Nat was a great CEO. The best that could have happened to Github after the acquisition IMO.
The one time that I won't forget about Github under Nat, was when they stood up for Iranian developers [1]. They went the extra distance to get a permission/license from the US government specially to offer full Github to developers from Iran. Many other companies didn't do something similar.
"They went the extra distance to get a permission/license from the US government specially to offer full Github to developers from Iran."
Wait, that's a thing ?
We get a signup from Iran about once every month and I always, apologetically, send a personal note saying that I wish we could provide service to them but ...
You're saying rsync.net can legally provide service to Iranians with ... some paperwork ?
> And separately, we took our case to the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), part of the US Treasury Department, and began a lengthy and intensive process of advocating for broad and open access to GitHub in sanctioned countries. Over the course of two years, we were able to demonstrate how developer use of GitHub advances human progress, international communication, and the enduring US foreign policy of promoting free speech and the free flow of information. We are grateful to OFAC for the engagement which has led to this great result for developers.
There are standing "general" licenses for any product / company that is doing certain activities and "specific" licenses granted to individual companies. I believe GitHub managed to get a general exemption for anyone providing source code hosting? The general idea is that there are things that the US government wants people in Iran to be able to do as it would help their fight rather than hurt it. This page has the list of general licenses:
Iranian dev here. I can tell you if a company goes the extra mile to provide services to us, the reason is almost always that they just care. It's not a marketing tactic. You have to care if you go through all that trouble. And there is very little publicity to these acts. No one is going to notice it but us. They only do it out of the goodness of their hearts.
They also went the extra-mile to block Iranian developers, they didn't have to do so much police, and probably tried to buy their redemption. For example, in theory Hackernews should block Iranians, but they will probably pretend not to be aware and won't actively chase them.
Compliance with US export controls and sanctions isn't optional. That some companies are less diligent about it than others doesn't change the compliance requirements, and people can and do regularly go to prison for willful violations.
And if GitHub did not block Iranian developers _before_ it obtained the exemption, it would be in violation of sanctions, which carries both criminal and pretty much unlimited financial charges.
I don't know whether HN violates sanctions, but comparing to GitHub HN is very, very small fish. The chances that GitHub would swim under the radar were pretty slim.
Really, "this company obeys the law, so it is evil" is lame.
> They also went the extra-mile to block Iranian developers, they didn't have to do so much police, and probably tried to buy their redemption.
US sanctions, even the threat thereof, are serious business. To this day, US nationals or US tax persons are having a really hard time finding a bank in Europe that is willing to deal with them because many banks don't want any exposure to the US FATCA they can avoid.
I had an ex-girlfriend who was born in Germany to US and Greek parents. Quite the shitshow with paperwork.
I'm curious how they discover this if they are trying to stay so distant from US authorities. If you have EU citizenship which is what I assume here then presenting the Greek passport and supporting local documents isn't enough? Or, is it the case that something local like a missing local tax number, or even an accent telegraphed the situation.
With the US, it feels like everything is much more uniform with the tie back to a federal social security number. The SSN is universally requested for many types of financial and insurance setups.
Every bank I've opened an account with in recent years has asked multiple specific questions about any ties to the US during the account opening process. One even asked if I'd ever had a US telephone number or mailing address.
In some places the family name tips them off. Like here in Thailand a Thai woman who is married to a westerner and has his last name will have to fill out a form stating whether or not they are a US person.
Lying to your bank is typically not a good strategy when it comes to compliance. You can get asked on a form and if you lie, they have a very good case later on to close your account.
That works exactly as long as such an US-aligned company doesn't enter the spotlight in some sanctioned entity related trouble.
Had friends working export compliance for a larger US IT company, and they once (temporarily) blocked a larger shipment to the (British) Royal Air Force because some bozo abbreviated them as "RAF" - which, obviously!, refers to the (German) Red Army Faction, a left-extremist terrorist cell that wasn't relevant for more than 10 years at that point (and wouldn't know what to do with high performance computers, anyway).
Better safe than sorry, otherwise you mess up one day, come back to the HQ on the next and all that's left is a brand new parking lot.
Hacker News probably falls under the general license for personal communications, etc. Github is not really personal communications, so caution is warranted, at least a bit. Rsync.net doesn't really provide personal communications either, IMHO, and it seems reasonable for them to not do business with people in Iran unless rsync.net obtains a specific license or finds a different general license they fit into.
> You're saying rsync.net can legally provide service to Iranians with ... some paperwork ?
A lot of it probably. Also, not sure how you can collect payment from these users. And keep in mind your software might end up being used by their regime for oppressive purpose.
Keep in mind the people of Iran can end these sanctions at any time. It's a personal and societal choice.
> the people of Iran can end these sanctions at any time
Sorry to bite on this off-topic thing... but, _how_? Overthrowing their government? I guess that would be technically true, but "at any time" seems like a weird phrase to use for that.
