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The edit history of the announcement is quite a ride: > [2025-11-27T02:10:07Z] it’s abundantly clear that the talented folks who used to work on the product ha

• deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
• testdelacc1 10mo ago
  At least he edited it to something more palatable. I vastly prefer someone who can admit to making a mistake and amending what they said to someone who doubles down. The latter attitude has become far too normalised in the last few years.
  • cyanydeez 10mo ago
    that attitude has and continues to approach a entire bloodless coup of the largest economy on the planet. The normalization, in fact, has been quite successful. The entire silicon valley has tacitly approved of it. You act like people arn't being rewarded for this type of behavior.
    • montroser 10mo ago
      They didn't make any comment on effectiveness.
  • jack_pp 10mo ago
    Is political correctness necessary to have a thriving community / open source project? Linux seems to be doing fine. I wouldn't personally care either way but it is non-obvious to me that the first version would actually hurt the community.
    • whatevaa 10mo ago
      Linus famously was quite strict and cursed quite a bit when somebody pissed him off with stupidity.
      • cinntaile 10mo ago
        He's not exactly a role model when it comes to communication.
        • antonvs 10mo ago
          Perhaps he should be. This idea that we should tolerate terrible things and only respond to them politely seems to produce bad outcomes, for some mysterious reason.
          • ethbr1 10mo ago
            The problem with that is always people. Because one person is judging that "terribleness" before being entitled to flame, changes to that person influence their ability to objectively make that assessment. Say, when their project becomes popular, they gain more power and fame, and suddenly their self-image is different. Hence it usually being a more community-encouraging approach to keep discussions technical without vitriol. Flaming is unnecessarily disruptive, not least because it gives other (probably not as talented) folks a license to also put their worst impulses to text.
          • csoups14 10mo ago
            Any analysis of Github's functionality that begins and ends with blaming individuals and their competency is deeply mistaken while being insulting. Anyone who has ever worked at a large company knows exactly how hard it is for top performers to make changes and it's not difficult because the other people are stupid. At least in my experience, almost everyone holding this "they must be stupid" opinion knows very little about how large organizations make decisions and knows very little about how incentives at different levels of an org chart leads to suboptimal decisions and results. I would agree with you that being overly polite helps no one, but being correct does, and what they initially wrote isn't even right and it's also insulting. There's no value in that.
  • Handy-Man 10mo ago
    That's only here, he has been doubling down on Mastodon https://mastodon.social/@andrewrk https://mastodon.social/@andrewrk
• styanax 10mo ago
  On the previous HN article, I recall many a comment talking about how they should change this, leave the politics/negative juju out because it was a bad look for the Zig community. It would appear they listened to that feedback, swallowed their ego/pride and did what was best for the Zig community with these edits. I commend them for their actions in doing what's best for the community at the cost of some personal mea culpa edits.
  • dannersy 10mo ago
    I often find we don't appreciate enough people accepting their failures and changing their mind. For some reason I see the opposite: people respecting those who "stick to their guns" or double down when something is clearly wrong. As you say, the context matters and these edits seem to be learning from the feedback rather than saving face since the sentiment stands, just in a less needlessly targeted way.
    • embedding-shape 10mo ago
      Never understood that either. If someone was wrong and bad, and now they're trying to do right and good, we need to celebrate that. Not just because that's awesome in itself, but also to give the opportunity and incentives for others in the future to do better. If everyone is always bad regardless if they're trying to change, what incentives would they have from changing at all? It doesn't make any sense.
      • ljm 10mo ago
        I agree with the sentiment (people changing their minds), but the flipside to that is people pleasing. Someone who capitulates under even the slightest pressure is not much better than the person who is set in their ways. The trouble there, of course, is that the motivation for changing (or not changing) one's mind is not always clear, and it's easy to score points from spinning it one way or another.
        • soganess 10mo ago
• xeonmc 10mo ago
  Reads like an official White House statement[0]. [0] https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2025/03/yes-biden-spent-millions-on-transgender-animal-experiments/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2025/03/yes-biden-spent-...
  • skeeter2020 10mo ago
    this seems unfair; I didn't see any terrible (both concept and execution) AI generated art accompanying their statement here.
  • ethbr1 10mo ago
    [flagged]
• egeozcan 10mo ago
  Also > More importantly, Actions is created by monkeys ... vs > Most importantly, Actions has inexcusable bugs ... I commend the author for correcting their mistakes. However, IMHO, an acknowledgement instead of just a silent edit would have been better. Anyway, each to their own, and I'm happy for the Zig community.
  • oaiey 10mo ago
    He acknowledged. Linked in the article.
