[HN Gopher] GitHub issues is almost the best notebook in the world
___________________________________________________________________
GitHub issues is almost the best notebook in the world
Author : ingve
Score : 251 points
Date : 2025-05-26 07:41 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (simonwillison.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (simonwillison.net)
| _mikz wrote:
| Don't forget the checkbox list! And linking to specific comments.
| hliyan wrote:
| Ten years ago, I worked in a small non-profit development shop
| that used Github issues for all project management. Checkboxes
| were used as both subtasks and ACs. Now that I think back, it
| worked really well. I don't think we even had Slack (we used
| Google Talk).
| Jakob wrote:
| On the last point on Apple Notes: iCloud has the "keep
| downloaded" option now on iOS and macOS for folders and files.
|
| This makes every app that saves into iCloud files behave like
| Notes, i.e. work offline with automatic online sync.
| greggsy wrote:
| How does it handle contention, and how frequently does it sync?
| nsonha wrote:
| is iCloud still downloading and reuploading again if you drag
| things between folders?
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Noteplan (https://noteplan.co/)
| orphea wrote:
| $100/year? No, thank you. Why does everything have to be a
| subscription?
| tcshit wrote:
| ... and why are those subscription fees so obscene? I guess
| too many people have too much money...
| pbowyer wrote:
| This. Everything is getting priced for U.S. (software
| engineer) incomes.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Sure. But it's worth it for me. It's really great. And i have
| full control over my files. It's not hosted by them. Just
| markdown files
| j_maffe wrote:
| Sounds like Obsidian but with extra steps.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Obsidian sounds like text files with extra steps, but your
| point remains, plain text files are great. There's multiple
| solutions from keeping them available across devices.
| alfons_foobar wrote:
| Well yeah, Obsidian is basically a markdown editor with some
| nice extra features. And apparently a quite thriving plugin
| ecosystem.
| Lutger wrote:
| The extra step is to open the text file in an editor, except
| in this case the editor is called Obsidian.
|
| Granted, you do have to install it versus using the default
| editor that comes with your operating system, so that is an
| extra step. But most people don't use the builtin editors
| from their OS anyway.
| supermatt wrote:
| Is one of those extra steps "not pay $50 a year to have access
| on all your devices", or maybe it's "not pay $100 a year to
| access via the web"?
| nsteel wrote:
| I have access on all my devices through my email provider
| WebDAV. I don't pay anything to Obsidian for this (but I do
| donate to them because it actually is the best notes
| provider, in my opinion).
| supermatt wrote:
| So I guess the extra step is "not install and configure a
| 3rd party WebDAV plugin for all your devices while ensuring
| you have WebDAV support by your email provider"?
| nsteel wrote:
| I guess so. I'm personally not getting bogged down in
| extra steps or not. I simply don't trust GH to keep my
| personal note data for me, it's much too valuable. It
| looks like it is possible to backup GH issue data... with
| some extra steps...
| rubidium wrote:
| I thought it supports most file storage sync solutions? I'm
| using with the free iCloud level storage I believe.
| supermatt wrote:
| Sure, but then you can't access it on windows or android.
| Or the web.
|
| I'm responding more to the comment that it's extra steps.
| It's clearly not as good a solution as obsidian, but there
| are no extra steps for it being accessible over the web or
| to all your devices - not just those for the devices built
| in cloud provider.
| gchamonlive wrote:
| If windows or android is a must then use something that
| has a client in them. I use OneDrive because it's the
| cheapest in my region. It's got terrible support from
| Microsoft, just lazy and terrible, but there are third
| party sync solutions for all platforms.
|
| I think GitHub/gitlab issues is totally viable.
| Obsidian/Logseq too.
| supermatt wrote:
| Does onedrive work now for syncing obsidian on iOS? I
| don't think it did when I last tried a year or so ago.
| gchamonlive wrote:
| If it doesn't, you just need to find one that does. I use
| it because I don't care about iOS. If you need one that
| supports iOS, macos, windows, Android and Linux and there
| isn't one, then it's justified to pay for their sync
| solution.
|
| Or just use GitHub/gitlab issues.
| j_maffe wrote:
| I use Git syncing on GitHub with 0 issues myself. Since
| when has file syncing been an issue?
| cheema33 wrote:
| I use obsidian on iphone, Mac, Windows and ipad. It syncs
| using icloud free tier. I don't have to pay. icloud is
| available on Windows as well.
| cpach wrote:
| I gladly pay those fifty bucks. Creating good applications
| require hard work.
|
| (I wouldn't say Obsidian is perfect, but so far I haven't
| found any note-taking application that I like more.)
| supermatt wrote:
| I'm not denying that obsidian is a better solution, just
| pointing out to the parent that there aren't "extra steps"
| to the described solution - it is exactly what it is - but
| you need to add paid features (8$/m) to obsidian in order
| to get web access.
