
GitHub Discover - uyoakaoma
https://github.com/dashboard/discover
======
relyio
Poor execution on a great idea imo.

To me it feels like they sacrificed functionality for aesthetics. It's not the
right trade-off to make for a professional tool. I don't want my Github feed
to be Facebook-like. I'd rather have it be compact and useful. A feature
that'd let me browse by "topic" (e.g systems programming) regardless of
language would be welcome as well.

In this update, the three culprits are the font-size, the spacing (so much
space wasted) and the (slow) auto-load. It wasn't great before but this is
most definitely worse.

Dear Github, please make technology discovery _efficient_ rather than pretty.
I spend hundreds of hours on your platform. You could save me a lot of time
focusing on the _right_ stuff.

It's a shame because there's so much potential there.

~~~
knownothing
> A feature that'd let me browse by "topic" (e.g systems programming)
> regardless of language would be welcome as well.

What you're talking about already exists. In fact, they're called topics,
e.g.: [https://github.com/topics/systems-
engineering](https://github.com/topics/systems-engineering)

~~~
relyio
That's not what I am talking about though. Topics work with the recently
introduced "tags" that you can add to your repo's description.

No one or few people self-reference their repo with something as broad as
"systems engineering" or "systems programming".

The closest thing that exist on Github is the explore tab which lets you
browse random repos by categories (e.g open government). Such feature would
require Github to do the appropriate groundwork to become great at technology-
discovery, namely: interest maps, automatically infer a repo's category based
on its content, description and the profiles that star or fork it, for
starters. They can even make their search engine relevant and pleasant to use
if they feel like treating us.

And I'd want that to be integrated in my feed. Right now, I follow around 150
_active_ users and it is still pretty sparse: it's not uncommon for me to see
"X started Y 2 days ago". It would be good to add more (good) signal.

I want to see more of what better programmers are starring.

~~~
knownothing
Just for posterity, you asked for:

> A feature that'd let me browse by "topic" (e.g systems programming)
> regardless of language would be welcome as well.

Topics are exactly what you initially described. Perhaps you didn't do a very
good job describing what you'd like.

Also, they're called topics. Not tags. It's in the documentation.

> Such feature would require Github to do the appropriate groundwork to become
> great at technology-discovery, namely

They did a bunch of work to automatically add topics for many repositories to
solve for this:
[https://githubengineering.com/topics/](https://githubengineering.com/topics/)

~~~
relyio
You're telling me that a feature exists which technically fits my request.
Cool

I tell you it only does so nominally. I didn't fully develop its specs but you
could have inferred that they weren't matching the existing one's. The topic
feature is half-baked, poorly thought-out and integrated.

------
fortytw2
But why is the Browse Activity tab now full of huge bolded text and gobs of
whitespace? I wasn't unhappy with how it was, but this seems to strictly be
worse, especially if you follow a decent number of people

~~~
manigandham
There's a ridiculous UI trend of adding whitespace and hiding everything
behind more menus and popups now... even though we all have bigger/high-res
screens with more real estate than ever.

~~~
shortstuffsushi
> even though we all have bigger/high-res screens with more real estate than
> ever.

I'm not disagreeing with you, but is this perhaps the reason _why_ this is
happening? If we have so much more space, we've got room for extra big bars.
If we get higher resolutions, smaller fonts are (possibly) harder to read, so
we make them bigger.

Maybe I'm just making stuff up, though.

~~~
reilly3000
Responsive design sort of forces these trade offs as mobile screen real estate
and the demand for consistentcy across devices means dumbing down to the
smallest possible screen.

------
dguo
It's good to see the homepage get more attention. I personally would love a
more Facebook-like news feed. There is so much interesting activity on GitHub,
but I generally discover it all through Twitter, HN, Reddit, etc.

~~~
pkamb
Whereas the top items on my current github homepage are just a list of repos a
follower starred 5 days ago.

