Because it's Microsoft. Categorically incapable of respecting their users.

What's interesting to me is how many people went like 'Oh, Satya really gets open source, this time it will be different'.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17225599

The worst part of Microsoft is whoever is running their marketing department, they just inject themselves into everything, like Windows. GitHub is different, they will 100% lose users and income if they don't learn to back the hell off of it though. Windows, well, everyone complains about Windows no matter what, so valid complaints are ignored.

With Office, well, your employer is paying for it, so you have no say in it anyway.

It's clearly the marketing dept at Microsoft swoops in and poisons all their software, who else would be doing this?

This is why I say, marketing driven development is garbage.

Growth. It's a disease. Can't just work on a good product it's got to make arbitrary growth targets.

This type of behaviour seems to be endemic within Microsoft. They're like the scorpion in the Russian tale of the scorpion and the frog, seemingly a retelling of the Persian tale of the scorpion and the tortoise:

A long time ago, a scorpion came to the edge of a great river. Not being a good swimmer, it asked a nearby frog if it might get a ride across.

The frog eyed the scorpion warily. “I’ve heard of your kind. I see the stinger you hide behind your back. I wish I could help you, but I cannot risk it.”

“Why would I sting you?” the scorpion reasoned. “If you die, we would both drown.”

The frog was convinced. It let the scorpion climb atop its back, then began to swim across the great river. But when they were halfway across, the scorpion suddenly stung the frog.

As the poison spread through his body, the frog cried out, “Why did you sting me? You have killed us both!”

The scorpion replied, “I couldn’t help it. It’s my nature.”

Microsoft just can't help it that they end up destroying the goodwill they inherit when they buy a property. It is in their nature.

Microsoft can't help themselves. They ruin everything that they touch.

Funny that people said the exact same thing back when GitHub was originally acquired [0], I wonder how many actually went through with their words and ditched it. I bet GitHub has more users today than ever before though.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17227286

What are some good alternatives for closed source codebases that people have been using and enjoying?

I only ask because I already know of good alternatives for FOSS, but it's the private / work projects that keep me tethered to GH for now.

even aside from this, their reliability has been absolutely terrible since they took it over. it's down so often we had to setup slack notifications directly to the devs to try to take some of the pressure off our ops teams.

they must be migrating it to hyper-v or something. brutal.

Are there any obvious successor to GitHub yet?

There are a few alternatives, but none have the critical mass of users yet.

i am surprised it took them time to destroy Github. usually they manage to make acquired companies a garbage pretty fast.

Yes. Like they did with the githubsearch for users that are not logged in.

At first, they brought it back. Then they changed to limits so you get between zero and two searches before getting an error message that you have hit some kind of limit.

They only turn on features that users disabled every chance they get.

Instead of polluting PRs, Copilot will insert comments and logging and text fields and buttons with links to web sites with helpful product tips into your code and user interfaces.

Talking about doing it is virtue signaling.

Don't just say, do! If you have a popular repository, share news of your migration to drive others to do the same.

VOTE WITH YOUR FEET, PEOPLE!

> sorry about the tangent

I understand why you felt the need to do it, but it’s still sad that you have to apologise for it. It’s not like if using technology for killing is a fringe hypothesis, it’s happening right now and on the news. It’s a discussion worth having.

> This really is the quote of the century

I loathe that quote. The people thinking about how to make others click ads are only concerned with themselves and their own profit. To me that does not qualify as a “best mind”. Maybe a “smart” or “good at computers” or “good at manipulation” mind, but certainly not “best”. A “best mind” should be capable of empathy and have a broad societal view of consequences for their actions.

> They created an amazing technology that oftentimes is indistinguishable from magic and then use it to deliver ads

The people who created the tech and the ones that use it for ads in this case are two different groups - the first one is from Google (initial discovery) and OpenAI (realizing the potential of discovery and developing it into a product), whereas the second is the same company that decided that building ads into an operating system is an excellent idea.

It's just the natural evolution of "They're not advertisements. They're recommendations."

These people could invent actual AGI, and the only thing they could think to do with it is push ads.

And nobody has ever bought anything just because of an ad.

