Thank you, GitHub
github.blog
github.blog
The one time that I won't forget about Github under Nat, was when they stood up for Iranian developers [1]. They went the extra distance to get a permission/license from the US government specially to offer full Github to developers from Iran. Many other companies didn't do something similar.
[1]: https://github.blog/2021-01-05-advancing-developer-freedom-g...
https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2020/11/2020-11-1...
Wait, that's a thing ?
We get a signup from Iran about once every month and I always, apologetically, send a personal note saying that I wish we could provide service to them but ...
You're saying rsync.net can legally provide service to Iranians with ... some paperwork ?
Regarding the cost, it might be more than "some paperwork".
US sanctions, even the threat thereof, are serious business. To this day, US nationals or US tax persons are having a really hard time finding a bank in Europe that is willing to deal with them because many banks don't want any exposure to the US FATCA they can avoid.
I had an ex-girlfriend who was born in Germany to US and Greek parents. Quite the shitshow with paperwork.
With the US, it feels like everything is much more uniform with the tie back to a federal social security number. The SSN is universally requested for many types of financial and insurance setups.
Lying on these forms is punishable under our AML/KYC regulations and exposes you to civil liability for damages.
Had friends working export compliance for a larger US IT company, and they once (temporarily) blocked a larger shipment to the (British) Royal Air Force because some bozo abbreviated them as "RAF" - which, obviously!, refers to the (German) Red Army Faction, a left-extremist terrorist cell that wasn't relevant for more than 10 years at that point (and wouldn't know what to do with high performance computers, anyway).
Better safe than sorry, otherwise you mess up one day, come back to the HQ on the next and all that's left is a brand new parking lot.
I don't know whether HN violates sanctions, but comparing to GitHub HN is very, very small fish. The chances that GitHub would swim under the radar were pretty slim.
Really, "this company obeys the law, so it is evil" is lame.
> And separately, we took our case to the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), part of the US Treasury Department, and began a lengthy and intensive process of advocating for broad and open access to GitHub in sanctioned countries. Over the course of two years, we were able to demonstrate how developer use of GitHub advances human progress, international communication, and the enduring US foreign policy of promoting free speech and the free flow of information. We are grateful to OFAC for the engagement which has led to this great result for developers.
https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/financial-sanctions/...
A lot of it probably. Also, not sure how you can collect payment from these users. And keep in mind your software might end up being used by their regime for oppressive purpose.
Keep in mind the people of Iran can end these sanctions at any time. It's a personal and societal choice.
Sorry to bite on this off-topic thing... but, _how_? Overthrowing their government? I guess that would be technically true, but "at any time" seems like a weird phrase to use for that.
Iran at least has some sort of functioning government entity (which I, to be clear, absolutely despise), Libya collapsed completely as a result of Ghaddafi's (well deserved) downfall and it will likely be a hotbed of Islamist terrorism and instability for decades to come. I don't see any nation or block of nations willing to step up and do nation rebuilding in once-beautiful Libya outside of the EU financing terrorists aka the so-called "coast guard" to torture migrants - what makes you think any kind of revolution in Iran would be assisted by anyone?
The US even abandoned the Kurds ffs.
There is a good chunk of Iranian society that genuinely thinks their system is good, and it keeps the country somewhat stable in a region where such condition is not particularly common. Telling them to throw it all away by pointing at Libya is basically a cruel joke.
In addition, “the secular executive branch” comment is flat out wrong. The executive branch and candidates for presidency are explicitly obligated to believe and follow Islamic and Sharia laws.
In practice, there have been elected presidents that the religious element did not really like. They did not last, and were sabotaged at every turn, but they existed. Iran is a big country and it contains a number of different power-centres, unlike, for example, North Korea.
> In addition, “the secular executive branch” comment is flat out wrong.
Uh, no it isn't:
>> the religious element can pre-emptively stop pesky candidates from running altogether
Whether this is achieved by claiming they are unbelievers or corrupt, is irrelevant. Candidates can (and do) get purged before they get a chance, but the latter part of the process is fairly democratic (which is why occasionally the "wrong" candidates do win). One of the reasons for the increasingly low turnout in recent years is precisely that purges are getting more and more indiscriminate; Iranians are not all stupid, and won't engage when they think the process is meaningless. The "secular" qualifier is there because, in practice, that's what it is - a government that cares about economy, army, police, and administration.
Demonising everything is a recipe for being ignored, you should try understanding other points of view when you're trying to persuade.
You are absolutely incorrect[1]. There are no ifs and buts. They absolutely positively require the candidate to assert they'd abide by Islamic law--there is not even a pretense of secularism. Which Islamic Republic lobby group did you get your propaganda from? I lived there for 20 years.
If you think you know better, please cite a reference to your egregious claims. Even Khamenei himself does not make some of the claims you are making.
Oh come one. Is the US not a democracy because the executive branch and candidates for presidency are explicity obligated to believe and follow the constitution?
As a Canadian I've personally benefited from the US hegemony and if I had to pick a least-rapacious global hegemon historically you'd be in the running. But I see comments like this and I can't help but feel like the US might have 'Earned' the same kind of 'Democracy' its three-letter boys brought Libya.
Did you just equate "following the US constitution" to "following Sharia law"?
edit: Wanted to leave it at that, but I should really clarify. I'm equating a group choosing the US constitution as their founding document with a group choosing Sharia law for the same purpose. If a person says they believe in democracy but doesn't believe in other people's right to make what looks like obviously bad decisions, they don't really believe in democracy.
Libya was especially an affair of France, Italy (the former colonial power) and the UK.
If you ask me, the Italians are the reason why Ghaddafi was outright executed - there were numerous dirty deals done between Italy and Ghaddafi's Libya, mostly to have Ghaddafi do the dirty work for the EU in keeping migrants away.
