Hacker News Reader

Looks like Dear GitHub[1] is having a rather quick impact on the product; first templates[2], now this:

[1] https://github.com/dear-github/dear-github

[2] https://github.com/blog/2111-issue-and-pull-request-template...

Perhaps it follows the Hollywood model. There are lots of features in development, staff-shipped, in discussion, in the backlog, or whatever. Then there is some external stimulus (Facebook launched reactions!) and the feature gets quickly tailored and green-lighted.

So there is a quick reaction, but work on the idea may have been hidden from the public for a long time.

That's a bit suspicious, really. A feature like "Reactions to a comment" doesn't take two years to implement, even with all the scaling considerations. And people have been complaining about that for at least two years.

Version 3.4.0 of Octicons [0] came out on January 22, 2016. It added "smiley" icon, which was used in this feature today. That's 8 days after the dear github letter. 7 weeks before today.

[0] https://github.com/github/octicons/releases/tag/v3.4.0

Reply on news.ycombinator.com