> 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.
> 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).
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.
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?
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.
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.
Is that not also true of human written software that costs more per hour than the monthly cost of a coding agent? Developers are expected to ship enterprise software with defects that would land you in court if you made equivalent mistakes designing a water treatment plant or bridge.
I get the “AI sucks” argument from a programmers point of view. It’s weird looking and doesn’t care about “code smells” or about rearranging the code base’s deck chairs just the way you like. From an owner’s or client’s perspective, human programmers suck. You want big standard CRUD app? Like a baby’s first Django app? That’s going to take at least 6 months for some reason. They don’t understand your problem domain and don’t care enough to learn it. They work 15 minutes on the hour, spend 45 on social media or games, and bill you $200/hr. They “pair program” for “quality” to double their billed rate for the same product. They bill you for interns learning how to do their job on your dime. On top of that there is still a very good chance the whole project will just be a failure. Or I can pay Anthropic $20/month and text an AI requirements on my phone when I’ve got 5 minutes of down time. If it doesn’t work I just make a new one and try again. Even if progress on AI stopped today, the world is now so much better for consumers of programs. Maybe not for developers unless you’re writing the AI and getting paid in the millions. Good for them. I’m glad to see the $200/hr Stack Overflow copy and pasters go do something else.
> Is that not also true of human written software that costs more per hour than the monthly cost of a coding agent?
The difference is that a human can learn and grow.
From your examples, it sounds like we're talking about completely different applications of code. I'm a software engineer who is responding to the original topic of reviewing PRs full of LLM slop. It sounds like you are a hobbyist who uses LLMs to vibe code personal apps. Your use case is, frankly, exactly what LLMs should be used for. It's analogous to how using a consumer grade 3d printer to make toys for your kids is fine, but nobody would want to be on the hook for maintaining full scale structural systems that were printed the same way.
In this analogy though, a different someone designed a device or several devices and is printing them on a 3d printer and selling them online and making an alright living through that.
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.
I’m pretty sure the USSR, Cuba, and the like never succeeded doing this sort of thing, but maybe if we hit ourselves in the head with the same hammer (and sickle) just one more time it will work?
Absolutely. In areas where there are known quality options, people are clearly willing to pay more. Toyota for instance is a solid example of this.
Automobiles are large, expensive purchases with a relatively small set of options though... For most purchases, it's impossible to determine quality ahead of time.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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
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.
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.
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)
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
When looking at this history here on HN, he started out in the poker world. I'm not sure if he played, but he wrote a poker engine or something. In my experience, the venn diagram for professional poker players, crypto enthusiasts and grifters have a lot of overlap.
But for this guy specifically there's practically complete radio silence during the crypto era. It's only recently with all the AI noise that he's become active here on HN again.
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?
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.
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. :/
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.
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.
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.
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.
It is absolutely not socially acceptable, and people like yourself blithely declaring that it is is getting tiring. Maybe it’s socially acceptable in your particular circles to not give a single shit, take no pride in the slop you throw at people, and expect them to wade through it no questions asked? But not for the rest of us.
Maybe I didn't clearly state my point. That was a comment about my experience earlier here on HN, someone was asked whether or not they've used AI to write and their response was "why not use it if it's better than my own", if that is the reasoning that people give and they are not self-aware enough to be embarrassed about it, I think it must mean that there's a lot of people who think like that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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™.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I've worked at a couple of companies with pay scales on part with FAANG, as well as a startup that was extremely selective in hiring. We rarely looked at GitHub, and never used it as a in a situation where someone got hired. I could see a situation where someone had good open source contributions it might help them get noticed by a recruiter, but that's so incredibly rare and hard to discover that it's kindof the last place people look. Having a good GitHub profile can't hurt, but LinkedIn is still king here
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.
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 .
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.
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.
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…
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When the metrics becomes a target, ladida. GitHub profiles are utterly meaningless to me, speaking as someone that was hiring folks in 2023–4.
Perhaps we need an app to keep track of bad job candidates. We can gossip about them and such. I mean, we did that for an entire gender (sex?), let's go make a unicorn.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.)
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?
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".
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.
> 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.
Right, that seemed like a minor issue. There was also the minor issue of the increase of AI code PRs. Seems like the greater issue was a perception of deterioration of the platform (in their sites for years) and a reasonable path towards migration to another platform.
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.
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.
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.
Do you see a difference between 'signaling virtue' and 'having virtue and living in accordance with those virtues'?
People that use the former like a slur seem to need to believe that the latter cannot be true.
I wouldn't want to live in a world like that personally, assuming nefarious intention behind every good act (people in positions of highest power excepted). It seems exhausting.
Andrew Kelley means what he says and says what he means (in an on-the-spectrum way). It makes him off-putting and charming in equal measure, depending on the issue. But you shouldn't assume that this is a mere 'signal', it is what he believes.
Speaking for myself, I do disassociate myself from unethical products and people. It's not always as soon as I'd like, Amazon being a good example. I've never regretted doing so.
It's not even worth bragging about, who would even care? I just despise lying, and if I want to believe that I behave ethically without lying to myself, this is the natural consequence.
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.
There's nothing that compels you to "purity spiral" other than attempting to appease cynics who insist that all decisions must be completely binary and consistent, with no room for nuance or practicality, and that anything else is virtue signaling (which is somehow less defensible than enabling harm in the first place).
Reducing harm where feasible is still meaningful, and certainly better than no attempt at all.
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.
> 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.".
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.
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.
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.
Hello there (new-account){name}{number}! When did you discover that {you, a real person} believed that the only way to protect the {women!} and {children!} was this new agency founded under Bush in the wake of 9/11?
Did you know that all {women!} (over 12 million every year) are actually most endangered by their intimate partners, who are predominately within their same race and class?
Do you think this is more or less concerning than this inflammatory anecdata you've created an account to provide? Do you think that domestic violence prevention (less than 1 billion) should be more or less well-funded than ICE (170 billion)?
> (Under the Trump admin): Teams responsible for violence prevention have been decimated, and a reorganization of the Department of Health and Human Services has eliminated divisions wholesale.
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.
Though you will no doubt assume you're getting downvoted because you're speaking truth to sociopaths, I just wanted to say I'm downvoting you because your comment violates multiple HN guidelines. Reminder, those are here:
It's disappointing to see such a long-term community member engage so thoughtlessly. I know the guidelines also say I should just flag and move on, but this will only reenforce your narrative, and I am hoping to break the cycle.
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.
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.
You got one. And how many good neighbors were dragged out of their cars, how many parents torn from their children, and how many American citizens wrongly harassed or dragged out of their houses for it? How many preachers praying peacefully in the streets were shot in the head?
This is not, and has never been, about the murderers. The murderers are the excuse, the people who are actually being harassed and brutalized are not them. And as mentioned, many of them are American citizens.
You can support sane border policies without also supporting racial profiling, the militarization of our cities and warrantless searches and detention. These two things don’t have to be mutually exclusive, but arguably much of what ICE has represented recently is what many people would consider to be unconstitutional behavior.
Ok, if you want to go down this road, should I start posting articles of religious leaders caught raping children? Should we be spending 170 billion a year trying to shut down all churches?
One or the biggest ironies in US politics to me is the complaints about the degradation of the rule of law in this country under Trump. While simultaneously arguing that federal immigration law should be actively ignored and blocked by cities and states. Of course the details are all messy and complicated. But if you feel both of those things are true, you owe it to yourself to take a moment and reflect on the irony of your own views. Empathy for people you disagree with is in dangerously short supply these days and is fundamental to a functioning democracy.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Github was great at the time when it replaced Sourceforge. But that was a long time ago and actually better alternatives are popping up left and right. And that's even without Microsoft's recent-ish enshittifaction process (e.g. letting everything rot that's not AI related). Githubs entire management and development process is simply broken beyond repair, monkeys at the wheel or not.
PS: also Gitlab CI is so much better than GH Actions that they are not even in the same league. It is very apparent that Gitlab is actually dogfooding their stuff, which is not the impression I get from any Github feature.
When you can afford to have good things, and you're not, don't come crying about getting called bad names.
Actions is bad.
> I dare anyone who is delusional enough to think they can create something better to actually make something better
Actions speak louder than words.
Zig is leaving because of the issues they mentioned.
> People tried other services like GitLab and realized it is slower, uglier and overall worse than GH and came crawling back.
Maybe. I guess we'll see.
I think the OP has been pretty clear that they're not happy with it, and, they're putting their money where their mouth is.
Clearly, just complaining about broken things isn't working.
