> And so today, I am excited to announce that effective November 15th, Thomas Dohmke (@ashtom), GitHub’s Chief Product Officer, will become CEO and I [Nat Friedman] will become Chairman Emeritus.
Things Nat Friedman could have done, but didn't,
while CEO of GitHub: stop the use of GitHub Enterprise in organizations that operate concentration camps.
Hate to see this downvoted, and glad it got vouched. This is my number one gripe with GitHub and is frequently dismissed as a conspiracy when it is very real. GitHub does nothing because nobody cares, and that's a sad state of affairs.
This is a motte and bailey response. You're right, governmental agencies shouldn't be denied service by Github. I don't think anyone here is denying that statement as is. However, the business ICE conducts, the actions they take against other humans, and the vile, insideous content they post in private facebook groups about it, are something most people would have a problem with if they were aware of it.
I know he travels most of the time now and I’m wondering if this is a reflection of wanting to spend more time doing that or if there’s some other new project he’s moving on to.
> That’s why I’m moving on to my next adventure: to support, advise, and invest in the founders and developers who are creating the future with technology and tackling some of the biggest opportunities of our day.
I'm also one of the people in this thread who was under the misconception that he was a Github founder / early employee. if he's merely an employee of the acquiring company, why is he so rich?
The moving on post was kind of vague. I'm curious if there are external factors involved. I do feel like Nat has done a great job at GitHub but curious as to extenuating factors. Would love to hear perspective/sentiment from current hubbers.
The github deal with MS closed almost exactly three years ago.
I'm guessing there was a massive financial incentive that he just fulfilled by staying three years. Not a hubber, but this is a pretty common thing to see with acquisitions.
But he was a MS employee pre-acquisition, right? Is it common for the acquiring company to give their employees that manage the acquisition massive incentives that vest in a short-medium window? (Honest question. It's not been common in my experience, but that's pretty limited.)
He was already an MS employee 3 years ago though (he came over when Xamarin was acquired in 2016), whereas I usually associate those terms started when you join the parent company. Granted, 2016 is not that much longer ago, and it does seem plausible there was some bonus that vested after 3 years at Github, so you could be right.
Is this a sign of the continued progression of GitHub to be further molded in Microsoft's image? Usually there's a churn in leadership when the alignment isn't there anymore, though it's typically accompanied by graceful public communication.
EDIT: what's also interesting is that Thomas Dohmke joined Microsoft in 2015, moved to the Github division around the time of the acquisition (2018) but only became CPO 4 months ago.
We don't actually know one way or another. Golden handcuffs are very common in the industry and it's very easy to imagine that becoming CEO of very public and important subdivision of a cloud company comes with a very large stock option grant. Easily 8-figures worth. When/how they expire are also a mystery to us. I'm sure he didn't get the standard engineer vesting schedule of 4-years with a 1-year cliff.
Management changes all the time, People change all the time, hell, Microsoft has changed... If anything, Microsoft evolved around GitHub and it's for the better in doing so.
Embrace, extend, extinguish still alive at MS it seems.
E: Pointing out proven, explicitly-defined-in-internal-emails tactics used by Microsoft always seems to get downvoted on HN. Why? Would someone like to start a conversation?
Tactics that were true 20+ years ago are not necessarily still true today. The E E E trope is pithy and a shared cultural experience in our history. This does not immediately imply it is true now. You made no supporting argument as to why this announcement is an example of E E E. As such it contributed little to 0 content to the discussion. I suspect that is why you are getting downvoted in this instance.
All build tools that MS doesn't control. Their strategy has always been to try lock developers into their ecosystem so that only their ecosystem has all the software people want.
> Which things do you think they extended?
Acquiring and extending both Xamarin and Github. Atom editor is basically dead, MS/Github created an AI tool that presumably uses data they got from Github, they tried to remove features from free .NET tools, etc...
How long until they try to apply some more blatant vendor lock-in techniques with Github, .NET/Mono or maybe Azure?
If I read another piece of American corporate crap --- plastic, formulaic, always-be-selling --- I'm gonna throw up on my keyboard. The write-up is rife with stock phrases, and vapid emotionalism. Somewhere when the rest of us are busy there's a room somewhere where people get the cheat-sheet, fill-in-the-blank training that produces this junk. Look the guy probably had some success and met some great people. So why in the hell can't you say that in your own words?
When you are a company leader, your words can have a material effect on your business. This is doubly so true at a disruptive point like leadership exits. Of course words are going to be delicately chosen?
That being said I didn't notice anything particularly offensive about this letter. He describes the accomplishments under his watch, expresses gratitude for employees, and expresses confidence in his successor.
There is one particular corporate leader who speaks their mind and has made a tremendous impact on the world. So, it's not clear if it has anything to do with polished big-corp language.
I'd rather listen to someone who is straightforward than Sundar Pichai speaking entirely in corporate-speak while saying absolutely nothing of value or substance. Completely uninspiring.
All corporate speak is rather an invention of the 80's and 90's. Listen to corporate leaders from any other time before that.
It's funny to me that you think Musk isn't an "always-be-selling" type of person and that you think he speaks his mind without spewing "corporate speak" because to me, "Musk speak" is just another form of corporate speak.
Musk isn't so much "speaking the truth", he's more "selling things, his way".
When you're a corporate leader, the way you speak is by default a form of corporate speak, because as a public figure who is listened to, everything you say is a reflection of the brand.
I think there's a specific "corporate style" of speaking that's very stiff and blandly positive, which is what they're thinking of when they're saying corporate speak. But I agree with your point and was making it, even though Musk speak is a different style, it ultimately works the same way as the corporate style, which is to buff up his brand in a way that maximizes shareholder value. Musk speak might not be the corporate style, but it's still a form of corporate speak, as per your definition.
Exactly, his shtick just happens to be the complete opposite of conventional corporate speak. It's edgy "tell-it-like-it-is" trolling, but it's still designed to build a brand and a relationship with the consumer. He's not even the only corpo who does that.
Edit: lol, this will be the most downvotes on a char count basis I've ever received. I thought it was generally accepted that for better or worse, he does not mince words.
Agree. Corporate speak is un-open. It's a spin. It's pejorative because it's essentially manipulative. To get out of that and to work from one's own experience requires intelligence and some (not a ton) of confidence. If the putative speaker doesn't have that, how in the hell did he get into the top spot? To be sure, such plain speak also comes with a take, a slant, and frame. Is that manipulative? Not in the end: you see it coming. You see from whom it's coming. And the listener can assess how it lands. If there's a meeting of the minds, great. If not no harm, no-foul.
Why is one thing a corporate persona and the other "speaking their mind"? I think most CEOs are good at cultivating a personal brand that speaks to the people they want to be reaching out to.
Musk is equally if not more pompous with his nuggets of wisdom, and offers no value or substance either.
Ah yes Elon Musk also tweets about “TITS university”. I’m sure there’s no one that finds issue with that, but doesn’t have the power to speak against it.
There are over 7 billion people on this planet. I'm sure that for every utterance you could construct in the English language, you could find someone who "finds issue with that, but doesn’t have the power to speak against it".
