GitHub is no longer independent at Microsoft after CEO resignation • Hacker News Board

Re: GitHub is no longer independent at Microsoft after CEO resignation

#671

Post by terminalshort » Tue, Aug 12, 2025, 1:09 AM UTC

bratsche wrote: post #665

kokanee wrote: post #589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment warrants a post in its own right: let's rank FAANG/M by evilness. Personally I've always been way more afraid of Google, because Microsoft's evil is just old-school capitalism, which is blatant, brash, and harder to ignore than to identify. Google feels like they are quietly and surreptitiously trying to pull the strings of the online economy in their favor, voraciously consuming the world's data behind…

I think what's almost shocking about this is that Google seemed so great in the beginning. "Don't Be Evil" was even like an internal code of conduct slogan or something. I never worked there and have no inside knowledge of what happened. Did they get taken over by MBAs who gained control of the company? Was it always evil and we were just misled the whole time? Something else?

Nothing fundamentally changed. The only real difference is they hit that inevitable point for any business that they had to start making money. They weren't evil then and they aren't now. They're a business, and they are responding to market demand for free to consumer products paid for by advertisement. What nobody on HN wants to admit is that the vast majority of people would rather have that than pay for their software in dollars. People love to complain about the Google panopticon but aren't willing to grapple with the fact that it has tremendous benefits too.

Re: GitHub is no longer independent at Microsoft after CEO resignation

#672

Post by jen20 » Tue, Aug 12, 2025, 1:13 AM UTC

mrbombastic wrote: post #554

theptip wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah exactly. The MacBook Pro is by far the most capable consumer device for local LLM. A beefed up NPU could provide a big edge here. More speculatively, Apple is also one of the few companies positioned to market an ASIC for a specific transformer architecture which they could use for their Siri replacement. (Google has on-device inference too but their business model depends on them not being privacy-focused and t…

They are well positioned but have a history of screwing up their AI plays, I hope they can get it right.

This is only true if you consider AI to be LLMs and chatbots. The non-LLM AI built into just the iPhone camera is almost certainly the largest scale consumer deployment of any AI but largely goes unnoticed because it works so well.

Re: GitHub is no longer independent at Microsoft after CEO resignation

#673

Post by smcin » Tue, Aug 12, 2025, 1:15 AM UTC

hbn wrote: post #495

827a wrote: post #163

My deepest concern at this time isn't that AI eventually gets written down to nothing; because I don't think it will. Its that these companies are so scared of being out-competed by an AI-first competitor that they're willing to make deep sacrifices to their core businesses just to effectively virtue signal that they're AI first and unable to be out-competed. It is deeply concerning because all things point to realit…

Do I have any fellow Duolingo users here? I know they've gotten shit for years, it's not gonna make you fluent, etc etc But I've defended them because it's at the very least a good starting point and something to keep you consistent every day. As long as you're trying to be mindful about learning, I've found it to be a great tool to assist in improving my Spanish. That is until a month or 2 ago where they completely…

Yes I've been chronicling the enshittification of Duolingo here for several years (below). But unlike Github/CoreAI, DuoLingo is tied to a single (and imperilled) revenue-stream from a single product, plus they had a 7/2021 IPO in the heady days of Covid, so they started out in a subscriber market awash with cash. Also like other sites with a formerly vibrant community and forums, they rug-pulled the way they extracted value from the user community's posts then copyright-washed it through AI, then turned around and tried to remarket it back to said users ('Duolingo Max = Super Duolingo + features like AI-powered "Explain My Answer" and "Roleplay" options for more advanced practice'). While laying off thousands of their contractors and translators.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44165464

