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Comment by tiffanyh | Hacker News Reader

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tiffanyh

I have to imagine this is related to: https://openai.com/index/scaling-git-at-openai/

And you'll see that mitchellh is a big fan of Pierre (and I think investor)

https://x.com/mitchellh/status/2036855931569651884?lang=en

For those who don't know Pierce, here's a demo from mitchellh:

https://x.com/mitchellh/status/2057229385963618787

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He is a minor investor. He commented on the acquisition at https://x.com/mitchellh/status/2118012675582280038

Who needs to review millions lines diff ? Even 10k lines diff ? What can you do with that ?

i suppose this could help an agent review

tangent: I think mitchellh was talking about moving Ghostty off GitHub? Any update?

i found Mitchell's answer to someone's question regarding why buy a open source software company, very interesting.

https://x.com/mitchellh/status/2118017893921436019?a=bCZdMwC...

code/coding isn't valuable. the problem solving skill is what set a good and bad engineer apart.

Lately (last 10 years or so) these have tended to be acqui-hires, which is probably what Open AI was doing, either to acquire people with specific skills and subject matter expertise, or to deny it to your rivals.

Not sure about this specific instance, but there are other useful artifacts in open source companies too, since they usually have an enterprise support, hosting and/or gated premium feature upsell business model. This means they have customer data such as usage patterns, contact info of purchasing decision-makers, and technical points of contact in other businesses plus sometimes a cache of UGC from their hosted offerings. Keep the hosted offering running for a bit after acquisition and throw in a sly change of the user agreement and it’s all yours for the taking.

For those too lazy to open the Twitter/X link:

    > @0xTMK: Why do companies acquire open source software companies if everyone can already access the repos?
    > @mitchellh: Because code by itself isn't valuable. Coding is the easy part.

So... acqui-hire? No hate on that, but this team must be wildly talented.

That question isn't really applicable to this situation, since https://code.storage is the company's main product. It has a business model, customers, and revenue. The open source libraries are tangential.

if code by itself isnt valuable, why are companies reportedly trying to increase their code output with ai while letting people go or letting their skills rot? which is it, is code valuable or isnt it?

Gotta love that Github has decided that hiding largest diffs by default was a good idea. It's not like the amount of changes has any correlation to importance, right? And to top off the joke that they are, it's still amazingly slow, even when you skip the bulk of the code.

At this point I don't know if anyone at github does code reviews. They hide large diffs as you said, but navigation is also broken, I have to click several times on a filename for the UI to scroll to it.

They also decided that comments should not be visible instead you have to hunt for a tiny avatar of the person who left them. Very puzzling

Try https://pyor.review if your only complaint is GitHub’s UI

Yeah, unlikely they use Github much internally.

At least they finally fixed the sidebar to use anchor tags instead of divs, so right-click can open the file in a new tab. It's still a bit wonky, since the a tag is only the size of the filename, with zero padding. It was broken since they introduced their new UI sometime last year.

Maybe by the end of 2027 clicking a filename actually takes you to it.

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