If someone finds issue with it but doesn't have the power to speak against it, then who cares that they find issue with it? If Elon was worried about making sure he didn't offend anyone, he wouldn't speak the way he does.
Can't deny that Musk is an incredibly successful man, but if it's the choice between Sundar Pichai's corporate speech and someone who attacks a rescue expert as "pedo guy" because his ego is hurt, I'd rather work for Pichai.
I mean, if we can excuse Musk's behavior as "So what? His companies have been incredibly successful," then, fine, but why can't we say the same for other CEOs? Other CEOs at least have a good sense of keeping their personal feuds out of twitter.
Mostly started by Google as "Do No Evil" PR, and later by Apple's creating products that “enrich people's lives.”
I dont think it is this letter in particular. So may be it is not fair to criticise it. But my guess is that the accumulation of these cooperate speaks, PR, and the past 10 years of main stream media riding along these PR to new height, just happen to tricker OP this time around.
And it doesn't seems to be an American things either, I read a lot of Fortune 500 post, somehow these over the top PR speak are mostly related to tech only.
However, I still think Github and Nat deserve a lot of praise for what they have done. Lots of changes and improvement happened after the acquisition. And not only credit to Nat but also to Microsoft.
> Of course words are going to be delicately chosen?
that question mark at the end of a non-question. Nothing personal, just critique on a larger trend, but IMO upspeak and vocal fry are more annoying than corporate speak.
But I agree about these exit letter being more delicate. The more intimate notes are fine internally.
Corporate PR speak is a reflection of the American public's willingness to have corporations put their foot on their neck, and then play for the pleasure of it.
Incendiary statements don't add much to the conversation.
You probably like buying groceries, you're typing on a computer and you presumably at least own clothes so you don't have a problem with all corporations. One would also assume you don't want a return to feudal society in which the goods generally available to you were those produced in a 2-mile radius.
The computer point is fair, but for many growing your own food and making your own clothes is nearly impossible with some kind of corporation involvement.
Corporate PR speak is a reflection of the American media's willingness to endlessly mock anything that is outside the accepted norm. PR speak is meaningless because saying something interesting isn't worth the potential blowback.
I don't really think it's virtue signaling. "Virtue signaling" is itself an extremely tired cliche/accusation. To me it feels more like stock "relatability signaling", which gives me a similarly unctuous feeling. Kind of the nerd-corporatespeak version of "hello, fellow kids".
I actually thought OP's take was very pertinent to the situation.
...which was riddled with phrases like:
"With all that we’ve accomplished in mind, and more than five great years at Microsoft under my belt, I’ve decided it’s time for me to go back to my startup roots. What drives me is enabling builders to create the future.
If you start from the assumption that it is meaningless and insincere, then it is eye-rollingly vapid.
If you start from the assumption that it is a genuine attempt to put messy feelings into concise words, then it is a bit lacks vividness but is nonetheless heartfelt.
When you choose not to trust someone, you make them untrustworthy.
Is that why we make judgement calls on this case? No one can know the intent or original thoughts of the author, but we can certainly ascribe qualities to their product based on our experience...
The fun exercise here is not that this is yet another vapid post on HN, but that people are defending it.
> The fun exercise here is not that this is yet another vapid post on HN, but that people are defending it.
It's quite plausible that the simple truth of the matter is that some people commenting here, defending the post, may feel that HN shouldn't be so very frequently cynical, negative, mean, quick to jump to assuming the worst about intentions, and so on. The Guidelines - for good reason - even go out of the way to try to drive users away from behaving that way.
Because “If people would assume the worst about someone as competent at communication as $leader, then how much more likely are they to mistrust me when I try to communicate sincerely?” is the story I tell myself. Spending time in low-trust environments does bad things to the psyche.
Reading up higher will inform you of context, but to reiterate:
OP: "Look the guy probably had some success and met some great people. So why in the hell can't you say that in your own words?"
My comment: "Not even Clark Kent could be this braggadocios."
There are better way of expressing one's (dis)satisfaction in the workplace. Starting with, perhaps, whittling down one's pride in accomplishing what tens of thousands already have...
When a leader lists each of these accomplishments, it’s less “See what I did” and more “To the team that did this: I see you, I recognize your contribution”.
I think all these comments are incredibly childish. It’s a nice goodbye letter from their well known and visible leader.
He cannot say it in his own words because it's a ritual. All formulae here are ritualistic, following a corporate protocol for such speeches. The speaker's agency is,limited to choosing which formulae to choose, and filling in the predefined slots in them.
The point of the ritual is to signal the world that all goes as planned, while giving away as few salient details as possible.
I do agree we're living an eternal september for the past months and comment quality has gone down to reddit-level, but I also agree with the commenter about this specific post from GH's founder.
How so? My first thought when reading the title and seeing it was a GitHub blog was that someone was probably leaving the company. Do you expect someone leaving their company to title their goodbye blog post like "John Doe leaving GitHub"?
That's fair. It is interesting when you look at other types of farewell post over the years/decade on HN (mostly open source projects or programming langs). There is definitely a tendency to favor those types versus corporate ones.
disagree. Honest exasperation over the constant fakeness in the industry and how corporate it has become is valuable in the sense that it at least expresses a genuine emotion, something that can't be said about the empty but faux-civil communication that is 99% of the tech industry nowadays with its constant need to pat its own back.
I'm with you about corporate drivel generally, but I'm not really seeing it here... this post is much more human and expresses seemingly genuine gratitude towards team members in a way that's absent from the utter tripe I find, for example, in the LinkedIn feed.
I always wonder how much of these statements are PR driven vs PR edited... what percentage of these words actually belong to Nat vs the corporate communications team.
As I live longer, I realize some people take to corporate speak and corporate values like ducks to water.
It's actually their preferred mode of communication and existence.
Politicians play this game most clearly - they need to communicate allegiance to the rich, their political party and 'the people', which is an impossible ask (because the parties are not aligned and you please one by taking away from the other) but they do quite well by having invented a vocabulary that's interpreted differently by each group, plus they can outright lie, which's a last resort move they try to avoid.
Because this is a corporation. Why would he say it in his own words? This is not a dinner party with aunt and grandma, it's a multi-billion dollar business with lots of liability.
Nat is a mogul in SV. Everyone knows him, many even before GitHub. Simply walking away from GitHub without much of a speech would make it seem like he didn't care or left on bad terms, optics-wise. That would have a potentially serious effect on perception and thus shareholders would be affected. This clearly isn't his intent.
I offer a contrary point of view: why does it bother you so much? Simply do not read it.
Sure it was, and for MS there is definitely strategic value in owning Github. But I even if you factor in that strategic value, Github is not as important to Microsoft as, say, Instagram is to Facebook.
Instagram is likely the greatest acquisition of all time in terms of synergy and mainly financial gains.
Instagram is worth hundreds of billions now. Bought for $1B. It is an actual unicorn situation of being incredibly rare.
There’s no point bringing up something so rare.
For example, the only other [tech?] acquisition that I can think of even sniffing IG is Priceline (now Bookings Holdings) acquiring Bookings.com for a couple hundred million. Now being the core of the business.
