Live data from Hacker News

GitHub isn't fun anymore

jaredpalmer.com

571–580 of 623 posts

Re: GitHub isn't fun anymore

#571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes I understand. Yet it in another sense remains geographically inaccurate or contradictory, and amusingly so. It's my personal opinion that when we see such a discongreguity that we should perhaps choose other words.

Words are never some sort of perfect encapsulation of their meaning. They only achieve that via their definitions. What you're suggesting is basically using the etymological fallacy as a basis for changing words. Because of linguistic drift, a majority of words would have up be changed at some point - words like "nice" which came to mean their opposite, for example.

I think my suggestion that we should "perhaps" choose different words occasionally was mistaken for a demand that we must.

Choice of words is an individalized thing and language allows us to be as flexible as we like within still getting the point across. If I choose to say "European" instead of "western" when contrasting with indigenous Americans that sounds fine to me. If you don't make that same choice that's fine too. We'll all be understood.

Re: GitHub isn't fun anymore

#572
post #56
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before adding the newest fad features, maybe the should go back and add old fads that they missed. One big fad from 50+ years ago that I'd welcome is folders. I don't want to just have all my repositories appear in a flat list ordered by time since last update. I want to make folders so I can organize repositories by topic--just like I have my repositories organized in my computer.

The modern version is tags, but they lack good sorting/viewing for tags

It’s surprising to me that they don’t just do a folder based view using tags and relationships among tags.

I don’t like being restricted to single folders, but I’d love to symlink projects into multiple folders.

This would work out well if they just added some graph functionality among tags.

Re: GitHub isn't fun anymore

#573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes I understand. Yet it in another sense remains geographically inaccurate or contradictory, and amusingly so. It's my personal opinion that when we see such a discongreguity that we should perhaps choose other words.

> It's my personal opinion that when we see such a discongreguity that we should perhaps choose other words. Not really. Then we'd be changing terms established for centuries, that most people understand in their two contexts (geographical and cultural), with some new words we'd have to explain every time we use them -- so making things worse.

If I contrasted indigenous Americans with "European" culture rather than a "western" one, you would completely understand the meaning and it wouldn't be a big deal.

Re: GitHub isn't fun anymore

#574
post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is that Github actually discourages reviewing by commit because it makes it difficult to do so. Though there are those who are only interested in the overall diff, there are others who want to be able to maintain a clean and informative history via version control. When the review system makes it difficult to ensure that's the case, then then version control history cannot be maintained.

Precisely. We're in a vicious cycle where most people using Git don't use what ought to be Git best practices for most serious large scale projects (clean history with self-contained logical commits and good commit descriptions) because GitHub makes it so difficult to do this. And to be fair, GitLab really isn't much better in this department. And there isn't enough pressure on GitHub or GitLab to clean up their act…

If you use squash and merge this won't be a problem, you will have a "clean history with self-contained logical commits and good commit history", and intermediary commits won't matter anyway.

Re: GitHub isn't fun anymore

#575
post #73
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Social network features are such a 2015 me-too fad feature anyway. What they should add is AI, or maybe blockchain.

I would like end-to-end encrypted repositories even they can't read - like keybase!

Thats possible now, right. If they supported it more I’m not sure how much value over just encrypting blobs. I wouldn’t trust github’s clients or servers to do it for me.

Re: GitHub isn't fun anymore

#576
post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>maybe blockchain. but git is already a blockchain. each commit is a "block", with a reference back to the previous commit.

There was this one guy, whom was a cryptocurrency fanatic but not a developer, who tried to convince me to get involved in a "blockchain code database for developers". I told him that Git uses a blockchain, and he simply couldn't accept that a blockchain has been used for years on something that isn't cool or possible to monetize. It's pretty funny how people still think that a blockchain is this magical thing, yet I…

I have a funny story about how I told a colleague who was really into blockchain how I had updated our project to use a blockchain.

I demo’d github and described the distributed features with pull requests and stuff “oracle-based mediation.”

It was funny because this was maybe 3 years ago and had never heard about GitHub but had read all the blockchain literature.

Re: GitHub isn't fun anymore

#578
post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That "works on my machine" comment in particular is flippant and definitely degrades a complex discussion in my opinion. The project name is a pun on a science fiction movie, if the (unpaid) maintainer does not want to change it for compatibility reasons, that's entirely understandable. People should donate money or contribute substantial code effort towards the name change if they care enough.

Yeah, that remark really bothered me and I felt like it misunderstood the point.

"Works on my machine" is shorthand for the flippant dismissal that, "I don't need to care about that bug because it didn't show up or cause problems in a deliberately ideal environment."

The repo author is saying the opposite, that it "works" even in "non-ideal environments". That is, he has no inherent negative association with "cop" even in a near-dictatorship where, in practice, most cops are bad and work with impunity, since he thinks the concept is legit (enforcing law and order) even if particular jurisdictions get it wrong.

So, if anything, he was saying, "it even works on forgotten legacy systems"...

Re: GitHub isn't fun anymore

#579
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".

I hold a diametrically opposite viewpoint and would like to present it. I think people would be happier if they did think in terms of a six year old. There is nothing inherently "professional" about using drab and dull interfaces for coding and going to an office where you all dress in identical suits. There is quiet satisfaction in achieving mastery like you mention, but (IMO) it should be accompanied by a pleasant…

Thank you. I 100% agree. We've for some reason decided that "professional" and "enterprise grade" means dull colors, ugly interfaces, and zero room for "hacking" and "experimentation". That code needs to be "work". That the poster of the comment would claim that this is akin to the thinking of a six year old is in itself curious.

It's as if we're letting the jaded cynics of the world win.

Re: GitHub isn't fun anymore

#580
post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a bit longer than I intended, but is my point of view, and not intended to dismiss what you’re saying at all. I think it’s easy to dismiss conversations like master/slave whitelist/blacklist as overly PC or childish. I certainly don’t appreciate the overly-preachy feeling I sometimes get from people pushing their point of view. And my nature is to find pleasure in giving The Man the proverbial finger. The sel…

Git doesn't have master/slave terminology. It has a master "copy" which is not the same thing at all. It's a stupid conversation. Really it is.

I've seen at least one interesting conversation that casts at least doubt on that.

https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2019-May/...

But even the use of the word "master" as it relates to the primary copy seems to be related to a master, as in one who guides or rules others. So that seems to still be related to the master/servant relationship. I'm not an etymologist, so someone could point an error here.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/master

The point isn't that every person from Linus on has been engaged in a giant conspiracy to spread hate via git repos (Side note: would there be a secret code you can interpret by arranging hashes in a particular order?). The point is really that our language and culture contain countless reminders of the belief that not all people should be treated with equal value, to the point that we've been using them without regard to or even understanding of their impact.

Post reply on HN