24 ms·

When I tell the Windows Terminal team something is simple, I am "misguided"

616 points by moritonal 4y ago

smt88 4y ago
1. The linked threads don't support the title written here. 2. Even if this were true, who cares? 3. Microsoft comes across fine. The dev comes across as entitled and petty.
- hactually 4y ago
  Thanks for your opinion. Could you expand on why the op seems entitled given the circumstances where an MS member chastised them?
moritonal 4y ago
Previous context can be found here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27728177 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27728177
zamadatix 4y ago
I read through the Windows Terminal Github a lot, and have for a long time. It's a really interesting project to follow. I saw all these threads play out in real time. No, the Microsoft team was not perfect, back then or now, but it's not the witch hunt it's being made out to be here. DHowett, lhecker, zadjii, and probably some I'm forgetting readily admitted that multiple times on multiple Github threads with Dhowett even saying a literal "sorry" to Casey in name while accrediting the in progress work to his suggestions as early as November of last year despite the countless comments here about the blog posts in 2022 not being proper enough apologies because of the lack of these things. I also don't blame any of these folks for not wanting to link back to the GitHub comments of what amounts to flame wars on issues, some closed and some still open as they do actually care about making the performance better for more use cases, and instead leave them to be focused on the technical aspects now that they are finally steered in that position. It's also worth noting there was a non-Microsoft individual out of China cmuratori et al had a lot of early communication issues with. They also apologized individually and ended up dropping out of contributing to the project (mostly performance related commits) last year due to some of the things said about them on GitHub and Twitter. Imperfectness of the terminal committers aside, past and current, I don't think I've ever seen something approaching an apology for anything from cmuratori (though admittedly I don't follow anything outside Github as I'm just trying to follow the changes). I have seen the guy go out of his way to write an alternative demo terminal (licensed in a way the Microsoft folks can't even read it on GitHub if they wanted to) rather than actually try to help the project... and have folks like lhecker kindly responding to GitHub comments about it while he was working on making it happen in the real Windows Terminal codebase. For all that still just want to gang up on the Windows Terminal team here because they can find something they did that wasn't perfect I'd just say they've handled it better than I think 95% of HN would have, better than I would have for sure, and you shouldn't give this troll more of a platform even if he was right about the technical approach in this case (though wrong about a lot of other things about it along the way). If you must talk about it why not instead focus on what better examples of handling this kind of situation have been instead of easy quips about why this didn't go as it should have? Or handling toxicity in online communication since it could easily apply to many of the comments here as well.
h2odragon 4y ago
if it was an open project the narrative would be "reaction to the suggestion was mixed; then it was adopted." Its not like Microsoft is a singular mind here; the poor slobs working there do not deserve to be tarred with all the sins of that name, and vice versa. That said, why suggest anything to Microsoft? I no longer advocate for the dissolution of the company and torment of its employees with the fervor i used to, but they're still not deserving of engagement and assistance as if they were actual members of civil society.
- yakubin 4y ago
  > Its not like Microsoft is a singular mind here The author of the blog post is the author of the second comment on GitHub. Also[1]: > Afterward, the same dev also used a fake name to hang out on our discord and talk about Windows Terminal without telling anyone who he was. I figured it out and confronted them, and they failed to see anything wrong with that behavior. It's a really special team they have there. [1]: <https://nitter.net/cmuratori/status/1522471966929653761 https://nitter.net/cmuratori/status/1522471966929653761>
- spacemanmatt 4y ago
  It was the same guy in both cases
- blagie 4y ago
  1) 1980-2000 Microsoft was evil. I find 2022 Microsoft to be ahead of Google and Facebook on the ethics front, so YMMV. Microsoft doesn't do much antitrust anymore, is /more/ respectful of privacy than most of the tech industry, and by some measures, is the world's largest contributor to the open source collective. Tools like Visual Studio Code are pretty good too, and run on GNU/Linux. 2) Even with evil companies, contributing doesn't always mean helping evil. Companies are, as you pointed out, abstractions. I find much of what Facebook / Meta does to be particularly evil, but they have some very good, ethical projects I'd gladly work on or contribute to. 3) Even so, if an organization were evil, there are different tactics. Microsoft isn't going away. One can affect change from the outside or from the inside. In many cases, the best way to turn evil into good is to engage and contribute.
tubs 4y ago
Pretty sure the "trivial" in the blog post is sarcastic, or at least slightly self depracating.
- michelb 4y ago
  Given that writer's track record on self-reflection and introspection, I'd say it's not.
- royjacobs 4y ago
  It's not a great look to open a blog post with sarcastic comments referring to (unneeded) controversy, though. Regardless if you were right or wrong.
  - GraphenePants 4y ago
    It stands to reason that Microsoft, being a professional company, can better determine whether their writing is a great look or not. Unclear that your speculation is based on a higher degree of subject matter expertise.
    - royjacobs 4y ago
      I feel like you are being meta-sarcastic here. It's sarcasms all the way down!
- jtbayly 4y ago
  The "trivial" solution doesn't work. And they thus had to do the non-trivial thing and write their own custom text renderer. If I'm right in my reading, the author of the tweet is wrong to complain about them saying it's "trivial," because they never did.
  - dmitriid 4y ago
    A custom text renderer was exactly the trivial solution suggested and demonstrated to them when they claimed it was extremely hard and required a doctoral research.
deburo 4y ago
I blame the disagreement on online communications. Can you imagine this conflict lasting this long if these guys had been talking about it in person over coffee? They would probably behave with much more restraint and respect for each other.
- oneepic 4y ago
  Even in 2022, having worked there, I guarantee that the Microsoft org chart meme [0] is still true. I do agree in-person talking would have helped. [0] https://assets.sbnation.com/assets/2907963/microsoftguns.jpg https://assets.sbnation.com/assets/2907963/microsoftguns.jpg
  - jgalt212 4y ago
    Truth. I tell my children that 90% of the fights I've gotten into with my friends (not enemies) have been on-line and not in-person.
- BaseballPhysics 4y ago
  Careful, that's starting to sound like an example of a downside to remote work, which is a touchy topic these days...
  - rglullis 4y ago
    That's a downside of exclusive reliance on written communication, not of remote work. You can avoid this with a phone call or a "can we pair for a bit?" session as well.
    - InCityDreams 4y ago
      I take it "Can we pair for a bit?", means 'meet to discuss..." The non-apology sounded more heartfelt than this.
      - rglullis 4y ago
jeroenhd 4y ago
Looks like Microsoft finally found someone good enough at terminal emulator development to fix the performance issues. I can't shake the feeling that the original Github issue and the heated discussions in there were more Windows Terminal devs not wanting to admit their knowledge gap in this area than impracticality and complexity.
- lelandfe 4y ago
  To be fair, the GitHub commenter in question had made this statement: > It really seems like most of the code in the parser/renderer part of the terminal is unnecessary and just slows things down. What this code needs to do is extremely simple and it seems like it has been massively overcomplicated. I think they deserved a better response from Microsoft, but I also probably would not have responded favorably to that wording – irrespective of if they were correct.