Maybe a couple more big moves like this is what GH needs to wake up and allocate some more resources (that they, can categorically afford) to fixing things.
So who is complaining that Zig leaving GH is somehow a problem? I just don't like how they have to put out false claims like there are big problems with GH CI and Sponsors.
Zig is leaving GH for another provider. They did not make a better GH and fixed all the problems with it.
You literally have to fill out a form to convince Codeberg that you need CI. I would take GH CI over that.
> Microsoft can afford to make these tools better; they just dont care.
They certainly have enough money, but can they actually improve it? Who could step in? How? Do you think more hiring would help? Or would it make it worse?
Leadership could try and step in by force. But they'd have to undermine whoever is running github actions to do so. It would be a huge, risky political move. And for what? Are they actually losing customers over gh actions? I doubt it. I'm just not sure anyone cares to spend that much political capital to "fix" something that is arguably not that broken.
Big companies also simply can't fix stuff that's broken internally. Its not a money thing. Its a culture & politics thing. Its a leadership thing.
For example, does anyone remember Google Code? It was a github-like code hosting service that predated github by many years. Compared to github, it was terrible. When github came out, google could have rewritten Code from the ground up to copy github's better design and better choices. (Kind of like android did with ios). But they didn't. Github kicked their butt for many years. But nothing happened. They couldn't fix it. Now google code is basically dead.
Or why didn't Adobe build a viable figma competitor? Why didn't microsoft make a successful iphone or ipad competitor? Why didn't intel win the contract to make the iphone CPU? These aren't money problems. Its something else.
I've only heard stories of a couple leaders who had the force of personality to fix problems like this. Like Steve Jobs. And Elon Musk pulls some wild stunts too. Frankly, I don't think I'd like to work under either of them.
Github has been entirely integrated into Microsoft's AI division since the last Github CEO left a couple of months ago (not much of a loss since he was responsible for Githubs AI enshittifaction). Those org-changes alone are plenty of reason to lose trust in Github's future. IMHO things can only get worse with an "AI first" division in charge and now is probably the best time to jump ship, at least it's the responsible thing to do for sufficiently large and professional projects (and I bet that ziglang is only one of many to follow).
> But they'd have to undermine whoever is running github actions
I'm not sure if anybody is running the GH Actions project at the moment beyond bare maintenance work and trying to keep the whole thing from collapsing into a pile of rubble. There is also no separate Github entity anymore within Microsoft, so nothing to "undermine".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
GitHub actions may be one if the best free options, but that doesn't make it one of the best paid options. I have seemingly endless headaches with it at work.
the technical issues are completely valid. at the same time, there is a balance between citing reasons for the change and burning bridges with those you leave behind.
the friction caused for the supporters felt a bit tone deaf. although the project itself runs on strong principles so i can imagine they know what they signed up for.
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.
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
Yea but this is going from the assumption that there aren't benefits to using JavaScript or reasons other than snappiness for introducing new (or in this case a decade old framework).
We don't know how these decisions are made, who is making them, or more importantly, why they're being made. And attributing all of that to the developers being monkeys make me think the author has never actually worked for a real company before or is conveniently forgetting what it's like to.
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...
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Not being an American is a privileged position regarding an issue that negatively affects Americans. It's no different than if I, an American, fail to care about, say, Hungary's slide into autocracy. I am privileged to be able to not care about it.
By that definition, "privileged" looses all meaning, as there is an infinite number of injustices in the universe, and no one is affected by all of them.
The oppositie is also true. "Caring" about ICE and wanting to flood the US with illegal immigrants is also a political position, a privileged one at that. It's a luxury belief: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxury_belief
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
> 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.
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?
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 :/
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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...)
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
...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.
> 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)
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.
"I also strongly believe that you should not be proud of working for Microsoft, and particularly on GitHub for the last 5 years. I truly am sorry but you need to be called out."
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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”.
Read this entire thread. There are over two dozen links with Andrew's own words and bullying behavior provided by other commenters.
This is only the billionth time he's said something like this. He's apologized for it in the past and said he'd change, but it clearly didn't stick.
He's a jerk and a bully like Linus.
This is the guy setting culture at Zig, which is undoubtedly why five people responded to me in this thread with homophobic remarks. His community feels emboldened to do that.
When your leader breaks the Code of Conduct and attacks people, it probably feels like a safe space for all sorts of hatred and vile behavior.
Totally toxic.
Andrew has had a chance to read this thread by now. He's had a chance to reflect on the awful things people have said. Ball's in his court.
This implies Zig culture is being poisoned by Andrew.
He's the leader, and everyone looks to him. If he behaves like an asshole, and few people call him out or hold him accountable, everyone else thinks that's okay. You then see other members of the community behaving in a similar manner.
Toxic culture breeds toxic behavior and people.
You don't see other open source communities doing this.
Like I said, "rotten from the head". The idiom is appropriate.
wow, and you’re still defending yourself with a lecture on how your words should be interpreted in such good faith. in this situation. and, to add to that, comparing to two dictators who separate children from their parents and close people in labour camps.
keep believing you fit the moral standard and insight to emotional nuance to impart your judgments onto others.
And a tu quoque without even knowing my opinion on the matter and calling me an enabler for calling out the irony of your responses, hiding your personal aggressiveness behind a veil of moral superiority. I will refrain from continuing on this thread, good luck with this pain you carry, I hope you find something positively creative to alleviate it.
I can't imagine being someone like Andrew, or any BDFL of a popular open source project, and having to deal with folks like this. Imagine posting a timed output of your compiler on a thread about a similar language's slow compiler and having someone cite this as bad behavior.
Anyway, the clear absurdity of this particular post aside, it's not OK to call other people monkeys. I make no statement on the quality of their engineering. But they're people! I'd hope to see a quiet dignity from the Zig folks here. They've done so much excellent work, and I'm sure it's frustrating to see what software can be and then have it sharply laid against what software often is. But kindness is always the way.
Thanks to everyone involved with Zig for their work and love of software!
It's completely fine for someone working on a programming language that is useful for some of the same things as Rust to compare that language to Rust, including in ways that make the language not seem as good. Indeed, this is useful information for someone who is using Rust and is considering using Zig (or vice-versa), or who is new to both languages and trying to figure out which is better for their use case.
In what way is the tone of the linked messages not appropriate? Rust is a programming language, not a sacred object. It's fine to say that a different programming language does something better than it, regardless of whether or not you're the developer of that language.
To be clear I like Rust and use it frequently and have for about as long as it's been publicly released, whereas I have only played around a little bit with Zig and I suspect I won't like it as much as Rust even when it's feature-complete. But I don't like seeing an attempt to enforce a social norm that it's wrong to point out shortcomings of Rust, especially when it's aimed at people doing the interesting and valuable work of exploring other areas of the systems programming language design space that Rust is not doing.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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)
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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).
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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!
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").
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
> 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.
> 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
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.
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.
"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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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".
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
Good, rejecting reliance on Microsoft's centralized platform means less vulnerability to their evil policy/practices (AI, users/country bans, privacy, vendor-locking)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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".
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.
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.
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 :^)
> It's still a significant chunk, but it's also not going to go away overnight.
You despise and are leaving GitHub, but intend to keep collecting money from their sponsorship feature/program? Sounds like they are doing something right then…
I had to scroll too far for someone to mention third-party CI. GitHub Actions free runners have always sucked, but the third-party runner ecosystem is really strong for those who can afford it. imo the APIs are far better than the rest of the product - I suspect enterprise customers are strong-arming GitHub to keep them reliable. and there's always third-party CI like tekton if Actions' yaml is too annoying
Namespace fixed all of the issues I had with GitHub Actions. Ghostty uses them to build their project: https://namespace.so
Using Namespace made it clear how much cruft GitHub Actions has accumulated and how much performance they leave on the table. I regard GitHub Actions like Nix: weird configuration, largely shell-based, and the value you get out is commensurate with the investment you put in. But it works well enough.
But at the end of the day, GitHub Actions, like Nix, is just shell scripts. They're fairly portable. I like Namespace because they fixed the parts of CI that matter, like fast local caching versus GitHub's HTTP-based cache.
But I also don't hate this: I use GitHub for the pretty website and global search. Someone will mirror Zig for the search, and my terminal does not care where I clone the repository from. I think this is the new world we live in.
Someone will have to build the aggregator that indexes all repositories and makes them searchable, but that can ultimately be separate from hosting.
As the creator of one of the larger Zig projects, does this announcement undermine your confidence in Zig at all? Either with the language used or the decision in itself?
