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Why are they seemingly underrepresented on Github? When I check out a library I often peek at who made it. My general demographic "feel" is - 40% some Europea

Why are they seemingly underrepresented on Github? When I check out a library I often peek at who made it. My general demographic "feel" is - 40% some European or American - 40% some dude in Siberia, - 10% Chinese hacker in Shenzhen - 10% some cryptic Japanese hacker I'm always a bit surprised there are very very few South East Asians, Latin Americans, Koreans, Indians

darnir 3y ago
I don't know about the others, but there are indeed people like me in India developing and maintaining non-cool, not on Github, free software. If you're here on Hacker News, there's actually a pretty good chance you've run, directly or indirectly, code I've written without even registering it.
- contrarian1234 3y ago
  What's the popular forge platform in India? I know in China they typically host on Gitee - but it's in part an artifact of the national firewall. Didn't know in India it's also silo'ed off
  - darnir 3y ago
    I wouldn't say its siloed off. Its often on popular forges like Github and Gitlab. But also on smaller ones like sourceforge, GNU Savannah, sourcehut, etc. My point being that a lot of the free software movement in India doesn't create the hot new Rust / Go app. Its more focused on smaller things or on using the existing tools
    - nequo 3y ago
      What are some examples of smaller things that are more relevant in India than in the US/Europe?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
badpun 3y ago
> - 40% some dude in Siberia, Is this remotely true? There's just 33 million people in Siberia, it would be strange for them to dominate OS like that.
- bsagdiyev 3y ago
  A good chunk of the more interesting code I've seen around is usually attributed to someone from Russia or the Eastern Bloc. Doesn't seem weird to me at all. It isn't Siberia in a literal sense but I think this was the point trying to be made.
  - red-iron-pine 3y ago
    "Siberia" in the "random dude in the middle of nowhere slamming out lines of code" sense. Siberia itself is not crazy; Novosibirsk is the capital of Siberia and 3rd largest city in Russia, strong engineer culture cuz of all of the natural resources around.
vidyesh 3y ago
I want to say thats a very general stereotype? Not sure if thats the correct term here. Popular repos do not represent all of open source. People generally contribute to thing which they are interested in and/or actively using, most of the traditionally popular repos that most people come across are bleeding edge technology not being actively used by rest of the world but mostly by US/EU. There are a lot of regional technical issues in SEA that devs need to solve, the ones that are not so valuable for rest of the world to look into.
- red-iron-pine 3y ago
  What would these be in particular? only one I can think of is IPv6 being way more common
screye 3y ago
The same reason that only 10% are some 'Chinese hacker from Shenzhen'. Indians & Chinese are invested in their local ecosystem, so you are unlikely to see their efforts reflected in the type of western-repositories that we're looking at. Secondly, India is still a poor country. So open source is produced as a by-product of the commercial work you do, but it does not have the maturity of a made-for-open-source product that ends up having dubious commercial viability. The main point of open source in under-developed economies is to put out a positive signal for hiring. So the second you've done just enough, you are looking to escape the hell that is 'unpaid open source work' and move to corporate code that might also be open-sourced. Also, the best candidates (IITians, flagship university kids, Bangalore undergrads) are hired through on-campus hiring procedures. So efforts go into improving their signaling towards those avenues, rather than publicizing your work to the entire world.
- vladak 3y ago
  For a project on Github I maintain, I've seen increased amount of low quality PRs in the recent months (changes where it was obvious that the submitter never ran the code or interacted with the project as a user) that seemed to be raised just for the purpose of getting some sort of cred. These create noise and extra work for the maintainers. Most of them originated from India, I believe. Had to remove those 'help-wanted' and 'good-first-issue' tags because of these void PRs.
- contrarian1234 3y ago
  I don't find these argument convincing - hackers in Shenzhen are underrepresented b/c of the language barrier. There is actually a huge Chinese language ecosystem (a lot of it off Github on Gitee) that is sort of impenetrable but you come across it all the time. I said 10% just b/c typically I have no way to use their work b/c it's under-documented in English. If you zip around this map you will see lots of "Zh" islands: https://anvaka.github.io/map-of-github/ https://anvaka.github.io/map-of-github/ - Are Indian hackers working in Hindi and other regional languages? - While I understand that it's not as financial comfortable for a programmer in Indian compared wtih the US or Europe, Chinese and Russian hackers aren't significantly better off. Your typical Chinese program is also of course worried about working for a big company and making money and all of that jazz - "escape the hell that is 'unpaid open source work' " - I think maybe is the crux of it... Most people work on open source work b/c they enjoy it.. You're definitely not going to make a major github project used by other people just because you're looking to pad your resume. Sidenote: I don't personally know anyone who got hired from a deliberate effort to build an open source portfolio. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone as a way to try to find a job
ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
You are right. The more popular libraries seem that way but if you look at the linux and the python ecosystem, you will find a lot more.