  - 10000truths 4y ago
    > I also probably would not have responded favorably to that wording – irrespective of if they were correct. Why not? I see nothing wrong with this sort of feedback. It's blunt, but constructive.
    - lelandfe 4y ago
      If it was your code they were talking about, you may feel differently. Blunt, hyperbolic statements like "massively overcomplicated" can feel like a shot across the bow when someone is talking about code you wrote. Kindness and gentleness go a long way in OSS.
      - AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
        Statements like this make me feel like all the people talking about how overly sensitive modern "snowflake's" are might be right.
      - gimme_treefiddy 4y ago
djoldman 4y ago
Link to dev's presentation of their implementation that seems to run circles around microsoft's terminal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxM8QmyZXtg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxM8QmyZXtg
- xoac 4y ago
  Anybody using his terminal?
oneepic 4y ago
This seems to be the latest chapter of the Windows Terminal story. https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10362 https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10362 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27728177 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27728177
jcranberry 4y ago
Seems like a misleading title to me.
- Ajedi32 4y ago
  Yeah, maybe there's more context I'm missing but the screenshotted comments don't seem particularly "insulting", and the blog post announcing that they're implementing the idea does credit Casey (just not by name). I'd summarize this more as "Microsoft employees initially disagree with dev's idea, but eventually admit he was right."
  - gjm11 4y ago
    I think "does credit Casey (just not by name)" is an oxymoron. You aren't crediting someone unless you actually, y'know, give them the credit.
    - Ajedi32 4y ago
      Maybe, but my point is that "takes credit for their idea" is inaccurate. The post clearly says the idea came from "a community member"; not that they came up with it themselves.
      - ergocoder 4y ago
        That is even worse. They know who the person is but is so vengeful that they don't name the person. Microsoft should be embarrassed that they have engineers like this. I couldn't imagine how bad they would treat colleagues with inferior authority.
deleted 4y ago
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twirlock 4y ago
l30n4da5 4y ago
dev seems to have a chip on his shoulder. that being said, the actions of the ms dev don't paint him in a good light, either. i'd say theyre both in the wrong in one way or another.
DHowett 4y ago
Another day, another Casey post dunking on my team. Hi! This tweet misses the mark only a little bit; in a previous blog post, we apologized[1] pretty frankly to everyone involved in this discussion. I'll admit that we didn't list him by name, but neither did we list the other handful of folks involved. We should have. In turn, Casey rightly did not acknowledge it except to tell his followers that it was not a real apology[2]. This blog post is matter-of-fact, but Casey is right. However, he said himself that it was trivial to do this. Is it not acceptable that we use the same language? Casey, I'm sorry. We made a mistake. I made a mistake! We didn't know what we didn't know, and thought we were clever enough to pass for it. Using a texture atlas was a great idea, and we didn't know about it until you told us. We should do better to credit you. [1]: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/windows-terminal-preview-1-13-release/#new-rendering-engine https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/windows-terminal-... (scroll down under the image) [2]: https://twitter.com/cmuratori/status/1489406091318349826 https://twitter.com/cmuratori/status/1489406091318349826 -- (Note: I've iteratively edited this post, as it was originally a one-sentence diatribe written in anger. I originally asked, "I just don't know what else he's asking for here. Credit? Us to die screaming?" It was not a good look. It also originally contained "I get it, Microsoft sucks, we should all be fired, rah rah rah." As the message evolved, that became more and more out-of-place.)
- dangerface 4y ago
  > Is it not acceptable that we use the same language? Good question why insult him for his use if you feel its appropriate language?
- indy 4y ago
  A good apology has three parts: 1. I'm sorry 2. It was my fault 3. How do I make it right?
  - chii 4y ago
    They skipped straight to the 3rd step, without doing the first 2.
- TrueTom 4y ago
TrueTom 4y ago
After the Windows Terminal Teams' half-hearted attempt at an apology a few months ago I actually believed they might improve their behavior. I guess that may have been too optimistic.
AndrewKemendo 4y ago
I will say, looking through the Windows Terminal GH repo, their whole page seems unnecessarily curt in tone: >I built and ran the new Terminal, but it looks just like the old console >Cause: You're launching the incorrect solution in Visual Studio. I realize that comforting language isn't a priority for a lot of devs/documentation writers, but it's always good to keep in mind that we are dealing with other people reading our docs and we should take the time to care of each other with our language. https://github.com/microsoft/terminal https://github.com/microsoft/terminal
- ectopod 4y ago
  Eh? That's an FAQ, in the FAQ section, written in the style of an FAQ. The next line, which you didn't quote, has the solution. There's nothing wrong with it.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  I dunno, that seems reasonable? It's very much to the point, and it would be better if it didn't lead with "You're [doing it wrong]" (I'd prefer to couch it with "This most likely occurs because [reason]"), but the written version seems fine.
miiiiiike 4y ago
Issue: Feeling bad after interaction with OSS developer at <BIG COMPANY>. Steps to reproduce: 1) Report a bug. 2) Get called dumb by developers at <BIG COMPANY>. 3) Demonstrate that it is, in fact, a bug with examples, test cases, and offer a potential fix/PR. 4) Hear that it’s being “handled internally”. 5) Wait for the blog post re-iterating what they called dumb, talking about how great the team is that fixed it, and see your demonstration code or test cases in the linked commit. 6) Why are you still here? No, you’re not going to be credited, this is going in my promotion packet. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve seen this over the past 20 years. Whenever I’m about to report a bug in a <BIG COMPANY> project I smile to my girlfriend and say “OK, I’m going to go get called dumb.”
- Longhanks 4y ago
  And the Windows Terminal team reeks of this. There's so many blog posts saying look, we're so smart because they're reimplementing something both Linux and macOS had for *years*, as if the whole world of CLI was waiting for their savior.
  - ethbr0 4y ago
    When CMD is your benchmark... (In all fairness, PowerShell has a lot of good ideas)
    - stjohnswarts 4y ago
      Yeah it is far superior to cmd. But I mean cmd was frozen in the 90s it seems anyway.
    - Narishma 4y ago
      cmd is a shell. The old terminal is called conhost I think.
      - ethbr0 4y ago
        I figured I'd get this from someone. ;) I'm approximating that 99% of people who use Windows use default terminals for built-in legacy shells, and thus effectively analogous terminology. You're correct though!
curiousgal 4y ago
Idk, personally I hardly think of DHowett's comment footer as insulting. Going through the Github thread the OP does come off as standoff-ish. It's just a reminder that being right is not always enough.
- aulin 4y ago
  Same here, maybe it's because I'm not a native speaker, but I didn't see anything offensive in the discussion. It wasn't even a particularly productive discussion worth crediting OP for.
  - physicsguy 4y ago
    It comes across as very passive aggressive to me (native British English speaker).
Shadonototra 4y ago
Look at the settings menu, it looks like a setting menu from iOS, huge controls, everything is a list, endless scrolling No wonder why they didn't know what they were doing So that kind of behavior doesn't surprise me What's even more surprising is it's the same for everything windows related, including windows 11, performance issues all over the place, nobody acknowledge it, and whenever they face criticism and complain, it's the ugly trolls! Sometimes i feel like some managers doesn't want to give up their position and salary, so they surround themselves with tasteless people Culture and hiring problems at microsoft, as usual, apple is being hit by the same issues these days, just like google and facebook Lot of money to be made in these positions, it always attract the wrong people
