[HN Gopher] Migrating the main Zig repository from GitHub to Cod...
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Migrating the main Zig repository from GitHub to Codeberg
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 847 points
Date : 2025-11-27 01:49 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ziglang.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (ziglang.org)
| bitbasher wrote:
| I'm happy to see the move. Codeberg is probably a more
| stable/long-term solution than SourceHut as the founder is
| slightly unhinged (but love what he has built). Honestly, either
| would have been great choices.
|
| More opensource projects should move off GitHub. I moved off it
| myself.
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| I'm pretty sure Drew has stepped away from SourceHut. It's kind
| of a bummer SourceHut stuck so stubbornly to mailing list only
| workflows. Everything else about the platform is great.
| bitbasher wrote:
| I believe Drew was taking a "break" from it, but not stepping
| away in any permanent sense. It's probably better for him to
| stay involved. I'd like to see him push his idea further.
| It's great to have options.
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| I'm glad they have robust support for email based patching
| but it's a hard sell for people getting in to the platform.
| pabs3 wrote:
| Drew is still working on SourceHut:
|
| https://sourcehut.org/blog/2025-11-20-whats-cooking-q4-2025/
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| Thanks. My information was outdated.
| michaelanckaert wrote:
| I agree that there is a steep learning curve compared to
| Github pull requests or Gitlab merge requests, but like many
| things the steep learning curve actually hides a very
| powerful tool. A famous example is the Linux Kernel, a
| project of such a size that simply can not work with the
| Github/Gitlab model.
| rs186 wrote:
| I would use the word "exception" rather than "example".
|
| I doubt the next generation of programmers will have any
| idea what it means to contribute code "by mailing list".
| gwerbret wrote:
| > I'm happy to see the move. Codeberg is probably a more
| stable/long-term solution than SourceHut as the founder is
| slightly unhinged
|
| What's this about?
| LtWorf wrote:
| Anyone who has read Drew de vault's blog for some time
| reaches the same conclusion it seems.
| ameliaquining wrote:
| DeVault's controversial takes are pretty similar to the
| ones that Kelley expresses in this post, so I don't see
| much misalignment here.
| dsissitka wrote:
| Maybe the incident:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41837782
|
| https://dmpwn.info/
| dpatterbee wrote:
| I'm confused, the incident is that he wrote a document
| detailing repeated bad behaviour from a well known
| community figure? And this is a bad thing?
|
| And that second link is really grasping at straws lol
| debugnik wrote:
| He apparently pretended to not have written it despite
| its DNS pointing to his servers, and Certificate
| Transparency logs and Internet Archive all attributing
| the page to his domain. Compare the top comment thread in
| the first link above to his reply there:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41838124
|
| I generally like Sourcehut and Drew's writing but I just
| learned about this and I find it disappointing.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Which part of the second link? Some of it is very
| accurately sourced, he 100% operates a loli bot which
| targetted subreddits banned by reddit for illegal
| content. Theres no walking around that. Near the end they
| also point out that Drew changes his TOS for SourceHut to
| align with banning projects he disagrees with, which
| makes GitHub look like paradise.
| bfkwlfkjf wrote:
| > the incident is that he wrote a document detailing
| repeated bad behaviour from a well known community
| figure? And this is a bad thing?
|
| He collected all Stallman statements about Epstein and
| related subjects (this is perfectly ok) and then wrote
| his own summaries which completely misrepresent the
| things which were actually said. So what happened was
| that a lot of people just skimmed the summaries and
| concluded that Stallman molests children, or says that
| it's ok to do so etc etc.
|
| If fact I have taken to link the Stallman report and add
| "don't read the summaries, read only the things that
| Stallman actually said". This only works if I believe the
| person is in good faith, of course. I would suggest the
| same to you.
| climb_stealth wrote:
| Holy shit this escalates completely. I had no idea any of
| this was going.
|
| Is sr.ht tainted now or still a decent place to host code?
| I can't quite tell.
| cookiengineer wrote:
| It's a defamation campaign done by 4chan bigots. See my
| sibling comment.
| climb_stealth wrote:
| Thanks for mentioning it! Makes me glad to live a life
| out of the spotlight and to be generally ignorant of
| stuff like this going on. Would not want to be targeted
| like that :/
| bitbasher wrote:
| He's a bit unhinged, but for what it's worth every
| interaction I've had with him has been positive.
| skrebbel wrote:
| > Is sr.ht tainted now
|
| I hate that this is now a thing you can ask
| unsarcastically.
|
| Just use the tool you like the best man, screw what other
| people think. Yes, there's people who will go "you're bad
| because your use a tool that's made by a guy who said
| something wrong about Stallman" (or whatever he did
| exactly again). These people are not worth your
| attention.
| climb_stealth wrote:
| My bad, I shouldn't have said tainted. Trustworthy is
| what I had in mind.
|
| I moved my private repos to sr.ht ages ago because it was
| the open source, free software, ethical, longevitable
| approach. And stepping away from the mega corporations
| and everything going on with those.
|
| I was wondering whether this was still the case.
| cookiengineer wrote:
| > dmpwn
|
| Kinda horrible to see that the 4chan bigots use the same
| strategy to try to discredit drew devault, and implying
| things of ownership through their own created fake accounts
| and smearing campaigns. Pretty much all allegations on that
| page are circumstantial evidence, especially the bot
| ownership parts that sircmpwn even took down while citing
| those bigots using it to scrape child porn.
|
| And then the dude of dmpwn posting things on image boards
| with the tag dmpwn, and forgetting to remove that from
| screenshots? lol, really?
|
| Having experienced the same kind of doxxing attempts by
| 4chan bigots, /pol/ and kiwifarms, I think I am qualified
| to comment on how they operate.
|
| Maybe someone needs to summon the Antichrist a second time
| to thin out the herd, huh?
| wolvesechoes wrote:
| > Kinda horrible to see that the 4chan bigots use the
| same strategy to try to discredit drew devault
|
| No need, Drew does a good job himself.
| rs186 wrote:
| Should have made some popcorn before clicking the link.
|
| The drama in the open source community is no less fun than
| YouTubers or celebrities.
|
| Great way to begin Thanksgiving.
| xvilka wrote:
| Biggest problem of SourceHut that should be solved first before
| mass migration of open source - lack of the organizations that
| would allow multiple contributors working on the project,
| especially the project with multiple repositories.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| I am getting fatigued by all of these. I am learning about a
| new one each time. We have - GitHub -
| BinCode - GitLab - SourceHut - CodeBerg
|
| They all seem to do roughly the same things, but with a
| different web UI. Competition is great! Especially in response
| to a big corp that has market share. But... there was value in
| the centralization of GH.
| tcfhgj wrote:
| there is value in interoperability, not in centralization
| bfkwlfkjf wrote:
| > They all seem to do roughly the same things
|
| Codeberg (Forgejo) is Free software, GitHub isn't. Not
| everything is about the software features.
| ZeroAurora wrote:
| It's a pity that the GitHub repository is not mirrored, probably
| making downstreams broken.
|
| Good move anyway.
| rererereferred wrote:
| It's a simple `git remote set-url` to fix it, unless you are
| using some github proprietary API which is the kind of vendor
| lock-in they want to avoid.
| SoKamil wrote:
| > As a bonus, we look forward to fewer violations (exhibit A, B,
| C) of our strict no LLM / no AI policy, which I believe are at
| least in part due to GitHub aggressively pushing the "file an
| issue with Copilot" feature in everyone's face.
|
| Also, the big part of that issue is people are incentivized to
| make their GitHub profile look good to have a higher chance of
| getting hired. Any non-mainstream platform is not as compelling
| to get social credits.
| manquer wrote:
| Issues and Pull requests are only optional features . Open
| source projects could always use GitHub as just git host/mirror
| like how torvalds/linux is setup .
| mlugg wrote:
| PRs are not optional: there is no way to disable them on
| GitHub. I can't be sure that this is intentional, but it
| certainly works out well for them that this is one of many
| properties which make it quite difficult to migrate away from
| the platform.
| 8organicbits wrote:
| Yikes, the PRs on the Linux repo are quite terrible. At
| least there's a bot to auto-reply with the correct
| procedure.
|
| https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/1370
| jamesnorden wrote:
| There's technically a way[1], but you'd have to do it every
| 6 months which is not great.
|
| https://docs.github.com/en/communities/moderating-
| comments-a...
| mlugg wrote:
| Yeah, that's actually what we've done on the Zig GitHub
| repository. However, it doesn't stop pushes to existing
| PRs, which isn't ideal; and, yes, it's quite hard to
| escape the conclusion that there being no "until I turn
| it back on" option is intentional.
| ACCount37 wrote:
| It's completely intentional, and goes back to when GitHub
| was founded. GitHub was intended as a collaborative
| software development platform, not "look but don't
| touch".
| noname120 wrote:
| I suppose you can fork a repository if you want to
| collaborate with others though. Reviewing pull requests
| and engaging with a community is a lot of work and has
| possible legal ramifications; in many cases it's faster
| to just do things yourself. Some teams/companies
| deliberately refuse outside contributions for this
| reason.
| noname120 wrote:
| You can close them and limit discussion to contributors I
| guess? Not ideal but at least they wouldn't appear in the
| pull requests tab.
|
| Alternatively you can use a bot or a GitHub Action to
| automatically change the description and title of the
| pull request to something like "[PRs are not allowed and
| deleted automatically]". But yeah not a perfect solution
| either...
| chillfox wrote:
| I guess you could make a bot that closes any opened PR with
| a message that PRs are not accepted on Github and a link to
| the contribution docs.
| p-e-w wrote:
| Pull requests are not optional on GitHub. Users have been
| begging for more than a decade for an option to disable pull
| request for a repository, and GitHub continues to ignore
| them.
| manquer wrote:
| As another poster noted, you can disable it by limiting all
| interactions (6 months at a time). It is not ideal, but it
| does work to for PRs. You should also close all current PRs
| when you do that so users cannot push to those branches as
| well.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| PRs aren't an optional feature, though _acting_ on PRs is
| obviously optional; nothing prevents you from ignoring or
| (even automatically) closing all PRs from anyone who is not
| on a list of approved contributors.
| technion wrote:
| Not long back we were all urged to take CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md
| seriously. I've arrived at a place where the next thing I open
| source will include such a file which discusses not sending
| slop to the repository.
| lII1lIlI11ll wrote:
| > Also, the big part of that issue is people are incentivized
| to make their GitHub profile look good to have a higher chance
| of getting hired.
|
| Do people really get hired for bunch of PRs to random repos on
| GH or just think they will? My impression has always been that
| GH profile is completely ignored by both recruiters and
| interviewers.
| brodo wrote:
| And this kind of behaviour is a red flag for people who
| actually go digging through the GitHub profile. Like techical
| people in the last stages of a hiring process.
| throw10920 wrote:
| Is this aspirational or anecdotal, or is this what
| technical people in FANNG/tech actually do? I _hope_ it 's
| true but it strikes me as the kind of thing that most
| technical people involved in the interview process would be
| too tired/overworked to do.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Nobody ever has brought up my GitHub though I did use my
| private GitLab projects to land my first dev job.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I agree. As a technical person who has been involved in
| hiring, I never looked at github. My evaluation of a
| candidate was based on how he/she answered questions in
| the interview, and my general sense of "could I work with
| this person every day." I had no spare time to go beyond
| that.
| hobofan wrote:
| > "could I work with this person every day."
|
| Communication skills (or lack thereof) on PRs or issues
| they opened is something I try to look for if they
| provide a Github profile. Signs of a big ego that will
| likely get in the way of day-to-day work is the main
| thing I look out for and it's sadly not that uncommon.
| hobofan wrote:
| I've seen quite a few HR hiring processes where a mediocre HR
| person (knows to look for GH profile + activity on that, but
| not how to evaluate them) is paired with engineers with too
| little input power. In those processes, people that game
| their GH profiles tend to benefit.
| BrouteMinou wrote:
| Biting the hand that fed you. I hope he's going to donate some of
| the money is getting begging to codeberg in return of their
| services.
| rvrb wrote:
| you say this like it's some own or something, but I'd be more
| surprised if they didn't. believe it or not, they are already
| donating some of their funds to the upstream ecosystem[0].
|
| [0]: https://ziglang.org/news/2025-financials/
| rvz wrote:
| > Effective immediately, I have made ziglang/zig on GitHub read-
| only, and the canonical origin/master branch of the main Zig
| project repository is https://codeberg.org/ziglang/zig.git.
|
| If there is one benefit in moving from GitHub it is certainly
| avoiding receiving AI slop issues on GitHub.
|
| Github was on the decline anyway in the past 5 years, it's time
| for an alternative and we'll see. Would rather it being Codeberg
| over something like Sourcehut.
| drey08 wrote:
| > Github was on the decline anyway in the past 5 years, it's
| time for an alternative and we'll see.
|
| I tend to agree. But I don't see how an exact UI replica of
| Github is innovative.
|
| I've only glanced at it though, maybe there's more features
| underneath the hood.
|
| Happy to learn more about what makes it better. Is the CI
| system more refined than Github Actions? I was definitely never
| a fan of that system.
| ferfumarma wrote:
| Where do you see sourcehut falling short?
| jsxyzb wrote:
| Nice work
| _ache_ wrote:
| I don't particularly like Zig, actually I don't like the
| language. But I have to admit, it's a bold move, free software
| projects should be encouraged to do the same.
| munchler wrote:
| Calling the people who work on GitHub "losers" is not cool.
| linkage wrote:
| Look at the absolute state of what they are working on. If they
| are not losers, they are dispirited clock-punchers who don't
| care about their craft.
| bigyabai wrote:
| The absolute state of Github is that I use it dozens of times
| a day and it works flawlessly, for free, with intermittent
| outages.
|
| Microsoft is doing more with Github than I can say for most
| of their products. I won't go to bat for the Xbox or Windows
| teams, but Github is... fine. Almost offensively usable.
| mason_mpls wrote:
| Given the trajectory of Microsoft products it stands to
| reason Github's future is uncertain. Also Git is ultimately
| a hosting platform that any competent software shop can
| recreate; the people behind the platform matter more than
| the platform itself.
| DeepYogurt wrote:
| True eventually, but not today
| gen220 wrote:
| As someone who is intimately familiar with GitHub's data
| models, I wouldn't say that replacing it is so
| technically trivial.
|
| But even then, you are right that that the moat of social
| cachet and implicit trust is still more valuable than the
| moat of technical implementation.
| shevy-java wrote:
| So you are ok with 2FA, right? If you contribute code
| there.
|
| Now - what if you are not ok with it? What can you do?
|
| > Almost offensively usable
|
| I think you conflate two points here. One is how useable
| github is. The other is: control. At which point are you no
| longer ok with what a private company does? This is not
| solely about Microsoft alone by the way.
| hobofan wrote:
| > So you are ok with 2FA, right?
|
| Yes. Are you not? It's one of the most effective measures
| to prevent a whole class of supply chain attacks. On
| Github the 2FA is also flexible enough to allow non-
| hardware passkeys, so you can choose a privacy preserving
| option with good UX.
| davidsainez wrote:
| > works flawlessly
|
| > intermittent outages
|
| Those seem like conflicting statements to me. Last outage
| was only 13 days ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45915731.
|
| Also, there have been increasing reports of open source
| maintainers dealing with LLM generated PRs:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46039274. GitHub seems
| perfectly positioned to help manage that issue, but in all
| likelihood will do nothing about it: '"Either you have to
| embrace the Al, or you get out of your career," Dohmke
| wrote, citing one of the developers who GitHub
| interviewed.'
|
| I used to help maintain a popular open source library and I
| do not envy what open source maintainers are now up
| against.
| xeonmc wrote:
| GitHub: 60% of the time, it works every time.
| bigyabai wrote:
| > GitHub seems perfectly positioned to help manage that
| issue, but in all likelihood will do nothing about it
|
| I genuinely don't understand this position. Is this not
| what Github issues bots were _made_ for? No matter where
| your repo is hosted, you take the onus of moderating it
| onto yourself.
|
| Downtimes are an issue, it's why I jokingly mentioned it.
| Besides that I'm without gripe. Make Github a high-nines
| service and I'll keep using it until the wheels fall off.
| healsdata wrote:
| > intermittent outages
|
| The outages have gone from "almost every Friday" to
| "several times per week".
| p2detar wrote:
| My thinking as well. If people don't like Microsoft, the
| last place to start their quixotic adventure would be
| GitHub.
|
| I don't use Azure or Windows. At work I push against Teams
| and actively try to persuade customers not to use Microsoft
| products. The reason isn't even ideological - most of the
| time their products suck and the dev support is bad. VScode
| may be an exception, I'll give them that.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| ...so far... but the problems are noticeably increasing in
| frequency, especially in Github Actions, and most of those
| don't show up on the status page because they are so random
| (eg restart the ci pipeline and it works) It feels exacty
| like Github is slowly rotting from the inside and I guess
| the reason is that everybody is forced to work on pointless
| AI features so there's nobody left doing actually important
| feature and maintenance work.
| aeonfox wrote:
| They could also just be people with bills to pay who are
| maybe faced with--by some accounts--a very challenging
| employment market. Or maybe due to disabilities they find the
| process of finding new work difficult or impossible.
| shevy-java wrote:
| That is fine, but they adopt or delegate corporate opinions
| onto others. I feel that if you need to lie to people
| because of money, your job is not honest. (I don't mean
| you; I mean people who need to do this because otherwise
| they may lose their job etc...)
| KingMob wrote:
| > I feel that if you need to lie to people because of
| money
|
| Then your beef is with capitalism, not Github/MSFT.
| spencerflem wrote:
| It's not either/or
| vdupras wrote:
| Except for the "disabilities" part, which is problematic to
| classify, wouldn't your description broadly fit the word
| "losers"?
|
| EDIT: I don't understand the downvotes. It's not a value
| judgement on Github employees, it's about the meaning of
| the word "loser". Go back to your teenage years. What's a
| loser? Someone, often through no fault of their own, keep
| being in a bad situation, having the "short end of the
| stick". What characteristically makes them losers is that
| they lack the audacity to snap out of it.
|
| Isn't that an accurate definition of what "loser" generally
| means?
| aeonfox wrote:
| > Isn't that an accurate definition of what "loser"
| generally means?
|
| "Loser" is a catch-all taunt that bypasses empathy. But
| certainly they might be 'in a losing situation', which is
| an important distinction.
|
| > Except for the "disabilities" part, which is
| problematic to classify
|
| Disability in this context is something intrinsic to the
| person (e.g., physically, mentally) that makes the
| employment process substantially difficult to engage
| with.
|
| In addition to disability, difficulty can also arise do
| to any prejudice that might be levelled against them
| (e.g., ageism, sexism, junior vs senior, skin color,
| language skills, country of origin), as well as visa
| consideration, financial situation, etc. There's so many
| things that affect the risk calculus of changing jobs.
| munchler wrote:
| It's more likely that most of them are competent
| professionals doing their best in an impersonal corporate
| environment, just like the rest of us.
| shevy-java wrote:
| Not all of us sold out to corporations.
|
| Admittedly some of those may be a bit ... unusual. Like the
| guy who created TempleOS.
| d3Xt3r wrote:
| Unfortunately, some of us are stuck in a country which is
| a Microsoft shop, which makes it next to impossible to
| get into a Linux job - especially an entry-level one
| (these are basically non-existent where I live). I've
| even considered moving to a place where Linux jobs are a
| thing (Europe), but that would mean learning the local
| language first and also already having sufficient
| professional Linux experience (no one would hire a
| foreigner for an entry level role when they could just
| hire a local).
|
| So unless you've got any bright ideas, I'm stuck in this
| Microsoft job till someone comes up with some magical
| Linux roles, or I start my own Linux-based company and
| twiddle my thumbs because there's no customers...
| ok_dad wrote:
| Gotta sell yourself to someone in this world. There's no
| sense in demeaning someone about it.
| account42 wrote:
| Shielding individuals from outside criticism is a big part
| of that impersonal corporate environment.
| __turbobrew__ wrote:
| Github is migrating from their old infra to Azure. Doing
| migrations like that is hard, no matter who you are. And from
| a business and engineering perspective I think it makes sense
| to leverage the economies of scale of Azure instead of GitHub
| running their own boxes.
| logicchains wrote:
| Anyone being forced to use Azure has, at least temporarily
| until they can find a new job, lost at life, not
| necessarily through any fault of their own. The poor souls
| probably also have to use Teams.
| __turbobrew__ wrote:
| The engineers at github are getting paid $300k/year at
| SWE3 to do their job. I don't think they lost at life.
|
| Why bring people down so hard? That is really solid money
| and you can provide for a family, retire in your 40s, and
| it is work that does not destroy your body.
| nostrebored wrote:
| Spending your life working on making things worse (and
| knowing it) is pretty demoralizing. I know many people
| who have made the decision to take a pay cut or just quit
| when they realize that's their job.
| Jach wrote:
| Sometimes those people aren't realizing that they're
| making things worse, they're just in a depressive spiral
| and can't see the other end, or see how much good is
| still being generated while other things are temporarily
| worse, or see that different tradeoffs have been made to
| make things worse in some ways and better in others. Just
| as people can delude themselves that they're always
| making a positive impact, people can delude themselves
| that they're making a negative one. The latter tends to
| be more costly, though, which can sure be annoying to
| those with a bias for a more cynical or pessimistic
| outlook...
|
| Trying to ascribe positive/negative impact to strangers
| isn't usually a useful exercise, even if you have enough
| data to make a solid case. It can be cathartic -- imagine
| a different world where programmers making things worse
| would screw off and go do something else that's not
| programing! (I have a similar imagining, like of a world
| where programming is done by those who love it even
| outside of work -- even though I've worked with and
| helped hire excellent engineers who only treated
| programming as a job, they weren't my favorite to work
| with, and some were very much not excellent.) The best
| you can hope for is to trigger some self-reflection, and
| I do think that's important on an individual level. It's
| better to not make the world uglier, if you notice
| yourself doing so, and it's not just a distortion of your
| thinking, then you should probably stop, do something
| else, or figure out if it's at a level that you can
| compensate. A Richard Stallman quote I like:
|
| "The straightforward and easy path was to join the
| proprietary software world, signing nondisclosure
| agreements and promising not to help my fellow
| hacker....I could have made money this way, and perhaps
| had fun programming (if I closed my eyes to how I was
| treating other people). But I knew that when my career
| was over, I would look back on years of building walls to
| divide people, and feel I had made the world ugly."
| lawn wrote:
| > lost at life
|
| It's so refreshing to read such a truly philosophical
| insight.
| franktankbank wrote:
| > they are dispirited clock-punchers who don't care about
| their craft.
|
| Interestingly that is synonymous with losers according the
| definition of it in gervais principle. Which weirdly makes
| being called a loser less of an insult. (More like realist)
| echelon wrote:
| Holy shit, some people in the Zig community are toxic af. By
| extension, this means the community itself has issues it needs
| to face.
|
| Not only have some of these folks - including the creator -
| been shitting in Rust threads, but here they're in here
| shitting on the awesome engineers at Github for no reason at
| all.
|
| Good god.
|
| edit: this is written by Andrew, the creator. The culture is
| rotten from the head.
| AndyKelley wrote:
| You have accused me of "shitting in Rust threads". Do you
| have any evidence for this libel?
| Jach wrote:
| Their "VP of Community" wrote this in 2020:
| https://kristoff.it/blog/addio-redis/ I didn't come across it
| until 2022. Still, particularly that and other writing from
| him and others convinced me the Zig community is full of
| goobers. That's not so bad, I have my tastes in immature
| humor and can sometimes be a goober too, but the application
| in that post's clearly-marked over-the-top skit still is just
| bizarre and doesn't encourage me to interact with them. To be
| more fair to the author and the community though, especially
| with respect to this GitHub migration, his more serious
| writing is better: https://kristoff.it/blog/the-open-source-
| game/ (2021). Some nice things said about Rust and the Rust
| community, even. In that he outlines a core position of
| "software you can love" being what he wants to create and
| inspire people to create, and how tents like "big tech" and
| "open source" don't really cater to that. The migration off
| of GitHub is predictable in the sense that GitHub stopped
| being something a lot of people loved a while ago -- of
| course some still love it, this tent creates obvious tension.
| (Though I don't know that Codeberg is any better and worthy
| of love. A few libraries I use have migrated to it and it
| seems fine at least, though them using Anubis is annoying and
| I've gotten the fail page of "Internal Server Error:
| administrator has misconfigured Anubis." a number of times.
| It does not spark joy in me.)
| ulbu wrote:
| someone called some indeterminate anonymous corporate group
| of people who actively participate in enshittification of a
| product "losers". you call that specific private individual
| "rotten".
|
| i'm really twisting my finger at the temple here.
| GaryBluto wrote:
| Is it really a surprise that the project that declared a
| blanket ban on LLM-generated code is also emotional and
| childish in other areas?
| davidsainez wrote:
| Not wanting to review and maintain code that someone didn't
| even bother to write themselves is childish?
| GaryBluto wrote:
| Denying code not on it's merits but it's source is
| childish.
| voidhorse wrote:
| I think most people are in complete agreement.
|
| What people don't like about LLM PRs is typically:
|
| a. The person proposing the PR usually lacks adequate
| context and so it makes communication and feedback, which
| are essential, difficult if not impossible. They cannot
| even explain the reasoning behind the changes they are
| proposing, b. The volume/scale is often unreasonable for
| human reviewed to contend with. c. The PR may not be in
| response to an issue but just the realization of some
| "idea" the author or LLM had, making it even harder to
| contextualize. d. The cost asymmetry, generally speaking
| is highly unfavorable to the maintainers.
|
| At the moment, it's just that LLM driven PRs have these
| qualities so frequently that people use LLM bans as a
| shorthand since writing out a lengthy policy redescrbiing
| the basic tenets of participation in software development
| is tedious and shouldn't be necessary, but here we are,
| in 2025 when everyone has seemingly decided to abandon
| those principles in favor of lazyily generating endless
| reams of pointless code just because they can.
| davidsainez wrote:
| But to determine its merit a maintainer must first donate
| their time and read through the PR.
|
| LLMs reduce the effort to create a plausible PR down to
| virtually zero. Requiring a human to write the code is a
| good indicator that A. the PR has at least some technical
| merit and B. the human cares enough about the code to
| bother writing a PR in the first place.
| p1necone wrote:
| It's absolutely possible to use an LLM to generate code,
| _carefully review, iterate and test it_ and produce
| something that works and is maintainable.
|
| The vast majority of of LLM generated code that gets
| submitted in PRs on public GitHub projects is not that -
| see the examples they gave.
|
| Reviewing all of that code on its merits alone in order
| to dismiss it would take an inordinate amount of time and
| effort that would be much better spent improving the
| project. The alternative is a blanket LLM generated code
| ban, which is a lot less effort to enforce because it
| doesn't involve needing to read piles and piles of
| nonsense.
| franktankbank wrote:
| Brandolini's law
|
| Usually I hate quoting "laws" but think about it. I do
| agree that it would be awesome if we scrutinize 10+k
| lines of code to bring big changes but its not really
| feasible is it?
| lenkite wrote:
| > Denying code not on it's merits but it's source is
| childish.
|
| No, its pretty standard legal policy actually.
| wilg wrote:
| This argument obviously makes no sense. Especially when one
| of the examples is a 7 character diff.
|
| But it's fine to say "this PR makes no sense to me explain
| it better please" and close it.
