back.

I think it is not logical to take a single argument and ascribe it to a greater movement. I once knew someone who claimed to be a feminist who told me there is no such thing as consenting to penetrative sex (that all penetrative sex is rape). But it would be unreasonable to assume this ascribes to all feminism, or more obviously that all women felt this way because I saw it in one woman.

There are plenty of folks who are more worried about looking for the latest crusade to join than who are worried about a well developed view of any topic (feminism, transgender rights, etc). These folks will use any and all excuses to jump on the attack bandwagon, and that they happen to be self-labeled progressives is itself almost incidental at best.

Rage mobs aren't new, they still can cause plenty of damage and ruin careers.

Re: GitHub isn't fun anymore

#424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is not logical to take a single argument and ascribe it to a greater movement. I once knew someone who claimed to be a feminist who told me there is no such thing as consenting to penetrative sex (that all penetrative sex is rape). But it would be unreasonable to assume this ascribes to all feminism, or more obviously that all women felt this way because I saw it in one woman.

I do feel a lot of the fear around PC is based on taking extreme examples and thinking everyone is trying to destroy things. For instance the Rubocop - someone suggested it, some people agreed, some people disagreed, and ultimately they did not rename it. The React props and mount thing is just ludicrous...unfortunately the people with the most extreme viewpoints often shout the loudest.

Yes I agree that the props/mount thing is silly, which is probably why it's only seen in one discussion years ago and hasn't gained any traction since. It's far different than the issues that garnered the rise of community guidelines, which were broad, systemic, and repeated in several communities.

Re: GitHub isn't fun anymore

#425
I thought the fun part was being able to share code with the world and get contributions or even people interested in teaming up out of that? I have literally never looked at trending, and I'm not sure why I ever would.

Re: GitHub isn't fun anymore

#426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Their abrupt cease of support for mercurial damaged it beyond repair for me and many others. I'm not the biggest Atlassian fan, but they posted in August last year, gave 10 months notice and cited that less than 1% of new repos being created are using mercurial as their primary reason for doing so. If you cared about a project, almost a year is plenty of time to move it. I don't think it's entirely unreasonable to…

It was more like a community and they destroyed it. Less than 1% of new repos were mercurial (what a surprise with zero mentions of mercurial anywhere except small text and zero marketing and they didn't even have it in their self-hosted product), sure, but existing repos were the problem. Some abandoned ones are lost forever. At least archive them, offer a tar download, anything... People had to parse the issues, pe…

> I think after a year they could put everything in archive mode, but no, they deleted it with no easy export.

I mean, it's still there. If it's that much of an issue, and the tooling has been made by the community, you're free to archive it now. At what point is it ok for them to say "hey, we don't want to pay to store the data/keep the codepaths to display/interact with this data" anymore?

How many of those people were paying customers before this? I don't know the answer offhand, but if I had to guess, I'd suspect a small number of them.

> That's not OK and I'm clearly very, very angry as a former user.

I hope as a paying customer, you cancelled your subscription to them and told them explicitly why then.

Re: GitHub isn't fun anymore

#427
post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've read that thread a few times and I see the people requesting the change doing so in a calm, reasonable manner. The only non-productive posts I see are from people who are vehemently and acerbically against it.

That's false in the first 10 comments > emilyst commented 11 days ago I live in a country with a real dictator (although not on paper), unchecked police that's just an instrument in the hands of the government, and while no one here has any fondness of the Bulgarian police as an institution or our cops, I don't have any issues with the words "police" and "cop". "works on my machine" Additionally I haven't seen a sing…

They high-road the guy until their's no room left for discussion. They stop just short of calling him a racist authoritarian for naming his package RuboCop years ago. The creator isn't even from the US, it's a bit ignorant to assume the entire world shares their personal world view, and worse to assume the rest of the world should cater to it. I am entirely sympathetic toward the US' plight right now, and we have had protests in my city in a different country in solidarity. But it's a US systemic and cultural problem specifically, we probably shouldn't accuse random people from other countries of being racist just because they aren't immediately up to speed with your issues.

Re: GitHub isn't fun anymore

#428
post #10

A major reason open source projects use GitHub is the social network features. It really helps you build traction and get noticed. Regardless of what you may think of it the trending page does indeed drive further traffic which drives adoption. Otherwise we'd all still be on SourceForge or migrate to something more OSS pure like Gitlab.

We don't all migrate to gitlab mainly because Github's UI is better and because of network effects. Nothing to do with social features.

Thanks for your feedback on GitLab's UI. We're always working to make it better, so if you have specific feedback, please do share.

Re: GitHub isn't fun anymore

#429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is not logical to take a single argument and ascribe it to a greater movement. I once knew someone who claimed to be a feminist who told me there is no such thing as consenting to penetrative sex (that all penetrative sex is rape). But it would be unreasonable to assume this ascribes to all feminism, or more obviously that all women felt this way because I saw it in one woman.

There are plenty of folks who are more worried about looking for the latest crusade to join than who are worried about a well developed view of any topic (feminism, transgender rights, etc). These folks will use any and all excuses to jump on the attack bandwagon, and that they happen to be self-labeled progressives is itself almost incidental at best. Rage mobs aren't new, they still can cause plenty of damage and r…

And I think it is unreasonable to assume that a single bad take on a subject made by an anonymous user years ago should be held as an example that there is an overwhelming movement of harming the OS community. It is simultaneously possible that plenty of individuals have uninformed, clumsy approaches to a topic and that it is not an overwhelming movement or agenda.

Re: GitHub isn't fun anymore

#430
post #288

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 it's a consequence of gamifying absolutely everything. If you had a online tool I used to quietly manage production at my cardboard box factory and then you went and added leader boards, badges, xp, recognition points and an influencer score, then box manufacturing better be pretty bloody exciting for me from now on. We now have an entire generation of software developers who have never known these tools without the gamified experience.
Post reply on HN