Or is it more that factions in Italy that benefit from human trafficking got the upper hand on those that were working with Qaddafi to limit it? Italy is #3 in the world for trafficked humans after all, presumably some powerful people profit from it.
That explains the massive exodus of talent, minds and people straight out of the country minutes after the revolution.
And if you go to any western university campus, you'll meet many of them, born after the revolution, who worked hard to make it to the west and who are trying to sponsor their families to join them.
The opposite (westerners trying to do the same in Iran) is virtually unheard of.
Why? This chart should be illustrative: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libya#/media/File:Libya_Produc...
- Dinosaur juice that we took out of the ground
- Dinosaur farts that we took out of the ground
- Dinosaur juice that we took out of the ground and then cooked
- Shiny metal that we took out of the ground
In other words, all industries that, critically, do not require the people to operate. Libya is the poster child for the resource curse. In poor countries, democracy is a dangerous boondoggle that squanders the wealth of the country, and any country with an economy shaped like this that tries democracy will be swiftly punished for their obvious flaunting of basic economics. Likewise, all of the other things you see in these kinds of countries - sectarian violence, religious and ethnonationalist conflict, and so on - are all merely part and parcel of being poor.[0]
Taking this back to Iran... the country is born out of geopolitical praxis, not a resource curse. The US tried to utterly fuck over Iran and turn it into Libya, in the name of fighting the Soviets. So at least part of the current hostility towards the US is still borne out of actual popular support. Yes, some Iranians would like to just enjoy a cosmopolitan software developer lifestyle, but those people are fewer in number compared to the people who want nothing to do with a country that has hypocritically denied it the right to self-determination. Maybe that will change, and people on both sides will forget long enough for us to normalize trade relations. But that's not a simple matter of uninstalling and reinstalling governments like they were device drivers. Plenty of Iranians still hate the US, and plenty of Americans do, too.
[0] This is also why a lot of Donald Trump voters bought into a lot of far-right racist bullshit, as well as why many poor countries see regular genocides. Because that's exactly what you promise poor people. It's far easier to make you richer than a race or religion you don't like, than to make you richer overall.
Here’s the internal msft email
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29098640
This person at MSFT who got promoted is the one that caused the problems in the dotnet community where features that had a go-live RTM license (as in merged and ready for long term support) were removed from the programming language so that more Microsoft Visual Studio licenses could be sold.
Other items under this persons remit:
- Visual Studio
- .NET
- Python
- TypeScript
- OpenJDK
- GitHub (+NPM)
- (hint hint) Azure SDKs (hint hint)
- (hint hint) Azure PaaS / Azure Serverless (hint hint)
Honestly, I’m fine with this level of dickishness so long as it means the rest of the VS ecosystem is free-to-use.
Someone or something has to subsidise VSCode.
It would be totally fine if .NET were a closed-source, Microsoft-run language. It is pretty cool that this isn't true. But the idea that Microsoft organizationally having control over the .NET open source project is somehow bad for open source is just incomprehensible to me, who grew up on .NET not being open source at all.
It's not about open-source: it's more that major organizations and industries won't use a programming platform that is entirely at the whims of a company they have no real control over and without independent means to ensure it keeps on working, so a compromise position that Microsoft took is to make .NET open-source, so that in the event Microsoft disappears overnight (say, Mt. Rainier erupting and wiping out the Seattle metro area) people have something they can keep on using and build and maintain themselves. We saw the opposite with VB6: the VB6 platform was never open and shared and now all the companies that invested in VBA and VB6 in the 1990s is rightfully annoyed because VB6 is a complete dead-end with no feasible upgrade-path to .NET (VB.NET is not compatible with VB6).
--------
While my SaaS (and my current job) is a .NET shop because it originated with some "Classic" ASP 3.0 VBScripts that my boss put together himself in the late 1990s that was slowly transitioned through .NET WebForms (ew) and ASP.NET MVC, we still use it for new greenfield projects because .NET is a nice platform overall that scales really well from one-off prototype projects that can be easily transitioned to high-performance distributed applications without any major rewrites (the only thing I've had to "rewrite" was the conversion from .aspx (as an MVC View, not WebForms) to Razor .cshtml, everything else has been refactored through the years. The tooling and integration between MS products and services does save a lot of trouble otherwise (that's where the value is).
My experience from other shops, and the problems I've seen there is not that other "stacks" (I hate that word) like MySQL+PHP, Postgres+Python, Anything+NodeJS are somehow less capable (excepting PHP, it's often the opposite, actually) but that you end up with dozens of projects all with their own separate stacks and build environments, all with their own tedious onboarding processes (e.g. having one Angular project that absolutely requires Node 12, not Node 14, to run) while another project's server-side NodeJS code absolutely requires Node 16 and Python and Tomcat somewhere.
So I'm more than happy to pay the thousands of USD per year for my MSDN Subscription because it gives me a platform that saves me the trouble and headaches of a highly heterogenous environment especially given the fact we're a small shop.
100% this, the biggest issue I see with dotnet and Swift is that they're spending too much time trying to be appealing to people who don't want to use them. Swift, as a language, really only makes sense to use if you're extensively targeting Apple systems and planning to skip Windows/Linux altogether. That's a pretty shit deal, from the perspective of developers who want to deliver software to the largest possible audience. Similarly, writing an entire program in dotnet used to be a death sentence until Mono finally got thrown together. Even still it's not a very attractive framework for most cases, which just goes to show how important open governance can be when developing such a complex system.
This is somewhat ironic, considering .NET is effectively "Java as rebuilt by Microsoft", and one of the original selling point of Java was... cross-platform support, "write once - run anywhere". BillG clearly made sure that particular aspect would not carry over to the MS version.