I do think the combo of not using Twitter, not using Discord, and not using GitHub does make it a bit more challenging for Zig to become a mainstream programming language. Twitter being the least important amongst those. Hard to say how much it matters in practice, as things tend to win on their strengths and not on lack of weakness
I was happy from the sideline seeing the recent big Zig donations. But this sudden decision is a shock. Technical issues can be worked around (I wish/think), but leaving such a dominant platform? I don't know. For my small small needs Forgejo works great, but for Zig, a project which I hope has a lot of mainstream success, I'm not convinced, that Forgejo/Codeberg is the best fit (atm). Even Graphene OS which has very high standards is (still) on Github, maybe Zig could brood (brüten) a bit longer to decide if it is really time to leave?
> 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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
i was drunk and at a bar.. zig and nim got up to do karaoke together..
elm was there...
anyway, they started singing..
'weeee are the champions, my friends..'
it was fun. i got up.
'no time for looooosers, cos we are the champions..'
so fun.
we had these awesome, delicious cocktails.. they had strawberry in them (with 3 r's) and guido made a toast. he said he couldn't sing but wrote down my name for a song. 'abracadabra'.
heh, i want to reach out and grab ya! i nailed it, then did another queen song.
eventually we went out back and smoked a joint, but we were so drunk, it knocked us out.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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!)
This is a total victory for Rust. Zig was making progress before this. Now the project is going to black hole itself in the most tone deaf and spectacular way possible. Not even a mirror? Way to accept total defeat.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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?
> 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?
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.
Am I to understand that all killers are leftist? It's either that, or you looked at the list of all killers and cherry-picked the leftist ones to make an argument.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
Ok, but as you've sort of implied yourself, the CoC of every project is essentially the same. Which means there's no reason for 99% of projects to have a distinct CoC.
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.
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...)
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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?
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.
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.
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
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.
"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.
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?
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.
If you've worked in a large company, you know that the product reflects the priorities of the company so much more than the people who work there. Leadership states the priority and the employees do what they're told.
Leadership is part of the group of people who built the product, therefore different leadership would have also built a different product.
With that said, it's also not correct to claim that line folk have no influence at all. I don't believe that you can blame any individual since they may have stood up against something bad being put in the product, but they're still part of a collective group of people that built a bad product.
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..
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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?
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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".
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.
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.
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.
> 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!
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
> 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.
> 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".
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ?
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).
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!
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.
> 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.
"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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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!
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
Hard to tell from that PR... but just looking at it, it does look a bit chaotic. Maybe if it wasn't clear, he should have discussed it with the core devs before? I cannot imagine it's easy maintaining an open source projects with PR's flowing in without context.
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.
> 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.
>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.
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.
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.
No, corpo bullshit rises to the "insult and denigrate people" level. Bad product decisions are forgivable, even understandable. We all make bad decisions. Microsoft's recent product decisions and corporate direction, meanwhile, should be viewed as hostile.
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!
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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"
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
Did you even read the article. Yes, he had 1 sentence on ICE, which maybe you disagree with its politics. But most of the article was with technical issues in github as a platform and its neglect of non AI features. Please take your low quality comment to X.
Finally, I can’t believe I have to say it, but a creator of an open source project is free to infuse it with whatever values he wants, no one hates on SQLite, no need to hate someone for adding his brand of politics / values to his passion project. Please go create your own “non woke” language if you hate it so much.
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.
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.
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].
> 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
My old rule about the difference between coding and software engineering:
My new rule:> 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.
> 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).
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
Is that not also true of human written software that costs more per hour than the monthly cost of a coding agent? Developers are expected to ship enterprise software with defects that would land you in court if you made equivalent mistakes designing a water treatment plant or bridge.
I get the “AI sucks” argument from a programmers point of view. It’s weird looking and doesn’t care about “code smells” or about rearranging the code base’s deck chairs just the way you like. From an owner’s or client’s perspective, human programmers suck. You want big standard CRUD app? Like a baby’s first Django app? That’s going to take at least 6 months for some reason. They don’t understand your problem domain and don’t care enough to learn it. They work 15 minutes on the hour, spend 45 on social media or games, and bill you $200/hr. They “pair program” for “quality” to double their billed rate for the same product. They bill you for interns learning how to do their job on your dime. On top of that there is still a very good chance the whole project will just be a failure. Or I can pay Anthropic $20/month and text an AI requirements on my phone when I’ve got 5 minutes of down time. If it doesn’t work I just make a new one and try again. Even if progress on AI stopped today, the world is now so much better for consumers of programs. Maybe not for developers unless you’re writing the AI and getting paid in the millions. Good for them. I’m glad to see the $200/hr Stack Overflow copy and pasters go do something else.
> Is that not also true of human written software that costs more per hour than the monthly cost of a coding agent?
The difference is that a human can learn and grow.
From your examples, it sounds like we're talking about completely different applications of code. I'm a software engineer who is responding to the original topic of reviewing PRs full of LLM slop. It sounds like you are a hobbyist who uses LLMs to vibe code personal apps. Your use case is, frankly, exactly what LLMs should be used for. It's analogous to how using a consumer grade 3d printer to make toys for your kids is fine, but nobody would want to be on the hook for maintaining full scale structural systems that were printed the same way.
In this analogy though, a different someone designed a device or several devices and is printing them on a 3d printer and selling them online and making an alright living through that.
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.
I’m pretty sure the USSR, Cuba, and the like never succeeded doing this sort of thing, but maybe if we hit ourselves in the head with the same hammer (and sickle) just one more time it will work?
The capitalist west seems fully happy buying slop and crap as long as it is cheap... Nearly no one demands quality anymore.
Quality isn't really an option anymore, because expensive no longer means quality, it means expensive-looking crap.
If it's all crap anyway, why pay more?
Absolutely. In areas where there are known quality options, people are clearly willing to pay more. Toyota for instance is a solid example of this.
Automobiles are large, expensive purchases with a relatively small set of options though... For most purchases, it's impossible to determine quality ahead of time.
You don’t need communism to do this. You need a strong culture where elites care for their people. Elites willingly working to enrich their people.
Our current parasitic elites are just enriching themselves. Arguing about economic systems is pointless if the ruling class hates the common people.
[dead]
Does it matter? Either way seems to just reflect badly on the junior, who needs to improve their self-review skills and knowledge
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.
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.
I feel like the distinction is equivalent to
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).
"I feel like these distinctions are equivalent to
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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
The 100% test coverage metric is far more then "entirely useless" it is typically incredibly harmful.
Brittle meaningless tests tend to lock bad decisions in, and prevent meaningful refactoring.
Bad tests simply are code debt, and dramatically increase the future cost of rework and adaptation.
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
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.
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.
It is questionable if they've even tried any one of them.
Hustle hustle. I'm not disgusted by this person, but by the system that promotes or requires such behaviour.
oh god... he has a humongous AI generated PR for julia too https://github.com/tshort/StaticCompiler.jl/pull/180
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.)
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.
In a submission to OCaml, when asked why the files he submitted list someone else as an author he says,
I find that sort of attitude terrifying.° https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/14369#issuecomment-35573...
I cannot believe it's not trolling
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)
That is a curious take. Open source projects were flooded by dumb PRs before AI too, so what would it prove?
Intentional or not its an interesting social experiment.
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
I'd be willing to put money that before LLMs they were all in ok crypto
When looking at this history here on HN, he started out in the poker world. I'm not sure if he played, but he wrote a poker engine or something. In my experience, the venn diagram for professional poker players, crypto enthusiasts and grifters have a lot of overlap.
But for this guy specifically there's practically complete radio silence during the crypto era. It's only recently with all the AI noise that he's become active here on HN again.
[0]: https://xkcd.com/221/
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-...
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. :/
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
Maybe this guy is it: the actual worst coder in the world
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.
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’?
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.
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.
The people of Jonestown collectively drank less kool-aid than all this.
I don't know whether to be worried or impressed.
I had $1000 in Claude credits and went to town.
Yes, I made mistakes along the way.
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.
I've seen this in other places as well.
The bottleneck is not coding or creating a PR, the bottleneck is the review.
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.
> This ought to be automated using AI.
When the world is telling you to fucking stop, maybe take a moment and listen.
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.
It is absolutely not socially acceptable, and people like yourself blithely declaring that it is is getting tiring. Maybe it’s socially acceptable in your particular circles to not give a single shit, take no pride in the slop you throw at people, and expect them to wade through it no questions asked? But not for the rest of us.
Maybe I didn't clearly state my point. That was a comment about my experience earlier here on HN, someone was asked whether or not they've used AI to write and their response was "why not use it if it's better than my own", if that is the reasoning that people give and they are not self-aware enough to be embarrassed about it, I think it must mean that there's a lot of people who think like that.
