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Zed Shaw: Github's Favorite Joke
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- gooddelta 15y agoI'm a bit surprised that Github would allow one of their employees to behave that way without firing them. Love Zed or hate Zed, he's still a user, and you're still a company providing a service; show some professionalism. Zed: I'm on your side here, but please stop rising to these assholes' attacks. You're not going to convince them to change their ways, and getting into a pissing match with them gives them what they're looking for. You won this one, but your time is worth more than this.
- eropple 15y agoHe could do a lot worse than provide the rest of us free entertainment. I saw this fifteen minutes ago and I'm still chuckling.
- rimantas 15y agoHe surely can do a lot worse, I have no doubt he will. Warning to Github, really? The mighty Zed is not going to recommend it to anyone, how scary.
- gooddelta 15y agorimantas, I think you're missing the point -- Zed knows that his "recommendation" holds relatively little weight; however, sometimes it's good to remind a company that they can still lose customers, and how easy it can be to do so.
- rimantas 15y agoLosing customers is not necessarily a bad thing. Let's say I am having a dinner in a nice quiet restaurant but there is some noisy, aggressive drunk at the table nearby. I'd be more than happy for the restaurant to lose that customer. Was it Sprint who ditched 10% of their customers who used to complain the most so they could spend less time arguing with them and provide better service to the rest instead? Note, this is not to say, that any of these examples applies there but just to illustrate my first sentence.
- anon_throwaway 15y agoGithub lost me as a prospective customer (and I currently pay for multi-user accounts at both BeanStalk and Kiln). They had an unhappy customer, and their staff felt the best way to handle it was to mock the customer publicly. That's juvenile bullshit, no matter what you think of the customer.
- gjs278 15y agoyou're an idiot then because there is no verification that the twitter user is actually a github employee. zed should be the one apologizing here for just making bullshit up. at no point did anyone at github say anything bad about him.
- anon_throwaway 15y agoI have reason to believe, aside from Zed's post, that at least one GitHub employee was involved in the harassment. I could be wrong, but my beliefs aren't based on nothing. The startup world is very small. Thank you for the reminder that HN is now reddit. P.S. Nobody's mind was ever changed by a sentence that begins 'you're an idiot'.
- bigiain 15y agoIsn't this more like: I'm having dinner in a nice quiet restaurant, but there's a table of noisy aggressive jerks at a table nearby, who happen to be restaurant staff and their friends, who're causing existing customers to leave and driving away potential customers. ?
- rdtsc 15y ago> scary. Yes. Regardless what you, I, or Github thinks of him, as a company their best move is to issue a public apology over this. Imagine they get into a spat with him -- they start calling him names, he fights back etc. Then some customer has to make a decision on whether they want to pick Github, are they going to like seeing and hearing public spitting matches between them and Zed, is that going to look like mature, reliable company to trust the crown jewels (source code) of one's company to? -- No.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- ericflo 15y agoI don't think that Nick Martini guy is a GitHub employee.
- zmitri 15y agoI believe he's speaking about the curator of HackerNewsTips, who from the last few tweets, sounds like he might be the GitHub employee who had to deal with the wrath of Zed.
- ryanf 15y agoI think that's Zed's assumption, but it also seems to be completely unwarranted. The HackerNewsTips guy was making (funny, accurate) jokes that are in keeping with the tone of the rest of the feed.
- zedshaw 15y agoI never said Nick Martini is a github employee, I know who he is and he's definitely not there. I said: 1. I suspect HackerNewsTips is a github employee. I'd also suspect a fellow former PowerSet employee. 2. They are not only in on the joke (from their Ruby connections), but like the joke, and that's why they don't really fix the problem. We'll see what's true.
- kenneth_reitz 15y agoI would be shocked if any GitHub employee is "in" on this.
- silencio 15y agoI wouldn't mind finding out more about the whole story. Did Zed try to contact someone at github to try to get a fix for this problem before writing his little script? To get this person banned? Whatever it takes for him to stop showing up as a collaborator, regardless of what dick obsession github employees might have? Or is the extent of his github contact just passive aggressively trolling a troll and then blaming github for doing nothing when he did nothing to work with them? All I'm reading is assumptions and more assumptions in his post about who might be the author of @HackerNewsTips and github employees liking dicks therefore they won't help him and will just laugh. That's not terribly convincing.