| j_maffe wrote:
| No you don't. You can use your own web-hosting or web-
| syncing solutions. I just use Git. There's an excellent
| (and free) plugin on Obsidian exactly for this reason.
| stavros wrote:
| Does this plugin let me export Obsidian notes as a
| website? Would you happen to remember the name?
| supermatt wrote:
| that sounds like "extra steps" to me... and you still
| need somewhere to sync to and serve from...
| j_maffe wrote:
| I never said Obsidian doesn't require extra steps to
| setup sync without paying. Do you happen to know one that
| also allows you to save locally and have back-linking
| features?
| j_maffe wrote:
| Also with Github you can have a private repo for free
| with which you can host and sync your files.
| genewitch wrote:
| I thought private repos were the ones that required
| patment, did that change?
| j_maffe wrote:
| I think there's a limit on the number of private limit. I
| personally never hit that limit.
| simonw wrote:
| They made unlimited private repos available to free
| accounts with up to 3 collaborators in 2019:
| https://github.blog/news-insights/product-news/new-year-
| new-...
|
| Then for unlimited collaborators in 2020:
| https://docs.github.com/en/get-started/learning-about-
| github...
| nsteel wrote:
| And unlike Obsidian, online only. Can you even backup GH
| issues? If not, that's surely got to be a deal-breaker.
| pipes wrote:
| Can I host obsidian myself? I would like to use it for work,
| but I don't want to expose my employer to potential data leak.
|
| I'm thinking, host it locally and just let one drive act as
| back up for the mark down files it produces?
| delcaran wrote:
| With Syncthing you don't need hosting. I use it for
| everything I can.
| conception wrote:
| It's just a bunch of markdown files. You can sync with
| anything. I just use a git plugin.
| justusthane wrote:
| As others have pointed out you don't "host" Obsidian - it's
| just a local collection of markdown files. But if you're
| asking about a self-hosted alternative to "Obsidian Publish"
| for creating a knowledgebase that others can answer, I'm
| Quartz[0], a static-site generator designed to turn Obsidian
| markdown files into a website. I'm building and it and
| hosting it on Gitlab Pages at work[1].
|
| [0]: https://quartz.jzhao.xyz/
|
| [1]: https://quartz.jzhao.xyz/hosting#gitlab-pages
| etra0 wrote:
| I recently went through this effort and I'd say it's worth
| it. In particular, I've used the "Self-hosted LiveSync" plug-
| in + docker.io/oleduc/docker-obsidian-livesync-couchdb, and I
| setup all my infrastructure within a VPN (with Tailscale,
| this was pain-free).
|
| I knew about using just git, but having Windows, Linux,
| macOS, iOS and Android, it was just way easier to use this
| solution instead of fighting with git-like apps for each OS.
| jtwaleson wrote:
| Broken links with 404s have been called "a feature, not a bug" of
| the web, but I think that for internal documentation purposes,
| having consistent bi-directional links is a _very_ good thing to
| have.
| Tepix wrote:
| The missing feature is federation! In my view, centralized
| structures like a giant source repository such as github are
| something we as a developer community need to avoid.
| Unfortunately, features like federated merge requests in gitlab (
| https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/14116 ) are
| something we've been waiting for for 9 years and nothing seems to
| be happening there. This feature alone would enable a lot of new
| collaboration without forcing everyone to work on a centralized
| system to use git - a decentralized versioning system - with high
| efficiency.
|
| Last week, Microsoft cut off the email account of the chief
| prosecutor of the international criminal court, after being
| ordered to do so by the Trump administration. This is merely a
| week or two after Microsoft did a big PR campaign, telling the
| European Union how they were to stand up against this
| administration if the need arises. The irony!
|
| Trump isn't hiding his opinion about the EU. What's stopping him
| from ordering Microsoft to block the EU from accessing github one
| day? Right now: Nothing at all. Think about how it would impact
| your business and open source software in general. We must not
| put all our eggs in a single basket.
| Lutger wrote:
| Absolutely. Any public institution or governmental body needs
| to rethink their fragile reliance on technology from countries
| they can longer trust. This applies to China, but the US is
| even more unpredictable.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| I keep meaning to check out https://radicle.xyz/ for this, but
| I think I'll wait for things to get even worse before I do, and
| then later I'll regret not having explored the durable option
| sooner.
| Propelloni wrote:
| So GitHub notes let me do what Zim Desktop Wiki let me do since
| 2005 without requiring internet.
|
| But I get the OP, if you live in GitHub, it makes perfect sense.
| fbnlsr wrote:
| Like many I've been looking for the best note-taking app for
| years. And somehow I always come back to a bunch of markdown
| files inside a Git repo.
| msravi wrote:
| ...accessed through Obsidian (esp on mobile) -- On Android, you
| can "Open folder as vault"
|
| Or neovim with FzfLua (on laptop)
| miroljub wrote:
| For me, it's the same way, except that instead of Markdown, I
| use plain org-mode files sprinkled with a bit of org-roam tags
| when needed.