    • veverkap 10mo ago
      He hid the comments he made and apologized to the Zig community for his behavior. He never apologized to the people he harmed (the 'losers' at GitHub in this context).
      • venturecruelty 10mo ago
        [flagged]
        • veverkap 10mo ago
          [flagged]
          • venturecruelty 10mo ago
            * * *
        • seanw444 10mo ago
          [flagged]
• bryanrasmussen 10mo ago
  to quote something I said a day ago about AI spotting in the posts of other people: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46114083 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46114083 "I think that writing style is more LinkedIn than LLM, the style of people who might get slapped down if they wrote something individual. Much of the world has agreed to sound like machines."
  • acessoproibido 10mo ago
    This has always been the case in the "corporate/professional" world imo. It's just much easier now for "laypeople" to also adjust their style to this. My prediction is people will get quickly tired of it (as evidenced by your comment)
    • oaiey 10mo ago
      Question: would you go to a public place and call a person who is listening to you a loser or a monkey with the risk of getting your face smashed in? Companies do public announcement with the risk of getting sued left and right. Normal people chose careful words in public. In the Internet it seems different rules apply in public. Laypeople are not adjusting to corporate talk, laypeople are more and more aware of the public of the Internet and behave accordingly (most are, like in real life, mute)
  • snickerbockers 10mo ago
    AI witch-hunts are definitely a problem. The only tell you can actually rely on is when the AI says something so incredibly stupid that it not only fails to understand what it is talking about but the very meaning of words themselves. Eg,metaphors that make no sense or fail to contribute any meaningful insight or extrenely cliched phrases ("it was a dark and stormy night...") used seriously rather than for self-deprecating humor. My favorite example of an AI tell was a youtube video about serial killers i was listening to for background noise which started one of its sentences with "but what at first seemed to be an innocent night of harmless serial murder quickly turned to something sinister."
    • 10mo ago
• Copenjin 10mo ago
  They should know that crap software is rarely intentional as they make it out to be in the initial version of the text, what you get is what they are able to build in the environment they are in (that matters too). Capability and environment.
  • IgorPartola 10mo ago
    I think the Reddit mobile website team might be the exception to that. What they make is a particular brand of unusable and from what I remember there is evidence of them talking about how that was intentional.
    • chuckadams 10mo ago
      Reddit is trying to steer everyone into using their mobile app, which schlorps up as much personal data as it possibly can. I normally don’t go in for the whole mustache twirling thing, but given their previous actions in shutting down all third party apps, I’m fine in this case with accusing them of outright malice.
      • immibis 10mo ago
        I think they recently banned people from creating their own API keys, which is a thing that people were doing to enter into their third party apps to bypass the ban - every copy of the app was registered as a single-user app. Now if you want to make any app or bot, you either screen-scrape, steal an API key, or get the approval of Reddit management.
• arccy 10mo ago
  this Corporate Americanism is of only positivity and fake smiles is exactly how we end up with enshittified products, because no one is ever called out for it. If the feedback is too soft, it just gets swept under the rug. we need less self censorship, not more.
  • ethin 10mo ago
    Fully agreed. I can't upvote yet (nto enough Karma) but corpospeak is IMO never the solution unless your in court or something.
  • soiltype 10mo ago
    No, the edits are better. The original message made unwarranted assumptions, and used intentionally inaccurate language. That's objectively bad communication. It's not a binary choice between insults (escalates conflict, destabilizes rational decision making) vs hiding your opinions. That's what the word tact is for. It's simply, quite literally, a skill issue if someone can't find a middle ground between those two failure modes.
• ants_everywhere 10mo ago
  I say this as someone who has been cautioning about Microsoft's ownership of GitHub for years now... but the Zig community has been high drama lately. I thought the Rust community had done themselves a disservice with their high tolerance of drama, but lately Zig seems to me to be more drama than even Rust. I was saddened to see how they ganged up to bully the author of the Zig book. The book author, as far as I could tell, seems like a possibly immature teenager. But to have a whole community gang up on you with pitch forks because they have a suspicion you might use AI... that was gross to watch. I was already turned off by the constant Zig spam approach to marketing. But now that we're getting pitchfork mobs and ranty anti-AI diatribes it just seems like a community sustaining itself on negative energy. I think they can possibly still turn it around but it might involve cleaning house or instituting better rules for contributors.
  • zero0529 10mo ago
    I agree partially. I do think that it was weird to focus on the AI aspect so much. AI is going to pollute everything going forward whether you like it or not. And honestly who cares, either it is a good ressource for learning or it’s not. You have to decide that for yourself and not based on whether AI helped writing it. However I think some of the critique was because he stole the code for the interactive editor and claimed he made it himself, which of course you shouldn’t do.
