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Rarely has one blog post complained for so long about something that matters so little. He isn't arguing there is an actual flaw, he is arguing that the featur

Rarely has one blog post complained for so long about something that matters so little. He isn't arguing there is an actual flaw, he is arguing that the feature isn't identical to what he hypothetically wants He doesn't give practical problems with it, just hypothetical problems. For example, he says it's hard to tell 'the importance' of a fork. The importance of a fork is whether or not it is the original project, or a fork. If it's the original project, it's what you were looking for. If not, it's not, unless you were looking for a modification or feature missing in the original. In the latter case, you don't need to see the 'importance', whatever that means, you need to see the diff. Or have someone recommending it. Anyway, the post just rambles for pages. Speaking of flaws, HN has one big flaw, which is not showing sub-domains (and thus tricking me into clicking this link, thinking it was an official github thing).

zmanji 15y ago
HN does have sub-domain support if the link is posterous or a few other sites. I don't know why it is not enabled for all links though.
- justin_vanw 15y ago
  PG: Make the decision on what sites to show subdomains on at page render time, based on a flat file list of domains. Have a job run every now and then that checks submitted urls, and creates the flat file list of domains, including any domain with more than N different subdomains submitted, where N is high (maybe 400 different sub domains or something). If this file would be large, just build it based on the last M submitted urls (nobody will be browsing the older ones anyway, so if a domain comes and goes oh well).
zbowling 15y ago
I'm sorry, but I don't believe I was rambling. There is a flaw in the approach that they are taking. I made this clear several times by pointing out Linus's talk and the background of forking on Git. When I make an argument, I try to be thorough and show evidence, then propose a solution rather than just complaining. I agree with you that the project is important if it's important. That is exactly what I want. Let the community decide. I hate GitHub implying that my fork is any more or less important unilaterally because I was just the original or not. I document evidence that people follow that link even when the parent is a dead project I put in place. This one issue has really been festering at me for the last couple years on GitHub. As the number of projects grow, more projects are starting to bitrot and the problem is only getting bigger.
- soult 15y ago
  I could not agree more. When I find a new cool library or program on github I often have trouble finding the "official" or "best" version. Many times it is of course the root repository of all forks, but often the original developer moved on and someone else picked up his work. If there are only 2 or 3 forks I can check them all, but more is impractical. When I put stuff on github myself I often lose interest in the software, but someone was nice enough to fork the project and keep working on it. Unfortunately my project will still always be displayed as the most important version. Some software developers have decided to create a shared account (or, since Github now supports this too, an "Organization") to prevent this problem (see for example github.com/ruby/). When one developer decides to leave the Ruby developement team, he is simply removed from the shared account/organization, but the project URL stays the same.
  - joevandyk 15y ago
    Look at the Network activity. It shows you the level and dates of commits of all the forked repositories.
    - bryanlarsen 15y ago
      This doesn't always help as much as you would think it should. Often times I've seen a fork with a lot of recent commits, but it's actually a bunch of pseudo-private changes against an old version.
  - georgebashi 15y ago
    I find GitPop to be really useful for finding the most popular fork. It shows you the number of watchers, forks and issues for each fork, which makes spotting the "best" one a lot easier. It even has a handy bookmarklet! http://gitpop.heroku.com/ http://gitpop.heroku.com/
  - billpatrianakos 15y ago
    In cases where you've moved on and someone else is taking over as a fork, can't you just delete your repo and have the entire hierarchy just shift? I'm honestly asking because I've deleted a ton of repos but none that have been forked so I'm curious.
sant0sk1 15y ago
wrt subdomains: they're actually in the page source, but not shown. This makes it trivial to enable them via JS. Here's an example using dotjs, but it'd be just as easy via Greasemonkey or otherwise: https://github.com/sant0sk1/dotfiles/blob/master/js/news.ycombinator.com.js#L1-L14 https://github.com/sant0sk1/dotfiles/blob/master/js/news.yco...

zmanji 15y ago

HN does have sub-domain support if the link is posterous or a few other sites. I don't know why it is not enabled for all links though.

justin_vanw 15y ago
PG: Make the decision on what sites to show subdomains on at page render time, based on a flat file list of domains. Have a job run every now and then that checks submitted urls, and creates the flat file list of domains, including any domain with more than N different subdomains submitted, where N is high (maybe 400 different sub domains or something). If this file would be large, just build it based on the last M submitted urls (nobody will be browsing the older ones anyway, so if a domain comes and goes oh well).

zbowling 15y ago

I'm sorry, but I don't believe I was rambling. There is a flaw in the approach that they are taking. I made this clear several times by pointing out Linus's talk and the background of forking on Git. When I make an argument, I try to be thorough and show evidence, then propose a solution rather than just complaining. I agree with you that the project is important if it's important. That is exactly what I want. Let the community decide. I hate GitHub implying that my fork is any more or less important unilaterally because I was just the original or not. I document evidence that people follow that link even when the parent is a dead project I put in place. This one issue has really been festering at me for the last couple years on GitHub. As the number of projects grow, more projects are starting to bitrot and the problem is only getting bigger.

soult 15y ago
I could not agree more. When I find a new cool library or program on github I often have trouble finding the "official" or "best" version. Many times it is of course the root repository of all forks, but often the original developer moved on and someone else picked up his work. If there are only 2 or 3 forks I can check them all, but more is impractical. When I put stuff on github myself I often lose interest in the software, but someone was nice enough to fork the project and keep working on it. Unfortunately my project will still always be displayed as the most important version. Some software developers have decided to create a shared account (or, since Github now supports this too, an "Organization") to prevent this problem (see for example github.com/ruby/). When one developer decides to leave the Ruby developement team, he is simply removed from the shared account/organization, but the project URL stays the same.
- joevandyk 15y ago
  Look at the Network activity. It shows you the level and dates of commits of all the forked repositories.
  - bryanlarsen 15y ago
    This doesn't always help as much as you would think it should. Often times I've seen a fork with a lot of recent commits, but it's actually a bunch of pseudo-private changes against an old version.
- georgebashi 15y ago
  I find GitPop to be really useful for finding the most popular fork. It shows you the number of watchers, forks and issues for each fork, which makes spotting the "best" one a lot easier. It even has a handy bookmarklet! http://gitpop.heroku.com/ http://gitpop.heroku.com/
- billpatrianakos 15y ago
  In cases where you've moved on and someone else is taking over as a fork, can't you just delete your repo and have the entire hierarchy just shift? I'm honestly asking because I've deleted a ton of repos but none that have been forked so I'm curious.

sant0sk1 15y ago

wrt subdomains: they're actually in the page source, but not shown. This makes it trivial to enable them via JS. Here's an example using dotjs, but it'd be just as easy via Greasemonkey or otherwise: https://github.com/sant0sk1/dotfiles/blob/master/js/news.ycombinator.com.js#L1-L14 https://github.com/sant0sk1/dotfiles/blob/master/js/news.yco...