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| I don't see how the two are related at all. A blanket ban on
| LLM-generated code is at least arguably a reasonable policy.
| ethmarks wrote:
| > A blanket ban on LLM-generated code is at least arguably
| a reasonable policy.
|
| No, I don't think it is. There's more nuance to this debate
| than either "we're banning all LLM code" or "all of our
| features are vibe coded".
|
| A blanket ban on _unreviewed_ LLM code is a perfectly
| reasonable way to mitigate mass-produced slop PRs, but it
| is not reasonable to ban _all_ code generated by an LLM.
| Not only is it unenforceable, but it 's also
| counterproductive for people who genuinely get value out of
| it. As long as the author reviews the code carefully before
| opening a PR and can be held responsible, there's no
| problem.
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| Banning all LLM code doesn't mean they see things in
| binary terms like that. There is nuance between "all code
| must have 100% test coverage" and "tests are a waste of
| time", for instance, but that doesn't mean a project that
| adopts one of those policies thinks the middle ground
| doesn't exist.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| A blanket ban is really the only sensible thing to do so
| that no time is wasted for both sides (contributors know
| upfront that there's no point trying to get an AI-
| generated PR accepted - so they won't waste time creating
| one, and project maintainers don't waste time reviewing
| what might be broken AI slop - even if _some_ AI
| generated PRs would be acceptable from a quality point of
| view).
|
| When there's a grey zone then there will be lots of
| pointless discussions like "why was this AI-generated PR
| accepted but not mine" etc etc...
| ethmarks wrote:
| Perhaps you misunderstood my comment. I'm not advocating
| for vibe-coded AI-generated PRs, and I _do_ think that
| blanket banning them is pretty reasonable for the reasons
| you stated.
|
| However, I _don 't_ think that banning all AI-generated
| code is reasonable. Having an LLM generate a couple of
| functions or a bit of boilerplate in an otherwise
| manually coded PR should not invalidate it from being
| accepted if it's helpful.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| A blanket ban on LLM-generated code is a completely
| reasonable position. If someone couldn't be bothered to write
| the code, why should anyone else bother to read it, let alone
| merge it?
| 65 wrote:
| No wonder they moved to Codeberg. Those kinds of projects
| tend to do the ol' move to Codeberg for whatever reason. If I
| had to put an analogy to it, Codeberg is like Kick and Github
| is like Twitch.
| GaryBluto wrote:
| Purity testing. I mean, one of the first lines in their
| announcement is relating to politics.
| rs186 wrote:
| Given my own experience working on compiler stuff with LLM,
| I'd say it's a very good decision.
|
| LLMs jump at the first opportunity to use regex for
| EVERYTHING instead of doing proper lexing/parsing, for
| example. You need to repeatedly tell it not to use regex. In
| the end you might as well hand write your code, because you
| actually know how it works, unlike a clueless LLM.
| MarkMarine wrote:
| I'm sure this isn't directed at everyone that works at GH, but
| it would have been more tactful to fault the people making
| decisions. Those frustrations are real though.
| kragen wrote:
| I'm not sure that your unsupported assertion represents a
| substantive contribution to this discussion. Why do you believe
| it's not cool, munchler?
| echelon wrote:
| It's bully behavior.
|
| It reminds me of the creeps in school that punched me, shoved
| me into lockers, tried to assault me.
|
| I almost killed myself as a kid because of bullies. Some
| people never grow out of that, it seems.
| kragen wrote:
| Hmm, that seems plausible, yeah. It's unfortunate munchler
| didn't say something like that. But it seems like now
| people on HN are dogpiling on this Andrew guy? I imagine
| he'll feel the same way reading this thread, won't he?
| Surely there's a solution for bullying other than more
| bullying?
|
| Regardless, it's hard for me to imagine that many readers
| will find great intellectual interest in a long thread
| about what a terrible person Andrew is.
| skrebbel wrote:
| Ziglang is a small organization supported by donations,
| Microsoft is one of the largest companies in the world. If
| anything, they're punching up.
|
| Calling people losers isn't classy, but if I were a well-
| paid Microsoft employee I'd laugh all the way to the bank
| that some community funded purist called me that. If it's
| supposed to be bullying he isn't very good at it.
| JuniperMesos wrote:
| You know what else isn't cool? Working at GitHub!
|
| More seriously: I probably wouldn't have called every single
| current employee of GitHub a "loser", but more because I think
| truly cool people don't define themselves by where they happen
| to work at any given time. I'm sure the vast majority of people
| at GitHub are just tech employees trying to earn a living and
| don't particularly care whether the Zig guy thinks they're cool
| or not. What actually matters is that GitHub is a big
| centralized platform run by Microsoft for their own ends, and
| it's good to be free of it.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| Oh no! Not the poor Microserf drones! I will play a dirge on
| the world's smallest violin while they count down the days
| until stock vesting.
| travisgriggs wrote:
| Came hear and read "GitHub isn't a good guy anymore" (not the
| first time, and seems to be increasing in frequency).
|
| It's like sourceforge all over again. History rhymes with itself,
| and enshitification has been added to dictionaries for a good
| reason.
|
| As a once upon a time avid slashdotter, makes me wonder if some
| day, HN will go the same route.
| shevy-java wrote:
| I am not sure it is like sourceforge. The UI of sourceforge was
| always bad. Github's UI is quite solid. I actually started to
| hate gitlab recently because of their UI. I always feel in
| utter confusion when it comes to gitlab.
| kragen wrote:
| Compared to installing Apache, Wiki, Roundup, CVS, and
| Mailman on your own server, SourceForge's UI was _fantastic_.
| preisschild wrote:
| > actually started to hate gitlab recently because of their
| UI.
|
| Same. UI "improvements" and LLM slop features instead of
| improving the developer experience
| jdhendrickson wrote:
| I don't see this site as being the spiritual successor to /. at
| all, the audience is much more money focused and much less
| software focused. I miss /. as a low 5 digit user there.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| I certainly think that this site has significant overlap with
| /., though of course not 100% the same. It feels crazy
| similar to me in fact, like stepping back in time to when I
| used to post there.
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| What's the main diff between the different repos? I would think
| whoever keeps the repo free of malicious code is the best. A big
| player like GH should have an advantage on that. Also not
| intentional malicious code uploads, but vulnerable code should be
| detected and reported to tyhe submitters.
| Arcuru wrote:
| For a while now I've been dual hosting my projects on both Github
| and Codeberg and adding a note in the README's [1] explaining the
| situation. I donate to Codeberg and run my own self-hosted
| forgejo runners for actions, and maintain much of my testing on
| both platforms.
|
| I push to Github and then an Action mirrors the code to Codeberg
| automatically.
|
| I'd fully switch over except practically everybody is on Github
| and nobody is on Codeberg, and I've had more outages with
| Codeberg than Github over the past year.
|
| It really feels like there could be some good tooling in this
| area to make working through multiple Forge's easier and not
| force things to be centralized so much. Hopefully more projects
| moving out of Github makes it easier and gets more people
| contributing elsewhere.
|
| [1] https://codeberg.org/arcuru/eidetica#repository
| ehnto wrote:
| What do you find lacking in tooling in that regard?
|
| I don't think there is all that much friction in distributing
| git, it's one of the easiest tools to have multiple remotes on.
| The auxiliary tooling is all open source too, so not much in
| the way of hosting your own, or for hosted platforms offering
| the services.
|
| The social aspect of the hosted platforms is unlikely to ever
| be distributed because that is basically githubs only
| differentiation.
| tonymet wrote:
| I think OP means multiplying n repos by m hosts and you get
| nXm assets out of sync , and lots of manual labor keeping
| track
|
| A managed update service could work to replicate and then
| raise an error during conflicts . Call it "agentic" and you
| might get $75m
| mason_mpls wrote:
| Hopefully more projects can follow! Codeberg has a far more
| secure foundation to avoid unethical practices on users.
| woodruffw wrote:
| I don't have strong opinions about Zig or Codeberg, but I find
| the self-described status of the latter's infrastructure
| concerning[1]: they're seemingly running faulty hardware _in
| production_ with limited redundancy, and are actively soliciting
| more hardware of unknown quality /reliability/provenance from
| their community. This is cool for a hobbyist project, but it
| doesn't scream "stable platform for a post-GitHub world," which
| is how I've seen Codeberg (aspirationally) described.
|
| [1]: https://blog.codeberg.org/letter-from-codeberg-onwards-
| and-u...
| MarkMarine wrote:
| Reading the infra part of the post made me smile, I spent part
| of my week putting workloads on spot but this is the real spot
| market. Chaos monkey is running in prod if you are ready for it
| or not.
|
| Jokes aside, the technical depth it takes to make that one
| server run is impressive. That makes me more interested in
| codeberg, not less, though I'm going to keep my own mirror of
| the zig repo until they get some better hardware.
| woodruffw wrote:
| To be clear, I'm not knocking it; I also like to reuse old
| computers. But it's incongruous with _replacing_ GitHub,
| rather that being a "weirdo hobbyist" version of GitHub.
| jdhendrickson wrote:
| And yet the amount of work time I've missed out on from
| github being down is slightly concerning in retrospect. I
| imagine the smaller scale of codeberg will actually lead to
| more uptime despite chaos monkey's best efforts.
| woodruffw wrote:
| The numbers aren't looking great so far[1]: they're not
| cracking 3 9s on their primary service, and their CI/CD
| isn't even cracking 2 9s. And these numbers are much
| better than when I checked a few days ago!
|
| (This should not be read to imply that I think that
| GitHub's reliability is acceptable; it clearly isn't.)
|
| [1]: https://status.codeberg.eu/status/codeberg
| franktankbank wrote:
| Uptime above 99 I really would only care about the time
| to get back working. My enterprise experience with Github
| was multiple days of no work in a year.
| kps wrote:
| > _we hope to use direct solar power to operate CI /CD nodes
| only during sunshine hours_
|
| Status: CI down due to cloud issues.
| mzi wrote:
| It seems like they have reliability issues; if I read their
| status page correctly, they have incidents every few minutes.
| Or how should one read their all green page?
| ivanjermakov wrote:
| I would like to know the reasoning why Zig chose Codeberg
| instead of self-hosting something like gitea or forgejo.
|
| Seems to be a safer bet to limit hosting related weaknesses and
| unknowns, considering move from github being quite disruptive
| already.
| alexrp wrote:
| We always have the option of exiting Codeberg to a self-
| hosted Forgejo instance if that should become necessary for
| some reason. (Not that I expect it will, considering Codeberg
| is a non-profit.)
|
| We do self-host all our CI machines.
| quirino wrote:
| > As a bonus, we look forward to fewer violations (exhibit A, B,
| C) of our strict no LLM / no AI policy,
|
| Hilarious how the offender on "exhibit A" [1] is the same one
| from the other post that made the frontpage a couple of days ago
| [2].
|
| [1] https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/25974
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46039274
| jeffbee wrote:
| I agree that's a funny coincidence. But, what about the change
| it wanted to commit? It is at least slightly interesting. It is
| doubly interesting that changing line 638 neither breaks nor
| fixes any test.
| wavemode wrote:
| Perhaps the offset is always zero anyway in that scenario
|
| But yeah hard to say
| wagerlabs wrote:
| It was a bug in my own modes to the Zig compiler not in the
| stock compiler itself.
| quirino wrote:
| There's a tweet with a Claude screenshot with a bit more
| context (linked on the PR).
|
| I don't know enough about the project to know if it makes any
| sense, but the Zig contributor seemed confused (at least
| about the title).
| wagerlabs wrote:
| This one
| https://x.com/joelreymont/status/1990981118783352952?s=20
|
| I made the mistake of poorly documenting that PR.
| aeve890 wrote:
| >MAJOR BREAKTHROUGH ACHIEVED
|
| the bootlicking behavior must must be like crack for wannabes.
| jfc
|
| >I did not write a single line of code but carefully shepherded
| AI over the course of several days and kept it on the straight
| and narrow.
|
| >AI: I need to keep track of variables moving across registers.
| This is too hard, let's go shopping... Me: Hey, don't any no
| shortcuts!
|
| >My work was just directing, shaping, cajoling and reviewing.
|
| How people can say that without the slightest bit of reflection
| on whether they're right or just spitting BS
| mikelitoris wrote:
| oh god... he has a humongous AI generated PR for julia too
| https://github.com/tshort/StaticCompiler.jl/pull/180
| wagerlabs wrote:
| I had $1000 in Claude credits and went to town.
|
| Yes, I made mistakes along the way.
| forgotpwd16 wrote:
| The biggest mistake, AI or not, is dropping a 10K+ PR.
| 300~500 LOC is how far one should be going, unless they're
| doing some automated refactoring. E.g. formatting the
| entire StaticCompiler.jl source. This should've been a
| distinct PR, preferably by a maintainer.
| wagerlabs wrote:
| I agree with you.
| VMG wrote:
| I've seen this in other places as well.
|
| The bottleneck is not coding or creating a PR, the
| bottleneck is the review.
| wagerlabs wrote:
| This ought to be automated using AI.
|
| It could first judge whether the PR is frivolous, then
| try to review it, then flag a human if necessary.
|
| The problem is that Github, or whatever system hosts the
| process, should actively prevent projects from being
| DDOS-ed with PR reviews since using AI costs real money.
| VMG wrote:
| I mean this with all sincerity, try doing this yourself.
|
| The established projects are resistant to YOLOing their
| projects and running them on complete LLM autopilot.
|
| You are proposing a completely different development
| style.
|
| Fork Ocaml to Oca-LLM and Julia to Jul-AI and see how it
| goes.
| wagerlabs wrote:
| I'm not trying to say that this is now projects ought to
| work right now.
|
| I do think this is where we are heading, though.
|
| No, existing open source projects are not ready for this
| and likely won't ever be.
|
| It will start in the corporate world and maybe already
| has.
| VMG wrote:
| > This ought to be automated using AI.
|
| ...
|
| > I'm not trying to say that this is now projects ought
| to work right now.
|
| which is it?
| wagerlabs wrote:
| It's both but the focus is on the future.
| messe wrote:
| > This ought to be automated using AI.
|
| When the world is telling you to fucking stop, maybe take
| a moment and listen.
| wseqyrku wrote:
| It's been stated like a consultant giving architectural
| advice. The problem is that it is _socially acceptable_
| to use llms for absolutely anything and also in bulk.
| Before, you strove to live up to your own standards and
| people valued authenticity. Now it seems like we are all
| striving for the holy grail of conventional software
| engineering: The Average.
| Anon1096 wrote:
| It's truly astonishing to me that your account has existed
| since 2008 and you decided to pull this.
|
| As a troll job for the lulz it is some amazing work. Hats
| off
| messe wrote:
| You've wasted other peoples time and mental energy with
| utter bullshit that you weren't even bothered to read
| yourself. Be more considerate in future.
| globnomulous wrote:
| This isn't just "making mistakes." It's so profoundly
| obnoxious that I can't imagine what you've actually been
| doing during your apparently 30 years of experience as a
| software developer, such that you somehow didn't
| understand, or don't, why submitting these PRs is
| completely unacceptable.
|
| The breezy "challenge me on this" and "it's just a proof of
| concept" remarks are infuriating. Pull requests are not
| conversation starters. They aren't for promoting something
| you think people should think about. The self-absorption
| and self-indulgence beggar belief.
|
| Your homepage repeatedly says you're open to work and want
| someone to hire you. I can't imagine anybody looking at
| those PRs or your behavior in the discussions and
| concluding that you'd be a good addition to a team.
|
| The cluelessness is mind-boggling.
|
| It's so bad that I'm inclined to wonder whether you really
| are human -- or whether you're someone's stealthy,
| dishonest LLM experiment.
| zipy124 wrote:
| Please don't tell me you actually spent $1000 on generating
| fake tests....
| sundarurfriend wrote:
| More context/discussion on this:
| https://discourse.julialang.org/t/ai-generated-
| enhancements-...
|
| (Honestly, that's a lot more patience than I'd be able to
| give what are mostly AI-generated replies, so kudos to these
| folk.)
| sundarurfriend wrote:
| As an aside, he originally titled the thread "A complete
| guide to building static binaries with Julia (updated for
| 1.12)", with no mention of AI. That got me excited every
| time I opened the Discourse, until I remembered it was this
| slop. :/
| legobmw99 wrote:
| Similar things on the OCaml forums. He has a post titled
| "Dune: concurrent builds are here!" but really it's a
| +967 -100 slop PR that had to be closed
| nake89 wrote:
| When confronted about LLM writing completely broken tests
| the guy said the funniest thing: "It knows what it's doing
| but tends to be... lazy."
|
| I'm a big fan of LLMs but this guy is just a joke. He
| understand nothing of the code the LLM generates. He says
| things like "The LLM knows".
|
| He is not going to convince anybody to merge is PRs, since
| he is not even checking that the tests the LLM generates
| are correct. It's a joke.
| Lyngbakr wrote:
| In a submission to OCaml, when asked why the files he
| submitted list someone else as an author he says,
| > Beats me. AI decided to do so and I didn't question
| it.deg
|
| I find that sort of attitude terrifying.
|
| deg https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/14369#issuecommen
| t-35573...
| poulpy123 wrote:
| I cannot believe it's not trolling
| franktankbank wrote:
| Intentional or not its an interesting social experiment.
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| Yeah, either this guy's totally insane or it could even
| be somebody who's an AI skeptic who's just flooding
| projects with really dumb PRs just to show the risks and
| get people skeptical about the use of AI in open source
| (Takes on my folie hat)
| manwe150 wrote:
| That is a curious take. Open source projects were flooded
| by dumb PRs before AI too, so what would it prove?
| monegator wrote:
| that's a grifter doing grifting. there was a thread on
| /g/ about this guy the other day, anons digged out much
| of its past as a failure / grifter in many areas, running
| away with the money at the first problem
| zipy124 wrote:
| I'd be willing to put money that before LLMs they were
| all in ok crypto
| mzajc wrote:
| function estimate_method_targets(func_name::Symbol,
| types::Tuple) # Conservative estimate #
| In a real implementation, we'd query the method table
| return 2 # Assume multiple possibilities end
|
| Hilarious. Was this model trained on XKCD [0] by any
| chance?
|
| [0]: https://xkcd.com/221/
| Archit3ch wrote:
| Among all the other problems with this... They describe
| [1] their contributions as "steering the AI" and "keeping
| it honest", which evidently they did not.
|
| [1] https://discourse.julialang.org/t/ai-generated-
| enhancements-...
| conartist6 wrote:
| Maybe this guy is it: the actual worst coder in the world
| testdelacc1 wrote:
| Lot of people are criticising this guy but we all benefit
| from having an example to show people - this, please don't
| do what this guy is doing. Please read the generated code,
| understand it, edit it and then submit it.
|
| If anyone's answer to "why does your PR do this" is "I
| don't know, the AI did it and I didn't question it" then
| they need a time out.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| Well that's the origin story for the main character on Solo
| Leveling, so...
|
| Actually, I probably shouldn't make this comment publicly.
| It could cause another 3-5 programmer-isekai anime series.
| smartmic wrote:
| A question I only dare to ask myself in these times of LLM:
| Is this even a real human being or already an instance of
| an 'agentic system'?
| ljm wrote:
| The people of Jonestown collectively drank less kool-aid than
| all this.
|
| I don't know whether to be worried or impressed.
| zipy124 wrote:
| I guess we now have the equivalent of cowboy builders but for
| software now. Except no one asked for anything to be built in
| this case lol.
| carlmr wrote:
| I'm not sure if this is advanced trolling at this point.
| amoss wrote:
| This is redefining the cutting edge of trolling.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| I think the term is "frontier trolling".
| cyanydeez wrote:
| Is the. AI bubble just biolliinaires larping about their
| favorite dystopuan scifi?
| Sammi wrote:
| I'll one up you: at this point I'm becoming pretty sure that
| this is a person who actually hates LLMs, who is trying to
| poison the well by trying to give other people reasons to
| hate LLMs too.
| kibwen wrote:
| I envy your optimism. The truth is that humans are
| generally stupider and more craven than you have apparently
| even begun to conceive.
| thorn wrote:
| Ah. I remember that guy. Joel. He sold his poker server and
| bragged around HN long time ago. He is too much of PR stunt guy
| recently. Unfortunately AI does not lead to people being nice
| in the end. The way people abuse other people using AI is
| crazy. Kudos to ocaml owners giving him a proper f-off but
| polite response.
| wagerlabs wrote:
| That one was poorly documented and may have been related to an
| issue in my code.
|
| I would offer this one instead.
|
| https://github.com/joelreymont/zig/pull/1
| noname120 wrote:
| Can you stop wasting everyone's time?
| debugnik wrote:
| Even after the public call-outs you keep dropping blatant ads
| for your blog and AI in general in your PRs; there's no other
| word for them than ads. This is why I blocked you on the
| OCaml forum already.
|
| When I was a kid, every year I'd get _so obsessed_ about
| Christmas toys that the hype would fill my thoughts to the
| point I 'd feel dizzy and throw up. I genuinely think you're
| going through the adult version of that: your guts might be
| ok but your mind is so filled with hype that you're losing
| self-awareness.
| rixed wrote:
| Comme on HNers, is it that hard to assume good faith in
| this case ?
| debugnik wrote:
| I assume he's well meaning because I've been seeing his
| posts for a few months already in the OCaml forums before
| this pattern of his started, but he's suddenly acting
| irrational and doubling down. There's no way I can put
| that nicely, plus he's since deleted his strongest
| reactions so you can't grasp it fully either.
|
| This is not my first interaction with him outside HN, I
| already talked to him privately when this was starting to
| unfold in the OCaml community. Then I gave up, flagged
| his ads for the mods and blocked him for a few months,
| but I've kept encountering his drama on github and HN.
| rixed wrote:
| I've been following as well. As much as i disagree with
| it, I appreciate that he has the audacity to propose this
| "all in" attitude. I'm a bit worried by the amount of
| anger that border doxing at times. I'd like this
| community to behave better.
| debugnik wrote:
| I don't think doxing means what you think it means but
| whatever. I also expected more of him than to spam ads,
| waste the time of maintainers and mods on multiple
| communities, and reply passive-aggressively to anyone
| asking him to tone it down.
| zipy124 wrote:
| Good faith doesn't mean you can waste people's time. It's
| the reason why patents for perpetual motion machines are
| banned in most countries. The inventors often genuinely
| believe they've done it and want to help people, and yet
| it just wastes people's time having to review them.
|
| In either case I'd argue it is no longer good faith if
| asked to stop and you continue and do not learn from your
| peers.
| sundarurfriend wrote:
| Good faith includes the ability to respect and listen to
| the other person (or in this case, multiple other people
| who have been working on these projects for years). The
| attitude he demonstrates has been and remains (this is a
| quote from him elsewhere on this thread):
|
| > existing open source projects are not ready for this
| and likely won't ever be.
|
| i.e. he is enlightened and these projects are just not
| seeing The Way(tm).
| wagerlabs wrote:
| You are really reaching here!
|
| Please point out where my interaction with project
| maintainers has been disrespectful and I'll note it to
| shape up in the future.
| Levitating wrote:
| Just reading his blogposts, gross. He not only thinks he is
| actively contributing, he thinks he deserves credit.
| greazy wrote:
| FYI you're replying to the Joel the person being discussed.
| On HN he uses the username wagerlab
| wagerlabs wrote:
| Yep, that's me!
|
| I will look into renaming myself, although don't think HN
| allows this.
| tjalfi wrote:
| You might try emailing them, they've renamed other
| accounts before.
| rs186 wrote:
| I wonder why the maintainers haven't banned this dude yet.
| Eldt wrote:
| Stop the catfishes, please
| brodo wrote:
| Check out this dude:
| https://github.com/GhostKellz?tab=repositories
|
| He's got like 50 repos with vibe-coded, non-working Zig and
| Rust projects. And he clearly manages to confuse people with
| it:
|
| https://github.com/GhostKellz/zquic/issues/2
| forgotpwd16 wrote:
| It is questionable if they've even tried any one of them.