—
Beyond that. Just to be geeky about this stuff. The only other general financial deals in this ballpark are SoftBank, Yahoo, and Naspers investments. Copy pasting previous comment:
SoftBank and Yahoo bought around 40% stakes each in Alibaba. SoftBank spent $20M in 1999, the year Alibaba was founded. Alibaba owned 34% as of the mid 2010s. Now own 26%. Yahoo, because of Jerry Yang, invested $1B in 2005.
Naspers invested $32M for almost 50% of Tencent in 2001. Probably the best investment ever. Naspers split into two companies. Prosus owns the remaining close to 30% stake now. Though Naspers and Prosus both own around one half of one another.
All three investing companies have had issues with their own valuations. They’ve all had their own market caps be undervalued. Their one investment alone usually was close to or even exceeded the entire market cap of the company. Still the case for SoftBank and Prosus.
It'd be reasonable to peg GitHub as being worth $40-$50 billion.
That's a serious asset for Microsoft shareholders - even if the parent is worth $2t - and they will want to see it flourish. Which goes in line with what the parent comment noted about presenting the correct impression, not only to shareholders but also to anyone interested in working at GitHub for Microsoft. Potential employees will want to know that the context is healthy.
They absolutely care about revenue, but in the early innings it is not AS important. Strategic value is essentially enterprise value you haven’t quantified yet.
GitHub’s acquisition cost was close to $24B (dividend and stock value today). Gitlab being far smaller are closing in on $20B valuation. Even if Microsoft is worth $2.5T, GitHub being worth $50B-75B still means a lot. Especially for the synergies they gain with Azure and the good publicity they get from being current stewards of GitHub.
You need to read enough to be sick to realize what it is.
In part because even the title is clickbait. Even the tl;dr manages to inject some platitudes before getting to the point.
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And you're arguing a strawman. The comment you replied to never implied he shouldn't say farewell. They're complaining about how utterly insincere it comes across being blasted full of every trite corporate saying in existence
If anything they're arguing for more of a farewell than this, and it would have taken less effort too.
I wonder why it upsets you that someone would complain about this though, do you have a personal attachment to Nat?
I have no dog in this race but it sounds like you're assuming that a sentence with a negative sentiment (whatever that actually means) must have been created by a person who's upset. A bit of a stretch, no?
A tongue-in-cheek reference to the fact HN users act like basic social skills like the ability to infer tone are voodoo gets dissected like this?
You can't make up this stuff up.
To the reply:
> would not be acceptable in any social setting otherwise
You're close to getting it!
In a normal social setting if someone says "If you don't like X don't interact with it!" that can reasonably understood as a negative statement.
Going "show me where I said I'm upset!!" instead of just clarifying is not acceptable in a social setting. Busting out an ML model is just holding up the mirror.
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> I am not responsible for how the voice in your head portrays what you read.
I'm not responsible for teaching people how basic social interactions work, yet here we are...
I believe using a sentiment analysis tool you googled for to back up an assumption you made about me and my character would not be acceptable in any social setting otherwise. Just pointing this out. My original comment was made with an informative/inquisitive tone.
I am not responsible for how the voice in your head portrays what you read.
Of course you couldn't help yourself, I poopoo'd on your dog in the race and you couldn't think of something meaningful to reply with.
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And I am upset, I hate working in one of the few industries where people wear social ineptitude like a badge:
Like someone says something when they're clearly upset, you ask why they're upset, then suddenly they derail the conversation because
"how dare you imply I am some descendant of a caveman capable of being shudder upset"
Like holy shit, real people get upset! Wowie what a concept!
Dude was upset someone insulted his rockstar idol that everyone in SV knows and got called out.
I jokingly tell him even a computer can see he's upset and now there's literally another reply to me by this "peter" person picking a fight with the computer!
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Maybe you're all stuck in this weird passive aggressive bubble of timidity (maybe that's the "everyone") where you're not allowed to express emotion but I'm not going to coddle you, not here or in real life
This person was upset. They didn't need to present it as some passive aggressive "informative", like the guy they replied to didn't know they couldn't read it.
They're just not used to having to deal with emotions directly instead of being as biting as possible while seeming... "informative"
> In a normal social setting if someone says "If you don't like X don't interact with it!" that can reasonably understood as a negative statement.
Except they didn't say that, did they? What they said verbatim was "simply do not read it" which is a much more reasonable tone than how you seemingly interpreted it.
Whether it's negative or not also depends on the context which in this case is a proposed solution to literally the most negative and upset-sounding post in this chain: the one that started it. What does your ML model think of "I'm gonna throw up on my keyboard"?
"You don't have the social skills to realize people can infer tone, so here let your fellow computer tell it to you"
third person shows up to pick a fight with the computer.
Never chance y'all.
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And for the record, if someone complains about a piece of writing, and you tell them "simply not to read it"
You are being a passive aggressive joke, and you are clearly upset with their critique.
People are allowed to dislike things, and gasp even hate things, you don't need to get all max passive aggression over that.
Not everyone lives in an echo chamber of timidity where all emotions must be moderate some of you put yourselves in.
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The person I replied to had no answer to the actual point I made, so they tried to derail the conversation to "how dare you claim I'm upset!" which was a complete aside in my comment as it was in theres.
Yet now I am talking to a guy who wants to argue with an ML model so I guess well played?
A little off-topic, but why does the CEO even need to say goodbye? I'm not really concerned with listening the words of most CEOs of companies I work at. It's just another job at the company, albeit, probably one with a bit too much power and influence.
mostly b/c it's rather unlikely that someone has decided, themselves, to do that. There is no human behind the pen (or the keystrokes). I suppose some might have been in a similar position and resent it.
He probably can but doesn't want to. He may be posturing for whatever thing he wants to do next which requires being "very professional" (aka high-quality executive bullshit). Or he might just be boring as hell. My dad was an executive, and he was one of the most bland and uncreative human beings I've ever met.
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
It turns out that using throwaway accounts completely changes the votes I receive for comments. It seems to result in way more positive feedback than sockpuppets. The last two throwaways I've used accrued several hundred points in less than a month just from comments (no submissions), whereas my 'normal' account actually gets so many negative and neutral votes that the score doesn't change, and seeing that literally makes me feel bad/sad/angry. It seems like throwaways could indeed create a different kind of forum - one where we get more positive feedback and don't feel bad. Or as another way to put it, a community can be toxic because people think they know who someone is.
I don't see the reply I made here with that throwaway (shadowban?), so I'm doing it with my other one.
> for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to
Apparently not! Using throwaways, people have upvoted me like crazy. Hundreds of points per month, for a person with no identity. If it kept going at the same pace, I would outrank some of the highest-point users within a year or two, all from using throwaway. Is that not community? And if it's not - isn't it better than community? Isn't upvoting someone you don't know, don't owe anything to, who you hold no preconceived ideas about, actually a more honest way to interact with a community?
When I get upvoted, I'm happy. Me being happy encourages me to post in a happy mood, so I create happier comments (on average). When I get downvoted or ignored (on my 'real' account), I get angry and depressed, and that makes for much less happy comments (and just a bad feeling all around). Using the throwaways not only makes me less angry and depressed, but it also enables creating content that people clearly approve of.
> Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community
There have been throwaways on this site for ages, in addition to known people. The community hasn't disappeared as far as I can tell. So it seems like you can, in fact, have it both ways. In addition, I've been a member of a lot of different communities. A lot of the time, the ones that banter on about how much of a close-knit community they are, enable some of the most toxic behavior. There are some great aspects to community, and some horrifying ones. Rather than trying to change the community to fit the standards we think it should have, perhaps we should encourage the behavior that metrics show have a more positive outcome. I could be crazy, but it seems like anything that inspires more upvotes (without the content being hateful, vitriolic, judgemental or divisive) seems like it's worth keeping.
Maybe I missed something, and there's some metrics-driven approach where you're pushing back on all throwaway behavior because its existence (regardless of content) leads to worse outcomes. Or maybe you just consider 'most' throwaways to post divisive content, and push back on all of them. Or maybe you just don't like the idea of throwaways, I dunno. All I know is this little experiment with throwaways has made me much happier on HN.
You can't judge these things by upvotes alone. Indignation and flamebait routinely get upvoted, for example, and are obviously not what this site is for. The system is complex and upvotes are just one factor.
As for 'the community not disappearing' - this is a freerider argument. You're benefitting from the contributions of all the people who aren't behaving this way.
So do you consider positive comments that get positive engagement to be a benefit to your community? If not, I get it, and your position is basically "I just don't like throwaways regardless of their contribution". But if that's not your position, you don't seem to have much of an argument yourself.
Also, there is no "freeriding" if the throwaways are actively producing positive content. You might as well call every single user a "freerider" - what are they contributing at all? Is your forum getting paid by someone based on an estimate of "real users" or something, and throwaways screw up your numbers? It really doesn't make sense.
The idea that a static username alone has an outsized positive effect on your community doesn't seem to be provable, in the face of accounts like mine. Maybe you're just making a general rule so you can eliminate the majority of accounts used for flaming or spam, I can't tell.
I feel you. Words of those in leadership positions can often seem fairly hollow. They don't just seem so, though, they are and that's on purpose.
Being authentic as a leader is impossible. Your thoughts, desires, core beliefs, etc are going to be offensive to someone -- even if those disagreeable things made agreeable outcomes for people mad at your words. I mean offensive in the broadest possible definition here; more plainly, they'll be perceived negatively by someone with enough motivation to be nasty and often it's not worth the trouble of dealing with someone who woke up feeling nasty. We live in a world where people think it's okay to read into the words (and lives) of others, try to derive deep meaning out of simple actions (even if there is none), and where people believe you're lying by default (as a leader). The fact is, as time has gone on confirmation of these things in various people and businesses builds, so they're hard assuations to just toss aside. Therefore, it is most safe to type a paragraph giving direction, listing accomplishments, and thanking entities that helped you along the way in the most taste-free way one can, while saying absolutely nothing at all.
You're absolutely right, though is this case even the taste-free text is offending enough people. Being a leader means you'll offend someone, so it becomes an exercise in whom you're ok with offending.
This is written in Protect-The-Stock-Price::English; a late post-modern dialect of American English distinctive for its bold and verbose phrases that are also in-explicitly devoid of any substance.
We're confident that intelligent audience members, like yourself OP, can appreciate the large amounts of money and diverse political sensitivities that our communication must be careful to navigate. And while we respectfully regret any discomfort you might have experienced, we hope that you find joy in our future communications.
The mind numbing boringness is entirely the point. The real message is that there’s nothing to see here, everyone is on the same page, everyone loves the successor, if you’re an investor or an employee this is definitely not an event that should make you reconsider your relationship with the company.
Yoooooooooooo homies. I'm dippin out! Tom the new homie now. This a legit cruise. One love to y'all. Always remember, Snitches get stitches.
Peace out braphogs.
I can be subject to similar views at times but here it's just the usual leaving message. Just like on the Firefox release, people should chill out. I guess the global context is getting to people's head.
Didn't see this one coming, considering how well Nat/GitHub was doing since MS acquired them where they now appear to be unstoppably dominant who are successfully branching out of repo hosting to take over more of the dev/project lifecycle.
Will be interesting to see what his next plans are.
It was only a couple years ago when it seemed competitors were eating at many of GitHub's fringe uses, and even some (like GitLab) were hacking at the core.
GitHub really amped it up and not only brought out useful features from around 2018 on, it also started fixing some (not all) of the most annoying long-term gripes users and maintainers have had.
Couple that with adding more abilities to free accounts, and they seem to have all the momentum for dev tooling right now.
I just hope they don't get complacent, or target the enterprise stuff too much.
Tangential but what do you mean with better CI? GitHub doesn’t do any CI at all as far as I know, and Travis turned commercial only. Did I miss something?
If person's legacy is a list of all the good things (or bad things) they've done during their time, Nat's legacy as the CEO of GitHub can also be summed into a list.
Let me get started...I only remember this one thing but other users of HN can help add more I supposed:
- That one time when Nat spoke against DMCA law and said taking down youtube-dl was wrong and he actively pushed for their reinstatement. [1]
Could you explain the moral and legal reasoning that necessitates that Github block ICE from using their public services, but also allows them to continue their "Developers should be allowed to user our service" that allows them to defend youtube-dl and usage in Iran?
I'm sure this is going to get hate but not all of ICE is bad. They're also the guys who go after the super rich crimes. The immigration stuff had such a bad effect on the agency that the money crime people literally asked to be separated so they could get back to hunting money crimes without the stigma of the immigration stuff. [0]
Also, immigration control in itself isn't a bad thing. You shouldn't be asking that people stop providing services to a goverment agency. You should demand the goverment agency stops being a bunch of dicks.
Copilot is still fresh in my mind as a reason to question using GitHub to host my source code. Though I understand that my opinion on this is not universal.
I don't entirely trust that they will remain excluded from Copilot in future. This probably isn't the place to re-litigate this discussion, but GitHub's claim is that source licenses simply do not apply to what Copilot ingests.
That being the case, the only thing that distinguishes private repos in this context is a thin policy that can be changed at a whim (and perhaps without any announcement).
Also, one of the reasons I put my code on a host like GitHub is so that I can share it/show it off*. So using a private repo to avoid Copliot defeats some of the purpose of me using GitHub in the first place.
I think it's _exceptionally_ unlikely they would use copilot in private repos. Not for licensing issues, but for security issues. People include secrets all the time in private repos. Trying to get an AI that can train on that sort of data, but avoid including these secrets would be a technical nightmare, and they'd get sued as soon a secret inevitably leaked out. And they have no incentive to; there's _plenty_ of data available in public GitHub to make copilot amazing. And they have access to that data in a way no other company does, so competition is going to be waaaays away.
Outside of that, I see copilot like the future of search engines. Instead of searching for plain text matches, it lets you search for abstract and complicated patterns. The killer feature for me would be seeing for a given suggestion (or search result), where the suggestion was derived from, linking back to the code snippet in GitHub.
