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

The single most important criteria when replacing GitHub

joeyh.name

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 135 posts

Re: The single most important criteria when replacing GitHub

#61

Post by simplyinfinity »

shawn wrote: post #45
cortesoft wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like the HN community fails repeatedly to really grok this concept. They focus on the negatives of having a single dominant player for a service (with worries about monopolistic practices and stagnation), but completely ignore WHY these single providers become dominant. There are HUGE network-effect benefits to having a single dominant provider. Right now, if I am looking for a code library, I pretty much only…

It works both ways. If you're too lazy to learn a service I chose to host my code, you don't deserve my code. (Sorry to put it harshly, but it's felt like we're all getting a bit spoiled. Especially compared to the old days.) For better or worse, you are the product if you use a centralized, free service. And the only thing keeping those dominant players dominant is the blind loyalty we seem to give freely. It's all…

I use (for example) 50 libraries, and want to submit bug reports and pull requests to all of them over the course of 5 years...

and your attitude is "well.. if you don't make 50 accounts you don't deserve it!". Really? And also that's why we have package repositories... npm, nuget, PECL, composer, should i also register on 500 websites just so i can build a website or two?

Also, github is free for open-source projects, but it's paid for teams and enterprises. it's a win-win situation where they do social good and get paid for private service.

Alternatives & competition is good, but too much competition is not that great either in this case.

Re: The single most important criteria when replacing GitHub

#62

Post by sametmax »

erichurkman wrote: post #58
sametmax wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't you forget a little something ? Buying the server, reading the docs, setting it up, buying an URL domain, binding it to the server, getting the backup server, setting it up, testing that everything works, training the team on the new UI, documenting the whole things for when you are not available or it's not your job anymore, blocking one team of 5 devs from working for 2 hours (or a man day of work) because so…

Isn't that why GitLab (and others) publish things like AMIs where config is easy and takes 10 minutes? https://about.gitlab.com/aws/

Aaaah, the infamous "10 minutes" sale pitch.

I think it's getting 10 minutes years old to this day.

Re: The single most important criteria when replacing GitHub

#63

Post by yani »

shawn wrote: post #45
cortesoft wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like the HN community fails repeatedly to really grok this concept. They focus on the negatives of having a single dominant player for a service (with worries about monopolistic practices and stagnation), but completely ignore WHY these single providers become dominant. There are HUGE network-effect benefits to having a single dominant provider. Right now, if I am looking for a code library, I pretty much only…

It works both ways. If you're too lazy to learn a service I chose to host my code, you don't deserve my code. (Sorry to put it harshly, but it's felt like we're all getting a bit spoiled. Especially compared to the old days.) For better or worse, you are the product if you use a centralized, free service. And the only thing keeping those dominant players dominant is the blind loyalty we seem to give freely. It's all…

> It works both ways. If you're too lazy to learn a service I chose to host my code, you don't deserve my code.

Not really, you just get less people using, contributing, and testing your project - software should try and stay in the known, not scattered around sourceforge, google code ... etc

Re: The single most important criteria when replacing GitHub

#64

Post by seabrookmx »

Shank wrote: post #55
cortesoft wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like the HN community fails repeatedly to really grok this concept. They focus on the negatives of having a single dominant player for a service (with worries about monopolistic practices and stagnation), but completely ignore WHY these single providers become dominant. There are HUGE network-effect benefits to having a single dominant provider. Right now, if I am looking for a code library, I pretty much only…

I find that this network effect really makes me want to improve my projects, too. I've worked for hours on README files, making sure I had my licenses in check, and crafting the short repo description to be informative and useful for this reason [0]. If it's on GitHub, I feel like it needs to be presentation ready. Not everyone feels this way, but I do. If I just need a git repository, I store it locally. Git is a DV…

Appreciate all the hard work! TShock is great :)

Re: The single most important criteria when replacing GitHub

#65

Post by danmg »

People keep implying that Microsoft is somehow going to break git and somehow use it to destroy people who want to give away their code.

You can just change your remotes and push to a different server. The protocol was designed to be distributed and prevent a single point of failure.

Also, Microsoft and people who develop on Microsoft tools realise that there are network effects of being able to share code. This was just a side benefit and not altruism. What they were after was Electron, since that's a very popular way of writing desktop applications currently.