- usrn 4y ago
  OS dev is dead everywhere.
  - curiousgal 4y ago
    Who knew hiring based on leetcode would backfire
starburst 4y ago
Casey's next stream [1] will probably be very entertaining! Back when the original drama unfold I could very much empathize with his frustration. Let's not forget they told him that what he was suggesting was the work of a PHD when any game developer worth his grain of salt could do that very trivially. [1] https://www.twitch.tv/handmade_hero https://www.twitch.tv/handmade_hero
- aulin 4y ago
  Devs over and underestimate effort all the time
  - starburst 4y ago
    Sure but in this case it was grossly over-estimated compared to the under-estimated side. Casey did the implementation [1] to prove the point and also made explanatory videos [2] of it. [1] https://github.com/cmuratori/refterm https://github.com/cmuratori/refterm [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxM8QmyZXtg&t=1052s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxM8QmyZXtg&t=1052s
    - aulin 4y ago
      thanks, that's a lot of context missing from the tweet in the title and from the bug report
- oofbey 4y ago
  - starburst 4y ago
    This is so insulting to Casey, he does his instructional videos for the world to see and educate a new generation of programmers about how to make a game completely from scratch. This isn't his full-time jobs. This isn't some streamer trying to gather new audience by brewing up drama.
    - 4y ago
dark-star 4y ago
I really wonder why OSS developers often have so big ego issues. I mean I get it, attribution is nice and all, but trying to force attribution for evey small idea you might have had in your life by trying to rally the public against "the evil corporate enemy"? Really? How low can you sink
- rationalfaith 4y ago
- Longhanks 4y ago
  There's keeping your head down and silently not giving attribution, and then there's publishing a blog post, boasting how smart you are, and merely mentioning that the idea came from "someone in the community".
- lobocinza 4y ago
  Maybe you don't know the context but this isn't a "small idea".
deleted 4y ago
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QuikAccount 4y ago
Anyone who knows anything about Casey Muratori knows that nice and humble are not usually words associated with him. That is not to say the devs he is calling out are in the right. Frankly, I just see a bunch of combative assholes arguing with each other.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- bena 4y ago
  Yeah, DHowett's and LHeckler's responses were kind of dickish, but Casey's own words, tone, and attitude aren't doing him any favors either. Casey happens to be right on the technical issue in this case and people are just glossing over all the ways in which he was also wrong. Now, personally, I believe it was the WT Team's responsibility to let it go as they're representatives of a larger organization and as such how they interact with people reflects back on the organization they work for. But yeah, no heroes in this story.
  - phaistra 4y ago
    How was Casey wrong?
    - bena 4y ago
      He was wrong in how he approached the team. Everyone lacks tact in this exchange.
      - phaistra 4y ago
        Just because you don't think he was polite to some arbitrary standard does not make him wrong. If people are this sensitive to "tone" and "tact" about technical matters, then we (as a community I guess) have much deeper issues then the technical matters themselves.
        deleted 4y ago
ghusbands 4y ago
This is worse than it looks, since the person who wrote the blog post is the same person who insulted the dev, and is the same person who joined that dev's related discord under a pseudonym. [1] [1] https://twitter.com/cmuratori/status/1522471966929653761 https://twitter.com/cmuratori/status/1522471966929653761
- s_dev 4y ago
  The fact that he went unmentioned is pretty damning. I don't give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt here -- this reeks of stealing credit under the guise of "open to feedback".
- aldebran 4y ago
  Yeah this person has made a “career limiting move”. Actually it’s been multiple moves but yeah. This goes against Microsoft’s community engagement policies. I hope Leonard reflects on his actions and makes better choices in the future.
- fire 4y ago
  Jesus christ, this behavior would have gotten me in deep shit in any place I've worked
- mikestew 4y ago
  And here we all thought they disbanded the Microsoft Munchkins[0] 25 years ago. I guess they're back for a reunion tour. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_OS/2#Analysis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_OS/2#Analysis
seneca 4y ago
This whole interaction, on both sides, is childish and makes our entire profession look bad by reinforcing the stereotypes peoples have of us. I would avoid working with anyone involved in this.
lizardactivist 4y ago
The fact that, months later, this guy has still not let go of the self-perceived insult of someone else's software not meeting his own expectations of performance, is the very definition of being combative.
Havoc 4y ago
Sounds like all three people could do with brushing up on soft skills...
lhecker 4y ago
Hi! I'm the person who wrote that blog post. If you have any questions whatsoever, please let me know! English is not my native language and "The solution is trivial" was meant sarcastic. The solution isn't trivial at all, nor is it complete, because solving the corner cases is complex. I'd also like to mention ahead of time that DirectWrite/Direct2D is very fast at drawing western (Latin) text without coloring (>2000 FPS). In other words, in most situations Casey's suggestion doesn't help much, but it does address his termbench issue. At the time we assumed we were using the API incorrectly, after all Direct2D already had everything Casey suggested we should implement and it ran very fast outside of termbench. The new solution is largely identical to regular Direct2D with the only major difference being that ClearType/Grayscale gamma-correction is run on the GPU instead. Casey's suggestion wasn't unique to me, as a significant number of other terminals do it exactly that way in OpenGl, something I was quite familiar with already. Originally I credited alacritty in the blog, because that's how I knew how to do it, but I removed it to keep the article as succinct as possible. Update: I'm very sorry for publishing the blog post without giving proper credit where it is due, and it's been updated since. I'm sorry for my continued, overly defensive behavior.
- BaculumMeumEst 4y ago
  Did you participate in the molly rocket discord?
- TIPSIO 4y ago
  This is way above my pay grade. Just don’t take anything personal. Being defensive / know best is in this industry everywhere at all levels and organizations. Being humble in general is hard, being humble in code reviews is harder, being humble to Internet comments in any forum… sometimes impossible. Then repeat that with two super genius experts - eek. You find everyone is usually trying their best if you ever have face to face (except server admins, they are stone-cold psychopaths, stay away). Would bet you both are helpful and open minded at the end of the day.
  - lhecker 4y ago
    Oh yeah, for sure. I can't tell you how much I regret being that defensive about something that benign. This was certainly a life lesson. I've apologized to Casey in person before (well, to my best ability) and I'll apologize again if given the opportunity to do so. I just wish people wouldn't say I'm taking credit, when it's an old, widely used idea and when I spent such an incredible amount of time reading and understanding DirectWrite/Direct2D's code in order to ship this renderer in the state it is.
baisq 4y ago
Insults? Everything is an insult nowadays. Recommendation to the MS team: instead of engaging, wait a couple of days and this will blow over. In these situations, if you engage, you will always lose.
nimish 4y ago
You don't get promotions from speeding up code, unfortunately. Nobody cares about something that's difficult to motivate to the program managers or demo. Clearly some egos have been bruised, but that's the reality of open source. You aren't just dealing with pre-screened colleagues. Some higher management should step in to mediate and cool things off. Absolutely unsurprised that the Windows Terminal team wasn't focused on this or didn't pull in, say, a rendering expert. Microsoft is very siloed.
