5 ms·

Lots of apologia for Github here. Aside from the fact that defending a billion-dollar company is a bit strange; especially one that is steward to the the overwh

by dijit 6mo ago

Lots of apologia for Github here. Aside from the fact that defending a billion-dollar company is a bit strange; especially one that is steward to the the overwhelming majority of open-source software. Maybe that's good-will doing the work? For me it's always been a sour pill to swallow that I have to buy in to a large companies internal politics and practices in order to work on projects I love. I don't feel like I owe them anything. Especially if they can't hold up their end of the deal. Unfettered access to the world's software repositories, for the princely sum of a bucketload of Azure credits.

Imustaskforhelp 6mo ago
I think its the fact that people have used the software for so long that they feel emotional to it (Hashimoto crying tears of sadness when he decided to move ghostty away from github) and there is completely nothing wrong about it as we are emotional human beings. But, you are right in the sense that, Github has failed to accept its part of the deal which is actually to just be a usable place. People HAVE previously tolerated so much AI slop and slowness in github's UI just because of its reliability but this downtime is like the Github's achilles heel. At some point, I recommend people to accept this and move to more healthier alternatives, there is also an momentum. For example, the only reason I joined github was that I wanted to join codeberg but so many of projects used github and involved sign in with github that I finally gave in into github and I had thought that codeberg is so good but nobody is gonna come here because of the network effects but the tide is turning and I hope more people look into codeberg and healthier alternatives.
EduardoBautista 6mo ago
Defending a multi-trillion dollar company you mean (Microsoft).
IshKebab 6mo ago
> Maybe that's good-will doing the work? Of course. GitHub has been an enormous gift to the open source community. Arguably more than Git itself. They deserve a lot of good will.
- kevmo 6mo ago
  You're right, but that GitHub is dead. Also, the former stewards of that open source goodness sold it to Microsoft for a cheap buck. Any goodwill they earned has been spent.
- gordon_freeman 6mo ago
  they are not the non-profit. they make money of it and devs expect certain kind of service in return. GH failed to deliver on the service expectation.
  - xp84 6mo ago
    What money do GH make off open source projects on the free tier? I haven’t seen ads, micropayments to clone repos, etc?
    - tardedmeme 6mo ago
      It's the marketing budget. People only pay for it because they've used it for free.
- collinmanderson 6mo ago
  https://xkcd.com/1150/ https://xkcd.com/1150/
  - IshKebab 6mo ago
    Oversimplification.
otterley 6mo ago
Let me ask the question in reverse: what do you have against them such that the fellow human beings struggling to maintain their operations don’t deserve even a modicum of kindness, respect, and good will? Are you unable to separate the business from the hard working people behind it? It’s not like they don’t know that people like us are counting on them: they recognize that their service is the “dial tone” for much of the world’s software development capability. They are keenly aware of the impact. What happened to #hugops? Does it go out the window because those people happen to work for a company you don’t like?
- logicchains 6mo ago
  >What happened to #hugops? Does it go out the window because those people happen to work for a company you don’t like? Would you feel the same way about a colleague who kept causing downtime in your product again and again, seemingly without making any progress in addressing whatever issue was causing their repeated mistakes? There are web applications out there that are far more complex than GitHub but have much less downtime. It's not like they're facing an unsolvable problem.
  - otterley 6mo ago
    You don’t know that it was “their mistake.” Unless you’ve personally successfully scaled a suite of nontrivial services equivalent to GitHub’s to accommodate an unexpected 14x increase in traffic, you respectfully have no basis for such an assertion.
    - qotgalaxy 6mo ago
      [dead]
    - mattmanser 6mo ago
      Yeah, they should be testing for that, right? I think there's a lot of people reading comments like yours and thinking, is this person a paid shill or what? The earn bucket loads of money, they should be planning for exactly that. And testing for it via load testing every day. Perhaps you've forgotten the days of GitHub presenting themselves of software engineering thought leaders.
pluc 6mo ago
I'm surprised at how little the perception of GitHub changed post-acquisition. Coupled with WSL, it almost balanced things for a lot of people and put Microsoft back in the "benefit of the doubt" column. This is undoing a lot of that, on top of the operational costs. Suddenly the bad press is more noticeable and harder to ignore.
- saghm 6mo ago
  As far as I'm concerned, any benefit of the doubt I might have had for Microsoft is gone after this debaucle: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47989883 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47989883
  - pluc 6mo ago
    You must've been fuming at email clients for the last 20 years hijacking people's signatures eh?
    - saghm 6mo ago
      I don't use any email clients that mess with signatures, so I think I'm fairly consistent here, yes.
wilg 6mo ago
Using "apologia" here is pretty embarrassing.
- jasonmp85 6mo ago
  [dead]
nout 6mo ago
I think it depends if you pay them money. If you do, then you should indeed have strong expectations towards them and hold them accountable. If they provide a free service to you, then it's still reasonable to feel upset, but at the same time you get what you pay for.
- maest 6mo ago
  Does this logic still applies if the company is getting other benefits from having me as a user? (Genuine question, I can see arguments for both sides) For example, if I am using the free tier of a service and "paying" by seeing ads, should I have similar expectations? I'm not saying that's how users pay for github - in that case it's more subtle, for example by giving up control of some of their stack and bolstering github already near monopolistic network effect.
mghackerlady 6mo ago
there are two groups of people willing to die defending [billion-dollar company]: HN users and Nintendo fans
- hootz 6mo ago
  Apple, clothing brands, even some Microsoft.
ryandrake 6mo ago
> Aside from the fact that defending a billion-dollar company is a bit strange More than a bit strange. This is an HNism that I'll never get. Why would you go to the comment section anywhere to passionately try to defend the honor of a trillion dollar company, unless 1. you're being paid to astroturf or 2. you own that company's stock? Satya Nadella isn't going to read a post here and say, "Gosh, how nice of that commenter! I'm going to send him some Microsoft stock as a show of appreciation for him defending us online!" I don't think I'll ever understand company-fanboys.
- xp84 6mo ago
  1. Telling that you think the only possible motivations are financial (getting paid, stockholder, or foolish expectations of a gift from Satya). 2. Maybe you know a bunch of people who work there, could be ex-colleagues etc. and you think overall it’s mostly good well-intentioned people there. Therefore you want to see them succeed, and also you might disbelieve that the company is deliberately being awful. I don’t have any specifically warm feelings about a corporate legal entity, but I know people who work at various companies and partly for that reason I am not rooting for those companies to fail and I also don’t believe the least charitable explanations for all their failings.

