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Comment by bigyabai | Hacker News Reader

The absolute state of Github is that I use it dozens of times a day and it works flawlessly, for free, with intermittent outages.

Microsoft is doing more with Github than I can say for most of their products. I won't go to bat for the Xbox or Windows teams, but Github is... fine. Almost offensively usable.

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> works flawlessly

> intermittent outages

Those seem like conflicting statements to me. Last outage was only 13 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45915731.

Also, there have been increasing reports of open source maintainers dealing with LLM generated PRs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46039274. GitHub seems perfectly positioned to help manage that issue, but in all likelihood will do nothing about it: '"Either you have to embrace the Al, or you get out of your career," Dohmke wrote, citing one of the developers who GitHub interviewed.'

I used to help maintain a popular open source library and I do not envy what open source maintainers are now up against.

GitHub: 60% of the time, it works every time.

> GitHub seems perfectly positioned to help manage that issue, but in all likelihood will do nothing about it

I genuinely don't understand this position. Is this not what Github issues bots were made for? No matter where your repo is hosted, you take the onus of moderating it onto yourself.

Downtimes are an issue, it's why I jokingly mentioned it. Besides that I'm without gripe. Make Github a high-nines service and I'll keep using it until the wheels fall off.

My thinking as well. If people don’t like Microsoft, the last place to start their quixotic adventure would be GitHub.

I don’t use Azure or Windows. At work I push against Teams and actively try to persuade customers not to use Microsoft products. The reason isn’t even ideological - most of the time their products suck and the dev support is bad. VScode may be an exception, I’ll give them that.

Given the trajectory of Microsoft products it stands to reason Github’s future is uncertain. Also Git is ultimately a hosting platform that any competent software shop can recreate; the people behind the platform matter more than the platform itself.

As someone who is intimately familiar with GitHub’s data models, I wouldn’t say that replacing it is so technically trivial.

But even then, you are right that that the moat of social cachet and implicit trust is still more valuable than the moat of technical implementation.

True eventually, but not today

So you are ok with 2FA, right? If you contribute code there.

Now - what if you are not ok with it? What can you do?

> Almost offensively usable

I think you conflate two points here. One is how useable github is. The other is: control. At which point are you no longer ok with what a private company does? This is not solely about Microsoft alone by the way.

> So you are ok with 2FA, right?

Yes. Are you not? It's one of the most effective measures to prevent a whole class of supply chain attacks. On Github the 2FA is also flexible enough to allow non-hardware passkeys, so you can choose a privacy preserving option with good UX.

Last I looked a couple of years ago, GitHub 2fa has a lot of shoddy gotchas actually. There are a handful of GH issues on it with tons of comments.

For example it was impossible to remove/delete a phone number 2fa, even if you registered multiple other 2fa sources like security keys.

> intermittent outages

The outages have gone from "almost every Friday" to "several times per week".

...so far... but the problems are noticeably increasing in frequency, especially in Github Actions, and most of those don't show up on the status page because they are so random (eg restart the ci pipeline and it works) It feels exacty like Github is slowly rotting from the inside and I guess the reason is that everybody is forced to work on pointless AI features so there's nobody left doing actually important feature and maintenance work.

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