Live data from Hacker News

Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service

theregister.com

541–550 of 641 posts

Re: Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service

#541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you only provide clear and direct feedback on poor work by insulting people?

No but I won’t rule it out for the incorrigible

Ok, but that’s still not effective as a leadership course of action. Calling people names might make you feel like a big man inside, but that’s it, it won’t accomplish anything, that’s only for your personal benefit, not the project, not the product and definitely not the team.

Re: Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service

#542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It just seems like someone got upset about something they can't articulate Dunno, they don't play well to the HN crowd I thought it was pretty clear what their pain points with GitHub were.

ICE, Actions, and Microsoft, not a single complaint about git itself. All I see is they have CI issues coupled with dumbest anti AI policy that is impossible for them to enforce. Giving up your donations and losing half your community doesn't seem like an intelligent move when all you had to do is update your CI.

That's kind of what they are doing - the move is 'updating their CI' to Codeberg Actions which is presumably more reliable. All the git workflows stay the same.

Re: Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service

#543

Probably a good time to mention fossil, an excellent SCM from the makers of SQLite with a number of github-like features built-in: https://fossil-scm.org/ Single ~6mb executable, blazing fast. I've been a happy user for years.

There's no code review system for Fossil, because the SQLite guy doesn't believe in formalized code review. It also doesn't have any good flow for accepting external contributions other than .patch/bundle files, because the SQLite guy doesn't believe anyone but him is good enough to regularly contribute code.

It might be great for single person projects, which I guess is fine for hobby stuff, but unless you luck out like Richard Hipp and manage to become a well-paid hermit working in a effectively-one-person cathedral model, then it's not really going to work for most projects.

Re: Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service

#544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the previous HN article, I recall many a comment talking about how they should change this, leave the politics/negative juju out because it was a bad look for the Zig community. It would appear they listened to that feedback, swallowed their ego/pride and did what was best for the Zig community with these edits. I commend them for their actions in doing what's best for the community at the cost of some personal me…

I often find we don't appreciate enough people accepting their failures and changing their mind. For some reason I see the opposite: people respecting those who "stick to their guns" or double down when something is clearly wrong. As you say, the context matters and these edits seem to be learning from the feedback rather than saving face since the sentiment stands, just in a less needlessly targeted way.

Some would say if you always stick to your guns and double down, you might wind up President.

Re: Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service

#545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No but I won’t rule it out for the incorrigible

Ok, but that’s still not effective as a leadership course of action. Calling people names might make you feel like a big man inside, but that’s it, it won’t accomplish anything, that’s only for your personal benefit, not the project, not the product and definitely not the team.

Actually if you completely rule out the possibility of harshness then you are giving license to let yourself be walked over and for standards to drop to zero. It might make you feel like a big enlightened man inside to do so, but the proper application of firmness and pressure is absolutely effective in leadership.

Re: Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service

#546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why do you consider that a useful metric? Hit dogs holler, after all. you do... > The methods for influencing results within an organization exist on a spectrum, and failing to adequately utilize the breadth of that spectrum is always counter-productive. Or did you have a different expectation for result in mind? The one you thought would be counter-productive without insults. My assumption was that ark wanted to p…

I do about what? I haven’t actually used harsh language with anyone so I’m not sure what your point is. I have been on HN long enough to know that expressions of strong negative emotion are punished here. That says absolutely nothing about the effectiveness of different methods of influence within an organization. I think if people are rallying to defend GitHub due to some language that ruffled their feathers and not…

I'm talking about the ideas, threads and conversations that are occupying the head space of others.

> then they have completely lost the plot as engineers.

I think most people who would call themselves software engineers have lost the plot of engineering.

That applies equally to those who are blind to the fact that engineering only exists to create stuff for humans. Most engineers are ignorant to the ability to consider the humans they're supposedly build for.

The point is to make shit better, not worse, and not more inhuman.

Re: Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service

#547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps it's time for Windows to stop being the odd man out? This is the same nonsense rationalizations that zig gave. Windows is the odd man out. If you want to release something on windows you match an extra byte on the ends of lines. It isn't that hard and even the simplest toy language does it. It's just part of line splitting, it isn't even something that happens at the language stage. Last I checked both Visual…

> This is the same nonsense rationalizations that zig gave. I'm guessing you didn't live through the early days of webdev when you had to jump through ridiculous hoops just to support IE. At least back then there was the excuse that IE had the lions share of the market and many corporate users. The industry wide acceptance of supporting IE majorly held back what websites/apps were capable of being. Around 2012ish (ri…

Now you may claim "but Windows is 70% of users!" but this issue doesn't impact anyone wanting to run Zig applications, only those writing them.