    • ants_everywhere 10mo ago
      You can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the actual claim was that Zigbook had not complied with the MIT license's attribution clause for code someone believed was copied. MIT only requires attribution for copies of "substantial portions" of code, and the code copied was 22 lines. Does that count as substantial? I'm not sure because I'm not a lawyer, but this was really an issue about definitions in an attribution clause over less code than people regularly copy from stack overflow without a second thought. By the time this accusation was made, the Zigbook author was already under attack from the community which put them in a defensive posture. Now, just to be clear, I think the book author behaved poorly in response. But the internet is full of young software engineers who would behave poorly if they wrote a book for a community and the community turned around and vilified them for it. I try not to judge individuals by the way they behave on their worst days. But I do think something like a community has a behavior and culture of its own and that does need to be guided with intention.
• dangoodmanUT 10mo ago
  This, I was shocked when I read the first version. I get it if you’re an influencer, but as a programming language people need to expect you can manage your emotions and be objective
• throwA29B 10mo ago
  What is the point of this post? To shame the author?
• MiddleEndian 10mo ago
  More and more people should call out bloated buggy JS frameworks lol
  • krashidov 10mo ago
    Isn't github a rails app that heavily uses server side rendering?
    • MiddleEndian 10mo ago
      I'll be honest, I don't use github often. So if they're wrong, well, they fucked up in their complaint that could be redirected to one of many other websites instead.
      • krashidov 10mo ago
        fair enough! To be clear - a rails app and a bloated js app are not mutually exclusive. From my observations though, github feels slow because it feels slow, not because of js shittiness
    • lenkite 10mo ago
      Not any longer. The rewrite which destroyed performance uses ReactJS https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44799861 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44799861 What is terrible is that new developers think that this has been the usual poor state of things...this is why Zig & others moving to alternate platforms is good.
• mmaunder 10mo ago
  Anger is a mind killer. Build software out of love. Love for engineering, innovation, creation, and love of working with people who feel the same way.
  • beepbooptheory 10mo ago
    A righteous, passionate anger can be indistinguishable from love. Having and committing to something worth fighting over, however bloody the battles may be, can make a life just a meaningful as one that practices disciplined quiescence, reflection, acceptance, etc. Love is what it is because it must paradoxically accept its opposites; love can be anger, anger can be love. The real mind killer is a pat moralism! Thus spake zarathustra etc etc..
    • dxdm 10mo ago
      > A righteous, passionate anger can be indistinguishable from love. ... love can be anger, anger can be love. These are just word games. Blurring and mixing what we mean with different words. To say what? Passion takes different forms and can be a hell of a motivator? Nobody disputes that. There's clearly a difference between anger and love. GP was addressing that difference and recommended to focus on the healthier of the two. That's good advice.
      • beepbooptheory 10mo ago
        Is there? I am not playing games! What is the anger that arises from you when one you care for is hurt because of some violence or injustice? Is that not an expression of love? What is that particular anger you can feel towards a romantic life partner of many years? One that can only be based in an already profound intimacy, in some deep fidelity? Don't you feel that same love you have always felt for them, but in a different color? What is the anger you feel when you see grand injustices? Hate crimes, genocides, crimes against freedom.. Isn't that something like a humanistic love? To make love simply the "healthier" option is to totally destroy it! It makes it, like, at best a pragmatic maxim and at worst a weird kind of imperative (we should be healthy after all..). But love is not an imperative, it's a (beautiful, amazing, natural) condition. And it is not always "healthy," not always without anger, but always "good" in that you can't go wrong following it.
• intalentive 10mo ago
  Kelly’s indignant attitude and commitment to “engineering excellence” suggest a bright future for Zig. It’s good to see the leader of a technical project get angry about mediocrity.
  • oaiey 10mo ago
    [..] in a product not people. Insulting people is never a solution.
    • xanthor 10mo ago
      Sometimes people need to be shocked awake. Reality is harsh, and gentle language doesn't change that.
      • subw00f 10mo ago
        You’re not mining coal, get real. Either use efficient techniques to make people do the intellectual work necessary to achieve whatever goal you have in mind, or you’re just deluding yourself thinking you’re some kind of “reality expert” while being an asshole, meaning they might still do it, but it would be despite your leadership, not because of it.
        • xanthor 10mo ago
          Why does intellectual work imply that people doing poor work need to be treated like fragile little birds?
          • grayhatter 10mo ago
            Intellectual work requires a bit of creativity (across all the domains I can think of), abuse, of any kind increases stress, stress decreases creativity, ability to problem solve, and resilience (or the ability to endure the difficulty of solving hard problems). But even if that wasn't true. There's a significant difference between confronting the harshness of reality. And behaving in a way that makes reality suck more. Every human deserves to be treated with dignity, and a base level of respect. Suggesting that someone is fragile and weak, because they object to being insulted, or object to the careless and needless stripping of dignity and humanity from people is a wild take.