------
Mizza
Wow, I'd never heard of Rails before. What a great recommendation. /s

Am I just a curmudgeon, or does every step that GitHub takes these days seem
like wrong one? Everything, from small design changes, to the results of their
discovery engines, to the pricing and offering of there paid services, just
seems to get worse over time.

As somebody who visits GitHub more than any other page, it makes me a bit
said. I do hope they can turn it around or GitLab will come up on them fast.

~~~
greysteil
The stuff they announced today on dependency security feels like a really good
step. They stopped short of saying they were going to resurrect OSVDB, but not
far short. In the meantime, they're going to display a project's dependency
graph in the insights tab, and in future will suggest fixes for any security
vulnerabilities in it (i.e., insecure versions).

~~~
alvesjtiago
The dependency security features really do look awesome. I've been working on
a project called Octotrack
([http://octotrack.tiagoalves.me](http://octotrack.tiagoalves.me)) for a while
now whose objective is exactly that with other features for dependency
management (currently only available for projects that use Bundler/Gemfile).
It would be great to get your feedback.

------
j_s
I hit [https://github.com/trending](https://github.com/trending) as a lower-
priority time-filler day-to-day. It is a "top 25" of most starred today, also
viewable per programming language.

Unfortunately some of the slots are wasted on ever-popular projects which are
always on the list, particularly in some of the more esoteric languages. It is
also interesting to see how few stars are required to hit the language-
specific top 25, especially on weekends/holidays.

No matter how awesome GitHub Discover's predictions someday grow to be, it's
always useful to monitor the collective wisdom of the crowds.

------
anikdas
I use [http://usepanda.com/](http://usepanda.com/) for browsing through
trending GitHub repos and read all tech related news. It has a nice feature of
viewing feeds in columns. Great for spending two hours in the morning.

------
rahimnathwani
For me, the third repo they suggest is:

    
    
       csurfer/gitsuggest
       A tool to suggest github repositories based on the 
       repositories you have shown interest in.
    

So meta.

~~~
justbaker
I’m going to star then use the tool for more meta.

------
cdevs
Wow didn't know there was a open source roller coaster tycoon 2 clone, that
would be interesting to mod into some sort of server traffic representation.

~~~
SOLAR_FIELDS
It’s actually really good, I played it quite a bit earlier this year. The main
thing that makes it a lot better from the original rct2 is speed up button.
It’s also entertaining to peek at the C code and figure out how they are
calculating certain things like excitement rating.

~~~
orb_yt
For those wondering i'm assuming it's this repo:
[https://github.com/OpenRCT2/OpenRCT2](https://github.com/OpenRCT2/OpenRCT2)

It looks like it requires a local copy of the original Roller Coaster Tycoon 2
to work. Why is that?

~~~
mikegerwitz
Wow...nostalgia going strong. These screenshots bring me back.

[https://openrct2.website/getting-
started/index.html](https://openrct2.website/getting-started/index.html)

"OpenRCT2 needs the object files (containing graphics, sounds and models) from
the original RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 to work. You'll need to have a copy of
RCT2 before beginning."

~~~
Cthulhu_
After a number of years, the OS version of Transport Tycoon allowed developers
to use their own graphics package; they made and open sourced one of those, so
needing a copy of the original game was no longer necessary.

------
eadmund
So, I have multiple GitHub accounts, and the recommendations — purportedly
based on stars & people I follow — are identical for both. They are also
really, _really_ bad (I don't program in JavaScript, or .net, or Julia).

------
perlgeek
Doesn't work too well for me. The first ~15 suggestions are repos I already
know, and contributed to most of them.

~~~
shortstuffsushi
Yeah, because I've created issues with the Brave browser, my first 8
suggestions were other Brave repos. Not useful for me.

------
morpheuskafka
I was certain that this would be some sort of JS library filled with
buzzwords. Instead, the very first hit was this:
[https://github.com/k4m4/movies-for-hackers](https://github.com/k4m4/movies-
for-hackers). RIP my time management for the next month...

