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Nginx has moved to GitHub

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Re: Nginx has moved to GitHub

#111

Post by sjshn »

amiga386 wrote: post #24
aseipp wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are some alternatives like https://grep.app or https://sourcegraph.com/search if you want fast live search, but at the end of the day these are services offered by companies, and rather expensive ones especially for free anonymous users, so you should probably at least accept that service providers can and do change things like this. You can also run something like your own copy of Zoekt and then ingest reposit…

Github managed to provided search to free anonymous users since its inception in 2007, to mid-2023 when they introduced this new code search. I would submit that this change is entirely business-related: it's a power-play to make people create accounts and stay logged in so they can track you better. It is not that they cannot afford it, it is that they are enshittifying the service to further their interests. If the…

As a fairly recently departed GitHub employee, I know with certainty that this change is primarily related to abuse. The search infrastructure (both old and new) is complicated and expensive to run, and anonymous search was abused at a remarkably large scale. DDoS against the anonymous search service was a big problem, but another was the presence of many very large search botnets that constantly scraped the site for secrets and other confidential data inadvertently made public. Long time users might remember that anonymous search was aggressively rate-limited on a per-IP basis, but the size of the search botnets grew to a scale that made this ineffective.

My personal opinion is that most enshittifying changes on GitHub are due to the proliferation of middle managers who are evaluated almost exclusively on speed-shipping net-new features at the expense of maintenance and incremental improvement of existing features.

Re: Nginx has moved to GitHub

#112

Post by Dylan16807 »

Alupis wrote: post #105
nicce wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The person you are responding to doesn't even want to make a free account yet expects to be able to use all of Github's services for free. To be fair, definition of free depends. OPs argument was that they pay with data. That is not free if you think that you lose something. It is different question do we value it similarly.

Ok then, so that's like going to a restaurant and complaining the food costs money. Metaphoric " duh ".

That's not accurate. GitHub is still getting lots of data from people without accounts, and providing open access helps them get more users in general.

If we have to do a restaurant analogy, it's like going to a restaurant (buffet?), opting out of premium, and still wanting access to a particular food item. It's not automatically ridiculous.

Re: Nginx has moved to GitHub

#113

Post by smcnally »

amiga386 wrote: post #62
arp242 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So those people are outright lying through their teeth? Got it. You're just reasoning from negativity and cynicism. No evidence for anything. Other than "zomg they're bad".

I didn't say they were lying. It can be true that their new search is better but costlier to run. They can focus on that in their PR, along with how shiny and new the shiny new search is, to distract you that they are removing anonymous search and making the site worse. Nobody made them turn off the old search, they chose that, and they bundled the two together in one PR push. Fancy new search = carrot. Remove anonym…

I don’t begrudge them requesting an authorized user account for some cases. YMMV. They balance this against allowing more open access to other projects, features and functions. Their balanced approach seems reasonable.

Re: Nginx has moved to GitHub

#114

Post by zaik »

azzentys wrote: post #4

Recently, I was browsing an open source project I use a lot. "Sign in to search code on GitHub" was kinda discouraging to see. Sure, I can clone it and run grep/ripgrep - but sometimes I like the ability to search the code on the browser. Is it only GitHub where this is a restriction or GitLab is similar?

If you find searching locally cumbersome, you should know that you can do a "shallow" git clone which only downloads the most recent commit and is much faster than cloning the whole repo.

    git clone --depth 1 ...

Re: Nginx has moved to GitHub

#115

Post by Dylan16807 »

smolder wrote: post #87
dsr_ wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the last seven months, Google has pushed every non-login search from my house network through a captcha; the image captcha is typically five to infinite repetitions. Audio captcha works after a single run-through, except that it is frequently "unavailable" now. I don't know why. Google won't tell me. They just started doing the same for YouTube: "Please login because we have detected malicious behavior from your…

You're probably blocking ads or blocking tracking in some fashion and denying them signals their naive models use to evaluate whether you're bot-or-not. It could be somewhat intentional but I'd lean towards it being an edge case they just don't care to address.

It's a big enough edge case that not caring to address it makes it intentional.

Re: Nginx has moved to GitHub

#116

Post by Dylan16807 »

Alupis wrote: post #108
tourmalinetaco wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s Microsoft, one of the most successful companies in human history. A poorly formed moralistic argument about “entitlement” is absurd. They certainly feel entitled to every aspect of my life, as do most other Fortune 500 companies, I think I can safely desire not needing to log in during a damn search.

So again, because Microsoft has more money than you do, it entitles you to their services for free ? Where else in life does this logic apply? Perhaps you waded into a conversation without even understanding the core complaint. You can search on Github without a user account, entirely for free . However, they do not provide context-based code search to non-users, despite it still being free. If for whatever reasons y…

"more money than you" is a pretty crazy strawman of the actual comparison they made.

The general idea of imposing more user-friendliness on very large corporations is not a bad one.

Re: Nginx has moved to GitHub

#117

Post by jaktet »

mh- wrote: post #73
Alupis wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counter-anecdote. I cannot even remember the last time I was asked to log into Github, at the office, at home, on my laptop, and even on my phone. Do you perhaps have a browser setting that nukes cookies/session data by any chance? Or perhaps use a VPN that might be tripping some sort of account protection mechanism?

Counter-counter, I share his experience as well and don't have any of those things. Just bog standard Chrome with no extensions. What I do have, and I expect is relevant: frequent ~weeklong gaps where I don't access GitHub at all in this browser profile. I assume there's some medium-lived token that's refreshed when you access the site.

My experience is similar to yours, though I seem to have to login every other week or so it feels like (maybe it’s once a month I don’t know).

This feeling could also be exasperated though since while I only use a personal GitHub account, I access it frequently from the browser and app on numerous devices.

I can definitively say though that I need to login more than twice a year on any one device.

Re: Nginx has moved to GitHub

#118

Post by smcnally »

Alupis wrote: post #69
pcl wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely understand where they're coming from. Maintaining two separate search stacks for different user groups sounds like a nightmare. Multiply that by every feature that increases in complexity enough to bubble up on the cost-center metrics, and it for sure makes sense to prune complexity at the cost of secondary-feature functionality for anonymous requests.

Besides all of that - Github has zero obligation to provide Free services to users, let alone non-users . The person you are responding to doesn't even want to make a free account yet expects to be able to use all of Github's services for free . That's some wild entitlement. The disconnect here is unreal...

One day I’m going to share stories here of how the "Columbia House Record Club" worked to watch people assume the foetal position and rock themselves to horrified sleep.

Re: Nginx has moved to GitHub

#119

Post by syngrog66 »

I loved the tech design of Nginx when it came out. However eventually its Russian provenance became too risky for my use cases. Plus I began a moral boycott of all things Russian... where I can easily enough anyway. Plenty of other choices now for web servers compared to late 90s or early 2000s.
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