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

I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA

reddit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 210 posts

Re: I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA

#171

Post by skinnymuch »

jameslk wrote: post #11

> That said, the GitHub team reports that the set of users who have migrated or closed their accounts is extremely small, and this is more than made up for by the surge of new signups and new interest in GitHub this week. It's interesting to hear this. If you were on HN the past week, it might have seemed from all the front page articles that GitHub was about to implode due to an an exodus to GitLab.

Looking at HN or certain subreddits would similarly have you believe FB is quickly dying and no young person uses it. Or that a ton of people deleted their accounts as a result of the recent scandals. Yes, I’m exaggerating of course.

The number of repos that were imported to Gitlab via their GitHub importer had crosses 100K on Tuesday if my memory serves me right. GitHub has 75M repos, I believe. For now, the migration has been potentially significant, but too early to tell.

Overall, I’m sure there’s something to glean from places like HN and some parts of Reddit, and other similar places. What exactly you can take away, I’m not sure about yet.

There was a front-page article of some survey that was saying something like 40% of people were going to or already did delete Facebook. Not a correct number of course.

Re: I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA

#172

Post by skinnymuch »

Semaphor wrote: post #85
gaius wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Github has 28 million users with 85 million repos. Thousands is a very small proportion. Also: Gitlab also has to exit one day. The only question is who buys them.

FWIW, Gitlab would prefer an IPO and they say they are on track for it. Source: Gitlab guy in one of the many, many, many Gitlab or Github threads recently.

Gitlab isn’t going to say no to $7.5B or any number close to that. They are also more venture backed compared to GitHub.

Re: I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA

#173

Post by skinnymuch »

irq11 wrote: post #99
hultner wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do they? Are they backed by capital pushing for an “Exit”, and even if so, couldn’t an IPO be a viable option?

They’ve taken a big pile of VC funding, so the answer to your first question is yes. Meanwhile, the biggest player (by far) in the market just abandoned dreams of an IPO. Gitlab is a distant third place in that market, and has a revenue model that is best described as “like Github, but cheaper.” IPOs are only viable if you have a business capable of supporting them.

Is Gitlab a distant third? I didn’t know if they are in second place or not. But distant seems too much. Is Bitbucket in second place? Any numbers or references you have?

Re: I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA

#174

Post by skinnymuch »

dawnerd wrote: post #40
beberlei wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a few hundred thousand repositories of the 85 million reported Github repositories is really not much, see https://github.com/ten at the bottom for the number.

of those 85 million how many are actually active and not just placeholder empty repos or automated mirrors for wordpress/jquery plugins? Not on anyones side here but if the top 250k repos switched, that would be really bad news. I think it's more important to compare size and popularity of the repos than just what the % is.

Yeah. That has to go both ways too. If it’s only tiny repos moving over and not top repos.

Re: I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA

#175

Post by [deleted] »

skinnymuch wrote: post #173
irq11 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’ve taken a big pile of VC funding, so the answer to your first question is yes. Meanwhile, the biggest player (by far) in the market just abandoned dreams of an IPO. Gitlab is a distant third place in that market, and has a revenue model that is best described as “like Github, but cheaper.” IPOs are only viable if you have a business capable of supporting them.

Is Gitlab a distant third? I didn’t know if they are in second place or not. But distant seems too much. Is Bitbucket in second place? Any numbers or references you have?

[deleted]

Re: I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA

#176

Post by skinnymuch »

superflyguy wrote: post #33
jameslk wrote: post #11

> That said, the GitHub team reports that the set of users who have migrated or closed their accounts is extremely small, and this is more than made up for by the surge of new signups and new interest in GitHub this week. It's interesting to hear this. If you were on HN the past week, it might have seemed from all the front page articles that GitHub was about to implode due to an an exodus to GitLab.

Interesting, and also...a lie? Or he thinks the 250,000 projects migrated to gitlab within 24 hours of the news that Microsoft was going anywhere near GitHub is a small number.

Is the number 250k projects (are projects repos?) in first 24 hours? I thought it was topping 100K repos imported to Gitlab at some point on Tuesday. This is from Gitlab giving those numbers themselves in a post that was linked from here.

The first hint of Microsoft and GitHub was around 6 pm EDT/11 pm UTC on Sunday.

And like others are saying. Even if that is the case, it isn’t a huge number with context of Github’s size.

Re: I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA

#178

Post by skinnymuch »

crtasm wrote: post #59
superflyguy wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, and also...a lie? Or he thinks the 250,000 projects migrated to gitlab within 24 hours of the news that Microsoft was going anywhere near GitHub is a small number.

I wonder how many people/organisations own those 250k projects, I assume it is far less than 250k.

Yeah. For example, I just put up and am putting up a few more repos of old code I had lying around. With those I have over 15 repos on GitHub. Unfortunately, but also not uncommon at all, the most stars any repo has is 5 with most having none. So, no repos that are material to GitHub.

Re: I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA

#179

Post by skinnymuch »

codinghorror wrote: post #139
kartan wrote: post #6

Nat is being really smart here. It should not backfire unless he acts pedantic or insults Redditors intelligence. I think that both are unlikely. Maybe Nat is trying to counteract any PR damage to GitHub, or maybe he just wants to see how much can skyrocket his account's karma. If I was in his situation I will be happy doing it for both reasons.

I can't imagine a world where anyone would care about their Reddit account karma. I periodically destroy any Reddit account I have to use as a matter of online hygiene. (and yes, I destroyed the account I did an AMA on a while back as well.)

Come on. You have to know some people care about their karma. Reddit being one of the biggest sites in the world makes that fraction of people quite a large number.

Re: I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA

#180

Post by trisimix »

djsumdog wrote: post #94
pera wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The announcement happened just 3 days ago, so it's still too early to draw any conclusions. I personally decided to move my stuff out of GitHub, but it will take me a week or so to know where exactly as I'm still analyzing various options. And after migrating, I don't think I will close my account (even when I really distrust Microsoft) simply because too many libre software projects are currently using GitHub.

Exactly. How can they measure this stuff. You can add a new remote and push your code somewhere else, update the readme file to point to the new location, and that's a migration. That's not an easy thing for Github to track. So this statement doesn't even make a lot of sense. They simply cannot really know -- they can only measure the people who explicitly close projects and accounts.

The reality doesn't matter at this point just what people think.
Post reply on HN