> 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?
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?
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.
Which suffice to say is not at all
They don't have to refute it; they have the power to ignore it.
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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.
Not even virtue, codes of conduct just signals leftist control over an organisation.
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.
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.
Just FYI github nags projects to have a code of conduct.
Well.
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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.
They are also used to exclude control speech and exclude certain people https://chrismcdonough.substack.com/p/the-shameful-defenestr...
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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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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> 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.
The product was made by people. Or by AI which was made and controlled by people.
There's no stupid product, only stupid 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..
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.
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.
> 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.
If you call people at work monkeys when you don't like their work, you're closer to Kindergarten than you think.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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).
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
i think the word "losers" was replaced by "rookies"
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
> 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.
a lot of "actual people" are also suffering from dunning kruger and just love to build stupid shit that nobody wants in horrific ways.
> 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.
Yea... Nail in the coffin on them for me.
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.
Quite on-brand of Zig, though.
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.
But he is right
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.
> 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.
Kicking up is very different from kicking down. Zig is not kicking down here.
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?
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.
And insulting publicly developers like that isn't ok.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ridiculous to claim this is a "US-specific thing" https://www.academia.edu/22669911/Comparing_black_people_to_...
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.