| stocksinsmocks wrote:
| I don't think this is uncommon. At one point Lemmy was a
| project with thousands of stars and literally no working code
| until finally someone other than the owner adopted it and
| merged in a usable product.
| PNewling wrote:
| Wow, and if you go to their website listed in they're
| profile, not only do almost none of the links work, the one
| that did just linked out to the generic template that it was
| straight copied from. Wow.
| rdtsc wrote:
| My favorite of his
| https://x.com/joelreymont/status/1990981118783352952
|
| > Claude discovered a bug in the Zig compiler and is in the
| process of fixing it!
|
| ...a few minutes later...
|
| https://github.com/ziglang/zig/pull/25974
|
| I can see a future job interview scenario:
|
| - "What would you say is your biggest professional
| accomplishment, Joel?"
|
| - "Well, I almost single-highhandedly drove Zig away from
| Github"
| ivanjermakov wrote:
| > Well, I almost single-highhandedly drove Zig away from
| Github
|
| If you think about it, Joel is net positive to Zig and its
| community!
| ljm wrote:
| Those overly enthusiastic responses from the LLM are really
| going to do a number on people's egos.
| ulbu wrote:
| people already go psychotic on LLMs lol
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| My old rule about the difference between coding and software
| engineering: For coding, "it seems to work for
| me" is good enough. For software engineering, it's not.
|
| My new rule: For coding, you can use AI to
| write your code. For software engineering, you can't.
| epolanski wrote:
| I absolutely don't care about how people generate code, but
| they are responsible for every single line they push for
| review or merge.
|
| That's my policy in each of my clients and it works fine, if
| AI makes something simpler/faster, good for the author, but
| there's 0, none, excuses for pushing slop or code you haven't
| reviewed and tested yourself thoroughly.
|
| If somebody thinks they can offset not just authoring or
| editing code, but also taking the responsibility for it and
| the impact it has on the whole codebase and the underlying
| business problem they should be jobless ASAP as they are de
| facto delegating the entirety of their job to a machine, they
| are not only providing 0 value, but negative value in fact.
| strix_varius wrote:
| Totally agree. For me, the hard part has been figuring out
| the distinction with junior engineers... Is this poorly
| thought out, inefficient solution that is 3x as long as
| necessary due to AI, or inexperience?
| manwe150 wrote:
| Does it matter? Either way seems to just reflect badly on
| the junior, who needs to improve their self-review skills
| and knowledge
| epolanski wrote:
| It's not easy to be a junior, and we might be speaking
| with survivor bias, but most juniors don't end up in
| solid engineering teams, they are merely developers that
| are much cheaper and from whom you expect much less, but
| more often than not they are borderline left learning and
| figuring out things on their own. They need to luck some
| senior member that will nurture them and not just give
| them low quality work (which I admit I have done too when
| I had myself lots of pressure to deliver my own stuff).
|
| Even in less desperate teams, as productivity grows with
| AI (mine does, even if I don't author code with it it's
| tremendous help in just navigating repos and connecting
| the dots, it saves me so much time...) the reviewing
| pressure increases too, and with that fatigue.
| strix_varius wrote:
| It does matter, because it's a worthwhile investment of
| my time to deeply review, understand, and provide
| feedback for the work of a junior engineer on my team.
| That human being can learn and grow.
|
| It is not a worthwhile use of my time to similarly
| "coach" LLM slop.
|
| The classic challenge with junior engineers is that
| helping them ship something is often more work than just
| doing it yourself. I'm willing to do that extra work for
| a human.
| stocksinsmocks wrote:
| Not defending him, but we were already doing this with
| electron apps, frameworks, libraries, and scripting
| languages. The only meaningful cost in most software
| development is labor and that's what makes sense to
| optimize. I'd rather have good software, but I'll take
| badly made software for free over great software that
| costs more than the value of the problem solved.
|
| These discussions are always about tactics and never
| operations.
| sidjxnbx wrote:
| I get it, but I think there's something deeply anti human
| about being ok with this (not just in software). It's
| similar in sentiment to how you behave when nobody is
| looking - a culture and society is so much better off if
| people take pride in their work.
|
| Obviously there's nuance (I'll take slop food for
| starving people over a healthy meal for a limited few if
| we're forced to choose), but the perverse incentives in
| society start to take over if we allow ourselves to be ok
| with slop. Continuously chasing the bottom of the barrel
| makes it impossible for high quality to exist for anyone
| except the rich.
|
| Put another way: if we as a society said "it is illegal
| to make slop food", both the poor and the rich would have
| easy access to healthy food. The cost here would be born
| by the rich, as they profit off food production and thus
| would profit less to keep quality high.
| strix_varius wrote:
| > I'll take badly made software for free
|
| No, not if I have to maintain it.
|
| Code is liability. LLM written PRs often bring net
| negative value: they make the whole system larger, more
| brittle, and less integrated. They come at the cost of
| end user quality and maintainer velocity.
| networked wrote:
| > For coding, you can use AI to write your code. For software
| engineering, you can't.
|
| This is a pretty common sentiment. I think it equates using
| AI with vibe-coding, having AI write code without human
| review. I'd suggest amending your rule to this:
|
| > For coding, you can use AI. For software engineering, you
| can't.
|
| You can use AI in a process compatible with software
| engineering. Prompt it carefully to generate a draft, then
| have a human review and rework it as needed before
| committing. If the AI-written code is poorly architected or
| redundant, the human can use the same AI to refactor and
| shape it.
|
| Now, you can say this negates the productivity gains. It will
| necessarily negate some. My point is that the result is
| comparable to human-written software (such as it is).
| jorl17 wrote:
| 100% this.
|
| Just don't expect to get decent code often if you mostly
| rely on something like cursor's default model.
|
| You literally get what you pay for.
| bhouston wrote:
| > For coding, you can use AI to write your code. For software
| engineering, you can't.
|
| You can 100% use AI for software engineering. Just not by
| itself, you need to currently be quite engaged in the process
| to check it and redirect it.
|
| But AI lowers the barrier to writing code and thus it brings
| people will less rigour to the field and they can do a lot of
| damage. But it isn't significantly different than programming
| languages made coding more accessible than assembly language
| - and I am sure that this also allowed more people to cause
| damage.
|
| You can use any tools you want, but you have to be rigorous
| about it no matter the tool.
| rootlocus wrote:
| I feel like the distinction is equivalent to
| LLMs can make mistakes. Humans can't.
|
| Humans can and do make mistakes all the time. LLMs can
| automate most of the boring stuff, including unit tests with
| 100% coverage. They can cover edge cases you ask them to and
| they can even come up with edge cases you may not have
| thought about. This leaves you to do the review.
|
| I think think the underlying problem people have is they
| don't trust themselves to review code written by others as
| much as they trust themselves to implement the code from
| scratch. Realistically, a very small subset of developers do
| actual "engineering" to the level of NASA / aerospace. Most
| of us just have inflated egos.
|
| I see no problem modelling the problem, defining the
| components, interfaces, APIs, data structures, algorithms and
| letting the LLM fill in the implementation and the testing.
| Well designed interfaces are easy to test anyway and you can
| tell at a glance if it covered the important cases. It can
| make mistakes, but so would I. I may overlook something when
| reviewing, but the same thing often happens when people work
| together. Personally I'd rather do architecture and review at
| a significantly improved speed than gloat I handcrafted each
| loop and branch as if that somehow makes the result safer or
| faster (exceptions apply, ymmv).
| krupan wrote:
| "I feel like these distinctions are equivalent to
| LLMs can make mistakes. Humans can't."
|
| No, that's not it. The difference between humans and AI is
| that AI suffers no embarrassment or shame when it makes
| mistakes, and the humans enthusiastically using AI don't
| seem to either. Most humans experience a quick and viseral
| deterrent when they publish sloppy code and mistakes are
| discovered. AI, not at all. It does not immediately learn
| from its mistakes like most humans do.
|
| In the rare case when there is a human that is consistently
| persistently confidently wrong like AI, a project can
| identify that person and easily stop wasting their time
| working with that person. With masses of people being told
| by the vocal AI shills how amazing AI is, projects can
| easily be flooded with confidently wrong aaI generated PRs.
| blibble wrote:
| > LLMs can automate most of the boring stuff, including
| unit tests with 100% coverage. They can cover edge cases
| you ask them to and they can even come up with edge cases
| you may not have thought about. This leaves you to do the
| review.
|
| in my experience these tests don't test anything useful
|
| you may you have 100% test coverage, but it's almost
| entirely useless but not testing the actual desired
| behaviour of the system
|
| rather just the exact implementation
| gloosx wrote:
| If unit tests are boring chores for you, or 100% coverage
| is somehow a goal in itself, then your understanding of
| quality software development is quite lacking overall.
| Tests are specifications: they define behavior, set
| boundaries, and keep the inevitable growth of complexity
| under control. Good tests are what keep a competent
| developer sane. You cannot build quality software without
| starting from tests. So if tests are boring you, the
| problem is your approach to engineering. Mature developers
| dont get bored chasing 100% coverage - they focus on
| meaningful tests that actually describe how the program is
| supposed to work.
| rootlocus wrote:
| > Tests are specifications: they define behavior, set
| boundaries, and keep the inevitable growth of complexity
| under control.
|
| I set boundaries during design where I choose
| responsibilities, interfaces and names. Red Green
| Refactor is very useful for beginners who would otherwise
| define boundaries that are difficult to test and
| maintain.
|
| I design components that are small and focused so their
| APIs are simple and unit tests are incredibly easy to
| define and implement, usually parametrized. Unit tests
| don't keep me "sane", they keep me sleeping well at night
| because designing doesn't drive me mad. They don't define
| how the "program" is supposed to work, they define how
| the unit is supposed to work. The smaller the unit the
| simpler the test. I hope you agree: simple is better than
| complex. And no, I don't subscribe to "you only need
| integration tests".
|
| Otherwise, nice battery of ad hominems you managed to
| slip in: my understanding of quality software is lacking,
| my problem is my approach to engineering and I'm an
| immature developer. All that from "LLMs can automate most
| of the boring stuff, including unit tests with 100%
| coverage." because you can't fathom how someone can
| design quality software without TDD, and you can't
| steelman my argument (even though it's recommended in the
| guidelines [1]). I do review and correct the LLM output.
| I almost always ask it for specific test cases to be
| implemented. I also enjoy seeing most basic test cases
| and most edge cases covered. And no, I don't particularly
| enjoy writing factories, setups, and asserts. I'm pretty
| happy to review them.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation
| of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to
| criticize. Assume good faith.
| do_not_redeem wrote:
| Congratulations on the move!
|
| > Thank you to the Forgejo contributors who helped us with our
| issues switching to the platform, as well as the Codeberg folks
| who worked with us on the migration
|
| I'd love to see a writeup about these problems/solutions at some
| point.
| mfenniak wrote:
| Although it's not a writeup, most of the problems can be traced
| through this "moving-to-forgejo" meta-issue:
| https://codeberg.org/forgejo-contrib/moving-to-forgejo/issue...
| GalaxyNova wrote:
| Also take a look at sourcehut for those interested in an
| alternative
| Handy-Man wrote:
| > remaining losers > created by monkeys
|
| That just shows what kind of person they are, and makes me never
| want to use Zig, even hope for its failure.
| DeepYogurt wrote:
| Exhibit A is a github user joelreymont who seems to be making a
| habit of this behavior. He did a very similar spam on ocaml
| github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/14369
| theflyinghorse wrote:
| Reminds me of Blindsight by Peter Watts. Aliens viewed our
| radio signals as a type of malware aimed to consume the
| resources of a recipient for zero payoff and reduced fitness.
| This is the same.
| kronks wrote:
| This is absolutely insane. If you look at joelreymonts recent
| activity on GitHub, there is what I would consider an bomb of
| AI slop PRs with thousands and thousands of changes, AI
| generated summaries/notes, copyright issues, you name it.
|
| People like this are ruining open source for the rest of us,
| and those poor maintainers really have their work cut out for
| them sorting through this slop.
| franktankbank wrote:
| What are you going to do? You can't expect some sort of self-
| censorship based on righteousness and morals. I see
| joelreymonts as a pioneer planting chestertons fences. LET
| THE MAN COOK!
| shevy-java wrote:
| It is good to have alternatives to mega-corporations controlling
| the ecosystem.
|
| Microsoft controlling GitHub is an issue, but one can see this
| issue emerging in different places too; see shopify puting
| pressure on the ruby ecosystem, ending with various developers
| who contributed to ruby (in particular via gems and bundler) no
| longer being accepted there (via RubyCentral's take-over, under
| shopify's directive and influence onto ruby). Many more examples
| can be given here. The thing is that money buys influence,
| ultimately dictating who can contribute and how. Python forcing
| mandatory 2FA onto all developers is also an example here - the
| hobbyist who just contributes code, has not really any benefit
| here, whereas corporations delegate more "security" onto unpaid
| folks.
| newcodebergfan wrote:
| Damn - Codeberg is snappy! It's as fast as Github used to be 10
| years ago. Server rendered pages. No AJAX-style slow updates.
| Love it.
| mlugg wrote:
| This was the very first thing I noticed when we (the Zig team)
| started seriously trialing Codeberg. Honestly, the transition
| was worth it just for the ability to navigate the website
| without a 3-5 second wait every time I click a link.
| newcodebergfan wrote:
| Codeberg performance is not good today - 12 seconds per click
| before any update. Not sure if they're able to scale.
| mlugg wrote:
| I think this thread caused a bit of a hug of death; I too
| was seeing pretty bad page loads earlier today, but that
| seems to have sorted itself out. Understandable imo,
| because Codeberg simply haven't had to deal with this level
| of traffic so far. I'm optimistic that they'll be able to
| scale as (thanks to projects like Zig making the switch)
| their needs grow.
| JimmaDaRustla wrote:
| Github is backend rendered too...
| stratts wrote:
| GitHub seems to be the worst of both worlds - partially
| rendered on the server, but then the frontend inexplicably
| pulls in additional data like... commit messages??
|
| It's a double hit of latency, and for bonus points, the
| commit messages won't load at all if your browser is slightly
| out of date
| kstrauser wrote:
| It was. Open a huge diff in it now and go grab some dinner
| while your browser tries to render it.
|
| I don't hate GitHub or anything, but its UI is way slower now
| than it use to be.
| sammy2255 wrote:
| Not snappy at all for me.
| muratsu wrote:
| > Putting aside GitHub's relationship with ICE, it's abundantly
| clear that the talented folks who used to work on the product
| have moved on to bigger and better things, with the remaining
| losers eager to inflict some kind of bloated, buggy JavaScript
| framework on us in the name of progress.
|
| This says more about the author than anything else.
| echelon wrote:
| The author of the article is the creator of the Zig language.
|
| This is par for the course for him. He's quite a bit like Linus
| [1].
|
| He needs to start following his own advice [2].
|
| [1] https://mastodon.social/@andrewrk/112362751644363647
|
| [2] https://andrewkelley.me/post/open-letter-everyone-butted-
| hea...
| drannex wrote:
| That they don't support a nationalistic paramilitary
| organization that requires its members to be masked and never
| known by the public so they cant be held accountable? A
| nationalized KKK is not something to ever support.
| petcat wrote:
| I don't care about ICE one way or another, but calling people
| "monkeys" and "losers" because they're not building a product
| to your exact specifications is extremely childish.
|
| It seems to me that the real "losers" are the ones spending
| so much time bitching and moaning about a software platform
| they don't like.
| barnabee wrote:
| > I don't care about ICE one way or another,
|
| Which is itself a political position, a privileged one at
| that
| samdoesnothing wrote:
| What an incredibly arrogant statement. Not everyone is
| American for starters.
| voidnap wrote:
| They aren't "bitching and moaning" they are moving
| communities and platforms. GitHub is user hostile run by a
| company with a pattern for that. Alternatives to GitHub
| exist and supporting them is not "bitching and moaning",
| it's building and creating. The fact you can't or won't
| recognize that is telling.
| veeti wrote:
| But they renamed the master branch, doesn't that excuse any ICE
| associations?
| miki123211 wrote:
| PSA: Codeberg currently does not implement accessible account
| registration. It is impossible for screen reader users to make a
| Codeberg account due to the image-only captcha. There's a manual
| fallback path, but no idea how long that takes. I've been forced
| to use the Wikimedia one, and that was about 3 months. This has
| been pointed out to them many times, and it's seemingly not
| something they're willing to fix.
|
| If you didn't know what Codeberg's political stance really is and
| how they treat the inconvenient part of their userbase... I guess
| now you know.
| mlugg wrote:
| > This has been pointed out to them many times, and it's
| seemingly not something they're willing to fix.
|
| On the exact page you're on is a link to an issue [0]
| acknowledging that the CAPTCHA is inaccessible and expressing
| that they plan to drop it (albeit with no concrete time-frame).
| I don't at all understand your argument that Codeberg must be
| slow at replying to emails (the "manual fallback path") because
| Wikimedia are; these are two completely unrelated entities and
| I don't see why you would make inferences about one from the
| other.
|
| [0]: https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/Community/issues/1797
| bayesnet wrote:
| It greatly saddens me to see how little concern there is for
| accessibility for dev tooling. It says something about our
| industry that accessibility is often viewed as a "luxury"
| feature that can be dealt with once you've reached some level
| of success or revenue or whatever.
|
| I'm hopeful AI tools can improve qol for those who require
| screen readers and similar tools but have a sinking feeling
| that it will only transfer even more of the burden for
| accessible access from operator to user.
| miki123211 wrote:
| > It greatly saddens me to see how little concern there is
| for accessibility for dev tooling.
|
| This really depends on company size, and the company in
| question.
|
| Everything Microsoft does in this space is excellent, VS Code
| almost feels like an app specifically designed for the blind
| at times. Other large companies aren't as good, but their
| products are usually somewhat usable.
|
| Startups are a mixed bag, Zed is notoriously and completely
| inaccessible for example. Most SaaS tools wouldn't pass an
| audit but can be used with significant annoyances.
|
| Open Source is usually pretty bad. GTK still doesn't do any
| accessibility on non-Linux platforms. QT used to be
| completely inaccessible, although they've significantly
| improved in the last couple years. Linux in general has major
| issues that makes it almost unusable unless you understand it
| at a very deep level, and maybe not even then.
|
| Accessibility isn't a sexy thing to do, so unless you're
| practicing manager-driven development, nobody wants to work
| on it.
| hobofan wrote:
| > This really depends on company size
|
| It mainly depends on whether the company is trying to sell
| to governments that have accessibility requirements
| anchored into their procurement process requirements. Of
| course there is some causality between company size and
| ability to service government contracts.
| pier25 wrote:
| How is accessibility a political issue?
| tsimionescu wrote:
| How is it not? In the not so distant past of the 1930s there
| were political parties advocating for the mass killing of
| people with disabilities, or at least the sterilization of
| those with heritable disabilities. There have been real
| campaigns in that period that did this type of forced
| sterilization, especially in some mental hospitals. You'll
| still find people espousing such beliefs, thankfully at the
| fringes for now.
|
| Accessibility is the opposite position of that - but it's by
| no means a universally accepted good, unfortunately,
| especially when it requires extra effort to implement.
| dlisboa wrote:
| > In the not so distant past of the 1930s there were
| political parties advocating for the mass killing of people
| with disabilities
|
| Those parties still exist today.
|
| - https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/fox-
| friends-h...
| arp242 wrote:
| Going from "we're a small non-profit and we're struggling
| finding a good solution that's also accessible, this really
| sucks - we're sorry" to eugenics is quite a leap.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| My response was to someone asking how accessibility can
| be considered a political topic. I assumed they were
| asking in general.
| pier25 wrote:
| Seems weird to me that anyone would frame it like this.
|
| In my country (Spain) we put eg ramps for wheelchairs no
| matter the political party. It's considered a human rights
| or moral issue, not a political one.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| I would bet Franco was not really putting up ramps for
| disabled people. That a political party is not currently
| represented in your country (thankfully!!) doesn't mean
| that the topic is not political.
| dchest wrote:
| I wonder why they didn't just enable audio captchas, which are
| supported by the captcha package I wrote that they use.
| cetra3 wrote:
| For those like me who are obviously blind, the new location is at
| https://codeberg.org/ziglang/zig
| Ohkay wrote:
| Codeberg has a yearly fee via euro payment method or manual wire
| transfer. Membership requires manual approval.
|
| Edit: you can register without membership.
| mlugg wrote:
| This is extremely misleading. "Membership" is about direct
| contribution to and influence over the non-profit; it'd be
| somewhat analagous to being a GitHub shareholder. The very
| first question on Codeberg's FAQ [0] makes this abundantly
| clear, as does the "Join" page [1]. I don't see any part of the
| website you could go to to get any other impression.
|
| [0]: https://docs.codeberg.org/getting-started/faq/#what-do-i-
| nee...
|
| [1]: https://join.codeberg.org/
| holysoles wrote:
| I haven't really taken a step back to critically think about
| using GitHub as a platform until now, but I do agree with the
| points in this article.
|
| While I like the idea of a more distributed repository
| environment, I will miss the project discoverability, social
| aspects, and centralization that GitHub offers. It'll probably be
| awhile before I make a switch, but I will eventually.
| tcfhgj wrote:
| Fwiw they're implementing federation, so bring it back some
| aspects of centralization without centralization
| holysoles wrote:
| Good to know! Thanks
| input_sh wrote:
| You don't have to miss any of that.
|
| Most of my commits for the past five or so years are not on
| GitHub (both in professional and personal contexts), but that
| does not equal to me not having a GitHub account and
| occasionally using it to raise issues / submit PRs to someone
| else's project that happens to be on GitHub.
|
| GitHub is just not my go-to platform anymore.
| mikeington wrote:
| No idea if this is a big thing or not, but people don't like AI.
| Other than leaders who have been sold a promise, and the people
| charging for that promise.
| JimmaDaRustla wrote:
| That was quite the insufferable egotistical virtue signaling
| nonsense.
|
| Do they actually think the folks who run Github are in charge or
| making typescript?
| leo_e wrote:
| To see this just as a hosting switch misses the bigger picture.
| This is the logical infrastructure conclusion of Zig's 'Zero
| Dependency' philosophy.
|
| Zig spent years removing dependencies on the system C compiler
| (zig cc), removing dependencies on libc, and is currently working
| to remove the dependency on LLVM (the self-hosted backend).
|
| GitHub was just another dependency.
|
| For a project obsessed with reproducibility and toolchain
| sovereignty, relying on a single proprietary platform (and its
| changing ToS/AI policies) was a massive architectural liability.
| They aren't just moving repos; they are eliminating 'Platform
| Risk' the same way they eliminated 'Linker Risk'.
| O_H_E wrote:
| This is a valuable take tbh, I missed it.
|
| Zig team ought to probably write about it in that manner.
| tonymet wrote:
| Coderberg is nice , but their P80s are terrible. And they are
| hosted in Germany, which adds a few seconds to every remote
| command .
|
| I wouldn't move business critical repos there .
|
| Everyone loses their mind when GitHub goes down once every 2
| years . If codeberg provided SLas , they would probably breach
| them weekly
| AdrienPoupa wrote:
| Every 2 years? More like every 2 days for GitHub Actions or Git
| operations those days :(
| tonymet wrote:
| Grass is always greener.
| marssaxman wrote:
| What are "P80s"? Given the context, I doubt this refers either
| to screens used in mineral processing or to home-built
| firearms, which are all that I see in the first couple pages of
| search results.
| bikelang wrote:
| They probably mean 80th percentile of the response time
| distribution? Usually you see this talked about for P95 or
| P99
| tonymet wrote:
| They haven't yet reached that level of maturity
| bikelang wrote:
| I wish GH had issues only every 2 years. That'd be amazing! We
| see issues weekly - if not near daily - at work. Personally I
| advocate for self-hosted GitLab. I like their pipelines a lot
| more than GH Actions too.
| preisschild wrote:
| Unfortunately, IMO Gitlab is getting enshittified too and
| adding llm slop features instead of improving the developer
| experience...
| bikelang wrote:
| That's a bummer to hear. I last used GitLab in 2021 and
| quite enjoyed it then. Although it does make sense -
| GitLabs former CTO/CPO now works at OpenAI as their CRO.
| That kind of shift doesn't happen in a vacuum. I worked
| with this person at a previous company and they were an
| incredibly destabilizing force there - so I was pretty
| nervous for GitLab after their hiring.
| Vespasian wrote:
| We do have a on prem GitLab (ultimate) at work and I'm pretty
| happy with it all in all with around ~100 active daily users.
|
| Privately Forgejo is fullfilling all my needs with very
| little maintenance work.
| csullivannet wrote:
| > when GitHub goes down once every 2 years
|
| Uhh ... More like every two weeks there's some kind of
| incident.
| pixelpoet wrote:
| > And they are hosted in Germany, which adds a few seconds to
| every remote command
|
| Except, you know, if you live in Germany. Heaven forbid we get
| decent ping once in a while :)
| tonymet wrote:
| You're still going to get better p80s from GitHub , across
| the Atlantic
| johnfn wrote:
| > it's abundantly clear that the talented folks who used to work
| on the product have moved on to bigger and better things, with
| the remaining losers eager to inflict some kind of bloated, buggy
| JavaScript framework on us in the name of progress.
|
| > More importantly, Actions is created by monkeys
|
| This writing really does not reflect well on Zig. If you have
| technical issues with Github, fine: cite them. But leave ad
| hominems like "losers" and "monkeys" out of it.
| halJordan wrote:
| The unfortunate truth is that this is where we are as a
| society. It doesn't reflect poorly on them. It reflects well.