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.
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.
> 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?
It's both but the focus is on the future.
I agree with you.
Please don't tell me you actually spent $1000 on generating fake tests....
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
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.
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.
[dead]
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"
> Well, I almost single-highhandedly drove Zig away from Github
If you think about it, Joel is net positive to Zig and its community!
Those overly enthusiastic responses from the LLM are really going to do a number on people's egos.
people already go psychotic on LLMs lol
I'm not sure if this is advanced trolling at this point.
This is redefining the cutting edge of trolling.
I think the term is "frontier trolling".
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.
I envy your optimism. The truth is that humans are generally stupider and more craven than you have apparently even begun to conceive.
Is the. AI bubble just biolliinaires larping about their favorite dystopuan scifi?
>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
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.
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.
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).
This one https://x.com/joelreymont/status/1990981118783352952?s=20
I made the mistake of poorly documenting that PR.
Perhaps the offset is always zero anyway in that scenario
But yeah hard to say
It was a bug in my own modes to the Zig compiler not in the stock compiler itself.
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
Can you stop wasting everyone’s time?
Just reading his blogposts, gross. He not only thinks he is actively contributing, he thinks he deserves credit.
FYI you're replying to the Joel the person being discussed. On HN he uses the username wagerlab
Yep, that's me!
I will look into renaming myself, although don't think HN allows this.
You might try emailing them, they've renamed other accounts before.
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.
[flagged]
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.
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.
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.
To me this is borderline doxing (didn't check on /g/, maybe that was actual doxing):
> there was a thread on /g/ about this guy the other day, anons digged out much of its past
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™.
[flagged]
When a ocaml maintainer took the time to give you real feedback, all you responded with was:
"Thanks X Person"
You're the direct cause to open source burn out.
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.
I wonder why the maintainers haven't banned this dude yet.
Stop the catfishes, please
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> "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.
I've worked at a couple of companies with pay scales on part with FAANG, as well as a startup that was extremely selective in hiring. We rarely looked at GitHub, and never used it as a in a situation where someone got hired. I could see a situation where someone had good open source contributions it might help them get noticed by a recruiter, but that's so incredibly rare and hard to discover that it's kindof the last place people look. Having a good GitHub profile can't hurt, but LinkedIn is still king here
Nobody ever has brought up my GitHub though I did use my private GitLab projects to land my first dev job.
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.
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 .
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.
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...
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.
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…
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".
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When the metrics becomes a target, ladida. GitHub profiles are utterly meaningless to me, speaking as someone that was hiring folks in 2023–4.
Perhaps we need an app to keep track of bad job candidates. We can gossip about them and such. I mean, we did that for an entire gender (sex?), let's go make a unicorn.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
> we hope to use direct solar power to operate CI/CD nodes only during sunshine hours
Status: CI down due to cloud issues.
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.
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.
But when you exit
One great thing about Forejo is that you can have a FreeBSD builder and on GH you cannot, have to spin up a slow VM.
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?
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.
> 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.
Right, that seemed like a minor issue. There was also the minor issue of the increase of AI code PRs. Seems like the greater issue was a perception of deterioration of the platform (in their sites for years) and a reasonable path towards migration to another platform.
I think the MSFT ownership was pushing it along as well.
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.
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.
Yeah but would you stop using AWS because of the same reason?
I never started for similar reasons
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.
I didn't say it is wrong but I sure as hell wouldn't swap my business out of AWS to signal my virtues
Do you see a difference between 'signaling virtue' and 'having virtue and living in accordance with those virtues'?
People that use the former like a slur seem to need to believe that the latter cannot be true.
I wouldn't want to live in a world like that personally, assuming nefarious intention behind every good act (people in positions of highest power excepted). It seems exhausting.
Andrew Kelley means what he says and says what he means (in an on-the-spectrum way). It makes him off-putting and charming in equal measure, depending on the issue. But you shouldn't assume that this is a mere 'signal', it is what he believes.
Speaking for myself, I do disassociate myself from unethical products and people. It's not always as soon as I'd like, Amazon being a good example. I've never regretted doing so.
It's not even worth bragging about, who would even care? I just despise lying, and if I want to believe that I behave ethically without lying to myself, this is the natural consequence.
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.
Having reasons based in ethics for doing something is not the same thing as a purity spiral.
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.
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.
There's nothing that compels you to "purity spiral" other than attempting to appease cynics who insist that all decisions must be completely binary and consistent, with no room for nuance or practicality, and that anything else is virtue signaling (which is somehow less defensible than enabling harm in the first place).
Reducing harm where feasible is still meaningful, and certainly better than no attempt at all.
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.
> 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.".
If by dig you mean lazily sweep the front door while listening to dance music, then yes, I agree with you :)
Lmao absolutely right
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.
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
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.
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.
You should've met the nice boys from ice here in Chicago, I'm sure they'd have treated you real well
[flagged]
Hello there (new-account){name}{number}! When did you discover that {you, a real person} believed that the only way to protect the {women!} and {children!} was this new agency founded under Bush in the wake of 9/11?
Did you know that all {women!} (over 12 million every year) are actually most endangered by their intimate partners, who are predominately within their same race and class?
Do you think this is more or less concerning than this inflammatory anecdata you've created an account to provide? Do you think that domestic violence prevention (less than 1 billion) should be more or less well-funded than ICE (170 billion)?
> (Under the Trump admin): Teams responsible for violence prevention have been decimated, and a reorganization of the Department of Health and Human Services has eliminated divisions wholesale.
[dead]
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.
Though you will no doubt assume you're getting downvoted because you're speaking truth to sociopaths, I just wanted to say I'm downvoting you because your comment violates multiple HN guidelines. Reminder, those are here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It's disappointing to see such a long-term community member engage so thoughtlessly. I know the guidelines also say I should just flag and move on, but this will only reenforce your narrative, and I am hoping to break the cycle.
Some of us witnessed ICE agents' rampant sociopathy with our own eyes. You could too if you wanted to.
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.
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."
That's why the article put that reason aside
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.
so far we know of 1 branch, in 1 thread, on the entire internet, "talking about it instead"
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.
Which is totally fine
they saw an opportunity for bait and you took it
It does signal/imply that even if GitHub fixed every technical grievance tomorrow, Zig might still not come back.
[flagged]
You got one. And how many good neighbors were dragged out of their cars, how many parents torn from their children, and how many American citizens wrongly harassed or dragged out of their houses for it? How many preachers praying peacefully in the streets were shot in the head?
This is not, and has never been, about the murderers. The murderers are the excuse, the people who are actually being harassed and brutalized are not them. And as mentioned, many of them are American citizens.
You can support sane border policies without also supporting racial profiling, the militarization of our cities and warrantless searches and detention. These two things don’t have to be mutually exclusive, but arguably much of what ICE has represented recently is what many people would consider to be unconstitutional behavior.
Ok, if you want to go down this road, should I start posting articles of religious leaders caught raping children? Should we be spending 170 billion a year trying to shut down all churches?
One or the biggest ironies in US politics to me is the complaints about the degradation of the rule of law in this country under Trump. While simultaneously arguing that federal immigration law should be actively ignored and blocked by cities and states. Of course the details are all messy and complicated. But if you feel both of those things are true, you owe it to yourself to take a moment and reflect on the irony of your own views. Empathy for people you disagree with is in dangerously short supply these days and is fundamental to a functioning democracy.
[dead]
>and the rest of the article provides technical reasons
The post ends with an indictment of capitalism.
Levels of indirection matter.
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
[dead]
And with no money or users....
Levels of indirections matter.
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?
It didn't seem to me that the person you answered to was "mad". Are you "mad" because of what they wrote?
It's not in conflict. They are pointing out that in this case their stated goal was not achieved so it's pointless.
It wasn't their stated goal, if you read linked article. The commenter got it wrong.
Enlighten me, they specifically mention ICE as a reason they wanted to switch from GitHub?
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.
I am well aware it was not the only reason, but that does not improve the reasoning.
We’re all sick of these activist dorks
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.
> 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.
Can’t any donation platform you don’t fully control cut you off at any point?
What exactly is different about GitHub sponsors here?
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.
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.
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.
Gitlab smokes and rolls githubs shitty ass CI all day any day for over 10 years now
I've had so many issues with Gitlab CI. I don't think it's really any better than Github's.
I'll take any CI service that isn't cobbled together by mountains of nested and indirected YAML.
Absolute horror to maintain.
