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Comment by giancarlostoro | Hacker News Reader

To be fair they haven't screwed up LinkedIn. I think they will let GitHub grow with their resources.

IMO that's because LinkedIn wasn't a great product to begin with. It's just the stickiest app of all time. Something something network effects.

How many projects are there out there that repositories hosted in GH, run in GH, and have package manifests that directly reference other GH repos. I'm sure there are a lot.

Most of the golang ecosystem, I think. Not to mention any other language-specific package managers that support pulling from GitHub...

And I was thinking JS/npm, not even golang.

Golang can be the biggest offender in this regard because you import by typing the URL to a github repository... Better hope someone mirrors those projects if they ever go poof. It's not even a generic import to a package[0]. Gotta be fun to have to update all those imports later if a project moves to another host to avoid Microsoft.

[0]: https://godoc.org/github.com/lib/pq

Well that's the beauty of git, as long as anyone anywhere has a checkout of the Repository nothing will be lost. If tags are GPG signed you don't even have to put any trust in the surviveing source. That said for mantained code 99.9% of the time you would just use one of the core develops local copies.

Except for issues and pull request metadata, which are important part of the project knowledge.

In SIT (decentralized collaborative information tracker, https://sit.fyi) there's an issue tracking module and an import tool (https://github.com/sit-fyi/sit-import) that allows to convert all issues and PRs into self-contained issues that can be worked with using SIT issue-tracking, so at least there's a relatively smooth way out to decentralized issue tracking.

It's a good thing computers are good at search and replace.

and since the standard library includes a parser for go you don't even need to do it textually

I remember the CocoaPods debacle of 2016.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11245652

[1] https://github.com/CocoaPods/CocoaPods/issues/4989#issuecomm...

It's just the stickiest app of all time To me it barely exists. I'm a hirer in the UK.

Before anyone touts how much wider our reach might be for potential hires, can I point out that my little firm has hired people from the other end of Europe directly ("real" friend of friend etc). Oh and just in case you are wondering - we pay and treat everyone equally and equitably.

If you pay everyone equally, I don't think I'd want to work there.

Maybe it isn't a thing wherever you are but here:

we pay and treat everyone equally and equitably.

... means that we do not discriminate unfairly. Do I really need to spell it out?

> IMO that's because LinkedIn wasn't a great product to begin with.

Linkedin is way way better than other job sites. For instance, Glassdoor doesn't even support basic keyword search. If you happen to track job ads for C programmers then you'd get all ads which may have a C character somewhere in their text, and forget abou searching for C++ because Glassdoor doesn't recognize the plus character. With linkedin at least basic keyword searches do work.

I'd argue LinkedIn is much worse than it was pre-acquisition, but it was already on that trajectory. The "news feed" and discussions around current events, etc. They've locked down more and more of it without a $30/mo subscription. Privacy controls are a nightmare to decipher.

I think it's significantly worse albeit probably short of totally "screwed up". Just marginally worse in a lot of small ways that add up to a less useful, less efficient experience for me.

just so you know, i know quite a few people at both linkedin and microsoft and for the most part they are still very seperate entities. linkedin is still using google docs and slack for instance. most of the influence microsoft has had on linkedin in smaller isolated integrations. so anything youve seen go downhill in linkedn consumer app is very much due to independent choices/acts by linkedin itself.

As someone with lots of friends at LinkedIn (I used to work there), I can agree somewhat. But I also know that things can be screwed up in non-obvious ways to rank and file employees (Tumblr/Yahoo and Flickr/Yahoo as examples, which I sadly was there for both).

Plus I'm sure under Microsoft they will have some sort of free private repos like GitLab, Bitbucket and Visual Studio Team Services already do.

Lack of free private repos is the main (only) reason why I don't use GitHub.

What do you base this on?

1. They already have such offering (VS Team Services).

2. Their competitors (GitLab, Bitbucket) already have that offering.

3. I don't think they're interested in GitHub for its revenue, but for its strategic value. GitHub has to protect its revenue model by disallowing free private repos, Microsoft can afford to be more flexible.