| They're straightshooters. Theyre not afraid to speak candidly
| (your definition of candid may differ). They inject humor. You
| may not like it personally, but it doesn't reflects poorly even
| if it should.
|
| We're at the tail end of a long decline.
| kanwisher wrote:
| pretty sure there was no humor there, just looks poorly upon
| the author
| _heimdall wrote:
| It sure reads like it was meant satirically to me. Whether
| one finds it funny or offensive is up to the reader though,
| and I assume the GP is basically saying an article should
| be written such that "or offensive" isn't reasonably on the
| table.
| GolDDranks wrote:
| Calling people monkeys and losers doesn't particularly tickle
| my sense of humor. If anything, it reminds me of Linus
| Torvalds from his toxic ages. Fortunately, he has matured
| well. Andrew seems like a smart guy, I hope that he will have
| the emotional maturity to realize that you can be no-bullshit
| and straight to the point without the need to call people
| names.
| oaiey wrote:
| He shot the wrong entity.
| brendoelfrendo wrote:
| Nah, fuck 'em. Call out corpo bullshit where you see it. Github
| is just LinkedIn for people with compsci degrees now.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| And what's wrong with that? Even if you're right, just don't
| use it, why insult and denigrate people?
| brendoelfrendo wrote:
| Because they deserve to know they're making the world a
| worse place.
| wilg wrote:
| GitHub is definitely not making the world a worse place.
| Touch grass.
| brendoelfrendo wrote:
| Ok, fine; that was hyperbole. They are incrementally
| making their product worse in very visible ways and for
| some reason refuse to fix it or change course. I mean, in
| introducing these inconveniences to their users they are
| technically making the world worse, but sure, not in a
| way that matters.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| And does that require dehumanizing them? The hypocrisy! I
| would bet dollars-to-donuts you can't write better code
| than the people who worked on actions.
| jimmyed wrote:
| I agree that the article is strongly worded, and Andrew seems
| quite angry/frustrated. However, it also gives me flashbacks of
| how it was back in the golden days, when Linus was calling
| wannabe kernel contributors idiots who should have died because
| they "couldn't find their mothers tit to suck on".
|
| Having low patience is a quirk of our nerd culture, and now
| that the woke season has ended, it seems to be going back to
| how it has always been!
| xedrac wrote:
| While I generally think constructive criticism is usually the
| right choice, I suspect Github will never get the message
| unless there are some very strongly worded criticisms. In
| Andrew's defense, he did post some constructive evidence of
| things he considered problematic.
| baq wrote:
| The most effective message GitHub can receive is when they
| don't get to invoice you.
|
| GHA in particular is a hot mess, I'm as surprised as a
| decade ago that anybody is using this crap. IMHO it's bugs
| as a service kind of product, and the bugs start at the
| core design with the 'pretend yaml but actually an unholy
| mix of shell, js and json' language.
| johnfn wrote:
| A high-profile repository like Zig moving off of Github is
| as loud a message as one can give. Tossing in "losers" and
| "monkeys" only muddies the delivery.
| oaiey wrote:
| Exactly. I have not finished reading the post. And I
| never will. It destroys the message and the reputation
| testdelacc1 wrote:
| Treating people poorly isn't a quirk of nerd culture. Even
| Linus doesn't think so.
|
| > This is my reality. I am not an emotionally empathetic kind
| of person and that probably doesn't come as a big surprise to
| anybody. Least of all me. The fact that I then misread people
| and don't realize (for years) how badly I've judged a
| situation and contributed to an unprofessional environment is
| not good.
|
| > This week people in our community confronted me about my
| lifetime of not understanding emotions. My flippant attacks
| in emails have been both unprofessional and uncalled for.
|
| > Especially at times when I made it personal. In my quest
| for a better patch, this made sense to me. I know now this
| was not OK and I am truly sorry. The above is basically a
| long-winded way to get to the somewhat painful personal
| admission that hey, I need to change some of my behavior, and
| I want to apologize to the people that my personal behavior
| hurt and possibly drove away from kernel development
| entirely.
|
| > I am going to take time off and get some assistance on how
| to understand people's emotions and respond appropriately.
|
| And he walked the walk. He became better after that. Linux is
| a better project for it. But I suppose it did influence a
| generation of people in software who looked up to Linus and
| thought this is the correct way to treat people you perceive
| as beneath you.
| brabel wrote:
| But it is very common. I was watching a YouTube video by
| Casey Muratori where he says anyone using a garbage
| collected language is stupid and just not a good
| programmer! Just like that he offended 95% of our industry.
| He even said people who use smart pointers are just
| beginners and haven't learned the true ways yet, offending
| the remaining 5%. And this sort of comment and people
| supporting those opinions are extremely common!
| testdelacc1 wrote:
| I truly feel like Linus did a lot of damage by
| normalising his brand of leadership. Younger developers
| wanting to emulate someone as accomplished as Linus
| unsurprisingly adopted the habits that are easiest to
| emulate - name calling, attacking, denigrating,
| dismissing.
|
| Linus is better now but the behaviour is ingrained into
| so many people. They now "tell it like it is", are
| "straight shooters", don't have time to be "politically
| correct" and so on.
| latexr wrote:
| > But it is very common.
|
| It's important to keep in mind that "common" doesn't mean
| "right" or "positive". Lots of things, such as CFCs in
| aerosol spray cans and radioactive elements in household
| items used to be common.
|
| I'm not saying that's what your argument is--on the
| contrary, I get the feeling you're making a statement and
| not justifying it--but still think it's an important
| point to not forget.
|
| > I was watching a YouTube video by Casey Muratori where
|
| Do you remember what video it was? That's a bit
| disappointing and I'd like to see for myself to gather
| context and tone. From all I've seen from Casey I'd
| expect gentle bashing of _languages_ but not groups of
| people. Though I mostly have seen Casey on his own
| teaching or being interviewed one-on-one, I get the
| feeling he might be different in podcasts.
| brabel wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xt1KNDmOYqA
| zeofig wrote:
| We're past the point of civility when it comes to things like
| github and M$0FT's involvement.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| Thankfully, many of us are not in that "We" group you're
| referring. This is a toxic culture I want no part of. It says
| a lot about the nature of the Zig community.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| You're right, I've been hearing lots of good things about Zig
| and I wanted to check it out but I'm glad I saw this post. I
| want no part of this thing.
|
| I've heard people call other people "monkeys" before in a work
| setting. it's never good. Fact is, you don't need to call
| anyone names or insult them.
|
| The takeaway for me is that the Zig project is led by people
| who are extremely immature and toxic. I simply don't trust any
| decision these people make. If you can't bring yourself to
| respectfully disagree with other human beings, if you resort to
| calling names and insults targetted at developers because of
| bugs, then i don't trust you to not backdoor your own code, or
| do something harmful to those who rely on your work because of
| some drama, spat or activism.
|
| Even if actual political activists did this it would be
| unacceptable. If you called Netanyahu a monkey because of his
| Gaza genocide, most people who are pro-palestine will try to
| cancel you! Not because they think highly of him, but because
| it hurts the cause more than it helps.
|
| Andrew: It seems you don't respect your own self or your
| community enough to set an example of decorum and civility.
| You've made Zig a platform for your own personal shitposting.
| Please do better!
| andsoitis wrote:
| > I simply don't trust any decision these people make
|
| Do you have an example or two of poor decisions that push you
| away so strongly?
| vips7L wrote:
| Yes, calling people monkeys is a bad decision.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| Clearly, my distrust is based on Andrew's publicly
| displayed character, not an analysis of historical
| behavior. When you see a Chef not wash his hands after
| using a restroom, you should avoid eating at their
| restaurant, even if you have no proof they don't wash their
| hands in the kitchen prior to cooking.
|
| The important observation for me is that he didn't know
| where to draw the line, and this is regarding people he
| doesn't work with, unknown/random Microsoft employees. Will
| he cross the line if someone he does know and trust does
| something he disagrees with? I would like to give him the
| benefit of the doubt, but the bar is high when it comes to
| trusted software like programming language compilers.
|
| I wish Zig all the success, but only if it's community and
| the tech community as a whole can hold it's leadership
| accountable instead of making excuses and defending him
| like this. It's ok to tell people you admire and respect
| they screwed up.
| skeledrew wrote:
| Your logic doesn't really pan out here, as Zig is a fully
| open source project (so any backdoor would be out there
| for eyes to see) and so far there have been primarily
| good things said about it. Similarly Linus Torvalds was
| pretty "toxic" for years, and it never affected the
| quality of the Linux project negatively. And Linux
| essentially runs the world of tech.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| Backdoors can be called bugs. They could introduce a
| backdoor and fix it a CVE in the next release and no one
| would the wiser.
|
| I don't defend Linus either, but I don't consider him
| calling someone a monkey or dehumanizing people either.
| If he has, please send me the lkml archives, I've been on
| the fence with going full on Apple anyways :)
| kannanvijayan wrote:
| I really don't understand what any of this has to do with
| "trust", especially of the project or code. If anything
| people who want to gain undeserved trust would be
| incentivized to appear to follow a higher standard of
| norms publically. The public comments would be nice and
| polite and gregarious and professional, and the behaviour
| that didn't meet that standard would be private.
|
| FWIW I've never programmed a line of code in zig and I
| don't know who this developer is.
|
| All I got from it was "seems like GitHub is starting to
| deteriorate pretty hard and this guy's fed up and moving
| his project and leaving some snark behind".
| conorbergin wrote:
| >If you called Netanyahu a monkey because of his Gaza
| genocide, most people who are pro-palestine will try to
| cancel you! Not because they think highly of him, but because
| it hurts the cause more than it helps.
|
| Your reading of the current political climate is very
| different to mine.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| I don't know about that. in my view, you can call him a
| murderer, genocidal, sociopath, anything related to his
| actions. But calling him an epithet, comparing him to an
| animal is a different thing. Even physical violence is more
| tolerable. of course people can say whatever they want in
| private, i'm talking about public discourse. terms like
| "monkey" and "dog" have been used across cultures to mean
| really nasty things. It's dehumanizing (literally!), it
| says as much about the speaker as it does about the
| subject.
| prmoustache wrote:
| > comparing him to an animal
|
| homo sapiens is an animal species.
| KingMob wrote:
| Tomatoes belong in fruit salad, and the cause of every
| plane crash is gravity.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| when humans say "an animal" in the English language,
| they're referring to "non-human animals". Being called an
| animal in itself isn't insulting either before you go
| there. Hardly anyone would be insulted at being called a
| lion. I think everyone who can read understands exactly
| the implication being drawn and the dehumanizing being
| done. Everyone from slave traders, colonialists,
| nazis,etc.. have used "monkey" to dehumanize people. Same
| with "dog" , "snake" ,etc.. in different contexts.
| dvrj101 wrote:
| > The takeaway for me is that the Zig project is led by
| people who are extremely immature and toxic.
|
| immature and toxic : welcome to every big tech , you don't
| want part of them either, right ?
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| if they call their employees monkeys, certainly. I think
| every big tech company is well aware of lawsuits regarding
| a hostile work environment, work place bullying, etc.. they
| all have company wide training on these topics.
|
| Having been in that situation before, if I even get a hint
| that I would be treated this way, I'm backing out of any
| interview. I won't say for no amount, but for no amount
| they would consider reasonable compensation would I think
| it's worth it. People commit suicides over this stuff. This
| isn't a joke. Life is too short. I mean just seeing other
| people treated this way is horrible on its own. I can't
| believe people defend this stuff. People need to learn to
| be ashamed again.
| porker wrote:
| > if they call their employees monkeys, certainly.
|
| It seems to have decreased in the last 10 years but
| calling us code-monkeys was a common derogatory reference
| to the software department. I didn't like being compared
| to a monkey randomly bashing a typewriter but that's how
| things were.
|
| It was better than what everyone called HR.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| "code-monkey" is a bit different, I've seen people use it
| to call themselves that in a positive way. Maybe Andrew
| meant "code-monkey" in a more positive way instead of
| "monkey"? But i just re-read it and to me it sounds like
| an insult to their intelligence, to mean as if it was one
| of those studies where they train a monkey to hit keys to
| see what happens? Like they were so dumb it was the
| equivalent of monkeys hitting keyboards and accidentally
| creating something that works?
|
| Either way, can we at least agree that it is an insult to
| those people at a personal level, it attacks who they are
| instead of what they did?
|
| Like i mentioned, I've had myself/coworkers compared to
| monkeys in the same way. I didn't think much of it at
| first, but coworkers were really demoralized and kept
| mentioning it, and it coincided with all sorts of other
| hosilities from people in power.
|
| My whole goal here wasn't to demonstrate some internet
| rage, but to do my part in making sure other people don't
| get treated like crap, especially in their work place. If
| this was at my work, I'd probably just quietly look for
| other places to work at, because I'd be afraid for my
| job. In this case it's not like Microsoft employees can
| publicly respond in like to Andrew and not lose their
| jobs either. I see someone with some level of authority
| and a public figure abusing that to harass others.
|
| There is no asshole-badge that is granted to people when
| they achieve positions of authority, a louder voice or
| great success in life. Those of us who can implement some
| sort of an adverse response to this behavior, must.
| random3 wrote:
| Based on this rationale nobody should use Linux either =))
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| Linus losing is temper over a contributor messing up is not
| the same as calling people who maintain a free service
| (github - unless Zig was paying) monkeys. Correct me by all
| means, but did Linus call someone a personally denigrating
| name like that?
|
| Either way, I like linux but I've avoided operating systems
| like freebsd and openbsd for less, so I agree. I've said
| plenty enough against Linus when he did lose his temper and
| started cussing at people.
|
| And to be clear, I consider people who defend him (and in
| this case Andrew) far worse of an individual than the
| original offenders. People mess up, they're led astray by
| being put in positions of leadership and authority. That I
| get, and that's why i'm calling him out here. If he was
| random person, I wouldn't have bothered. But the enablers
| and defenders are the real problem. I hope you're not one
| of them. If you are, I consider you people responsible for
| every single work place bullying and toxic environment out
| there. People do great things without being classless
| uncivilized bullies.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| Calling the Github clowns monkeys is being charitable.
| mikelitoris wrote:
| microsoft employee detected. lol to all ms employees, keep
| downvoting...
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| I wish :)
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| > I've heard people call other people "monkeys" before in a
| work setting. it's never good.
|
| Is this blog post in a work setting? Oh my. You should
| probably run to HR and report unprofessional behavior!
|
| Oh wait.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| I think people like you don't understand these things well.
| you can be civilized and deal with things in a professional
| way, or we can do things in a very uncivilized way. You
| can't be uncivilized and then whine about someone running
| to HR. I'd like to see you or Andrew call someone that to
| their face outside of a work setting with no authority to
| run to when there are consequences.
|
| If Andrew considers Zig a professional software to be used
| in production environments, then this is a indeed a
| professional setting. If not, then it is a hobby project
| run by immature/whiny people like you, so let's just ignore
| it and talk about more serious people/projects.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Yeah this is pretty embarrassing.
|
| I get frustrated with tech all the time! I get it. Grr when
| Actions feels so irritatingly misbehaved...
|
| But how you handle or fail to handle your frustration
| demonstrates the competence of your character and speaks
| volumes of what you'd be like to work with.
| oofbey wrote:
| Also important to note that this post was authored by the
| original author of zig, who presumably effectively controls
| the project.
| ImHereToVote wrote:
| You would be happier working in a kindergarten. I truly mean
| that. Think about it. Not trying to be rude.
| foldr wrote:
| A lot of us here have real world jobs where people don't
| call us losers or monkeys when we fuck up. This isn't some
| kind of hypothetical Big Rock Candy Mountain of
| professional conduct. It's just what working life is like
| for a lot of people.
| oefrha wrote:
| Not only do we not call coworkers losers or monkeys when
| they fuck up, I don't think I've seen this when telling
| mean jokes about competitors in private conversations
| either. Individuals who are jerks about people you don't
| like tend to also be jerks about you behind your back,
| and we don't want that, so we don't it.
|
| If your workplace has a lot of name calling, consider the
| possibility that it may be unusually toxic, and the
| possibility that you're making it toxic.
| Capricorn2481 wrote:
| If you call people at work monkeys when you don't like
| their work, you're closer to Kindergarten than you think.
| ssivark wrote:
| > created by monkeys
|
| I don't particularly care for either Zig or Github, but...
|
| they do precisely cite the technical issues. That snippet links
| to a Github discussion comment
| https://github.com/actions/runner/issues/3792#issuecomment-3...
|
| (reproduced below)
|
| _" The bug in this "safe sleep" script is obvious from looking
| at it: if the process is not scheduled for the one-second
| interval in which the loop would return (due to $SECONDS having
| the correct value), then it simply spins forever. That can
| easily happen on a CI machine under extreme load. When this
| happens, it's pretty bad: it completely breaks a runner until
| manual intervention. On Zig's CI runner machines, we observed
| multiple of these processes which had been running for hundreds
| of hours, silently taking down two runner services for weeks."_
|
| _" I don't understand how we got here. Even ignoring the
| pretty clear bug, what makes this Bash script "safer" than
| calling into the POSIX standard sleep utility? It doesn't seem
| to solve any problem; meanwhile, it's less portable and
| needlessly eats CPU time by busy-waiting."_
|
| _" The sloppy coding which is evident here, as well as the
| inaction on core Actions bugs (in line with the decay in
| quality of almost every part of GitHub's product), is forcing
| the Zig project to strongly consider moving away from GitHub
| Actions entirely. With this bug, and many others (severe
| workflow scheduling issues resulting in dozens of timeouts;
| logs randomly becoming inaccessible; random job cancellations
| without details; perpetually "pending" jobs), we can no longer
| trust that Actions can be used to implement reliable CI
| infrastructure. I personally would seriously encourage other
| projects, particularly any using self-hosted runners, to look
| carefully at the stability of Actions and ask themselves
| whether it is a solution worth sticking with long-term when
| compared with alternatives."_
|
| ----
|
| I agree that the writing in the blog post is more colorful than
| precise, but sanitizing every bit of expression dulls the
| internet. Humans invented language for a reason.
| dpkirchner wrote:
| I must be missing something huge here, or maybe it's the wine
| -- how is the code in PR 3157 (referenced in a later comment)
| a proper fix?
|
| https://github.com/actions/runner/pull/3157/files
|
| Is : doing something unusual in GH actions?
| Veserv wrote:
| The original loop is:
|
| while (time() != timeout) {;}
|
| The fixed loop is:
|
| while (time() < timeout) {;}
| dpkirchner wrote:
| I see. I did not realize SECONDS was a built in bash
| variable.
| nh2 wrote:
| It is still not a proper fix. It is still busy-looping
| 100% CPU.
|
| Given that Github Actions is quite popular, probably
| wasting large amount of energy.
|
| But probably good at generating billable Actions minutes.
|
| One can only hope that not many people use sleeps to
| handle their CI race conditions, as that itself is also
| not a proper fix.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| Clearly the job for a microservice. Accept number of
| seconds to wait as url, return content after that many
| seconds. Then just use curl in runner.
| xp84 wrote:
| Brb founding a SaaS startup. I'll call it cloudsleep dot
| io of course. After our Series B I'll buy the .com.
|
| Only task to do before lining up investors is how can I
| weave AI into our product?
| debugnik wrote:
| Describe the task you're waiting for as text, and let an
| LLM pick the number of seconds for each request. More
| expensive the better model you clearly need for this.
| There, your AI pitch.
| xp84 wrote:
| Excellent, welcome aboard, Chief Product Officer!
| wmanley wrote:
| Retries won't work in that case. Would be better to have
| two endpoints: get the time in x seconds and wait until
| time passed. That way retrying the wait endpoint will
| work fine and if time hasn't elapsed it can just curl
| itself with the same arguments.
| dpkirchner wrote:
| If you have curl (but not sleep) sure, but if not maybe
| you can use bash's wacky /dev/tcp. The microservice could
| listen on ports 1 through 64k to let you specify how many
| seconds to sleep.
| dpkirchner wrote:
| Yeah, definitely not a proper fix.
|
| Maybe a more serious fix is something like "read -t $N".
| If you think stdin might not be usable (like maybe it
| will close prematurely) this option won't work, but maybe
| you can open an anonymous FD and read from it instead.
| xp84 wrote:
| Me neither. I am over 40 and did not know this. Feels
| good to learn something today, in an unexpected place!
| petersellers wrote:
| > I agree that the writing in the blog post is more colorful
| than precise, but sanitizing every bit of expression dulls
| the internet. Humans invented language for a reason.
|
| Where do you draw the line, then? Is a racist screed
| acceptable to you as long as the following paragraph
| references technical issues correctly?
|
| The language in the blog post is insulting. Imagine how you
| would feel if you were the person who wrote this code, and
| now you are being called a monkey in front of thousands of
| people on the internet. Certainly you've made mistakes in
| your code before...or are you saying you've always written
| flawless code without errors?
|
| These codes of conduct always seemed a bit superfluous to me,
| but after reading comments like these I can totally see why
| they are necessary.
| ssivark wrote:
| Would you perhaps have preferred if they referred to it as
| "unprofessional" or "sloppy" instead alluding of monkeys?
|
| To me all those mean the same thing, except the latter is
| more flavorful and makes my eyes less likely to glaze over.
|
| > Imagine how you would feel if you were the person who
| wrote this code, and now you are being called a monkey in
| front of thousands of people on the internet.
|
| Er.. so? Why should anyone be allowed into a position of
| responsibility where their code impacts millions of people
| if they can't handle the tiniest bit of strong feedback? It
| was, after all, a pretty egregious bug.
|
| > Certainly you've made mistakes in your code before...or
| are you saying you've always written flawless code without
| errors?
|
| I've definitely made mistakes, and also accept that my
| output might have on occasion been "monkey-esque". I don't
| see what's insulting about that; we are all human/animal.
| petersellers wrote:
| > To me all those mean the same thing, except the latter
| is more flavorful and makes my eyes less likely to glaze
| over.
|
| And to many others, the difference is that one is
| informative, the other is likely to turn them off of the
| author and project forever.
|
| I noticed that you never answered my question. If this is
| acceptable to you, where do you draw the line? If you can
| answer that question, maybe you'll be able to see the
| flaw in your argument.
| throwaway150 wrote:
| > the other is likely to turn them off of the author and
| project forever
|
| Which is absolutely fine. It's their project, their
| website. If they can't be colorful on their own website,
| where else can they be! If it turns off some people, I'm
| sure the author is aware of the risk and happy with that
| risk.
|
| I, for one, find this kind of colorful language
| refreshing. Everyone trying to be politically correct
| makes the internet a dull place.
| petersellers wrote:
| not being an asshole != political correctness
|
| Surely you have your own line on what is or is not
| acceptable discourse. What is it?
| throwaway150 wrote:
| > Surely you have your own line on what is or is not
| acceptable discourse. What is it?
|
| I do but I decline to share it here. I'm not going to
| shift this thread from what the author is doing on their
| website to my personal beliefs and boundaries!
|
| All I am saying is it is their project, their blog. They
| can be however much rude they want to be on their
| website. It's their website, their lines and their
| boundaries. Where _I_ set _my_ boundaries has no bearing
| on what Andrew should write on their website.
|
| If Andrew alienates people by his writing, it's his
| decision, his action, his consequences that he has to
| deal with. How does it matter where I draw the line?
| petersellers wrote:
| > All I am saying is it is their project, their blog.
| They can be however much rude they want to be on their
| website. It's their website, their lines and their
| boundaries.
|
| That's funny, because if that is true he violated his own
| code of conduct: https://ziglang.org/code-of-
| conduct/#safe-constructive-only
|
| > I do but I decline to share it here
|
| The point is that everyone has different lines for what
| they consider to be "acceptable" or not. That is exactly
| the reason why codes of conduct exist - it's an attempt
| to find a common denomiator so that it can help foster a
| community where people can feel included without feeling
| like they are being attacked or insulted.
| throwaway150 wrote:
| > That's funny, because if that is true he violated his
| own code of conduct
|
| Yes, he did. It is funny. I don't know why we need to
| talk endlessly about it. If you are bothered so much by
| this violation, file an official report on their issue
| tracker.
|
| > The point is that everyone has different lines for what
| they consider to be "acceptable" or not. That is exactly
| the reason why codes of conduct exist
|
| When I said I decline to share my lines and boundaries
| here, I meant just that. I didn't mean that I need a
| lecture on CoC from you. I know what CoCs are and why
| they exist. Thank you very much. I am not morality
| police. Neither are you.
|
| My morality applies to myself. Andrew's morality applies
| to himself. But yeah... CoC may apply to him too. So
| you've got a good point. I don't know if the CoC applies
| to their website. If you know more and if it does, a
| violation of CoC should be reported on their issue
| tracker. If this is such an important topic for you,
| please do report the violation to them. That'd be fair.
| petersellers wrote:
| > Yes, he did. It is funny.
|
| Yeah, it's hilarious! Calling someone a monkey is such a
| clever and thought provoking insult!
|
| > I don't know why we need to talk endlessly about it
|
| If you are confused by this, why are you continuing to
| respond?
|
| > When I said I decline to share my lines and boundaries
| here, I meant just that. I didn't mean that I need a
| lecture on CoC from you. I know what CoCs are and why
| they exist.
|
| I really don't think you know why CoC's exist, because
| you are chastising people when they point out a
| legitimate violation (e.g. being the "morality police").
|
| > But yeah... CoC applies to him too. So you've got a
| good point
|
| Thanks for finally admitting this, I guess? Not sure why
| you needed to add all the extra argumentation about it,
| but at least you got there eventually.