- zedshaw 15y agoYes, one of their employees actually fixed a bug I caused so someone there knows, yet here we are again. Now I know what you're saying, I should go through their bug tracker bureaucracy for a few weeks. File some nice bugs, talk with people, go down to their office, pick up some schwag, and then after they've had about 6 months to fix the problem I'll finally have dongml off my project list. Sorry, but if they don't fix it after it causes a bug in their system, and after other people complain about it, then it probably won't get fixed. Based on that, I'll just write about it and move on to something else (again).
- silencio 15y agoNo matter github's priorities or prior knowledge of this issue, there is always the option of manual intervention. That is probably what I would have contacted github for if I found myself in your problem. I was just wondering if you tried to contact someone at github before reaching the conclusion that you needed to take this into your own hands. This is before finding the bug they needed to fix and letting the world know in a super high profile blog post that you had a problem. Even if it wouldn't do anything in the short term other than banning the account in question, github would have documented history of abuse and another big +1 for fixing the way adding collaborators works. I don't mean that you have to spend 6 months and become drinking buddies with everyone at github to get anything done. Even a simple one liner email like "this dick is being a dick with his dicks" to support would be better than assuming they're not going to do anything. Basically, I'm trying to see this from a developer perspective. We expect these kinds of bug reports and emails from users (or, at least, analytics that would correspond with a problem) and we know that we can't read minds (well, I don't know about you, but I know I can't). We also have priorities. Yet we have users and clients and bosses that want to disregard all that :) If you do know that this was a well known problem to github and they didn't want to address your particular issue, then kudos to you for your creative trolling of a troll and deciding to switch to another provider. Otherwise, I don't know, I'm pretty ambivalent on how I feel about people complaining without saying anything to the company/person in question. I can't blame you for being frustrated, but part of your frustration might be self-inflicted.
- anon_throwaway 15y agoOn GitHub's side, it's surprising that they don't offer some sort of 'block/reject' option when somebody gets added as a collaborator. I'm disappointed in that, but also in all the companies who have employees who think this is acceptably professional behavior. I'm pretty far from a Zed Shaw fan, but come the fuck on.
- zedshaw 15y agoWe'll see if HackerNewsTips is a github employee, or if they've been in on these "Ruby dick jokes". I've got good insider knowledge that some of them are involved, but that's been wrong before. Until then, assume that it's just one guy being a jerk and he's doing it without their knowledge.
- eropple 15y agoThe most entertaining thing about all this is that you can merge against nonexistent branches in git. I think my eyes just crossed.
- randrews 15y agoYou can't. Maybe Github lets you, git just says "fatal: 'doesnotexist' does not point to a commit."
- eropple 15y ago'doesnotexist' wouldn't be a valid commit though, yes? From @zedshaw, when I asked him: '@edropple Yep, you can just push randomness in various ways, my favorite is: git push -f origin master:BIGASSHEX' http://twitter.com/#!/zedshaw/statuses/75423197192921088 http://twitter.com/#!/zedshaw/statuses/75423197192921088 I don't have any git projects on my machine (migrated off of github and git a while ago), so I can't try.
- randrews 15y agoThat doesn't actually do anything though. It pushes your local master branch to a remote branch called BIGASSHEX (creating it if it doesn't exist). So if you generate a new bigass hex each time you'll end up with a ton of randomly-named branches that all point to the same commit, so they use no space. I think he found a way to take down Github (having to do with having too many branches in a project), but not actually a hole in Git.
- Jd 15y agoYet another reason why some of us fear getting too close to the Ruby hipsters.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- m0th87 15y agoBroad generalities like "Ruby hipsters" are just as juvenile as the stupid dick jokes that begot the stereotype.
- marcusbooster 15y agoI think his sentiment resonates with the numerous outsiders who are amazed that this kind of drama always seems to bubble up from the Ruby community.
- anko 15y agoZed has nothing to do with the ruby community - even he says this. He wrote a web server in ruby once. In his post he even goes on to say how much he likes python.
- rimantas 15y ago> bubble up from the Ruby community. And somehow always involves Zed.
- marcusbooster 15y agoI was referring more to the latent sexual confusion.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- Jd 15y agoFYI, in my usage "Ruby hipsters" ⊂ Rubyists
- awakeasleep 15y agoZed, you gave me a hearty laugh. But please take a minute to think about starting a mud-slinging contest with a pig. Think about how you repeatedly stated that you didn't understand the motivation to show you the peni, where you direct your limited attention and time, etc. If you are considering all that already, well rock on :)
- kuahyeow 15y agoTime for Github to start banning people
- kenneth_reitz 15y agoThey have in the past.
- Flow 15y agoBanning people is not enough, at least not if you only do it via technical means. If you let the banned user know that further interaction with the company's services will lead to legal action, you might have something that could work, but I doubt that too. Github should take a clue from Facebook and other social network sites. Those sites often work in a explicitly-include-someone-in-my-social-sphere way instead of the other way.
