alt Hacker NewsGitHub and the crime against software
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Because of so many GitHub problems, I'm adding GitLab.com and Codeberg.org.
Setup is simply 3 steps:
1. Sign up on each service, ideally with the same username.
2. For each repo you want to share, create the same repo name as a blank repo; do not automatically create a README.
3. Edit your local file .git/config to add push URLs, then push as usual.
Example:
[remote "origin"]
url = [email protected]:foo/bar.git
pushurl = [email protected]:foo/bar.git
pushurl = [email protected]:foo/bar.git
pushurl = [email protected]:foo/bar.git
fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*I've been an avid GitHub user for a very long time.
I remember way back in the "olden days" in San Francisco seeing people with Octocat signs on Market. GitHub was awesome. Fond memories.
But times are a-changin', and for lots of reasons I just don't feel like GitHub is cool or "for me" anymore.
So, with my new Mac Mini, because they were on sale and everyone was getting one for OpenClaw... I put that puppy on my tailnet, installed Gitea, and I've been using it exclusively for all my projects. It's been weeks since I've pushed anything to GitHub.
I feel free.
This web site is very hard to read because of the colors and font sizes.
I know this is just a speculative comment, but the list of GitHub issues is eerily familiar. These problems read a lot like the types of mistakes and assumptions unattended agents will make that corrode codebases.
“Never, ever, think about something else when you should be thinking about the power of incentives.”
— Charlie Munger
Edit: great write up, thank you op.
I use Github extensively for my personal company, but I also use Azure DevOps (and all git-related features) extensively for a client's project. I keep seeing the Github issues being attributed to their move to Azure backend for "scale".
But we have no issues whatsoever with Azure Devops....ever. It's excellent. Seriously.
Does anyone know why the experience between Github and DevOps is so different, if they're supposed merging the two? Or at least seemingly related? Or are they not at all?
Or is it simply because Azure is "enterprise" and Microsoft cares about that more?
Nginx was compelled to move to GitHub [1].
The fact that companies request you to star them on GitHub and the stars can be bought tells you that there is a value in these stars. [2]
Now, some astute reader, who thinks the $1 trillion global advertisement market does not influence them, will also claim that they don't care about GitHub stars.
Well, that's not how the world works.
Fake stars can propel a good project to great.
A lot of people will use GitHub stars as a currency to decide the importance of certain FOSS (or even open-core) projects.
The real lock-in is in GitHub stars [3].
1 - https://blog.nginx.org/blog/nginx-open-source-moves-to-githu...
What happened to hacker culture? Did everyone (or enough) just sell out?
It’s fascinating to me that the people who know the most about tech keep deciding over and over to give something to some corporation and inevitably it becomes an issue. I guess ease of use and freemium really trumps everything; I expect more from smart people but money talks.
Even ignoring the reliability and security issues, Github feels like an app from 2008.
Issues aren't a proper project management tool and wikis aren't fit as documentation.
I've completely abandoned Github.
I’m in the process of developing an alternative Frontend for Forgejo that’s incredibly fast, and works perfectly well on Safari and Firefox.
Here is a screencap of the wip mobile UI on old safari: https://files.catbox.moe/bo7pxn.jpeg
> Github does not expose a public bug list or any issues page, hiding their problems deep in email chains
Which email chains is this referring to? GitHub/community is fairly active from the community perspective. GitHub rarely looks at it anymore, prioritising their Enterprise roadmap.
> Github often breaks on firefox and safari, browsers with millions of users
[[citation needed]].
I’ve been as annoyed as everyone with the GitHub frontend performance since the React rewrite, but never really faced breakage in Firefox. This claim is repeated a few times in the article, but without any links.
We're going to enter the era of returning to self hosting.
Self hosted gitlab is a dream, no surprises ever, exactly how your repos are supposed to work.
> The increased ‘agentic’ load on github is the direct result of their own actions and those of their parent company, Microsoft, and that makes reliability problems their own fault.
Microsoft & Github are not a monolith. it's an institution with dozens of divisions and 100k+ employees all vying for revenue.
Anyone who's worked at a big company knows what it's like to be given an unfunded mandate to serve an important business strategy.
The author moans about the 3 copilot button's on github. meanwhile github has to manage (a) providing loads of free hosting and (b) keeping the servers up.
The entitlement to moan about a free app not providing enough free hosting, and bemoan the engineers who are barely keeping it running.