Iran at least has some sort of functioning government entity (which I, to be clear, absolutely despise), Libya collapsed completely as a result of Ghaddafi's (well deserved) downfall and it will likely be a hotbed of Islamist terrorism and instability for decades to come. I don't see any nation or block of nations willing to step up and do nation rebuilding in once-beautiful Libya outside of the EU financing terrorists aka the so-called "coast guard" to torture migrants - what makes you think any kind of revolution in Iran would be assisted by anyone?
The Iranian system also has some democratic legitimacy. Yes, the religious authority is supreme, but it's not as overtly tyrannical as the average dictatorial regimes: the religious ruler is himself elected by an assembly (similarly to what happens with the Catholic Pope), and the secular executive branch is elected (although the religious element can pre-emptively stop pesky candidates from running altogether).
There is a good chunk of Iranian society that genuinely thinks their system is good, and it keeps the country somewhat stable in a region where such condition is not particularly common. Telling them to throw it all away by pointing at Libya is basically a cruel joke.
This characterization is ridiculous. Following the form does not make you “somewhat democratic,” nor does calling oneself Democratic People’s Republic.
In addition, “the secular executive branch” comment is flat out wrong. The executive branch and candidates for presidency are explicitly obligated to believe and follow Islamic and Sharia laws.
> Following the form does not make you “somewhat democratic,”
In practice, there have been elected presidents that the religious element did not really like. They did not last, and were sabotaged at every turn, but they existed. Iran is a big country and it contains a number of different power-centres, unlike, for example, North Korea.
> In addition, “the secular executive branch” comment is flat out wrong.
Uh, no it isn't:
>> the religious element can pre-emptively stop pesky candidates from running altogether
Whether this is achieved by claiming they are unbelievers or corrupt, is irrelevant. Candidates can (and do) get purged before they get a chance, but the latter part of the process is fairly democratic (which is why occasionally the "wrong" candidates do win). One of the reasons for the increasingly low turnout in recent years is precisely that purges are getting more and more indiscriminate; Iranians are not all stupid, and won't engage when they think the process is meaningless. The "secular" qualifier is there because, in practice, that's what it is - a government that cares about economy, army, police, and administration.
Demonising everything is a recipe for being ignored, you should try understanding other points of view when you're trying to persuade.
You are absolutely incorrect[1]. There are no ifs and buts. They absolutely positively require the candidate to assert they'd abide by Islamic law--there is not even a pretense of secularism. Which Islamic Republic lobby group did you get your propaganda from? I lived there for 20 years.
If you think you know better, please cite a reference to your egregious claims. Even Khamenei himself does not make some of the claims you are making.
Current affairs are still mostly mundane - as much as sharia law is prescriptive about some stuff, it won't cover how to set up a database of taxpayers or how to make a nuclear plant work. That was my point - the elected side of things takes care of that, obviously under the supervision/control of the religious element, and depending on who you elect things will be carried out differently. You can't tell me things were not different when Ahmadinejad was in office compared to when Rouhani was in office.
>The executive branch and candidates for presidency are explicitly obligated to believe and follow Islamic and Sharia laws.
Oh come one. Is the US not a democracy because the executive branch and candidates for presidency are explicity obligated to believe and follow the constitution?
As a Canadian I've personally benefited from the US hegemony and if I had to pick a least-rapacious global hegemon historically you'd be in the running. But I see comments like this and I can't help but feel like the US might have 'Earned' the same kind of 'Democracy' its three-letter boys brought Libya.
> I can't help but feel like the US might have 'Earned' the same kind of 'Democracy' its three-letter boys brought Libya.
Libya was especially an affair of France, Italy (the former colonial power) and the UK.
If you ask me, the Italians are the reason why Ghaddafi was outright executed - there were numerous dirty deals done between Italy and Ghaddafi's Libya, mostly to have Ghaddafi do the dirty work for the EU in keeping migrants away.
Interesting, I hadn't heard that theory - are you saying the Italians had him killed because he knew too much or that they failed to protect their clandestine ally from France and the UK?
Or is it more that factions in Italy that benefit from human trafficking got the upper hand on those that were working with Qaddafi to limit it? Italy is #3 in the world for trafficked humans after all, presumably some powerful people profit from it.
edit: Wanted to leave it at that, but I should really clarify. I'm equating a group choosing the US constitution as their founding document with a group choosing Sharia law for the same purpose. If a person says they believe in democracy but doesn't believe in other people's right to make what looks like obviously bad decisions, they don't really believe in democracy.
> There is a good chunk of Iranian society that genuinely thinks their system is good, and it keeps the country somewhat stable in a region where such condition is not particularly common.
That explains the massive exodus of talent, minds and people straight out of the country minutes after the revolution.
... which was 40 years ago. Quite a few people were born since then, and still live there. Obviously it's not a paradise, but it's not comparable with the likes of North Korea, and these days it's not that incredibly different from other supposedly-good countries in the region.
> Quite a few people were born since then, and still live there
And if you go to any western university campus, you'll meet many of them, born after the revolution, who worked hard to make it to the west and who are trying to sponsor their families to join them.