You either already knew about shit through some other way or you were going to buy it anyway.

Only people downvoting this will be the ones who perpetuate this Emperor With No Clothes racket.

It's just a thin veil for surveillance.

They were not ads though. The companies did not pay for those, from what I can tell. Microsoft seemed to really thought they were being helpful here.

A lot of amazing technology has been invented just for the purpose of killing people. It's nothing new. Humans are monkeys that like to kill other monkeys and no amount of civilization will change that.

if its indistinguishable from magic please do some reading or refrain from using.

I don’t think the quote is particularly fair. You could just as easily see it as the best minds are building huge amounts of amazing, free technology and need a way to pay for it.

For every microsecond level ad auction broker there’s a free Android update, cat video platform enhancement, calendar app feature, or type checked scripting language release.

HFT on the other hand — now there’s a tech black hole!

[edited to add What have the Romans ever done for us?, below]

> > The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads

> What a waste.

If you consider "what people (un-coercedly) spend money on" as "what people actually want", the situation gets obvious:

People don't voluntarily spend money so that e.g. deep scientific questions are worked on or other things are done that are often claimed that "smart people should do".

(by the way: a lot of problems that are claimed that "we need smart people to solve" actually don't need smart people (i.e. the problem could be solved by raw intelligence), but are rather "political" problems, i.e. problems of manipulating people).

I wish it was different, but before you claim that it is a waste that "the best minds are thinking about how to make people click ads", you should better find an idea what these people should do instead.

Exactly same for me.

If I think about it, that was in my head accounted as „no one would be that stupid”.

Microsoft doesn't believe in consent, it believes in yes or every 3 days.

> Microsoft is seriously the worst offender in shoving AI down everyone's throats.

Microsoft will always be a company that pushes things on people rather than building things that attract people. It's in their DNA.

There was a great quote in an article I read from here recently along the lines of: Microsoft have invested enough in OpenAI that it's not their problem -- not Sam Altman's -- if it doesn't work out.

> Microsoft is seriously the worst offender in shoving AI down everyone's throats.

The worst, or just ahead of the curve? Because you’re kidding yourself if you don’t think every other AI company or company integrating AI into their products won’t be using it as an advertising delivery vehicle.

The fact that they chose to publish the ad _under someone else's name_ is so tone deaf that I just can't understand what they were thinking.

What is this referring to? Is GitLab using AI to guess which issue a merge request is meant to fix?

How do you know better if it was a mistake than GitHub themselves? It is possible that the tip was only supposed to show up in some other place and it accidentally started getting added somewhere it shouldn't have been.

Oh, this is just the usual Microsoft Stockholm syndrome. I've been witnessing this for over 20 years now and have been told that it has been a thing for much longer than that.

"No, we can't switch to OpenOffice you weird Open Source hippie! I can't e-mail documents to other people anymore, nobody can open them. Besides, the UI is all different, I won't be able to find anything!"

Then Office 2007 happened, tossing out the waffle menu for the ribbon and people started receiving e-mails with strange docx/xlsx files that nobody could open. IIRC that was still an issue 3 years later.

But no, when Microsoft does it, it is different: "This is progress! Are you against progress, you weird Luddite?"

I remember by the time Windows 8 was released ("Kachelofen edition" - "hurr, your desktop is a tablet!"), I was discussing with a Unix graybeard friend in the cafeteria how long it will take until the complainers accept that "this is the way now". I think it was him who suggested that if Microsoft sent a sales rep around to shit on peoples lawns, it would take at most a year until they start defending it as the inevitable cost of technological progress.

No matter how slow and bloated the GitHub web UI gets, or how many nonsense anti-features Microsoft stuffs into it. People will accept it and find funny excuses (network effect will be the main one).

> ca. everyone here

Every time someone claims “everyone on HN thought X”, I go back to check and find out that it was not true and that the discussions had both people in favour and against. Every time. But this case is particularly bad, I’m checking the top voted comments and so far the feeling is of dread and wariness, the complete opposite of what you claim.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17227286

I really wish people would stop this silly “everyone thought X” shtick. It’s embarrassing. Verification is trivial. What do you gain from it? It’s just spreading heated reactions based on a lie.

