pjhyett

If those projects are looking for a new home, we'd be happy to welcome them at GitHub.

If folks want to improve our language detection on GitHub, please take a look at https://github.com/github/linguist

GitHub's looking for Enterprise Support Engineers (EU/Asia) and Technical Account Managers (SF) https://github.com/about/jobs

We've gone into excruciating detail about how GitHub's architected: https://github.com/blog/530-how-we-made-github-fast

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "only vaguely." The fact that passionate developers are building developer tools has a lot to do with why we've been successful.

Chris, the CEO, has spoken at length about this topic. He and I built another site prior to GitHub where there was very little correlation between our interests and the product we were building. Not surprisingly, our hearts weren't in it and we threw in the towel.

All of this said, just because you're working on something you're passionate about doesn't immediately mean you're bound for success; it just helps tremendously.

Not for nothing, but full fare economy can often be more expensive than discounted biz tickets. Having an actual conversation telling the VC to cool it might have ended up saving you more money.

That is certainly not the case at GitHub. We don't care where or when you work as long as the work gets done. If you're being guilted into staying later, then the hours aren't actually flexible.

This is poor advice. We've met dozens of VC's since GitHub launched to 1) meet interesting people 2) learn as much as possible 3) figure out who we like if we ever decide to go that route. Folks like Satish Dharmaraj at Redpoint have loads of information gleaned from successful ventures and I'd have a drink with him any day.

We're trying to fundamentally change how people write, collaborate, and discover code and the sooner people stop thinking of us as just a repo depository, the better, because we've never been about that.

Ask yourself what kind of markup we'd have to charge on storage space and still be able to grow our business when most of the repos we host are less than 1 MB.

We charge what we do because it makes money. Money that allows us to continue hiring really talented people that are all focused on building an even better service.

Doing things like including private repos with our free plan would eat into our margins and only satisfy the people that are likely to never convert to a paid plan. Frankly, I think being able to use all of the tools we provide for the price of a pint of Guinness every month is a damn good deal.

Just like there are diminishing returns coding for many hours without resting, trying to build a business without having a social life will ultimately have damaging effects. Knowing how to communicate is half the battle and you're not going to learn how to do that sitting in front of a screen all day.

I think we've all read the stories of founders not sleeping for days and ruining their personal lives in the process and I just don't see how any of that is necessary.

San Francisco's distractions should be seen as a benefit, not a hindrance.

I interned at a 1.0 bubble company the summer prior to my freshman year of high school. I built a website for the church I attended for no particular reason, the CEO happened to be a member, and he thought it would be fun for me to come work for him. I couldn't agree more, because the alternative was carrying around heavy golf bags for another summer.

I had a really great summer working long hours writing ASP all day, befriending the college interns that also worked there (whom I still keep in touch with), and generally feeling all grown up and respected even at age 14. The only real disappointment was when I found out my boss made $70k/yr for doing more or less the same thing I did, but I was making minimum wage. That may have been the same moment I realized I needed to be my own boss.

We're well aware that Windows support needs improvement. Rest assured we will be addressing that issue.

We built the Mac app because 1) we wanted it 2) to learn how a desktop client should work prior to tackling other platforms.

Beyond that, one-third of our traffic uses Macs. It's not a small market for us.

All of GitHub's space limits are soft limits to prevent abuse.

We've responded multiple times that we have nothing to do with that account. In this thread just a couple of pages up, in fact: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2606408

We haven't shouted this from the rooftops primarily because we're tired of this being the story when it should have focused on the bullying and our addressing of the problem.

> For example, I didn't contact github because I knew one of the peole working there was in on the joke.

For the record, this isn't true no matter how many times you repeat it. You should have emailed us and we would have taken care of it without a holiday weekend filled with unnecessary drama.

GitHub is investing heavily in libgit2 because we think it's the future for git for all the reasons listed at http://libgit2.github.com/

I have this discussion fairly often as a founder of GitHub with folks that don't trust 3rd parties, but I think it's unwise to assume you're more prepared to defend against attacks than cloud providers that employ people to worry about it constantly. Reducing your exposure by bringing those services to your home isn't a sufficient security measure.

It's worth noting that none of the Ruby guys Tom worked with at Powerset are still working for Microsoft 3 years later. The guys I've spoken with had a miserable time working there and left to work for other startups like Greplin, Bank Simple, and Square.

I know it's in vogue to throw the word bubble around, but I'd be interested to see the CS enrollment stats worldwide. The first generation of kids that spend more time in front of their computer than the TV are starting to hit college. More screen time is bound to create more people interested in how they can program the thing they sit in front of all day.

Colloquy is the client I use when I'm on IRC, so I appreciate the work you've done on it.

Point 2 is actually the most important point for us. Since Tom was the only one that liked irssi, the rest of us lost the backlog and that was a deal-breaker.

Speaking frankly, even on our slowest days, the number of open source commits being pushed to GitHub dwarfs other sites [1]. That's not to say OS development isn't happening elsewhere, but there happens to be a lot of it going on in one particular place these days.

To your second point, you're right. I'd love to be able to convince older OS projects to move to GitHub. Some do[2], but it's an uphill battle.

1. https://github.com/blog/802-still-committing-like-crazy

2. https://github.com/bagder/curl

* Aesthetically speaking, I can't stand irssi.

* It just works

* Inline image viewing

* You can customize anything via Propane[1]'s custom javascript support.

1. http://propaneapp.com/

Tom was very much an IRC guy. He begrudgingly moved to Campfire after Chris and I told him for months it was a better solution.

No disagreement there: http://github.com/~pjhyett

(That's legacy from the earliest days of github and I can't promise it'll be around forever, but it still makes me smile being able to do it)

People were already using the @ notation in their code comments, so it seemed like the logical way to offer additional functionality without anyone changing their behavior.

Even at 16, you should be mature enough to know that this is classless. I hope for their sake they never start their own business and never fuck up, because that'd be awfully sad if the next kids to come along decided to show them the same courtesy they've shown here.

No one in their right mind thinks Twitter's moving to Brisbane except for the jokers in city hall. Their employees would sooner quit than have to commute to an office park wasteland everyday.

The vast majority of the traffic that hits Sourceforge is there to download software, not contribute to the projects. When we spoke to them a few years ago, they said their main competitor was Downloads.com not us (GitHub).

Don't get too caught up using graphs to assume relevancy, Myspace still gets a lot of traffic.

Because it's incredibly dangerous to think your machines are more secure just because you own them. How much time per day do you spend making sure your machine and everything on it is secure?

We employ teams of people to keep your code safe on GitHub.