Live data from Hacker News

The Zulip Foundation

blog.zulip.com

21–30 of 85 posts

Re: The Zulip Foundation

#21

> I’m stepping back from full-time Zulip leadership to join Anthropic, alongside three senior team members, and we’re donating the company to a newly created, independent, nonprofit Zulip Foundation Not trying to be cynical … but announcing on a Friday afternoon is typically the operating mode for when you need to announce something that you do not want to get noticed. I can only speculate this weeks Bun/Rust news mi…

Historically, Zulip blog posts have actually gotten more engagement when they landed on the Hacker News homepage during off-peak times for regular news (After business hours and weekends) than when we've published them on weekdays mornings.

Fun fact: The original blog post announcing the Zulip Open Source project (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10279961) was published on a Friday and I think got more attention because of that choice of date than it would have otherwise.

Re: The Zulip Foundation

#23
This article would have been fine and a good send-off if the maintainers just said they were moving on to greener pastures. The discussion of the Anthropic job offer and the cult-like praise of them seems out of place, especially the unnecessary defensiveness in the tone.

It’s okay to make money and change up your career! But this communication is bizarre.

Re: The Zulip Foundation

#24
post #5
post #3

> Over the last few months, I’ve been reflecting deeply on the myriad ways in which AI is changing the world, and how it might change the world in the future. And I came to the conclusion that it’s vitally important that we navigate this strange adolescence of technology well, and that I should contribute to this cause more directly than I ever could as the CEO of Kandra Labs. The compensation for a senior developer…

I worked in the FOSS space for roughly half a decade. Comments like this are easy to make and also add absolutely no value whatsoever. If you actually feel strongly about it, do the work yourself, no one is stopping you.

I have no qualms with him deciding to step away from developing Zulip or setting up a foundation. My qualms are with his choice to work for an AI company when someone of his experience could easily have found a job working somewhere else. Public figures should be subject to criticism of their ethical choices when they make bad ones.

Re: The Zulip Foundation

#25
I've long thought that we need a name for what Zulip is other than "team chat." IMO it's different qualitatively than slack/mattermost/discord/teams &c.

Re: The Zulip Foundation

#26
post #18

Not sure what to term this as it's an acqui-hire without the acquire, but why did Anthropic want to poach most of Zulip/Kandra's team?

Multi-user/team-chat with Claude/Code. Today it's all 1:1.

Re: The Zulip Foundation

#27
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've known Tim personally for over a decade. I'm certain that he's not doing this because he wants more money.

> I'm certain that he's not doing this because he wants more money. There are many reasons to change job. The pay is always one of them (if you don't work for money, it's not called a job, is it?). > join Anthropic because of its remarkable commitment to the responsible development of AI for the long-term benefit of humanity. Obviously, it's better to believe that what Anthropic is doing is good for humanity when you…

> There are many reasons to change job. The pay is always one of them (if you don't work for money, it's not called a job, is it?).

Not at the same scale as this, but I've seen friends deliberately choose to get paid less, perhaps much less money, because they wanted to do something. Video games for example, does not pay well, but it may be your passion. Banking pays very well, but it's hard to find any significant emotional involvement.

You can probably argue that's what I did, but it's complicated because I'm hard work. I can't stand debt but I also don't like the feeling of not knowing how to spend all the money. I can say that it's surprisingly hard to get people who are hiring you to accept that (a) the number you put in their mandatory "previous salary" box is correct and yet (b) yes you did understand that they have fixed pay scales and can't possibly match that.

Re: The Zulip Foundation

#28
post #25

I've long thought that we need a name for what Zulip is other than "team chat." IMO it's different qualitatively than slack/mattermost/discord/teams &c.

Yeah I've often had the same thought! Ideas are very much appreciated.

I do like our current "organized team chat" quite a bit better than the original "group chat", which would often result in confusion with WhatsApp and its equivalents.

Re: The Zulip Foundation

#30

Gotta love the frontier labs annihilating open source projects left and right either by acquiring them directly or stealing the teams.

You can’t annihilate a project by hiring its devs away. The project is still out there and the code is still open source.

This idea that devs owe their continued free service to an open source project they released in the past is a crazy one.

Post reply on HN