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Comment by rickette | Hacker News Reader

Lots of comments here remind me of the time GitHub was purchased by Microsoft. It would be the dead of GitHub. While in fact it got better: GitHub Actions (pretty neat CI system) happend under Microsoft. Free private repos happend under Microsoft.

Now this time it could be different. But last time wasn't that bad imho.

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Microsoft made the GitHub UI significantly worse by rewriting everything in React. It's now slow and bloated. Copying text from the file viewer is a nightmare. And never ever look at how GitHub Actions work under the hood, you will wish you never became a developer.

Search is very much FUBAR. I get nagged to register even though they know I have like 17 github accounts, because who does not? They missed the ball on that one. Sometimes I like to browse without any cookies on a separate browser for window shopping reasons. Leave me alone Microsoft.

What was it before react? I do remember it being much faster.

I don't think they used a framework, I remember they used a lot of "vanilla JavaScript". They're using Rails after all. Here is a thread from 2022 where they began using React for their (then) new search: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33576722

Gitlab had their CI/CD a few years earlier, Github had no other option. As to which one feels more productive, that's up to personal tastes, for me Gitlab's option seems far more polished.

Github Actions was announced in OCT 2018, the acquisition deal close was announced a few days later.

Has there been any reports whether GitHub actually makes any money?

I feel like it doesn't matter at this point as long as MS valuation goes up it's all worth the costs. We're living in the VC economy :D

Github is the trainingmaterial for AI. It's a resource, not a product to make money with.

Is there evidence that GitHub has successfully prevented other AI companies from cloning open-source projects?

Yes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43936992

Microsoft doesn't disclose much but there were headlines in 2022 saying they were now at $1B annual recurring revenue.

Now with copilot I'd be surprised if they weren't profitable

The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent, etc, etc.

It did not entirely get better; some things may have improved and some things may have been made worse.

Private repositories is not a feature I use (if I want the files to be private, I will not send them to Microsoft or to someone else, unless they are the intended recipient).

I use GitHub Actions to automatically assign issues to myself,

I think they have changed the HTML in many worse ways; some functions require JavaScripts, etc. They also made mandatory 2FA, and setting it up does not work properly. (I can use the API to get around both issues, for now.)

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