GitHub Raises $250M at $2B Valuation • Hacker News Board

Re: GitHub Raises $250M at $2B Valuation

#381

Post by Fishkins » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 4:35 PM UTC

ssmoot wrote: post #376

Fishkins wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My employer also recently switched from Hipchat to Slack, and I'd say Slack is vastly superior. Most important for me are the notifications. Slack lets you set per-channel notification settings. With Hipchat I'd either miss messages I wanted to see or have to get constant notifications. "More granular notifications" was either the #1 or #2 highest-voted issue in their feature requests for over three years , and they'…

Since I used the keyboard for most of my navigation in HipChat I find Slack incredibly annoying. With HipChat I could rearrange channels and have my most often used 3 at the top and switch between with a couple keystrokes. With Slack it's so much more cumbersome. Slack feels much slower. In Hipchat you can edit your last message with Vim style substitution strings. i.e.: s/were/where/ The Channel/Group distinction in…

I know about the s// substitution, but it just isn't very useful. Sometimes I'll have sent a couple messages before I notice a typo. Also, it's very limited in the type of edits it can make. Last time I tried to use it I realized I had typed "it's" instead of "its", but it turns out I had already using "it's" earlier in the message. I ended up making both "it's" wrong instead of correcting the one I wanted to.

Slack added @here a few weeks ago. Otherwise that would have been on my list of Hipchat pluses.

Being able to rearrange channels would be nice, but it isn't a big deal to me. I mostly use the "Jump to next unread message" hotkey in Slack to switch between channels.

Re: GitHub Raises $250M at $2B Valuation

#382

Post by Anderkent » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 4:37 PM UTC

danieltillett wrote: post #212

e40 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes fundraising is to get cash to founders, early investors.

mmm - insiders trying to get out is never a good sign.

People wanting to rebalance their portfolio isn't really a warning. Someone selling out completely perhaps is; but people need money for things.

Re: GitHub Raises $250M at $2B Valuation

#383

Post by mpdehaan2 » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 4:56 PM UTC

michaelmior wrote: post #329

mpdehaan2 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Despite having a gazillion issue trackers, something halfway between the two would be welcome. GitHub issue tracking is not good enough to manage any kind of large project, JIRA is a bit of a beast. I'd prefer having an integrated JIRA any day, though I do still strongly DISLIKE JIRA. There's still opportunity for something better IMHO. (For very small teams, I find that's Trello, but Trello isn't really for large gr…

AFAIK, GitHub uses GitHub to build GitHub. I'd say GitHub is a large project.

I'm not positive they use it for issue tracking but they may. In my case, I was dealing with a single repo with 1000 or so contributors, and they were community people so it was very hard to get them to file quality structured bug reports, and the system didn't really allow for asking questions.

It lacks strong organizational features, categorization, issue templates, search, and ability to save filters.

I've seen a lot of projects use it for pull requests and then disable the issue tracker, which is good and bad - you get a better tracker, you miss probably half of the bug reports.

Re: GitHub Raises $250M at $2B Valuation

#384

Post by bjourne » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 4:57 PM UTC

timr wrote: post #63

calcsam wrote: post #41

Both this piece, and most commenters, seem to miss the point about where Github's value comes from. It's not for being a social identity for programmers, or hosting open-source libraries. Those are worthy pursuits, but from a business perspective mostly serve as marketing. Github is basically Microsoft Word for programmers, and is an essential part of their workflow. Companies that need enterprise functionality aroun…

Microsoft Word became a valuable monopoly because it was a proprietary standard. But git hosting is a commodity service. There are already a number of players doing exactly what GitHub does, for less money, and it's trivially easy to migrate a repository away from GitHub to those other providers. Something tells me that the "facebook for programmers" angle is essential to selling the dream here. The so-called "networ…

> There are already a number of players doing exactly what GitHub does, for less money, and it's trivially easy to migrate a repository away from GitHub to those other providers.

What does "exactly" mean in this context? I've looked at competing code hosting sites and could find none that does exactly what GitHub does. For example GitHub very good search function which can quickly search through all commits, pull requests, tickets and wiki pages in a project in one go. It's a very useful feature no other code hosting site has. And that's just one of dozens of features (the repo branch visualization tool being another) that other sites doesn't have or doesn't do nearly as well as GitHub.

In a way, back then, Gmail did "exactly" what Hotmail did.. But not really.

Re: GitHub Raises $250M at $2B Valuation

#385

Post by shlant » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 4:58 PM UTC

blazespin wrote: post #112

timr wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft Word became a valuable monopoly because it was a proprietary standard. But git hosting is a commodity service. There are already a number of players doing exactly what GitHub does, for less money, and it's trivially easy to migrate a repository away from GitHub to those other providers. Something tells me that the "facebook for programmers" angle is essential to selling the dream here. The so-called "networ…

Agreed, the valuation makes no sense to me. There's really no switching costs that I see. Bitbucket is actually superior in many ways because of its tight integration with Atlassian - the real Microsoft Word of the Developer community. Sourceforge had this kind of play at one point and look at it now. Maybe they're going to start displaying ads for jobs for developers. Not sure that's worth 2B though...