Yeah... are there any though?
What? Jenkins? No way.
[flagged]
Github was great at the time when it replaced Sourceforge. But that was a long time ago and actually better alternatives are popping up left and right. And that's even without Microsoft's recent-ish enshittifaction process (e.g. letting everything rot that's not AI related). Githubs entire management and development process is simply broken beyond repair, monkeys at the wheel or not.
PS: also Gitlab CI is so much better than GH Actions that they are not even in the same league. It is very apparent that Gitlab is actually dogfooding their stuff, which is not the impression I get from any Github feature.
Oh come on.
Micros$$$$ft owns github.
We don't need to give some pretend sympathy.
When you can afford to have good things, and you're not, don't come crying about getting called bad names.
Actions is bad.
> I dare anyone who is delusional enough to think they can create something better to actually make something better
Actions speak louder than words.
Zig is leaving because of the issues they mentioned.
> People tried other services like GitLab and realized it is slower, uglier and overall worse than GH and came crawling back.
Maybe. I guess we'll see.
I think the OP has been pretty clear that they're not happy with it, and, they're putting their money where their mouth is.
Clearly, just complaining about broken things isn't working.
Maybe a couple more big moves like this is what GH needs to wake up and allocate some more resources (that they, can categorically afford) to fixing things.
So who is complaining that Zig leaving GH is somehow a problem? I just don't like how they have to put out false claims like there are big problems with GH CI and Sponsors.
Zig is leaving GH for another provider. They did not make a better GH and fixed all the problems with it.
You literally have to fill out a form to convince Codeberg that you need CI. I would take GH CI over that.
> I just don't like how they have to put out false claims like there are big problems with GH CI and Sponsors
These aren't false claims.
Thats my point.
Microsoft can afford to make these tools better; they just dont care.
Yes, its better than having nothing, but honestly you have to be wearing blinkers not to see the decline rn.
> Microsoft can afford to make these tools better; they just dont care.
They certainly have enough money, but can they actually improve it? Who could step in? How? Do you think more hiring would help? Or would it make it worse?
Leadership could try and step in by force. But they'd have to undermine whoever is running github actions to do so. It would be a huge, risky political move. And for what? Are they actually losing customers over gh actions? I doubt it. I'm just not sure anyone cares to spend that much political capital to "fix" something that is arguably not that broken.
Big companies also simply can't fix stuff that's broken internally. Its not a money thing. Its a culture & politics thing. Its a leadership thing.
For example, does anyone remember Google Code? It was a github-like code hosting service that predated github by many years. Compared to github, it was terrible. When github came out, google could have rewritten Code from the ground up to copy github's better design and better choices. (Kind of like android did with ios). But they didn't. Github kicked their butt for many years. But nothing happened. They couldn't fix it. Now google code is basically dead.
Or why didn't Adobe build a viable figma competitor? Why didn't microsoft make a successful iphone or ipad competitor? Why didn't intel win the contract to make the iphone CPU? These aren't money problems. Its something else.
I've only heard stories of a couple leaders who had the force of personality to fix problems like this. Like Steve Jobs. And Elon Musk pulls some wild stunts too. Frankly, I don't think I'd like to work under either of them.
Github has been entirely integrated into Microsoft's AI division since the last Github CEO left a couple of months ago (not much of a loss since he was responsible for Githubs AI enshittifaction). Those org-changes alone are plenty of reason to lose trust in Github's future. IMHO things can only get worse with an "AI first" division in charge and now is probably the best time to jump ship, at least it's the responsible thing to do for sufficiently large and professional projects (and I bet that ziglang is only one of many to follow).
> But they'd have to undermine whoever is running github actions
I'm not sure if anybody is running the GH Actions project at the moment beyond bare maintenance work and trying to keep the whole thing from collapsing into a pile of rubble. There is also no separate Github entity anymore within Microsoft, so nothing to "undermine".
> Are they actually losing customers over gh actions? I doubt it.
Did you read the article?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I doubt Zig was ever a paying customer of github.
Damn, I guess if Zig really wanted to spite Github they should have stayed and continued being a drain in Microsoft's resources.
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
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.
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).
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.
Unfortunately I don’t really know what a CI provider should do to fix this.
They fixed it 8 hours after your comment lol
Not the case
Sorry for being stupid. I thought that linked PR was GitHub's.
> 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.
Well nothing is better than anything else other than the things that make it better.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
>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?
They could have easily done that without all the insults.
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.
I would agree if they weren't so clearly deserved. Calling shit out as being shit is fine.
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.
He didn't insult the people who are still using github.
You are not talking a out github actions? Monkeys would have done it better.
And yet there are millions of monkeys out there who've produced nothing.
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.
CI's job for me is to just run a nix flake
GitHub actions may be one if the best free options, but that doesn't make it one of the best paid options. I have seemingly endless headaches with it at work.
the technical issues are completely valid. at the same time, there is a balance between citing reasons for the change and burning bridges with those you leave behind.
the friction caused for the supporters felt a bit tone deaf. although the project itself runs on strong principles so i can imagine they know what they signed up for.
[dead]
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
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
Hacker News is a misnomer. This is a VC and FAANG mercenary watering hole.
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.
While juvenile, it is a fair point that github and all websites that ditch everything for javascript get less snappy to use.
Yea but this is going from the assumption that there aren't benefits to using JavaScript or reasons other than snappiness for introducing new (or in this case a decade old framework).
We don't know how these decisions are made, who is making them, or more importantly, why they're being made. And attributing all of that to the developers being monkeys make me think the author has never actually worked for a real company before or is conveniently forgetting what it's like to.
Oh, so that makes the name calling justified.
Isn't making things more performant a juvenile ideal? as I get older, I no longer care about making things better, just getting it done.
(Not everyone is as polite as you lemon. Seems like the majority of the internet has namecalling tourettes :)
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...
> where Microsoft appeared to be on the right path
Only to the hopelessly naive.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> I don't care about ICE one way or another,
Which is itself a political position, a privileged one at that
What an incredibly arrogant statement. Not everyone is American for starters.
Not being an American is a privileged position regarding an issue that negatively affects Americans. It's no different than if I, an American, fail to care about, say, Hungary's slide into autocracy. I am privileged to be able to not care about it.
By that definition, "privileged" looses all meaning, as there is an infinite number of injustices in the universe, and no one is affected by all of them.
It doesn't lose all meaning and your argument doesn't support your assertion.
It’s still a political position to take to not care about things that happen in other countries. (I’m not American either, not that it should matter.)
The oppositie is also true. "Caring" about ICE and wanting to flood the US with illegal immigrants is also a political position, a privileged one at that. It's a luxury belief: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxury_belief
> so much time bitching and moaning
They are doing more than that.
[dead]
[flagged]
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...
[dead]
But they renamed the master branch, doesn't that excuse any ICE associations?
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.
I am getting fatigued by all of these. I am learning about a new one each time. We have
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.there is value in interoperability, not in centralization
> They all seem to do roughly the same things
Codeberg (Forgejo) is Free software, GitHub isn't. Not everything is about the software features.
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.
Drew is still working on SourceHut:
https://sourcehut.org/blog/2025-11-20-whats-cooking-q4-2025/
Thanks. My information was outdated.
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.
I’m glad they have robust support for email based patching but it’s a hard sell for people getting in to the platform.
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.
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".
> 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?
Maybe the incident:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41837782
https://dmpwn.info/
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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?
> 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.
Do you have evidence the accounts are fake? That all those accounts are fake?
Sneed
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.
He's a bit unhinged, but for what it's worth every interaction I've had with him has been positive.
It's a defamation campaign done by 4chan bigots. See my sibling comment.
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 :/
> 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.
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.
Anyone who has read Drew de vault's blog for some time reaches the same conclusion it seems.
DeVault's controversial takes are pretty similar to the ones that Kelley expresses in this post, so I don't see much misalignment here.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
> 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.
> Everything Microsoft does in this space is excellent, VS Code almost feels like an app specifically designed for the blind at times.
Yep. The start menu ads are also excellent as long as you're blind and can't see them.
> 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.
I wonder why they didn't just enable audio captchas, which are supported by the captcha package I wrote that they use.
How is accessibility a political issue?
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.
> 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...
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.
My response was to someone asking how accessibility can be considered a political topic. I assumed they were asking in general.
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.
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.
Spain under Franco was a dictatorship. Not really sure how it compares. If you're actually being cheeky that is actually quite distasteful.
And yes the far right is represented politically in most countries in Europe, including Spain with Vox.
Calling the people who work on GitHub “losers” is not cool.
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.