Relevant thread

"Microsoft acquires Github" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17227286

"Microsoft loves open source now!"

Oh, they adore it. Specially once they figure out how to plaster all open source projects with ads...

I've had so many discussions with friends over the past 15 or so years where they've praised Microsoft and their embracing of open source, and have given me a hard time for continuing to distrust them. To be fair, I was a teenager in the 90s, and a huge computer nerd who followed the MS antitrust case very closely; quite a few of these friends are 5-7 years younger, rendering them a bit too young at the time to experience that going on in real-time.

But damn... I enjoy a good "I told you so" as much as the next guy, but most of the time it sucks to be right.

Thinking of megacorps as anything other than slimy, amoral, scum honestly requires superhuman levels of mental gymnastics.

ahahah yes I remember those comments yes

Does it matter these days if a company or administration are "the good guys"? Does "good" even have a meaning anymore? The "good" part of the world rotates in disbelief since Trump was re-elected in a democratic vote. Everyone says Microsoft is evil, since, what, the 90s?! But still, Windows is everywhere. Is anyone still buying this moral bullshit? "Goodness" obviously has no majority.

So they can drop them at some point and then hold the party that has now become dependent on those ads to ransom and/or as a way to soften them up before acquisition.

> letting Copilot make changes to PRs written by a human without their knowledge

Wait, did they really sneak this in entirely without user interaction? So people trying not to use AI would still risk being ""contaminated""? Incredible breach of trust. Similar kind of thing to lying about whether your product is vegan.

Would be cool if they listened to us about the top voted feedback of all time, re: when the destroyed the feed

https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/66188

This is corporate PR speak 101, external or internal doesn't matter. None of that sentence is true and everybody knows that.

Its just a theatre since other peers are dancing the same dance and they can't stick out as too rough or honest or whatever. Of course they realized this very well from the start, weighted risk of backfiring, reward for meeting some fucked up quarterly or yearly objective set by higher ups and decided to go ahead.

You can safely ignore the words, just make a mental mark that this is/are sociopathic assholes, move on with life and leave the mark there for next 4 decades and act according to that knowledge the next time you deal with them or their products, if you have to.

Someone, claiming to be from the Raycast team, in the original HN thread said that they were not aware of the advert or were involved with it in any manner.

Sometimes I see something nifty in Raycast and it tempts me. Then I see something weird from them, look in the Alfred manual, and realize it already supports the same feature and that I’ll stay put, thanks.

They're not even trying. But this time 'the hacker did it' excuse wouldn't hold so they had to come up with something new in a hurry.

Don't assume they were in on it. Microsoft plays very weird games with platform access and traffic.

Doubt Raycast would have known about this, think they are smarter than that. But who knows.

forgejo.org

> Who should resign?

And achieve what?

Feels like you never worked at corporation it goes more like this:

"old employees who know the environment and are in tune with community are playing safe so they don't bring in immediate results, feels like progress stagnates, so they move those people to other tasks"

"new clueless manager joins, has to come up with a brilliant idea (that actually is bad across the board for someone who understands the environment) to get quarterly bonus, then convinces bunch of |out of touch suites| with power point presentation where numbers go up"

"he gets burned by community response, becomes more conservative - next quarters he is moved away or he moves away on his own - new clueless can come into his place"

Microsoft had a lot of goodwill?

Wouldn't it change the hash, making push requests conflict in many case?

perhaps they forgot to set thinking mode in the LLM payload

Yeah, that's part of why nobody wants to use Sourceforge.

Ironically, that's what probably killed Sourceforge and helped GitHub take off. It remains to be seen whether Codeberg will now repeat the process.

Wow, I haven't heard that name for decades.

> I understand "free services" eventually come to the conclusion of either charging or using ads to finance and even make money out of them.

The endgame is not "or", it's "and": eventually come to the conclusion that, why choose between revenue streams when we could just have both?

The issue is context. GitHub is a professional workbench, not social media. Any "tip" that serves as an ad is just noise in a high-focus environment.