Hacker News

AI: The cause of, and solution to, all of your tech debt.

Perhaps best to simply declare indefinite-mortem

> It's not physically possible to run post-mortems for issues at those rates.

Not at all, you merely move the goal post of at what layer the "root cause" actually could come from! At that speed, it's always something short and sweet, while when you actually want to long-term address things, you have to have time to even investigate organizational issues or whatever the actual problems stem from.

But you have half a day? "Post-mortem: Push X wasn't properly analyzed before deployment, in future more testing" and call it a day.

One tangent, I believe sev-0 is actually "critical" (at least as how I'm used to reading it), and the higher you go the less critical something is.

IMO as a github-watcher, I think they changed their definition of what constitutes a sev-0 between sev-1 for the better. In particular, they had a few "sev-1"'s around the turn of the year that would be classified as sev-0's if they happened today.

Pre-4/22 GitHub sev-1 was a normal SaaS company's sev-0, imo. So I think their new system is more reflective of reality. My guess is that a few of their big customers bullied them to have more accurate SEV categorization.

Waves around it had to break eventually eh?

FWIW, I'm not convinced that chart is necessarily an accurate representation of pre-acquisition reality. It would really surprise me if GitHub did not have a single sev-0 pre-acquisition, but it wouldn't surprise me if they were not formally captured and reported in a format that would make its way into their current status page's database.

I wonder what the cause of this was? Microsoft Politics? Bureaucracy? Forced move to azure?

> The UI of that page is so nice

Is it? Seems a text description of "Make a website outlining 'How cooked GitHub' is with a modern style" to basically any LLM would produce exactly that UI and design, literally nothing of that design a human had any influence on, besides the ones selecting what training data the used LLMs was trained with.

I think most of us who've tried using LLMs for web-design can recognize that style and design at this point, regardless of model actually used.

I’m actively working on an alternative Frontend for Forgejo at the moment, completely self hostable, free, and open source.

Moving everything from GitHub to Forgejo and Tangled for now. These outages haven’t effected me for the past month because of this.

The UI is in the default claude code style

>"The UI of that page is so nice"

Most part screen is taken by picture. Contrast ratio is really low. Hard to read Should they remove that useless banner, current status which is the most interesting part coud've been made visible right away.

I would call this whole thing highly un-ergonomic

Lol it's pretty bad UI

Commits are up 14x year-over-year

https://x.com/kdaigle/status/2040164759836778878

It looks like it is the number of consecutive days with no incident. If you look at 31 Dec 2025, that corresponds to an 8-day period with no incidents.

It's a streak for continuous uptime, and yeah it is fairly depressing to imagine overseeing that :/

hey now, LinkedIn was terrible before Microsoft.

I think Minecraft is still in good shape

GH was acquired by microsoft some eight years ago. It has been working quite well until recently.

People may have had complaints about functionality, features, commercial issues, but the thing used to at least have a decent uptime until recently.

Dave Cutler?

If all you need is a repository, you don't even need any of these. You need SSH access to a server, and optionally, one of several web front-ends. Git comes with a CGI script that handles public anonymous checkouts via HTTP(S), although since nginx doesn't support CGI, integrating those is a little bit tricky as you need a FastCGI wrapper.

I moved most of my projects off GitHub to Forgejo and will be using Tangled too for public repositories. I don’t think people realize that if you self host Forgejo, you get 99% of the functionality of GitHub with zero of the limitations. Especially if you have the hardware to spare for CI runners. And if self hosting isn’t your thing you can always just use Codeberg and Tangled directly.

I’m working on an open source Forgejo browser called Joui. It’s coming along nicely, and is so much snappier than GitHub in every single way.

We're halfway there!

I think they’re referring to services using AI for coding and shipping bugs more often as a result.

Per a report that came out the other day, the GitHub move to Azure has been slowed down (i.e. I don't think it's done). But maybe you have newer/better info than me

GitHub’s data architecture (lots and lots of projects in a hierarchical distribution with immutable, highly transaction-based data elements) ought to be easily shardable to allow for massive scale-out. Especially a decade after acquisition by Microsoft. Even a major increase in activity (which was surely predicted internally years ago, given the marketing around AI) should be easily handled by a company with their resources. These repeated failures are indicative of massive mismanagement and misinvestment.

It’s not just their own slop that’s causing this, it’s also caused by the tsunami of slop being uploaded by vibe coders.

If you want to upload to GitHub, you should pay. The days of charitably giving away compute for the “open source communities” are over.

Grandfather existing public repositories in, then cut it off. Stop the bleeding. It doesn’t have to be forever.

Yes that would be part of getting things under control, of course.

And/or move more contextually aware humans with 10K+ hours of hard won experience and fear of failure/sense of pride back into the loop.

Forgejo is fantastic. I do think it could use a fresh coat of paint from a designer but it’s otherwise really good.

Gitea (what Forgejo forked from) recently stole the sidebar on repos from GitHub and I think that would be great for Forgejo to steal too…

Forgejo themed by Codeberg: https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo (the codeberg theme is extremely low contrast)

Forgejo default: https://v15.next.forgejo.org/pparaxan/quark

Forgejo themed by Lix: https://git.lix.systems/lix-project/lix

Gitea: https://gitea.com/gitea/awesome-gitea

Gitea themed by Blender: https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender

I personally like Blender’s Gitea theme better than the rest but I guess that’s subjective. In dark mode I do not like the low contrast Codeberg theme or the default Forgejo theme, but all of the instances custom themes look great.

As far as Git forges go in general though.. tangled is very pretty https://tangled.org/tangled.org/core I think more power user oriented software should be comfortable with compact interfaces

It's fascinating how fast the Forgejo I host at my university's laboratory loads from my home network. Every page load is <100ms. I think it goes to show how much bloat we don't realise exists in modern webapps.

Ideally those forgejos would safe enough to be on the public internet (and using a federation protocol like activitypub) so we don't have to go through a centralized service such as github and not locked behind private networks (such as tailscale nets)

Have you forgotten about Azure Dev Ops aka Visual Studio Team System aka Team Foundation Server*?

Yes, it's still Microsoft, but they've forgotten about it, so it runs entirely adequately and is actually a surprisingly okay github replacement. It does nothing special, but it does do everything, just in a way you often would rather it wouldn't. It doesn't have the flexibility of JIRA for the ticketing, and the deployment machinery doesn't have the fanciness ( and vendor threat ) of chaining github actions, but it does handle both.

I haven't used gitlab, so I'm curious to hear what makes it a "complete mess" too.

* Microsoft's headless chicken naming strategy in full force, it's a miracle they haven't yet renamed and rebranded it to align with copilot yet.

How is it painful to use GitLab? Curious, as a user of both, I find them both nice. I like GitLab CI/CD more than I do GHA, but that's personal preference/bias more than anything objective.

Yes, on a single repo. Now multiply that per bazillion companies on github, some of which are trying that.

I think it'd be pretty neat to be able to rebase my undo history on to a remote branch someone else is working on.

And push to remote as well? Seems not thought out

Microsoft corporate culture destroys Github reputation and tech.

At this point, you might as well say that is what's happening at GitHub with the help of GitHub Copilot since nothing has changed and has only gotten worse over time.

You missed the option to "lobby the government to tell Microsoft to straighten up and fly right". Microsoft is a corporation, a legal entity only created with the permission and grace of the State of Washington.