- ruethewhirled 15y agoWould be good to see github do something about it. Was looking to use github for some new projects but after reading this now I might have a look at alternatives
- marcamillion 15y agoLove Zed, Hate Zed or neither, it is disappointing if Github really allows this type of abuse to happen with no repercussions. ...and I have been a major Github fanboi from day 1, so it sucks for me to see such pettiness. Quite frankly, I am not a big fan of Zed Shaw either...his hissy fits tend to get on my nerves....but come on man Github. You are a damn company!
- rawsyntax 15y agoAs far as I can tell the only side effect of being added to a project, is that it shows up in your list of your repositories on your [private] dashboard. Edit: see http://github.com/zedshaw http://github.com/zedshaw , he's not listed on the dongml project, because that link only shows your forks, not repos you have commit access to Edit 2: Why the downvotes, am I wrong?
- kenneth_reitz 15y agoIt should be noted that GitHub does allow users to remove themselves from collab'd repos (the article stated otherwise.) Being a collab on a repo has no affect (public or private), other than the fact that it will show up in your personal repo list when you're logged in. GitHub has also banned users in the past for abusing the service. I'm sure they would have acted accordingly if a complaint was filed.
- kuahyeow 15y agoYes, that functionality is at https://github.com/account/repositories https://github.com/account/repositories . I think the problem here is that there's nothing (?) to prevent the user being re-added. The article does state a github employee showed Zed how to do this - no details though
- zedshaw 15y agoThere is nothing to block someone from doing it other than report them for abuse or get a different account and hope they don't find you. The problem with reporting this as abuse though is the owner of the project wins his little lame-troll attempt. He got you to react, so he's all happy. The only way to really stop it is if people's whole accounts were removed from the site, but then they'd just go make another account and do it again. Instead, they need to require a confirmation, and/or let you block projects. I prefer the confirmation because you can just ignore it and then nothing happens. A block would mean someone does it and then you have to do work to stop them.
- drats 15y agoThis is the key to the argument here. It seems Zed said "they won't respond to any complaint" and never filed one before he went to DDOS the account and inadvertently the whole site. Seems like poor form from all sides.
- zedshaw 15y agoI didn't DDOS the site, I did commits that overwrote ones he was doing then tried to break his repo. Keep in mind that I suspect there's at least one gihub employee in on it and supporting it, so no amount of submitting tickets and begging will get them to change it. If I can't block the guy, and I can't thrash his repo, and I can't humiliate him, and someone at github is in on it, then all I've got left is writing about it and moving on.
- leif 15y agoWhile it would've been better to just ignore him, I must say, fighting back with working code lends Zed some amount of class.
- mitchty 15y agohttps://github.com/nickmartini/dongml/commit/b9b8ba94e807fc70c3f8b20995388db6a675bbb9 https://github.com/nickmartini/dongml/commit/b9b8ba94e807fc7... That isn't very classy, automated or not. It seems more like a pissing match.
- randrews 15y agoLivejournal had this problem a few years ago. You could add anyone to a community, and everyone's profile page had a list of all the communities they were in... Zed should absolutely get off Github; he's enough of a troll magnet that people will figure out ways to mess with him even after this is fixed. It's easy enough to set up a bare repository on a random machine you have SSH access to.
- zedshaw 15y agoThat's why I liked fossil. It was like a little mini-github in a tiny cross platform package. Too bad it nuked my code.
- randrews 15y agoSomeone should make the Git equivalent of Wordpress: deploy this thing on your server and have your own private Github-like engine. I think Github is a lot like Rails: they took this cool thing (Ruby / Git) and made it attract a bunch of douches.
- hardboiled 15y agoI think the larger community has to shun this kind of behavior from Github. It's unacceptable and unprofessional. Although I don't like how Zed is repeatedly qualifying the homophobic Martini as a Ruby guy, as if Ruby made him this way, Martini is a douche from his behavior. This has nothing to do with languages. I'm with Zed on this.
- peterbraden 15y agoWhat a bunch of children. It's not cool to antagonize people It's not cool to DDOS a service. It's not cool to call someone out in a public forum. Grow up people.
- Tarks 15y agoIt's not cool to call someone out, but it's even less cool to have to. What else was he supposed to do? Have a nice reasonable talk with a troll? Better that he's making people aware rather then continuing a fight that was disrupting a service for others.
