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Comment by anitil | Hacker News Reader

For all the negativity on github I will praise them for one really good feature - code search across an organisation. I've found it really useful particularly for 'platform' related changes to be able to find how other people in an org has solved a problem. It's particularly useful when the documentation only shows the happy path (or was written 5 years ago and 'oh nobody does it that way anymore')

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The unified search (org wide, across issues/prs/code) and custom search backend works really well.

Honestly I don't understand all the GitHub hate recently. Honestly seems like a fashionable trend. Virtue signaling.

There was a decade where they barely innovated. Maybe people forgot about that? Or maybe they are too young to remember? I'll gladly take all the advances over the past 8-ish years for the odd issue they have. GH actions has evolved A LOT and I'm a heavy Copilot user at the org/enterprise level..

I'm largely happy with GitHub though for public GitHub at least, search is now terrible - it doesn't seem to return anything when not logged in and if you are logged in the filtering options are limited (this was the case mid last year anyway - maybe it's improved but I've given up trying to use the web search).

Whatever the motivations are, at least the end result is moving to freer (non-proprietary) and sometimes self-hosted solutions. If virtue signaling is what it takes to get there, I would like more of it. Virtue signaling gave us quality universities and museums, after all...

The raft of outages lately (my company was disrupted by I think four last week?) have certainly (and deservedly) created some pent-up frustration. I'm personally frustrated with its poor performance on Safari.

Overall, though, it's ... fine. That's all. A little worse than it used to be, which is frustrating, but certainly nowhere near unusable. I stood up my own forge and mirror some repos to it. The performance is almost comically better. I know it's not a fair comparison: I have only one user. On the other hand, I'm on a 9-year-old Xeon located geographically farther from me than GitHub's servers.

Is that a unique feature to GitHub?

No, Gitlab has it too (don't know about the others offerings). Gitlab integrates Advanced Search via Elasticsearch, last I checked they had plans to make zoekt available as an alternative.

No I think all the platforms have roughly similar features (it's not too hard - I built a toy one in a weekend using sqlite's fts module), but the speed and usefulness seem much better than the other platforms I've tried

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