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.
Shielding individuals from outside criticism is a big part of that impersonal corporate environment.
Not all of us sold out to corporations.
Admittedly some of those may be a bit ... unusual. Like the guy who created TempleOS.
Gotta sell yourself to someone in this world. There’s no sense in demeaning someone about it.
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...
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.
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...)
> I feel that if you need to lie to people because of money
Then your beef is with capitalism, not Github/MSFT.
It’s not either/or
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
> lost at life
It's so refreshing to read such a truly philosophical insight.
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.
> 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.
GitHub: 60% of the time, it works every time.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
True eventually, but not today
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.
> 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.
Last I looked a couple of years ago, GitHub 2fa has a lot of shoddy gotchas actually. There are a handful of GH issues on it with tons of comments.
For example it was impossible to remove/delete a phone number 2fa, even if you registered multiple other 2fa sources like security keys.
> intermittent outages
The outages have gone from "almost every Friday" to "several times per week".
...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.
> 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)
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.
It is actually.
"I also strongly believe that you should not be proud of working for Microsoft, and particularly on GitHub for the last 5 years. I truly am sorry but you need to be called out."
https://hachyderm.io/@andrewrk@mastodon.social/1156234452984...
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?
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?
Not wanting to review and maintain code that someone didn't even bother to write themselves is childish?
Denying code not on it's merits but it's source is childish.
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.
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.
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.
> Denying code not on it's merits but it's source is childish.
No, its pretty standard legal policy actually.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
Purity testing. I mean, one of the first lines in their announcement is relating to politics.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
Read this entire thread. There are over two dozen links with Andrew's own words and bullying behavior provided by other commenters.
This is only the billionth time he's said something like this. He's apologized for it in the past and said he'd change, but it clearly didn't stick.
He's a jerk and a bully like Linus.
This is the guy setting culture at Zig, which is undoubtedly why five people responded to me in this thread with homophobic remarks. His community feels emboldened to do that.
When your leader breaks the Code of Conduct and attacks people, it probably feels like a safe space for all sorts of hatred and vile behavior.
Totally toxic.
Andrew has had a chance to read this thread by now. He's had a chance to reflect on the awful things people have said. Ball's in his court.
and this vision is enough to excuse targetting a person as “rotten”. in all your professed moral acuity.
others are shaming. many could, if not agree, at least understand that. you’re calling “rotten”. wtf man.
Familiarize yourself with the idiom. It's commonly used to describe tech companies and organizations with bad leadership:
https://www.theidioms.com/fish-rots-from-the-head-down/
https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/fish-rot-from-the-head-d...
It's commonly used in journalism:
https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/373487-the-white-hou...
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/xi-jinping-chin...
This implies Zig culture is being poisoned by Andrew.
He's the leader, and everyone looks to him. If he behaves like an asshole, and few people call him out or hold him accountable, everyone else thinks that's okay. You then see other members of the community behaving in a similar manner.
Toxic culture breeds toxic behavior and people.
You don't see other open source communities doing this.
Like I said, "rotten from the head". The idiom is appropriate.
wow, and you’re still defending yourself with a lecture on how your words should be interpreted in such good faith. in this situation. and, to add to that, comparing to two dictators who separate children from their parents and close people in labour camps.
keep believing you fit the moral standard and insight to emotional nuance to impart your judgments onto others.
This thread contains ample evidence of his habitual behavior and if you lack the empathy to understand, that's on you.
He's a bully and you're an enabler of that bullying by defending this behavior.
And a tu quoque without even knowing my opinion on the matter and calling me an enabler for calling out the irony of your responses, hiding your personal aggressiveness behind a veil of moral superiority. I will refrain from continuing on this thread, good luck with this pain you carry, I hope you find something positively creative to alleviate it.
You have accused me of "shitting in Rust threads". Do you have any evidence for this libel?
[flagged]
[flagged]
I can't imagine being someone like Andrew, or any BDFL of a popular open source project, and having to deal with folks like this. Imagine posting a timed output of your compiler on a thread about a similar language's slow compiler and having someone cite this as bad behavior.
Anyway, the clear absurdity of this particular post aside, it's not OK to call other people monkeys. I make no statement on the quality of their engineering. But they're people! I'd hope to see a quiet dignity from the Zig folks here. They've done so much excellent work, and I'm sure it's frustrating to see what software can be and then have it sharply laid against what software often is. But kindness is always the way.
Thanks to everyone involved with Zig for their work and love of software!
> Imagine posting a timed output of your compiler on a thread about a similar language's slow compiler and having someone cite this as bad behavior.
That was the entirety of the contribution. It was gloating. And there is a long history of this.
There's open source contributions, and then there's this.
> Anyway, the clear absurdity of this particular post aside, it's not OK to call other people monkeys.
You don't see how the two are related?
It's completely fine for someone working on a programming language that is useful for some of the same things as Rust to compare that language to Rust, including in ways that make the language not seem as good. Indeed, this is useful information for someone who is using Rust and is considering using Zig (or vice-versa), or who is new to both languages and trying to figure out which is better for their use case.
You seem to be running a lot of interference in this thread.
In what way is the tone of the linked messages appropriate?
In what way is the tone of the linked messages not appropriate? Rust is a programming language, not a sacred object. It's fine to say that a different programming language does something better than it, regardless of whether or not you're the developer of that language.
To be clear I like Rust and use it frequently and have for about as long as it's been publicly released, whereas I have only played around a little bit with Zig and I suspect I won't like it as much as Rust even when it's feature-complete. But I don't like seeing an attempt to enforce a social norm that it's wrong to point out shortcomings of Rust, especially when it's aimed at people doing the interesting and valuable work of exploring other areas of the systems programming language design space that Rust is not doing.
[dead]
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.
I'm not sure that your unsupported assertion represents a substantive contribution to this discussion. Why do you believe it's not cool, munchler?
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.
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.
They're not punching Microsoft.
They're punching employees on a team. People with less freedom and autonomy than the Ziglang ICs.
On the scale of FAANG comp, Microsoft is at the lower end of the scale. I've had several jobs making more in TC than Microsofties.
According to Zig's financials https://ziglang.org/news/2025-financials/, Andrew himself makes more money than a few staff engineers I know there.
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.
> 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.
In my experience a lot of Free software communities are like this.
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
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)
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.
> Stacked pull requests using Jujutsu's change IDs.
Now I'm very interested. Will definitely give it a try.
Keep up the great work!
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Marketing and visibility retention will likely be better when people think - hey its the PL that is NOT on github.
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).
> 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.
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?
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
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.
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
It might even reduce the numbr of slop PRs they get.
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.
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...
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.
I wonder why they did not choose Sourcehut or were they on there at some point?
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.
Ah yes, I always look for big box Warhammer 40k stores in malls.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Codeberg performance is not good today - 12 seconds per click before any update. Not sure if they're able to scale.
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.
Not snappy at all for me.
Github is backend rendered too...
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
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.
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.
This just in: Software engineer with motivation and skills to develop a new language, strangely lacking in PR and marketing skills. More at 11.
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.
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.
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…
"rookies" is an edit - he originally said "losers"
[dead]
[flagged]
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.
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
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.
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.
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!
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
> 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
> 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.
> 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
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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
$200k GH enterprise “relationship with ICE “ ?
I’m sure ICE spends more than $200k at Dunkin’ Donuts are they in a relationship ?
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
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.
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.
Unfortunately, IMO Gitlab is getting enshittified too and adding llm slop features instead of improving the developer experience...
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.
Every 2 years? More like every 2 days for GitHub Actions or Git operations those days :(
Grass is always greener.
> 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 :)
You’re still going to get better p80s from GitHub , across the Atlantic
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.
They probably mean 80th percentile of the response time distribution? Usually you see this talked about for P95 or P99
They haven’t yet reached that level of maturity
> when GitHub goes down once every 2 years
Uhh ... More like every two weeks there's some kind of incident.
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.
[dead]
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.
[dead]
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.
So we’re calling our fellow programmers monkeys and losers now.
Just MSFT employees. Nobody important.
You have a toxic attitude.
No, I have two decades of negative experiences with them being belligerent assholes to the rest of IT and humanity in general.
All of them? Every single one of their employees?
Every single one of them is ok with working for a company like Microsoft. So, yes.
[dead]
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'.
This is a valuable take tbh, I missed it.
Zig team ought to probably write about it in that manner.
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.
Fwiw they're implementing federation, so bring it back some aspects of centralization without centralization
Good to know! Thanks
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.
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.
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.
It's a pity that the GitHub repository is not mirrored, probably making downstreams broken.