Heh, well .NET's cross-architecture support was/is still useful for allowing .NET to target Windows CE on SH-3, MIPS, ARM and more - also consider that at-the-time (1999-2001) even though Windows NT no-longer supported MIPS and Alpha, there was IA-64 (Itanium) looming on the horizon which was widely anticipated to replace x86 (hah), so even though it wasn't true cross-platform (i.e. cross-OS) it still made business-sense.
Another advantage of .NET's use of JIT bytecode was that Microsoft could sell it as a platform enabling "verifiable code": which is true: a "pure" CIL/MSIL assembly file literally cannot have any memory-related bugs to worry about and their consequential security vulnerabilities, which were a big deal at the time (this was related to Microsoft's "Trustworthy computing" initiative as well: you don't need to "trust" the programs you're running: the use of verifiable bytecode means you can verify its safety entirely by yourself).
That is a risk that is common to every single industry, and as such is a risk that is easily understood and quantifiable. We live in an interdependent world. You're always going to be dependent on suppliers, vendors, equipment etc. We have seen how covid related supply chain issues have affected everyone. Atleast with a S/W platform, what you have in-hand continues to work, and you can continue to use the compiler, libraries, etc to churn out new binaries.
Honestly: No
If it would be "easily quantifiable", you would not see in 2021 still bank ATM running damn Windows XP or nuclear power plant under Win2000 with some old deprecated crap supervisor tools.
It is a common drama with proprietary solutions, they are seducing to install and a nightmare to maintain.
This even more due to the decision to use these "vertically integrated proprietary (crap) solution" are generally taken by executive level without any long term thinking and that will be long way gone when the mess need to be cleaned-up
> It is a common drama with proprietary solutions, they are seducing to install and a nightmare to maintain.
The fact the software is "proprietary" or not is largely irrelevant to whether or not the systems-integrator who made those ATMs and Nuclear Power plants is acting responsibly. Had they chosen Linux then that ATM would still be sitting there with just-an-outdated version of some embedded Linux distro.
There is an argument that if they used a GPLv3 or other anti-Tivo license that the end owner or operator of the machine would be able to upgrade the host OS software themselves, however in both of those cases (ATMs and power-plants) what makes-the-thing-run is not the OS but the application software (BankAtm.exe and NuclearReactorMonitor.exe) which will have their own dependencies and (knowing most software) will just break when running on an updated OS - and it'd be even worse on Linux because Linux does not have a stable applications ABI between major releases: the software would need to be recompiled.
Now if the application software itself were also open-source, then I agree: that does help, but I'm not convinced that's a solution either because I can assure you that companies like banks and infrastructure operators are not going to be happy having to do patch-tuesday and recompiling their software on a regular basis for hardware they'd really prefer to leave alone and stable. Hence why they're air-gapped (or at least meant to be air-gapped).
Being non-proprietary is not a panacea.
That's wrong, they would have been in a position to update / maintain themselves their own distro or dedicate that to a third party company that has the knowhow to do so. This for more than 20 years without problems. Because they would DO have the code for it if they want it.
With proprietary solutions in the embedded system world, this is impossible to do. If your providers refuses to support your OS anymore, you're fucked and that's it. And if he wants to increase the cost of your support maintenance program per 10x because it's legacy, you're fucked too, just in an other way.
> Linux because Linux does not have a stable applications ABI between major releases: the software would need to be recompiled.
I disagre and for two reasons:
- first, if it's your software stack recompiling should not be a problem
- second, it is not true. Kernel ABI is stable (mostly). And running statically compiled binary between major kernel releases never have been a problem.
> infrastructure operators are not going to be happy having to do patch-tuesday and recompiling their software on a regular basis for hardware they'd really prefer to leave alone and stable.
Do they ? Even on ATM, client software evolves and is updated. In their case, they just do it with the pain of a legacy system without being able to touch to the platform itself because they have no control on it.
Why would you not see that? The risk profile is well understood, and can be mitigated. Sandboxes, firewalls, app-containers, input sanitization, Virtual Machines, etc, etc, etc.
I don't quite understand exactly what you're disagreeing with?
So well understood that hacks on ATM happens every weeks :)
Nobody in this thread is arguing that everything in the world is perfect. There are a lot of bad things in the world. (The fact that we haven't figured out a reliable, scalable way to develop major F/OSS projects without the backing of companies that either sell proprietary software or do far worse things is certainly one of them!)
The specific argument in this subthread is about whether it's okay to build your business on proprietary software or whether there's too much of a risk that the vendor will stop producing updates. If they aren't interested in updates when they actually happened, then clearly this wasn't a concern for them.
(Also, have you never seen people running extremely out-of-date versions of F/OSS operating systems?)
It has everything to do with that and I think it's a way too narrow view.
In this case Microsoft indeed did not go bankrupt. They did however stopped to provide updates to solution "Windows XP", without giving an alternative compatible on the same legacy hardware (the old ATM hardware).
And that illustrates perfectly the problem with proprietary ecosystem. You do NOT need your provider to bankrupt to put yourself in shit, you just need him to have interests diverging of your interests.
Because at the end, he is the one controlling your software stack, not you.
Hang on there… Microsoft never did stop making updates to Windows XP Embedded - they kept it on super-extended support as “Windows POSReady” (I think the pun was intentional…) and it’s replacement in “Windows IoT” is reasonable.
Your argument is valid only if ATM manufacturers were being missold XP Embedded by Microsoft on the basis that the support lifecycle of XP Embedded would outlive the ATM hardware - but I put it to you that is not the case. The support lifeycle of MS products is (surprisingly) well-documented and transparent - and to my knowledge (and saying that as a former blue-badge myself) MS has never represented XP Embedded (or other NT-family OSes) as being suitable for a 20+ year lifespan. The blame lies squarely with the systems-integrator who built the ATMs.
