Azure's going to suffocate github. I'm curious to see what's next. Will self-hosting the code repository come back in vogue or will another social-coding platform take off?
I used to work in a small independent team of 30 people within a large corp, half of which was dev. We used to run our own gitlab on-prem, our CI/CD was also on-prem. It worked perfectly, never had down time, devops guy could configure them on-demand to our needs. Me (and some other guys) also jumped in times to times to help (mostly just ssh into the servers for health check, disk partition, etc.). Then we grew (the biz team, dev was the same) and some new PMs with fancy Ivy League degrees came in and pushed for on-cloud Bitbucket. Things went to shit pretty fast after that ... Our codebase was only a few hundred thousands lines, there was only like hundreds of commits per day, the servers our git + CI/CD lived on never saturated ...
I've mostly worked for "engineering lead" corps and a PM has only ever affected outside software sold to users except for JIRA. There's no chance a PM would be able to affect the internal code storage/ci-cd systems at anywhere I've worked in the past unless they went on some proselytizing war path and convinced some senior lead engs to convince the rest of the org to accept it.
In the example, in my 20 year career, I've seen bitbucket in use once. I'm the one who usually manages that stuff since I'm an infra eng.
To be honest, I'm very much surprised Amazon hasn't eaten Microsoft's lunch here. Offer out-of-the-box AWS instances with Gitlab, SLAs, backups and the works, should be straightforward.
We should worry less about what everyone else uses, and more about what we use. I'm self-hosting Gitea and thinking of upgrading to Forgejo. What are you using?
If you move the company too, what would make you pay someone to run forgejo instead of self-hosting it? Disclosure, I run Fjord, a managed dedicated forgejo provider.
There was never a "sense of community", there was only low friction on issue reporting and especially, commenting on an issue you had nothing else to do with. Every time an issue hit HN it would be flooded with bystander comments.
If you're actively considering self hosting, I recommend giving forgejo a try. The experience is much more similar to what GitHub offers, actions API is nearly identical to name one similarity of which there are many. Moving essentially becomes one prompt and a coffee later for a small team.
I find this recommendation funny, because I completely agree from a sysadmin perspective.
I used to use Gitlab at work, and small teams would run into so many footguns with CI that we had to throw up guardrails to prevent mistakes. Far too many links to gitlab issues that were not fixed even after >8+ years of being open ended up biting us. With GHA I haven't had that experience, and same for all of my self hosted Forgejo instances. I used to hate using GHA from about ~2018 to 2021, but they've fixed a lot of things I disliked since then.
What do you need real anchors for? Sharing of pipelines?
Maybe I’ve been burned too much by pipeline maintenance (because we didn’t have yaml anchors?) but I rather have builds defined in make /bazel/etc than in yaml. So the only thing the pipeline does is optionally restoring caches, kicking off the build system, uploading PR validation results, and saving cache. Pushing artifact etc is all done from inside the build system.
There is no “setup” like installing packages because we make the build image seperately.
probably not. The people that have done it before or willing to do it now is probably a very % of the commit volume, they leaving wouldn't change much, probably not gonna even move the exponential growth needle.
I've heard that companies that run enterprise Github instances on-premises have almost equally poor availability compared to github.com. There are probably plenty of reasons why they have so many outages, though I agree one of them is probably Azure. The outages started around the same time as the number of pushed commits skyrocketed, and the number of Dependabot vulnerabilities started growing as well, which in its turn increases the amount of PRs and Actions activity. Also, LLMs regularly import dependencies that are already out of date, meaning that when doing agentic development, one commit often results in several Dependabot PRs being created instantly.
> Probably just a coincidence that Github started to have issues after beginning their move to Azure at the end of last year.
Right.
I'd like to think that Azure has improved in a meaningful way in the past half a decade or so... but it has not. Maybe less inexplicable 400 errors in random API calls, I guess.
And yet Microsoft keeps posting record growth. Unbelievable.
Meta has warped society to think that life is meaningless without affirmation.
No amount of money can fix that or punish them.
I think that sharing things can be wonderful, but monetizing that or adding Like counts to gamify it is very damaging to people. This idea that everyone should know better and take a ideological stand against some dumb app is ridiculous. Life can be hard at times, and these apps manipulated that.
>Meta has warped society to think that life is meaningless without affirmation.
