GitHub's Explore Email | Hacker News Reader

GitHub's Explore Email

github.com

225 pointsChris91159 comments

As much as I love GitHub, I think the exploration paradigm could use a little work -- it seems to have something of a flywheel effect, where popular repositories receive more exposure, thus more stars/forks/watches, thus appear as 'trending', thus become more popular. (For example: currently trending as #3 in Python today is the official Django repository; and trending as #2 today is the official AirBNB javascript style guide, which has been boasting around 4,000 stars and hasn't been updated in around ten years.)

I'd kill for a GitHub StumbleUpon: click a button (filtering for, say, vertical or programming language) and get transported to a repository that has a baseline level of merit (say, at least three stars).

Check out my site, Cocoa Controls (and sign up for my weekly newsletter), which does roughly what you want for iOS content. I curate everything that shows up on there, and—in a lot of cases—the content I post initially has zero watchers/zero forks on GitHub.

http://www.cocoacontrols.com

So, I really really love cocoacontrols. Thought you should know. Awesome work.

thanks, that always makes me happy to hear! :)

Have to agree, Cocoa Controls is one of the first blogs I read daily on NewsBlur.

I've found one of the best ways to do the "stubmleupon" concept is to follow dozens of devs who star interesting repos (sometimes solely for that reason) and check your news stream often. I follow devs from a wide variety of backgrounds, which yields numerous libraries that I might not otherwise be aware of (and sometimes months ahead of HN exposure). One of the best things I've done with my GitHub account.

A solid example is: https://github.com/fogus

this is exactly what i do too.

Another great person to follow is Ilya Grigorik ... https://github.com/igrigorik

He spents a lot of time following repos, and literally built the github archive just to keep up with this.

for the interested:

http://www.githubarchive.org/

http://us5.campaign-archive2.com/home/?u=439aa16a39e4b10e0b6...

How do you find these devs who star interesting repos?

Edit: after some thought and poking around, one way to find these devs is to just look at the profiles of devs who run projects you use. If they've starred a lot of repos, see if they star things you would be interested in. If so, follow them. Easy.

Your example is spot on. Additionally, I use twitter, authors of books, authors of research papers, see who these devs follow, and numerous other ways of traversing the GitHub social graph.

Thanks! I use the same technique as you and have found many interesting repositories via https://github.com/swannodette and https://github.com/namin.

Many open-source news sites suffer from the same flaw. It's lazy to call something like this 'exploration' when you're re-hashing the same projects over and over.

Edit: sorry if I sound harsh on it. I think it's very necessary! But there needs to be more thought on how to find new and interesting projects.

  > click a button (filtering for, say, vertical or programming
  > language) and get transported to a repository that has a baseline
  > level of merit (say, at least three stars).

Below is a search for repos with at least three stars sorted by date updated. You can filter by language by clicking a language listed on the left side of the page.

https://github.com/search?q=stars%3A%3E2&s=updated

Deleted comment

Well, that was a double whammy of me typing 'ten years' instead of 'ten months' and also reading the wrong commit timestamp. I think my point is still valid, but thanks for pointing that out -- awesome work, btw!

I deleted my comment because I realized it was tangential to your point and don't want to sidetrack discussion. Carry on!

Anyone else disappointed in the Explore page's redesign? It's harder to navigate and they deleted the Languages portal.

You're probably looking at the wrong page. Have a look here instead: https://github.com/trending?l=javascript

You can’t see the list of the most popular languages anymore.

The following search displays the top 10 languages on the left side of the page:

https://github.com/search?q=stars%3A%3E=0

There's no harm in that. :)

A bit confusing that there isn't any submit button or other indicator that shows me that my preference is saved.

Otherwise, a cool feature; didn't know about it until now.

You do get immediate feedback "Subscribed!" directly below the radio button when you click it, and the box you choose turns green.

It felt pretty obvious to me.

the box turning green feels as having selected something, not actually submitted, and the "Subscribed!" line is far from the where you did the action, and disappears after a moment.

I don't know if this is a good design or not, just sharing my opinion as someone else who took a bit to understand I had actually subscribed.

I also was sort of expecting the example to change :/

I had the exact same feeling - I was unsure of whether I should be seeing a "save" button or not - and I didn't know whether the site had saved my response automatically.

It's a very subtle approach, but it's a little too subtle for my taste.

There's is an indicator: When you choose a subscription frequency, "Subscribed!" appears beneath the box.

It disappears after just a few seconds, though. That might be why you missed it.

Like it! Let's hope it comes in right time (before morning/during night in Spain) so I can read it with the morning coffee.

However, I would have loved to select which language/languages I'm interested in since if a project is in Python it's not as interesting for me as if it was in JavaScript.