Good move anyway.
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.
It forces people to update their fetch URL to the proper authoritative repo, which is a good thing.
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 :)
This post is gross and makes me think a lot less of Zig. Calling people losers and monkeys is unprofessional and unnecessary.
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.
> 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.
GitHub is only nice if you’ve used bitbucket after Atlassian bought it.
But that’s very faint praise.
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.
For those like me who are obviously blind, the new location is at https://codeberg.org/ziglang/zig
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.
It's not accidental but rather part of their AI training strategy.
> 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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
ITT people defending a megacorp. Oh my...
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Compared to installing Apache, Wiki, Roundup, CVS, and Mailman on your own server, SourceForge's UI was fantastic.
> actually started to hate gitlab recently because of their UI.
Same. UI "improvements" and LLM slop features instead of improving the developer experience
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!
My least favorite thing about modern philosophy / discourse is how the idea of having virtues is made to seem ridiculous
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?
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".
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.
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.
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 :^)
> It's still a significant chunk, but it's also not going to go away overnight.
You despise and are leaving GitHub, but intend to keep collecting money from their sponsorship feature/program? Sounds like they are doing something right then…
I had to scroll too far for someone to mention third-party CI. GitHub Actions free runners have always sucked, but the third-party runner ecosystem is really strong for those who can afford it. imo the APIs are far better than the rest of the product - I suspect enterprise customers are strong-arming GitHub to keep them reliable. and there's always third-party CI like tekton if Actions' yaml is too annoying
Namespace fixed all of the issues I had with GitHub Actions. Ghostty uses them to build their project: https://namespace.so
Using Namespace made it clear how much cruft GitHub Actions has accumulated and how much performance they leave on the table. I regard GitHub Actions like Nix: weird configuration, largely shell-based, and the value you get out is commensurate with the investment you put in. But it works well enough.
But at the end of the day, GitHub Actions, like Nix, is just shell scripts. They're fairly portable. I like Namespace because they fixed the parts of CI that matter, like fast local caching versus GitHub's HTTP-based cache.
But I also don't hate this: I use GitHub for the pretty website and global search. Someone will mirror Zig for the search, and my terminal does not care where I clone the repository from. I think this is the new world we live in.
Someone will have to build the aggregator that indexes all repositories and makes them searchable, but that can ultimately be separate from hosting.
Speaking as the creator of one of the largest Zig projects, I agree with antirez
As the creator of one of the larger Zig projects, does this announcement undermine your confidence in Zig at all? Either with the language used or the decision in itself?
> undermine your confidence in Zig
Nah
I do think the combo of not using Twitter, not using Discord, and not using GitHub does make it a bit more challenging for Zig to become a mainstream programming language. Twitter being the least important amongst those. Hard to say how much it matters in practice, as things tend to win on their strengths and not on lack of weakness
I was happy from the sideline seeing the recent big Zig donations. But this sudden decision is a shock. Technical issues can be worked around (I wish/think), but leaving such a dominant platform? I don't know. For my small small needs Forgejo works great, but for Zig, a project which I hope has a lot of mainstream success, I'm not convinced, that Forgejo/Codeberg is the best fit (atm). Even Graphene OS which has very high standards is (still) on Github, maybe Zig could brood (brüten) a bit longer to decide if it is really time to leave?
Also Julia, https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia
And https://github.com/ZigEmbeddedGroup/microzig or e.g. https://github.com/haydenridd/silvia-pid-board
Moving away from Github may end up killing the project.
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.
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...
>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.
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.
Codeberg repo took only an eternity to load. So much for “snappy”.
Hug of death followed by a DDoS. At the time of me writing this, it loads instantly again.
Seems to be HackerNews effect. It's typically instant
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.
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.
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.
Gitlab CI is leagues better
i was drunk and at a bar.. zig and nim got up to do karaoke together.. elm was there... anyway, they started singing.. 'weeee are the champions, my friends..' it was fun. i got up. 'no time for looooosers, cos we are the champions..' so fun. we had these awesome, delicious cocktails.. they had strawberry in them (with 3 r's) and guido made a toast. he said he couldn't sing but wrote down my name for a song. 'abracadabra'. heh, i want to reach out and grab ya! i nailed it, then did another queen song. eventually we went out back and smoked a joint, but we were so drunk, it knocked us out.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> Very good move, codeberg is noscript/basic (x)html friendly
No, they use the Anubis malware.
Last time I did check codeberg, they were very careful at being noscript/basic (x)html browser friendly.
Weird. Need to double check I guess.
Your making Zig look like a joke. Im gonna go back to C.
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.
Hopefully more projects can follow! Codeberg has a far more secure foundation to avoid unethical practices on users.
I tend to avoid projects that take tech decisions based on activism. It never signals a quality product.
All of gnu was a technical decision based on activism. Ignorance of this signals something as well.
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.
Is he turning to be a Linus? I'm worried for Zig.
> 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.
Where do you see sourcehut falling short?
> 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.
Also take a look at sourcehut for those interested in an alternative
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.
That was quite the insufferable egotistical virtue signaling nonsense.
Do they actually think the folks who run Github are in charge or making typescript?
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!)
> i say from my windows machine doh, its for games, really!
Games run really well on Linux nowadays too :P
This is a total victory for Rust. Zig was making progress before this. Now the project is going to black hole itself in the most tone deaf and spectacular way possible. Not even a mirror? Way to accept total defeat.
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.
Translation ?
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.
Hey not everything Microsoft makes turns into shit like Windows. Github is king. Your politics will age like $5 wine.
Codeberg has a yearly fee via euro payment method or manual wire transfer. Membership requires manual approval.
Edit: you can register without membership.
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/
Nice work
hn post = verify if you scale codeberg doesnt
Consequent move.
I am by no means an Ai fanboy, but not using translation tools feels odd?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
This is not a problem with CoCs, but authority in general.
A CoC is still a useful communication tool. Guidelines are useful to have.
You get penalised in some ways if you don't have a code of conduct. For example github will nag you about having one.
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.
CoC are the HR department of open source.
> 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?
> 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?
Not even virtue, codes of conduct just signals leftist control over an organisation.
Just FYI github nags projects to have a code of conduct.
Well.
US leftists, or non-US leftists?
Whats the difference? Both are (or were) funded by NGOs and the state department.
US has a special definition for what constitutes "left" that doesn't apply outside. Compared to European leftists, US leftists are center-right.
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.
Am I to understand that all killers are leftist? It's either that, or you looked at the list of all killers and cherry-picked the leftist ones to make an argument.
No, my point was that "US leftists are leftist-light compared to the rest of the world" couldn't be further from the truth.
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".
I get the impression that you attempt to discuss in good faith. This is probably as far as we will get.
[flagged]
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
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.
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.
Is it really? In this example, could you not see anything wrong with calling employees losers and monkeys, until someone linked you the CoC?
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.
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?
Seems there was some latency, now the post has been updated and those words are not there anymore.
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.
They don't have to refute it; they have the power to ignore it.
Which suffice to say is not at all
[dead]
To add to it, the post is still calling people losers and monkeys, so the CoC is clearly not working properly.
Might as well get rid of laws against murder because sometimes people commit murder anyway?
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.
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.
Yes the same way laws don't eradicate delinquency and crime magically. Humans are humans.
Oh my code of conduct allows using profanities but not directing them at people :D
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”.
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.
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.
Ok, but as you've sort of implied yourself, the CoC of every project is essentially the same. Which means there's no reason for 99% of projects to have a distinct CoC.
They are also used to exclude control speech and exclude certain people https://chrismcdonough.substack.com/p/the-shameful-defenestr...
[dead]
[flagged]
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!
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.
Microsoft is actually just a group of people as well.
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...)
But the post isn't talking about Microsoft, it's specifically calling the people that work on GitHub monkeys.
I don't see anybody called out by name.
To me saying 'product X is so bad, it's coded by monkeys' is not really a personal insult to a specific coder, but a decrying of a company.
Hell, if I would be a github engineer I'd probably agree.
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.
> You should also consider the point of view of anyone working on github and being paid by microsoft but who actually does care.
That would be easily 90% of GitHub.
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.
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.
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.
>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?
Those people are despicable too. But they are far less common than you probably think.
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.
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.
> 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:
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.
It may not violate the letter of the document, but it does seem to violate its spirit to me.
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
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.
[flagged]
> 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.
Then blast the product, not the people who built it.
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.
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.
Microsoft poured salt into your cup years ago, you just did not notice.
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?
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.