All I said was that it's cool but I can't see the latest commit status (the result of your CI pipeline) any more, and that I sent that feedback through the official channels as it were. I think I tacked a less favourable comment on the end and that was also answered.
First reply to my HN comment was from Nat, acknowledging it.
That was cool. Also, solid leadership.
I’m still personally waiting on “leveraging the vast resources of Microsoft will have the greatest likelihood of affecting public policy” regarding ICE.
That was 2019. It’s almost like he didn’t actually intend on doing anything about it.
Nat is an incredible person. I’ve been lucky to get to know him over the past couple months. Not only is he super chill, but he’s also not afraid to ask basic questions. Many of you might roll your eyes at that, but it’s a real problem: when you’re organizing something, you feel pressured to know everything, or else you’ll lose people’s confidence. So all the people who try to act confident also rarely ask basic questions.
Hackers are the opposite. We’re always focused on breaking down problems into the most basic components, and then building up complexity once we understand the system.
When Nat reached out to me, I didn’t know what to expect. But I certainly didn’t expect him to be a fellow hacker that happened to be famous. I think it’s incredible that someone can go so long without losing that spirit — imagine suddenly having a boatload of money. Most of us would probably take things easier.
Another surprise is how incredibly chill he is. When things go seriously wrong, he’s totally cool about it, in a way that’s hard to put into words. I learned the phrase “No stress, friend” from him, and I’ve used it a few times to soothe other people. As cliche as it sounds, sometimes it’s the one thing in the world you need to hear.
I wish I could tell a certain story to underscore the point, but Nat’s stories are his to tell. I hope he writes a book someday — nothing fancy, just a raw thought stream of all his experiences.
And I wish I could share his future ambition. It’s so exciting that I can hardly contain myself. It might not work out, but that’s true of everything.
I don’t know if anyone will see this. But I just wanted to write a little note to say how rare Nat is. He actually cares — deeply — and also cares about you. Most leaders don’t.
If someone reading this has the opportunity to work with him on his new project, I encourage you to leave your cushy job on that basis alone. It’ll be fun in a way you won’t experience elsewhere.
You got a real opinion. The fact it offended you shows that at least.
Maybe he could have communicated things better? I don't know which remarks specifically you're referring to. But "undiplomatic" is not a bad thing IMHO (within bounds of reason).
That's the worrying thing - how will Github be 5 years from now without Nat at the helm.
Here’s the internal msft email
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29098640
This person at MSFT who got promoted is the one that caused the problems in the dotnet community where features that had a go-live RTM license (as in merged and ready for long term support) were removed from the programming language so that more Microsoft Visual Studio licenses could be sold.
Other items under this persons remit:
- Visual Studio
- .NET
- Python
- TypeScript
- OpenJDK
- GitHub (+NPM)
- (hint hint) Azure SDKs (hint hint)
- (hint hint) Azure PaaS / Azure Serverless (hint hint)
Don't forget https://github.com/dotnet/sdk/pull/22262
Mind you this is first restart of Visual Studio in however many days had passed since the last update. Hence "cold boot time" is largely irrelevant to me.
I value VS for reasons other than "cold boot time". IntelliSense and debugging features weigh way more in my decision to keep VS as my main development tool for C++.
All my C++ servers are multiplatform: Linux/Windows. Usually I develop and debug on Windows and deploy on Linux. Deployment on Linux is handled by simple script that pulls from repo, builds and runs tests. However if needed VS can deploy, compile and debug straight on remote Linux server. I use this feature sometimes.
Hot reloading could be a better metric maybe ?
When I learnt to debug remote code from my Visual Studio, I was blown away. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/debugger/remot...
I have it running for weeks sometimes. My development desktop has 128GB RAM so VS just stays there. I frankly do not care about hot/cold reload time of this IDE at all even though it is very fast in my case.
>"When I learnt to debug remote code from my Visual Studio, I was blown away."
You should try VS 2022 preview. All you need is SSH access on remote comp. You do not have to deploy anything to target. VS does everything it needs
- "We have at the time of writing, 5 core developers who contribute part time to the development of CPython: Brett Cannon, Steve Dower, Guido van Rossum, Eric Snow, and Barry Warsaw"
- "also employs several core contributors and maintainers of key open-source projects in the Python ecosystem, including pandas, Dask, Jupyter, nteract, scikit-learn and Apache Arrow"
- "$150K financial sponsorship of the PSF"
- "long-time sponsors of PyCon US, having been the top-tier Keystone sponsors of the event for four years and continuing" (and other conferences too)
“Microsoft doing shitty/shady things is nothing new, especially here, but seeing as they've recently started advocating for open-source, this seems like quite a step backwards. Some background first. Microsoft has been working on an open-source Python type checker called pyright for some time now. The first public commit dates back to 2019-03-11. It seems quite promising, though I haven't tried it myself yet, with them advertising "speed" as its main characteristic. All fine and good so far. Then, in October of this year, they released PyLance, a VS code extension that serves as a language server for Python and uses pyright for type checking. PyLance is not open-source”
Feel free to be more candid...
It's about as "free" as Internet Explorer.
Or what am I missing here..
Of course his corporate persona is a bit different, but his work is still inspiring. Best of luck with your next adventure Nat! Cheers.
I still have some printed cards where I copied his idea to print 'Your_Name would like to apologize most abjectly for his behavior on the evening of ___________'
If there were any retention contracts that came with GitHub acquisition, that probably didn't apply to him.
The initial conversation was about how Nat was likely leaving because his contract ran out. The counterpoint was that he was from the Microsoft side and therefore he didn't have a retention contract. I brought up Xamarin because he was likely under a retention contract from that acquisition.
