4 ms·

> What GitHub Gave Us To me one of the clear things that GitHub gave us was a structure around a person rather than a project. To me it felt liberating to quic

> What GitHub Gave Us To me one of the clear things that GitHub gave us was a structure around a person rather than a project. To me it felt liberating to quickly create a repository attached to my name than it was to go through the (what felt to me) very serious process of coming up with a project name and reserving it on sourceforge just to get a cvs or svn repository (along with website, mailing lists, issue tracking(?), etc, etc...). It felt like the mental load of "oh this is just a quick thing" was a lot easier with github. > It gave projects issue trackers, pull requests, release pages, wikis, organization pages, API access, webhooks, and later CI. Although it didn't give us this all at once. I still remember when we created a new user account in order to simulate an organisation, before they existed. I distinctly recall discussing with friends if we wanted to set up a bug tracker software for our project with the assumption that "GitHub will probably release one in a few months anyway". In the end we just kept a text file committed in the repository. Issues were announced a few months later.

psychoslave 5mo ago
[flagged]
- pxc 5mo ago
  Huh? The usual pattern is that experiments belong to a user and then they graduate to having their own org iff they grow enough maintainers for that to make sense. How is that toxic or self-centered? It's just like "here's a place to do low-stakes experiments in public view". It's not particularly about ego or selfishness or whatever.
  - psychoslave 5mo ago
    [flagged]
    - estimator7292 5mo ago
      You are being a toxic asshole right now by accusing people of being sociopaths completely unprompted. Honestly, pretty sociopathic behavior right here.
      - buildsjets 5mo ago
        [flagged]
      - psychoslave 5mo ago
        [flagged]
        JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
        > exposing You’re not exposing any new ideas. You’re just attacking.
        psychoslave 5mo ago
        Not attacking any individual at least. Attacking in the sense of being critical of individualism as a louded ideology, and connecting technical artifacts to some form of individualism and likely outcome, yes definitely. There is no need to pretend for novelty in such a critic, indeed. Just because we don't reinvent it on the fly doesn't make the use of arithmetic worthless.
  - Lammy 5mo ago
    “Organizations” didn't exist until GitHub was already popular and entrenched, and it got popular and entrenched by centering the person developing the code instead of the code that was being developed: https://github.blog/news-insights/introducing-organizations/ https://github.blog/news-insights/introducing-organizations/ And they weren't free until 2020: https://docs.github.com/en/get-started/learning-about-github/faq-about-changes-to-githubs-plans https://docs.github.com/en/get-started/learning-about-github...
    - Kwpolska 5mo ago
      2010 is pretty early as far as GitHub history goes. Organizations were free, what wasn’t free was private repositories (but that applied to personal accounts too).
- kelnos 5mo ago
  What a weird take on what GP said...
- Lammy 5mo ago
  [flagged]
- tom_ 5mo ago
  Bruh.
  - psychoslave 5mo ago
    Thanks for introducing me to a term I want aware of. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bruh https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bruh for those who also wonder.
- GroksBarnacles 5mo ago
  The most insane response I've ever read here, so far.
- alfg 5mo ago
  Very strange take. A lot of software is built on trust and the people behind it. Hence why the social aspect of Github was so important to a lot of open source software.
  - LtWorf 5mo ago
    I don't think it was important. It just came at a time when sourceforge was being heavily enshittified.
    - alfg 5mo ago
      There were many other options for git and version control in general at the time, though. GitHub made the onboarding to git much easier while using the platform as a social tool.
  - psychoslave 5mo ago
    Hey, thank you for staying polite while expressing disagreement. That's much appreciated. To the risk it might seem surprising, I actually completely agree that trust is essential to software creation and and use. Actually I would more broadly frame it as, no trust, no viable sustainable society, no technical/cultural artifact. But trust and societies can be realized without individualism as underlying chief paradigm. That doesn't mean total negation of individual though. One alternative, among others yet different approches, can be state as a metaphor of individual like a cell in a social body. Thus the term metastasis, as when a cell starts to degenerate in self centric behavior at the expense of the health of the body as a whole. On the other hand, no cell, no body.
- lpln3452 5mo ago
  Good grief. Now the YouTube Shorts crowd is showing up here too.
3form 5mo ago
>To me it felt liberating to quickly create a repository attached to my name If I remember correctly, it was also one of the few places sticking to the now-standard passing of the parameters via path rather than the '?' URL query part. It might not seem like much now, but then the ease and simple beauty of having just github.com/user/repo - not only for web access but also cloning - was definitely some freshness factor.
- Chaosvex 5mo ago
  Definitely not. That's been a thing for at least as long as mod_rewrite has existed (and I'm sure there's prior art). It was common long before GitHub.
  - robertlagrant 5mo ago
    It happened, but not as often as you'd think. In 2017 I was arguing with someone that the back button should work and URLs should be obvious in a fairly large project and they said "people are used to the back button not working - like a bank website".
    - fl4regun 5mo ago
      i've seen people argue about how the back button should work this year on HN
    - Izkata 5mo ago
      Path parameters has nothing to do with history replacement breaking the back button, did you mean to respond to someone else?
      - robertlagrant 5mo ago
        That was the "URLs should be obvious" bit - sorry, it was a bit buried.
  - echelon 5mo ago
    GitHub was one of the first popular places to 1. not use query params for key entities in the URL 2. to stick user identifiers at the root path! totally unheard of to occupy such an important path at that point! Taken together, this was entirely novel. Next to nobody did this. Twitter was the one other notable example, and that's literally all I can think of. The URL bar was so different back then. It wasn't search by default. The average tech savviness of internet users was higher. People cared about URLs despite the fact most websites had garbage cgi-bin query string slop. Lots of folks had personal domain names. People typed URLs and shared them a lot - so this was a big deal, because they were memorable, unlike the other slop URLs at the time. To give more character - HN's urls would have been considered exceptionally nice back then. The average URL was way worse and was littered with hundreds of query parameters. A great deal of websites put your session token in the query params. PHP had first class ways of spending "sessions" to all urls. Essentially a cookie. It was disgusting. GitHub revolutionized urls as a product. Even today, not many companies followed suit. They're still the gold standard.
sstevemmitchell 5mo ago
[flagged]
theptip 5mo ago
I enjoy speculating on what could come from revisiting the first principles with our new tech stack. The Fediverse makes it much easier to broadcast updates in a truly decentralized fashion. Maybe this can be the discovery layer instead of requiring a centralized social network in GitHub? Git itself has many of the primitives needed, but issue tracking and CI/CD seem the main pieces still lacking. Seems likely that issues can be solved satisfactorily both natively in git, or in the fediverse. I bet that agents can pass branches/patches amongst themselves just fine, maybe native git (pulling from each others’ remotes on a crontab, or sharing patches by listserv) is actually completely viable now. I also wonder if agents will cause a shift from forking and contributing back upstream, to more like horizontal gene transfer where people or tight teams broadcast their repos and other projects borrow/steal whatever may be useful. You see this with the Claws where maintainers are simply swamped with contributions and no way to verify whether they are correct/positive. (Things like “first time install on a Mac mini breaks at step 7, due to some iMessage issue” are fiendishly difficult to automate”)