The only benefit I have ever seen with Bitbucket is it is priced per user instead of per repo which is only a benefit if you have smaller teams. The very first project I created for myself in my new role was to move everything out of Bitbucket to GitHub.

Github is so ubiquitous that it too has very good integration with Jira. It's popularity alone means that essentially anything that has version control integration has Github integration.

Here's the thing though: besides the many benefits of Github mentioned in this thread, such as the interface being MUCH nicer and more streamlined, 2 factor auth (which, yes, is VERY important) etc. the nail in the coffin for Bitbucket comes down to one very understandable feature:

After almost 4 YEARS, you STILL can't search through source code on Bitbucket. If there is any confirmation that Atlassian has no idea what developers actually want, that is it right there.

https://bitbucket.org/site/master/issues/2874/ability-to-sea...

Re: GitHub Raises $250M at $2B Valuation

#386

Post by findjashua » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 5:06 PM UTC

sytse wrote: post #335

findjashua wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

my apologies if my tone come across as combative. Slack: 1. I agree on the part about multiple teams, but since I only use it for work, it hasn't really been much of an issue. 2. I never really had any issues w message delivery, I'm on Android though, and it seems like you're on iOS. 3. I also don't remember having any issues w integrations, do you have a specific example of something that it wasn't able to do? 4. Wh…

GitLab protects the master branch by default and other branches can be configured to be protected. Protected branches don't allow force pushes or deletions from anyone.

good to know, ty!

Re: GitHub Raises $250M at $2B Valuation

#387

Post by findjashua » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 5:09 PM UTC

timblair wrote: post #327

findjashua wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

my apologies if my tone come across as combative. Slack: 1. I agree on the part about multiple teams, but since I only use it for work, it hasn't really been much of an issue. 2. I never really had any issues w message delivery, I'm on Android though, and it seems like you're on iOS. 3. I also don't remember having any issues w integrations, do you have a specific example of something that it wasn't able to do? 4. Wh…

Regarding (Slack/4)... I believe that toomuchtodo is talking about the following features within Slack: * Stars: the ability to privately star individual messages (so you can easily find them again) * Pinning: the ability to publicly highlight specific messages within a channel, much like pinned posts in a forum (effectively channel-wide starring) * History links: click on the timestamp next to any Slack message and…

i see. History links does seem like a useful feature (I've pasted links to SO answers in slack, so same could be applied to when someone answers a q on slack)

Stars also seems like a useful feature, but I'm so used to pasting useful stuff in a google doc, never even thought of it

Re: GitHub Raises $250M at $2B Valuation

#388

Post by michaelmior » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 5:28 PM UTC

mpdehaan2 wrote: post #383

michaelmior wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK, GitHub uses GitHub to build GitHub. I'd say GitHub is a large project.

I'm not positive they use it for issue tracking but they may. In my case, I was dealing with a single repo with 1000 or so contributors, and they were community people so it was very hard to get them to file quality structured bug reports, and the system didn't really allow for asking questions. It lacks strong organizational features, categorization, issue templates, search, and ability to save filters. I've seen a…

I would agree with you on most points, but isn't categorization accomplished by tags?

Re: GitHub Raises $250M at $2B Valuation

#389

Post by JimmaDaRustla » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 5:29 PM UTC

lojack wrote: post #357

JimmaDaRustla wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going to say exactly this - Word had very little competition, whereas GitHub has many equivalent competitors. I'm a fan of BitBucket - they allow free private repos, but the company as a whole offers multiple other enterprise solutions above and beyond what GitHub provides.

Word had massive amounts of competition. WordPerfect dominated the market well before Microsoft Word, was the biggest competitor for a long time, and still remains popular in niche applications. Lotus Word Pro, WordStar, StarOffice, and countless other lesser used products. Arguably, word processors are the one piece of software that probably has had the most competition throughout the years.

If that was true, where are they now?

I remember some of these products as being wretched, and Word was our saviour, even with it's terrible formatting sometimes.

Re: GitHub Raises $250M at $2B Valuation

#390

Post by lifeisstillgood » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 5:35 PM UTC

TillE wrote: post #89

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? I trust a private repo I am paying for to be there in a few years. Perhaps I am still of the "buying a cd" generation but someone somewhere has to pay for a saas service. It's just more real this way.

The beauty of DVCS is that it really doesn't matter if your "main" repository suddenly vanishes. As long as you've got it checked out locally, just push it somewhere else.

The main point is that I have to pay someone - otherwise hosting and indeed it seems every web service out there is running on the Greater Fool Theory.