That being said, these contracts probably had little to no effect on his decision though, as I'm sure he would have made more money than he could spend in a lifetime regardless of whether he had stayed or not.
Microsoft bought Xamarin in February 2016. I'm sure five-year retention contracts are possible, but that seems extraordinarily long; I've rarely seen longer than two years.
I do not see any indication about that being bound to a contract. They are also promoting the chief product officer which indicates that he did so far a good job. Which means, we can expect that they continue like they have done in the last year.
So exactly what GitHub tried to do before the acquisition?
Will be interesting to see what his next plans are.
GitHub really amped it up and not only brought out useful features from around 2018 on, it also started fixing some (not all) of the most annoying long-term gripes users and maintainers have had.
Couple that with adding more abilities to free accounts, and they seem to have all the momentum for dev tooling right now.
I just hope they don't get complacent, or target the enterprise stuff too much.
At Notion we use Actions to build our iOS and Android nightly apps and deploy our client and server releases to production.
It also happened M$ promoted [1] a new president of the MSFT DevDiv, which includes GitHub.
It happened on the same day, I mean I cant help to read a lot into it.
- That one time when Nat spoke against DMCA law and said taking down youtube-dl was wrong and he actively pushed for their reinstatement. [1]
[1] https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1328365679473426432?l...
[0] https://github.blog/2019-10-09-github-and-us-government-deve...
Also, immigration control in itself isn't a bad thing. You shouldn't be asking that people stop providing services to a goverment agency. You should demand the goverment agency stops being a bunch of dicks.
[0] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/6/29/17517870/i...
That being the case, the only thing that distinguishes private repos in this context is a thin policy that can be changed at a whim (and perhaps without any announcement).
Also, one of the reasons I put my code on a host like GitHub is so that I can share it/show it off*. So using a private repo to avoid Copliot defeats some of the purpose of me using GitHub in the first place.
*To the extent anyone else cares, at least ;)
Outside of that, I see copilot like the future of search engines. Instead of searching for plain text matches, it lets you search for abstract and complicated patterns. The killer feature for me would be seeing for a given suggestion (or search result), where the suggestion was derived from, linking back to the code snippet in GitHub.
GitHub handled the situation really well, both in terms of the course of action it took, as well as setting up new procedures and a legal fund to prevent future incidents like this. Along with the EFF, they have actively promoted the right of developers (and FOSS) to tinker.
I think people don't realise how impactful youtube-dl going the wrong way could be.
https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2020/11/2020-11-0...
[1] https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1346517148357648385
Meanwhile similar repos get DMCA banned daily, like when Google demanded they remove all repos using a public widevine decryption key: https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2020/11/2020-11-0...
Microsoft is a member of the RIAA so don't expect to see real defense of any repos unless there is major bad press.
Screw the people who still spread MS FUD. I cannot think of any other company, certainly not FB/Goog (Amzn has nothing in this space and no interest outside paid AWS services) that would've done anything close to what MS have done.
Everything is better, tons of things are now free, integration has improved, there's full transparency. It helps that MS's own tools like VSCode, VS online etc are best in class by some margin and used by everyone.
I’m rolling my eyes hard at your claim of VS Code as best in class. If the category is JS-powered code editors then I’ll surely give them that title. However BS Code has many flaws compared to other IDEs. One being that it’s restricted in performance by the language it’s written in. I don’t use those products so I must not be apart of everyone?
Then when someone calls that out, they shouldn't comment if they don't work with Javascript?
Which one is it, best in class JS editor (which yepthatsreality actually agreed to), or best in class IDE (but only people who work on JS can comment on that...)?
There is never "Just Best". Its always very much subjective. And speed is not always everything, as long as it is fast enough. And for example.. For me, my use case, emacs is best. It can do anything. It is best as Swiss Army knife, because it can do anything. JS IDE? Sure here. Clojure? Here you go boss. Haskell? Hell yeah. Especially, since introduction of LSP stuff (Emacs LSP and Eglot). Simultaneously it can do IRC, note taking, literate programming, statistics, and much more, like remote editing with TRAMP. So in that case, it is best.
But is it best as just Java IDE? Absolutely not.
When is the last time Microsoft "EEE"-ed anything? The most recent examples are 20 years old.
And look, you should never trust $bigcorp blindly, that would be naïve, but people have these 20-year old grievances that have little bearing on the situation today.
Surely they screwed up the massive lead in the space that Skype had, but I can't say they "EEE"'d it. It was just badly run.
Teams is just a run-of-the-mill chat thingy, no? Was is ever open in any way or built on standards? What did they "embrace" or "extend"?
So pray tell me, how does one either "embrace" or "extend" a product that has always been proprietary, has never used open protocols or standards, and never had any interoperability with anything else?
I didn't bring Skype into this, so I'm not going to comment on it as an example.
(nascent) HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29095759
Reason for changing: probably the most important exception to HN's title rule ("Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.") is in the case of corporate press releases, whose bland titles are usually a kind of misdirection (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).
Reason for reverting: on reflection I think the title is more Nat's voice than corporate PR, and I'd rather respect that.
That confusion alone speaks books on how well Microsoft integrated Github under his tenure. Kudos.
Stack Exchange, GitHub and Wikipedia, God bless them.
I must be missing something. For whatever reason GH Actions just never appealed to me. Am I missing something? I've used Drone IO more, granted it's better than travis but the #1 CI services seems like a stretch.
Gitlab has a similar YAML system from more than a decade, it's low friction, pretty polished and highly reliable. But it will always be a more niche product by the effect of Gitlab being way smaller that Github.