hkt 4y ago
I'm charmed and delighted that seemingly multiple microsoft employees are here giving non-apologies. Honestly people, just don't use the product. A putty session to a Linux box still beats anything Microsoft can offer.
- eatonphil 4y ago
  I use Windows Terminal to SSH into my dev machines. I prefer it to other options on Windows including putty (which I really couldn't dislike more). Different strokes for different folks. :)
ionwake 4y ago
I’m against ganging up but I think adding a relevant comment to this thread won’t count as such. Something the Microsoft API team did irked me slightly. One day the Microsoft 360 API (used for email) seemingly stopped working. After a whole week of troubleshooting and discussion with other devs around the planet I fixed the issue. New headers had to be included. It was a one line fix that stole a week of my life. The API had changed. I could have been ok with this but when I made a post on the repo explaining the fix and that I had no idea why it had even changed, instead of a thank you- a Microsoft API dev chimed in to say it was a trivial change and didn’t see what everyone was so upset about. Knowing no documentation had been updated and every system around the planet had been broken for probably a week that depended on it. No apology no gratitude. I can handle that. But an insult to say I was being impertinent and overblowing the importance. Well I never forgot it, and eventually this stuff comes out. I hazard to say there are toxic dangerous people in every major company I just don’t understand why these people aren’t cautioned as soon as these public incidents happen it’s as if no one is really watching the behaviour in the irc channels or repos but are instead focusing on internal metrics which in my opinion don’t measure the devastation cause by these bad apples - who should atleast be checked up on.
darepublic 4y ago
I remember watching the casey youtube video on terminal performance. Inspiring! In generally I find his content quite refreshing. Sorry to see he got the cold shoulder after all his useful input
kragen 4y ago
https://nitter.dark.fail/cmuratori/status/1522468481135902725 https://nitter.dark.fail/cmuratori/status/152246848113590272...
Traster 4y ago
To be honest, this tweet comes across as incredible unproductive behavior in an open source project. If I were the MSFT guys, I just wouldn't be responding to community members who behave like this.
- curiousgal 4y ago
  Thank you! It has been absolutely mind-boggling going through the comments. If I were a Microsoft exec and came through this mess I would say fuck Open Source. This is why we can't have nice things.
Accacin 4y ago
So I've got to say that IMO, all of this seems pretty silly. Casey does come across as pretty rude sometimes (saying this with respect, as I love Handmade Hero and his other work) and the Windows Terminal developers seems like they were a bit egotistical to just discount his idea as they did. The blog post by Leonard H seems pretty tame. The "solution is trivial" comment I took as sarcasm (but I'm British so maybe I just assume everything is sarcasm :). The only bit I found a little odd was about one of the developers joining a Discord server under a fake username. If that did happen, it seems like it was a bad idea.
otterley 4y ago
This seems like pure drama to me. Does it really meet the bar for the HN front page? It doesn’t further this site’s mission to inspire intellectual curiosity.
kelvin0 4y ago
Ah yes, I've travelled that road many times and it burnt me out. I've learned to 'let it go' and move on, not easy though.
ericyan 4y ago
We should have a linter for issue/PR comments that flag out sentences starting with “You are...”. The scope of the comments should be limited to the issue or code and must never extend to the person that bring it up.
stickyricky 4y ago
Big tech engineers "do the impossible" by preemptively declaring every problem impossible.
georgia_peach 4y ago
Fruitless intrapersonal controversy of prick vs pricks. Flagged!
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j_barbossa 4y ago
I really hate when fellow devs say things are "simple" like Casey Muratori said in the first place. Nothing is simple in the software (and hardware) world! If something seems simple then most likely because smart people have written libraries for you that abstract the hard part away. It also shows a certain arrogance to call a topic "simple", because it is supposed to show the audience that you are an incredible expert in the field.
- sussmannbaka 4y ago
  the solution to the problem is simple and thus widely used in prior art. the person in question has written such a library (well, a reference implementation). the person in question is an expert in the field.
- deelly 4y ago
  Agree. Sometime I really struggle to see a difference between Reddit and HN.
  - bena 4y ago
    HN doesn't have sub-reddits
- gimme_treefiddy 4y ago
  Maybe I’m nitpicking since it’s OSS, but sometimes it’s not even the code. From the outside it seems like a few lines of code but internally there’s a whole org and OKRs and what not.
bitshiftfaced 4y ago
Has anyone got vim to display properly on Windows terminal?
- zamadatix 4y ago
  Sure, neovim as well.
  - bitshiftfaced 4y ago
    Hmm, not sure what I'm doing wrong. It displays correctly in PowerShell. In Windows Terminal, it shows a blinking cursor instead of the box, and it makes it look like the cursor is one to the left of where it actually is
    - zamadatix 4y ago
      Not sure about the cursor being 1 to the left of where you'd expect but the box behaviour is something you need to specify in your .vimrc otherwise it'll use the default cursor for the terminal. Something like this may be what you're used to: let &t_SI .= "\<Esc>[4 q" let &t_EI .= "\<Esc>[2 q" You probably also want set ttym=sgr if you want mouse interactions to be sent properly.
      - bitshiftfaced 4y ago
        Yep that was it. Many thanks.
        zamadatix 4y ago
        Any time, it's all a bit arcane really I'm not sure how anyone is supposed to figure it out without having been told themselves. Love your username by the way!
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TrueTom 4y ago
It's funny that Hacker News went out of it's way to bury this.
- phendrenad2 4y ago
  On the contrary, I'm surprised that this purely drama-driven non-technical post is surviving at all. I guess it has enough comments to break through the flags.
deleted 4y ago
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trapnii 4y ago
- dogleash 4y ago
  >That speaks more about the community than I want to believe, sadly. You're the one passive-aggressively chiding me for not rehashing a technical conversation already discussed to death three for four rounds of refterm submissions ago.
emrah 4y ago
Right or wrong, there is no need to be condescending or rude. That's a choice and a very unproductive one. I remember the original incident, I followed it on Twitter. I think the tone on both sides could be nicer.
ukverwwrttyv 4y ago
Both sides need better communication. They are like oil and water in boiling degrees Credit where it's due, I think Windows Terminal's team did try to extend an apology. (Sincere or not, what is the extent that you deem sincere enough) https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10462#issuecomment-957992128 https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10462#issuecomm... > We certainly handled the original issue poorly, and we're trying to do better. > We may not have taken the feedback seriously to begin with, but if it appears to have been completely dismissed then I am sorry. > Personally I'd like to also welcome @ cmuratori and @ mmozeiko back to give any comments if they wish to do so. Of course it'd be entirely understandable if they don't. Minimised comment https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10462#issuecomment-873518251 https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10462#issuecomm... > We‘re quite aware about the code and are extremely happy about what was created there. I mean it seriously: It sets a great goal for us to strive for. Unfortunately the code is intentionally GPLv2 licensed and we‘ll honor this wish entirely. As such no one at Microsoft will ever look at either of the links. Claims that they tried to communicate with Casey: > I‘ve talked with the author before and they made it abundantly clear they don’t wish to ever speak with us again. They‘re entirely welcome to return and take part in this project‘s discourse of course… I‘d be delighted if that was the case! -- What do everyone think of this?

