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

GitHub backs down, kills Copilot pull-request ads after backlash

theregister.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 386 posts

Re: GitHub backs down, kills Copilot pull-request ads after backlash

#221

Post by tovej »

gorgoiler wrote: post #55
yosamino wrote: post #4

Calling advertisements "product tips" as if everybody is too stupid to understand what that means. They created an amazing technology that oftentimes is indistinguishable from magic and then use it to deliver ads and - sorry about the tangent - kill people. This really is the quote of the century: > The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads What a waste.

I don’t think the quote is particularly fair. You could just as easily see it as the best minds are building huge amounts of amazing, free technology and need a way to pay for it. For every microsecond level ad auction broker there’s a free Android update, cat video platform enhancement, calendar app feature, or type checked scripting language release. HFT on the other hand — now there’s a tech black hole! [edited to…

That is an incredibly dishonest way to look at it.

1) You're conflating the "smartest people" with tech companies. The point of the quote is that people's careers are funneled towards ads. 2) The technology is not free and amazing. It may give consumers some marginal utility, but it's making them dependent on the system and recording most interactions they have with it. It's a widespread system of surveillance and control, and the tech companies are in charge.

Re: GitHub backs down, kills Copilot pull-request ads after backlash

#222

Post by whalesalad »

arnvald wrote: post #215

I’ll never understand why they ruined GitHub. They had everything they needed - the one place in the world where 99% of open source projects were hosted, where all the discussions happened. A product that people were so used to that it was a no brainer when it came to hosting private repos. And they had to ruin it and give space to GitLab and other competitors. What a waste…

Microsoft can't help themselves. They ruin everything that they touch.

Re: GitHub backs down, kills Copilot pull-request ads after backlash

#223

Post by ramon156 »

dewey wrote: post #217
c0balt wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GitLab is quite good, the organizational features and CI is also mostly on par with GitHub. You can use gitlab.com, SaaS or self-host.

But compared to GitHub it's much more complicated in terms of UX as it covers more enterprise use cases that GitHub doesn't.

I'm a bit confused what you mean. I have to use GitLab for work and don't see much difference. Some UI elements look a bit more complex than on GH but other than that it's working the same way. Less buggy as well.

Personally I host forgejo for my private apps and have had no issues with that either.

Re: GitHub backs down, kills Copilot pull-request ads after backlash

#224

Post by Already__Taken »

arnvald wrote: post #215

I’ll never understand why they ruined GitHub. They had everything they needed - the one place in the world where 99% of open source projects were hosted, where all the discussions happened. A product that people were so used to that it was a no brainer when it came to hosting private repos. And they had to ruin it and give space to GitLab and other competitors. What a waste…

Growth. It's a disease. Can't just work on a good product it's got to make arbitrary growth targets.

Re: GitHub backs down, kills Copilot pull-request ads after backlash

#225

Post by tovej »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #141
yosamino wrote: post #4

Calling advertisements "product tips" as if everybody is too stupid to understand what that means. They created an amazing technology that oftentimes is indistinguishable from magic and then use it to deliver ads and - sorry about the tangent - kill people. This really is the quote of the century: > The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads What a waste.

> > The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads > What a waste. If you consider "what people (un-coercedly) spend money on" as "what people actually want", the situation gets obvious: People don't voluntarily spend money so that e.g. deep scientific questions are worked on or other things are done that are often claimed that "smart people should do". (by the way: a lot of problems…

Maybe resources shouldn't be distributed purely using a free market that can easily be manipulated, especially if the top dogs are allowed to use manipulative advertising and sales tactics.

Re: GitHub backs down, kills Copilot pull-request ads after backlash

#227

Post by esafak »

moron4hire wrote: post #192
troad wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are some good alternatives for closed source codebases that people have been using and enjoying? I only ask because I already know of good alternatives for FOSS, but it's the private / work projects that keep me tethered to GH for now.

If it's for work, why do you need GitHub at all? To me, GitHub only makes sense as a social media site for code. If you are publishing to GitHub with no intent to be open in your code, development process, and contributor roster, then I don't see the point of being on GitHub at all. Because it's not like their issue tracker is particularly good. It's not like their documentation support is particularly good. It's not…

What do you use for code review and CI/CD then?

Re: GitHub backs down, kills Copilot pull-request ads after backlash

#228

Post by jacquesm »

arnvald wrote: post #215

I’ll never understand why they ruined GitHub. They had everything they needed - the one place in the world where 99% of open source projects were hosted, where all the discussions happened. A product that people were so used to that it was a no brainer when it came to hosting private repos. And they had to ruin it and give space to GitLab and other competitors. What a waste…

Because it's Microsoft. Categorically incapable of respecting their users.

What's interesting to me is how many people went like 'Oh, Satya really gets open source, this time it will be different'.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17225599

Re: GitHub backs down, kills Copilot pull-request ads after backlash

#229

Post by b00ty4breakfast »

This is how these kinds of companies operate; push the limit until customers start complaining, then you back off a little bit. They've still advanced to that line, of course, but now the userbase can be conditioned for the next push so that "a little bit worse than before" feels normal.
Post reply on HN