• w0m 10mo ago
  was github ever ~not kinda buggy?
• venturecruelty 10mo ago
  That's crazy! He should've left the original.
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 10mo ago
  "bloated, buggy Javascript framework" Companies with heaps of cash are (over)paying "software engineers" to create and maintain it Millions of people, unable to disable it, are "active users" When I use Github servers I only use them to download source code, as zipballs or tarballs. I don't run any JS The local forward proxy skips the redirects when downloading http-request set-path %[path,regsub(/blob/,/raw/,g)] if { hdr(host) github.com } http-request set-path %[path,regsub(/releases/tag/,/releases/expanded_assets/,g)] if { hdr(host) github.com } Works for me
• Rochus 10mo ago
  The fact that three revisions were needed to tone down inflammatory language could raise questions about impulse control in leadership decisions (regularly prioritizing ideological positions over pragmatic stability). This is notable given that Zig has been in development since 2015 and remains at version 0.15.1 as of August 2025.
• marcelr 10mo ago
  blaming framework on low quality software is a skill issue
• deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
• zelphirkalt 10mo ago
  Whatever the wording, what they are writing truly shows on Github. There are many things wrong with its code display ... All of which used to work fine or were not added in this buggy state in the first place. Code folding is buggy. Have some functions that have inner functions or other foldable stuff like classes with methods and inside the method maybe some inner function? It will only show folding buttons sporadically, seemingly without pattern. Also standard text editing stuff like "double click and drag" no longer properly works without issues/has weird effects and behavior. The inspection of identifiers interferes with being able to properly select text. The issue search is stupid too, often doesn't find the things one searches for. You must be logged in to search properly too. Most of the functionality is tied to running that JavaScript. In short, it shows typical signs of a platform that is more and more JavaScriptianized with bloated frameworks making things work half-assed and not properly tested for sane standard behavior. But there is more. Their silly AI bots closing issues. "State bot". "Dependabot". All trash or half thought out annoying (mis-)features. Then recently I read here on HN, that apparently a project maintainer can edit another person's post! This reeks of typical Microsoft issues with permissions to do things and not properly thinking such a thing through. Someone internally must be pushing for all this crap.
  • seanw444 10mo ago
    Do people actually use GitHub to inspect code? I figure for anything that's not a 1-second lookup, I might as well just do at least a shallow clone of the repo, and look through it with my own personally-tailored editor instead. Not to say their implementation doesn't suck. I just wouldn't know because even a non-buggy one would probably still be a subpar experience.
    • ViewTrick1002 10mo ago
      For my own PRs I like reading the changes again in the UI. It is almost like getting someone else to proofread it since my mind isn’t as good at filling in the blanks like it is when looking at the code in the editor I wrote it in.
      • 10mo ago
• martin-t 10mo ago
  Honestly, why do so many people, especially in the western hemisphere, act so shocked when somebody speaks their mind openly? To me this kind of communication says it comes from a real person who has real experiences, not the marketing department, and is understandably angry at the people who make his life worse. And it's natural to insult those people. Insults are a signal, not noise. They signal something is wrong and people should pay attention to it. I hear criticisms about being unprofessional and the like. So what? I don't wanna live in a world where everything everyone says is supposed to be filtered to match some arbitrary restrictions made up be people who more often than not can't do the work themselves. Almost all of the actually competent people I personally know speak like this. They can't stand those dragging us down through incompetence. They get angry when something that should work doesn't. They are driven by quality and will not be silent when it's lacking. If somebody fucked up, they will tell them they fucked up and have to fix it. And I much prefer that approach.
• _zagj 10mo ago
  Nice that they cleaned it up, but Andrew has a pattern of coming across across as even less mentally stable than the Notepad++ dev, which isn't a good look for a BDFL. For example, he randomly broke down in tears during a presentation not long ago.
• 29athrowaway 10mo ago
  The original version is fine. GitHub is critical infrastructure for many projects and pushing AI slop is not acceptable. They have the money to pay for quality development time.
• never_inline 10mo ago
  I, for one, welcome our Next Linus Torvalds.
• micik 10mo ago
  that's a long time between edits. as a single contributor to my own posts, i usually achieve a like iteration within minutes. did they have to have a board meeting in between the changes? lovely conservative process. "rookies", love it
• zombot 10mo ago
  I like the first version the best.
• thrwaway3243 10mo ago
  And discussion about this not so much important part of the statement started once again ...
• rurban 10mo ago
  You missed the monkeys. That was my highlight. My team was called "code monkeys" once.