[styanax]

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]

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]

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.

[snerbles]

The incentive is less about morals and very much about self-preservation.

With online mobs, when the target shows any sort of regret there is blood in the water and the sharks feast. It sometimes turns into a very public form of struggle session for the person under scrutiny. Besides avoiding the faux pas in the first place, one well-tested mitigation is to be absolutely unapologetic and wait for the storm to blow over.

[serial_dev]

For what it’s worth, I found the original announcement childish and unnecessarily negative towards people working on the product (against their CoC which I found hilarious and hypocritical), and I find it refreshing that they updated the post to phrase their criticism much more professional.

[Eisenstein]

I think that real honesty works well as long as you have the character to stand up for yourself. An unflinchingly honest self-assessment which shows that you understand the error and rectified it is almost always the path to take.

Acknowledgement of mistakes do not invoke much of a mob reaction unless there is wavering, self-pity, or appeals for leniency. Self-preservation should be assumed and not set as a goal -- once you appear to be doing anything that can be thought of as covering up or minimizing or blaming others, the mob will latch on to that and you get no consideration from then on.

[immibis]

The other part of the equation is not letting bad people get away with doing bad stuff if they do good stuff after that. The return on doing bad stuff, then good stuff has to be greater than the return on only doing bad stuff, but less than the return on only doing good stuff. It should increase over time the more you don't do bad stuff again.

[ljm]

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]

Engineers are not exactly famous for people-pleasing. Maybe management, but engineering? Maybe some fresh junior?

I'm not convinced that the existence of a low-probability event justifies normalizing the regular occurrence of a much more likely (and negative) event, like a belligerent engineer throwing a fit in a design meeting. I'd go as far as to say I'm open to more people-pleasers in engineering.

Also, fwiw, if you want to know why someone changed their mind, you can just ask them and see how you feel about the answer. If someone changes their mind at the drop of a hat, my guess is that their original position was not a strongly held one.

[ljm]

You and I obviously have different experiences because I encounter belligerent engineers much less frequently than ones who are enthusiastic to do what they can, and those who don't want to rock the boat when challenged.

I thought I made a fairly innocuous point, I don't even think I was talking about engineers specifically.

[serial_dev]

You can’t read people’s mind, so when in doubt, assume good intention.

It’s not particularly relevant (to me as a random non-zig affiliated HN reader) why they right their wrongs, as long as they did it, I find it positive (at least better than if they had left the monkey comments in the post).

[Lapsa]

mind reading tech is here - a reality. look up radiomyography and EEG deciphering neural networks. you shouldn't though, not without a permission

[Yizahi]

Well, it's not like it's a simple black and white situation, universally applicable to every debate in human history. Sometimes it is relatively better to be open-minded and able to change own opinion. Sometimes it is relatively better to keep pushing a point if it is rational and/or morally correct.

The reason why the latter stance is often popularized and cheered is because it is often harder to do, especially in the adverse conditions, when not changing your opinion has a direct cost of money or time or sanity or in rare cases even freedom. Usually it involves small human group or individual against a faceless corporation, making it even harder. Of course we should respect people standing against corporation.

PS: this is not applicable if they are "clearly wrong" of course.

[chrisweekly]

Consider the plight of a policy-maker who changes their stance on some issue. They may have changed their mind in light of new information, or evolved their position as a result of deeper reflection, personal experience, or maturation. Opponents will accuse them of "waffling" or "flip-flopping", indicating a lack of reliability or principles (if not straight-up bribery). Elected officials are responsible for expressing the will of the people they represent, so if they're elected largely by proponents of issue X, it is arguably a betrayal of sorts for them to be as dynamic as private citizens.

This is tangential to the original topic of insider trading, where the corruption is structural / systemic -- akin to how "conflict of interest" objectively describes a scenario, not an individual's behavior.

[ryandrake]

The demonization of "flip-flopping" is so stupid. Bro, I want my politicians to change their minds when new facts arise or when public sentiment changes. The last thing we need is more dogmatic my-way-or-the-highway politicians that refuse to change their minds about anything.

[jcheng]

Reminds me of Stephen Colbert's roast of George W. Bush at the 2006 White House Correspondents' Dinner:

> The greatest thing about this man is he's steady. You know where he stands. He believes the same thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday, no matter what happened Tuesday. Events can change; this man's beliefs never will.

[martin-t]

The underlying issues are:

1) People don't really vote based on logic and sound reasoning. They vote based on what sounds right to them. If they're unhappy with something, they vote for somebody who also claims to be unhappy about it, regardless if he has any actual solutions.