That youtube-dl moment was a really defining moment for me, particularly as a heavy user of youtube-dl and having contributed a PR here or there.
GitHub handled the situation really well, both in terms of the course of action it took, as well as setting up new procedures and a legal fund to prevent future incidents like this. Along with the EFF, they have actively promoted the right of developers (and FOSS) to tinker.
I think people don't realise how impactful youtube-dl going the wrong way could be.
If you read the response letter the EFF prepared you'll see their argument was that the "rolling cipher" yt-dl worked around was not an actual protection measure. They contrast it with widevine, which is. There's a good legal argument yt-dl was legal in the us, and there isn't for the repo you linked to. I think standing up for things that have a plausible argument that they're legal in the US but not things that aren't is a reasonable line for a corporation to draw.
Nat has done a great job of embracing the ideals that many if us respect. I look forward to watching Thomas continue to extend Githubs influence in open source and productivity.
I contacted Thomas several years ago about an Open Source project that he didn't maintain anymore and which I wanted to maintain. He was very cool about it and put maintainership in my hands. I wish him the best of luck, too.
Let's not give -too- much credit here. This only happened after massive public outcry and targeting trolling campaigns exploiting Github design flaws forced them to take a position, and a position of anything other than defense of youtubedl was going to be an expensive reputation hit given all the journalists covering it.
Good data. We have learned that if your company ever gets bought by Microsoft, you have to wait about three years to be fully vested. (The acquisition was in June 2018, but I guess it must have been finalized on November 3rd ;)
Why is that a surprise? All of the top tech companies have many public acquisitions and all of the leader info is available from multiple sources. In fact, you could use that leader info from LinkedIn to understand that Nat was already at MS from the Xamarin acquisition to know that his tenure at GitHub wouldn't be a good data point.
I'm kinda worried about GH now. I actually worked at MS over a decade ago. They had a pattern at the time which routinely drove their acquisitions into the ground. It went something like this: an acquisition happens, and in order for folks who matter to not jump ship immediately, the acquired company would be allowed to operate semi-autonomously for a while. A year, year and a half sharks from Microsoft proper would start coming in smelling the water for blood. Someone leaves (or is stabbed in the back and fired), and MS "mafia" would start moving in, quickly bringing their old boys network with them. Absolutely the most soulless, corporate types imaginable. Dev team then inevitably notices this turn of events and bails. A new, much weaker dev team is brought in to replace it. Acquisition is now in smoldering ruins, sharks start looking to ruin something else. Lather, rinse, repeat. Seen this happen several times in adjacent teams.
This one does seem to be different. Github is held at arms length from the rest of Microsoft (like LinkedIn) such that all of this sort of interference can't happen currently.
It will be interesting to see if they can keep that up. It is clearly an advantage to have an organization that can think "developers first" and not Azure, Windows, or whatever first.
I guess the post-Gates Ballmer era was prone to these types of acquisition wreckage. My feeling is that under Nadella everything is more nuanced. Still, we'll see soon enough.
Microsoft acquired GitHub around two and a half years ago. GitHub has improved greatly over that period. This CEO was already a Microsoft employee when the acquisition occurred.
Crucially, Nat wasn't a "lifer". Crucially as well, whatever the reason is, he's giving up his $1M+/yr comp package to go work elsewhere. A MS "lifer" wouldn't have done that.
Hundreds of developers were moved from Azure teams to the GitHub org about a year or so ago. Several new features they have added are effectively rebranding/built on top of other Azure projects.
Let us be straight: they effectively made the Azure DevOps (the leftover from the once might Team Foundation Server) a weak product to further foster GitHub. So when this team brought some tech over, that just means, they are now working for GitHub primarily and no longer on Azure DevOps.
Now I'm REALLY worried. Bringing in a large number of people like that at MS means they brought in A TON of managers, leads, and program managers. At MS these categories of folks get ahead primarily through political warfare, "networking", and stabbing each other in the back, and given large enough critical mass, that's what they'll continue to do, unless organizationally isolated from the rest of GH. Or at least that's how it was a little over a decade ago.
I wouldn't be surprised if it takes years for the phase-out, if it ever gets phased out at all. There is a particular type of organizational culture that believes having the "big" option for a productivity tool is the best option. AzDO feels like the "big" option. It is quite customizable and can emulate (and in some areas surpass) GitHub's functionality, but at the expense of having more knobs. To me, AzDO feels like the inside of a space shuttle, but I'm certain that this complexity is seen as a strength to some orgs.
In CI-land, though, I think GitHub Actions and Azure Pipelines fates are much more closely intertwined. The Microsoft-hosted runners for Azure Pipelines have the same environment as GitHub Actions (or perhaps it's GitHub Actions that's standing on the shoulders of Azure Pipelines)[1].
I like and respect nat because he never seemed afraid of engaging directly with customers (here on HN, on Twitter, etc). You need to talk to customers at the start of founding any startup, but to carry on doing that long past the point of being able to have a team to do it for you is pretty awesome. I hope the next CEO is equally open to listening to us.
I should say that back in the day Nat was one that got me into coding. His nat.org blog (unfortunately cannot find it anymore on archive) was such an authentic piece of writing with his Xamarin and GNOME adventures along with posts and great photography on his general coding life working for OSS and other smallerish companies such as Novell. It was truly inspiration and made me want to live that life - building cool things with great people - but more importantly enjoying the whole human side around it where your colleagues become your friends and coding is just something that gets you closer to one another - similar to "playing guitar" or "cycling around town" or "going snowboarding together".
Of course his corporate persona is a bit different, but his work is still inspiring. Best of luck with your next adventure Nat! Cheers.
His blog seems to be excluded from archive.org, but I have found archived copies elsewhere. I don't want to link directly but you can find it with a little searching for his "Evolution for Windows" blog post from 2005.
I loved reading his blog in the early 00s. Imagine that one day in 2006 I ran "wget --mirror" on nat.org/blog and I still keep the result in my archive folder. I really don't get it why he deleted it.
I still have some printed cards where I copied his idea to print 'Your_Name would like to apologize most abjectly for his behavior on the evening of ___________'
I was at Eazel back in the day and worked with Nat and Miguel when they were at Ximian. It was obvious then that Nat would go on to do great things. What will be next for Nat? Something amazing I hope!
I also had a parasocial relationship with him through nat.org. There were some great posts about him and his friend buying a used British roadster that had a lot of problems. I still remember one of my favourite lines, "this car is a real dude magnet."
"GitHub Actions has become the #1 CI service, used by popular open source projects and enterprises alike."
I must be missing something. For whatever reason GH Actions just never appealed to me. Am I missing something? I've used Drone IO more, granted it's better than travis but the #1 CI services seems like a stretch.
Its free for open source projects and integrated nicely into Github. Even if another CI service is better, the bar to get started with Actions is much lower.
It's just extremely low friction. Push some YAML in an existing repo, done. I've enjoyed using TeamCity in the past, and tolerated Hudson/Jenkins, and I do keep expecting to hit something that makes me want to go back, but it hasn't happened yet.
Another way to put it: any CI properly integrated to Github will be #1 CI by sheer market size.