- zedshaw 15y agoGithub is a company. Remember, they make money, have employees, and are a corporation. I didn't say Tom Preston-Warner was an asshole, I said github has a problem with how their collaborators work and they refuse to fix it. Without people pointing out flaws like this and reporting on companies like this we'd all just be a bunch of corporate slaves buying their random crap.
- enneff 15y agoHere's a question: why didn't you take the issue up with Github before trashing the dongml repository?
- zedshaw 15y agoI knew some github employee(s) were in on it, and that if I removed it he'd just add it again, and at that point just figured why the hell am I bothering with this? Might as well fight back at the jerk and then hope he gets a hint.
- stock_toaster 15y agoDid they actively refuse to fix it in the past, or is it just a broken window that has been ignored until now? (honest question)
- potatolicious 15y ago
- shaggyfrog 15y agoIs GitHub really aiding and abetting this kind of anti-social behaviour/feature? This kind of allegation demands an official response, and soon. Otherwise it's mega bad PR. More than anything, I'm surprised that you can add a collaborator to a project unilaterally. A way to request an add seems like a natural choice considering you can request pulls.
- rdtsc 15y agoIt probably was never a top priority feature ... until now. But they should definitely respond, with an apology, regardless if they all personally hate Zed and would love nothing more than see him get hit by a bus. Zed throws hissy fits about shit like this, and attracts trolls, because, trolls love public hissy fits. But at the same time Zed writes awesome code and is well known in the open source community. I am not saying whether we should personally like him or not, but Github getting into a spat with him over this in public can only result in their PR failure.
- zedshaw 15y agoI don't want an apology, I want them to add a feature that prevents people from abusing others. If throwing a "hissy fit" gets it done then rock on. If not then I'll go somewhere else. That's what's great about a meritocracy in a free market.
- ddkrone 15y agoJust goes to show you nobody ever gets social features right in the web 2.0 landscape. One of the reasons I've avoided github is because it feels like facebook for code geeks.
- rtomayko 15y agoI'm the GitHub employee that fixed the bug. I usually try not to get involved with stuff like this but I feel like I'm in a unique situation to correct the record here. "They purposefully allow this glaringly obvious mechanism for insulting and annoying their members and are actually involved in the joke." I've never heard of the joke. I've never heard of anyone at GitHub being involved in one of these jokes. There has been one case that I'm aware of where someone mass added people to a repository in order to fill up activity feeds. That person was banned. It's an issue we'd like to address more generally. "Until I broke their server they were all laughing at my 'testing' then they were pissed when they had to fix the bug I found." I fixed the bug without being aware of any of this. I check our exception monitor every day. It was there. It was obvious. I fixed it. It was a simple bug triggered by branch names that look like commit SHA1s. Here's the commit: https://gist.github.com/88bc774d0c97e6c955c0 https://gist.github.com/88bc774d0c97e6c955c0 It affected only branch list pages with branch names matching [0-9a-f]{40}. "If you don't believe me, look at the HackerNewsTips twitter account, which I know is astroturfed by a github employee." That is not a GitHub employee. We don't hire anyone that witty as a rule.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- zedshaw 15y ago> It's an issue we'd like to address more generally. I wish you would. I'm apparently not the only one who's had this "joke" played on them, and it'd be nice if it was ended. Here's how you do it: If someone adds me to a project, either I can reject that add, OR I can block a project and they can never say anything to me again. Pretty easy. Also, you should talk with Tom about this joke, I'm sure he knows allll about it.
- rtomayko 15y agoAs a first measure I think we could make it so that once you removed yourself as a collaborator from a project, it would not be possible for the person to re-add you. I realize that's not ideal but would be much more trivial to implement than UI / additional server state for confirmation before being added.
- georgieporgie 15y agoWow, so much drama.
- Joakal 15y agoReminds me of this troll 'Insulting source code': http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=477454 http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=477454
- nestlequ1k 15y agoZed really has a victim complex. As Ryan validated above, I can guarantee you anyone who has any authority at all at github did not encourage or sanction this behavior. It may not have been high on the fix queue, but thats because they expected people to be rational, and they can just manually ban the people who abuse the system. Zed.. seriously... the world is not out to get you. We love your code and your contributions. Don't let a few losers get you down.
- zedshaw 15y agoI don't have a victim complex, I stand up for myself, there's a big difference.
- Confusion 15y agoYou stand up for yourself so much that you also stand up against things that aren't actually there. Your threshold for identifying something as a conspiracy against you or 'the world' has become too low. There is not enough evidence that Github is 'in on it' to assert it as fact. Occam suggests their product simply isn't finished and some features are on the 'Todo' list because relatively few people have complained about them.
