> This is pretty concerning. I can’t imagine the average person equates hitting this button with forfeiting their privacy.
When you click "thumbs down" you get the message "Submitting this report will send the entire current conversation to Anthropic for future improvements to our models." before you submit the report, I'd consider that pretty explicit.
> Why do people still use Subversion on GitHub, anyhow? Besides simple inertia, there were workflows which Git didn’t support until recently. The main thing we heard when speaking with customers and communities was checking out a subset of the repository–a single directory, or only the latest commit. I have good news: with sparse checkout, sparse index, and partial clone, Git can now do a pretty decent job at these workflows.
With these features I can have a local clone with just a subfolder, and without downloading all the history. But it still comes with git - which I'll then have to remove for my use case.
I really think that grabbing some files from a certain commit should be a completely trivial oneliner.
If you are already using GitHub you can write your own short scripts with GitHub's file raw URLs (which include a specific commit hash) and curl/httpie.
Obviously, that's not easily portable to other hosts (though most of the big ones have similar URL patterns that you can discover), but depending on your use case may be a handy option.
> But it still comes with git - which I'll then have to remove for my use case.
I don't know what your use case is, or why you don't have a local history anyway of the repo so that you need to spot-download sub-trees, but if this is a somewhat common workflow this seems to indicate you may possibly be looking for something like git-archive [1]. That's a tool included in the "corners" of the git "suite" to take a `treeish` and build a tar or zip directly from it (with no git metadata inside). You can use a commit or a tag name for a `treeish`, but if you wanted it to be a specific folder inside a commit you can pull the commit, examine the tree it points to until you find the tree ID inside that representing just the subfolder you are looking for. You can pass that tree ID to git-archive. (And other things that take a `treeish`.) It's not quite a "completely trivial oneliner" to write a script to do that, but it may not be that much more complicated of a script to write.
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
I think many hackers (myself included) find this interesting.