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44165398

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44102081

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35287456

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35297240

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35679783

Re: GitHub is no longer independent at Microsoft after CEO resignation

#674

Post by inkyoto » Tue, Aug 12, 2025, 1:18 AM UTC

catigula wrote: post #352

n8cpdx wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Delusional take. Rosetta is for maintaining compatibility during the transition. Efficiency is fine with Rosetta. But it doesn’t matter because the ARM transition is essentially already done. Not true, unfortunately, for Windows. Aside from superior performance and battery life (even compared to ARM windows offerings), the M series devices are generally reliable, unlike windows laptops running Intel and (less so) AMD…

What is the efficiency loss specifically? Do you even know, or are you just asserting it? >it doesn't matter because the ARM transition is essentially already done 'Essentially' is doing a lot of heavy-lifting here, but, putting that aside, A. you're wrong, I've recently ran into Rosetta throttling and B. it's not a good reason to begin the project at all, it's only a good reason when it's already done. You're essent…

> A. you're wrong, I've recently ran into Rosetta throttling […]

Can you please define and explain the meaning «Rosetta throttling»? Rosetta 2 is static binary translation + JIT optimisations at the run time. Is Rosetta injecting delays slots or delay loops into the translated code? Or, is it injecting branch instructions that consistently fail the branch predictor? Something else? Since you seem to have analysed specific code paths, the esteemed congregation on here is eager to pick the disassembled code apart.

Without the direct evidence, such claims are as credible as that of a vegetable vendor at the local farmer market claiming that spinach they sell cures cancer.

Re: GitHub is no longer independent at Microsoft after CEO resignation

#675

Post by ocontraire » Tue, Aug 12, 2025, 1:22 AM UTC

gmueckl wrote: post #435

meindnoch wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft being the cool guys? The cool guys ? Mwuhahahhaa. This gave me the good belly laugh I needed. For the last 25 years, Microsoft was known for: - being the no. 1 enemy of free software - shipping the worst web browser in existence, despite 80%+ market share - making corrupt deals with governments around the world to tie them to their office software suite - creating vendor-locked proprietary extensions to kil…

This comment comes some 15 years late. Microsoft runs the biggest org on github and has open sourced a lot of their own code under permissive licenses. IE has been dead and buried for ages. Edge doesn't have even close to the same market share and is based on Chromium. They build more and more of their own UIs on Electron. I honestly don't remember when they tried to snare someone to use proprietary extensions to som…

> And they have behaved relatively nice for so long that some young adults don't know any other side of MS now.

Except that their macOS software still is non-parity with Windows for really no good reason other than anti-competitive. They’ve also had the opportunity to open-source Windows, but won’t go that far willingly, with the exception of those that did it without approval.

Re: GitHub is no longer independent at Microsoft after CEO resignation

#676

Post by physix » Tue, Aug 12, 2025, 1:22 AM UTC

kokanee wrote: post #589

rustystump wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Idk i can think of a long list of awful stuff coming out of ms that is modern. They put fing ads in an os among other atrocities. I put them behind meta on the evilness meter but i think google is less evil which speaks volumes. The only side of ms that i have any love for is xbox but that is also waning with all the studio acquisitions.

Your comment warrants a post in its own right: let's rank FAANG/M by evilness. Personally I've always been way more afraid of Google, because Microsoft's evil is just old-school capitalism, which is blatant, brash, and harder to ignore than to identify. Google feels like they are quietly and surreptitiously trying to pull the strings of the online economy in their favor, voraciously consuming the world's data behind…

What's so evil about Netflix?

They use Cassandra and make cool series ever now and then, like Love Death Robots. :-)

Re: GitHub is no longer independent at Microsoft after CEO resignation

#677

Post by smcin » Tue, Aug 12, 2025, 1:22 AM UTC

camel_Snake wrote: post #532

hbn wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do I have any fellow Duolingo users here? I know they've gotten shit for years, it's not gonna make you fluent, etc etc But I've defended them because it's at the very least a good starting point and something to keep you consistent every day. As long as you're trying to be mindful about learning, I've found it to be a great tool to assist in improving my Spanish. That is until a month or 2 ago where they completely…

going to shout-out ClozeMaster here since I first found out about it on hacker news. Always hated duolingo - it's the gamification triggered to many alarm bells to me. Clozemaster is much more rudimentary but I do like how they use AI - there's a single button that gives you an AI grammatical summary of the translation and calls out any idioms or grammatical conventions in the target language compared to your native…

> going to shout-out ClozeMaster here since I first found out about it on hacker news. Always hated duolingo - it's the gamification triggered to many alarm bells to me.

