Hacker News Reader

Comment by ttam | Hacker News Reader

these talks are actually not new. the same rumor appeared back in 2016 https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/07/github-is-raising-a-second...

imho, github feels a bit too slow innovating, which is kinda surprising since they are still "a startup"

View on HN

I have the opposite opinion. I think every few months I see an interesting feature being added that are slowly making github a better platform. Just for the last few months we've seen a lot of improvements for Enterprise, improvement to gitHub pages, saved replies, team discussions, security alerts. I love the pace they have to release meaningful improvements.

That's almost entirely because of the competition with Gitlab.

If the outcome is that they're adding more features to make the product better who cares? That's competition functioning as intended.

i'm also a big fan of the atom editor

Yes, it's so snappy...

Indeed; why pay the overhead of shared libraries or timely security updates: https://www.noobslab.com/2017/07/atom-text-editor-can-now-be...

lol, it can be slow on larger projects but its innovative and complete. i really like the packages system/community. always open to suggestions, whats better?

You’re kidding, right? Anyway Microsoft will kill it and replace it with VS Code, a much better editor.

i actually love atom and kind of hated vs code. ill check it out again tho. what do you like more about it?

Oh snap. Atom would be killed of. No business can afford developing two same products.

GitHub has not been a startup for a few years, and it's business model is more or less mature now.

Have they ever turned a profit yet? Last I heard they were still losing money in 2017. Not what I would call mature.

I’m pretty sure they’ve been profitable since the first month of private repos.

AFAIK the timeline of profitability is somewhat like this:

- really profitable after introducing private repos - burning quite some money for growth after they took VC money - really profitable again after they changed their pricing to per-seat pricing

They lost 66 million as recently as 2016.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13188574

They introduced the new pricing in the middle of 2016[0].

[0]: https://blog.github.com/2016-05-11-introducing-unlimited-pri...

Most companies leave startup status long before they are profitable. It has much more to do with the stability and maturity of the business model and whether it can be scaled.

I hope they don't innovate that much. It seems everytime they do, the designs gets worse and worse.

> I hope they don't innovate that much. It seems everytime they do, the designs gets worse and worse.

Can you share some examples?

I'm personally really happy with Github. I feel like anything they can add would like detract from my experience.

It's not perfect, but it's simple, easy to use, and gets to the point.

At this point I just hope that the acquisition goes through, is completely terrible and gitlab becomes the new standard.

I don’t know why you’d willingly be against competition though. GitLab makes GitHub better, but GitHub makes GitLab better. Why isn’t that a good thing?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com