psychoslave 5mo ago

[flagged]

pxc 5mo ago
Huh? The usual pattern is that experiments belong to a user and then they graduate to having their own org iff they grow enough maintainers for that to make sense. How is that toxic or self-centered? It's just like "here's a place to do low-stakes experiments in public view". It's not particularly about ego or selfishness or whatever.
- psychoslave 5mo ago
  [flagged]
  - estimator7292 5mo ago
    You are being a toxic asshole right now by accusing people of being sociopaths completely unprompted. Honestly, pretty sociopathic behavior right here.
    - buildsjets 5mo ago
      [flagged]
    - psychoslave 5mo ago
      [flagged]
      - JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
        > exposing You’re not exposing any new ideas. You’re just attacking.
        psychoslave 5mo ago
        Not attacking any individual at least. Attacking in the sense of being critical of individualism as a louded ideology, and connecting technical artifacts to some form of individualism and likely outcome, yes definitely. There is no need to pretend for novelty in such a critic, indeed. Just because we don't reinvent it on the fly doesn't make the use of arithmetic worthless.
- Lammy 5mo ago
  “Organizations” didn't exist until GitHub was already popular and entrenched, and it got popular and entrenched by centering the person developing the code instead of the code that was being developed: https://github.blog/news-insights/introducing-organizations/ https://github.blog/news-insights/introducing-organizations/ And they weren't free until 2020: https://docs.github.com/en/get-started/learning-about-github/faq-about-changes-to-githubs-plans https://docs.github.com/en/get-started/learning-about-github...
  - Kwpolska 5mo ago
    2010 is pretty early as far as GitHub history goes. Organizations were free, what wasn’t free was private repositories (but that applied to personal accounts too).
kelnos 5mo ago
What a weird take on what GP said...
Lammy 5mo ago
[flagged]
tom_ 5mo ago
Bruh.
- psychoslave 5mo ago
  Thanks for introducing me to a term I want aware of. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bruh https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bruh for those who also wonder.
GroksBarnacles 5mo ago
The most insane response I've ever read here, so far.
alfg 5mo ago
Very strange take. A lot of software is built on trust and the people behind it. Hence why the social aspect of Github was so important to a lot of open source software.
- LtWorf 5mo ago
  I don't think it was important. It just came at a time when sourceforge was being heavily enshittified.
  - alfg 5mo ago
    There were many other options for git and version control in general at the time, though. GitHub made the onboarding to git much easier while using the platform as a social tool.
- psychoslave 5mo ago
  Hey, thank you for staying polite while expressing disagreement. That's much appreciated. To the risk it might seem surprising, I actually completely agree that trust is essential to software creation and and use. Actually I would more broadly frame it as, no trust, no viable sustainable society, no technical/cultural artifact. But trust and societies can be realized without individualism as underlying chief paradigm. That doesn't mean total negation of individual though. One alternative, among others yet different approches, can be state as a metaphor of individual like a cell in a social body. Thus the term metastasis, as when a cell starts to degenerate in self centric behavior at the expense of the health of the body as a whole. On the other hand, no cell, no body.
lpln3452 5mo ago
Good grief. Now the YouTube Shorts crowd is showing up here too.

