Hacker News Reader

Comment by tokenizerrr | Hacker News Reader

Not true. You can make a nearly empty github repository with a few clicks and start adding releases to it.

You /can/, but it's not a use case that github pushes or that people who don't know github would think of. With rapidshare et al you go to the site and it has a big obvious "upload and share a file" button right on the front page.

So? It's possible, and people can make use of it. They may not know, but this can be remedied by communicating. It's also quite a lot better than using some one-off file host such as rapidshare. See Ixiaus' post for more information.

Defaults are important, and what's optimized for one use case isn't optimized for another. An opinionated site that just provides the simplest possible interface for uploading and downloading files is a valuable thing.

(Plus I suspect that if a lot of people started hosting multi-megabyte binaries on github, their policies would change pretty quickly)

There are already many, many mulit-mega binaries hosted on github. It is what the releases feature is for.

But yes, the most simplest site is the best for the most simplest people. However we're talking about people who spent a lot of time into creating their mod/whatever here. They can spend a minute or two more to figure out distribution.

I have no idea why you're being downvoted but you're absolutely right. You can create a new repo, click on "releases", click on "draft new release". Type in the description in markdown (easier than HTML) and upload a binary attachment, hit publish.

Zero knowledge of git was necessary. Oh and also if you want to edit that README.md? You can do it from inside Github too, still zero need to know git.

Come on... ask any one out of the IT world and they all prefer not using GitHub... your vision is way to oriented from a developer perspective.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com