
Git-random: Chrome extension replaces new tab with random GitHub user's profile - idnan
https://github.com/Idnan/git-random
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CM30
Wouldn't this just be more annoying than useful? I mean, finding random people
on GitHub is maybe 0.5% of the times I use the new tab button. Why have that
happen all the time? Just to show it's possible?

It's a novel idea, just have no idea why anyone would make or install an add
on based on it.

~~~
gedrap
I guess it depends on how actually random it is.

Genuinely random? Well, yeah, that would be crap, assuming most of the github
accounts have pretty much nothing public other than maybe a hello world or
something equivalent.

Something recommended instead of actually random? That might be interesting,
just maybe repositories other than users (in other profile you have to click
on something to discover, while in repo just scroll for readme).

For example, I like the idea of Github explore newsletter, offered by Github.
A few trending repositories every morning. Sometimes something useful,
sometimes inspirational.

Unfortunately, it's not implemented well :( a lot of the repos are JS and
couldn't find where to change the option, also I often get the same repos
(e.g. I get this
[https://github.com/FreeCodeCamp/FreeCodeCamp](https://github.com/FreeCodeCamp/FreeCodeCamp)
pretty much every day for the past half a year).

~~~
rev_bird
>I get this
[https://github.com/FreeCodeCamp/FreeCodeCamp](https://github.com/FreeCodeCamp/FreeCodeCamp)
pretty much every day for the past half a year

This seems like a pretty perfect example of how outliers can make algorithms
act funny -- Free Code Camp has more than _100,000_ stars on GitHub. That's
well over twice as many as Angular[1] and nine times as many as
CoffeeScript[2]. I mean, it's still annoying, but I'd imagine they're
collecting "+1"s faster than GitHub Explore can ignore them.

[1]
[https://github.com/angular/angular.js](https://github.com/angular/angular.js)
[2]
[https://github.com/jashkenas/coffeescript](https://github.com/jashkenas/coffeescript)

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raimue
Another case where the terms "Git" and "GitHub" are wrongly being used
interchangeably.

~~~
userbinator
How about GitHub-random: replaces a random file in your repository with the
version from someone else's fork of it.

~~~
PascLeRasc
It should replace a file with another with the same name somewhere else, like
some other main.py.

Objective-C and Matlab people will hate each other.

~~~
surement
Prolog and Perl also.

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kyberias
I don't see any randomness in the implementation. It seems to be taking users
in the sequence that the github users API provides.

~~~
idnan
But you are not going to see the same profile again and probably you don't
know them. So it's random for you. :)

~~~
brudgers
"Arbitrary" is probably more consistent with the mathematical rigor some
people might expect. On the other hand, little in computing is random rather
than pseudo-random.

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morninj
I think this would be more interesting if it showed a random repo with more
than n stars (maybe n = 10?). There are a lot of empty user profiles.

~~~
to3m
Language selection would be good too - possibly by excluding uninteresting
ones rather than actively including them though. This would keep the results
slightly surprising; the point is just to let you ignore languages that might
otherwise be overrepresented.

See, e.g., [http://githut.info/](http://githut.info/) \- if you're not
interested in one or more of Javascript, Java, Python, PHP, C, C++ or Ruby,
you could easily see a lot of uninteresting projects.

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douglance
But why?

~~~
cooper12
Likely so you could see things other people have open-sourced that you might
not have before. It would probably be most useful for getting ideas of what
people have made rather than finding projects to contribute to, since a lot of
these will be abandoned projects. (Or you could see where people contribute
their time) I think seeing profiles of "active" users might be more helpful.

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vermooten
At last!