Through the magic of Claude, here is what the two hundred and eleven javascript files that GitHub loads on accessing an empty repo with just .md files (https://github.com/github-samples/.github):
┌─────────────────┬───────┬────────────┬────────────┐
│ Category │ Files │ Total Size │ Total Time │
├─────────────────┼───────┼────────────┼────────────┤
│ Copilot │ 32 │ 1,749 KB │ 1,141 ms │
├─────────────────┼───────┼────────────┼────────────┤
│ GraphQL / Relay │ 4 │ 1,629 KB │ 190 ms │
├─────────────────┼───────┼────────────┼────────────┤
│ Primer Design │ 4 │ 1,617 KB │ 329 ms │
├─────────────────┼───────┼────────────┼────────────┤
│ Highlighting │ 4 │ 1,048 KB │ 414 ms │
├─────────────────┼───────┼────────────┼────────────┤
│ Code View │ 14 │ 966 KB │ 1,226 ms │
├─────────────────┼───────┼────────────┼────────────┤
│ React Core │ 6 │ 692 KB │ 446 ms │
├─────────────────┼───────┼────────────┼────────────┤
│ UI Components │ 26 │ 674 KB │ 1,541 ms │
├─────────────────┼───────┼────────────┼────────────┤
│ SVG │ 2 │ 634 KB │ 51 ms │
├─────────────────┼───────┼────────────┼────────────┤
│ Code Editor │ 9 │ 615 KB │ 366 ms │
├─────────────────┼───────┼────────────┼────────────┤
│ Vendored │ 17 │ 608 KB │ 986 ms │
├─────────────────┼───────┼────────────┼────────────┤
│ Issues │ 13 │ 589 KB │ 504 ms │
├─────────────────┼───────┼────────────┼────────────┤
│ Markdown │ 8 │ 321 KB │ 198 ms │
├─────────────────┼───────┼────────────┼────────────┤
│ Runtime │ 12 │ 263 KB │ 807 ms │
├─────────────────┼───────┼────────────┼────────────┤
│ HTML Parsing │ 2 │ 235 KB │ 152 ms │
├─────────────────┼───────┼────────────┼────────────┤
│ Navigation │ 11 │ 230 KB │ 362 ms │
├─────────────────┼───────┼────────────┼────────────┤
│ Web Components │ 7 │ 229 KB │ 540 ms │
├─────────────────┼───────┼────────────┼────────────┤
│ Comments │ 4 │ 131 KB │ 146 ms │
├─────────────────┼───────┼────────────┼────────────┤
│ Analytics │ 5 │ 103 KB │ 348 ms │
├─────────────────┼───────┼────────────┼────────────┤
│ Other │ 32 │ 484 KB │ 2099 ms │
└─────────────────┴───────┴────────────┴────────────┘
Some personal highlights:
- Syntax Highlighting for every obscure language under the sun. Seems like the language analysis they do the repository does nothing.
- Shipping the editor on pages where there is no editor
- Shipping Copilot prompts. Incredible. { prompt:\"Analyze the test coverage of this codebase. Identify areas with missing or insufficient tests and add comprehensive test cases to improve coverage.\" }
- Just a javascript file with a massive 500K SVG.
- I don't really know anything about GraphQL & Relay. But 1.4 megabytes of generated ASTs?
- Shipping Protobuf, YAML, Lodash (hashing, unicode, collections), Typebox, GSAP and Framer
My company recently forced us to move from Atlassian BitBucket to GitHUb. What a mess.
Has anyone switched over to Fossil SCM, so they get issue tracking as part of the repo
> Microsoft: Our priorities are clear: availability first, then capacity, then new features.
> This is a lie. Github - and the microsoft organization more widely - clearly prioritize flashy AI features over fundamental reliability Github has a public changelog. In thirty days since they posted their update, their patch notes contain the words “copilot” 59 times, “agent” 8 times, “performance” 0 times, and “reliability” 0 times. The changelog has a feature to filter by category: copilot is it’s own category: performance and reliability do not exist at all.
I suppose when calling someone a liar, it's beneficial to have hard numbers to back it up. Ouch.
The biggest shame is for Gitlab I think, if you ever try to run the service, empty, without any repository or user yet, you will need a very powerful CPU and already a dozen GB or RAM. To do nothing...
Amen.
People should consider decentralized git over Nostr, rather than switching to a replacement like Codeberg or Gitlab and waiting for the resulting enshittification after it attracts everyone else.
All this hate directed at github feels odd, every time I look into people complaining, or moving their projects off, other than a few related to genuine bugs, many just seem ideological. This article, calling it a crime against software? ... It's just silly. The article itself is a crime against articles, barely readable, weird ass colors. It mostly seems a regurgitation of other peoples complaints and mostly overblown.
We've been using github for a while at our company and find it really good. Copilot reviews are good, we have actions that work every single time, everything just works really well. There are, of course, plenty of things that could be improved, but it's still top dog in this space. I think maybe a couple of times there's been an outage that's affected us for a small amount of time. Overall, it's a good product.
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bro needs to touch some grass
Yeah, I didn't really like this post much. I agree the UI is bloated. But there's really two big factors here the post either ignores or doesn't empathize with, which I don't like:
1. The rise of Claude Code is what pushed this behavior, not GitHub and Microsoft's own actions. It is not because they shoved Copilot buttons everywhere, it is because a ton of people worldwide are autonomously pushing commits from Claude Code, and automated PRs/commits kicks off tons of other compute work that highly stresses a system that was never built for this scale.
2. The timeline is extremely compressed. Claude Code did not take off until late last Winter. So in one season they went from being able to mostly handle the volume of activity on their backend to an explosion of activity that shows no signs of slowing down. There is not a team on this planet earth who could foresee this circumstance and reimplement a massive distributed system like GitHub to handle the load gracefully in just a few short months. The writer of this post seems to think very highly of themselves as an engineer and my money is they would also be absolutely crushed by the nature of this challenge.
Author here. For those who don't care for the color scheme, my site has - a light theme: https://eblog.fly.dev/githubbad-light.html - a plain theme: https://eblog.fly.dev/githubbad-plain.html, added as part of the same update where I submitted this article. Both of those are available as PDFs as well (replace .html with .pdf).
And of course you can use reader mode in your favorite browser.