by dijit 6mo ago

Imustaskforhelp 6mo ago

I think its the fact that people have used the software for so long that they feel emotional to it (Hashimoto crying tears of sadness when he decided to move ghostty away from github) and there is completely nothing wrong about it as we are emotional human beings. But, you are right in the sense that, Github has failed to accept its part of the deal which is actually to just be a usable place. People HAVE previously tolerated so much AI slop and slowness in github's UI just because of its reliability but this downtime is like the Github's achilles heel. At some point, I recommend people to accept this and move to more healthier alternatives, there is also an momentum. For example, the only reason I joined github was that I wanted to join codeberg but so many of projects used github and involved sign in with github that I finally gave in into github and I had thought that codeberg is so good but nobody is gonna come here because of the network effects but the tide is turning and I hope more people look into codeberg and healthier alternatives.

EduardoBautista 6mo ago

Defending a multi-trillion dollar company you mean (Microsoft).

IshKebab 6mo ago

> Maybe that's good-will doing the work? Of course. GitHub has been an enormous gift to the open source community. Arguably more than Git itself. They deserve a lot of good will.

kevmo 6mo ago
You're right, but that GitHub is dead. Also, the former stewards of that open source goodness sold it to Microsoft for a cheap buck. Any goodwill they earned has been spent.
gordon_freeman 6mo ago
they are not the non-profit. they make money of it and devs expect certain kind of service in return. GH failed to deliver on the service expectation.
- xp84 6mo ago
  What money do GH make off open source projects on the free tier? I haven’t seen ads, micropayments to clone repos, etc?
  - tardedmeme 6mo ago
    It's the marketing budget. People only pay for it because they've used it for free.
collinmanderson 6mo ago
https://xkcd.com/1150/ https://xkcd.com/1150/
- IshKebab 6mo ago
  Oversimplification.

