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Comment by delano | Hacker News Reader

This is the best thing to happen to site hosting in a long, long time. It's possibly even the nail in the *forge coffin.

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If *forge, as you say, had at least decent and responsive service with CVS and SVN then perhaps it might be worth it for some people. But it doesn't! It needs to die.

So true.

I'm still waiting for aggregation of update messages so that I can follow way more stuff, but github is one of my favorite sites on the net already...

Except they can never allow you to do anything dynamic on the server or you'd be able to read the HttpOnly github session cookies of anyone logged into github.com itself.

Well, they could, but they'd have to move to www.github.com exclusively, wait for all those session cookies to expire or for folks to visit and get them reset...

GitHub cookies are restricted to github.com and gist.github.com domains (using a redirect trick to allow cross subdomain cookie sharing). You can use all the JavaScript you like on your Pages.

There's not redirect trick, the cookies are just set to .github.com.

I didn't say anything about JavaScript being disallowed, the cookies are HttpOnly. So I said that you can't do things on the server.

The .github.com cookie is old and useless. You can't use it to do anything - it's a relic of our old authentication system. We should have made sure they were deleted before switching to the new cookie as it's caused some confusion.

What mojombo said is accurate. (He's a GitHub co-founder and I'm the person who wrote the redirect code.)

Actually, this isn't so true anymore.

A friend of mine is a web developer and he's got a shocking dynamic site that the server treats as entirely static. He accomplishes this with JSON callbacks.

http://iancollins.me

(P.S. For a good time, click on the white background box or the "3N" logo when you're using are recent webkit nightly. Ian has a... ironic sense of humor.)

You can read cookies from javascript, so it's not the issue. I think cookies' domain names are set strictly to 'github.com', not '*.github.com'.

I checked. They're .github.com. Dunno why I was downvoted, I was right.

See my other comment.

I thought that was Google Code.

Like a lot of good ideas from Google (Documents springs to mind as well) it seems like the initial version had a lot of promise and then it was followed up with few revisions to bring needed features.

Google supplied the wood.

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