Duolingo was always aiming at the casual app user (not serious language learners, think getting casual 14-30yo users to switch 10 min a day from playing casual games instead or consuming SM), and openly admitted they crafted the product and their metrics around gamification and socially acquiring new (paying, non-freemium) users. So judge their behavior by that. Also, you can turn off some but not all of the default gamification + social features.

Re: GitHub is no longer independent at Microsoft after CEO resignation

#678

Post by 7thpower » Tue, Aug 12, 2025, 1:25 AM UTC

meindnoch wrote: post #404

pjmlp wrote: post #84

I think that just like it happened with Apple after they made it out of bankruptcy, Microsoft being the cool guys phase is slowly over. Xamarin is no more, after the whole MAUI rewrite without backwards compatibility to Xamarin.Forms, killing VS4Mac, shortly after having rewriten the underlying Xamarin based IDE into Mac, what survives is a subset of Xamarin tech for mobile and WebAssembly workloads. .NET is now cros…

Microsoft being the cool guys? The cool guys ? Mwuhahahhaa. This gave me the good belly laugh I needed. For the last 25 years, Microsoft was known for: - being the no. 1 enemy of free software - shipping the worst web browser in existence, despite 80%+ market share - making corrupt deals with governments around the world to tie them to their office software suite - creating vendor-locked proprietary extensions to kil…

This is bullshit, the Zune was great and was doing incredibly well, at least around here.

It was THE device to have, people were going crazy for them; there was enough pent up demand that people were breaking windows and sliding into cars to get them.

I still miss that thing.

Re: GitHub is no longer independent at Microsoft after CEO resignation

#679

Post by kaladin-jasnah » Tue, Aug 12, 2025, 1:26 AM UTC

physix wrote: post #676

kokanee wrote: post #589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment warrants a post in its own right: let's rank FAANG/M by evilness. Personally I've always been way more afraid of Google, because Microsoft's evil is just old-school capitalism, which is blatant, brash, and harder to ignore than to identify. Google feels like they are quietly and surreptitiously trying to pull the strings of the online economy in their favor, voraciously consuming the world's data behind…

What's so evil about Netflix? They use Cassandra and make cool series ever now and then, like Love Death Robots. :-)

DRM is probably something that people take issue with, and it's probably harder to buy physical media that you "own" more than streaming services.

Re: GitHub is no longer independent at Microsoft after CEO resignation

#680

Post by sothatsit » Tue, Aug 12, 2025, 1:28 AM UTC

bsimpson wrote: post #248

codingdave wrote: post #233

I've been in a three different scenarios where I worked for independent companies under the umbrella of a large parent organization. In all 3, the leadership left or was fired, and the remainder of the company was merged into a division of the parent company. The product quality went to shit in all 3 scenarios. There were different reasons and nuances to them all, but all 3 boiled down to one common factor. Instead o…

From a product POV, GitHub seems like a solved problem. It's been working well-enough with the current feature set for over a decade, with many companies building themselves on top of its stack. If they stagnate in MS bureaucracy but keep the lights on for push/pull/PRs, that's probably good enough for most people until something completely changes how software is made.

I think GitHub also doesn't have the same vendor lock-in that other companies do. I am very happy with their service, and I wouldn't want to move off of it. But at the same time there are numerous alternatives and it wouldn't be that hard to switch. Because, as you say, it is pretty much a solved problem, and because of that there are several competitors with feature parity at this point.