| triknomeister wrote:
| I have an idea. Coming soon!!
| bayindirh wrote:
| Obsidian + Git plugin? :)
| exe34 wrote:
| org-roam inside git
| frou_dh wrote:
| Compared to something with automatic bidirectional sync between
| all devices, something where one has to manually
| commit/push/pull a new/edited note feels archaic.
| klez wrote:
| You can automate commits and push on save. I had a similar
| setup for vimwiki before migrating to a web-based wiki system
| (dokuwiki).
| tasuki wrote:
| OTOH you get version history, with commit messages if you
| care to write them. And the full power of git to explore the
| history. You can edit the same file on two (offline) devices,
| then resolve the inevitable merge conflict.
|
| "Automatic bidirectional sync between all devices" scares me.
| How does it deal with merge conflicts? How am I sure I'll be
| able to revert to a previous version? Can I see the full
| history of a file? I don't know, perhaps it'd be ok. I
| certainly wouldn't learn git just for note taking! But, I
| know how to use my hammer, so everything look like a nail...
| j_maffe wrote:
| But you can still have the full power of git with Obsidian
| still, since they're just MD files at the end of the day.
| fbnlsr wrote:
| I thought it would be a problem as well but it turns out I
| absolutely never edit my notes on two machines at once. The
| commit/push/pull is done via a simple bash script that I'm
| running as a build command inside VS Code.
| prepend wrote:
| I like it as I consciously enjoy sort of checking in.
|
| I also store in a onedrive folder for automatic sync and
| backup in case I have a crash before I do a git commit.
| trevinhofmann wrote:
| Might be worth trying this free and open source note-taking app
| (disclaimer: client of mine).
|
| https://github.com/cybersemics/em/
|
| "em is a beautiful, minimalistic note-taking app for personal
| sensemaking."
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Strong rec to keep using markdown files in a git repo -- and
| start using Obsidian to edit and manage them.
| fbnlsr wrote:
| I switch between VS Code and MarkText. It does the job
| perfectly.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| > And somehow I always come back to a bunch of markdown files
| inside a Git repo.
|
| Others have mentioned this but if you want to keep this
| workflow, the best app I've found is Obsidian + Git Plugin. It
| works fantastically well on desktop though it does require a
| little work to get it working on iOS.
| noahjk wrote:
| Are there options to see the current state of the repo? What
| I mean is, for example, I like that in VS Code I instantly
| know the current state because the git sidebar icon shows a
| notification of uncommitted changes. If I don't have a visual
| reminder, I'm more likely to not make commits when I should,
| and I also don't want an auto-committer firing after each
| change. I find the visual reminder keeps me anchored to my
| git status.
|
| Heck, maybe I should just use code for notes. One plus would
| be web access with code server, since Obsidians only docker
| image that I know of uses VNC.
|
| Anyone compared these two tools and have a decent write up?
| The biggest item which comes to mind would be referencing
| other notes and the features built on top of that?
| DavideNL wrote:
| > Are there options to see the current state of the repo?
|
| Yes...always visible in the status bar. Fyi:
| https://github.com/Vinzent03/obsidian-git
| naxx wrote:
| How do you use Obsidian + Git on iOS?
| jdenning wrote:
| There are a couple methods - I use Working Copy to manage
| the git stuff on iOS. Far from perfect, but it works.
| SOLAR_FIELDS wrote:
| a-shell is another way you can do this. Takes a bit of
| finagling to set up and wire in plugins and the like but
| is relatively stable afterward.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| > Others have mentioned this but if you want to keep this
| workflow...
|
| If I want to keep this workflow why shouldn't I just continue
| using this same workflow?
| al_borland wrote:
| I oscillate between Apple Notes and a bunch of markdown files,
| which is a pretty painful thing to do.
|
| I like how future proof a folder of markdown files is. But I
| like the design, simplicity, and deep features for capture and
| media support offered in Apple Notes.
|
| The more a markdown app supports extra stuff, the more
| proprietary it starts to feel, as any app to read it will also
| need to support those things.
|
| A while back I told myself I was going to stick to Apple Notes,
| as going back and forth to other things is painful, and doing
| it proactively means more pain, rather than maybe having some
| pain in 10 years of the app goes away. However, where I am
| again, in the middle of a largely manual migration back to
| Obsidian for my folder of markdown files. I used an export, but
| the formatting is so bad that I need to clean up every single
| note.
| thebytefairy wrote:
| The inability to export, as well as the lack of anything more
| than the bare basic formatting options (at least at the time
| a few years ago) pushed me off apple notes.
| prepend wrote:
| I've been able to export since early, early iPhone. They're
| just txt files. Surprisingly, Apple notes have been the
| most durable as Apple has migrated them from every iPhone
| I've had for the past 15-20 years or whatever.
|
| Basic formatting is a plus for me. Although now notes has
| really advanced formatting and even sketching.
| bob_theslob646 wrote:
| Have you found a solution to mass export notes?