These days Drone CI is my current favorite for OSS projects, I'm forced to use gitlab at work so that's what we use for internal projects.
I think Drone appeals to me for its simplicity, golang choice and docker everything. Not that it doesn't have its own set of issues as well.
When you say "seems like a stretch", I read it as you thinking he meant "quality, as a matter of opinion".
I would not be surprised if it's #1 in usage, getting there by being integrated in github and free and actually pretty darn good.
The quantity aspect is also a bit surprising since it hasn't been that long that it's been released, so seeing a #1 leader is impressive in itself, even if it's free and integrated.
I mean I have a bunch of TravisCI projects that I really don't want to migrate over unless I have a good reason. The "if it works" leave it alone.
If there's enough motivation for people to switch it's impressive (or it shows how much people hate travis/jenkins/whatever CI they ARE using)
Nat founded Xamarin which was acquired by Microsoft in 2016. Github was acquired in 2018 and Nat was already an Microsoft employee at time.
So Nat departing now is actually 5 years post the Xamarin acquisition (when he joined Microsoft).
https://www.linkedin.com/in/natfriedman/
EDIT: what's also interesting is that Thomas Dohmke joined Microsoft in 2015, moved to the Github division around the time of the acquisition (2018) but only became CPO 4 months ago.
E: Pointing out proven, explicitly-defined-in-internal-emails tactics used by Microsoft always seems to get downvoted on HN. Why? Would someone like to start a conversation?
Pointing out stuff from decades ago doesn’t really count as still proven tactics.
Though of course all major companies do behave and do things like EEE in different ways.
All build tools that MS doesn't control. Their strategy has always been to try lock developers into their ecosystem so that only their ecosystem has all the software people want.
> Which things do you think they extended?
Acquiring and extending both Xamarin and Github. Atom editor is basically dead, MS/Github created an AI tool that presumably uses data they got from Github, they tried to remove features from free .NET tools, etc...
How long until they try to apply some more blatant vendor lock-in techniques with Github, .NET/Mono or maybe Azure?
I know he travels most of the time now and I’m wondering if this is a reflection of wanting to spend more time doing that or if there’s some other new project he’s moving on to.
> That’s why I’m moving on to my next adventure: to support, advise, and invest in the founders and developers who are creating the future with technology and tackling some of the biggest opportunities of our day.
And then loose everything if the supreme being puts you on a blacklist just because it stopped liking your government.
from bash man page
> _ At shell startup, set to the pathname used to invoke the shell or shell script being executed as passed in the environment or argument list. Subse‐
> quently, expands to the last argument to the previous simple command executed in the foreground, after expansion. Also set to the full pathname used
> to invoke each command executed and placed in the environment exported to that command. When checking mail, this parameter holds the name of the
> mail file currently being checked.
In CI-land, though, I think GitHub Actions and Azure Pipelines fates are much more closely intertwined. The Microsoft-hosted runners for Azure Pipelines have the same environment as GitHub Actions (or perhaps it's GitHub Actions that's standing on the shoulders of Azure Pipelines)[1].
1: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines/agen...
AWS has this as well
That being said I didn't notice anything particularly offensive about this letter. He describes the accomplishments under his watch, expresses gratitude for employees, and expresses confidence in his successor.
I'd rather listen to someone who is straightforward than Sundar Pichai speaking entirely in corporate-speak while saying absolutely nothing of value or substance. Completely uninspiring.
All corporate speak is rather an invention of the 80's and 90's. Listen to corporate leaders from any other time before that.
Musk isn't so much "speaking the truth", he's more "selling things, his way".
Corporate speak, definition:
- to say what's in the best interest of the corporation, no matter what the circumstance
- to not tell the truth, unless it's something that can become a huge PR success for the corporation
- to not tell a lie, unless it's something that can become a huge PR success for the corporation
For the "Musk speak" definition, simply replace "the corporation" with "Musk".
systemvoltage made no comparison between impact of Musk & impact of GitHub
Edit: lol, this will be the most downvotes on a char count basis I've ever received. I thought it was generally accepted that for better or worse, he does not mince words.
Musk is equally if not more pompous with his nuggets of wisdom, and offers no value or substance either.
The framing on this as a demonstration of deep misogyny in tech is just way, way too morbidly absurd.
I mean, if we can excuse Musk's behavior as "So what? His companies have been incredibly successful," then, fine, but why can't we say the same for other CEOs? Other CEOs at least have a good sense of keeping their personal feuds out of twitter.
I dont think it is this letter in particular. So may be it is not fair to criticise it. But my guess is that the accumulation of these cooperate speaks, PR, and the past 10 years of main stream media riding along these PR to new height, just happen to tricker OP this time around.
And it doesn't seems to be an American things either, I read a lot of Fortune 500 post, somehow these over the top PR speak are mostly related to tech only.
However, I still think Github and Nat deserve a lot of praise for what they have done. Lots of changes and improvement happened after the acquisition. And not only credit to Nat but also to Microsoft.
that question mark at the end of a non-question. Nothing personal, just critique on a larger trend, but IMO upspeak and vocal fry are more annoying than corporate speak.
But I agree about these exit letter being more delicate. The more intimate notes are fine internally.
"plastic, formulaic, always-be-selling"
Huh?
OP is probably referring to this tired, cliched turn of phrase (among other examples in the blog).
...which was riddled with phrases like:
"With all that we’ve accomplished in mind, and more than five great years at Microsoft under my belt, I’ve decided it’s time for me to go back to my startup roots. What drives me is enabling builders to create the future.
Not even Clark Kent could be this braggadocios.
If you start from the assumption that it is a genuine attempt to put messy feelings into concise words, then it is a bit lacks vividness but is nonetheless heartfelt.
When you choose not to trust someone, you make them untrustworthy.