4. They've already made similar moves. They acquired Xamarin, which was expensive, and made it free.

When did you last look at GitHub? They've had free private repos for well over a year (maybe longer).

I have ~50 private on my account... Embarrassingly bad half-completed side projects mostly.

GitHub private repos are still $7/month, but available for free as part of the education discount

VSTS, Microsoft's hosted TFS solution, gives you unlimited private git repos for up to 5 users, 40 hours worth of hosted builds per month, complete project management, a private markdown based Wiki, and free orchestration of local build and deployment agents.

Huh? Not that I see. Private repos require a paid plan.

Paid plans of GH are too expensive.

Last I looked, Minecraft seemed to be quite in order as well.

Shall we talk Nokia...

Pre-Nadella tbf, who was opposed to the acquisition when Ballmer was CEO.

Agreed. Buying Nokia of all things stinks of Ballmer. I was listening to an interview where he seemingly took responsibility for the whole stuff up. Not sure how much weight that holds

Buying Nokia wasn’t the issue. Microsoft’s handling of Nokia was the issue. Microsoft is not good at making a physical product and releasing it to the world like Apple and Samsung. The fact many countries had to wait > 12 months to get the latest phone was retarded. Windows phone was awesome, but Microsoft screwed themselves by not doing minimum what it’s competitors were doing.

Huh? Microsoft has several very successful hardware product lines: peripherals (the Microsoft ergo keyboard is the gold standard in many circles), Xbox, the surface line. Maybe they can’t generate Apple hype but they do know how to make consumer hardware.

The surface line isn’t avaliable world wide on release. Windows phones were released in like 3 markets. Less than surface line. Xbox gets world wide releases.

Phones, people generally want what’s new. A 12-18 month old phone is not new.

I don’t think surface qualifies as good consumer hardware. It has been pleagued with driver problems and weird behaviour. But agree on periphericals and Xbox.

I had the top-of-the-line Nokia Lumia 920 (designed just before the acquisition), and the plastic case was too soft and collected dents & scratches like crazy. The matte finish was also too slippery to hold onto (I ended up putting some skateboard tape on it).

OTOH, I found the Windows Phone operating system to be highly responsive and I was able to navigate screens more quickly than the previous iPhone or the current Android I have. The problem was that as third-place in the market, few apps were available for it, and those that were weren't being maintained.

It got more bloated... My kids still use an old version to avoid that (they only play with each other so they don't need the latest version that is required to play on most servers online)

How about Skype, though?

People loved Skype so much, it was really a feat to make people hate it.

They had a decent Android app, then someone saw that it was too fast/responsive and was using too little memory and took that as a challenge, how can I make skype worst? React Native!

Obviously that didn't pleased people (see rating in Play Store), and they had to provide something for low/mid range phones, and skype lite was born (which is really good one).

Hey, thanks for mentioning skype lite. That a mile better than skype .

They undoubtedly did a bad job, but I think that Skype has a lot going against it from external factors anyway.

Everyone I know is using FaceTime or Facebook Messenger. The only time I hear Skype anymore is people using it for podcasts. Obvious anecdata but it seems reasonable that services with better device integration (FaceTime) or social graph access (Facebook) would do better in the long run.

Or google hangouts. It's skype but in the web and with an interface that actually works.

Minus a few gigs of ram

Hangouts is a great example of another horrible UI. The whole tie in to Chrome made it unusable for anyone non technical (where did it go? What did you want me to click? I am in the call, but you're not there... oh you're in another call? How do you hangup? I don't see the window anymore, etc.)

A standalone app would fix this, but there seems to be some strange internal agenda tying it to Chrome... Chromebooks I guess?

Disagreed.

Skype used to be mainstream. It was essentially a cross platform iMessage & FaceTime, almost ahead of its time. It was also efficient in terms of network usage, being peer-to-peer for the most part.