------
zspitzer
I would of preferred be able to see activity on my starred repos, instead of
suggestions based on my stars

------
sarcasmic
Why is this gated behind a login?

~~~
ataylor32
Because it's recommendations based on your stars and people you follow.

~~~
sarcasmic
Sure, but visiting the URL itself gives no context and just throws you to the
generic login page. Conversely, this makes for the sort of HN submission that
can't be evaluated without logging in to the provider in question; and unlike
a paywall it can't even be bypassed by workarounds.

There is a logged-out feature called 'Explore' [1] whose prominence on the
GitHub frontpage has fluctuated with time; now it's prominent again. Both of
these features showcase projects; one is curated by the company while the new
'Discover' is curated by an algorithm based on your activity. They appear to
exist side-by-side without any linkage or references to the other.

[1] [https://github.com/explore](https://github.com/explore)

------
l5870uoo9y
Now add a sidebar widget which lists the last 10 repositories that I committed
to.

------
germainelol
Took a look and still prefer to use Github Trending:
[https://github.com/trending/javascript?since=weekly](https://github.com/trending/javascript?since=weekly)

I have a lot of JS blogs/twitters/subscriptions that I use to keep up-to-date,
and generally most of the articles I read will appear in the first couple of
pages of the trending repositories.

------
liulantao
Hi guys, Make end users evaluate the product _as early as possible_ , that's
the methodology. Maybe what you have seen today is an pre-alpha version of the
github recommendation product, they will gather your comments and decide what
to create.

\- The feed design is poor, I don't like the alway black bold font for every
repo name, but they keep blue font for branch name.

------
bryanrasmussen
It either recommended stuff I already new about and use (even if I have never
forked or contributed) or stuff that was not interesting at all to me. I might
be an outlier here of course. I wonder how much fine tuning of their algorithm
is possible though.

------
goerz
Good to see some work on the homepage, but there's still so much potential! I
wish I could mark activity messages as read and remove them from the feed. It
should behave more as an "inbox"

~~~
styfle
I wish I could find notifications I already marked as read. Sometimes I click
a notification, then and I click back, then I click on the next notification,
now the first notification is gone forever because it’s not longer in my
browser history.

------
splitbrain
pretty cool suggestions, even though it suggests one of my own projects.

~~~
tmalsburg2
The suggestions are not so great for me. It seems to think that I'm interested
in pretty much every Julia package out there and nothing much else. Not sure
where it gets this idea because none of my own repos contain Julia code and I
starred very few Julia projects if any at all.

~~~
cormullion
Probably cos you’re following Doug Bates — he’s quite a well-known Julian...

------
kingofpandora
I haven't starred anything to do with Ethereum or any other cryptocurrency,
but 5 of my top ten are all Ethereum-related projects. Go figure!

------
drej
I scrolled through the list yesterday... to find my own repo there. Thanks,
Github, I'm aware of my own work :-)

------
prakashdanish
Notifications are coming to Github soon? [https://user-
images.githubusercontent.com/24463350/31359811-...](https://user-
images.githubusercontent.com/24463350/31359811-6ae670b6-ad00-11e7-9e7d-fe35a591494d.png)

~~~
michaelmior
What do you mean? GitHub has had notifications for a long time. Possibly since
day one, but I don't remember.

------
reilly3000
How long until they recommend libraries in our IDEs?

------
megous
Random selection of repositories would be better. Perhaps with a filter
filtering out anything with too many stars.

Reason: I know 80-90% of recommended projects.

------
caleb_thompson
This has been around for years.

~~~
always_good
But now it seems to be on your logged-in homepage and it lists repos related
to your stars.

I know Github has some sort of /explore link when you were logged out, but
it's so out of sight that I only remember it when I accidentally visit Github
on my incognito tab every few months.

------
rk06
why the hell does it include repos I have already starred?