The fun exercise here is not that this is yet another vapid post on HN, but that people are defending it.
It's quite plausible that the simple truth of the matter is that some people commenting here, defending the post, may feel that HN shouldn't be so very frequently cynical, negative, mean, quick to jump to assuming the worst about intentions, and so on. The Guidelines - for good reason - even go out of the way to try to drive users away from behaving that way.
Because “If people would assume the worst about someone as competent at communication as $leader, then how much more likely are they to mistrust me when I try to communicate sincerely?” is the story I tell myself. Spending time in low-trust environments does bad things to the psyche.
OP: "Look the guy probably had some success and met some great people. So why in the hell can't you say that in your own words?"
My comment: "Not even Clark Kent could be this braggadocios."
There are better way of expressing one's (dis)satisfaction in the workplace. Starting with, perhaps, whittling down one's pride in accomplishing what tens of thousands already have...
I think all these comments are incredibly childish. It’s a nice goodbye letter from their well known and visible leader.
A braggadocios "goodbye letter" is worse than no letter at all.
The corporate speak regurgitation is icing on the cake.
The point of the ritual is to signal the world that all goes as planned, while giving away as few salient details as possible.
Sometimes it's better to say nothing at all than be thought a fool.
Yeah... what message do you think that would send.
The world is starting to realize that tech companies are causing a lot of societal damage that will take years, if not generations to repair.
People are also starting to get upset at large corporations for being tone death and having zero social contracts for the societies they reside in.
Public opinion is turning and GitHub/Microsoft are just getting caught in the crosshairs with public sentiment.
As I live longer, I realize some people take to corporate speak and corporate values like ducks to water.
It's actually their preferred mode of communication and existence.
Politicians play this game most clearly - they need to communicate allegiance to the rich, their political party and 'the people', which is an impossible ask (because the parties are not aligned and you please one by taking away from the other) but they do quite well by having invented a vocabulary that's interpreted differently by each group, plus they can outright lie, which's a last resort move they try to avoid.
Anyhoo :)
I offer a contrary point of view: why does it bother you so much? Simply do not read it.
It belongs to Microsoft, doesn't it?
Instagram is worth hundreds of billions now. Bought for $1B. It is an actual unicorn situation of being incredibly rare.
There’s no point bringing up something so rare.
For example, the only other [tech?] acquisition that I can think of even sniffing IG is Priceline (now Bookings Holdings) acquiring Bookings.com for a couple hundred million. Now being the core of the business.
—
Beyond that. Just to be geeky about this stuff. The only other general financial deals in this ballpark are SoftBank, Yahoo, and Naspers investments. Copy pasting previous comment:
SoftBank and Yahoo bought around 40% stakes each in Alibaba. SoftBank spent $20M in 1999, the year Alibaba was founded. Alibaba owned 34% as of the mid 2010s. Now own 26%. Yahoo, because of Jerry Yang, invested $1B in 2005.
Naspers invested $32M for almost 50% of Tencent in 2001. Probably the best investment ever. Naspers split into two companies. Prosus owns the remaining close to 30% stake now. Though Naspers and Prosus both own around one half of one another.
All three investing companies have had issues with their own valuations. They’ve all had their own market caps be undervalued. Their one investment alone usually was close to or even exceeded the entire market cap of the company. Still the case for SoftBank and Prosus.
It'd be reasonable to peg GitHub as being worth $40-$50 billion.
That's a serious asset for Microsoft shareholders - even if the parent is worth $2t - and they will want to see it flourish. Which goes in line with what the parent comment noted about presenting the correct impression, not only to shareholders but also to anyone interested in working at GitHub for Microsoft. Potential employees will want to know that the context is healthy.
In part because even the title is clickbait. Even the tl;dr manages to inject some platitudes before getting to the point.
-
And you're arguing a strawman. The comment you replied to never implied he shouldn't say farewell. They're complaining about how utterly insincere it comes across being blasted full of every trite corporate saying in existence
If anything they're arguing for more of a farewell than this, and it would have taken less effort too.
I wonder why it upsets you that someone would complain about this though, do you have a personal attachment to Nat?
Please point to where I implied I was at all upset.
-
But this is HN where inferring tone is apparently a step too far in terms of speculation, so here.
Have an ML model tell you how upset you sound: https://i.imgur.com/nztQgdY.jpg
You can't make up this stuff up.
To the reply:
> would not be acceptable in any social setting otherwise
You're close to getting it!
In a normal social setting if someone says "If you don't like X don't interact with it!" that can reasonably understood as a negative statement.
Going "show me where I said I'm upset!!" instead of just clarifying is not acceptable in a social setting. Busting out an ML model is just holding up the mirror.
-
> I am not responsible for how the voice in your head portrays what you read.
I'm not responsible for teaching people how basic social interactions work, yet here we are...
I believe using a sentiment analysis tool you googled for to back up an assumption you made about me and my character would not be acceptable in any social setting otherwise. Just pointing this out. My original comment was made with an informative/inquisitive tone.
I am not responsible for how the voice in your head portrays what you read.
(sorry, couldn't help myself. I think you're all great simply for being here and applying your intellects!)
-
And I am upset, I hate working in one of the few industries where people wear social ineptitude like a badge:
Like someone says something when they're clearly upset, you ask why they're upset, then suddenly they derail the conversation because
"how dare you imply I am some descendant of a caveman capable of being shudder upset"
Like holy shit, real people get upset! Wowie what a concept!
Dude was upset someone insulted his rockstar idol that everyone in SV knows and got called out.
I jokingly tell him even a computer can see he's upset and now there's literally another reply to me by this "peter" person picking a fight with the computer!