Had it continued to be usable, it would still be mainstream and might have the place of WhatsApp today. Instead, we now have this garbage Snapchat-like UI, a server-based model that doesn't even work (it was supposed to "fix" the P2P model, but for me it's been way worse than P2P which always worked), and a shitty Electron client that melts your battery and looks awful (they killed a gorgeous - especially on Mac - native client to replace it with this shit).

Yup, all these came after Skype started sucking, most probably because of it.

They wanted total control over the data so they converted the p2p supernodes to Microsoft servers... now the government can get what it needs more easily.

I think people forget how bad Skype was in a lot of ways though. The big reason they shifted to the cloud model, for instance, was how unreliable message delivery was on phones with peer-to-peer. I remember when, in order to send images, you and the other person had to be online at the same time.

They made some missteps, sure, but Skype was already a very dated solution.

I am not sure how "unreliable" the peer to peer model was. From what I remember it's always been perfect for me.

Media uploads could have been solved by a server-based "media" service, while keeping the reliable & battle-tested P2P architecture.

As of currently, the server-based architecture is an absolute disaster, way worse than P2P.

I regularly had whole chatrooms that wouldn't update for days. I had no way of knowing if a message I sent would really like... ever... get delivered.

I've been a pretty big Skype user in the past, and still use it a bit now, and it is actually so much more reliable now that Microsoft runs it.

Haven't really used group chats that much on it, but for call establishment, I stand behind my words when I say it used to be a lot better.

With P2P it would sometimes take a bit longer (10 seconds?) but it would always work. When it wouldn't, it was because of a problem on either one of the endpoints, and switching network connections or rebooting the router fixed it.

With the current model it would just randomly not work (the client also sucks and sometimes hangs in an inconsistent state after the failed call attempts), without anything we can do - it's something with the software and/or servers.

I used to trust Skype calls to actually go through - now even if I see "ringing" I have no faith in whether it's actually ringing on the other side (and if it was, whether the call would actually connect once picked up).

The design history of Skype for iPhone was particularly misguided: First it was a native UIKit app, then MS put a lot of effort into making it look and behave exactly like a Windows Phone app [1], down to the unusual gestures. When they gave up on that, the app reverted to a native UIKit design, but just a few updates later we got the current Snapchat clone instead. Needless to say, features regularly got lost during these radical redesigns.

That‘s still very clearly the same Microsoft where a gazillion layers of dumb middle management ruin everything[2].

[1] http://www.iphonehacks.com/2014/06/skype-redesign-iphone-app... [2] http://moishelettvin.blogspot.com/2006/11/windows-shutdown-c...

> To be fair they haven't screwed up LinkedIn. I think they will let GitHub grow with their resources.

I'm not sure if LinkedIn could be any less "screwed up" than it was when Microsoft bought it.

Can somebody explain to me why LinkedIn is screwed up? I am genuinely asking ;)

It doesn't provide any value to the regular user; most people I know receive lots of emails mostly from body shops but rarely get a job from LinkedIn. The UI is designed to make it hard to configure privacy, and to make you casually spill your contact list. They are always trying to sell premium accounts. To be fair it should provide some value to a junior dev who doesnt have a Network yet but LinkedIn doesn't even try to hide the fact that you are the product (unlike say fb).

Shameless plug here but I'm also so sick of LinkedIn that I've started building an alternative for developers by myself - https://able.bio/

Still very much alpha but the idea is to have a clean UI and allow developers to write their own insightful articles for the community to read and reward the author with reputation. Like Medium but with more specific language, library, framework topics etc. Then use that to help recruiters who can't code advertise and source candidates for technical interviews. No inbox spamming free for all, they can only contact you when you've applied for a position.

I'd be interested to know what people think of this and if they have any feedback.

LinkedIn was so screwed up I don't know what they could have done to make it worse.

To be fair, they did screw Skype.

100% to the guy that said LinkedIn wasn’t a great product to begin with. X10

They didn't need to screw up linkedin -- they bought it that way.

So, previously Microsoft used to have a program to integrate new companies, called “venture integrations”. I wonder if LinkedIn is going through VI, or not.

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