|
| > If this is such an important topic for you, please do
| report the violation to them
|
| No thank you. I'm not actually offended by what he said,
| I just find it weird when people rush to his defense on
| this.
| throwaway150 wrote:
| > If you are confused by this, why are you continuing to
| respond?
|
| I'm not confused by anything. That was a rhetorical
| question. I continue to respond because there are other
| things that I care about and I have things to say about
| that. I don't care about what style or tone or words
| Andrew choses on their website. But I care about people
| trying to be morality police and discouraging someone
| blogging on their own website from writing rudely and
| writing politically incorrectly. So that's why I continue
| to respond.
|
| > Thanks for finally admitting this, I guess? Not sure
| why you needed to add all the extra argumentation about
| it, but at least you got there eventually.
|
| Credit where credit is due. If you make good points I
| agree with, I'll certainly say that.
|
| > Not sure why you needed to add all the extra
| argumentation about it, but at least you got there
| eventually.
|
| Because there are other points of yours I don't agree
| with.
|
| Must a person always 100% agree or 100% disagree? Can a
| person not 10% agree and 90% disagree? The latter is
| happening here.
| petersellers wrote:
| > But I care about people trying to be morality police
| and discouraging someone blogging on their own website
| from writing rudely and writing politically incorrectly
|
| This appears to be a strawman. You already admitted he
| violated the CoC - so he is in the wrong here.
|
| I'm not sure what else there is to disagree with - that's
| been my assertion from the beginning.
|
| If he wants to write childish stuff on his own website
| that is not covered by the CoC, that's his choice. I'm
| also free to express my opinion on that, but I never
| implied that he shouldn't be able to write whatever he
| wanted on his own personal blog.
| throwaway150 wrote:
| > You already admitted he violated the CoC - so he is in
| the wrong here
|
| I didn't say that. This is what I said -
|
| "But yeah... CoC may apply to him too. So you've got a
| good point. I don't know if the CoC applies to their
| website. If you know more and if it does, a violation of
| CoC should be reported on their issue tracker."
|
| Emphasis: "may", "I don't know if", "If you know more".
| petersellers wrote:
| You did say that. You performed a stealth edit and
| modified your comment, but fortunately I quoted what you
| originally said in my previous comment:
|
| > But yeah... CoC applies to him too. So you've got a
| good point
|
| Since you've just proven yourself to not be arguing in
| good faith, this will be my last response to you.
| throwaway150 wrote:
| It's not a stealth edit. It's an open edit. HN allows
| edits for 2 hours for good reason. I misspoke first when
| I thought the CoC applies to him. Obviously I don't know
| for sure since I hadn't read the CoC. So I corrected
| myself to be less sure.
|
| But you chose to reply to my outdated message although at
| the time you were replying my message said that I wasn't
| sure whether the CoC applies or not.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| read the CoC carefully, it says which spaces are governed
| by it. the website does not seem to be. that's
| deliberate, the CoC only applies to "working" spaces.
| ncruces wrote:
| If it was a company, you'd say the CoC is meant for
| lackeys, not for C-suites.
| LinXitoW wrote:
| No, it's meant for interactions inside the company, not
| towards random giant corporations outside of it.
| ncruces wrote:
| Made by monkeys and losers (because everyone else has
| left) does not target the company, but its employees.
| yunohn wrote:
| If that is how you feel, why are you spending multiple
| comments defending the language used? It feels like
| there's a reason you refuse to define your line in the
| sand.
| throwaway150 wrote:
| > If that is how you feel, why are you spending multiple
| comments defending the language used?
|
| I don't care much about the language used. I neither
| intend to defend it nor criticize it. But I do care about
| people trying to be morality police. That's why I am
| spending multiple comments here.
|
| > It feels like there's a reason you refuse to define
| your line in the sand.
|
| Yes, the reason is that my line applies to myself. My
| line doesn't apply to you. It doesn't apply to Andrew. So
| my line, which is a personal and private matter for me,
| isn't something I want to share here. It is irrelevant
| when talking about the words Andrew chose on his website.
| That's the reason. It's a simple reason. Don't overthink
| it!
| oaiey wrote:
| Not everyone is build robust enough for being called a
| monkey or loser straight into the person's face.
| petersellers wrote:
| My first thought when reading the article is that the
| author would never attempt to call the person a monkey or
| loser to their face "in real life".
|
| One of the unfortunate side effects of the internet is
| that it really brings out the asshole in a lot of people.
| ImHereToVote wrote:
| Maybe they would be happier working a job that requires
| zero accountability.
| paulddraper wrote:
| Do you believe that Zig is following its own code of
| conduct, or not?
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| The website is not covered by the CoC, so they are not in
| abeyance
| paulddraper wrote:
| Ziglang.org disconnected from the Zig Code of Conduct is
| wild.
|
| I really want to pull on that thread more, to see how far
| you'll go to defend an indefensible position, but I
| won't.
| therein wrote:
| > Is a racist screed acceptable to you as long as the
| following paragraph references technical issues correctly?
|
| I'm not the morality police. Nobody should be. I'd still
| take the article on its technical merits. As a random
| example, if Satoshi's paper called people using the banking
| system cattle, I'd still continue reading it.
|
| > Imagine how you would feel if you were the person who
| wrote this code, and now you are being called a monkey in
| front of thousands of people on the internet
|
| It would be absolutely fine, nobody is named specifically.
| He wasn't like Josh Examplemann working on Actions is a
| piece of shit that botches any feature he touches. Nobody
| is going to remember a blog post and forever hold anyone
| that worked on Actions to an unhirable status. And
| personally, I think it would be good for people to feel
| some shame for having implemented a feature in such a
| terrible way. It's not like they were told by their
| managers to commit these the way that they did. Calling
| into the sleep binary wouldn't even be more work.
|
| Whoever is behind the new React Start Menu in Windows
|
| along with whoever is responsible for the Chrome Web
| Environment Integrity
|
| along with whoever is behind the design of OSX Tahoe
|
| along with anyone who is working on Windows Copilot that
| screenshots your screen
|
| should be ashamed of themselves. The more articles that do
| that, the better. They are not doing good.
| 8n4vidtmkvmk wrote:
| Then blast the product, not the people who built it.
| satoru42 wrote:
| There's no stupid product, only stupid people.
| carlmr wrote:
| They are blasting the product tbf. The people part is a
| small part of it. And apparently at least distracting the
| HN Community from their point.
| darrenf wrote:
| Which is exactly why to cut it out. If you put salt in my
| cup of tea, I'm gonna notice and it's gonna ruin the
| drink.
| tomalbrc wrote:
| Microsoft poured salt into your cup years ago, you just
| did not notice.
| johnfn wrote:
| If you put _more_ salt into this rather thinly-stretched
| metaphorical cup when telling me what Microsoft did you
| are not going to endear yourself to me. Why muddy your
| message?
| ThomasMidgley wrote:
| The product was made by people. Or by AI which was made and
| controlled by people.
| solatic wrote:
| You cannot divorce a product from the people who built it.
| The product reflects their priorities and internal group
| well-being. A different group of people would have built a
| different product.
| 2pEXgD0fZ5cF wrote:
| The product isn't some result of a series of "oopsies". The
| worst aspects of bad and/or user-hostile software products
| are that way because the people working at these companies
| want them to be that way.
|
| Unless you want to call them just that incompetent. I
| assume they'd complain about that label too.
|
| In short: No it's not "the product", the people building it
| are the problem. Somehow everyone working in big tech wants
| all the praise all the time, individually, but never take
| even the slightest bit of responsibility fro the constant
| enshittification they drive forward..
| ericpruitt wrote:
| Amusingly, this post violates Zig's own code of conduct:
| https://ziglang.org/code-of-conduct
|
| > Examples of behavior that contribute to creating a positive
| environment include:
|
| > - Using welcoming and inclusive language.
|
| > - Being respectful of differing viewpoints and experiences.
|
| > - Showing empathy towards others.
|
| > - Showing appreciation for others' work.
| quantummagic wrote:
| Codes of conduct are perfunctory virtue signalling. Do we
| really need a unique set of "rules" posted on every project?
| They all sound like they were written by the same AI bot.
| That said, it's telling that the Zig leader can't even follow
| them. The rules should just be taken down.
| SanjayMehta wrote:
| CoC are the HR department of open source.
| serial_dev wrote:
| > HR is to protect the company, not the employee
|
| The CoC is not there to protect the community, but to
| protect all the bad actors and give ammunition to attack
| the good ones.
|
| Happens every time, the maintainers who add CoCs to
| projects have no problem being an ahole to others.
|
| Update: I know some people love their CoCs, but answer me
| this, how is this kind of childish name calling allowed
| and still online, if what I wrote above is not true?
| prmoustache wrote:
| > Update: I know some people love their CoCs, but answer
| me this, how is this kind of childish name calling
| allowed and still online, if what I wrote above is not
| true?
|
| Where you born 30 minutes ago to not have realized yet
| that people are not infallible, are subjects of emotions
| and contradict themselves all the time?
| duped wrote:
| It's helpful when people are being assholes to point to a
| document describing how they're being an asshole and to cut
| it out
| jakobnissen wrote:
| Is it really? In this example, could you not see anything
| wrong with calling employees losers and monkeys, until
| someone linked you the CoC?
| serial_dev wrote:
| To add to it, the post is still calling people losers and
| monkeys, so the CoC is clearly not working properly.
| prmoustache wrote:
| Yes the same way laws don't eradicate delinquency and
| crime magically. Humans are humans.
| amake wrote:
| Might as well get rid of laws against murder because
| sometimes people commit murder anyway?
| ifh-hn wrote:
| Not the same thing at all. There's consequences for
| murder, absolutely none for not abiding by this CoC; as
| clearly seen by the fact the posted remains as is.
| graemep wrote:
| A better analogy would be getting rid of laws against
| murder if its unevenly applied so people from a
| particular group always got away with it.
| hshdhdhj4444 wrote:
| Code of Conduct cannot stop someone from doing something.
|
| It's just a document.
|
| However, in this case, the presence of the code of
| conduct has made it trivially easy to point out the
| language as wrong in a way whoever wrote this for Zig
| cannot refute.
|
| It's working exactly as it should.
| kelnos wrote:
| How is it working? The post is still there, referring to
| people as "losers" and "monkeys". Was the author of the
| post chastised? Have they edited the post and apologized?
| KingMob wrote:
| Heh. You've rediscovered Critical Race Theory, which was
| a graduate-level theory about how rules/laws are
| systematically applied to minorities/the powerless, and
| not applied to the powerful/project leaders.
|
| Holding the powerful to the law is unfortunately, a
| separate issue to whether it's worth it to have written
| rules/laws in the first place.
|
| A CoC could still be better than no CoC, even if it fails
| to rein in abuse from the top.
| IshKebab wrote:
| They don't have to refute it; they have the power to
| ignore it.
| reactordev wrote:
| Which suffice to say is not at all
| lmm wrote:
| In my experience it's the opposite of helpful, because
| it's actually a lot easier to reach consensus on whether
| someone's being an asshole than on whether they have
| violated the code in the document.
| p-e-w wrote:
| It's a _very_ helpful tool for establishing opaque power
| structures, because it allows those with real power to
| pretend that they are simply following some legalese
| document instead of doing as they please.
|
| The fact that this behavior, which would violate most
| CoCs ever written, came from the top tells you everything
| you need to know.
| paxcoder wrote:
| They are also used to exclude control speech and exclude
| certain people https://chrismcdonough.substack.com/p/the-
| shameful-defenestr...
| hexbin010 wrote:
| A relic from the ZIRP era when people had time and job
| security to engage in politics and creating drama on
| Twitter instead of doing their job.
|
| Ah the good old days!
| freehorse wrote:
| Every org has a code of conduct and this is nothing new.
| How seriously it is taken in each case is a different
| issue. Code of conduct usually amount to some rules that
| say "don't be an asshole to others". Can't see why this is
| problematic or "virtue signaling".
| miki123211 wrote:
| CoCs are like HoAs. The people behind them are usually
| well-intentioned, and they certainly have their place,
| yet they're still quite dangerous. If the wrong kind of
| person gets into a position of enforcement, they can
| basically do whatever they wish, with no due process,
| recourse or principles of law being observed.
| cobertos wrote:
| This is not a problem with CoCs, but authority in
| general.
|
| A CoC is still a useful communication tool. Guidelines
| are useful to have.
| LtWorf wrote:
| You get penalised in some ways if you don't have a code
| of conduct. For example github will nag you about having
| one.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| CoCs are useful at least for autists. They don't have to be
| unique for every project.
|
| A good CoC for most projects is: "tl;dr: don't act rude or
| illegal", followed by a detailed explanation of what is
| rude or illegal, ending with "project maintainers have
| final discretion".
| dijit wrote:
| I've got skin in this game: Grew up in UK's social
| services with undiagnosed mental health quirks; too
| "smart" for ADHD, too "social" for autism, per my
| assessors. Ended up in classes thick with neurodivergent
| kids, from non-verbal to quirky misfits. Plus, I've
| moderated an IRC community for 20 years, where text chats
| strip away nuance like a bad compression algorithm,
| leaving everything ripe for misinterpretation.
|
| I'm sharing these facts not to "credential-dump", but to
| underscore: This comment comes from compassion, not
| condescension.
|
| Vague CoCs bug me because they're well-intentioned
| landmines. Take "don't be an asshole"; it could mean "act
| in good faith" (why not just say that?), or morph into
| "don't seem condescending" based on who's reading.
|
| Pair that with commitments to safe spaces for
| neurodivergence, like autism (where social cues in text
| can be a foggy maze), and you've got a recipe for
| unintended clashes.
|
| An earnest comment misfires, gets flagged as jerkish, and
| boom: escalation via subjective enforcement.
|
| I've flagged this before: good faith-vague inclusivity
| can ironically exclude through feelings-based policing,
| which is how communities often roll anyway. So, why not
| tighten rules for clarity? Swap "don't be an asshole" for
| "assume good intent and clarify misunderstandings." It'd
| make safe spaces safer for all, autists included.
|
| I don't doubt I'll get a tirade of "how can you call
| Autistic people assholes" just like always, totally
| missing the point on purpose.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| Hence the detailed explanation after "don't be rude". And
| "maintainers have final say" is 1) another otherwise-
| unwritten rule (it's true regardless), and 2) justifies
| banning repeat offenders when the maintainers don't have
| time to keep writing specific rules for them, and there's
| a vanishingly small chance they're not acting in bad
| faith.
|
| Also, when people cause social issues, they should be
| reprimanded referencing specific parts of the CoC, and in
| most cases given warnings or opportunities to recover.
| For when the person causing the issue genuinely isn't
| aware what they're doing is wrong and can learn to be
| tolerable; and even when the person is completely bad
| faith, for unaware bystanders to learn what's right and
| wrong.
|
| Diagnosed autistic people aren't the only ones who suffer
| from unwritten social cues. Also people from other
| cultures, e.g. where rudeness is considered more
| acceptable.
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| Not even virtue, codes of conduct just signals leftist
| control over an organisation.
| otikik wrote:
| US leftists, or non-US leftists?
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| Whats the difference? Both are (or were) funded by NGOs
| and the state department.
| otikik wrote:
| US has a special definition for what constitutes "left"
| that doesn't apply outside. Compared to European
| leftists, US leftists are center-right.
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| Charlie Kirk was shot by a center-right guy on September
| 10, 2025?
|
| Luigi Mangione shot the UnitedHealthcare CEO December 4,
| 2024 and had an anti-capitalist manifesto, was he center
| right?
|
| What about Elias Rodriguez (leftist activist, Israeli
| Embassy Staff Shooting)?
|
| Michael Reinoehl (antifa) who shot Aaron Danielson?
|
| "No Kings" Vance Boelter who shot two politicians?
|
| "Anti-ICE" Joshua Jahn who killed two detainees and
| wounding an agent in the Dallas ICE Facility Sniper
| Attack?
|
| US leftists are the same murderous closeted communists as
| they are everywhere else.
|
| They assassinate people (see recent cases), perform
| terrorist attacks (peaking at ~500 (!) bombings in 1971),
| form mobs to socially ostracise people they don't agree
| with, distribute brazen propaganda in mass media and
| subvert every organisation they join.
| otikik wrote:
| I don't think I get your point. Is it that the more
| someone is left-wing, the more they are likely to be
| killers? And extrapolating, the more right wing people
| are, the less likely they are? That is a wild take.
|
| My point is that Democrats and Republicans disagree on
| social policies, but on the economical side they are very
| close to each other. They are two shades of capitalist
| policies. Other countries have parties that are simply
| non-capitalist - that is the "left".
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| I get the impression that you attempt to discuss in good
| faith. This is probably as far as we will get.
| LtWorf wrote:
| Just FYI github nags projects to have a code of conduct.
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| Well.
| skullt wrote:
| I would think leaders sometimes not following their own
| codes of conduct is the strongest argument in favor of
| having them: yes, they are obvious to everyone but they are
| also evidently easy to forget in the heat of the moment.
| It's a standard of behavior to strive for not one
| statically attainable. Reminders are needed and that's the
| purpose their deliberate codifying serves.
| LtWorf wrote:
| Oh my code of conduct allows using profanities but not
| directing them at people :D
| harry8 wrote:
| There is a difference between what you say to and about
| volunteers working for free on their hobby and what you say
| about the work of a company famously known as "The Death
| Star"
|
| You want to work with people and the group says "yay and this
| is how we will work together" you do that or go away. This is
| entirely separate to stating a universal truth such as
| "Microsoft product blows because they do not care", "Oracle
| sucks" or famously "You can't anthropomorphise Larry Ellison"
|
| Did Linus ever blow-torch community volunteers or did he get
| the pip purely with big corp submitting paid trash for their
| own purposes? He seems to cop a fair bit himself from people
| saying thou shalt not...
|
| The standards differ. Microsoft is going to be ok guys.
| ChrisGreenHeur wrote:
| Microsoft is actually just a group of people as well.
| maybewhenthesun wrote:
| All companies are 'a group of people'. But that's not how
| you treat them. You should treat the individual employees
| of microsoft as the people they are. You should treat
| microsoft as a whole as the evil entity it is (TBF
| they're not worse than apple or google or etc...)
| lozenge wrote:
| But the post isn't talking about Microsoft, it's
| specifically calling the people that work on GitHub
| monkeys.
| harry8 wrote:
| You should also consider the point of view of anyone
| working on github and being paid by microsoft but who
| actually does care. Note that they are not named and
| shamed or anything like that.
|
| Do you think there is a chance these hypothetical
| engineers who care actually want this kind of thing said
| publicly? And said as poetically invictive laden as
| possible? The rationale being that they might use such
| sentiment to get management to see the danger and /start/
| caring about product quality?
|
| I've never worked for microsoft. In my experience when
| product goes into quality decline, rubbish management is
| >90% of the reason. How futile is fighting that? How
| futile is fighting it for github? Does github matter in
| general? My own use is so limited it doesn't directly
| matter to me. Indirectly it might well do.
| xp84 wrote:
| I have no connection to Microsoft but I think this take is
| terrible.
|
| Part of maturing and growing up, for me, was realizing that
| there are really very few people who truly deserve scorn
| and disrespect[1]. Those I disagree with politically,
| mostly think they're doing the right thing and they think
| that if people only understood, they'd change their tune
| (and that's basically what I think of them). Those "big
| companies" like Microsoft, Atlassian, etc, their incentives
| line up - and literally must line up - in a fashion where
| they make software that frustrates many users constantly.
| It really isn't malice or incompetence - no one, from the
| intern that wrote some snippet of JS on GitHub dot com, to
| Satya Nadella, is either intentionally phoning it in nor
| waking up in the morning asking himself, "how can I
| frustrate the efforts of people out there?"
|
| And anyway, because most people are trying their best,
| regardless of how the outcomes line up to affect my life
| and my interests personally, really do not deserve my scorn
| and derision. If I were in their situations, very little if
| anything would actually change. So spouting insults at
| these people who I don't know, and whose roles I don't
| really understand, is really not a mature, productive, nor
| fair thing to do.
|
| [1] if you are curious I'd say murderers, etc. dominate
| that group.
| trueismywork wrote:
| What would you say about people who knowingly do actions
| that will lead to widespread harm and future deaths even
| though they're killing no one directly?
|
| Murdering can be done very well without ever having to
| touch weapon.
| adastra22 wrote:
| Those people are despicable too. But they are far less
| common than you probably think.
| konart wrote:
| >What would you say about people who knowingly do actions
| that will lead to widespread harm and future deaths even
| though they're killing no one directly?
|
| Are we talking about scientists here too or just those
| who give orders?
|
| Pretty much anything can be used as a weapon and many
| things can be used for widespread harm.
|
| What if you are working on something that can be used
| both ways? Spread good and death?
| maybewhenthesun wrote:
| I think it's healthy, even necessary, to utterly distrust
| microsoft (or any large compny, for that matter). And
| while I don't think it's a-ok to call an individual
| microsft employee a monkey by name I think it IS a-ok to
| say any microsoft product is 'written by monkeys' or any
| other suitable derogatory term.
|
| The way github develops is steered by microsoft-the-
| company and not so much by it's individual employees. A
| company, especially such a huge one, is not to be trusted
| and can (should) be made fun of.
| imiric wrote:
| It's interesting that maturing and growing up for me has
| resulted in opposite conclusions to yours. We're all
| different, of course, but I'd like to offer a different
| perspective.
|
| > And anyway, because most people are trying their best,
| regardless of how the outcomes line up to affect my life
| and my interests personally, really do not deserve my
| scorn and derision.
|
| The fact that most people are "trying their best" doesn't
| mean that their goals and interests can't be selfish, or
| that their actions can't negatively impact others.
| Particularly people who pursue positions of power, in
| politics or corporations, often treat others with
| hostility. And unlike most hostile people, it's these
| high-rank individuals that have the capability to impact
| millions of people.
|
| So while I agree with your overall sentiment that well-
| intentioned people don't deserve my scorn and derision,
| the real world has taught me that governments and
| corporations often abuse my trust, my rights, my
| freedoms, and my quality of life. And for that, the least
| I can do is speak freely about how I feel about them as
| people on an online forum. I'm sure that my actions have
| practically zero impact on their lives, unlike theirs on
| mine.
| ljm wrote:
| I don't always get it right but I try not go on the
| internet and contribute even more anger and negativity
| that is already there. Try not to be a dick to other
| people.
|
| It's not really for anybody's sake except my own, because
| I'm the one who has to sit with a mind full of shit at
| the end of the day and I'm just going to wear myself
| down. Nobody who matters is gonna read any of the bile I
| _could_ write and change who they are, after all.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| coc says this:
|
| > This document contains the rules that govern these spaces
| only:
|
| > The ziglang organization on Codeberg
|
| > #zig IRC channel on Libera.chat
|
| > Zig project development Zulip chat
|
| doesnt seem to include the zig page!!
|
| so no, it does not violate CoC
| throwaway150 wrote:
| > Amusingly, this post violates Zig's own code of conduct:
| https://ziglang.org/code-of-conduct
|
| Not sure it does. Right there in the same link you posted:
| This document contains the rules that govern these spaces
| only: The ziglang organization on Codeberg
| #zig IRC channel on Libera.chat Zig project development
| Zulip chat
| otikik wrote:
| It may not violate the letter of the document, but it does
| seem to violate its spirit to me.
| ameixaseca wrote:
| I believe any reasonable person could understand the
| previous comment is about the rules themselves, not about a
| statement in the CoC saying where they apply or not.
|
| Also, the fact that the website is not covered by the CoC
| makes it worse, since the leadership is excluding
| themselves from their own engagement rules.
| snarf_br wrote:
| Honestly, I don't see where it violates that code of conduct.
|
| Luckily, no one cares about my (or your) opinions on that
| matter because, as far as I can tell, neither of us have
| contributed anything to Zig.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| The "monkeys" here are clearly refering to those kinds with
| typewriters.
| DANmode wrote:
| vs...?
| lmm wrote:
| Apparently there's some specific US cultural history of
| people calling black people "monkeys" as a racist insult,
| and so some people from there immediately leap to assume
| that any use of "monkey" as an insult is that.
| wilg wrote:
| Ridiculous to claim this is a "US-specific thing" https:/
| /www.academia.edu/22669911/Comparing_black_people_to_...
| DANmode wrote:
| Oh wow.
|
| Following now.
|
| Sheesh.
| ekropotin wrote:
| What racism has to do with it?
|
| https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=code%20mo
| nke...
| brabel wrote:
| You think that's an American thing only?? Oh boy, I have
| bad news.
| blahedo wrote:
| Evidently not "clearly", given the number of people who
| didn't see it, but that was my first interpretation as well:
| I took it as an "infinite monkeys" reference that, in
| context, was probably standing in for "some un-tested gen AI
| output". Which, clicking on the link, seems to be what
| happened?
|
| Anyway, yes, "infinite monkeys on typewriters" seemed to be
| the relevant meaning of "monkeys" here.
| jaredhallen wrote:
| I agree that he came out blasting, and the language and tone,
| particularly at the beginning are pretty off-putting. That
| being said, having read the full post, I can't say I disagree
| with the motives and point of view.
| oaiey wrote:
| I have not finished the post because of the tone at the
| beginning.
|
| IT at higher ranks is about people. This post disqualifies
| Zig as an org.
| mmaunder wrote:
| Agreed. Came here to point out that the lack of professionalism
| and common courtesy here is reminiscent of the dark entitled
| days of open source in the late 90s that had attitude of "We
| build free software so we can tell you to go fuck yourself.".
| Hope we're not headed back there.
| DANmode wrote:
| I'll take that vs no open source software contributors.
|
| Elitism is far from the worst character trait unpaid code
| janitors can be expected to have.