| draebek wrote:
| I think https://github.com/threeplanetssoftware/apple_clo
| ud_notes_pa... might do the trick. This is "user
| friendly" as long as you are a programmer or work in
| digital forensics. :D
| simonw wrote:
| I built a tool for this a while back:
| https://github.com/dogsheep/apple-notes-to-sqlite
|
| I just tried it and it still works: uvx
| apple-notes-to-sqlite /tmp/notes.db # in another
| terminal while that's running uvx datasette
| /tmp/notes.db
| lostlogin wrote:
| There are plenty of tools for exporting, and I've tried to
| leave Notes several times and had no issue getting the
| notes out.
|
| But trouble free sync between machines, the ability to
| 'scan' documents, adding basic maths support, the ease...
| it always sucks me back in.
|
| I wish it kept the date of creation and edits readily
| available, and supported markdown. But it's damn close to
| what I want.
|
| Why can't Apple Mail do search as well as notes?
| xeonmc wrote:
| Alternatively, you can use Codeberg to avoid vendor lock-in, or
| self-host Forgejo.
| simonw wrote:
| Not self-hosting and having a cost of zero is one of the
| features that makes GitHub Issues such a great solution.
|
| I don't want to risk my notes on a configuration error or
| billing mishap.
| xeonmc wrote:
| So Codeberg then.
| simonw wrote:
| https://codeberg.org/ says "Codeberg is a non-profit,
| community-led effort that provides Git hosting and other
| services for free and open source projects."
|
| Wouldn't hosting my own private notes on there be against
| the spirit of what they're trying to achieve?
|
| I have no problem at all freeloading off GitHub!
| layer8 wrote:
| You should arrange for backups either way.
|
| For example, stuff like this could happen:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23832437
| simonw wrote:
| My protection against that is nepotism: I'm a "GitHub Star"
| which gets me direct access to GitHub staff, plus I know a
| _lot_ of people who work there.
| layer8 wrote:
| Yeah, I'm writing this for the benefit of people who want
| to follow your usage. It also means that your advice
| doesn't generalize.
| simonw wrote:
| Totally fair - if you _don 't_ have a deep relationship
| with GitHub it's absolutely a good idea to arrange your
| own backups in case of your account being suspended!
| prepend wrote:
| I mean, there are my local clones. The odds of all my
| locals crashing at the same time as GitHub seem to be the
| same as local+github+sourcehut+whatever crashing.
| layer8 wrote:
| This thread is about using GitHub issues. Those aren't
| contained in local repository clones.
| aargh_aargh wrote:
| Call me long in the tooth but it sounds to me like he's
| describing HTML (sans the backlinks part).
| styfle wrote:
| I used GitHub issues as a form of project management to plan my
| wedding many years ago.
|
| My wife was skeptical at first, but the ability to add labels,
| search, etc made it really easy to work together and accomplish
| the tasked we needed in time for the wedding.
|
| The hardest part was creating a bookmark that links directly to
| the issue tracker.
|
| Oh, I've also used GitHub issues to organize all the boxes in my
| most recent move. I would create an issue and the description
| would list all the contents of a box. Then I would write the
| issue number on the box. After moving, I could search GitHub to
| find that one thing I was looking for and know what box it was
| in.
| klez wrote:
| Out of curiosity, what other solutions did you explore and why
| were they lacking?
| ableal wrote:
| (Not OP)
|
| I've used LibraryThing for book boxes. Using smallish boxes
| (30-40 paperbacks each) so that carrying them is not a
| backbreaker. Scan the ISBN barcodes with phone app, fix old
| ones/whatever on web app, tag with box number written on at
| least two sides. No problems found so far.
| sph wrote:
| Reminds me of: https://xkcd.com/1172/
|
| This is a fun anecdote to share, but everywhere you can find
| people with absurd workflows that are better dealt with using
| proper tools. FWIW I used Org mode to organize a move to
| another country. I really cannot stand the idea of feeding my
| personal information to Microsoft.
| birn559 wrote:
| Sounds to me like parent used a proper tool. It just happens
| to be very flexible. In general, the best tool is the one
| that you use and makes sense to you.
| INTPenis wrote:
| At my last job we almost used Gitlab for all our project
| management. The only thing that stopped us was not being able
| to use references between projects. It's very project focused,
| which is of course good enough for open source projects.
|
| But at my current job Gitlab could easily take over Youtrack,
| already took over Upsource.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Why not just write what's in the box on the box?
| veleek wrote:
| Because you can't search that without physically looking at
| each box. There could be a bunch odd reasons that many boxes
| remain unpacked; downsizing, temporary housing. It'd be nice
| to be able to finds the one thing you need (you could even
| label the issue with the box location!).
|
| Anyway, a fun solution but I think it's more effort than I
| would have been willing to put in even if I would have
| appreciated the outcome.
| lkbm wrote:
| I moved a couple weeks ago, and was quite confused when--
| after repeatedly searching through every kitchen box--we
| were missing the flour, sugar, and pasta.