616 points by moritonal 4y ago

1. The linked threads don't support the title written here. 2. Even if this were true, who cares? 3. Microsoft comes across fine. The dev comes across as entitled and petty.

hactually 4y ago
Thanks for your opinion. Could you expand on why the op seems entitled given the circumstances where an MS member chastised them?

moritonal 4y ago

Previous context can be found here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27728177 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27728177

zamadatix 4y ago

I read through the Windows Terminal Github a lot, and have for a long time. It's a really interesting project to follow. I saw all these threads play out in real time. No, the Microsoft team was not perfect, back then or now, but it's not the witch hunt it's being made out to be here. DHowett, lhecker, zadjii, and probably some I'm forgetting readily admitted that multiple times on multiple Github threads with Dhowett even saying a literal "sorry" to Casey in name while accrediting the in progress work to his suggestions as early as November of last year despite the countless comments here about the blog posts in 2022 not being proper enough apologies because of the lack of these things. I also don't blame any of these folks for not wanting to link back to the GitHub comments of what amounts to flame wars on issues, some closed and some still open as they do actually care about making the performance better for more use cases, and instead leave them to be focused on the technical aspects now that they are finally steered in that position. It's also worth noting there was a non-Microsoft individual out of China cmuratori et al had a lot of early communication issues with. They also apologized individually and ended up dropping out of contributing to the project (mostly performance related commits) last year due to some of the things said about them on GitHub and Twitter. Imperfectness of the terminal committers aside, past and current, I don't think I've ever seen something approaching an apology for anything from cmuratori (though admittedly I don't follow anything outside Github as I'm just trying to follow the changes). I have seen the guy go out of his way to write an alternative demo terminal (licensed in a way the Microsoft folks can't even read it on GitHub if they wanted to) rather than actually try to help the project... and have folks like lhecker kindly responding to GitHub comments about it while he was working on making it happen in the real Windows Terminal codebase. For all that still just want to gang up on the Windows Terminal team here because they can find something they did that wasn't perfect I'd just say they've handled it better than I think 95% of HN would have, better than I would have for sure, and you shouldn't give this troll more of a platform even if he was right about the technical approach in this case (though wrong about a lot of other things about it along the way). If you must talk about it why not instead focus on what better examples of handling this kind of situation have been instead of easy quips about why this didn't go as it should have? Or handling toxicity in online communication since it could easily apply to many of the comments here as well.

h2odragon 4y ago

if it was an open project the narrative would be "reaction to the suggestion was mixed; then it was adopted." Its not like Microsoft is a singular mind here; the poor slobs working there do not deserve to be tarred with all the sins of that name, and vice versa. That said, why suggest anything to Microsoft? I no longer advocate for the dissolution of the company and torment of its employees with the fervor i used to, but they're still not deserving of engagement and assistance as if they were actual members of civil society.

yakubin 4y ago
> Its not like Microsoft is a singular mind here The author of the blog post is the author of the second comment on GitHub. Also[1]: > Afterward, the same dev also used a fake name to hang out on our discord and talk about Windows Terminal without telling anyone who he was. I figured it out and confronted them, and they failed to see anything wrong with that behavior. It's a really special team they have there. [1]: <https://nitter.net/cmuratori/status/1522471966929653761 https://nitter.net/cmuratori/status/1522471966929653761>
spacemanmatt 4y ago
It was the same guy in both cases
blagie 4y ago
1) 1980-2000 Microsoft was evil. I find 2022 Microsoft to be ahead of Google and Facebook on the ethics front, so YMMV. Microsoft doesn't do much antitrust anymore, is /more/ respectful of privacy than most of the tech industry, and by some measures, is the world's largest contributor to the open source collective. Tools like Visual Studio Code are pretty good too, and run on GNU/Linux. 2) Even with evil companies, contributing doesn't always mean helping evil. Companies are, as you pointed out, abstractions. I find much of what Facebook / Meta does to be particularly evil, but they have some very good, ethical projects I'd gladly work on or contribute to. 3) Even so, if an organization were evil, there are different tactics. Microsoft isn't going away. One can affect change from the outside or from the inside. In many cases, the best way to turn evil into good is to engage and contribute.

tubs 4y ago

Pretty sure the "trivial" in the blog post is sarcastic, or at least slightly self depracating.

michelb 4y ago
Given that writer's track record on self-reflection and introspection, I'd say it's not.
royjacobs 4y ago
It's not a great look to open a blog post with sarcastic comments referring to (unneeded) controversy, though. Regardless if you were right or wrong.
- GraphenePants 4y ago
  It stands to reason that Microsoft, being a professional company, can better determine whether their writing is a great look or not. Unclear that your speculation is based on a higher degree of subject matter expertise.
  - royjacobs 4y ago
    I feel like you are being meta-sarcastic here. It's sarcasms all the way down!
jtbayly 4y ago
The "trivial" solution doesn't work. And they thus had to do the non-trivial thing and write their own custom text renderer. If I'm right in my reading, the author of the tweet is wrong to complain about them saying it's "trivial," because they never did.
- dmitriid 4y ago
  A custom text renderer was exactly the trivial solution suggested and demonstrated to them when they claimed it was extremely hard and required a doctoral research.

deburo 4y ago

I blame the disagreement on online communications. Can you imagine this conflict lasting this long if these guys had been talking about it in person over coffee? They would probably behave with much more restraint and respect for each other.

oneepic 4y ago
Even in 2022, having worked there, I guarantee that the Microsoft org chart meme [0] is still true. I do agree in-person talking would have helped. [0] https://assets.sbnation.com/assets/2907963/microsoftguns.jpg https://assets.sbnation.com/assets/2907963/microsoftguns.jpg
- jgalt212 4y ago
  Truth. I tell my children that 90% of the fights I've gotten into with my friends (not enemies) have been on-line and not in-person.
BaseballPhysics 4y ago
Careful, that's starting to sound like an example of a downside to remote work, which is a touchy topic these days...
- rglullis 4y ago
  That's a downside of exclusive reliance on written communication, not of remote work. You can avoid this with a phone call or a "can we pair for a bit?" session as well.
  - InCityDreams 4y ago
    I take it "Can we pair for a bit?", means 'meet to discuss..." The non-apology sounded more heartfelt than this.
    - rglullis 4y ago

jeroenhd 4y ago

Looks like Microsoft finally found someone good enough at terminal emulator development to fix the performance issues. I can't shake the feeling that the original Github issue and the heated discussions in there were more Windows Terminal devs not wanting to admit their knowledge gap in this area than impracticality and complexity.

lelandfe 4y ago
To be fair, the GitHub commenter in question had made this statement: > It really seems like most of the code in the parser/renderer part of the terminal is unnecessary and just slows things down. What this code needs to do is extremely simple and it seems like it has been massively overcomplicated. I think they deserved a better response from Microsoft, but I also probably would not have responded favorably to that wording – irrespective of if they were correct.
- 10000truths 4y ago
  > I also probably would not have responded favorably to that wording – irrespective of if they were correct. Why not? I see nothing wrong with this sort of feedback. It's blunt, but constructive.
  - lelandfe 4y ago
    If it was your code they were talking about, you may feel differently. Blunt, hyperbolic statements like "massively overcomplicated" can feel like a shot across the bow when someone is talking about code you wrote. Kindness and gentleness go a long way in OSS.
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
      Statements like this make me feel like all the people talking about how overly sensitive modern "snowflake's" are might be right.
    - gimme_treefiddy 4y ago

djoldman 4y ago

Link to dev's presentation of their implementation that seems to run circles around microsoft's terminal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxM8QmyZXtg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxM8QmyZXtg

xoac 4y ago
Anybody using his terminal?

oneepic 4y ago

This seems to be the latest chapter of the Windows Terminal story. https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10362 https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10362 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27728177 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27728177

jcranberry 4y ago

Seems like a misleading title to me.