| Nathanba wrote:
| I have a lot of understanding for such personalities too,
| I'm probably quite like this myself although I try my
| hardest to not open my mouth like this. For example I got
| blocked by Jonathan Blow over a simple question on twitter
| but I don't think too badly of him now, it's just a
| miscalculation on his part or him trying to optimize his
| life as a passionate person. But you really need to make
| sure to be right when you are putting other people down. I
| mean REALLY right, you need to tripple check that what you
| are doing is going to help an honest person to improve
| themselves. So my opinion is: You can be super critical but
| you have to be right.
|
| I'm not going to touch the political parts. But my main
| point is that the migration itself is obviously not well
| done, he isn't even migrating issues nor migrating perks
| for sponsors, splitting the community and attention apart.
| You could even say that he's critical of people who keep
| using github sponsors. In my view the text is implying that
| you are hurting ziglang if you keep using this thing that
| is a liability for ziglang... oh the horror of giving
| someone money in a way he doesn't like. People like this
| forget that contributors are doing free work for them too,
| it's not just one way. Everything that creates friction for
| them is real work you just caused them.
| messe wrote:
| > I got blocked by Jonathan Blow
|
| You're probably better off for it to be honest.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| > But you really need to make sure to be right when you
| are putting other people down. I mean REALLY right, you
| need to tripple check that what you are doing is going to
| help an honest person to improve themselves.
|
| But it then loses the emotional momentum and stops being
| colorful!
| ajkjk wrote:
| not the dichotomy we're actually talking about here...
| DANmode wrote:
| What is?
| ajkjk wrote:
| The question under discussion is 'open source developers
| posting childish rants vs not posting them'
|
| Not
|
| 'open source developers posting childish rants vs no open
| source developers'
| DANmode wrote:
| If they wanted to walk without that freedom,
|
| they'd be hacking on shit over at Mozilla (or similar -
| likely for more money) right?
| blub wrote:
| "We build free software so we can tell you to go fuck
| yourself."
|
| Sounds like a great thing compared to the sanitized corpo
| bullshit from nowadays. Microsoft bought themselves into OSS
| with github and each project has a bland CoC.
|
| It's pathetic. Even the github monkeys know deep down that
| this is wrong.
| brendoelfrendo wrote:
| As opposed to the modern era of megacorps benefitting from
| the free labor of OS maintainers? I will not deny that
| corporate contributions to open source projects are
| significant, but there are definitely some very visible
| examples of projects being taken advantage of by companies
| that want to use free software without giving back.
| shridharxp wrote:
| It's okay to bring some "natural" language in technical
| communication. It feels more humane. All the whitewashed
| corporate language, riddled marketing bullshit feels so soul
| dead.
| adrianN wrote:
| You can express dissatisfaction and anger ,,naturally"
| without calling people losers and monkeys.
| MarcelOlsz wrote:
| I think it's a breath of fresh air. Don't want to be called
| out like this then stop fucking up.
| petersellers wrote:
| I'm sure getting called a monkey will stop them from ever
| making a mistake again.
| teo_zero wrote:
| If this was true, teachers and trainers would have the
| easiest job in the world: just insulting their pupils
| would stop them from failing an exam, race or whatever
| again.
| ternaryoperator wrote:
| The comment is clearly sarcasm.
| patates wrote:
| I could try to explain that most jobs are way more
| nuanced than just 'failing and deserving to be called a
| monkey' or 'not failing.' Or, I could just call you names
| for not seeing that, you could call me names back, and we
| can keep doing this forever.
| Veserv wrote:
| Your argument is lacking nuance, declaring that the
| criticism being levied here must be a simple binary.
|
| The specific error they are criticizing is extremely
| egregious, akin to builder declaring a house without a
| roof complete. "failing and deserving to be called a
| monkey" is a criticism being levied against a 0/100 level
| mistake, not a mere minor mistake as you are claiming.
|
| While it might be desirable to use less colorful
| language, it is frankly challenging to express the sheer
| level of grossly incompetent organizational ineptitude on
| display here in a reviewed and delivered product actively
| causing negative customer impact for literal years which
| is trivially fixed and yet has been ignored.
|
| Customers of Github _should_ be infuriated that Github
| gleefully foists such utterly defective software upon
| them. It is hard to get that across in dispassionate
| writing.
| patates wrote:
| Thanks for the thoughtful response.
|
| > Your argument is lacking nuance, declaring that the
| criticism being levied here must be a simple binary.
|
| That isn't my argument. I am arguing against the idea
| that there is an "objective" threshold of failure where,
| once crossed, it becomes acceptable to call people names.
|
| > Customers of Github should be infuriated that Github
| gleefully foists such utterly defective software upon
| them. It is hard to get that across in dispassionate
| writing.
|
| See, while it has its bugs, I don't see a major problem
| with GitHub as a software product (setting aside the
| monopoly concerns). I encourage passionate discussion,
| but calling people names doesn't communicate passion; it
| communicates impatience. It suggests you don't have the
| patience to actually make a case for something you're
| supposedly passionate about, so you're choosing a
| shorter, more aggressive form instead.
| oaiey wrote:
| Not everyone is that robust. People get hurt over things
| like that. Not everyone is a wizard who does not give a
| fuck and does not need to care.
|
| These are people for God's sake. Empathy!
| zwnow wrote:
| If people get hurt over that they need to take some
| courses on building confidence...
| brabel wrote:
| Right, those black people who get offended by being
| called that just need confidence, right? Those LGBT are
| so sensitive and can't handle the colorful names we call
| them! Imagine that. This kind of comment shows how HN
| commenters can be so incredibly hateful while thinking
| they are righteous, which is the worst kind of people,
| it's the atitude that leads to the most terrible policies
| and behavior ever seen on this planet.
| zwnow wrote:
| Or you grow up and see these kinda things within the
| right context and brush off whats easy to brush off.
| Obvious racial slurs or discriminating insults towards a
| whole community is obviously something different. But you
| sound like the type of person to cancel a comedian over a
| joke.
| peterspath wrote:
| People indeed need a thicker skin
| majkinetor wrote:
| Treating grown up people like little kids is a major
| problem. If that was a stressor which requires defensive
| actions such as this one, what are you good for in life?
| ImHereToVote wrote:
| Feeling empathy for their pathetic fragile existence
| doesn't mean you sympathise with said fragility.
| freehorse wrote:
| Not being able to control your anger issues and name
| calling ppl as a public face of your org sounds pretty
| fragile to me.
| ImHereToVote wrote:
| I think this is called projection. Not everyone is angry
| when name calling someone.
| freehorse wrote:
| Yeah the tone matters.
| Spunkie wrote:
| > These are people for God's sake. Empathy!
|
| One man's empathy is another man's hatred.
|
| From my perspective your take and actions in this thread
| is itself completely devoid of empathy.
|
| The reason for colorful language breaking through
| professionalism is because there is real human emotion
| behind those words. Real pain and suffering, lost time in
| the life that will never be regained, an ever widening
| bald spot from the stress. That type of thing yearns to
| be expressed in a way that generic corpo speak is by
| design unable to communicate.
|
| Your response to these emotions is to simply stick your
| head in the sand(aka refuse to read the blog post)? Worse
| yet, even without that context, you are here trying to
| convince those around you to also stick their heads in
| the sand?
|
| To dream up scenarios where theoretical someones in a
| giant faceless corp might maybe possibly be offended?
| Instead of trying to listen and understand the person
| already in front of you who has actually been offended?
|
| Again everything is a matter of perspective, but from
| mine your comments severely lack the empathy you
| supposedly call for.
| throwaway150 wrote:
| > You can express dissatisfaction and anger ,,naturally"
| without calling people losers and monkeys.
|
| I can't speak for others. But if I am screwing up as badly
| as GitHub is, I'd rather someone calls me a loser and
| monkey for it. It's like someone splashing ice cold water
| on my face and showing me the reality. It's going to be
| very uncomfortable, yes. But I'll learn from it and try not
| to screw up so badly again. I find this kind of natural
| outburst refreshing really.
| latexr wrote:
| That's a theoretically admirable attitude if true (I
| don't doubt you believe it, and maybe even do it
| successfully, but often how we react differs from how we
| think or say we'd react) but definitely not universal. A
| more common and probable outcome is people clamming up
| and becoming defensive, actively rejecting the criticism
| because of how it was delivered.
|
| Though best case scenario, the people working on these
| features agree and can point their managers to the post
| as an example of growing discontent. I doubt it'll have
| an effect, though. GitHub is now under the AI division at
| Microsoft.
| adrianN wrote:
| Imo there is a big difference between insulting a
| person's work and insulting a person themself. People can
| and do mess up colossally without being losers or
| monkeys.
| m4rtink wrote:
| Yeah, its rude to actual monkeys - they did nothing wrong!
| rwallace wrote:
| Sure. If you feel the need to write "this is shitty code",
| fair enough, I'm fine with making allowances for that kind of
| language. But please leave it at that, instead of also
| insulting the people who wrote it. There are, unfortunately,
| plenty of ways for bad incentives to result in competent
| people creating bad products.
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| But not when it's against coc
| bsder wrote:
| And if he cleaned it up, an even larger number of people
| would be calling it written with AI.
|
| Shrug.
|
| If he were berating a specific person, I might flag it.
| Berating Github and Microsoft as an organization? Nah.
|
| Given that CEOs seem to now live in a Post Shame Reality(tm),
| I'll allow bringing some shame to the situation.
| tjpnz wrote:
| As a corporate drone it's refreshing. Already planning to
| dedicate some of the holiday season to learning Zig and this
| latest move only makes it more enticing.
| johnfn wrote:
| If he had gone on a rant purely about the product - eg
| "GitHub actions is a garbage product that never works", I
| think that wouldn't have left such a bad taste in my mouth.
| Calling the developers all "losers" crosses a line.
| oefrha wrote:
| Well at least he's being a jerk on his own blog here, so it's
| easy to ignore. I've seen instances of him unreasonably lashing
| out without the decency of understanding others' writings first
| on third party properties. A quick search turned up
| https://discourse.llvm.org/t/rfc-libc-taking-a-dependency-on...
| can't remember the details of other instances.
| rurban wrote:
| Nothing to see there, sorry.
| anhldbk wrote:
| Well said. It's not good to see such arguments like these.
| chmod775 wrote:
| Oh no! _Anyways_... I love zig and I 'm glad they're moving off
| what GitHub has become, not least because enough high profile
| projects leaving might make them focus on what matters again.
| throwaway150 wrote:
| > But leave ad hominems like "losers" and "monkeys" out of it.
|
| Ad hominem happens when someone undermines the argument based
| on the speaker's background. Here they are not undermining any
| argument. They're just name calling. This is name calling, not
| ad hominem.
| kees99 wrote:
| > bloated, buggy JavaScript framework
|
| Isn't that the unfortunate status quo? At least hard
| requirement for JS, that is.
|
| Google's homepage started requiring this recently. Linux
| kernel's git, openwrt, esp32.com, and many many others now
| require it too, via dreaded "Making sure you're not a bot"
| thing:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44962529
|
| If anything, github is (thankfully) behind the curve here - at
| least some basics do work without JS.
| begueradj wrote:
| And insulting publicly developers like that isn't ok.
| timcobb wrote:
| > Stuff that used to be snappy is now sluggish and often
| entirely broken.
|
| and as of when was GitHub known for its snappiness?
| throwaway150 wrote:
| GitHub was very snappy in the early days. I remember how
| refreshing I found GitHub when it was new. I don't know when
| but sometime after 2020 it has just been going downhill.
| DrBazza wrote:
| The same could be said of Jira.
|
| I could switch on the dev console in the Browser, and see
| which one loads the largest amount of Javascript, but I'd
| be disappointed with both.
| oaiey wrote:
| Came here to say that. Killed my curiosity towards Zig in an
| instant. What a disrespect.
|
| A pity. Saw Zig as something rising but with this kind of
| toxicity, no thanks.
| sgt wrote:
| It's probably a lapse, don't read into it too much. You can't
| expect people to tip toe around. Just give him feedback.
| carlmr wrote:
| >A pity. Saw Zig as something rising but with this kind of
| toxicity, no thanks.
|
| Don't get me wrong, it is a bit toxic. However, I feel like
| taking one comment in a larger article and blowing it up out
| of proportion is just as toxic.
| amake wrote:
| > blowing it up out of proportion is just as toxic
|
| One person decided that something wasn't for them. How is
| that in the same league as someone in a leadership position
| being unprofessional?
| carlmr wrote:
| I personally don't care too much for hierarchies, so I
| didn't factor this in. You can be toxic at any level.
| amake wrote:
| > You can be toxic at any level
|
| And yet the context is extremely important.
|
| > I didn't factor this in
|
| That's how you get to false equivalencies.
| carlmr wrote:
| >That's how you get to false equivalencies.
|
| No, you're just putting something into it which doesn't
| matter to me. Not a false equivalency.
| testdelacc1 wrote:
| God this entire thread is just people defending him as "a
| breath of fresh air" and "just using human language". There is
| something in people that makes them enjoy seeing others
| belittled like this. A complete lack of empathy, because no one
| would like to be treated this way themselves, but are perfectly
| happy seeing others treated this way. One commenter justifies
| it by saying "if I'm fucking up, it's ok to speak to me this
| way". Sure guy, we believe you.
|
| This reminds me of when Linus Torvalds would lose his shit now
| and then and launch gratuitous personal attacks at people who
| had made mistakes. Comment sections would be filled with folks
| laughing at Linus' latest victim. "Couldn't be me, I would
| never make this mistake". Even Linus admits he was wrong to
| treat people this way and he's taken time off to work on
| himself and become a better person. But there is still no
| shortage of people who enjoy seeing pain inflicted on others,
| nor people larping as a younger Linus.
| throwaway150 wrote:
| > no one would like to be treated this way themselves
|
| I'd like to be treated this way if I am doing really stupid
| things. If I am doing the kind of stupid things GitHub is
| doing, I'd rather someone call me out as a monkey so that I
| know I f-ed up.
|
| I know calling "monkey" is not professional but my
| expectation of professional treatment stops at my office with
| my colleagues and at a few other places. I don't expect the
| whole world to be professional to me. I can take some bloke
| on the internet calling me a monkey if that helps me to
| introspect and make things right.
|
| If they're nice about it and choose professional words to
| tell me I'm being stupid, that's great. But if they cannot
| and they call me "monkey", I'll take that too. I'd rather
| have the feedback in whatever words they can muster than not
| have the feedback at all.
| aschla wrote:
| Many people are tired of the toxic positivity common in
| corporate speak, which lets poor performers off the hook, and
| prevents high-quality talent from speaking freely.
|
| "A complete lack of empathy" is a bit of a stretch, no?
| Calling someone a monkey is fairly lighthearted, while
| getting the point across that maybe they should take stock of
| the awareness of their abilities.
| testdelacc1 wrote:
| Here's a "high performer" realising that it was his
| toxicity that was the problem, and he needs to fix it.
|
| > This week people in our community confronted me about my
| lifetime of not understanding emotions. My flippant attacks
| in emails have been both unprofessional and uncalled for.
|
| > Especially at times when I made it personal. In my quest
| for a better patch, this made sense to me. I know now this
| was not OK and I am truly sorry. The above is basically a
| long-winded way to get to the somewhat painful personal
| admission that hey, I need to change some of my behavior,
| and I want to apologize to the people that my personal
| behavior hurt and possibly drove away from kernel
| development entirely.
|
| And he did. And the project he heads is better for it. You
| don't need to call people names to run a project well.
| Linus learned that. It's time that other people who failed
| to grow up learn it too.
| Hammershaft wrote:
| There are honest constructive ways to engage that don't let
| poor performers off the hook.
|
| Calling people monkeys and losers is just shitty. It
| doesn't achieve anything, it's divisive, and it's often
| counterproductive because it creates cultures of fear.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| > A complete lack of empathy...
|
| ...for one of the largest of most toxic IT companies in the
| history if IT?
|
| Spare me, please. Microsoft is the last legal entity in the
| universe you should feel empathy for.
| testdelacc1 wrote:
| He's talking about people who wrote the code. Those are
| actual people. You've abstracted them away as "Microsoft"
| and decided they don't deserve any empathy.
| gaanbal wrote:
| a lot of "actual people" are also suffering from dunning
| kruger and just love to build stupid shit that nobody
| wants in horrific ways.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| > You've abstracted them away as "Microsoft"
|
| No, they did this when they joined Microsoft, not me. You
| don't get to be "an actual person" when you're paid by
| Microsoft to write Microsoft code for a Microsoft
| product.
| testdelacc1 wrote:
| You're talking about Microsoft like they're ISIS or al-
| Qaeda. You sound unhinged. If you ask people "do
| Microsoft employees deserve to be treated as human
| beings", 99.999999% of them will answer "yes of course".
|
| People like you terrify me.
| creato wrote:
| > One commenter justifies it by saying "if I'm fucking up,
| it's ok to speak to me this way". Sure guy, we believe you.
|
| Did you read the issue at hand?
|
| This is not average people making "mistakes". This is severe
| incompetence at every layer of decision making, and a
| complete lack of care for quality work. If you want to be mad
| at someone for being unfair, be mad at the manager of these
| people for putting them in a position they are grossly
| unprepared for.
| testdelacc1 wrote:
| > Please don't comment on whether someone read an article.
| "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be
| shortened to "The article mentions that".
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| Could you review the guidelines of this website and follow
| them?
| rurban wrote:
| He probably read too many Linux kernel mailinglist posts
| recently.
|
| But I agree on the Devon Zuegel praise. Most of the good devs
| and managers are gone. Only brian for the git SHA-256 migration
| is still there I think, though he got no time finishing it.
| paulddraper wrote:
| > eager to inflict some kind of bloated, buggy JavaScript
| framework on us in the name of progress
|
| Could someone elaborate what that JS framework is? Is this
| recent?
|
| I think GitHub was built on Rails, and the UI has changed
| relatively little in the past few years.
| paulddraper wrote:
| It means to be snidely controversial.
|
| > Putting aside GitHub's relationship with ICE...
|
| If you actual actually wanted to put that aside, you could
| have...put it aside.
|
| (Plus it being weird on a substantive basis. Selectively
| blacklisting specific government agencies...that's just not a
| sustainable approach.)
| eviks wrote:
| What's unsustainable about it?
| paulddraper wrote:
| I thought this was obvious, but you will be asked to
| evaluate every government/organization on their morales. So
| they enforce immigration laws, not enforce it, enforce
| improperly, do they support abortion, do they support the
| right side in the Middle East, do they have racist
| policies, do they not have anti-racist policies, do they
| limit freedom of speech, do they not limit free speech
| enough.
|
| Every service has rules but are the rules _clear and
| consistent_ enough that organizations can reliably use the
| service without worrying they'll be terminated.
| eviks wrote:
| > you will be asked to evaluate every
| government/organization on their morales
|
| So what? Obviously you won't respond to all the
| permutations, so can draw only some red lines.
|
| > without worrying they'll be terminated
|
| Yes, you can have some principles without increasing
| these concerns
| paulddraper wrote:
| > Obviously you won't
|
| That's what I meant by not scalable/sustainable.
| raincole wrote:
| Quite on-brand of Zig, though.
| myaccountonhn wrote:
| Eh I thought it was on point. The github CEO talking about
| adopt ai or get out uses no curse words or direct insults, but
| i found it far more threatening and distasteful.
|
| Hackernews seems to consistently believe that you can be
| terrible as long as you're polite.
| huimang wrote:
| Look at the issue linked. While I don't think that language is
| preferable, at some point we need to call out terrible and lazy
| code.
| MaxfordAndSons wrote:
| It doesn't reflect well, but also, is it not fairly par for the
| course from a BDFL type? Surely Linus Torvalds has said meaner
| things at some point on a listserv. Why does this guy get
| blasted for it? Because people still have generally positive
| sentiment towards Github? Just a day or 2 ago some other
| article was making similarly "ad hominem" attacks towards
| anonymous Youtube PMs, it got tons of upvotes and nobody
| clutched their pearls for the poor PMs. The Github/MS engineers
| who maintain actions (whose poor performance probably isn't
| even the result of any single individuals bad code), will be
| fine.
|
| Seems like the HN mob is just as capricious as the author in
| deciding who gets as pass or not.
| latexr wrote:
| > Surely Linus Torvalds has said meaner things at some point
| on a listserv.
|
| It boggles the mind why people keep using Linus as an excuse
| to justify rudeness. _Linus apologised_ , he recognised what
| he did for years was not OK, and took time off to reflect and
| become a better person.
|
| > Seems like the HN mob is just as capricious as the author
| in deciding who gets as pass or not.
|
| Are all the people who commented in that submission
| commenting on this one? No? Then it's not the same group of
| people, and opinions are different. There's no "mob", HN
| isn't a hive mind. If it were, you'd be part of it and agree.
| Jean-Papoulos wrote:
| I much prefer the authors of anything on the internet be honest
| about what they think instead of self-censoring their language.
| I really thought we all agreed on disliking Newspeak ?
| Levitating wrote:
| i think the word "losers" was replaced by "rookies"
| yobbo wrote:
| Kicking up is very different from kicking down. Zig is not
| kicking down here.
| isodev wrote:
| Monkeys, LLMs, coding agents, AI - are all synonyms for me. Not
| to be confused with actual living things.
| rohitpaulk wrote:
| For those who haven't seen the actual issue that links to, I'd
| take a closer look. Pretty insane:
| https://github.com/actions/runner/issues/3792#issuecomment-3...
| creato wrote:
| Yeah, calling the authors of this code losers and monkeys is
| being kind. There is zero excuse for ever writing code like
| this, the incompetence is staggering.
| Sirikon wrote:
| But he is right
| Ygg2 wrote:
| I thought people knew andrewk was an ahole? I thought that was
| his supposed charm? Like Linus.
|
| I mean https://github.com/ziglang/zig/pull/24317 wasn't that
| long ago.
| sgt wrote:
| What's wrong with that pull request?
| vanschelven wrote:
| This writing made me curious enough to click the provided
| citation though, and I'd have to say "monkeys" is really being
| kind if we take into account the combination of code quality
| issues, lack of surrounding process, and _what_ these code
| quality issues are affecting (the criticalness of the path).
| austin-cheney wrote:
| As a former JavaScript developer and current JavaScript
| hobbyist I see why this article's language is deeply offensive.
| Most employed JavaScript developers absolutely suck at what
| they do and are highly sensitive about it. Everything other
| than praise is offensive. The surest indication of maturity is
| abandoning politeness in favor of evidence, empathy, or
| stronger arguments.
|
| On the other hand Zig is often regarded as the fastest
| executing modern programming language. They have earned the
| ability to complain about performance like no one else. The
| article cites precise issues they have with GitHub.
|
| Furthermore JavaScript, when not written by monkeys, is
| extremely fast which further qualifies their complaint. For
| example I have a large SPA that loads in the browser from
| across a network in around 0.065 seconds and achieves full
| rendering and state restoration in about 0.135 seconds. If I
| drop the largest one feature from that SPA I can get full
| rendering and state restoration in about 0.08 seconds. Your
| typical JavaScript developer, on the other hand, struggles to
| copy/paste code into a JSX template someone else defined with
| no idea how to measure performance. To me that's what's
| offensive.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| Yea... Nail in the coffin on them for me.
| bfreis wrote:
| Seems like Andrew realize how insane it was name calling fellow
| software engineers and updated his post to not call Github
| engineers "monkeys" anymore. Still a shame he did it initially,
| and that he didn't apologize for it, but removing that is
| better than nothing.
| tinyhouse wrote:
| Well, integrations are also important. Currently everything works
| first with Github (Codex, Claude Code, Linear, etc. etc.) so it's
| just easier. There's also Gitlab for people who don't like
| Github. Personally for what I do, Github does its job well, and
| the free private repos are great.
| wewewedxfgdf wrote:
| Very questionable decision.
|
| You're running what aims to be a major programming language -
| have it where people expect and live with your gripes about the
| platform.
|
| In retail you set up your store in the biggest mall with the most
| customers walking past - sure you can go set up in some back
| alley but don't expect customers to come to your store. This
| remains true even if the mall owns forget to mop the floor.
|
| This feels immature and does not give confidence in the
| project/language leadership.
| zdw wrote:
| None of this means that you have to be on a specific platform.
| GitHub as default/mandatory is a single point of failure for
| the entire tech industry.
|
| For an example of another language that avoids being entirely
| coupled into Github, Go has it's real code hosting and CI
| interaction on a Gerrit instance, with some sync back and forth
| to GitHub for a few items.
|
| The CI pain and operational blindness mentioned in the Zig post
| is entirely real.
| wewewedxfgdf wrote:
| Yeah but marketing matters for Zig because it's still
| struggling to get significant mindshare.
|
| Zig needs to behave more mainstream rather than less and
| technical gripes about the source hosting platform should not
| matter more than marketing.
| mk89 wrote:
| Well maybe we are seeing this the wrong way. Maybe that's
| exactly the mindshare they want.
|
| People who get angry when they see bad code, so much to
| call the developers lackeys and monkeys.
|
| And an organization whose code base doesn't have to be on a
| mainstream server to attract exactly those who agree with
| this choice.
| skybrian wrote:
| Maybe, but isn't it too soon to be mainstream anyway? Until
| the language and standard libraries hit 1.0, it seems like
| Zig is for early adopters. Having too many of the wrong
| kind of users is just going to be frustrating for everyone.
| lenkite wrote:
| Marketing and visibility retention will likely be better
| when people think - hey its the PL that is NOT on github.