2) Even for the minority who wants to vote based on sound principles, it's very hard to push information back to them. If the politician changes his mind, he has to explain it to his voters. Are there really platforms which allow in-depth conversations in political debates?

Every university classroom has a whiteboard and a projector. Because you need to draw graphs, diagrams, etc. You need to explain the general structure and then focus on the details without losing track of the whole.

Is there a single country where politicians use either when talking to each other or voters?

[TheBicPen]

While I agree with you, I find it hard to argue against the view that politicians are elected for the views they held during their campaign. They may change their mind after being elected, but their constituents that voted for them will not all change their mind simultaneously. To the ones that don't change their mind, it does appear to be a betrayal of their principles. A rational politician would not want to gain that kind of reputation out of pure self-interest.

[jemmyw]

I would be much more inclined to continue voting for a politician who could explain their policy position as it changes in an open and sensible way. Politicians putting on a speech that sounds truthful and honest and like a discussion is happening between adults is so rare - it seems that very few people want that. I do though.

[acessoproibido]

Its a thing with (online) culture - no matter what you do you're going to ruffle some feathers.

If no one hates what you are doing chances are you're not doing anything really

[oaiey]

Well, it was comparing people with monkeys and calling them losers. It was a straightforward personal insult. Writing something online in a blog is like making a public announcement on a market with 100s listening. No one except someone who wants to inflame would use such words in the real world. People just forget that they are speaking in the public. And in that case not only for himself but also for others.

[acessoproibido]

I was more referring to the practice of "self-censoring" and editing what one wrote after publishing.

Of course you are right and it was distasteful but I'm sure they genuinely felt that way when they first wrote it.

[eviks]

There was no mind change, just a change in published words from a true expression of his mind into a more bland corporate speak

[giancarlostoro]

For me it depends heavily on context.

[jimbokun]

Some would say if you always stick to your guns and double down, you might wind up President.

[pessimizer]

> I often find we don't appreciate enough people accepting their failures and changing their mind.

Because this plays into a weird flaw in cognition that people have. When people become leaders because they are assholes and they are wrong, then after the wind blows the other way they see the light and do a mea culpa, there is always a certain segment that says that they're even more worthy to be a leader because they have the ability to change. They yell at the people who were always right that they are dogmatic and ask "why should people change their minds if they will be treated like this?"

If one can't see what's wrong with this toy scenario that I've strawmanned here, that's a problem. The only reason we ever cared about this person is because they were loud and wrong about everything. Now, we are expected to be proud of them because they are right, and make sure that they don't lose any status or position for admitting that. This becomes a new reason for the people who were previously attacking the people who were right to continue to attack the people who were right, who are also now officially dogmatic puritans whose problem is that they weren't being right correctly.

This is a social phenomenon, not a personality flaw in these leaders. People can be wrong and then right. People can not care either way and latch onto a trend for attention or profit, and follow it where it goes. I don't think either of these things are in and of themselves morally problematic. The problem is that there are people who are simply following individual personalities and repeating what they say, change their minds when that personality changes their mind, and whose primary aim is to attack anyone who is criticizing that personality. They don't really care about the issue in question (and usually don't know much about it), they're simply protecting that personality like a family member.

This, again, doesn't matter when the subject is stupid, like some aesthetic or consumer thing He used to hate the new Batman movies but now he says that he misunderstood them; who cares. But when the subject is a real life or death thing, or involves serious damage to people's lives and careers, it's poisonous when a vocal minority becomes dedicated to this personality worship.

It's so common that there now seems to be a pipeline of born-agains in front of everything, giving their opinion. Sir, you were a satanist until three years ago.

[jimbokun]

The flaw in your argument is referring to the people who are “always right.”

Those people don’t exist. Which is exactly why the ability to change your opinion when presented with new information is a critical quality in a good leader.

[jodrellblank]

“People who were right all along about this issue” rather than “people who are always right about everything all the time”.

[Octoth0rpe]

> The only reason we ever cared about this person is because they were loud and wrong about everything

Except we cared about Andrew Kelley because he was right about quite a lot of things (eg the zig design).

[oaiey]

Came here to write that. Let us recognize that he accepted our feedback and improved. This is good.

[aidenn0]

I think it's because when people do a 180 due to public pressure, it's hard to know to what degree they changed their mind and to what degree they are just lying about what is on their mind.