3form 5mo ago

>To me it felt liberating to quickly create a repository attached to my name If I remember correctly, it was also one of the few places sticking to the now-standard passing of the parameters via path rather than the '?' URL query part. It might not seem like much now, but then the ease and simple beauty of having just github.com/user/repo - not only for web access but also cloning - was definitely some freshness factor.

Chaosvex 5mo ago
Definitely not. That's been a thing for at least as long as mod_rewrite has existed (and I'm sure there's prior art). It was common long before GitHub.
- robertlagrant 5mo ago
  It happened, but not as often as you'd think. In 2017 I was arguing with someone that the back button should work and URLs should be obvious in a fairly large project and they said "people are used to the back button not working - like a bank website".
  - fl4regun 5mo ago
    i've seen people argue about how the back button should work this year on HN
  - Izkata 5mo ago
    Path parameters has nothing to do with history replacement breaking the back button, did you mean to respond to someone else?
    - robertlagrant 5mo ago
      That was the "URLs should be obvious" bit - sorry, it was a bit buried.
- echelon 5mo ago
  GitHub was one of the first popular places to 1. not use query params for key entities in the URL 2. to stick user identifiers at the root path! totally unheard of to occupy such an important path at that point! Taken together, this was entirely novel. Next to nobody did this. Twitter was the one other notable example, and that's literally all I can think of. The URL bar was so different back then. It wasn't search by default. The average tech savviness of internet users was higher. People cared about URLs despite the fact most websites had garbage cgi-bin query string slop. Lots of folks had personal domain names. People typed URLs and shared them a lot - so this was a big deal, because they were memorable, unlike the other slop URLs at the time. To give more character - HN's urls would have been considered exceptionally nice back then. The average URL was way worse and was littered with hundreds of query parameters. A great deal of websites put your session token in the query params. PHP had first class ways of spending "sessions" to all urls. Essentially a cookie. It was disgusting. GitHub revolutionized urls as a product. Even today, not many companies followed suit. They're still the gold standard.

sstevemmitchell 5mo ago

[flagged]

theptip 5mo ago

I enjoy speculating on what could come from revisiting the first principles with our new tech stack. The Fediverse makes it much easier to broadcast updates in a truly decentralized fashion. Maybe this can be the discovery layer instead of requiring a centralized social network in GitHub? Git itself has many of the primitives needed, but issue tracking and CI/CD seem the main pieces still lacking. Seems likely that issues can be solved satisfactorily both natively in git, or in the fediverse. I bet that agents can pass branches/patches amongst themselves just fine, maybe native git (pulling from each others’ remotes on a crontab, or sharing patches by listserv) is actually completely viable now. I also wonder if agents will cause a shift from forking and contributing back upstream, to more like horizontal gene transfer where people or tight teams broadcast their repos and other projects borrow/steal whatever may be useful. You see this with the Claws where maintainers are simply swamped with contributions and no way to verify whether they are correct/positive. (Things like “first time install on a Mac mini breaks at step 7, due to some iMessage issue” are fiendishly difficult to automate”)