| contrarian1234 wrote:
| I think it's a broader cultural issue where everyone has to
| have strong opinions about everything and make a strong stand -
| instead of picking your battles
|
| Not that I necessarily disagree with their reasoning, but stick
| to having strong feelings about your core "mission"? It just
| feels a bit "unstable". Hard to imagine such stuff coming from
| Java or Python or whatever other major language
| Arainach wrote:
| Eh. Their messaging is immature here, but you don't need to be
| on the biggest thing - especially when you have a limited set
| of contributiors, not millions.
|
| It is deeply unfortunate that Git won instead of Mercurial and
| even more unfortunate that GitHub won. GitHub's code review/PR
| UI is an abomination. We had better tools 15 years ago and
| GitHub is still a regression. There are tons of reasons to move
| off it if you're willing to pay the cost of working with
| alternatives.
| animesh wrote:
| I wonder why they did not choose Sourcehut or were they on
| there at some point?
| p2detar wrote:
| And I wonder why Codeberg and not a self-hosted
| Forgejo/Gitea instance? I also don't like GitHub but this
| bandwagon to Codeberg doesn't seem quite alright to me.
| There must be another way than jumping from one centralized
| git hosting service to another.
| dvrj101 wrote:
| > This feels immature and does not give confidence in the
| project/language leadership.
|
| so making tough decisions is now immature this days lol.
|
| > mall owns forget to mop the floor
|
| quite a whitewashing i would say.
| Klonoar wrote:
| _> You 're running what aims to be a major programming language
| - have it where people expect and live with your gripes about
| the platform._
|
| The core types who will make use of, contribute to, and/or
| otherwise use the repo likely don't need it to be on GitHub.
| Having it "where people expect" is useful for drive-by
| contributions but Zig doesn't really need that.
|
| Furthermore, why should we as a larger community cede things to
| GitHub and Microsoft? It doesn't change unless larger parties
| move the needle.
| Quothling wrote:
| Who are people? People in USA? Where I live it's frankly a
| positive if you're on a different base than github. SQLite
| seems to manage fine without github, so I'm not sure why you
| think Zig isn't going to be. That being said I don't
| necessarily disagree with your position on maturity, SQLite has
| an official github mirror after all. Even if you don't want to
| bother with that there are a lot of ways to write about it
| without calling people monkeys.
| bayesnet wrote:
| SQLite doesn't really accept PRs[0], so I don't think is
| comparable here. The SQLite model is great for their purposes
| but I doubt it's suited to a community-based open
| contribution setup.
|
| [0]: https://sqlite.org/copyright.html#:~:text=Open%2DSource%
| 2C%2...
| procaryote wrote:
| The messaging is questionable, but strengthening an open source
| alternative to a microsoft near-monopoly seems pretty good.
|
| Perhaps people should stop expecting all source code to be on a
| microsoft platform?
| flohofwoe wrote:
| It's just a public git repository and issue tracker, not a
| frigging "store front". People don't "discover" Zig because its
| source repository being hosted on Github vs some other random
| URL (and creating a bug report or PR appears to work exactly
| like on GH anyways: https://codeberg.org/ziglang/zig).
| poulpy123 wrote:
| It's a programming language, not a tool for end users. The
| intersection of people for who Zig being hosted on github is
| helpful with the people who are going to interact with the code
| source is basically none
| rererereferred wrote:
| It might even reduce the numbr of slop PRs they get.
| arp242 wrote:
| For established projects of a certain level of audience and
| attention, they can be hosted anywhere and it won't matter all
| that much. Zig is already such a project. People already know
| about Zig. There's tons of established projects that don't use
| GitHub (some migrated, some never used it) and they're fine.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I agree. I usually nope out of projects not on GitHub until
| someone builds an alternative that seems solid. I am surprised
| none of the major Linux distros have built one yet. I could see
| it being better funded if a few major Linux distros decided to
| host their own. Ubuntu had theirs but it uses a custom source
| control system so its niche to Ubuntu itself.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| Ah yes, I always look for big box Warhammer 40k stores in
| malls.
| nromiun wrote:
| So much vague outrage over nothing. That CI system created by so
| called monkeys is the one of the best free CI service in the
| world. Not everyone has the millions of dollars like Zig
| Foundation to create their own CI servers.
|
| After that they appreciate GitHub Sponsors, but say it is now a
| complete liability just because a project leader left. What are
| the actual changes? Any new rule? But no, it is now a "liability"
| and we should accept it.
|
| Honestly speaking I like how big projects are exploring new
| hosting options. But there is no need to attack other platforms
| like this to promote your new host.
| homebrewer wrote:
| The only good thing about it is their very generous limits for
| "open source" projects (it doesn't even have to be free
| software AFAIK, just the source has to be visible to everyone).
|
| The CI service itself is an absolute trash fire caused by the
| usual Microsoft NIH, and if they have financial means not to
| deal with it anymore, I see no reason for them to waste their
| limited development time on dealing with it.
| nromiun wrote:
| They could have easily done that without all the insults.
| baq wrote:
| I agree it's unprofessional, but at least we're talking
| about GHA, even if tangentially, because there's a lot to
| talk about and not much of it is good.
| Groxx wrote:
| I would agree if they weren't so clearly deserved. Calling
| shit out as being shit is fine.
| nromiun wrote:
| Just because you think something is shit does not mean it
| becomes gospel for the rest of us. Millions of other
| people are fine with GitHub, respect their choice.
| LtWorf wrote:
| He didn't insult the people who are still using github.
| ralph84 wrote:
| Where else would the CI service for a Microsoft product be
| invented? NIH is a weird insult in this context. If Microsoft
| had instead acquired a CI service you'd be complaining about
| how they're reducing competition.
| SkiFire13 wrote:
| > Where else would the CI service for a Microsoft product
| be invented?
|
| FYI Azure has its own CI service and that's pretty bad too.
| s-lambert wrote:
| Microsoft had their own CI service and it existed before
| GitHub Actions did, it was renamed Azure Dev Ops but it
| existed before GitHub Actions and it was largely similar
| from what I remember.
| bytehowl wrote:
| >it doesn't even have to be free software AFAIK, just the
| source has to be visible to everyone
|
| With the implication that MS is free to harvest it for LLM
| training?
| stabbles wrote:
| The best free CI system in the world has macOS 15 runners
| running at 75% capacity due to a background process that
| consumes 100% CPU [1]. The problem is known to them since May
| but not fixed half a year later.
|
| [1] https://github.com/actions/runner-images/issues/13358
| nromiun wrote:
| So tell us where is the better free macOS CI provider? I
| would love to switch to them.
|
| That is what I meant by the BEST FREE CI provider. It is not
| the best if you have money for something better.
| ncruces wrote:
| Yes I want to know too. Where can I run this test matrix
| for less than $100/mo _unbilled_ (where half the _"cost"_
| is from macOS alone): https://github.com/ncruces/go-
| sqlite3/wiki/Support-matrix
|
| I built a similar matrix to test wazero (of which I'm a
| maintainer).
| brabel wrote:
| I would love to know it. I use GH Actions to test my open
| source code on MacOS, Windows and Linux FOR FREE which is
| amazing. Without them I just wouldn't test on anything
| other than what I happen to have locally or what
| TravisCI/CircleCI had in their free tier before GH Actions
| made things so much easier.
|
| But if you do know of alternatives, I'm all ears.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Unfortunately I don't really know what a CI provider should
| do to fix this.
| CafeRacer wrote:
| You are not talking a out github actions? Monkeys would have
| done it better.
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| And yet there are millions of monkeys out there who've
| produced nothing.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| > That CI system created by so called monkeys is the one of the
| best free CI service in the world.
|
| It really isn't (look at Gitlab's for comparison), the only
| advantage of Github CI is that it offers free Mac runners.
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| Well nothing is better than anything else other than the
| things that make it better.
| silisili wrote:
| Anyone who has ever used Gitlab, or dare my foul mouth say
| Jenkins, has experienced a better system than Github actions.
|
| Unless it's miraculously improved recently as it's been a
| couple years for me, they didn't even document their
| regex/pattern matching. Best I could find via searching was
| that it was whatever Ruby used, which wasn't any kind of real
| standard.
|
| I don't want to call anyone names, but whoever defends said
| system deserves some ribbing.
| fHr wrote:
| Gitlab smokes and rolls githubs shitty ass CI all day any day
| for over 10 years now
| IshKebab wrote:
| I've had so many issues with Gitlab CI. I don't think it's
| really any better than Github's.
| ljm wrote:
| I'll take any CI service that isn't cobbled together by
| mountains of nested and indirected YAML.
|
| Absolute horror to maintain.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Yeah... are there any though?
| dlisboa wrote:
| I've used both and I don't know if they've been improved but
| both were terrible a few years ago (at least in our case).
| Very unstable and finicky. I last used Jenkins in 2017 and
| Gitlab in 2021, so I don't know how they are today.
| jacooper wrote:
| What? Jenkins? No way.
| 63stack wrote:
| I'm pretty sure the Zig Foundation does not have millions of
| dollars, contrary to Microsoft which has a market
| capitalization in the trillions, but consistently produces
| flaming garbage, product after product.
| Cloudef wrote:
| CI's job for me is to just run a nix flake
| alexrp wrote:
| > So much vague outrage over nothing.
|
| So you just chose to ignore the technical problems we have with
| GitHub Actions and then say there are no problems. That's
| certainly a take.
|
| > That CI system created by so called monkeys is the one of the
| best free CI service in the world.
|
| We self-host all our CI machines so the "free" hosted runners
| have no relevance here.
|
| > Not everyone has the millions of dollars like Zig Foundation
| to create their own CI servers.
|
| We don't have "millions of dollars". If only!
|
| I'd also note that we spend our money very efficiently; most of
| our CI machines are consumer-grade hardware hosted in team
| member's homes. We don't just throw endless amounts of money at
| cloud providers.
|
| > After that they appreciate GitHub Sponsors, but say it is now
| a complete liability just because a project leader left. What
| are the actual changes? Any new rule? But no, it is now a
| "liability" and we should accept it.
|
| GitHub Sponsors is a liability because Microsoft can increase
| their cut at any time, or even axe it outright if they don't
| think it's profitable for them anymore. This risk is very real
| considering that, as Andrew pointed out, the feature has been
| neglected for years. It is objectively less risky for us to
| have donors use a platform like Every.org.
| jswny wrote:
| Can't any donation platform you don't fully control cut you
| off at any point?
|
| What exactly is different about GitHub sponsors here?
| hobofan wrote:
| In theory sure, but you have to evaluate how likely it is.
|
| Some typical dynamics:
|
| Big org platform -> exposed to risk, as you are not a
| significant addition to their bottom line
|
| Small donation platform -> Can be easily bullied by payment
| processors to "derisk"
|
| ---
|
| every.org is a bit special, as it only lists 501c
| nonprofits - which the Zig Foundation is - and AFAIK has a
| decent track record. Most other open source projects don't
| clear that bar.
| icy wrote:
| I'm excited to see this migration happen, mostly because it
| signals to us (https://tangled.org) that large projects _are_
| willing to switch! We 're working pretty hard to get Tangled out
| of alpha--we want it to be _the_ place for free software
| communities.
|
| Also recently wrote about our vision and commitment to indies and
| communities (and never enterprise!): https://anirudh.fi/future
| xeonmc wrote:
| Aside: Bluesky PDSes are configured to let you upload up to
| 100MB per blob. Perhaps it might be worth exploring as a medium
| for hosting release artifacts? Maybe the web interface can
| merge multiple blobs as fragments of large release files
| exceeding 100MB (or 15MB for PDSes using the out-of-box config
| which seems to be the case for Tangled's instance)
| icy wrote:
| You can already do this for tags, but manually. Via CI,
| you'll need to set an app password and use goat
| (https://tangled.org/oppi.li/goat) or similar.
| lawgimenez wrote:
| So we're calling our fellow programmers monkeys and losers now.
| hinkley wrote:
| Just MSFT employees. Nobody important.
| lawgimenez wrote:
| You have a toxic attitude.
| hinkley wrote:
| No, I have two decades of negative experiences with them
| being belligerent assholes to the rest of IT and humanity
| in general.
| countWSS wrote:
| Its sad to see people silently supporting Github monopoly. Any
| migration out of github should be encouraged. Decentalized, open-
| source systems should always be preferred over corporate walled
| gardens. Trusting Microsoft never ends well. The amount of
| infrastructure/projects/etc that stop with github malfunctions
| and have no fallback or operating mirror git is astounding.
| Github is eventually going to be enshittified and abandoned, so
| its fairly wise to spread projects into multiple(not just
| codeberg) synced mirrors where any server failing doesn't stop
| progress.
| toastal wrote:
| Some of the best news I have read all week. We do not need to
| bend the knee to US megacorporations & proprietary code forges
| for open source. I hope this causes bigger discussions--
| especially including locking chat to platforms like Discord along
| the same lines.
| mythz wrote:
| I for one am thankful for GitHub Actions, having free access to
| stateless automation and deployment scripts that's versioned
| along with code, running on Servers I don't have to manage has
| been a gift.
|
| I don't miss anything from the dark days of managing self-hosted
| CI servers.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| I tend to avoid projects that take tech decisions based on
| activism. It never signals a quality product.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| All of gnu was a technical decision based on activism.
| Ignorance of this signals something as well.
| dbacar wrote:
| Apart from his skills and Zig work, this guy sounds like an angry
| teen or Linus wannabe .His tone makes Zig look like a one
| egoistic man show even it is not.
| mmaunder wrote:
| They've abandoned GitHub for Codeberg because GitHub has ICE as a
| customer. Codeberg uses Paypal which is a member of the ICE
| "Virtual Global Taskforce".
|
| https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/top-story-industry-partner...
|
| There is a purity spiral that organizations can enter when they
| start doing this, which ends up with you shoving yourself into a
| cold dark corner of the internet and still not being completely
| detached from the badness because Cisco provides infrastructure
| for nearly every major weapons manufacturer and defense
| department globally.
| __loam wrote:
| It seems like every organization in America is compromised in
| some way if you dig deep enough. Certainly you can find reasons
| for every big tech. There's still a balance to be struck
| though.
| kruffalon wrote:
| If by dig you mean lazily sweep the front door while
| listening to dance music, then yes, I agree with you :)
| __loam wrote:
| Lmao absolutely right
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| > It seems like every organization in America is compromised
| in some way if you dig deep enough.
|
| I agree, and my view is that it goes much further. Quoting
| author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn:
|
| "The line separating good and evil passes not through states,
| nor between classes, nor between political parties either--
| but right through every human heart--and through all human
| hearts.".
| sandmank wrote:
| when the shit finally starts flying there is no better place to
| be than low down, in a dark corner, with clean hands, looking
| nothing like a pig
| IshKebab wrote:
| And with no money or users....
| sapphicsnail wrote:
| You're mad because they left a vendor because they switched to
| a different vendor that you think is just as bad but also
| you're accusing them of starting an "inevitable purity spiral?"
| Which one is it?
| wilg wrote:
| It's not in conflict. They are pointing out that in this case
| their stated goal was not achieved so it's pointless.
| brendoelfrendo wrote:
| It wasn't their stated goal, if you read linked article.
| The commenter got it wrong.
| wilg wrote:
| Enlighten me, they specifically mention ICE as a reason
| they wanted to switch from GitHub?
| input_sh wrote:
| They mention it in passing before continuing with
| technical issues.
|
| They don't state it as the _only_ reason as you imply,
| but as something that contributed to their decision.
| wilg wrote:
| I am well aware it was not the only reason, but that does
| not improve the reasoning.
| otikik wrote:
| It didn't seem to me that the person you answered to was
| "mad". Are you "mad" because of what they wrote?
| picafrost wrote:
| That's a weird take-away from the post, where the only time ICE
| is mentioned is
|
| > Putting aside GitHub's relationship with ICE,
|
| and the rest of the article provides technical reasons.
| aadishv wrote:
| I feel like that's the whole point of the OP. I agree with
| the overall post but mentioning the ICE relationship seems to
| detract from the main point.
|
| "I hate GitHub because X Y and Z features are bad" is a good
| reason to move away; "I hate GitHub because one of their
| thousands of enterprise customers does not align with my
| political views" is not, in my opinion.
|
| For the record, I do not support ICE
| jenadine wrote:
| That's why the article put that reason aside
| zdragnar wrote:
| It could have done an even better job of putting it aside
| by not even mentioning it at all.
|
| Instead we're all sitting here talking about it instead
| of the technical reasons.
| tcfhgj wrote:
| Which is totally fine
| grimgrin wrote:
| so far we know of 1 branch, in 1 thread, on the entire
| internet, "talking about it instead"
| ruined wrote:
| they saw an opportunity for bait and you took it
| cratermoon wrote:
| If they had not mentioned github's association with ICE,
| then we'd be in a situation where everyone would be
| questioning whether or not the relationship had anything
| to do with the decision.
| MildlySerious wrote:
| People protesting ICE do not do so out of political
| concern, but humanitarian concern.
|
| This seems like a minor nitpick as those two are intimately
| tangled up, but it matters to make the distinction.
| Standing up for others is not petty or self-serving and
| that's exactly what this sort of conflation can falsely
| imply.
| oofbey wrote:
| Politics in the US is so extremely binarized these days
| that I think it's hard to assign motive for political
| issues beyond "my friends say that our team feels this
| way." Which I would argue is much more political than
| anything fundamental.
| andrew_ wrote:
| It's virtue signaling plain and simple. People who
| crafted their identities around the current thing in
| ~2017 are religiously attached to having to be part of
| the in group and can't let it go, and it inevitably
| bubbles up like this.
|
| This will no doubt rankle those who align with that
| group, but they are a pathetic remnant of a terrible
| period of rampant sociopathy.
| rvcas wrote:
| Just because people have a revolutionary fetish and
| fantasize about being the ones to stop Hitler in 1933
| (they would not have) does not make their delusions a
| reality. These dorks make anti-establishment vibes so
| lame. Just because you say something doesn't make it
| real.
| etyp wrote:
| I read it as "this was a big news story which we care
| about. You may know it, but it is not the primary reason.
| Here is the primary reason."
| latexr wrote:
| It does signal/imply that even if GitHub fixed every
| technical grievance tomorrow, Zig might still not come
| back.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| >and the rest of the article provides technical reasons
|
| The post ends with an indictment of capitalism.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Levels of indirections matter.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Levels of indirection matter.
| pyrale wrote:
| > There is a purity spiral that organizations can enter when
| they start doing this
|
| You are the one summoning that spiral by making a cheap gotcha
| wrt codeberg using Paypal.
|
| The project apparently could and did move because the swith
| from github to codeberg wasn't that big of an impact, and
| because, while the new forge is not perfect, they feel the
| association is less severe. There is no "purity spiral" in
| that, just a pragmatic choice factoring in ethics.
| simianwords wrote:
| As I was reading your reply I was half convinced that it was
| not purity spiral but by the end, even you admit it's an
| ethics thing so yeah it is pretty much purity spiral in
| place. Next they will leave the USA so that they won't be
| associated with Trump.
| latexr wrote:
| Practicality matters. For example, even if you choose not
| to harm other living things, you cannot avoid stepping on
| and killing the occasional insect. Theoretically you might
| be able to do it, but you'll stop having a life. But you
| can still do much in line with your beliefs, such as not
| killing animals for food.
|
| If GitHub were the sole game in town, maybe (probably) they
| wouldn't have switched. But it isn't, and they found
| something which in their view is an acceptable replacement
| and _less worse_. So yeah, maybe they don't ethically agree
| with everyone on every thing up the chain, but they
| apparently agree with them _more_. That matters. You take a
| stand where you are able to.
| simianwords wrote:
| Yeah but would you stop using AWS because of the same
| reason?
| f_devd wrote:
| I never started for similar reasons
| PapstJL4U wrote:
| There are multiple dozens of ethic schools and ideas and
| many of them are not about purity, but although viability
| and realistic expectations.
|
| They are not going Categorical imperative here.
| lkey wrote:
| Simian,
|
| You are making an ethical judgment when you say, in
| essence, that 'it is _wrong_ for businesses (and non-
| profits) to attempt to act in an ethical manner, aligned
| with their mission statement '.
|
| Making an ethical argument about the purposelessness and
| futility of ethics is... interesting to say the least.
| Please, consider stopping the internet today and instead
| spend time with a book on ethics that you think agrees with
| you sensibilities, and then look at this situation again.
| simianwords wrote:
| I didn't say it is wrong but I sure as hell wouldn't swap
| my business out of AWS to signal my virtues
| 0x000xca0xfe wrote:
| Sounds great because Zig folks do seem to have a history with
| rejecting existing tooling for fussy reasons and building their
| own (really good) stuff.
|
| If this forces them to rethink and build a better GitHub, can't
| wait.
| d0throww0 wrote:
| I think there's a difference between _providing services to X_
| and _a platform using a payment processor that collaborates
| with X_.
|
| You have a point, of course, but for many options, the best we
| can do is avoid the worst one as there's no perfect solution.
| I'm not saying that people should leave GitHub because of this,
| but I can see why some would and why they may pick a different,
| still not perfect, alternative instead of doing everything
| themselves.
| rvcas wrote:
| We're all sick of these activist dorks
| scuff3d wrote:
| I like Zig for the most part but this post does seem needlessly
| mean spirited. I don't like Microsoft or GitHub either, but I
| don't see the point of taking pot shots at the devs who work
| there.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| This just in: Software engineer with motivation and skills to
| develop a new language, strangely lacking in PR and marketing
| skills. More at 11.
| scuff3d wrote:
| Surprising or not, doesn't change what I said.
|
| And I this case it is a little surprising. Andrew is
| generally a pretty nice dude, has gone out of his way to try
| and make a fairly welcoming community. The Zig foundation
| also has Loris, who normally handles PR stuff, so he could
| have written this instead of Andrew.
|
| Finally, that's such a bullshit stereotype. Plenty of people
| in the software world are perfectly friendly and articulate.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| Gatekeeping basically. Neurotypical only please! Could
| Andrew have yielded his voice to someone who is good at PR?
| Sure. And that's how people give up and burnout.
|
| I'm ok if sometimes a nerd displays some emotion online.
|
| I'm corporate, so I have to manage my shit. I use LLMs to
| manage that. I'm glad Andrew has a space where he doesn't
| have to.
| mrcwinn wrote:
| This post is gross and makes me think a lot less of Zig. Calling
| people losers and monkeys is unprofessional and unnecessary.
| wg0 wrote:
| If voiced and channeled properly, I see very little chance of
| Microsoft and Github wouldn't prioritize fixes for a critical
| open source project.
|
| Yes issues have been filed but more could be done back channel.
|
| Personally - I think GitHub is a cultural artifact now. Of the
| entire planet. Hackers and curious minds from Japan to Alaska and
| everything in-between flock to GitHub.
| alexrp wrote:
| As I pointed out in a different comment, even IBM have to
| maintain a GitHub Actions runner fork with s390x support
| because upstream just cannot even be bothered to accept the
| relevant patches: https://github.com/uweigand/runner
|
| If IBM cannot get Microsoft to work with them on something so
| small but impactful, there's no chance we can.
|
| > Personally - I think GitHub is a cultural artifact now. Of
| the entire planet. Hackers and curious minds from Japan to
| Alaska and everything in-between flock to GitHub.
|
| And it's in the hands of a for-profit company pushing LLM
| nonsense. That should be alarming! Let's instead encourage
| people to use platforms managed by non-profits.
| megamix wrote:
| You own the code, you decide where you want to host it. If anyone
| knows, I'm looking for copyrighted code to deploy my own cloned
| service to make some money, DM.
| tonymet wrote:
| Translation ?
| megamix wrote:
| I think it would make more sense in a pure AI-topic, but the
| fact that you can scrape copyrighted content and create
| services (AI companies) is the original idea behind my
| comment. I'm not sure to what extent CoPilot was trained on
| private repositories or other possibly copyrighted code. But
| if it was e.g, I'm supporting their (Zig's) cause.
| tonymet wrote:
| $200k GH enterprise "relationship with ICE " ?
|
| I'm sure ICE spends more than $200k at Dunkin' Donuts are they in
| a relationship ?
| novoreorx wrote:
| I do feel that GitHub's product development has been less
| exciting in recent years, but that's natural for any maturing
| platform. While I can't judge whether there are fewer talented
| people involved, I've noticed they haven't increased mistakes,
| and the platform continues to grow. It would be unfair to
| overlook the hard work that goes into maintaining GitHub and
| shipping new features (even if some of those features aren't to
| everyone's taste). I'm grateful for GitHub and hope it continues
| to thrive. Peace.
| pikdum wrote:
| I'm not a fan of GitHub Actions either, but is there actually
| anything better nowadays? I've just come to accept it as the best
| of bad options.
| Quothling wrote:
| I don't like Azure DevOps or it's pipelines (the yaml ones, not
| the classic drag and drop that is now disabled by default), but
| I like it a lot more than github actions. I doubt we'd ever
| really use github actions for security reasons, but I do prefer
| the explicit behaviors and templating with structure with azure
| compared to how Github Actions tries to solve change management
| with digitalisation. I can totally see why github actions would
| make more sense if you don't have enterprise organisation type
| AD/Entra + Azure though.
| shim__ wrote:
| Gitlab CI is leagues better
| mlugg wrote:
| Forgejo Actions is what Zig has migrated to. It's very similar
| to GitHub Actions; the downside of that is that you inherit
| questionable design choices, but the big upside is that
| migration is super easy. While they don't target 1:1
| compatibility, things are similar enough that you basically
| only need to tweak workflow files very slightly. Our experience
| so far is that it fixes most of our serious problems with
| GitHub Actions; in particular, their runner software is
| significantly easier to deploy and configure, has much better
| target support (GitHub's runner is essentially impossible to
| use outside of x86_64/aarch64 linux/windows/macos; we tried to
| patch it to support riscv64-linux and got stuck on some
| nonsensical problems on GitHub's side!), and actually accepts
| contributions & responds to issues. My issues with the GitHub
| Actions' backend & web interface (of which I have _many_ ) are
| pretty much all gone, too, with no new issues taking their
| place.