No one is confused about how a compiler works. Those people being intentionally trolled are called your users when you make a language.

If you're an inexperienced dev that's super curious about Zig, this type of error might be another good nudge that maybe Windows isn't the OS you want to be working on.m

Then why did they make a windows version? Any normal person just sees that they shouldn't invest time in a language intentionally annoying it's own users for trying it out.

You still haven't come up with any explanation, your whole tangent about internet explorer has no relevance. There isn't one part of your comment that makes sense. Why would you even care about other people's OS and text editors? What kind of fanaticism would lead to wanting to use a language because they intentionally annoy users of something you aren't even involved in?

The whole thing is basically a case of "this things doesn't stand on any merits, I've just decided that I don't like certain people and they did something to upset them even though they are really just shooting themselves in the foot".

Re: Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service

#548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I often find we don't appreciate enough people accepting their failures and changing their mind. For some reason I see the opposite: people respecting those who "stick to their guns" or double down when something is clearly wrong. As you say, the context matters and these edits seem to be learning from the feedback rather than saving face since the sentiment stands, just in a less needlessly targeted way.

> I often find we don't appreciate enough people accepting their failures and changing their mind. Because this plays into a weird flaw in cognition that people have. When people become leaders because they are assholes and they are wrong, then after the wind blows the other way they see the light and do a mea culpa, there is always a certain segment that says that they're even more worthy to be a leader because they…

The flaw in your argument is referring to the people who are “always right.”

Those people don’t exist. Which is exactly why the ability to change your opinion when presented with new information is a critical quality in a good leader.

Re: Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service

#549

IMHO, the main advantage of github is that it is an ecosystem. This is a well-thought-out Swiss knife: a pioneering (but no longer new) PR system, convenient issues, as well as a well-formed CI system with many developed actions and free runners. In addition, it is best to use code navigation simply in a web browser. You write code, and almost everything works effortlessly. Having a sponsorship system is also great,…

I don't agree with this at all. I think the reason Github is so prominent is the social network aspects it has built around Git, which created strong network effects that most developers are unwilling to part with. Maintainers don't want to loose their stars and the users don't want to loose the collective "audit" by the github users. Things like number of stars on a repository, number of forks, number of issues answ…

I agree with you. I believe it speaks to the power of social proof as well as the time pressures most developers find themselves with.

In non-coding social circles, social proof is even more accepted. So, I think that for a large portion of codebases, social proof is enough.

Re: Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service

#550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps it's time for Windows to stop being the odd man out? This is the same nonsense rationalizations that zig gave. Windows is the odd man out. If you want to release something on windows you match an extra byte on the ends of lines. It isn't that hard and even the simplest toy language does it. It's just part of line splitting, it isn't even something that happens at the language stage. Last I checked both Visual…

If you want to release something on windows you match an extra byte on the ends of lines Did I miss some sort of formal directive from Microsoft or is this just outrage that someone dared do something not up to your standards? try to punish and troll its users for using it Nobody's being punished. Configuring your dev environment is something people do for every language. Let's add some perspective here: we're talkin…

Did I miss some sort of formal directive from Microsoft or is this just outrage that someone dared do something not up to your standards?

It's just the way it works, it isn't my standards, it is literally any piece of software that detects line breaks.

Nobody's being punished. Configuring your dev environment is something people do for every language.

No one has to configure around this issue because it is trivially solved and dealt with by every piece of software on the planet. It takes longer to write an error message than it does it just split a line correctly.

Let's add some perspective here: we're talking about a single runtime option for your text editor of choice.

Let's add some perspective here: they intentionally broke their own software to upset 72% of their potential users.

More to the point, why isn't your editor or IDE properly supporting Zig files?

No one has to care about zig, it's a niche language that doesn't care about its users, it's irrelevant except for hacker news threads.

If some language started demanding you save all your text files with carriage returns or will will error out, what would you think?

You sound like a lawyer grasping at straws instead of someone with a reasonable perspective that wouldn't be hypocritical when flipped around.

Post reply on HN