Gitlab has a similar YAML system from more than a decade, it's low friction, pretty polished and highly reliable. But it will always be a more niche product by the effect of Gitlab being way smaller that Github.
i assume he means #1 in usage (measurable) rather than in quality (an opinion, which he may also have, but which he probably wouldn't say as simply as "has become the #1").
When you say "seems like a stretch", I read it as you thinking he meant "quality, as a matter of opinion".
I would not be surprised if it's #1 in usage, getting there by being integrated in github and free and actually pretty darn good.
I'm honestly surprised by quantity even. I'd question the quality from my brief experience with it I didn't find it that impressive.
The quantity aspect is also a bit surprising since it hasn't been that long that it's been released, so seeing a #1 leader is impressive in itself, even if it's free and integrated.
I mean I have a bunch of TravisCI projects that I really don't want to migrate over unless I have a good reason. The "if it works" leave it alone.
If there's enough motivation for people to switch it's impressive (or it shows how much people hate travis/jenkins/whatever CI they ARE using)
I use it at work, I hate it. There's a senior level guy that keeps pushing for it, gets it barely working then leaves our CI/CD pipeline broken and I have to go and clean it up. I'm working on moving our team away from Github Actions now.
459 comments
[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 1638 ms ] threadLet's code golf this and see how short we can get it :)
https://www.vice.com/amp/en/article/m7jpgy/open-source-commu...
I know he travels most of the time now and I’m wondering if this is a reflection of wanting to spend more time doing that or if there’s some other new project he’s moving on to.
> That’s why I’m moving on to my next adventure: to support, advise, and invest in the founders and developers who are creating the future with technology and tackling some of the biggest opportunities of our day.
Nat founded Xamarin which was acquired by Microsoft in 2016. Github was acquired in 2018 and Nat was already an Microsoft employee at time.
So Nat departing now is actually 5 years post the Xamarin acquisition (when he joined Microsoft).
https://www.linkedin.com/in/natfriedman/
EDIT: what's also interesting is that Thomas Dohmke joined Microsoft in 2015, moved to the Github division around the time of the acquisition (2018) but only became CPO 4 months ago.
E: Pointing out proven, explicitly-defined-in-internal-emails tactics used by Microsoft always seems to get downvoted on HN. Why? Would someone like to start a conversation?
Pointing out stuff from decades ago doesn’t really count as still proven tactics.
Though of course all major companies do behave and do things like EEE in different ways.
All build tools that MS doesn't control. Their strategy has always been to try lock developers into their ecosystem so that only their ecosystem has all the software people want.
> Which things do you think they extended?
Acquiring and extending both Xamarin and Github. Atom editor is basically dead, MS/Github created an AI tool that presumably uses data they got from Github, they tried to remove features from free .NET tools, etc...
How long until they try to apply some more blatant vendor lock-in techniques with Github, .NET/Mono or maybe Azure?
That being said I didn't notice anything particularly offensive about this letter. He describes the accomplishments under his watch, expresses gratitude for employees, and expresses confidence in his successor.
I'd rather listen to someone who is straightforward than Sundar Pichai speaking entirely in corporate-speak while saying absolutely nothing of value or substance. Completely uninspiring.
All corporate speak is rather an invention of the 80's and 90's. Listen to corporate leaders from any other time before that.
Musk isn't so much "speaking the truth", he's more "selling things, his way".
Corporate speak, definition:
- to say what's in the best interest of the corporation, no matter what the circumstance
- to not tell the truth, unless it's something that can become a huge PR success for the corporation
- to not tell a lie, unless it's something that can become a huge PR success for the corporation
For the "Musk speak" definition, simply replace "the corporation" with "Musk".
systemvoltage made no comparison between impact of Musk & impact of GitHub
Edit: lol, this will be the most downvotes on a char count basis I've ever received. I thought it was generally accepted that for better or worse, he does not mince words.
Musk is equally if not more pompous with his nuggets of wisdom, and offers no value or substance either.
The framing on this as a demonstration of deep misogyny in tech is just way, way too morbidly absurd.
I mean, if we can excuse Musk's behavior as "So what? His companies have been incredibly successful," then, fine, but why can't we say the same for other CEOs? Other CEOs at least have a good sense of keeping their personal feuds out of twitter.
I dont think it is this letter in particular. So may be it is not fair to criticise it. But my guess is that the accumulation of these cooperate speaks, PR, and the past 10 years of main stream media riding along these PR to new height, just happen to tricker OP this time around.
And it doesn't seems to be an American things either, I read a lot of Fortune 500 post, somehow these over the top PR speak are mostly related to tech only.
However, I still think Github and Nat deserve a lot of praise for what they have done. Lots of changes and improvement happened after the acquisition. And not only credit to Nat but also to Microsoft.
that question mark at the end of a non-question. Nothing personal, just critique on a larger trend, but IMO upspeak and vocal fry are more annoying than corporate speak.
But I agree about these exit letter being more delicate. The more intimate notes are fine internally.
You probably like buying groceries, you're typing on a computer and you presumably at least own clothes so you don't have a problem with all corporations. One would also assume you don't want a return to feudal society in which the goods generally available to you were those produced in a 2-mile radius.
It seems more directed towards the public space of Twitter and Facebook where corporations have enough rope to hang themselves in the town square.
"plastic, formulaic, always-be-selling"
Huh?
OP is probably referring to this tired, cliched turn of phrase (among other examples in the blog).
...which was riddled with phrases like:
"With all that we’ve accomplished in mind, and more than five great years at Microsoft under my belt, I’ve decided it’s time for me to go back to my startup roots. What drives me is enabling builders to create the future.
Not even Clark Kent could be this braggadocios.
If you start from the assumption that it is a genuine attempt to put messy feelings into concise words, then it is a bit lacks vividness but is nonetheless heartfelt.
When you choose not to trust someone, you make them untrustworthy.
The fun exercise here is not that this is yet another vapid post on HN, but that people are defending it.
It's quite plausible that the simple truth of the matter is that some people commenting here, defending the post, may feel that HN shouldn't be so very frequently cynical, negative, mean, quick to jump to assuming the worst about intentions, and so on. The Guidelines - for good reason - even go out of the way to try to drive users away from behaving that way.
Because “If people would assume the worst about someone as competent at communication as $leader, then how much more likely are they to mistrust me when I try to communicate sincerely?” is the story I tell myself. Spending time in low-trust environments does bad things to the psyche.
OP: "Look the guy probably had some success and met some great people. So why in the hell can't you say that in your own words?"
My comment: "Not even Clark Kent could be this braggadocios."
There are better way of expressing one's (dis)satisfaction in the workplace. Starting with, perhaps, whittling down one's pride in accomplishing what tens of thousands already have...
I think all these comments are incredibly childish. It’s a nice goodbye letter from their well known and visible leader.
A braggadocios "goodbye letter" is worse than no letter at all.
The corporate speak regurgitation is icing on the cake.
The point of the ritual is to signal the world that all goes as planned, while giving away as few salient details as possible.
Sometimes it's better to say nothing at all than be thought a fool.