If you've worked in a large company, you know that the product reflects the priorities of the company so much more than the people who work there. Leadership states the priority and the employees do what they're told.
Leadership is part of the group of people who built the product, therefore different leadership would have also built a different product.
With that said, it's also not correct to claim that line folk have no influence at all. I don't believe that you can blame any individual since they may have stood up against something bad being put in the product, but they're still part of a collective group of people that built a bad product.
There's no stupid product, only stupid people.
The product was made by people. Or by AI which was made and controlled by people.
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..
If you only knew...
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?
The original loop is:
while (time() != timeout) {;}
The fixed loop is:
while (time() < timeout) {;}
I see. I did not realize SECONDS was a built in bash variable.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Excellent, welcome aboard, Chief Product Officer!
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.
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.
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.
Interestingly, it does reap on a blocked read without -t, so potentially the behaviour on -t would be considered a bug rather than as-designed.
There's also a loadable sleep builtin supplied with bash which calls into the internal fsleep() so should be reliable and without forking.
It's just all hacks. It should use `sleep`, period.
Sleeping is an OS scheduling task. Use the OS syscall that does that.
As is suggested on the Github issue that Microsoft has been ignoring for half a year.
Me neither. I am over 40 and did not know this. Feels good to learn something today, in an unexpected place!
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
not being an asshole != political correctness
Surely you have your own line on what is or is not acceptable discourse. What is it?
> 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?
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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".
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.
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.
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.
If it was a company, you'd say the CoC is meant for lackeys, not for C-suites.
No, it's meant for interactions inside the company, not towards random giant corporations outside of it.
Made by monkeys and losers (because everyone else has left) does not target the company, but its employees.
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.
> 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!
Not everyone is build robust enough for being called a monkey or loser straight into the person's face.
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.
Maybe they would be happier working a job that requires zero accountability.
Do you believe that Zig is following its own code of conduct, or not?
The website is not covered by the CoC, so they are not in abeyance
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.
it is what it is. i didnt write it, i was surprised when i read it too.
> 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
> 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.
> 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.
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.
Also important to note that this post was authored by the original author of zig, who presumably effectively controls the project.
You would be happier working in a kindergarten. I truly mean that. Think about it. Not trying to be rude.
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.
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.
If you call people at work monkeys when you don't like their work, you're closer to Kindergarten than you think.
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.
You can express dissatisfaction and anger „naturally“ without calling people losers and monkeys.
> 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.
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.
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.
I think it's a breath of fresh air. Don't want to be called out like this then stop fucking up.
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.
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.
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.
I'm sure getting called a monkey will stop them from ever making a mistake again.
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.
The comment is clearly sarcasm.
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!
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?
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.
Feeling empathy for their pathetic fragile existence doesn't mean you sympathise with said fragility.
Not being able to control your anger issues and name calling ppl as a public face of your org sounds pretty fragile to me.
I think this is called projection. Not everyone is angry when name calling someone.
Yeah the tone matters.
If people get hurt over that they need to take some courses on building confidence...
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.
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.
People indeed need a thicker skin
[flagged]
Yeah, its rude to actual monkeys - they did nothing wrong!
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.
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.
that's all well and good but not when it is peddled by you simultaneously in other facets: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46065778
But not when it's against coc
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> If you ask people “do Microsoft employees deserve to be treated as human beings”
No, I'm asking if Microsoft emploee code gets to be judged as a work of a person instead of a corporation, and the answer is a resounding NO.
Nobody cares what Microserfs do in their personal life. (I'm sure they're great people, some of my closest relatives were Microserfs too.)
a lot of "actual people" are also suffering from dunning kruger and just love to build stupid shit that nobody wants in horrific ways.
> 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.
> 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?
> 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.
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.
Nothing to see there, sorry.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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 ?
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).
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!
> 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 ?
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.
> 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.
"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.
He also called employees "losers"
Based on this rationale nobody should use Linux either =))
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.
Calling the Github clowns monkeys is being charitable.
>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.
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.
> comparing him to an animal
homo sapiens is an animal species.
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.
Tomatoes belong in fruit salad, and the cause of every plane crash is gravity.
> 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?
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.
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".
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.
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 :)
Yes, calling people monkeys is a bad decision.
> 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.
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.
microsoft employee detected. lol to all ms employees, keep downvoting...
I wish :)
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.
> Stuff that used to be snappy is now sluggish and often entirely broken.
and as of when was GitHub known for its snappiness?
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.
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.
I'm 40 years old and I've never heard or experienced such things :)
i think the word "losers" was replaced by "rookies"
> 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.
Quite on-brand of Zig, though.
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.
And insulting publicly developers like that isn't ok.
Yea... Nail in the coffin on them for me.
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.)
What's unsustainable about it?
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.
> 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
> Obviously you won't
That's what I meant by not scalable/sustainable.
Well said. It's not good to see such arguments like these.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> I got blocked by Jonathan Blow
You're probably better off for it to be honest.
> 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!
not the dichotomy we're actually talking about here...
What is?
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'
If they wanted to walk without that freedom,
they’d be hacking on shit over at Mozilla (or similar - likely for more money) right?
I have no idea what you're talking about
I’m not too sure how to help with that.
Read more about contributing to open source, who contributes, under what circumstances.
For example: are you familiar with Linus Torvalds?
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.
“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.
But he is right
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.
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.
pretty sure there was no humor there, just looks poorly upon the author
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.
He shot the wrong entity.
Kicking up is very different from kicking down. Zig is not kicking down here.
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.
What's wrong with that pull request?
I might have linked the wrong PR. Well here is the full context.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44766771#44809551
Hard to tell from that PR... but just looking at it, it does look a bit chaotic. Maybe if it wasn't clear, he should have discussed it with the core devs before? I cannot imagine it's easy maintaining an open source projects with PR's flowing in without context.
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.
> 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.
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.
>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.
> 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?
I personally don't care too much for hierarchies, so I didn't factor this in. You can be toxic at any level.
> 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.
>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.
You said:
> blowing it up out of proportion is just as toxic
Making a false equivalency of the supposed toxicity of the commenter's post and the toxicity displayed in the article.
You can just take the L; you don't have to be performatively obtuse about it.
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.
Monkeys, LLMs, coding agents, AI - are all synonyms for me. Not to be confused with actual living things.
Nah, fuck 'em. Call out corpo bullshit where you see it. Github is just LinkedIn for people with compsci degrees now.
And what's wrong with that? Even if you're right, just don't use it, why insult and denigrate people?
Because they deserve to know they're making the world a worse place.
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.
GitHub is definitely not making the world a worse place. Touch grass.
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.
And that rises to the bar of "insult and denigrate people" to you? Because you're annoyed with their recent product decisions?
No, corpo bullshit rises to the "insult and denigrate people" level. Bad product decisions are forgivable, even understandable. We all make bad decisions. Microsoft's recent product decisions and corporate direction, meanwhile, should be viewed as hostile.
[dead]
[dead]
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!
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.
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!
> 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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xt1KNDmOYqA
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.
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.
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.
Exactly. I have not finished reading the post. And I never will. It destroys the message and the reputation
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.
The "monkeys" here are clearly refering to those kinds with typewriters.
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.
vs…?
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.
Ridiculous to claim this is a "US-specific thing" https://www.academia.edu/22669911/Comparing_black_people_to_...
What racism has to do with it?
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=code%20monke...
You think that’s an American thing only?? Oh boy, I have bad news.
Oh wow.
Following now.
Sheesh.
We're past the point of civility when it comes to things like github and M$0FT's involvement.
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.
> 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.
what's wrong with ICE
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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"
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.
> 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.
A not-so-well designed CI is comparable to KKK. This is how discussions on the internet look today.
> 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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
This is one more reason to use Zig.
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!
[flagged]
[flagged]
Did you even read the article. Yes, he had 1 sentence on ICE, which maybe you disagree with its politics. But most of the article was with technical issues in github as a platform and its neglect of non AI features. Please take your low quality comment to X.
Finally, I can’t believe I have to say it, but a creator of an open source project is free to infuse it with whatever values he wants, no one hates on SQLite, no need to hate someone for adding his brand of politics / values to his passion project. Please go create your own “non woke” language if you hate it so much.
Github is by far the more woke platform, so I think you missed the point.
There is no sense in which a platform owned by a company which enthusiastically aided a genocide could be termed "woke."
That's why its called woke/rainbow imperialism.
[flagged]
Thanks for chiming in, ChatGPT.
It's so absurdly GPT-coded I have to think it's satirical.
I guess people think being a jerk is a signal that they are not a LLM bot.
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.
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.
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.
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/