[a2800276]

Toning down aggressive phrasing is not "doing a 180", calling the change from "only losers left at GitHub" to "the engineering excellence has left" lying seems disingenuous.

[aidenn0]

I was responding to the general sentiment of:

> 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.

Not this specific situation.

[kragen]

As I see it, someone who "listened to that feedback, swallowed their ego/pride" would include a note at the end of the post about the edits. Admitting you were wrong requires not erasing the evidence of what you said.

(He did post a kind of vague apology in https://ziggit.dev/t/migrating-from-github-to-codeberg-zig-p..., but it's ambiguous enough that anyone who was offended is free to read it as either retracting the offending accusation, or not. This is plausibly the best available alternative for survival in the current social-media landscape, because it's at best useless to apologize to a mob that's performatively offended on behalf of people they don't personally know, and usually counterproductive because it marks you as a vulnerable victim, but the best available alternative might still tend to weaken the kind of integrity we're talking about rather than strengthen it.)

[bccdee]

> Admitting you were wrong requires not erasing the evidence of what you said.

I don't think there's really an obligation to announce to newcomers, "hey, an earlier version of this post was overly inflammatory." But you should be forthright about your mistake to people who confront you about it, which is what's happening in the forum thread you linked. I think this is all fine.

[kragen]

If those newcomers are following a link from someone who was commenting on the earlier version, I think there is.

[raxxorraxor]

Perhaps you should frame it differently if you speak for a company and provide criticism on a public platform, but mean tweets are often far less insulting that some business decisions customers and developers are subjected to.

I think developers here are probably perfectly innocent about these changes. The product mangers have to push for this integration or get replaced. This has been a theme at Microsoft for quite a while.

[dandellion]

I don't see the need for a note in this case because what was there wasn't wrong, there's plenty of evidence that supports it. It's just that the tone they used that was inadequate and very rude for no reason, so they edited it to be more polite, it doesn't seem a correction or retraction.

[watwut]

No evidence was erased as the evidence exists.

[kragen]

You mean, on a third-party website that currently happens to have a capture of the page outside of the Zig team's control, one which can go down at any time?

[do_not_redeem]

The site is open source and the commits are still there. No need to be so dramatic.

https://github.com/ziglang/www.ziglang.org/commit/c8d046b288...

[kragen]

Oh, thanks, I thought watwut meant archive.org. Is this diff also linkable on codeberg?

[voxl]

The reality is he wasn't wrong, he just didn't care to deal with the tone policing concern trolls of HN and elsewhere.

[kragen]

That is absolutely a viable reading of what he wrote, yes.

[rzwitserloot]

There is utility in indicating how surprised / concerned you are at a certain process or event. We can flatten out all communication and boil everything down to an extremely neutral "up", "down", and "nailed it to exacting precision".

I find the fact that this painting has been hung crooked by 0.00001º: down

I find torture and mass murder: down

Clearly this is a ridiculous state of affairs. There's more gradations available than this.

Possibly coloured by my dutch culture: I think this rewrite is terrible. The original sentence was vastly superior, though I think the first rewrite (newbies to rookies) was an improvement.

The zig team is alarmed, and finds this state of affairs highly noteworthy and would like to communicate this more emotional, gut instincty sense in their words.

There's a reason humans invent colourful language and epithets. They always do, in all languages. Because it's useful!

And this rewrite takes it out. That's not actually a good thing. The fact that evidently the internet is so culturally USA-ised that any slightly colourful language is instantly taken as a personal affront and that in turn completely derails the entire debate into a pointless fight over etiquitte and whether something is 'appropriate' is fucking childish. I wish it wasn't so.

In human communication, the US is somewhat notorious in how flattened its emotional range is of interaction amongst friendly folk. One can bring anthropology into it if one must: Loads of folks from vastly different backgrounds all moving to a vast expanse of land? Given that cultural misunderstanding is extremely likely and the cost of such a misunderstanding is disastrously high, best plaster a massive smile on your face and be as diplomatic as you can be!

Consider as a practical example: Linus Torvalds' many famed communications. "NVidia? Fuck you!" was good. It made clear, in a very, very pithy way, that Linus wasn't just holding a negative opinion about the quality and behaviour of the nvidia gfx driver team at the time, but that this negative opinion was universal across a broad range of concerns and extremely so. It caused a shakeup where one was needed. All in 3 little words.

(Possibly the fact that the internet in general is even more incapable of dealing with colourful language is not necessarily the fault of USification of the internet: The internet is a lot like early US, at least in the sense that the risk of cultural misunderstanding is far higher than in face to face communications on most places on the planet).