Yeah... what message do you think that would send.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=582513
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=289254
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=253657
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=66057
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13852
From the HN guidelines.
The world is starting to realize that tech companies are causing a lot of societal damage that will take years, if not generations to repair.
People are also starting to get upset at large corporations for being tone death and having zero social contracts for the societies they reside in.
Public opinion is turning and GitHub/Microsoft are just getting caught in the crosshairs with public sentiment.
As I live longer, I realize some people take to corporate speak and corporate values like ducks to water.
It's actually their preferred mode of communication and existence.
Politicians play this game most clearly - they need to communicate allegiance to the rich, their political party and 'the people', which is an impossible ask (because the parties are not aligned and you please one by taking away from the other) but they do quite well by having invented a vocabulary that's interpreted differently by each group, plus they can outright lie, which's a last resort move they try to avoid.
Anyhoo :)
I offer a contrary point of view: why does it bother you so much? Simply do not read it.
It belongs to Microsoft, doesn't it?
Instagram is worth hundreds of billions now. Bought for $1B. It is an actual unicorn situation of being incredibly rare.
There’s no point bringing up something so rare.
For example, the only other [tech?] acquisition that I can think of even sniffing IG is Priceline (now Bookings Holdings) acquiring Bookings.com for a couple hundred million. Now being the core of the business.
—
Beyond that. Just to be geeky about this stuff. The only other general financial deals in this ballpark are SoftBank, Yahoo, and Naspers investments. Copy pasting previous comment:
SoftBank and Yahoo bought around 40% stakes each in Alibaba. SoftBank spent $20M in 1999, the year Alibaba was founded. Alibaba owned 34% as of the mid 2010s. Now own 26%. Yahoo, because of Jerry Yang, invested $1B in 2005.
Naspers invested $32M for almost 50% of Tencent in 2001. Probably the best investment ever. Naspers split into two companies. Prosus owns the remaining close to 30% stake now. Though Naspers and Prosus both own around one half of one another.
All three investing companies have had issues with their own valuations. They’ve all had their own market caps be undervalued. Their one investment alone usually was close to or even exceeded the entire market cap of the company. Still the case for SoftBank and Prosus.
It'd be reasonable to peg GitHub as being worth $40-$50 billion.
That's a serious asset for Microsoft shareholders - even if the parent is worth $2t - and they will want to see it flourish. Which goes in line with what the parent comment noted about presenting the correct impression, not only to shareholders but also to anyone interested in working at GitHub for Microsoft. Potential employees will want to know that the context is healthy.
In part because even the title is clickbait. Even the tl;dr manages to inject some platitudes before getting to the point.
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And you're arguing a strawman. The comment you replied to never implied he shouldn't say farewell. They're complaining about how utterly insincere it comes across being blasted full of every trite corporate saying in existence
If anything they're arguing for more of a farewell than this, and it would have taken less effort too.
I wonder why it upsets you that someone would complain about this though, do you have a personal attachment to Nat?
Please point to where I implied I was at all upset.
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But this is HN where inferring tone is apparently a step too far in terms of speculation, so here.
Have an ML model tell you how upset you sound: https://i.imgur.com/nztQgdY.jpg
You can't make up this stuff up.
To the reply:
> would not be acceptable in any social setting otherwise
You're close to getting it!
In a normal social setting if someone says "If you don't like X don't interact with it!" that can reasonably understood as a negative statement.
Going "show me where I said I'm upset!!" instead of just clarifying is not acceptable in a social setting. Busting out an ML model is just holding up the mirror.
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> I am not responsible for how the voice in your head portrays what you read.
I'm not responsible for teaching people how basic social interactions work, yet here we are...
I believe using a sentiment analysis tool you googled for to back up an assumption you made about me and my character would not be acceptable in any social setting otherwise. Just pointing this out. My original comment was made with an informative/inquisitive tone.
I am not responsible for how the voice in your head portrays what you read.
(sorry, couldn't help myself. I think you're all great simply for being here and applying your intellects!)
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And I am upset, I hate working in one of the few industries where people wear social ineptitude like a badge:
Like someone says something when they're clearly upset, you ask why they're upset, then suddenly they derail the conversation because
"how dare you imply I am some descendant of a caveman capable of being shudder upset"
Like holy shit, real people get upset! Wowie what a concept!
Dude was upset someone insulted his rockstar idol that everyone in SV knows and got called out.
I jokingly tell him even a computer can see he's upset and now there's literally another reply to me by this "peter" person picking a fight with the computer!
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Maybe you're all stuck in this weird passive aggressive bubble of timidity (maybe that's the "everyone") where you're not allowed to express emotion but I'm not going to coddle you, not here or in real life
This person was upset. They didn't need to present it as some passive aggressive "informative", like the guy they replied to didn't know they couldn't read it.
They're just not used to having to deal with emotions directly instead of being as biting as possible while seeming... "informative"
Except they didn't say that, did they? What they said verbatim was "simply do not read it" which is a much more reasonable tone than how you seemingly interpreted it.
Whether it's negative or not also depends on the context which in this case is a proposed solution to literally the most negative and upset-sounding post in this chain: the one that started it. What does your ML model think of "I'm gonna throw up on my keyboard"?
third person shows up to pick a fight with the computer.
Never chance y'all.
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And for the record, if someone complains about a piece of writing, and you tell them "simply not to read it"
You are being a passive aggressive joke, and you are clearly upset with their critique.
People are allowed to dislike things, and gasp even hate things, you don't need to get all max passive aggression over that.
Not everyone lives in an echo chamber of timidity where all emotions must be moderate some of you put yourselves in.
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The person I replied to had no answer to the actual point I made, so they tried to derail the conversation to "how dare you claim I'm upset!" which was a complete aside in my comment as it was in theres.
Yet now I am talking to a guy who wants to argue with an ML model so I guess well played?
Are you suggesting ML models are infallible? You might want to sit down before I tell you the news...
My comment said something a social skill as simple as inferring tone is too far above you.
Now here you are, still trying argue about the ML model that was used to compare your social skills to that of a text analysis model.
Hint: It was never about the ML model.
Like at first it was funny, now it's just sad. It's too on the nose.
Why not just tell it like it is then? Dear shareholders, I'm leaving because I'm rich / bored with Github and not because there was a falling-out.
>why does it bother you so much? Simply do not read it.
So you're suggesting people should just not read or listen to anything that they don't like? And just keep quiet?
Because what you suggested is extremely impersonal, arrogant, harsh, cold, and dismissive of the work of all the employees working under you.
This case has more than 50% likelihood.
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
> for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to
Apparently not! Using throwaways, people have upvoted me like crazy. Hundreds of points per month, for a person with no identity. If it kept going at the same pace, I would outrank some of the highest-point users within a year or two, all from using throwaway. Is that not community? And if it's not - isn't it better than community? Isn't upvoting someone you don't know, don't owe anything to, who you hold no preconceived ideas about, actually a more honest way to interact with a community?
When I get upvoted, I'm happy. Me being happy encourages me to post in a happy mood, so I create happier comments (on average). When I get downvoted or ignored (on my 'real' account), I get angry and depressed, and that makes for much less happy comments (and just a bad feeling all around). Using the throwaways not only makes me less angry and depressed, but it also enables creating content that people clearly approve of.
> Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community
There have been throwaways on this site for ages, in addition to known people. The community hasn't disappeared as far as I can tell. So it seems like you can, in fact, have it both ways. In addition, I've been a member of a lot of different communities. A lot of the time, the ones that banter on about how much of a close-knit community they are, enable some of the most toxic behavior. There are some great aspects to community, and some horrifying ones. Rather than trying to change the community to fit the standards we think it should have, perhaps we should encourage the behavior that metrics show have a more positive outcome. I could be crazy, but it seems like anything that inspires more upvotes (without the content being hateful, vitriolic, judgemental or divisive) seems like it's worth keeping.
Maybe I missed something, and there's some metrics-driven approach where you're pushing back on all throwaway behavior because its existence (regardless of content) leads to worse outcomes. Or maybe you just consider 'most' throwaways to post divisive content, and push back on all of them. Or maybe you just don't like the idea of throwaways, I dunno. All I know is this little experiment with throwaways has made me much happier on HN.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
As for 'the community not disappearing' - this is a freerider argument. You're benefitting from the contributions of all the people who aren't behaving this way.
Also, there is no "freeriding" if the throwaways are actively producing positive content. You might as well call every single user a "freerider" - what are they contributing at all? Is your forum getting paid by someone based on an estimate of "real users" or something, and throwaways screw up your numbers? It really doesn't make sense.
The idea that a static username alone has an outsized positive effect on your community doesn't seem to be provable, in the face of accounts like mine. Maybe you're just making a general rule so you can eliminate the majority of accounts used for flaming or spam, I can't tell.
Being authentic as a leader is impossible. Your thoughts, desires, core beliefs, etc are going to be offensive to someone -- even if those disagreeable things made agreeable outcomes for people mad at your words. I mean offensive in the broadest possible definition here; more plainly, they'll be perceived negatively by someone with enough motivation to be nasty and often it's not worth the trouble of dealing with someone who woke up feeling nasty. We live in a world where people think it's okay to read into the words (and lives) of others, try to derive deep meaning out of simple actions (even if there is none), and where people believe you're lying by default (as a leader). The fact is, as time has gone on confirmation of these things in various people and businesses builds, so they're hard assuations to just toss aside. Therefore, it is most safe to type a paragraph giving direction, listing accomplishments, and thanking entities that helped you along the way in the most taste-free way one can, while saying absolutely nothing at all.
We're confident that intelligent audience members, like yourself OP, can appreciate the large amounts of money and diverse political sensitivities that our communication must be careful to navigate. And while we respectfully regret any discomfort you might have experienced, we hope that you find joy in our future communications.
-Phat Nat
That doesn't make it good or bad, but HN itself changes the ranking of an article based on the upvotes/comments ratio...
Will be interesting to see what his next plans are.
GitHub really amped it up and not only brought out useful features from around 2018 on, it also started fixing some (not all) of the most annoying long-term gripes users and maintainers have had.
Couple that with adding more abilities to free accounts, and they seem to have all the momentum for dev tooling right now.
I just hope they don't get complacent, or target the enterprise stuff too much.
At Notion we use Actions to build our iOS and Android nightly apps and deploy our client and server releases to production.
It also happened M$ promoted [1] a new president of the MSFT DevDiv, which includes GitHub.
It happened on the same day, I mean I cant help to read a lot into it.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29098640#29098677
- That one time when Nat spoke against DMCA law and said taking down youtube-dl was wrong and he actively pushed for their reinstatement. [1]
[1] https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1328365679473426432?l...
[0] https://github.blog/2019-10-09-github-and-us-government-deve...
Also, immigration control in itself isn't a bad thing. You shouldn't be asking that people stop providing services to a goverment agency. You should demand the goverment agency stops being a bunch of dicks.
[0] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/6/29/17517870/i...
That being the case, the only thing that distinguishes private repos in this context is a thin policy that can be changed at a whim (and perhaps without any announcement).
Also, one of the reasons I put my code on a host like GitHub is so that I can share it/show it off*. So using a private repo to avoid Copliot defeats some of the purpose of me using GitHub in the first place.
*To the extent anyone else cares, at least ;)
Outside of that, I see copilot like the future of search engines. Instead of searching for plain text matches, it lets you search for abstract and complicated patterns. The killer feature for me would be seeing for a given suggestion (or search result), where the suggestion was derived from, linking back to the code snippet in GitHub.
GitHub handled the situation really well, both in terms of the course of action it took, as well as setting up new procedures and a legal fund to prevent future incidents like this. Along with the EFF, they have actively promoted the right of developers (and FOSS) to tinker.
I think people don't realise how impactful youtube-dl going the wrong way could be.
https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2020/11/2020-11-0...
[1] https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1346517148357648385
[0] https://github.blog/2020-03-16-npm-is-joining-github/
Meanwhile similar repos get DMCA banned daily, like when Google demanded they remove all repos using a public widevine decryption key: https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2020/11/2020-11-0...
Microsoft is a member of the RIAA so don't expect to see real defense of any repos unless there is major bad press.
https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp
It will be interesting to see if they can keep that up. It is clearly an advantage to have an organization that can think "developers first" and not Azure, Windows, or whatever first.
GitHub is hardly at arms length from MS.
Gack, what a terrible company.
(nascent) HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29095759
In CI-land, though, I think GitHub Actions and Azure Pipelines fates are much more closely intertwined. The Microsoft-hosted runners for Azure Pipelines have the same environment as GitHub Actions (or perhaps it's GitHub Actions that's standing on the shoulders of Azure Pipelines)[1].
1: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines/agen...
AWS has this as well
Of course his corporate persona is a bit different, but his work is still inspiring. Best of luck with your next adventure Nat! Cheers.
I still have some printed cards where I copied his idea to print 'Your_Name would like to apologize most abjectly for his behavior on the evening of ___________'
I must be missing something. For whatever reason GH Actions just never appealed to me. Am I missing something? I've used Drone IO more, granted it's better than travis but the #1 CI services seems like a stretch.
Gitlab has a similar YAML system from more than a decade, it's low friction, pretty polished and highly reliable. But it will always be a more niche product by the effect of Gitlab being way smaller that Github.
These days Drone CI is my current favorite for OSS projects, I'm forced to use gitlab at work so that's what we use for internal projects.
I think Drone appeals to me for its simplicity, golang choice and docker everything. Not that it doesn't have its own set of issues as well.
When you say "seems like a stretch", I read it as you thinking he meant "quality, as a matter of opinion".
I would not be surprised if it's #1 in usage, getting there by being integrated in github and free and actually pretty darn good.
The quantity aspect is also a bit surprising since it hasn't been that long that it's been released, so seeing a #1 leader is impressive in itself, even if it's free and integrated.
I mean I have a bunch of TravisCI projects that I really don't want to migrate over unless I have a good reason. The "if it works" leave it alone.
If there's enough motivation for people to switch it's impressive (or it shows how much people hate travis/jenkins/whatever CI they ARE using)