-
Maybe you're all stuck in this weird passive aggressive bubble of timidity (maybe that's the "everyone") where you're not allowed to express emotion but I'm not going to coddle you, not here or in real life
This person was upset. They didn't need to present it as some passive aggressive "informative", like the guy they replied to didn't know they couldn't read it.
They're just not used to having to deal with emotions directly instead of being as biting as possible while seeming... "informative"
Except they didn't say that, did they? What they said verbatim was "simply do not read it" which is a much more reasonable tone than how you seemingly interpreted it.
Whether it's negative or not also depends on the context which in this case is a proposed solution to literally the most negative and upset-sounding post in this chain: the one that started it. What does your ML model think of "I'm gonna throw up on my keyboard"?
third person shows up to pick a fight with the computer.
Never chance y'all.
-
And for the record, if someone complains about a piece of writing, and you tell them "simply not to read it"
You are being a passive aggressive joke, and you are clearly upset with their critique.
People are allowed to dislike things, and gasp even hate things, you don't need to get all max passive aggression over that.
Not everyone lives in an echo chamber of timidity where all emotions must be moderate some of you put yourselves in.
-
The person I replied to had no answer to the actual point I made, so they tried to derail the conversation to "how dare you claim I'm upset!" which was a complete aside in my comment as it was in theres.
Yet now I am talking to a guy who wants to argue with an ML model so I guess well played?
Are you suggesting ML models are infallible? You might want to sit down before I tell you the news...
My comment said something a social skill as simple as inferring tone is too far above you.
Now here you are, still trying argue about the ML model that was used to compare your social skills to that of a text analysis model.
Hint: It was never about the ML model.
Like at first it was funny, now it's just sad. It's too on the nose.
Why not just tell it like it is then? Dear shareholders, I'm leaving because I'm rich / bored with Github and not because there was a falling-out.
>why does it bother you so much? Simply do not read it.
So you're suggesting people should just not read or listen to anything that they don't like? And just keep quiet?
Because what you suggested is extremely impersonal, arrogant, harsh, cold, and dismissive of the work of all the employees working under you.
This case has more than 50% likelihood.
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
> for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to
Apparently not! Using throwaways, people have upvoted me like crazy. Hundreds of points per month, for a person with no identity. If it kept going at the same pace, I would outrank some of the highest-point users within a year or two, all from using throwaway. Is that not community? And if it's not - isn't it better than community? Isn't upvoting someone you don't know, don't owe anything to, who you hold no preconceived ideas about, actually a more honest way to interact with a community?
When I get upvoted, I'm happy. Me being happy encourages me to post in a happy mood, so I create happier comments (on average). When I get downvoted or ignored (on my 'real' account), I get angry and depressed, and that makes for much less happy comments (and just a bad feeling all around). Using the throwaways not only makes me less angry and depressed, but it also enables creating content that people clearly approve of.
> Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community
There have been throwaways on this site for ages, in addition to known people. The community hasn't disappeared as far as I can tell. So it seems like you can, in fact, have it both ways. In addition, I've been a member of a lot of different communities. A lot of the time, the ones that banter on about how much of a close-knit community they are, enable some of the most toxic behavior. There are some great aspects to community, and some horrifying ones. Rather than trying to change the community to fit the standards we think it should have, perhaps we should encourage the behavior that metrics show have a more positive outcome. I could be crazy, but it seems like anything that inspires more upvotes (without the content being hateful, vitriolic, judgemental or divisive) seems like it's worth keeping.
Maybe I missed something, and there's some metrics-driven approach where you're pushing back on all throwaway behavior because its existence (regardless of content) leads to worse outcomes. Or maybe you just consider 'most' throwaways to post divisive content, and push back on all of them. Or maybe you just don't like the idea of throwaways, I dunno. All I know is this little experiment with throwaways has made me much happier on HN.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
As for 'the community not disappearing' - this is a freerider argument. You're benefitting from the contributions of all the people who aren't behaving this way.
Also, there is no "freeriding" if the throwaways are actively producing positive content. You might as well call every single user a "freerider" - what are they contributing at all? Is your forum getting paid by someone based on an estimate of "real users" or something, and throwaways screw up your numbers? It really doesn't make sense.
The idea that a static username alone has an outsized positive effect on your community doesn't seem to be provable, in the face of accounts like mine. Maybe you're just making a general rule so you can eliminate the majority of accounts used for flaming or spam, I can't tell.
Being authentic as a leader is impossible. Your thoughts, desires, core beliefs, etc are going to be offensive to someone -- even if those disagreeable things made agreeable outcomes for people mad at your words. I mean offensive in the broadest possible definition here; more plainly, they'll be perceived negatively by someone with enough motivation to be nasty and often it's not worth the trouble of dealing with someone who woke up feeling nasty. We live in a world where people think it's okay to read into the words (and lives) of others, try to derive deep meaning out of simple actions (even if there is none), and where people believe you're lying by default (as a leader). The fact is, as time has gone on confirmation of these things in various people and businesses builds, so they're hard assuations to just toss aside. Therefore, it is most safe to type a paragraph giving direction, listing accomplishments, and thanking entities that helped you along the way in the most taste-free way one can, while saying absolutely nothing at all.
We're confident that intelligent audience members, like yourself OP, can appreciate the large amounts of money and diverse political sensitivities that our communication must be careful to navigate. And while we respectfully regret any discomfort you might have experienced, we hope that you find joy in our future communications.
-Phat Nat
It will be interesting to see if they can keep that up. It is clearly an advantage to have an organization that can think "developers first" and not Azure, Windows, or whatever first.
GitHub is hardly at arms length from MS.
Gack, what a terrible company.
Let's code golf this and see how short we can get it :)
That doesn't make it good or bad, but HN itself changes the ranking of an article based on the upvotes/comments ratio...