Git-random: Chrome extension replaces new tab with random GitHub user's profile | Hacker News Reader

Git-random: Chrome extension replaces new tab with random GitHub user's profile

github.com

65 pointsidnan27 comments

Wouldn't this just be more annoying than useful? I mean, finding random people on GitHub is maybe 0.5% of the times I use the new tab button. Why have that happen all the time? Just to show it's possible?

It's a novel idea, just have no idea why anyone would make or install an add on based on it.

It reminds me of Chat Roulette. It's less useful than it is entertaining and perception altering.

the discovery problem is a big deal for open source code. Not claiming this solves that, but like many great ideas, they can often look silly at first. And who knows, it could be the beginning of a cooler idea!

I use Panda -- a plugin that shows me a selection of pretty-looking websites when I new-tab. I'm not even a designer or anything, but it's nice for inspiration. I imagine this is going after the same angle.

Self-promotion, obviously.

I guess it depends on how actually random it is.

Genuinely random? Well, yeah, that would be crap, assuming most of the github accounts have pretty much nothing public other than maybe a hello world or something equivalent.

Something recommended instead of actually random? That might be interesting, just maybe repositories other than users (in other profile you have to click on something to discover, while in repo just scroll for readme).

For example, I like the idea of Github explore newsletter, offered by Github. A few trending repositories every morning. Sometimes something useful, sometimes inspirational.

Unfortunately, it's not implemented well :( a lot of the repos are JS and couldn't find where to change the option, also I often get the same repos (e.g. I get this https://github.com/FreeCodeCamp/FreeCodeCamp pretty much every day for the past half a year).

>I get this https://github.com/FreeCodeCamp/FreeCodeCamp pretty much every day for the past half a year

This seems like a pretty perfect example of how outliers can make algorithms act funny -- Free Code Camp has more than 100,000 stars on GitHub. That's well over twice as many as Angular[1] and nine times as many as CoffeeScript[2]. I mean, it's still annoying, but I'd imagine they're collecting "+1"s faster than GitHub Explore can ignore them.

[1] https://github.com/angular/angular.js [2] https://github.com/jashkenas/coffeescript

Another case where the terms "Git" and "GitHub" are wrongly being used interchangeably.

How about GitHub-random: replaces a random file in your repository with the version from someone else's fork of it.

And so begins software evolution by random mutation.

If you've ever seen first year compsci students try to bang out a Python assignment, this is already the case.

That's more of the primordial soup pre-evolution. Something might make it, but the chances are slim and nothing's really evolving, just kinda there.

Randomly changing the file is mutating an existing codebase with predecessors that made it out of the primordial soup.

I may have stretched the analogy too far now.

It should replace a file with another with the same name somewhere else, like some other main.py.

Objective-C and Matlab people will hate each other.

Prolog and Perl also.

That's mutation testing. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutation_testing

and yet the rationale for using Git over Github makes absolute sense, which should be obvious to anyone.

I don't see any randomness in the implementation. It seems to be taking users in the sequence that the github users API provides.

But you are not going to see the same profile again and probably you don't know them. So it's random for you. :)

"Arbitrary" is probably more consistent with the mathematical rigor some people might expect. On the other hand, little in computing is random rather than pseudo-random.

Seems easy enough to get the upper bound id...

https://api.github.com/search/users?q=created:%3E=2016-04-16... (backing off the date if needed)

I would prefer random over ascending.

I think this would be more interesting if it showed a random repo with more than n stars (maybe n = 10?). There are a lot of empty user profiles.

This does sound a lot more useful. The majority of GitHub users don't have any real projects. Maybe only showing GitHub users that have more than n followers would be better.

Language selection would be good too - possibly by excluding uninteresting ones rather than actively including them though. This would keep the results slightly surprising; the point is just to let you ignore languages that might otherwise be overrepresented.

See, e.g., http://githut.info/ - if you're not interested in one or more of Javascript, Java, Python, PHP, C, C++ or Ruby, you could easily see a lot of uninteresting projects.

But why?

Likely so you could see things other people have open-sourced that you might not have before. It would probably be most useful for getting ideas of what people have made rather than finding projects to contribute to, since a lot of these will be abandoned projects. (Or you could see where people contribute their time) I think seeing profiles of "active" users might be more helpful.

I can see the appeal of novel approaches to the discovery problem. I sure wish apple had this for the app store! Anyway, it's fun, and the internet can be boring when it's too rigid, so that's why I'm using it. This extension reminds me of /r/all

At last!

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