No, Meta just amplified it to the nth degree. Humanity has always put an outsized emphases on such affirmation, whether it's reputation, status, belonging, approval, prestige, attractiveness, respectability, yadda yadda yadda. Consumer culture and mass media were already firmly entrenched and doing a damn good job of turning those into visible measures of personal worth in the form of wealth, possessions, beauty standards, popularity, professional success, celebrity... I could go on and on.
Meta just put a big ol' bright spotlight on the worst aspects that we were already amplifying, and perhaps sped-run that amplification.
I'd put it differently. The affirmation we were accustomed to generally had some substance. If someone called, sent you a postcard, or met with you, it probably meant they cared at least to some extent.
Social media strips all that away to the point where affirmation costs no effort to give but also means nothing. Here's a test I like to recommend: don't post anything on HN, X, or Facebook for a month. See how many people notice or reach out and ask if you're OK. The most likely answer is zero. Hundreds or thousands of "friends", zero meaningful return.
This also makes us feel that we constantly need to work for these affirmations. If you don't post, no one likes you. This is not a Facebook problem, but Facebook built its business around it, so they deserve to be singled out.
>The affirmation we were accustomed to generally had some substance. If someone called, sent you a postcard, or met with you, it probably meant they cared at least to some extent.
For the Average Joe, absolutely! Completely agreed.
>Social media strips all that away to the point where affirmation costs no effort to give but also means nothing. Here's a test I like to recommend: don't post anything on HN, X, or Facebook for a month. See how many people notice or reach out and ask if you're OK. The most likely answer is zero. Hundreds or thousands of "friends", zero meaningful return.
This is what it had been like for celebrities, people of fame, of massive wealth, of great success/achievements, and so forth for a very long time. Cultures put those on a pedestal and encouraged people to want to reach for those same things, to want to be more than the Average Joe. We wanted it, and Meta gave everyone the ability to have it.
I don't think it's the same. People usually don't see their "relationship" with celebrities as peer-to-peer. They either look up or look down on them (i.e., idolize or hate). So the attention you get from fans as a celebrity is actually a lot more meaningful. People go to great lengths to tell you about the impact you had on their life and they don't forget you easily. The scale makes it awkward, but the emotions are real.
On social media, we usually don't care about the other person at all. Likes and comments are 100% transactional. I have thousands of "followers" on X. If I die tomorrow, they won't even notice. The space on their timeline will be filled by other content to retweet or like.
I always thought fandom was '3rd party.' Like, you have an actor in a high-exposure job, but the more the middleware companies boost the allure of any arbitrary celebrity, the more money they'll make. The actor may address 'the people at large' during press events, but by-and-large, don't really interface with fans all that much.
> We wanted it, and Meta gave everyone the ability to have it.
Slight modification: We wanted to feel good about things, and Meta, knowing exactly what they were doing, took advantage of that to enrich themselves while gaslighting everyone that their manipulation and exploitation was totally ok and normal.
Its easy for people without a conscience like Zuckerberg to do that and laugh about it.
> No, Meta just amplified it to the nth degree.
> [...]
> Meta just put a big ol' bright spotlight on the worst aspects that *we* were already amplifying, and *perhaps* sped-run that amplification.
No, pick one. If it's the former, it's essentially the same as saying they warped society.
I agree that these traits are human and were there before social media, but amplifying, gamifying and exploiting addiction is reprehensible.
> Meta has warped society to think that life is meaningless without affirmation
> No, Meta just amplified it to the nth degree. Humanity has always put
Those statements are the same. Our species was not designed to deal with the pressures of a A/B tested content fairy, designed by the most well paid minds our most advanced societies have trained, running on infrastructure that is more expensive than the GDP of many nations.
There are bounds within which a system functions optimally. When pushed far beyond those bounds, indefinitely, it is absolutely accurate to say the system becomes warped.
>This is the “If I wouldn’t have done it, somebody else would have”.
This is a disingenuous read of my comment.
>Villains have agency, and deserve to get the blame for their malevolent actions.
On this we absolutely agree, especially in regards to Meta. Nothing in life is that black and white, and there's nuance - to ignore our culture's outsized desire for things like that as a part of what pre-disposes us to being addicted to Meta/et al's bullshit is a fallacy.
It is that amplification that is the problem. Everyone has a voice. But if one actor chooses which voices to amplify it is responsible for the results.
