Comment by seiji | Hacker News Reader

Comment by seiji | Hacker News Reader

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The trick is, I think GitHub stopped being a software company. At some point (after Tom left), GitHub was taken over by finance people to just pump money out of the VC system. Is there any other explanation for why GitHub The Corporation has completely stopped interacting with GitHub The Community?

GitHub raised $250 million last year and, as you mentioned, there's nothing externally visible to show for it (as consumers of their public platform). (random guess: the $250 million could have been $150-$200 million in cashing out stock to individuals (like crooked groupon shenanigans) then maybe $50 million for operations? How many billions of dollars does it take to write an issue tracker with more features than redmine from ten years ago?)

Same comments were making the rounds months ago too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10165681#up_10166913

All this gets back to a bigger trend we see these days: closed platforms are like governments (google, apple, github, twitter). We don't allow (sane, first-world) governments to exist without citizen representation. We must demand user-level representation in corporations running global scale closed platforms everybody relies on. Community powered social platforms don't exist without the community, and private corporations exercising extended "we don't give a crap about the users even though we have millions (or hundreds of millions) of them" patterns must be... corrected.

No Computation Without Representation.

> GitHub raised $250 million last year and, as you mentioned, there's nothing externally visible to show for it

I completely agree, I've never been able to take github seriously as a GUI -- (e.g. there is still no way to search commits).

> All this gets back to a bigger trend we see these days: closed platforms are like governments (google, apple, github, twitter).

I don't think it's the same to include Github into these, the main facility provided by github is simply a centralized host for your git repo, Git is FOSS and there are a number of alternatives.

> there is still no way to search commits

Just an FYI. I've implemented commits search among other things for GitHub. You can learn more about it here:

http://gitsense.github.io/

Note the latest GitSense version doesn't include branch level code searching. I'm still testing this out, and I'll be releasing another GitSense update very soon, which also includes support for BitBucket.

And sometime next week, I'm going to start looking for beta testers for my indexing engine, which is what makes all of this possible. If you have 10,000 or less commits in your repository, you'll be able to install and use the indexing engine for free. However the free version won't include diff indexing, as that greatly increases the number of moving parts.

I don't want to pooh-pooh anyone's hard work--please don't misunderstand me--but I am legitimately curious: why put so much effort into building a house of cards upon a foundation of shifting sand? Your project is completely dependent on GitHub's reliability, integrity, and goodwill. It could implement its own version of your enhancements and render yours obsolete. Arguably, it should do that, because what's the point of relegating useful enhancements to third-party products?

So doesn't that mean that your project is living on borrowed time? Why not build upon an open platform instead, one that you can control, one that can't be ripped out from under you?

Again, I don't mean this as criticism, I'm just very curious, because I don't understand.

You have a valid point, but what isn't obvious is my technology isn't really dependent on GitHub. The only thing that can cripple me is Git becoming less vogue. There are two parts to my technology:

- There is the front end which is 100% JavaScript and this is important since it allows me to build on top of existing web solutions like GitHub

- There is the indexing engine which was insanely hard to develop and is what makes my solution unique.

I've attached some screenshots that shows how I'm using my JavaScript technology to integrate with Bitbucket here:

http://imgur.com/a/7AME6

I've also uploaded some screenshots that shows how I monitor/manage indexing. Right now, my indexing engine can easily process 10s of thousands of repositories with millions of branches on a single machine. The indexers are designed to scale horizontally and developing them was insanely hard and that's what I'm really selling. There is a reason why GitHub stopped indexing commits a few years ago. And why Bitbucket has a 5 year old ticket about code searching:

https://bitbucket.org/site/master/issues/2874/ability-to-sea...

Should the worst happen and I get shut out by GitHub and Atlassian, there is always GitLab, Gogs, etc. For now, I'm more than happy to build on top of GitHub and ensuring my solution works with their Enterprise offering.

Nice one! Looks very slick. I'm a dev attached to Bitbucket, I'm curious if you've seen the Bitbucket Connect framework:

https://developer.atlassian.com/bitbucket/guides/getting-sta...

The browser extension is nifty, but Connect provides a proper API for embedding custom views in the Bitbucket UI if you want something a bit more robust (i.e. it will still work even if we decide to change the DOM at some point in the future).

I looked at Bitbucket Connect, but it looks like everything is done via iframe for obvious security reasons. This doesn't appear to be the case with Bitbucket server.

Somebody from Atlassian has reached out to me and I'll get back to them next week to see what can be done to get this working with the Connect framework.

That's very interesting. Thanks.

The same can be said of anything built on top of the Twitter's and Facebook's of the world. Of course there is risk, but there is also some reward there too that is possible. It is a good question, but almost any API published by a corporation has risk of it being ripped out from under you.

> there is still no way to search commits

I guess you mean commit messages, because you can search the code on Github.

For the messages, if your repository is public you can use Google like this:

   > Search all branches of all crawled repos for "change license"
   >
   >       "change license" site:https://github.com/*/*/commits
   >
   > Search master branch of all crawled repos for "change license"
   >
   >    "change license" site:https://github.com/*/*/commits/master
   >
   > Search master branch of all crawled twitter repos for "change license"
   >
   >    "change license" site:https://github.com/twitter/*/commits/master
   >
   > Search all branches of twitter/some_project repo for "change license"
   >
   >    "change license" site:https://github.com/twitter/some_project/commits

Source: technosaurus [1], Stackoverflow [2].

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/users/1162141/technosaurus

[2] http://stackoverflow.com/a/29710705

You cannot do this for private repos? Anyways besides that, just having to know these hacks means there is absolutely no sense in committing to using a GUI tool when all of this is adequately implemented in command-line. Why a company with estimated worth at billion dollars+ can't add something as simple as commit message search though -- I don't know.

No you can't do this for private repos and it's kind of a hack anyway.

Just slapping a GUI to the command line interface wouldn't scale but given that they already support code search I don't understand why the don't support commit message search either.

>Community powered social platforms don't exist without the community, and private corporations exercising extended "we don't give a crap about the users even though we have millions (or hundreds of millions) of them" patterns must be... corrected.

The big difference here is "Community powered social platforms" don't pay a tax like citizens of the government do.

And, like some of us are trying to undo today, representation in a government/corporation skews heavily towards those that pay the bills.

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