Ajedi32 4y ago
Yeah, maybe there's more context I'm missing but the screenshotted comments don't seem particularly "insulting", and the blog post announcing that they're implementing the idea does credit Casey (just not by name). I'd summarize this more as "Microsoft employees initially disagree with dev's idea, but eventually admit he was right."
- gjm11 4y ago
  I think "does credit Casey (just not by name)" is an oxymoron. You aren't crediting someone unless you actually, y'know, give them the credit.
  - Ajedi32 4y ago
    Maybe, but my point is that "takes credit for their idea" is inaccurate. The post clearly says the idea came from "a community member"; not that they came up with it themselves.
    - ergocoder 4y ago
      That is even worse. They know who the person is but is so vengeful that they don't name the person. Microsoft should be embarrassed that they have engineers like this. I couldn't imagine how bad they would treat colleagues with inferior authority.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

twirlock 4y ago

l30n4da5 4y ago

dev seems to have a chip on his shoulder. that being said, the actions of the ms dev don't paint him in a good light, either. i'd say theyre both in the wrong in one way or another.

DHowett 4y ago

Another day, another Casey post dunking on my team. Hi! This tweet misses the mark only a little bit; in a previous blog post, we apologized[1] pretty frankly to everyone involved in this discussion. I'll admit that we didn't list him by name, but neither did we list the other handful of folks involved. We should have. In turn, Casey rightly did not acknowledge it except to tell his followers that it was not a real apology[2]. This blog post is matter-of-fact, but Casey is right. However, he said himself that it was trivial to do this. Is it not acceptable that we use the same language? Casey, I'm sorry. We made a mistake. I made a mistake! We didn't know what we didn't know, and thought we were clever enough to pass for it. Using a texture atlas was a great idea, and we didn't know about it until you told us. We should do better to credit you. [1]: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/windows-terminal-preview-1-13-release/#new-rendering-engine https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/windows-terminal-... (scroll down under the image) [2]: https://twitter.com/cmuratori/status/1489406091318349826 https://twitter.com/cmuratori/status/1489406091318349826 -- (Note: I've iteratively edited this post, as it was originally a one-sentence diatribe written in anger. I originally asked, "I just don't know what else he's asking for here. Credit? Us to die screaming?" It was not a good look. It also originally contained "I get it, Microsoft sucks, we should all be fired, rah rah rah." As the message evolved, that became more and more out-of-place.)

dangerface 4y ago
> Is it not acceptable that we use the same language? Good question why insult him for his use if you feel its appropriate language?
indy 4y ago
A good apology has three parts: 1. I'm sorry 2. It was my fault 3. How do I make it right?
- chii 4y ago
  They skipped straight to the 3rd step, without doing the first 2.
TrueTom 4y ago

TrueTom 4y ago

After the Windows Terminal Teams' half-hearted attempt at an apology a few months ago I actually believed they might improve their behavior. I guess that may have been too optimistic.

AndrewKemendo 4y ago

I will say, looking through the Windows Terminal GH repo, their whole page seems unnecessarily curt in tone: >I built and ran the new Terminal, but it looks just like the old console >Cause: You're launching the incorrect solution in Visual Studio. I realize that comforting language isn't a priority for a lot of devs/documentation writers, but it's always good to keep in mind that we are dealing with other people reading our docs and we should take the time to care of each other with our language. https://github.com/microsoft/terminal https://github.com/microsoft/terminal

ectopod 4y ago
Eh? That's an FAQ, in the FAQ section, written in the style of an FAQ. The next line, which you didn't quote, has the solution. There's nothing wrong with it.
yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
I dunno, that seems reasonable? It's very much to the point, and it would be better if it didn't lead with "You're [doing it wrong]" (I'd prefer to couch it with "This most likely occurs because [reason]"), but the written version seems fine.

miiiiiike 4y ago

Issue: Feeling bad after interaction with OSS developer at <BIG COMPANY>. Steps to reproduce: 1) Report a bug. 2) Get called dumb by developers at <BIG COMPANY>. 3) Demonstrate that it is, in fact, a bug with examples, test cases, and offer a potential fix/PR. 4) Hear that it’s being “handled internally”. 5) Wait for the blog post re-iterating what they called dumb, talking about how great the team is that fixed it, and see your demonstration code or test cases in the linked commit. 6) Why are you still here? No, you’re not going to be credited, this is going in my promotion packet. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve seen this over the past 20 years. Whenever I’m about to report a bug in a <BIG COMPANY> project I smile to my girlfriend and say “OK, I’m going to go get called dumb.”

Longhanks 4y ago
And the Windows Terminal team reeks of this. There's so many blog posts saying look, we're so smart because they're reimplementing something both Linux and macOS had for *years*, as if the whole world of CLI was waiting for their savior.
- ethbr0 4y ago
  When CMD is your benchmark... (In all fairness, PowerShell has a lot of good ideas)
  - stjohnswarts 4y ago
    Yeah it is far superior to cmd. But I mean cmd was frozen in the 90s it seems anyway.
  - Narishma 4y ago
    cmd is a shell. The old terminal is called conhost I think.
    - ethbr0 4y ago
      I figured I'd get this from someone. ;) I'm approximating that 99% of people who use Windows use default terminals for built-in legacy shells, and thus effectively analogous terminology. You're correct though!

curiousgal 4y ago

Idk, personally I hardly think of DHowett's comment footer as insulting. Going through the Github thread the OP does come off as standoff-ish. It's just a reminder that being right is not always enough.

aulin 4y ago
Same here, maybe it's because I'm not a native speaker, but I didn't see anything offensive in the discussion. It wasn't even a particularly productive discussion worth crediting OP for.
- physicsguy 4y ago
  It comes across as very passive aggressive to me (native British English speaker).

