Hacker News Reader

Comment by poorman | Hacker News Reader

> Earlier this year, we introduced the private beta of increased project item limits, expanding the capacity from 1,200 to 50,000 items in a project.

This reminds me why smaller companies can steal market share from larger companies. I can understand that at GitHub scale, it's probably difficult to support more that 1,200 items per project. The result? The entire ecosystem has these limits imposed on them. A smaller company could easily support 50,000 issues for a repository since they are hosting fewer repositories.

View on HN

Those smaller companies are usually just burning money in an attempt to gain traction. Free services usually have all harsh limitations when the company has to earn their own food. The main reason for this is usually the abuse of those services, not so much that they can't afford it.

You misunderstand: the keyword in that quote is “project.”

GitHub projects are boards, not repositories. I don’t know if there’s a limit on the number of issues repositories can have (nomad is over 5k).

I’m not actually sure how valuable a board with over 1k items on it is in practice.

I thought this was where OP was going with this comment. My inner LLM predicted the next sentence after “This reminds me why smaller companies can steal market share from larger companies.” to be: Larger companies get bogged down with heavy backlogs where it’s hard to tell what’s actually important to work on anymore. Small companies can stay nimble and focused more easily.

50K tasks in a single project is a joke. People should be forced to konmari it. Put a capacity diagram in their face so they have to constantly confront the reality of their lack of organization.

In GitHub, if you want to put an issue from a repository on a Project board it creates a project item to reference it, thus using an issue. If you have a large project (which I have where we hit the capacity of project items) then you are forced to start deleting issues from the project. Which in my opinion isn't great, because that limit includes project issues that have been marked "done". Then you lose the history of maybe why things were done a certain way.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com