- nestlequ1k 15y agoAlso a difference between standing up for oneself and feeding the trolls.
- zedshaw 15y agoYou have to stand up to the trolls now. The internet has created a permanent record of slander and humiliation from anonymous people, so if you don't stand up to it then it'll be assumed that there was some merit to what they said.
- dazonic 15y agoIf you paid it no attention it would go away and find someone else to annoy.
- tantalor 15y agoAll the dick jokes are hilarious when you're hanging out with your buddies, but GitHub is a professional forum. Would you do the same thing on LinkedIn? How does that kind of misogyny reflect on your colleagues and employer?
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- zedshaw 15y agoWhile I don't claim to be any kind of feminist or understand gay rights, I will say this kind of odd "macho homophobe" seems to be a Ruby on Rails thing.
- davidhollander 15y agoInteresting how this disappeared from HN's front page without being dead-ed. I seem to recall the 'Programming, Motherfucker' link meeting a similar mysteriously early demise, despite its 800+ upvotes.
- davidw 15y agoIt probably got flagged a lot, most likely for being Internet Drama with little interest for the wider world.
- davidhollander 15y ago>most likely for being Internet Drama with little interest for the wider world. At least it was better than TechCrunch.
- zedshaw 15y agoHehe, yeah, and I'm probably in their weird secret block list they vaguely mention. The thing to remember is most of the entrepreneurs claim to want a meritocracy but don't really. They don't want people to criticize their products, call bullshit on their marketing, or make something better to compete with them directly. When they say "meritocracy" they mean "everything I make has merit". So, in keeping with that, they like to take communities like HN and pretend it's a free market of ideas supporting the meritocracy, then secretly manipulate your opinions behind the scenes by killing articles and blocking people they just don't like. But hey, it's fun talking to everyone late at night between hacking bouts. :-)
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- statictype 15y ago>The thing to remember is most of the entrepreneurs claim to want a meritocracy Do they really? I think most people here are fine with pg weighing down on what he thinks is inappropriate. I have no idea what it is that got blocked or killed here so won't comment on that but I don't think many people on HN are under the delusion that this is a free market community of any sort.
- ryan-allen 15y agoThis story is no longer on the front page for some reason.
- prez 15y ago> Getting off github and onto bitbucket would another 20-30 minutes. Actually, much less than that - 5 minutes at most, for creating the repo. http://hg-git.github.com/ http://hg-git.github.com/
- fearsome 15y agoZed: Here's how you fix it - Get the 4chan on it. They'll create projects with all sorts of unsavoury content then add all sorts of people. They'll fuck up GitHub once and for all and force it to shut down. Live by the trolls, die by the trolls
- grimen 15y agoProfessionall trolling. GitHub made the world a better place - assuming open-source makes the world better that is which I do - and they've done this pixel-perfectly IMO downtimes aside. What this is about is pure hate from Zed, probably jelousy that some people from his past succeeded silently building one of the greatest web companies that exists with hardly no funding while Zed himself was writing rants. Mongrel might very well require a intelligent mind, but every intelligent person knows that the only way of owning trolls are by the dog treatment: ingore the trolls, and go on building great stuff. I know average people knowing this as common sense.
- grimen 15y ago...and this was not snacks for the troll, this was a note for those who don't know the history.
- ryandvm 15y agoThat was an obnoxious read.
- brown9-2 15y agoSo does anyone know who runs the HAckerNewsTips twitter?
- thenduks 15y agoThis whole thing is a waste of bytes. Simply adding someone to a repo makes it show up in their private repositories list and nowhere else. Annoying? Probably. A big deal? Hardly. (To have it show up anywhere else you have to commit to it.) The HackerNewsTips twitter account is not confirmed to be a GitHub employee and rtomayko, who is at least somewhat trustworthy, flat out says it isn't. The only interesting thing here is the bug related to the `[0-9a-f]{40}` regex -- and that's been fixed. It's over, and it would be great if we could move on quickly from this one.
- thenduks 15y agoA mere 1 day later: https://github.com/blog/862-block-the-bullies https://github.com/blog/862-block-the-bullies This was not some kind of conspiracy inside the Ruby community to troll Zed.
- calloc 15y agoExcept you also get emails and whatnot regarding that repo and when certain actions occur.
- thenduks 15y agoI'm not disputing that it's annoying. Props to GitHub if they improve it soon for sure. I just have better things to do than start a big flamewar over something like this. If you add me to some joke repo and start doing these 'certain actions' so I get useless emails... well, I'll just write a mail filter that blackholes them and get right back to work.