|
| Turns out one kitchen box got placed at the bottom of in a
| pile of book boxes in the living room.
|
| If you unpack in a day, it's no big deal, but if you spent
| a week unpacking, you may find yourself having to eat
| something other than spaghetti for lunch, which is normally
| fine, but not when you really want spaghetti and the lack
| of spaghetti merely makes you more determined to find it.
| layer8 wrote:
| I put a colored sticker on each box, where the color
| corresponds to the room where the box should go. The
| destination rooms are marked with the same stickers
| during the move, so helpers have an easy time telling
| where to put each box.
|
| In addition, I'm numbering the boxes, and when packing
| them keep a list mapping the numbers to what's in each
| box. So when later searching for something, I know it
| should be in box number _x_. This can be helpful even
| years later when you don't unpack all boxes.
| styfle wrote:
| > This can be helpful even years later when you don't
| unpack all boxes.
|
| Indeed, this is one of the biggest reasons I tracked this
| information to begin with.
| irrational wrote:
| Do your local grocery stores not sell spaghetti?
| lkbm wrote:
| I ended up buying spaghetti when I went to the store a
| couple days later, and now I have an abundance of
| spaghetti. But lunch that first day ended up being
| something else.
| bonki wrote:
| The good thing is, you can't have too much pasta.
| linsomniac wrote:
| >but if you spent a week unpacking
|
| Look at you! I still have boxes packed from my move a
| decade ago. :-)
| aembleton wrote:
| Time to bin them
| overfeed wrote:
| "I wonder what ever happened to $VERY_IMPORTANT_DOCUMENT?
| It just disappeared"
| lostlogin wrote:
| > If you unpack in a day, it's no big deal
|
| I think you're supposed to unpack 80% on day one, and
| keep the rest boxed up for the next move?
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Don't you still have to search for the box with the issue
| number, once you've found which number has what you need?
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| It's much faster to read a single number from 12 boxes
| than 3-4 pieces of text from 12 boxes.
| remram wrote:
| Wouldn't a single text document have achieved the same
| purpose? With a heading for each box?
| styfle wrote:
| I liked being able to "close" the issue once I unpacked
| the box.
| sameerds wrote:
| Because searching for a thing across all issues is way faster
| than eyeballing the list written on each box?
| styfle wrote:
| Correct. There's no way you're going to write every item
| inside the box on the box itself. And definitely not on
| every side of the box. Think cables and small items.
|
| It only makes sense if you plan on unpacking over a year
| but if you unpack everything in a couple days then the
| system is not as useful.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Can't you just label the box cables?
| rzzzt wrote:
| I remember seeing this house renovation project on HN, but it
| is gone from GitHub:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4962518
| bjourne wrote:
| Totally agree. GitHub issues is probably the best bug
| tracker/ticketing system you can imagine. Intuitive interface,
| simple, clean, and fast. Just waiting for a Microsoft redesign to
| completely fuck it up. :P
| kccqzy wrote:
| I've used plenty of proprietary issue tracking systems and
| GitHub is missing several features that I now consider quite
| important though certainly not essential:
|
| * The ability to write an issue summary separate from comments.
| When you are debugging some hairy bug, some manager doesn't
| really want to wade through all the comments to get an idea; an
| editable summary at the very top of the page communicates high-
| level points to stakeholders while others continue to comment
| on details. People work around this by editing the initial
| comment of the issue but it's better if there's something more
| dedicated.
|
| * Sophisticated access control. More than once when someone
| writes a bug report they are referring to a bug experienced by
| a single user. For user privacy reasons there needs to be a
| per-issue permission system to restrict access beyond the
| permission implied by the repo.
|
| * The ability to add personal notes to an issue without
| publishing it. Whether it's a draft form of a comment or
| something else, it gets rid of the need to maintain your own
| notes.
| 9dev wrote:
| > an editable summary at the very top of the page
| communicates high-level points to stakeholders
|
| I would hope this will soon be written by AI automatically;
| summing up high-level points in an issue discussion seems
| like a _perfect_ task for an LLM.
| simonw wrote:
| I've been rolling my own version of that recently via my
| https://github.com/simonw/llm-fragments-github plugin.
|
| Here's an example where I condensed 50+ comments
| (accumulated over a year and a half!) into a summary
| comment and added it to the thread:
| https://github.com/simonw/sqlite-
| chronicle/issues/7#issuecom...
|
| I created the summary like this: llm \
| -f issue:https://github.com/simonw/sqlite-
| chronicle/issues/7 \ -m openai/o4-mini \ -o
| reasoning_effort high \ -s 'Output markdown
| explaining this issue and the proposed resolution
| succinctly and clearly'
| hnlmorg wrote:
| 1. Summary
|
| It wouldn't be too hard to add that with a 3rd party plugin.
| You could set an event hook to run through the comments, and
| add it to the top comment.