[ethin]

If I could upvote you, I would. I have never liked the mob of people that think we should all be super diplomatic corpospeakers who hedge everything and who think that not doing so is "offensive" or "unprofessional". I definitely didn't think anything was wrong with the original sentences or word usage, because it wasn't aimed at any specific individual with the deliberate intent of being offensive, but was aimed at Microsoft itself. And even if the intent was to be offensive, well, on the internet your always going to offend someone. You could be super nice and say all the right words and someone would still find a way to be offended by it. And were these circumstances ordinary, I would call out the word usage as well, because it would be uncalled for. But given all the evidence that the original points at, it's rather hard to say that GitHub didn't deserve it. And it is also rather difficult for me to see how this wasn't the time or place for such language. Sometimes the only way to get your point across is to be "unprofessional" (whatever that means these days).

[inferiorhuman]

  There's a reason humans invent colourful language and epithets. They always
  do, in all languages. Because it's useful!

  I have never liked the mob of people that think we should all be super
  diplomatic corpospeakers who hedge everything and who think that not doing
  so is "offensive" or "unprofessional".

Agreed with you and OP. More to the point, the final rewrite leaves out any meaningful why. Perhaps they could/should be more diplomatic about their distaste, but leaving it out all together leaves quite the elephant in the room.

Then again the front end rewrite (which GitHub was crowing about for quite a while) and doubling down on AI nonsense got me to stop using GH for personal projects and to stop contributing to projects hosted on GH.

[chongli]

Thanks for pointing this out! I looked at the edit history and without looking at the timestamps assumed it was in reverse chronological order. Seeing that I was wrong brought a smile to my face.

I appreciate that Andrew and the other Zig team members are really passionate about their project, their goals, and the ideals behind those goals. I was dismayed by the recent news of outbursts which do a lot to undermine their goals. That they’re listening to feedback and trying to take the high road (despite feeling a lot of frustration with the direction industry is taking) should be commended.

[CyberDildonics]

Zig is the language that was intentionally made to fail and error out on windows carriage returns instead of parsing them like every language ever made. They made a version for windows and then made it not work with every windows text editor. Their answer was to 'get better text editors' or 'make a preprocessing program to strip out carriage returns' or 'don't use windows' (they had a windows executable).

This is not a group with community or pragmatism from the start.

[crystal_revenge]

In all seriousness, this comment really makes me want to try out Zig!

[CyberDildonics]

You want a language that releases a compiler on a specific platform then intentionally breaks it for everyone on something trivial just to troll and irritate them?

[crystal_revenge]

I like a language that aggressively discourages writing code in Notepad on Windows.

[CyberDildonics]

Every text editor on windows adds a carriage return by default.

You haven't given any actual reasons this makes sense, if you don't like windows why would you be using it in the first place? Why would you care what text editor people use?

Why would it be ok to release something on a platform just to annoy your own users?

[jpfromlondon]

>Every text editor on windows adds a carriage return by default.

Either you should know your tool well enough to turn it off, or tools shouldn't make obscure changes to the output that the user did not specify, either way Zig is absolutely correct in not allowing for either case, I wasn't aware of this but it makes me even more convinced of their principles.

The expurgation of "losers" less so.

[inferiorhuman]

Last I checked even Apple migrated to LF. Perhaps it's time for Windows to stop being the odd man out? Regardless:

  not work with every windows text editor

Last I checked both Visual Studio Code and Notepad++ can both make line endings configurable. That covers a plurality of use cases. Even the built-in Notepad supports using CR or LF only for going on eight years now.

[ekipan]

Hard agree. Literally every Windows editor I've ever used, except Notepad, allows me to configure it to save CRLF or LF or sometimes even CR files. And I always just leave it on LF because it's easier.

Old Notepad support should not be a priority for a language implementer. Get a real text editor, they're varied and plentiful. This was always a non-issue drudged up by nobody actually interested in using Zig and so it was rightfully ignored.

[CyberDildonics]

Perhaps it's time for Windows to stop being the odd man out?

This is the same nonsense rationalizations that zig gave. Windows is the odd man out. If you want to release something on windows you match an extra byte on the ends of lines. It isn't that hard and even the simplest toy language does it. It's just part of line splitting, it isn't even something that happens at the language stage.

Last I checked both Visual Studio Code and Notepad++ can both make line endings configurable.