| booleandilemma wrote:
| I'm very happy with this and hope it's part of a larger trend to
| move software away from Big Co. I'll have to move my projects off
| GitHub too, so I'm not a hypocrite :)
| WhereIsTheTruth wrote:
| Good, rejecting reliance on Microsoft's centralized platform
| means less vulnerability to their evil policy/practices (AI,
| users/country bans, privacy, vendor-locking)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45679837
| antics wrote:
| > Unfortunately, when it sold out to Microsoft, the clock started
| ticking. "Please just give me 5 years before everything goes to
| shit," I thought to myself. And here we are, 7 years later,
| living on borrowed time.
|
| Man, sometimes I feel like I live on a different planet. I have
| been using GitHub since 2010 and--while I really wish I had a
| nicer way of putting this--I cannot remember a time when all of
| the flagship products were not uniformly either worst-in-class or
| close to it. Code review/PRs, issues, code search, CI, a real
| enterprise offering, and now AI features: all of these offerings
| had gaps serious enough to instigate real, threatening upstarts,
| and some of those upstarts were themselves big enough to become
| public companies. Seriously. A viable path to IPO from 2013 to
| (say) 2019 was literally "make a version of a GitHub feature that
| simply does not suck."
|
| I _loved_ GitHub in 2010. I also remember those years, 2013 to
| 2019, being essentially totally lost, with no meaningful product
| movement at all. Am I truly alone in this? What is this Andrew
| talking about here?
|
| I'm not going to defend the Microsoft acquisition, but at least--
| excruciatingly slowly--things like code review and issues are
| finally starting to receive features. It's crazy to say it out
| loud but that is what I see.
|
| I just can't help but think the product "enshittification"
| narrative here is an _ex post_ justification of the author 's own
| feelings.
| hinkley wrote:
| GitHub is only nice if you've used bitbucket after Atlassian
| bought it.
|
| But that's very faint praise.
| zeiastra wrote:
| sounds about right to me. fuck github. if github can do whatever
| they want in the name of progress then surely they'd survive
| being called a monkey. anything with microsoft's name on it was
| designed by a drug-addled albatross.
|
| instead of crying about zig's coc they should work on that
| abomination of a framework.
| blackcatsec wrote:
| I'm not reading this whole thread, but based on the title I
| figured it kind of boiled down to name calling bullshit by more
| open source maintainers.
|
| Folks, we _have_ to stop this bullshit. NOBODY is perfect. Not
| you. Not me. Not anyone. It IS entirely possible that some script
| thing was written by an intern and it doesn 't quite work right.
| That's possible. Does that make them a shitty intern?
|
| As I've told others, and try to tell others, empathy is super
| important in the tech field. As a fellow autistic person who used
| to be this way towards other people, I find it equally as jarring
| now and completely turns me off to listening to whatever that
| person has to say when they make posts like this.
|
| Give people some grace, make fixes, move on with your life.
| That's the beauty of OSS development. Submit some patches, reach
| out to maintainers, open a dialog, have good conversation. Don't
| just shit all over someone for the sake of doing so even if they
| are doing something "stupid".
|
| I promise you we will ALL be better for it.
| ttiurani wrote:
| Looking at these comments, it's painfully apparent how many think
| that being polite in your communication is more important than
| actually doing something.
|
| I agree it would have been nicer if the message was more polite.
| But if you compare that to having the backbone follow through
| with meaningful long-term changes against a corporation you don't
| trust or respect, there shouldn't even be a discussion.
|
| And don't even get me started with the people who come in here
| just to point out that Codeberg isn't perfect either.
| gethly wrote:
| > it's painfully apparent how many think that being polite in
| your communication is more important than actually doing
| something
|
| I absolutely agree, but people in charge of large
| projects/groups, in any context, should know better than to put
| their personal feelings and opinion on topics into the
| "corporate" messages they are putting out. I am guilty of this
| myself, no one is holier than thou, but still. AK should know
| better.
| bakugo wrote:
| > it's painfully apparent how many think that being polite in
| your communication is more important than actually doing
| something.
|
| The zig maintainers think that, too, thus the presence of a
| Code of Conduct on their website. But, as always, it's a "rules
| for thee, but not for me" situation - if the author was called
| a "monkey" by someone else, I can guarantee he would invoke the
| CoC to call them out, but when he does it, it's fine.
| raincole wrote:
| > it's painfully apparent how many think that being polite in
| your communication is more important than actually doing
| something
|
| So you want people to talk about actions, not manners. Great.
|
| > And don't even get me started with the people who come in
| here just to point out that Codeberg isn't perfect either.
|
| Except actions they did with Codeberg...?
|
| Sharing their experience about Codeberg isn't off-topic in a
| thread about a major repo migrating to Codeberg.
| LinXitoW wrote:
| The fetish for "manners" has stood in the way of every single
| positive societal change. It's exactly what MLK meant with
| the white moderate favoring a negative peace over positive
| change:
|
| the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward
| freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux
| Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to
| "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which
| is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the
| presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you
| in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of
| direct action"
| foldr wrote:
| MLK was, of course, famous for hurling vitriolic personal
| insults at people he disagreed with.
|
| You should really take a step back and consider if MLK's
| struggle for racial equality is an appropriate point of
| comparison for an open source project deciding to change to
| a different CI provider.
| samdoesnothing wrote:
| > You should really take a step back and consider if
| MLK's struggle for racial equality is an appropriate
| point of comparison for an open source project deciding
| to change to a different CI provider.
|
| To the type of nerds who crash out about a git hosting
| provider and publicly insult other developers, moving off
| GitHub might even be more meaningful than whatever MLK
| did.
| raincole wrote:
| A not-so-well designed CI is comparable to KKK. This is how
| discussions on the internet look today.
| bartekpacia wrote:
| This. The round & slimy language is what big corps do. I don't
| like how this post is written - but what really matters here is
| that they are doing a good job moving away from GitHub. I hope
| more OSS does this.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Nobody thinks that. They just don't think that "doing
| something" gives you an excuse to be an arsehole. _Especially_
| if you are hypocritically violating your own CoC.
| Jean-Papoulos wrote:
| Yes, it does. Given the choice of having a coworker that's a
| very nice 0.1x engineer and having a bloody annoying one
| that's a 10x I'll work with the 10x any day.
|
| The internet has evolved such a Newspeak, censor-driven
| culture, it's sad to see. I want people to be able to tell
| each other "I think this is shit and here's why".
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| Given that choice, I would work with neither of them. The
| world has no shortage of people who are both skilled
| engineers and _not_ assholes.
| hinkley wrote:
| Just the fact of someone migrating a project to another
| platform during the last week of November suggests that last
| straws were involved. That's more of a January or a June thing
| than November/December.
|
| Fury can be a powerful motivator to commit to doing something
| you've been putting off. It also means your community
| announcement is going to be pretty spicy, unless you let
| someone else write it.
| atenni wrote:
| > I agree it would have been nicer if the message was more
| polite. But if you compare that to having the backbone follow
| through with meaningful long-term changes against a corporation
| you don't trust or respect, there shouldn't even be a
| discussion.
|
| You're framing it as either/or when it isn't. You can push for
| real change and communicate like an adult. The two aren't in
| conflict; often they reinforce each other.
| nlitened wrote:
| > The two aren't in conflict; often they reinforce each other
|
| I'd think they _are_ inherently in conflict. Every person has
| 24 hours per day, and they can spend them on researching and
| doing what's right or on reaching consensus. There is some
| mutual reinforcement to some extent (as it's usually right to
| have a reasonable consensus on what's the right choice), but
| beyond some basic level there's always tradeoff.
|
| And for programming language designers, I really appreciate
| when they make the right long-term choices even if I don't
| understand initially why they were made.
| samdoesnothing wrote:
| Politeness is free and easy, it's not a big ask and it's
| certainly not an either-or.
|
| I wouldn't even call it politeness, it's more like basic human
| decency. Would Andrew Kelly appreciate it if the LLVM guys
| publicly wrote a blog post calling the Zig maintainers losers
| and monkeys? Just screams of immaturity, which isn't surprising
| seeing their political views.
| kajika91 wrote:
| This is a very good move, using more open technology benefits
| everyone in the long run.
|
| Aside from the bitter words against Github (and I read comments
| here forgetting about the very real consequences with people
| lives like collaboration with ICE), using codeberg is using
| Forgejo : those technology are by us and for us. Unlike Github we
| can run our own if necessary and all the technology (actions and
| such) can be improved and be shared between us.
|
| An other benefit of Forgejo/Codeberg is the absence of pushing
| for paying more, Github is not free and lives of users going to
| Azure/Gemini or other Mircrosoft services. There are many parts
| that are made/changed to nudge people into paying more and more
| and be vendor-locked.
|
| I like my life to have the fewest dark patterns as possible and
| Coderberg is extremely helpful.
| zenlot wrote:
| Despite what majority are defending here, I love how Zig phrased
| out their blog. We're not in fake enterprise, where HR is guiding
| your language, calling you family and then fire you whenever
| convenient to them.
|
| This language by Andrew is natural, real and should be valued
| more than anything else. Thank you, it's a refresher and it
| reminds me an old internet, where everyone been really free to
| write what and how they wanted it to be.
|
| Who are you after all to judge how he writes his opinions?
|
| Happy hacking, Andrew!
| globalnode wrote:
| yeah dunno why anyone would willingly use a msoft product if
| there was a viable alternative (i say from my windows machine
| doh, its for games, really!)
| preisschild wrote:
| > i say from my windows machine doh, its for games, really!
|
| Games run really well on Linux nowadays too :P
| coolgoose wrote:
| I am by no means an Ai fanboy, but not using translation tools
| feels odd?
| rererereferred wrote:
| I thought the same but from another perspective, it's better to
| explain things in a language you dominate and let others
| translate it to theirs, which might be a good or bad
| translation; than translate it yourself to a language you don't
| dominate and the others always get a bad translation. At least
| in the first case new people can come with better translations.
|
| This is all assuming translation tools always translate things
| wrong, which they do when it comes to programming terms.
| hobofan wrote:
| One doesn't exclude the other. You can use machine
| translation and clearly marking it as such, and then let
| people override them if there is the necessary contribution
| activity.
| brunojppb wrote:
| You call the GitHub folks "monkeys" and "rookies" and at the end
| you "humbly" ask people to donate off? That is pretty depressing
| to see.
|
| I used to look up to the Zig folks...
| fpauser wrote:
| Consequent move.
| reactordev wrote:
| It's language like this that sours any darling effect and lets
| you know that the special project you hope would change the world
| is run by a child.
| bpbp-mango wrote:
| what's wrong with ICE
| danielEM wrote:
| Looks like advertisement of codeberg - worked, got my account
| there
|
| The message itself could be a bit nicer however. I agree with
| what it says but not with how it is written.
| dtj1123 wrote:
| In an industry full of people for whom there's little to no
| expectation that their work will do much more than fluff up a
| trust fund somewhere and pay their bills, it's refreshing to see
| someone who both has principles and is willing to act on them.
| usrbinenv wrote:
| I thought those of you who said he was being offensive were more
| or less justified in saying it here. Then I read the post.
| Literally nothing offensive. Calling someone a code-monkey has
| been around for as long as I can remember. If throughout your
| career you haven't questioned yourself "am I a code monkey?" at
| least once you're either incredibly smart or incredibly stupid.
|
| I can't agree with him more that Github went to absolute shit and
| I can feel React crap emanating from it without even looking at
| the code. There's everything in the world wrong with React and I
| would easily call anyone advocating it a code-monkey in their
| face. It's not about JavaScript itself - it's about the framework
| ideas, which are absolute trash. If anyone's offended by a code-
| monkey, I feel like maybe they should be.
| roflcopter69 wrote:
| ITT people defending a megacorp. Oh my...
| antirez wrote:
| Wow. I think that's a serious mistake. Maybe GitHub is no longer
| so great and snappy but nowhere to justify moving something that
| needs: 1. Money, 2. Exposition, to something obscure just because
| it's a bit better. It's Git with an UI anyway, there isn't such
| large difference. I don't care about the fact the post is harsh:
| it's the content that it is broken from my POV because. It is
| absolutely legit to do something like that, in theory, but when
| you are handling a project that - at this point - is also the
| chosen language of a non trivial amount of folks, you need to act
| not just following what you like, but what is better for the
| project in the long time, and it is very hard to see how going
| away from GitHub (the fucking big market of open source software
| in the main city plaza -- let's use the same post tones) is
| better for Zig. What I think it is better is, of course, not
| absolutely better, but let's zoom on this issue _root cause_. It
| is the classical developer intolerance for tool that are not "as
| they wish/think", which is very common among technical people,
| but is a POV, I mean this "tool oriented" workflow, where this
| little feature/customization matters so much in your life
| (instead of adapting a bit and do not care), that I believe is a
| problem in our industry, and also has effects on the design
| philosophy of many programmers, that are too details oriented.
| Coders spend the majority of their life in the terminal, not on
| in GitHub. To check issues / PR there is not this Stranger Things
| Upside Down nightmare.
|
| Another problem with that is that you know what you are leaving,
| but you don't really know what you find in the new place. GitHub
| used to go down often in the early days. Now they may not be
| snappy and unfortunately like 99% of the web felt for this
| Javascript framework craziness. But the site is always up, I bet
| has disaster recovery and serious backup policy, and so forth.
| Can you find this so obviously in other smaller places?
| kristoff_it wrote:
| GitHub Actions are seriously broken and that alone is a
| technically sound enough reason to move: the sleep.sh bullshit
| has degraded the performance of our CI for a long time, as it
| regularly livelocks in an endless while(true) spin runner
| agents, who stop processing new jobs. The agent itself has poor
| platform support also because it has a runtime dependency on
| .NET, and lately GH Actions started running jobs out of order
| with the result that old jobs would starve and time out,
| causing PRs to turn up red for no real reason.
|
| It's a real problem to run a project like Zig if your CI
| doesn't work. I guess we could have paid for an external CI
| service, but that as well would depend on GitHub APIs, so we
| would have gained what, a couple years? Given the current
| trajectory of GitHub I wouldn't trust them to maintain those
| APIs correctly for any longer than that (and as far as I know
| the current vibe-scheduling issues might already be reflected
| in the APIs that third party CI providers would use).
|
| Let's not forget that "GitHub is an AI company now".
| kristoff_it wrote:
| As a side note, people said that not posting anymore on
| Twitter and leaving Reddit was also a death sentence for Zig.
| Time has passed and we're still alive so far, while in the
| meantime both platforms have started their final journey
| towards the promised lands of the elves.
|
| They won't get there tomorrow or the next month, but I'm sure
| there has been a time where people started moving from
| Sourceforge to GitHub and somebody else remarked that they
| were doing something needlessly risky.
|
| As far as we can tell Codeberg is a serious attempt at a non-
| profit code sharing platform and we feel optimistic enough
| about its future that we're willing to bet on it.
| antirez wrote:
| I hope the best for Zig, Loris. But even if Zig will
| survive and prosper (I hope for both), still I believe this
| is not a sounding decision and not the right attitude. I
| hope I'm wrong, but I wanted to share with you my
| reasoning. Here you are moving away from the open source
| marketplace _AND_ from your main revenue stream. It 's not
| similar to not posting anymore to Twitter. A better
| parallel would be not posting anymore on Hacker News
| anything Zig related, in terms of potential outcome.
| kristoff_it wrote:
| We've been directing people to use other means to donate
| for a few years now, so GH Sponsors is not our main
| source of income anymore (and hasn't been for a while).
| It's still a significant chunk, but it's also not going
| to go away overnight.
|
| > A better parallel would be not posting anymore on
| Hacker News anything Zig related, in terms of potential
| outcome.
|
| I've been thinking about this lately and in my experience
| (having seen the effect of HN posts in the past when Zig
| was smaller vs now) the community is already big and
| vibrant enough that an HN post alone doesn't do too much
| of a difference. To be clear, I don't think that HN is
| losing relevance (unlike all the other big platforms
| mentioned earlier in this conversation), but our
| situation has changed.
|
| People now are more and more learning about Zig though
| cool Zig projects, not by looking at yet another
| superficial language comparison blog post, which is the
| kind of content that tends to get to the top of HN more
| often than not.
|
| More in general I think that your point about not pulling
| away from all the markeplaces of ideas is valid, but most
| of those marketplaces are not as good as they claim to be
| and we have the luxury to run a project that has a strong
| community connected to it, meaning that we won't be
| starved of attention or contributors by moving away from
| GitHub.
|
| This whole situation has an interesting parallel with
| what's happening in our community wrt chat platforms, if
| we happen to be at the same tech event in person I'll be
| happy to share with you all the details :^)
| Jarred wrote:
| Speaking as the creator of one of the largest Zig projects, I
| agree with antirez
| karel-3d wrote:
| Well, GitHub is under AI org now internally at MSFT; on the
| github front page, they mostly advertise Copilot; I think the
| ability to host, run and fund code is accidental.
| sylware wrote:
| Very good move, codeberg is noscript/basic (x)html friendly,
| which microsoft github is no more. Unfortunately, zig is in bad
| shape since microsoft rust is pushed hard everywhere in spite of
| zig.
| forgotpwd16 wrote:
| >Let us please consider the GitHub issues that remain open as
| metaphorically "copy-on-write". Please leave all your existing
| GitHub issues and pull requests alone. No need to move your stuff
| over to Codeberg unless you need to make edits, additional
| comments, or rebase. We're still going to look at the already
| open pull requests and issues; don't worry.
|
| No way for those to be moved too or not worth the effort? Unless
| misremembering, another project that moved forges (to GitLab?)
| had somehow done it.
| mlugg wrote:
| GitHub's API has extremely aggressive rate limits which make
| migrating large numbers of existing issues and PRs off of the
| platform borderline impossible. AIUI, this is why Gitea's main
| repo is on GitHub: they couldn't figure out a way to cleanly
| migrate! The tinfoil hat in me absolutely sees this as an
| attempt at vendor lock-in on GitHub's end.
| emrah wrote:
| Codeberg repo took only an eternity to load. So much for
| "snappy".
| nasretdinov wrote:
| Seems to be HackerNews effect. It's typically instant
| dchest wrote:
| I sent a pull request to an open source project and GitHub added
| Copilot to review it, saying _I_ invited it to review,
| embarrassing me. It then spit out some nonsense. Turns out this
| is controlled by a switch somewhere, which was enabled.
|
| I like Copilot in VSCode, but this is BS.
| akagusu wrote:
| This is one more reason to use Zig.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| The arguments seem... really weak ? They just linked to some
| random obscure bug and an obscure OS not being supported in
| containers (and I'd imagine solution being "just bring your own
| runner").
|
| I have... questions about Zig leadership
| messe wrote:
| > They just linked to some random obscure bug
|
| A bug that they have encountered, have reported, with a
| description of the root cause, and has not been fixed. A bug
| that has wasted their time and money.
| thrwyexecbrain wrote:
| Do the arguments have to be strong? I do not think they need to
| provide any justification. If the core developers decided that
| they would be more happy (or less miserable) with a different
| service, then let them.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| If they are not why bother ?
|
| "We don't like being hosted under microsoft due their
| business practices" is perfectly fine argument, no need to
| nitpick bugs out of bugtracker for justification
| spiffyk wrote:
| I mean, if they've been regularly hitting said bug, does it
| matter how obscure it is? If I were using a tool that was
| broken for me personally, I'd be ditching it, too; with
| absolutely zero regard to whether the tool works for others.
| alexrp wrote:
| > obscure OS not being supported
|
| Believe it or not, there are platforms outside of the big 3.
|
| The GitHub Actions runner does not work on FreeBSD, NetBSD,
| OpenBSD, and illumos, all of which are operating systems we
| either have existing support for, or intend to start supporting
| properly soon. (We already have FreeBSD CI; machines for the
| other 3 are arriving at my place tomorrow as it happens.)
|
| And that's ignoring CPU architectures; the upstream GitHub
| Actions runner only supports x86 and aarch64. We had to
| maintain a fork that adds support for all the other
| architectures we care about such as riscv, loongarch, s390x,
| etc. We will also likely be adding mips64 and powerpc64 to the
| mix in the future.
|
| Even IBM have to maintain an s390x fork because Microsoft can't
| even be bothered to accept PRs that add more platforms:
| https://github.com/uweigand/runner
| networked wrote:
| > We already have FreeBSD CI; machines for the other 3 are
| arriving at my place tomorrow as it happens.
|
| That's great. I hope it works out, and you have CI for
| NetBSD, OpenBSD, and illumos, too.
|
| Go's support for NetBSD has been a big boon to the more
| casual NetBSD user who isn't going to maintain a port. It
| means a random Go open-source project you use probably works
| on NetBSD already, or if it doesn't, it can be fixed
| upstream. Maybe Zig could play a similar role.
|
| It's a shame GitHub doesn't have native CI even for FreeBSD
| on x86-64. I can see the economic case against it, of course.
| That said, the third-party Cross-Platform GitHub Action
| (https://github.com/cross-platform-actions/action) has made
| Free/Net/OpenBSD CI practical for me. I have used it in many
| projects. The developer is currently working on OmniOS
| support in https://github.com/cross-platform-actions/omnios-
| builder.
| alexrp wrote:
| > Go's support for NetBSD has been a big boon to the more
| casual NetBSD user who isn't going to maintain a port. It
| means a random Go open-source project you use probably
| works on NetBSD already, or if it doesn't, it can be fixed
| upstream. Maybe Zig could play a similar role.
|
| In fact, we do already have cross-compilation support for
| NetBSD (and FreeBSD). But we currently only "test" NetBSD
| by building the language behavior tests and standard
| library tests for it on Linux, i.e. we don't actually run
| them, nor do we build the compiler itself for NetBSD.
| Native CI machines will allow us to fill that gap.
|
| As it happens, Go's cross-compilation support does indeed
| make our lives easier for provisioning CI machines since we
| can build the Forgejo Runner for all of them from one
| machine:
| https://codeberg.org/ziglang/runner/releases/tag/v12.0.0
| cedws wrote:
| I don't necessarily disagree with these points (especially with
| Actions being an unstable POS) but it's not very encouraging to
| see such language from the lead of Zig. I would reconsider future
| donations to the Zig Foundation if I were donating.
| budududuroiu wrote:
| Unsure if this post is being astroturfed or not, but seeing
| HackerNews root for Microsoft and boo communities that embrace
| alternatives feels very, anti-hacker in mentality.
|
| Sad state of affairs
| flohofwoe wrote:
| There was a short time period between when Balmer left and the
| beginning of Windows desktop enshittification with ads and the
| (frankly insufferable) AI hype where Microsoft appeared to be
| on the right path. A saner Microsoft acquiring Github could
| have actually turned out to be a good thing, but alas...
| jswny wrote:
| I don't think people are questioning the move away from a
| gigacorp owned platform, but it's the approach, the alternative
| chosen, and the brash language that are being questioned
| mexicocitinluez wrote:
| I'm not rooting for Microsoft, but comments like this:
|
| > with the remaining rookies eager to inflict some kind of
| bloated, buggy JavaScript framework on us in the name of
| progress.
|
| and
|
| > More importantly, Actions is created by monkeys
|
| are juvenile.
| nmz wrote:
| While juvenile, it is a fair point that github and all
| websites that ditch everything for javascript get less snappy
| to use.
| skylurk wrote:
| > Thank you to the Forgejo contributors who helped us with our
| issues switching to the platform, as well as the Codeberg folks
| who worked with us on the migration - in particular Earl Warren,
| Otto, Gusted, and Mathieu Fenniak.
|
| To me this said more than anything else in the post. The fact
| that there are genuine people at forgejo/codeburg that give a
| thought about what they are working on is pure gold.
| bfkwlfkjf wrote:
| In my experience a lot of Free software communities are like
| this.
| chekibreki wrote:
| Another software project feels it's necessary to dive into
| divisive politics when it should just make good software. It's
| sad, really. Now what I think of when I hear ,,Zig" is a
| community of self-important, immature and delusional people
| instead of thinking about the undeniable advantages of the Zig
| language.
| nullbyte808 wrote:
| Hey not everything Microsoft makes turns into shit like Windows.
| Github is king. Your politics will age like $5 wine.
| andrew_ wrote:
| This is hilarious. Hating Microsoft will never go out of style.
| Fun to see the youngs rediscover it. Also hilarious is that
| Codeberg as a frontend is slow as hell; slower than Github even.
|
| Have fun with your newfound virtue, Zig folks!
| spencerflem wrote:
| My least favorite thing about modern philosophy / discourse is
| how the idea of having virtues is made to seem ridiculous
| nullbyte808 wrote:
| Your making Zig look like a joke. Im gonna go back to C.
| losvedir wrote:
| Heh, I tried to follow the link to the Codeberg repo at the top
| of the blog post and it is failing to connect. Maybe HN hug of
| death? In any case it makes the rest of the post and its
| criticisms of GitHub hit a little differently.
|
| edit: I say as a GitHub sponsor of Zig for the past few years. I
| do see that I'll have to move that, and maybe I will, but I don't
| love having yet another account with saved credit card info and
| subscription to manage...
| cdilld wrote:
| I'm not sure I'd want something I cared about to depend on a
| codebase that included anything as amateurish as that
| "safe_sleep" script mentioned in the post. It's honestly
| astonishing that it took GitHub as long is it did to fix that
| bug.
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