|
| For bonus points, you could use an LLM to summarise. Every
| company loves a bit of AI these days, so your manager can
| gloat with his manager buddies that you now have AI-powered
| issue tracking.
|
| 2. That sounds like an anti-pattern to me. There shouldn't be
| PII in your dev issue tracking system.
|
| There problem here isn't RBAC, it's the workflow. If you're
| in a situation where you need to make notes of sensitive
| information then you should store that in the same data store
| as the source information (eg Salesforce, et al). And I say
| this as someone who hates Salesforce.
|
| 3. I've not seen this feature in any issue tracker. Sounds
| like a nice feature but I wouldn't have thought it as
| essential.
| billylb42 wrote:
| 3. ServiceNow incident tracking has something close called
| "work notes". Work notes are for internal team members with
| a certain role, where comments are public and meant to
| communicate to the issue reporter.
| kccqzy wrote:
| > That sounds like an anti-pattern to me. There shouldn't
| be PII in your dev issue tracking system.
|
| Then how do you track such issues? I'll give you a real
| example I've experienced: a high-value customer writes to
| support and complains that his UI is broken. None of the
| other people's UIs are broken. Do you not use the issue
| tracking system just because you need to get that
| customer's private settings and PII in order to debug the
| bug?
|
| It's common to require PII to be stored elsewhere, but
| people will still make mistakes and copy paste PII for
| convenience. In the end isn't it better for your issue
| tracking system to be flexible enough to store PII?
| hnlmorg wrote:
| You can say user ID is broken and define how it's broken.
| You don't have include any of their PII outside of the
| user ID.
|
| > It's common to require PII to be stored elsewhere, but
| people will still make mistakes and copy paste PII for
| convenience.
|
| That's a training problem.
|
| And It's also common for people to fuck up RBAC. The
| latter is a harder problem to fix with training than
| teaching them to keep PII out of issue tracking systems.
|
| > In the end isn't it better for your issue tracking
| system to be flexible enough to store PII?
|
| I've worked in some very sensitive domains. They managed
| just fine keeping customer data out of the issue tracking
| systems.
| kccqzy wrote:
| The user ID is a piece of email. It is PII. To define how
| it's broken is to describe a list of specific actions the
| user did to the private information in their account
| causing the UI to be broken.
|
| If training is such a problem, I don't understand why we
| solve the problem by obviating such training and make the
| issue tracking system an acceptable storage medium for
| PII?
| hnlmorg wrote:
| Because you were the one that said you needed granular
| RBAC to limit who has visibility of what issues!
| bjourne wrote:
| Every experienced dev knows what happens when they are
| subjected to issue trackers with loads of features: some
| managers require all those features to be used (cause that's
| what they paid for!). So instead of spending your time
| debugging you have to ensure the bug is properly tagged,
| categorized, has the right version number(s) for affected
| software, has the right assignee, yadda, yadda. Then some
| busy beaver will send you email reminding you that you
| haven't filled in all the drop-downs and check boxes
| correctly....
| pacifika wrote:
| Run the Orbit extension on the page. That should give you a
| summary
| kccqzy wrote:
| That reminds me: GitHub has a bad habit of hiding comments
| in a long issue. It displays the first few and the last few
| comments. So you can't expect an extension to grab the
| entire context without it specifically being designed for
| GitHub. In fact even the browser's built-in Find In Page
| won't find everything.
| simonw wrote:
| Yeah, I'm annoyed by that too. Thankfully it doesn't
| affect the API.
| soraminazuki wrote:
| It's already locked up behind a login wall. You can only search
| for a handful of issues before being quickly rate limited.
| hugh-avherald wrote:
| Isn't the entire purpose of Azure DevOps to be a sort of Jovian
| gravity well into which Microsoft marketing principles can be
| sucked into before they hit GitHub?
| chrisjj wrote:
| > Free and unlimited
|
| Extremely doubtful. The fact you haven't yet hit limits does not
| mean no limits.
|
| Nor does the fact the provider claims unlimited.
| simonw wrote:
| There are repos out there with over a hundred thousand issues -
| https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues?q=is%3Aissue%20st...
| has 180,000+ now.
| https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues?q=is%3Aissue is just
| over 100,000 across both open and closed.
|
| I take a _lot_ of notes but I don 't think I'm going to end up
| with the largest issue collection on GitHub.
|
| I could always spin up a second repo or org if I do run out. I
| have my notes scattered across several hundred repos (and a
| hunch of orgs) already.
| pmkary wrote:
| This is insane!
| simonw wrote:
| That's why I wrote this. The idea of using GitHub Issues as an
| alternative to a dedicated notes app is decidedly non-obvious.
| I only just realized myself that I've been using it that way
| for years.
| dboreham wrote:
| I've been doing it for years (before GitHub existed...). e.g.
| https://github.com/dboreham/global-bugs/issues
| cogogo wrote:
| I expected the first comment to be about privacy. I don't keep a
| lot of notes but I definitely consider them even more private
| than even email. Not sure I want them training LLMs. Or are there
| actually assurances from MS around privacy for private repos?