Re: The single most important criteria when replacing GitHub

#67

Post by yani »

cortesoft wrote: post #56
shawn wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It works both ways. If you're too lazy to learn a service I chose to host my code, you don't deserve my code. (Sorry to put it harshly, but it's felt like we're all getting a bit spoiled. Especially compared to the old days.) For better or worse, you are the product if you use a centralized, free service. And the only thing keeping those dominant players dominant is the blind loyalty we seem to give freely. It's all…

> It works both ways. If you're too lazy to learn a service I chose to host my code, you don't deserve my code. I have infinite work that needs to be done, and a finite amount of time. I have found in my experience that only looking at github works for maximizing my productivity; I can get almost everything there, and the returns for learning another system does not make up for the time it takes. This isn't about laz…

I would not say that GH offers the best service. There are lots of features that they are lacking compared to BitBucket and GitLab. I think it is about the interface and that we are just too used to it and lazy to retrain around brains... again

Re: The single most important criteria when replacing GitHub

#68

Post by yani »

Shank wrote: post #55
cortesoft wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like the HN community fails repeatedly to really grok this concept. They focus on the negatives of having a single dominant player for a service (with worries about monopolistic practices and stagnation), but completely ignore WHY these single providers become dominant. There are HUGE network-effect benefits to having a single dominant provider. Right now, if I am looking for a code library, I pretty much only…

I find that this network effect really makes me want to improve my projects, too. I've worked for hours on README files, making sure I had my licenses in check, and crafting the short repo description to be informative and useful for this reason [0]. If it's on GitHub, I feel like it needs to be presentation ready. Not everyone feels this way, but I do. If I just need a git repository, I store it locally. Git is a DV…

I havent found a code yet that I will only keep locally in a git repo. Can you give an example of such type of code?

Re: The single most important criteria when replacing GitHub

#69

Post by shaded-enmity »

chatmasta wrote: post #35
amelius wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’m highly skeptical of coupling the issue tracker and other non-VCS features with git. But isn't it nice that you can say "issue X has been solved in commit Y"?

Yes it’s nice, and there are dozens of products that allow you to do that. My point is that this is not the main value-add of GitHub, and discussions of “replacing GitHub” that center around re-implementing these features are missing the point. The value-add of GitHub is its community and years of developer mindshare. There is no simple technical solution to replacing that.

You seem to focus on step 2, e.g. having community and mindshare, while completely ignoring why all the people got there in there in the first place and why it gained such momentum, the step 1.

Re: The single most important criteria when replacing GitHub

#70

Post by Walkman »

MBCook wrote: post #43
Walkman wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like everybody is overestimating the cost of self hosting. I run my own instance of GitLab, but the "costly" part was setting it up and making backups. Since then I just "apt-get upgrade" and there is a new version and that's it. Since I set it up, I haven't touched any of the configuration files. The availability guarantees are much easier to keep for a small team than for thousands, so you don't really have…

How often do you test your backups? How many places (physical) do they exist? How often are they taken? What’s your server’s uptime? Is it highly available? How often do you patch? Do you test them first? How do you keep up with security updates from other software on the machine(s). How is your security team in general? Do they monitor for stolen credentials? Do pen-tests? Watch for network scans and attacks? Look f…

> What’s your server’s uptime? Is it highly available?

Who cares about uptime, when you use a server alone or with a small team? It can be down for 10 hours and you would not even notice.

You don't understand what you need.

> How often do you patch?

I patch the machine multiple times a week with some "apt update && apt upgrade" which takes literally less then a couple of minutes a week.

> Do you test them first?

I don't need to because I'm using ZFS and make a snapshot before upgrades, so in case of a disaster (which already happened multiple times) I can roll back within minutes, which happened multiple times, once when the machine didn't even booted.

> How is your security team in general? Do they monitor for stolen credentials? Do pen-tests? Watch for network scans and attacks? Look for weird traffic patterns?

You don't need any of that. If you think you do, you think you are far more important than you really are. Maybe framework authors or super-popular library writers would need to worry about that, but self-hosting makes you an order of magnitude lower chance of being a target.

> Is someone always on call? What are they experts in? How do you get support?

We might not talk about the same thing...

> And that’s not including the network effects of having so many projects in the same site.

This is the only valid point you came up with.

Post reply on HN