Github just hit 2 million users. | Hacker News Reader

Github just hit 2 million users.

github.com

143 pointsjoshryandavis36 comments

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If you're logged in, you can go to http://github.com/home to see it. We are super excited. :)

Congratulations!

Wondering how many are paid users

And how many active accounts...

And the definition of active accounts...

Well, at least one of those 2 million+ accounts is for my build server, who is not a particularly active committer, nor a paying customer.

But for my main account, I'm quite happy to pay Github their not very many £s per month.

Congrats on 2 million! We hit 1 million a few months ago and we had a great party.

I like how you can say "hosting over 3,514,881 repositories" because by the time the HTML has loaded it there would surely be at least one more ;)

Well, that’s why they say ‘over’

Github, I love you. You have saved my company months of engineering time because of all the third-party libraries that we can easily find and use through your service. We're only a year old, so taking the time to build all those features from scratch would be a massive tax.

And this is just one of the many, many benefits. Soon you'll have 3M users, then 5M, then 10M... who knows how big it'll get.

I second this. Even if the library is just an experiment by someone, has been dead for 6 months, and has a few bugs, it's still going to save our team at least a week and up to several months worth of development time. Time that as a startup is invaluable.

Unless the library got renamed, in which case you'll get a 404 with no indication whatever that anything had ever existed at that URL.

Yes, because you could not search for your libraries before github existed. I don't see any logic in your claim.

Github's project pages present a really nice, standardized, easy way to find out what a library does. I am always relieved when I find out that a 3rd-party python library I want to use is hosted on github, as it means I can very easily read the documentation, browse the source code, and examine outstanding issues.

GitHub is great and all, but shouldn't the thanks be directed at the third party library authors?

And the search providers which helped him find the libraries? God knows Github search didn't do it.

Obviously the library authors make this happen and I mean no slight to them. They rock. But this thread is about Github so I focus my comments on how they add value.

Github made it easier to share code and created a community. Now more people share. Github standardized project formats (which dougws points out below). It's easier to figure out what's in a library.

This makes it easier for me to build complex apps. It saves my company gob loads of time & money. I fucking love Github and I fucking love people who use it to share high quality code that I don't have to recreate.

I am simply amazed that there are 2 million software developers creating projects that they can host on Github. For some reason, I still think of open software development as a rather indie movement.

So much has changed just in the last few years :-)

Not all accounts are used for open software. Lots of paid users are hosting private repos

True (my own company uses Github private repos for most of our work), but what's nice about that is that the barrier to transitioning a useful internal library into a reputation bolstering Open Source library is nearly zero.

I feel incredibly lucky to have started learning to code with resources like Github, Stack Overflow and Railscasts. It has made the process so much easier. Thank you, Github.

That's great news for Github, and truly as a community its a fantastic place to share and find code.

But recently I've really begun to question Git for version control, two recent experiences are really making me reconsider with its complexity outweighs its perceived usefullness. Its quite possible that for at least one of the projects I am involved in we will move back to SVN for the next version build.

try mercurial - dvcs with svn's simplicity.

Just curious, what were the experiences? Hell, send them to support@github.com if you don't want to reply publicly :)

Two projects now have had repeated problems with issues regressing and features being lost between builds. I had never considered it might be an issue with Git until someone else mentioned it to me. We need to do some proper investigation but at the moment under the gun to finish a release. When I have more details happy to share via support.

Every git repository on GitHub can also be used with svn.

Details: https://github.com/blog/1178-collaborating-on-github-with-su...

Does the ratio of users to repositories seem strange to anyone else? This to me looks like each user has around 1.5 repositories. This seems quite small?

On average most accounts I've seen have far more than 1 and a half repositories.

I wonder why github's US traffic numbers go down?

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/github.com/

because those analytics are (most likely) not accurate, github doesn't have the compete tracking installed.

Exact traffic numbers might be not accurate, but traffic trend in the course of full year at that traffic volume is generally pretty accurate.

Those analytics bear very little resemblance to our actual traffic both in terms of volume and overall trend.

You are right, Quantcast shows different trend:

http://www.quantcast.com/github.com

Compete is often wildly off. Compare the different services that offer similar analytics and you'll see how often they disagree.

Why do people still think compete, quantcast, alexa, etc are accurate when they don't have tracking pixels installed on the sites they're showing traffic for?

There was an interesting comment recently on this topic, someone explained that some of the larger tracking companies purchase traffic logs from American ISPs and although their traffic reports aren't necessarily accurate (because they don't have all the data -- as shown by the github employee below) it's not complete guess work and they can be considered representative for sites used by the average internet user.

The rise of the official and unofficial non-browser clients have a hand in it I imagine.

Or those numbers could just be bollocks.

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