| fsflover wrote:
| > Or are there actually assurances from MS around privacy for
| private repos?
|
| Related discussion:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36184948
| simonw wrote:
| The amount of extremely sensitive corporate secrets in GitHub
| issues makes me assume that their security and privacy are
| pretty rock solid.
|
| A lot of companies pay GitHub a _lot_ of money to look after
| their source code and related artifacts. That 's GitHub's
| business model. I don't think they would jeopardize that trust
| for the sake of training a model on private data.
| al_borland wrote:
| Where I work we don't use GitHub, but we do use Copilot. It
| took a long time before it was opened up for us to be able to
| use it, as deals had to be struck and accounts and auth setup
| to use our corporate logins, which have different rules for
| data privacy than public use of Copilot. We are explicitly
| forbidden from using the public version of Copilot, or any
| other AI for that matter.
|
| I can only assume that companies paying for GitHub also pay
| for enhanced levels of privacy. Just because a company can
| pay GitHub not to train on their data, doesn't mean they're
| not going to train on your data that is being hosted for
| free. They are almost certainly crawling all free repos.
| randallsquared wrote:
| I dunno. For one thing, those companies are paying GitHub a
| lot of money for the enterprise version, separately hosted
| (right?). The data isn't actually available to Microsoft
| employees or LLMs, absent some security flaw or backdoor. For
| another, companies that pay for this also (sample size is
| small, though) have automation that scans GitHub repos,
| issues, etc for any secrets and require them to be removed
| and scrubbed from history, implying that they don't trust
| even the self-hosted GitHub Enterprise as much as you do.
| simonw wrote:
| I see secrets as a different issue. Putting those in an
| issue or repo exposes them to potentially hundreds of
| people within your own company, that's bad practice.
| dcreater wrote:
| Assumptions are not sufficient when it comes to basic human
| rights. And my assumption is that they do or will use your
| data from their own interest as the likelihood that someone
| within Microsoft will benefit tends to 1 as time tends to
| infinity.
|
| privacy needs to be verifiable (Apple has show this is
| possible with private cloud compute)
| Sunspark wrote:
| I remember awhile back that they were and do train on
| repositories to the point that I never wanted to use GitHub
| for anything other than submitting bug reports to projects.
|
| Maybe the non-training only applies if you pay protection
| money? But then you run into the whole if it's public there's
| nothing stopping some other AI that isn't MS from accessing
| the repository and training on it.
| simonw wrote:
| There's been a huge amount of speculative information
| floating around that GitHub are training on private repos,
| but I've never seen anything credible.
| ravivyas wrote:
| the notes app... there is none.
|
| There will always be better apps, but you need to stick to an app
| with its flaws and limitations.
|
| I have been through this rabbit hole... (paid for Bear, IAWriter,
| noteplan, FSnotes and probably more that I forget) and have just
| stuck to local markdown files and use VS code ... I even used
| LLMs to generate a tiny plugin to solve my micro needs.
| vijucat wrote:
| Unpopular opinion: developers obsess about the format being
| Markdown. This is completely backwards. This is a hammer-sees-
| nail thing. You should care more about the UX. And that
| somewhere, someone wrote a parser for the file format. That's it.
| You don't have to understand every byte of it. It need not be
| readable text and it need not be version-control friendly. It
| should be a joy to use, be powerful, be easy to annotate images
| and pdfs. I bet none of the Markdown solutions do this as
| elegantly as OneNote or alternatives.
| simonw wrote:
| The more time passes the _more_ I care about my notes living in
| Markdown:
|
| - I can transform it to other formats should I need to
|
| - The GitHub variant of it (GFM) has feature like syntax
| highlighting for different languages which is incredibly useful
| to me based on the kinds of notes I take
|
| - Diffing clearly genuinely is a benefit, sometimes I want to
| know exactly what I changed!
|
| - I can parse it with regular expressions, so useful
| information doesn't end up locked in some weird binary format
|
| - LLMs are great at reading and writing it
|
| These things may not matter to people who are not nerds. I'm a
| nerd!
| SOLAR_FIELDS wrote:
| Indeed, Markdown has become a self fulfilling prophecy of
| sorts: You want to use it because the toolchain and ecosystem
| surrounding the format is good, and the toolchain and
| ecosystem are good because everyone is using it.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| sir, this is HN, nobody wants to hear your rational practical
| ideas
| lawgimenez wrote:
| Almost the best notebook in the world, as long as there's no
| outage.
| eviks wrote:
| > It has excellent search
|
| How is it excellent when _current logs could do with a bit of
| redesign_ doesn 't find the comment (requires quotes to find it)
|
| And then a tiny typo _" current logs could" do with a bit of
| redesing_ also fails you
| sureIy wrote:
| Confirm. GitHub search is "search" not "excellent search"
| joker99 wrote:
| The fact that you can't even specify the branch or search
| across branches is anything but excellent
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| It's such a wasted opportunity too. It would be so powerful
| to understand how a tool is used by searching for popular
| repositories that are already using it.
| simonw wrote:
| I do that all the time! What's GitHub search missing that
| prevents you from doing that?
|
| Their code search supports regular expressions now, which I
| find pretty incredible.
| https://github.blog/engineering/architecture-
| optimization/th...
