Every minor redesign Github has released over the last couple of years increasingly reek of "designed by programmers". But Github deserves better than that. Please get real designers.
I could tell what buttons did simply from the text (and they were useful) e.g 'unwatch', 'your fork' etc. Now there's more space taken up with the text and the icon.
The icons don't seem to provide additional info in any way. Perhaps that's because Github would like to switch from text to icons eventually (with text+icons in the interim)? I hope not, as it would mean way too many things for people (esp novices) to get their heads around.
Like Gmail's new icon-only interface? I hope not! It's difficult enough for people to figure out what Gmail's icons represent.
It was actually useful to have a very obvious indicator that your repo was private and nobody else could see it.
There were several posts on HN over the last couple of years where people complained about these and other issues.
Github's design is not and has never been terrible. And furthermore, hiring a "real designer" will not solve the problem because the core issue is that Github is a complex product; throwing a designer in there who doesn't understand the nuances of how git is used in the wild is not going to help. There are many different audiences and many different conflicting problems to be solved. The reason there's so much meta information stacked at the top is because the meta information is more commonly used then the file contents in most cases. I agree it's not the most intuitive, but on the other hand there's not an obviously primary role for this page and things are reasonably well organized and delineated based on purpose. I've used almost every single link there and there's not much that doesn't deserve to be front and center.
As for the icon redesign, they are trying to establish a visual language so that the masses of information they are publishing are more readily digestible. This is not something that happens overnight, instead you have to use the icons for a while before they sink and start to pay dividends. I'm not saying Github is successful, but I think people on HN and indeed the Internet in general are way to quick to criticize redesigns based on first impressions.
As a non-designer, I always use text labels in my applications because I can't make good graphics/icons, but it always seems like the applications lack polish because of it. I guess there is a happy medium to be found between no icons and the strict only-ambiguous-icons like Google switched to with Android 4 and their recent web property redesigns.