We deliver these emails in the user's time zone so you'll receive it at 9am local time and have something fresh to start the day with.

I'm also an advocate of receiving the email sooner. Why not send it shortly after midnight in the users timezone so it sits in the users inbox when he wakes up.

At 9AM I'm already at work, had 2 cups of coffee, finished my morning tech news and started getting in the zone.

Ideally the user would choose the time the mail gets delivered. I have to have my phone on during the night in case of emergency and there is nothing more infuriating to me than a company that sends me email in the middle of the night, causing my phone to beep and wake me up.

Take control of your phone: use an app like Tasker to set up profiles to silence notifications except for ones you specify, like phone calls and messages from certain numbers.

As another Spanish based worker, a little earlier would be better - at 7, say, something to read over breakfast. But that's a very minor complaint!

I really like the way github is doing this. I'm irritated by the way other sites (linkedin, quora) automatically assume I must want their emails every X interval. I like that with github I can choose how frequently I get emails and that it's opt-in.

I built an iPhone app that shows you all of the trending repositories that use the languages you like. It's called Repo; if you're interested in checking it out, you can download it (for free) by going to:

http://appstore.com/repo

I really liked the design that you use to choose which level of newsletter subscription you want to sign up for. Clean, simple, and straightforward.

Would be pretty great to have this as an RSS feed (one daily/weekly/monthly item). I hesitate to subscribe to the email, but I wouldn't mind getting a the daily version in my RSS feeds.

Now that I mention it, some kind of service where I could get all emails from as RSS would be pretty neat.

EDIT: Seems like there is one! http://www.mmmmail.com/ However, I'm hardly able to just change my github email to that and have password reset emails etc be available to the public in the RSS feed. Best solution would be some kind of Gmail filter, where all emails with a specific tag would be available in the feed.

Would I just get emails for rethinkdb forever?

<realtalk>Bring back the old trending page!</realtalk>

It would be awesome if they tracked something like most used repositories, not just most starred. Like https://sourcegraph.com/repos

For some reason I have a suspicion that Github Trending is game-able. I tweeted once about this suspect repo that had 3000+ stars and all it said was something like "Hello to all github trending viewers" or something along those lines.

Link to the author of that repo: https://github.com/mandatoryprogrammer

What remains of the repo is visible in his profile.

Anybody have a clue as to how he did it?

The author details how he did it here:

http://thehackerblog.com/how-i-got-5000-github-followers-in-...

Firstly, I really love github explore. Having said that I still have yet to feel the need for one of these services that blindsides me with content just because I forgot I need it.

I understand that it drives more traffic to the site, but is it really worth saving the time of typing https://github.com/explore?

I guess that's the reason it's opt-in. Some people want "push" some people want "pull".

Personally, I intentionally keep my incoming stream very lean. I like aggregators like this, Ruby Weekly, JS Weekly, etc.

I'm late to the party - but a few months back I started http://gitat.me specially to highlight useful & interesting repos that don't make it to the trending page.

I've been subscribing to GithubArchive for awhile now, they send me top new & watched repos right in my inbox daily. I think we should check it out:

http://www.githubarchive.org/

Kudos for having the smoothest subscription process I've ever seen. One click, instant!

What about a filter which allows me to exclude repositories that use certain languages?

Is there a way to set the Explore emails to go to a different address than the primary? I set my primary as my work address, because most of my repos are work-related, but I'd like this email to go to my gmail.

I love to use http://www.githubarchive.org/ . Found it on 'Show HN' half a year ago or so.

Cool idea. I thought every day wouldn't be as special, so I went for every week. I'm looking forward to seeing some new projects...maybe some to contribute to.

I don't know everyone but exploring github day to day is an entertainment for me. Your thought about mail is good but doesn't work for some people.

I wish GitHub had a page like this: http://stackoverflow.com/users

https://github.com/search?q=repos%3A%3E0&type=Users&ref=sear...

Users with at least one repo - sorted by magical "Best Match".

That's great, thank you!

Just needs a prominent link somewhere and this would be super-useful as a starting point. Especially in the Enterprise product.

They kinda do. But again based on the user's repos. https://github.com/trending/developers?since=weekly

How about an RSS/Atom feed? I'm not crazy about signing up for another email.

And what happened to the 'Ref Log'?

Now that is the proper way to get someone to subscribe to emails.. so easy with great options.

My email is already too full -- how about a Twitter feed? My friend did this one:

https://twitter.com/mathisonian/status/399348431291817985

My twitter feed is too full already -- I'll stick with the email. Twitter is particularly annoying at limiting the amount of entries in my timeline that it will show from the past as it is.

Super duper. :)

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