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Maybe I have my search syntax wrong. Suppose I want to
| search for go projects with a flake.nix in the repo root.
| This finds nothing: language:Go
| path:/flake.nix
|
| I know they exist though, for instance here's one:
| github.com/joerdav/xc
|
| Can you tell me where I've gone wrong?
| simonw wrote:
| That's searching for files that are in the Go language
| but are flake.nix files - which is 0 results because
| flake.nix files are not written in Go.
|
| This seems to work; path:/flake.nix go
|
| https://github.com/search?q=path%3A%2Fflake.nix%20go&type
| =co...
| bob1029 wrote:
| For a typical organization, I think issues are still the most
| valuable part of the GitHub product stack. You can build very
| powerful project management abstractions on top of issues &
| labels.
|
| If you have discipline to do a monorepo for the entire
| organization, your issue and code tabs are effectively the entire
| universe in one place. This is the only thing I've seen that can
| pull middle managers out of email - a _single_ bucket that has
| everything of concern in it.
| bgwalter wrote:
| Except if you lose your 2FA one day before you need your plans.
| Or are all plans public?
|
| Any local notebook, including pencil and paper, is better.
| simonw wrote:
| Pencil and paper is terrible because you can lose the paper. I
| want my notes backed up to the cloud, with backups replicated
| across at least two continents.
|
| I've experimented with a bunch of tools for extracting copies
| of my issues and pulling them down locally, which is easy
| thanks to the GitHub API.
|
| One that's particularly fun is a GitHub Actions setup that
| copies the full contents of each issue thread into a file in
| the repo itself. Then I can "git pull" to fetch my backup!
|
| I still don't have any of them running on a cron at home but I
| might set that up some day.
| pier25 wrote:
| Isn't there something like Obsidian that uses GitHub instead?
| OutOfHere wrote:
| For offline use, these were posted recently:
|
| https://github.com/git-bug/git-bug
|
| https://github.com/dspinellis/git-issue
| pacifika wrote:
| How's the mobile experience?
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| The stuff that gets upvoted here...
|
| Next up: - "SQLite is almost the best notebook in
| the world" - "Claude is almost the best notebook in the
| world" - "An SQLite database containing only Markdown files
| in a Git repo self-hosted on an SD card in my Raspberry Pi served
| by a Node.js web app accessible via 56k modem is almost the best
| notebook in the world" - "I created a startup to take the
| previous thing, reinvent GitHub Issues on top of it, call it AI
| Notes, and make almost the best notebook in the world, and it's
| now valued at $50B"
| simonw wrote:
| This is fun: it turns out you can paste this GraphQL query:
| { viewer { issueComments {
| totalCount } issues { totalCount
| } } }
|
| Into https://docs.github.com/en/graphql/overview/explorer in
| order to see the total number of issues and comments you've
| posted over your time on GitHub.
|
| I got 9,413 issues and 39,087 comments, for a grand total of
| 48,500 combined!
| AstroJetson wrote:
| I always wonder when I see all these best notebooks / note taking
| systems, etc. why people don't spin up any of the dozens of wiki
| servers.
|
| You can put it online so you can get to it anywhere
|
| You can run it off a stick to keep it with you (Tiddlywiki)
|
| You can cross link pages to be able to collect things together
|
| You can search. Some even have auto link builders so you can
| build a page of links to pages that match a category.
|
| Some support Markup so you have formatting the way you want.
| prepend wrote:
| For me, I like to keep my life simple and not run servers
| unless I have to.
|
| I haven't run a wiki in years because markdown+git is good
| enough and simpler. I never really need anonymous edits.
| bjornasm wrote:
| Councidentally I just started using it as my todo list. Its
| really neat, especially when using githubs cli gh.
| paradox460 wrote:
| Try it with ZenHub atop and it's so absurdly good it boggles the
| mind why anyone would use Jira
| trenchgun wrote:
| Well... not everybody uses github, and not every task in Jira
| is about code in version control
| yearesadpeople wrote:
| I've come to the same conclusion myself in the past 2 months
| (possibly driven by the AI / LLM age making me think even more in
| version control... writing those words make me wince). I have a
| small webapp too, which hoovers up issues I like to publish, from
| a repo with links on the web I like that I feel I would like to
| share (I believe the kids are calling this 'new age curation').
| Its really quite a nice, organic, process. And its so odd its
| taken me 15 years of note apps - every other hot note app on the
| market - to realise this. Love Simon's articles, another nice
| insight
| digdugdirk wrote:
| Interesting, do you have a repo for that webapp? Sounds
| interesting, I'd like to check it out.
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