otterley 6mo ago

Let me ask the question in reverse: what do you have against them such that the fellow human beings struggling to maintain their operations don’t deserve even a modicum of kindness, respect, and good will? Are you unable to separate the business from the hard working people behind it? It’s not like they don’t know that people like us are counting on them: they recognize that their service is the “dial tone” for much of the world’s software development capability. They are keenly aware of the impact. What happened to #hugops? Does it go out the window because those people happen to work for a company you don’t like?

logicchains 6mo ago
>What happened to #hugops? Does it go out the window because those people happen to work for a company you don’t like? Would you feel the same way about a colleague who kept causing downtime in your product again and again, seemingly without making any progress in addressing whatever issue was causing their repeated mistakes? There are web applications out there that are far more complex than GitHub but have much less downtime. It's not like they're facing an unsolvable problem.
- otterley 6mo ago
  You don’t know that it was “their mistake.” Unless you’ve personally successfully scaled a suite of nontrivial services equivalent to GitHub’s to accommodate an unexpected 14x increase in traffic, you respectfully have no basis for such an assertion.
  - qotgalaxy 6mo ago
    [dead]
  - mattmanser 6mo ago
    Yeah, they should be testing for that, right? I think there's a lot of people reading comments like yours and thinking, is this person a paid shill or what? The earn bucket loads of money, they should be planning for exactly that. And testing for it via load testing every day. Perhaps you've forgotten the days of GitHub presenting themselves of software engineering thought leaders.

pluc 6mo ago

I'm surprised at how little the perception of GitHub changed post-acquisition. Coupled with WSL, it almost balanced things for a lot of people and put Microsoft back in the "benefit of the doubt" column. This is undoing a lot of that, on top of the operational costs. Suddenly the bad press is more noticeable and harder to ignore.

saghm 6mo ago
As far as I'm concerned, any benefit of the doubt I might have had for Microsoft is gone after this debaucle: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47989883 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47989883
- pluc 6mo ago
  You must've been fuming at email clients for the last 20 years hijacking people's signatures eh?
  - saghm 6mo ago
    I don't use any email clients that mess with signatures, so I think I'm fairly consistent here, yes.

wilg 6mo ago

Using "apologia" here is pretty embarrassing.

jasonmp85 6mo ago
[dead]

nout 6mo ago

I think it depends if you pay them money. If you do, then you should indeed have strong expectations towards them and hold them accountable. If they provide a free service to you, then it's still reasonable to feel upset, but at the same time you get what you pay for.

maest 6mo ago
Does this logic still applies if the company is getting other benefits from having me as a user? (Genuine question, I can see arguments for both sides) For example, if I am using the free tier of a service and "paying" by seeing ads, should I have similar expectations? I'm not saying that's how users pay for github - in that case it's more subtle, for example by giving up control of some of their stack and bolstering github already near monopolistic network effect.

mghackerlady 6mo ago

there are two groups of people willing to die defending [billion-dollar company]: HN users and Nintendo fans

hootz 6mo ago
Apple, clothing brands, even some Microsoft.

ryandrake 6mo ago

> Aside from the fact that defending a billion-dollar company is a bit strange More than a bit strange. This is an HNism that I'll never get. Why would you go to the comment section anywhere to passionately try to defend the honor of a trillion dollar company, unless 1. you're being paid to astroturf or 2. you own that company's stock? Satya Nadella isn't going to read a post here and say, "Gosh, how nice of that commenter! I'm going to send him some Microsoft stock as a show of appreciation for him defending us online!" I don't think I'll ever understand company-fanboys.

xp84 6mo ago
1. Telling that you think the only possible motivations are financial (getting paid, stockholder, or foolish expectations of a gift from Satya). 2. Maybe you know a bunch of people who work there, could be ex-colleagues etc. and you think overall it’s mostly good well-intentioned people there. Therefore you want to see them succeed, and also you might disbelieve that the company is deliberately being awful. I don’t have any specifically warm feelings about a corporate legal entity, but I know people who work at various companies and partly for that reason I am not rooting for those companies to fail and I also don’t believe the least charitable explanations for all their failings.