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Comment by relyio | Hacker News Reader

Poor execution on a great idea imo.

To me it feels like they sacrificed functionality for aesthetics. It's not the right trade-off to make for a professional tool. I don't want my Github feed to be Facebook-like. I'd rather have it be compact and useful. A feature that'd let me browse by "topic" (e.g systems programming) regardless of language would be welcome as well.

In this update, the three culprits are the font-size, the spacing (so much space wasted) and the (slow) auto-load. It wasn't great before but this is most definitely worse.

Dear Github, please make technology discovery efficient rather than pretty. I spend hundreds of hours on your platform. You could save me a lot of time focusing on the right stuff.

It's a shame because there's so much potential there.

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> A feature that'd let me browse by "topic" (e.g systems programming) regardless of language would be welcome as well.

What you're talking about already exists. In fact, they're called topics, e.g.: https://github.com/topics/systems-engineering

That's not what I am talking about though. Topics work with the recently introduced "tags" that you can add to your repo's description.

No one or few people self-reference their repo with something as broad as "systems engineering" or "systems programming".

The closest thing that exist on Github is the explore tab which lets you browse random repos by categories (e.g open government). Such feature would require Github to do the appropriate groundwork to become great at technology-discovery, namely: interest maps, automatically infer a repo's category based on its content, description and the profiles that star or fork it, for starters. They can even make their search engine relevant and pleasant to use if they feel like treating us.

And I'd want that to be integrated in my feed. Right now, I follow around 150 active users and it is still pretty sparse: it's not uncommon for me to see "X started Y 2 days ago". It would be good to add more (good) signal.

I want to see more of what better programmers are starring.

Just for posterity, you asked for:

> A feature that'd let me browse by "topic" (e.g systems programming) regardless of language would be welcome as well.

Topics are exactly what you initially described. Perhaps you didn't do a very good job describing what you'd like.

Also, they're called topics. Not tags. It's in the documentation.

> Such feature would require Github to do the appropriate groundwork to become great at technology-discovery, namely

They did a bunch of work to automatically add topics for many repositories to solve for this: https://githubengineering.com/topics/

You're telling me that a feature exists which technically fits my request. Cool

I tell you it only does so nominally. I didn't fully develop its specs but you could have inferred that they weren't matching the existing one's. The topic feature is half-baked, poorly thought-out and integrated.

Sure, in contrast "dependency graph in insights tab" is not bad feature.

Your comment is based on a pretty naive assumption that someone's making an either/or decision between pretty and functional.

What team have you worked on where that is literally ever the case?

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