Shadonototra 4y ago

Look at the settings menu, it looks like a setting menu from iOS, huge controls, everything is a list, endless scrolling No wonder why they didn't know what they were doing So that kind of behavior doesn't surprise me What's even more surprising is it's the same for everything windows related, including windows 11, performance issues all over the place, nobody acknowledge it, and whenever they face criticism and complain, it's the ugly trolls! Sometimes i feel like some managers doesn't want to give up their position and salary, so they surround themselves with tasteless people Culture and hiring problems at microsoft, as usual, apple is being hit by the same issues these days, just like google and facebook Lot of money to be made in these positions, it always attract the wrong people

usrn 4y ago
OS dev is dead everywhere.
- curiousgal 4y ago
  Who knew hiring based on leetcode would backfire

starburst 4y ago

Casey's next stream [1] will probably be very entertaining! Back when the original drama unfold I could very much empathize with his frustration. Let's not forget they told him that what he was suggesting was the work of a PHD when any game developer worth his grain of salt could do that very trivially. [1] https://www.twitch.tv/handmade_hero https://www.twitch.tv/handmade_hero

aulin 4y ago
Devs over and underestimate effort all the time
- starburst 4y ago
  Sure but in this case it was grossly over-estimated compared to the under-estimated side. Casey did the implementation [1] to prove the point and also made explanatory videos [2] of it. [1] https://github.com/cmuratori/refterm https://github.com/cmuratori/refterm [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxM8QmyZXtg&t=1052s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxM8QmyZXtg&t=1052s
  - aulin 4y ago
    thanks, that's a lot of context missing from the tweet in the title and from the bug report
oofbey 4y ago
- starburst 4y ago
  This is so insulting to Casey, he does his instructional videos for the world to see and educate a new generation of programmers about how to make a game completely from scratch. This isn't his full-time jobs. This isn't some streamer trying to gather new audience by brewing up drama.
  - 4y ago

dark-star 4y ago

I really wonder why OSS developers often have so big ego issues. I mean I get it, attribution is nice and all, but trying to force attribution for evey small idea you might have had in your life by trying to rally the public against "the evil corporate enemy"? Really? How low can you sink

rationalfaith 4y ago
Longhanks 4y ago
There's keeping your head down and silently not giving attribution, and then there's publishing a blog post, boasting how smart you are, and merely mentioning that the idea came from "someone in the community".
lobocinza 4y ago
Maybe you don't know the context but this isn't a "small idea".

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

QuikAccount 4y ago

Anyone who knows anything about Casey Muratori knows that nice and humble are not usually words associated with him. That is not to say the devs he is calling out are in the right. Frankly, I just see a bunch of combative assholes arguing with each other.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
bena 4y ago
Yeah, DHowett's and LHeckler's responses were kind of dickish, but Casey's own words, tone, and attitude aren't doing him any favors either. Casey happens to be right on the technical issue in this case and people are just glossing over all the ways in which he was also wrong. Now, personally, I believe it was the WT Team's responsibility to let it go as they're representatives of a larger organization and as such how they interact with people reflects back on the organization they work for. But yeah, no heroes in this story.
- phaistra 4y ago
  How was Casey wrong?
  - bena 4y ago
    He was wrong in how he approached the team. Everyone lacks tact in this exchange.
    - phaistra 4y ago
      Just because you don't think he was polite to some arbitrary standard does not make him wrong. If people are this sensitive to "tone" and "tact" about technical matters, then we (as a community I guess) have much deeper issues then the technical matters themselves.
      - deleted 4y ago

ghusbands 4y ago

This is worse than it looks, since the person who wrote the blog post is the same person who insulted the dev, and is the same person who joined that dev's related discord under a pseudonym. [1] [1] https://twitter.com/cmuratori/status/1522471966929653761 https://twitter.com/cmuratori/status/1522471966929653761

s_dev 4y ago
The fact that he went unmentioned is pretty damning. I don't give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt here -- this reeks of stealing credit under the guise of "open to feedback".
aldebran 4y ago
Yeah this person has made a “career limiting move”. Actually it’s been multiple moves but yeah. This goes against Microsoft’s community engagement policies. I hope Leonard reflects on his actions and makes better choices in the future.
fire 4y ago
Jesus christ, this behavior would have gotten me in deep shit in any place I've worked
mikestew 4y ago
And here we all thought they disbanded the Microsoft Munchkins[0] 25 years ago. I guess they're back for a reunion tour. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_OS/2#Analysis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_OS/2#Analysis

seneca 4y ago

This whole interaction, on both sides, is childish and makes our entire profession look bad by reinforcing the stereotypes peoples have of us. I would avoid working with anyone involved in this.

lizardactivist 4y ago

The fact that, months later, this guy has still not let go of the self-perceived insult of someone else's software not meeting his own expectations of performance, is the very definition of being combative.

Havoc 4y ago

Sounds like all three people could do with brushing up on soft skills...

lhecker 4y ago

Hi! I'm the person who wrote that blog post. If you have any questions whatsoever, please let me know! English is not my native language and "The solution is trivial" was meant sarcastic. The solution isn't trivial at all, nor is it complete, because solving the corner cases is complex. I'd also like to mention ahead of time that DirectWrite/Direct2D is very fast at drawing western (Latin) text without coloring (>2000 FPS). In other words, in most situations Casey's suggestion doesn't help much, but it does address his termbench issue. At the time we assumed we were using the API incorrectly, after all Direct2D already had everything Casey suggested we should implement and it ran very fast outside of termbench. The new solution is largely identical to regular Direct2D with the only major difference being that ClearType/Grayscale gamma-correction is run on the GPU instead. Casey's suggestion wasn't unique to me, as a significant number of other terminals do it exactly that way in OpenGl, something I was quite familiar with already. Originally I credited alacritty in the blog, because that's how I knew how to do it, but I removed it to keep the article as succinct as possible. Update: I'm very sorry for publishing the blog post without giving proper credit where it is due, and it's been updated since. I'm sorry for my continued, overly defensive behavior.

BaculumMeumEst 4y ago
Did you participate in the molly rocket discord?
TIPSIO 4y ago
This is way above my pay grade. Just don’t take anything personal. Being defensive / know best is in this industry everywhere at all levels and organizations. Being humble in general is hard, being humble in code reviews is harder, being humble to Internet comments in any forum… sometimes impossible. Then repeat that with two super genius experts - eek. You find everyone is usually trying their best if you ever have face to face (except server admins, they are stone-cold psychopaths, stay away). Would bet you both are helpful and open minded at the end of the day.
- lhecker 4y ago
  Oh yeah, for sure. I can't tell you how much I regret being that defensive about something that benign. This was certainly a life lesson. I've apologized to Casey in person before (well, to my best ability) and I'll apologize again if given the opportunity to do so. I just wish people wouldn't say I'm taking credit, when it's an old, widely used idea and when I spent such an incredible amount of time reading and understanding DirectWrite/Direct2D's code in order to ship this renderer in the state it is.

baisq 4y ago

Insults? Everything is an insult nowadays. Recommendation to the MS team: instead of engaging, wait a couple of days and this will blow over. In these situations, if you engage, you will always lose.

nimish 4y ago

You don't get promotions from speeding up code, unfortunately. Nobody cares about something that's difficult to motivate to the program managers or demo. Clearly some egos have been bruised, but that's the reality of open source. You aren't just dealing with pre-screened colleagues. Some higher management should step in to mediate and cool things off. Absolutely unsurprised that the Windows Terminal team wasn't focused on this or didn't pull in, say, a rendering expert. Microsoft is very siloed.

