Comment by johnfn

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”.

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.

Not even virtue, codes of conduct just signals leftist control over an organisation.

Oh my code of conduct allows using profanities but not directing them at people :D

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

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”.

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!

Microsoft is actually just a group of people as well.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There's no stupid product, only stupid people.

The product was made by people. Or by AI which was made and controlled by people.

The product isn't some result of a series of "oopsies". The worst aspects of bad and/or user-hostile software products are that way because the people working at these companies want them to be that way.

Unless you want to call them just that incompetent. I assume they'd complain about that label too.

In short: No it's not "the product", the people building it are the problem. Somehow everyone working in big tech wants all the praise all the time, individually, but never take even the slightest bit of responsibility fro the constant enshittification they drive forward..

The original loop is:

while (time() != timeout) {;}

The fixed loop is:

while (time() < timeout) {;}

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

I think it's a breath of fresh air. Don't want to be called out like this then stop fucking up.

Yeah, its rude to actual monkeys - they did nothing wrong!

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.

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.

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.

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.

Yes, calling people monkeys is a bad decision.

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.

I wish :)

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.

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.

> 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?

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.

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.

not the dichotomy we're actually talking about here...

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.

> 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 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.

I might have linked the wrong PR. Well here is the full context.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44766771#44809551

Because they deserve to know they're making the world a worse place.

A high-profile repository like Zig moving off of Github is as loud a message as one can give. Tossing in "losers" and "monkeys" only muddies the delivery.

The most effective message GitHub can receive is when they don’t get to invoice you.

GHA in particular is a hot mess, I’m as surprised as a decade ago that anybody is using this crap. IMHO it’s bugs as a service kind of product, and the bugs start at the core design with the ‘pretend yaml but actually an unholy mix of shell, js and json’ language.

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!

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.