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Git-random: Chrome extension replaces new tab with random GitHub user's profile
- kyberias 10y agoI don't see any randomness in the implementation. It seems to be taking users in the sequence that the github users API provides.
- idnan 10y agoBut you are not going to see the same profile again and probably you don't know them. So it's random for you. :)
- brudgers 10y ago"Arbitrary" is probably more consistent with the mathematical rigor some people might expect. On the other hand, little in computing is random rather than pseudo-random.
- tyingq 10y agoSeems easy enough to get the upper bound id... https://api.github.com/search/users?q=created:%3E=2016-04-16&sort=joined&order=desc&per_page=1 https://api.github.com/search/users?q=created:%3E=2016-04-16... (backing off the date if needed) I would prefer random over ascending.
- douglance 10y agoBut why?
- cooper12 10y agoLikely so you could see things other people have open-sourced that you might not have before. It would probably be most useful for getting ideas of what people have made rather than finding projects to contribute to, since a lot of these will be abandoned projects. (Or you could see where people contribute their time) I think seeing profiles of "active" users might be more helpful.
- crypticlizard 10y agoI can see the appeal of novel approaches to the discovery problem. I sure wish apple had this for the app store! Anyway, it's fun, and the internet can be boring when it's too rigid, so that's why I'm using it. This extension reminds me of /r/all
- vermooten 10y agoAt last!
- CM30 10y agoWouldn't this just be more annoying than useful? I mean, finding random people on GitHub is maybe 0.5% of the times I use the new tab button. Why have that happen all the time? Just to show it's possible? It's a novel idea, just have no idea why anyone would make or install an add on based on it.
- deckar01 10y agoIt reminds me of Chat Roulette. It's less useful than it is entertaining and perception altering.
- crypticlizard 10y agothe discovery problem is a big deal for open source code. Not claiming this solves that, but like many great ideas, they can often look silly at first. And who knows, it could be the beginning of a cooler idea!
- ng12 10y agoI use Panda -- a plugin that shows me a selection of pretty-looking websites when I new-tab. I'm not even a designer or anything, but it's nice for inspiration. I imagine this is going after the same angle.
- Camillo 10y agoSelf-promotion, obviously.
- gedrap 10y agoI guess it depends on how actually random it is. Genuinely random? Well, yeah, that would be crap, assuming most of the github accounts have pretty much nothing public other than maybe a hello world or something equivalent. Something recommended instead of actually random? That might be interesting, just maybe repositories other than users (in other profile you have to click on something to discover, while in repo just scroll for readme). For example, I like the idea of Github explore newsletter, offered by Github. A few trending repositories every morning. Sometimes something useful, sometimes inspirational. Unfortunately, it's not implemented well :( a lot of the repos are JS and couldn't find where to change the option, also I often get the same repos (e.g. I get this https://github.com/FreeCodeCamp/FreeCodeCamp https://github.com/FreeCodeCamp/FreeCodeCamp pretty much every day for the past half a year).
- morninj 10y agoI think this would be more interesting if it showed a random repo with more than n stars (maybe n = 10?). There are a lot of empty user profiles.
- t3nary 10y agoThis does sound a lot more useful. The majority of GitHub users don't have any real projects. Maybe only showing GitHub users that have more than n followers would be better.
- to3m 10y agoLanguage selection would be good too - possibly by excluding uninteresting ones rather than actively including them though. This would keep the results slightly surprising; the point is just to let you ignore languages that might otherwise be overrepresented. See, e.g., http://githut.info/ http://githut.info/ - if you're not interested in one or more of Javascript, Java, Python, PHP, C, C++ or Ruby, you could easily see a lot of uninteresting projects.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- raimue 10y agoAnother case where the terms "Git" and "GitHub" are wrongly being used interchangeably.
- userbinator 10y agoHow about GitHub-random: replaces a random file in your repository with the version from someone else's fork of it.
- Tiksi 10y agoAnd so begins software evolution by random mutation.
- jagger27 10y agoIf you've ever seen first year compsci students try to bang out a Python assignment, this is already the case.
- Tiksi 10y agoThat's more of the primordial soup pre-evolution. Something might make it, but the chances are slim and nothing's really evolving, just kinda there. Randomly changing the file is mutating an existing codebase with predecessors that made it out of the primordial soup. I may have stretched the analogy too far now.
- PascLeRasc 10y agoIt should replace a file with another with the same name somewhere else, like some other main.py. Objective-C and Matlab people will hate each other.
- surement 10y agoProlog and Perl also.
- 10y ago