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?
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 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.
Those seem like conflicting statements to me. Last outage was only 13 days ago: 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.
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.
...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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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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...)
3 replies →
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?
2 replies →
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.
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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=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.
2 replies →
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.
2 replies →
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.
2 replies →
> 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?
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.
Denying code not on it's merits but it's source is childish.
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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.
3 replies →
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.
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You have accused me of "shitting in Rust threads". Do you have any evidence for this libel?
[flagged]
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[flagged]
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.
2 replies →
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.