Last time I checked it was totally unnecessary because no other language releases for a platform and tries to punish their users. Options like that are to make files match while being worked on for different platforms, not so that a compiler doesn't try to punish and troll its users for using it.

[inferiorhuman]

  If you want to release something on windows you match an extra byte on the ends of lines

Did I miss some sort of formal directive from Microsoft or is this just outrage that someone dared do something not up to your standards?

  try to punish and troll its users for using it

Nobody's being punished. Configuring your dev environment is something people do for every language. Let's add some perspective here: we're talking about a single runtime option for your text editor of choice. BFD. More to the point, why isn't your editor or IDE properly supporting Zig files?

[crystal_revenge]

> This is the same nonsense rationalizations that zig gave.

I'm guessing you didn't live through the early days of webdev when you had to jump through ridiculous hoops just to support IE. At least back then there was the excuse that IE had the lions share of the market and many corporate users.

The industry wide acceptance of supporting IE majorly held back what websites/apps were capable of being. Around 2012ish (right as I was leaving webdev) more and more major teams started to stop supporting earlier broken versions of IE (this was largely empowered by the rising popularity of Chrome). This had a major impact on improving the state of web applications, and also got MS to seriously improve their web browser. Moves like this one by the Zig team are the only way you're going to push Microsoft to improve the situation.

Now you may claim "but Windows is 70% of users!" but this issue doesn't impact anyone wanting to run Zig applications, only those writing them. If you're an inexperienced dev that's super curious about Zig, this type of error might be another good nudge that maybe Windows isn't the OS you want to be working on.

[blibble]

that's amateur level anti-windows user

much better to put a colon in a filename, or call part of your toolchain "aux.exe"

https://help.interfaceware.com/v6/windows-reserved-file-name...

works like a treat

[integralid]

Related: aux.c in the kennel source https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=68981

[thrwaway3243]

At least, this change will make source files not portable, which is obviously bad.

[mistercheph]

Use a real operating system and problem solved?

[CyberDildonics]

Is this directed at Zig? They're the ones that released a windows executable.

[latexr]

> It would appear they listened to that feedback, swallowed their ego/pride and did what was best for the Zig community with these edits.

Indeed. The article even links to it.

https://ziggit.dev/t/migrating-from-github-to-codeberg-zig-p...

[coldtea]

>It would appear they listened to that feedback, swallowed their ego/pride and did what was best for the Zig community with these edits

They sugarcoated the truth to a friendlier but less accurate soundbite is what they did.

[lenkite]

I did prefer that honest line about bloated, buggy Javascript framework. Otherwise might as well ask an LLM to spit out a sanitized apology text for your change in provider. Just like ten thousand identical others copied from a playbook. Allow your eyes to comfortably glaze over with zero retention.

Have people already forgotten that the ReactJS port made github slow ? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44799861

The revised, politically-correct, sanitized re-framing that you apparently insist on does not convey this very important point of information.

We have freedom of speech for a reason - blunt honesty conveys important information. Passive language does not.

[photochemsyn]

Perhaps the final edit should have included the complaint about 'buggy bloated Javascript' as that's a very substantive issue - and now I don't know if they changed that as 'tone' or because they decided that technical criticism wasn't correct, and there are other issues?

[lunias]

I wish they edited it to be more extreme. Go full Torvalds like the good 'ol days before every opinion was "political".

[PunchyHamster]

Well, no, they still acted based on the original ego/pride, they just changed blogpost to look different.

I mean, reason of "we don't want to be tied with direction MS takes" is good enough, not sure why they felt need to invent reasons and nitpick some near irrelevant things just to excuse their actions

[shevy-java]

Yep, agreed. I think this would have been the better reason too, but anyway - I also don't think it is so important either way.

The big problem still remains: corporations control WAY too much in general.

[lawn]

Eh, it looks like they want to hide that they call people monkeys and losers.

If they would own up to it and say sorry, then your point stands. But that's not what happened here.

[styanax]

> I completely agree with this. I performed really poorly on this axis. I’m sorry to the Zig community for that. I’ll take my L and get back to working on std.Io and the rest of the roadmap. [1]

[1] https://ziggit.dev/t/migrating-from-github-to-codeberg-zig-p...

[veverkap]

> I do feel bad for hurting your feelings but I also strongly believe that you should not be proud of working for Microsoft, and particularly on GitHub for the last 5 years. I truly am sorry but you need to be called out.

Crocodile tears.

https://hachyderm.io/@[e-mail]/1156234452984...

[dugidugout]

Thank you for sharing this. :(