darnir 3y ago

I don't know about the others, but there are indeed people like me in India developing and maintaining non-cool, not on Github, free software. If you're here on Hacker News, there's actually a pretty good chance you've run, directly or indirectly, code I've written without even registering it.

contrarian1234 3y ago
What's the popular forge platform in India? I know in China they typically host on Gitee - but it's in part an artifact of the national firewall. Didn't know in India it's also silo'ed off
- darnir 3y ago
  I wouldn't say its siloed off. Its often on popular forges like Github and Gitlab. But also on smaller ones like sourceforge, GNU Savannah, sourcehut, etc. My point being that a lot of the free software movement in India doesn't create the hot new Rust / Go app. Its more focused on smaller things or on using the existing tools
  - nequo 3y ago
    What are some examples of smaller things that are more relevant in India than in the US/Europe?

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

badpun 3y ago

> - 40% some dude in Siberia, Is this remotely true? There's just 33 million people in Siberia, it would be strange for them to dominate OS like that.

bsagdiyev 3y ago
A good chunk of the more interesting code I've seen around is usually attributed to someone from Russia or the Eastern Bloc. Doesn't seem weird to me at all. It isn't Siberia in a literal sense but I think this was the point trying to be made.
- red-iron-pine 3y ago
  "Siberia" in the "random dude in the middle of nowhere slamming out lines of code" sense. Siberia itself is not crazy; Novosibirsk is the capital of Siberia and 3rd largest city in Russia, strong engineer culture cuz of all of the natural resources around.

vidyesh 3y ago

I want to say thats a very general stereotype? Not sure if thats the correct term here. Popular repos do not represent all of open source. People generally contribute to thing which they are interested in and/or actively using, most of the traditionally popular repos that most people come across are bleeding edge technology not being actively used by rest of the world but mostly by US/EU. There are a lot of regional technical issues in SEA that devs need to solve, the ones that are not so valuable for rest of the world to look into.

red-iron-pine 3y ago
What would these be in particular? only one I can think of is IPv6 being way more common

screye 3y ago

The same reason that only 10% are some 'Chinese hacker from Shenzhen'. Indians & Chinese are invested in their local ecosystem, so you are unlikely to see their efforts reflected in the type of western-repositories that we're looking at. Secondly, India is still a poor country. So open source is produced as a by-product of the commercial work you do, but it does not have the maturity of a made-for-open-source product that ends up having dubious commercial viability. The main point of open source in under-developed economies is to put out a positive signal for hiring. So the second you've done just enough, you are looking to escape the hell that is 'unpaid open source work' and move to corporate code that might also be open-sourced. Also, the best candidates (IITians, flagship university kids, Bangalore undergrads) are hired through on-campus hiring procedures. So efforts go into improving their signaling towards those avenues, rather than publicizing your work to the entire world.

vladak 3y ago
For a project on Github I maintain, I've seen increased amount of low quality PRs in the recent months (changes where it was obvious that the submitter never ran the code or interacted with the project as a user) that seemed to be raised just for the purpose of getting some sort of cred. These create noise and extra work for the maintainers. Most of them originated from India, I believe. Had to remove those 'help-wanted' and 'good-first-issue' tags because of these void PRs.
contrarian1234 3y ago
I don't find these argument convincing - hackers in Shenzhen are underrepresented b/c of the language barrier. There is actually a huge Chinese language ecosystem (a lot of it off Github on Gitee) that is sort of impenetrable but you come across it all the time. I said 10% just b/c typically I have no way to use their work b/c it's under-documented in English. If you zip around this map you will see lots of "Zh" islands: https://anvaka.github.io/map-of-github/ https://anvaka.github.io/map-of-github/ - Are Indian hackers working in Hindi and other regional languages? - While I understand that it's not as financial comfortable for a programmer in Indian compared wtih the US or Europe, Chinese and Russian hackers aren't significantly better off. Your typical Chinese program is also of course worried about working for a big company and making money and all of that jazz - "escape the hell that is 'unpaid open source work' " - I think maybe is the crux of it... Most people work on open source work b/c they enjoy it.. You're definitely not going to make a major github project used by other people just because you're looking to pad your resume. Sidenote: I don't personally know anyone who got hired from a deliberate effort to build an open source portfolio. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone as a way to try to find a job

ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago

You are right. The more popular libraries seem that way but if you look at the linux and the python ecosystem, you will find a lot more.