hkt 4y ago

I'm charmed and delighted that seemingly multiple microsoft employees are here giving non-apologies. Honestly people, just don't use the product. A putty session to a Linux box still beats anything Microsoft can offer.

eatonphil 4y ago
I use Windows Terminal to SSH into my dev machines. I prefer it to other options on Windows including putty (which I really couldn't dislike more). Different strokes for different folks. :)

ionwake 4y ago

I’m against ganging up but I think adding a relevant comment to this thread won’t count as such. Something the Microsoft API team did irked me slightly. One day the Microsoft 360 API (used for email) seemingly stopped working. After a whole week of troubleshooting and discussion with other devs around the planet I fixed the issue. New headers had to be included. It was a one line fix that stole a week of my life. The API had changed. I could have been ok with this but when I made a post on the repo explaining the fix and that I had no idea why it had even changed, instead of a thank you- a Microsoft API dev chimed in to say it was a trivial change and didn’t see what everyone was so upset about. Knowing no documentation had been updated and every system around the planet had been broken for probably a week that depended on it. No apology no gratitude. I can handle that. But an insult to say I was being impertinent and overblowing the importance. Well I never forgot it, and eventually this stuff comes out. I hazard to say there are toxic dangerous people in every major company I just don’t understand why these people aren’t cautioned as soon as these public incidents happen it’s as if no one is really watching the behaviour in the irc channels or repos but are instead focusing on internal metrics which in my opinion don’t measure the devastation cause by these bad apples - who should atleast be checked up on.

darepublic 4y ago

I remember watching the casey youtube video on terminal performance. Inspiring! In generally I find his content quite refreshing. Sorry to see he got the cold shoulder after all his useful input

kragen 4y ago

https://nitter.dark.fail/cmuratori/status/1522468481135902725 https://nitter.dark.fail/cmuratori/status/152246848113590272...

Traster 4y ago

To be honest, this tweet comes across as incredible unproductive behavior in an open source project. If I were the MSFT guys, I just wouldn't be responding to community members who behave like this.

curiousgal 4y ago
Thank you! It has been absolutely mind-boggling going through the comments. If I were a Microsoft exec and came through this mess I would say fuck Open Source. This is why we can't have nice things.

Accacin 4y ago

So I've got to say that IMO, all of this seems pretty silly. Casey does come across as pretty rude sometimes (saying this with respect, as I love Handmade Hero and his other work) and the Windows Terminal developers seems like they were a bit egotistical to just discount his idea as they did. The blog post by Leonard H seems pretty tame. The "solution is trivial" comment I took as sarcasm (but I'm British so maybe I just assume everything is sarcasm :). The only bit I found a little odd was about one of the developers joining a Discord server under a fake username. If that did happen, it seems like it was a bad idea.

otterley 4y ago

This seems like pure drama to me. Does it really meet the bar for the HN front page? It doesn’t further this site’s mission to inspire intellectual curiosity.

kelvin0 4y ago

Ah yes, I've travelled that road many times and it burnt me out. I've learned to 'let it go' and move on, not easy though.

ericyan 4y ago

We should have a linter for issue/PR comments that flag out sentences starting with “You are...”. The scope of the comments should be limited to the issue or code and must never extend to the person that bring it up.

stickyricky 4y ago

Big tech engineers "do the impossible" by preemptively declaring every problem impossible.

georgia_peach 4y ago

Fruitless intrapersonal controversy of prick vs pricks. Flagged!

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

j_barbossa 4y ago

I really hate when fellow devs say things are "simple" like Casey Muratori said in the first place. Nothing is simple in the software (and hardware) world! If something seems simple then most likely because smart people have written libraries for you that abstract the hard part away. It also shows a certain arrogance to call a topic "simple", because it is supposed to show the audience that you are an incredible expert in the field.

sussmannbaka 4y ago
the solution to the problem is simple and thus widely used in prior art. the person in question has written such a library (well, a reference implementation). the person in question is an expert in the field.
deelly 4y ago
Agree. Sometime I really struggle to see a difference between Reddit and HN.
- bena 4y ago
  HN doesn't have sub-reddits
gimme_treefiddy 4y ago
Maybe I’m nitpicking since it’s OSS, but sometimes it’s not even the code. From the outside it seems like a few lines of code but internally there’s a whole org and OKRs and what not.

bitshiftfaced 4y ago

Has anyone got vim to display properly on Windows terminal?

zamadatix 4y ago
Sure, neovim as well.
- bitshiftfaced 4y ago
  Hmm, not sure what I'm doing wrong. It displays correctly in PowerShell. In Windows Terminal, it shows a blinking cursor instead of the box, and it makes it look like the cursor is one to the left of where it actually is
  - zamadatix 4y ago
    Not sure about the cursor being 1 to the left of where you'd expect but the box behaviour is something you need to specify in your .vimrc otherwise it'll use the default cursor for the terminal. Something like this may be what you're used to: let &t_SI .= "\<Esc>[4 q" let &t_EI .= "\<Esc>[2 q" You probably also want set ttym=sgr if you want mouse interactions to be sent properly.
    - bitshiftfaced 4y ago
      Yep that was it. Many thanks.
      - zamadatix 4y ago
        Any time, it's all a bit arcane really I'm not sure how anyone is supposed to figure it out without having been told themselves. Love your username by the way!

deleted 4y ago

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TrueTom 4y ago

It's funny that Hacker News went out of it's way to bury this.

phendrenad2 4y ago
On the contrary, I'm surprised that this purely drama-driven non-technical post is surviving at all. I guess it has enough comments to break through the flags.

deleted 4y ago

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trapnii 4y ago

dogleash 4y ago
>That speaks more about the community than I want to believe, sadly. You're the one passive-aggressively chiding me for not rehashing a technical conversation already discussed to death three for four rounds of refterm submissions ago.

emrah 4y ago

Right or wrong, there is no need to be condescending or rude. That's a choice and a very unproductive one. I remember the original incident, I followed it on Twitter. I think the tone on both sides could be nicer.

ukverwwrttyv 4y ago

Both sides need better communication. They are like oil and water in boiling degrees Credit where it's due, I think Windows Terminal's team did try to extend an apology. (Sincere or not, what is the extent that you deem sincere enough) https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10462#issuecomment-957992128 https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10462#issuecomm... > We certainly handled the original issue poorly, and we're trying to do better. > We may not have taken the feedback seriously to begin with, but if it appears to have been completely dismissed then I am sorry. > Personally I'd like to also welcome @ cmuratori and @ mmozeiko back to give any comments if they wish to do so. Of course it'd be entirely understandable if they don't. Minimised comment https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10462#issuecomment-873518251 https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10462#issuecomm... > We‘re quite aware about the code and are extremely happy about what was created there. I mean it seriously: It sets a great goal for us to strive for. Unfortunately the code is intentionally GPLv2 licensed and we‘ll honor this wish entirely. As such no one at Microsoft will ever look at either of the links. Claims that they tried to communicate with Casey: > I‘ve talked with the author before and they made it abundantly clear they don’t wish to ever speak with us again. They‘re entirely welcome to return and take part in this project‘s discourse of course… I‘d be delighted if that was the case! -- What do everyone think of this?