This episode will come to an end, only to be replaced by a more subtle - surely AI driven - form of amplification/attenuation.
Tobacco existed for eons, and then American tobacco companies engineered it to make it a hundred times as addictive with full knowledge of what they were doing. They intentionally created dependencies. I have no sympathy for them. This is too light of a settlement.
> Meta has warped society to think that life is meaningless without affirmation.
As someone who graduated high school just before Facebook became a thing: it's always been like this. For better or worse, Facebook and Instagram just meant you could now seek affirmation from a larger community than your local community.
While there's definitely some harm with social media (comparing yourself to a perfectly curated profile) there's also plenty of benefits (it's democratized advertising, news, made it easier for small businesses to reach customers, etc...).
when florida banned phones from schools, a gold-standard causation study found a benefit of 0.9 percentiles on standardized tests between students who were under the ban and those who could use phones freely. this is about the same impact as studying for a standardized test for 1 hour.
we have had a lot of chances to study this stuff, and the results - like the teen sleep study and the teen wellness studies, both conducted by the same people and NOT capable of determining causation, but nonetheless the best publicized in the media - are real, but they are small.
so the stuff you are saying might be true, but the effect might be so small as to be meaningless. there are bigger threats to society than social media.
There are of course bigger threats, but have you ever talked to one of these gen Z zombies that have fried their brain on their phone? My nephew is one. He has the thousand yard stare, can barely have a conversation, and has no ability to do anything off his phone. Of course, it's not everyone, but the effects of phone use are beyond obvious and clearly destructive.
I remember being a zombie nephew, although back in those days it was the Game Boy that purportedly fried my brain. (It was entirely normal, of course, for the uncle who told me that to then leave the conversation and retreat to his armchair for his daily 3 hours of baseball watching; that's sports, you can't fry your brain with sports!)
Obviously it's not healthy to plop down in front of a TV for hours ever day. The science behind what social media is doing to young brains is very real, and to compare it to gameboy is arguing in bad faith.
personally i reject any frame of mind that makes stubborn, labeled generalizations about kids based on one or a handful of interactions. the people who conduct their business this way: they are always projecting.
The people building the app didn’t know any better either.
Maybe at some point they realized how addictive and corrosive to society the app had become. But I don’t believe they set out with that as an end goal.
Yes, do you think Parents spend every waking hour hovering over their kids?
Good to know how childless you are, or fortunate enough to grow helicopter wings.
The grift is strong when the marks are the fault. Black people are also at fault for living in a ghetto and getting addicted to crack served by the CIA in the 80s.
In fact I have 3 children, thanks! And controlling your child's screen time + social media is a very possible thing! It's called "raising your children".
Please stay on topic lest everyone get confused by your nonsense about unrelated topics.
People like you really do make the comments on HN quite bad. Do better!
You can't turn around though. Everything goes toward the black hole. If you turned around, atoms would be moving away from, or at the least changing their direction in respect to the black hole. And that's not possible. You wouldn't even see anything because all light is going toward the center, and it wouldn't go into your eyes.
Unless you went in butt-first, but the path of the photons would have changed and would now be going toward the black hole, and everything would look probably all smushed together.
I lived in Seattle for a couple of years, out in one of the suburbs (West Seattle). I would say that housing cost is the primary issue in Seattle, but its nowhere near San Francisco. Outside of that, public transit is pretty good. I have gone back and forth across the city, to Bellevue, even to Olympia, on public transit very cheaply and within a reasonable amount of time. The light rail recently opened up to Bellevue, though Bellevue is not really all that much cheaper lol.
The food didn't feel super expensive, but it definitely wasn't great. San Francisco and NYC are so much better. I have been consistently disappointed with the food in Seattle.
The one issue I see with Seattle is that they have a 30% or so vacancy rate for office buildings in downtown. A lot of companies have left, or will be moving. Many to Bellevue. The city decided to target businesses to fund more progressive policies, but with remote work, the businesses just moved across Lake Washington. Or to other states (like Starbucks). I don't see that changing. So now they have a budget deficit, lots of office vacancies, and the looming threat of more companies leaving. Not sure if that'll change it's standing or anything, but its not great.
I lived in Seattle for a couple of years, where its completely legal, and I almost never smelled it. I smell it far more often in cities where its illegal.
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