The opposite (westerners trying to do the same in Iran) is virtually unheard of.
And? Nobody said the Iranian system is some model of virtue, just that it isn't so incredibly bad that the alternative of "start a bloody civil war and ruin the whole country for decades" (the Libyan experience) can realistically be considered attractive by most of the population.
Libya is actually a terrible example of this. If I recall correctly, right after the Arab Spring, their country erupted into civil war, twice, and the current ceasefire is barely a year old. The reason for this is not because they chose civil war, but because Libya and many other poor countries are stuck in a local minima of dictatorship and sectarianism.
- Dinosaur juice that we took out of the ground and then cooked
- Shiny metal that we took out of the ground
In other words, all industries that, critically, do not require the people to operate. Libya is the poster child for the resource curse. In poor countries, democracy is a dangerous boondoggle that squanders the wealth of the country, and any country with an economy shaped like this that tries democracy will be swiftly punished for their obvious flaunting of basic economics. Likewise, all of the other things you see in these kinds of countries - sectarian violence, religious and ethnonationalist conflict, and so on - are all merely part and parcel of being poor.[0]
Taking this back to Iran... the country is born out of geopolitical praxis, not a resource curse. The US tried to utterly fuck over Iran and turn it into Libya, in the name of fighting the Soviets. So at least part of the current hostility towards the US is still borne out of actual popular support. Yes, some Iranians would like to just enjoy a cosmopolitan software developer lifestyle, but those people are fewer in number compared to the people who want nothing to do with a country that has hypocritically denied it the right to self-determination. Maybe that will change, and people on both sides will forget long enough for us to normalize trade relations. But that's not a simple matter of uninstalling and reinstalling governments like they were device drivers. Plenty of Iranians still hate the US, and plenty of Americans do, too.
[0] This is also why a lot of Donald Trump voters bought into a lot of far-right racist bullshit, as well as why many poor countries see regular genocides. Because that's exactly what you promise poor people. It's far easier to make you richer than a race or religion you don't like, than to make you richer overall.
This person at MSFT who got promoted is the one that caused the problems in the dotnet community where features that had a go-live RTM license (as in merged and ready for long term support) were removed from the programming language so that more Microsoft Visual Studio licenses could be sold.
Right, I have to admit I don't entirely understand the .NET kerfuffle. .NET is clearly Microsoft's language ecosystem, just as much as Swift is Apple's, and much more so than, say, Go is Google's. A lot of the value in .NET is how it works with the Microsoft ecosystem - or put another way, as someone who mostly doesn't develop on Windows (but uses Windows a lot as a desktop OS), I have never once felt that .NET was the best way to solve a problem that wasn't a Windows-specific problem.
It would be totally fine if .NET were a closed-source, Microsoft-run language. It is pretty cool that this isn't true. But the idea that Microsoft organizationally having control over the .NET open source project is somehow bad for open source is just incomprehensible to me, who grew up on .NET not being open source at all.
> It is pretty cool that this isn't true. But the idea that Microsoft organizationally having control over the .NET open source project is somehow bad for open source is just incomprehensible to me, who grew up on .NET not being open source at all.
It's not about open-source: it's more that major organizations and industries won't use a programming platform that is entirely at the whims of a company they have no real control over and without independent means to ensure it keeps on working, so a compromise position that Microsoft took is to make .NET open-source, so that in the event Microsoft disappears overnight (say, Mt. Rainier erupting and wiping out the Seattle metro area) people have something they can keep on using and build and maintain themselves. We saw the opposite with VB6: the VB6 platform was never open and shared and now all the companies that invested in VBA and VB6 in the 1990s is rightfully annoyed because VB6 is a complete dead-end with no feasible upgrade-path to .NET (VB.NET is not compatible with VB6).
--------
While my SaaS (and my current job) is a .NET shop because it originated with some "Classic" ASP 3.0 VBScripts that my boss put together himself in the late 1990s that was slowly transitioned through .NET WebForms (ew) and ASP.NET MVC, we still use it for new greenfield projects because .NET is a nice platform overall that scales really well from one-off prototype projects that can be easily transitioned to high-performance distributed applications without any major rewrites (the only thing I've had to "rewrite" was the conversion from .aspx (as an MVC View, not WebForms) to Razor .cshtml, everything else has been refactored through the years. The tooling and integration between MS products and services does save a lot of trouble otherwise (that's where the value is).
My experience from other shops, and the problems I've seen there is not that other "stacks" (I hate that word) like MySQL+PHP, Postgres+Python, Anything+NodeJS are somehow less capable (excepting PHP, it's often the opposite, actually) but that you end up with dozens of projects all with their own separate stacks and build environments, all with their own tedious onboarding processes (e.g. having one Angular project that absolutely requires Node 12, not Node 14, to run) while another project's server-side NodeJS code absolutely requires Node 16 and Python and Tomcat somewhere.
So I'm more than happy to pay the thousands of USD per year for my MSDN Subscription because it gives me a platform that saves me the trouble and headaches of a highly heterogenous environment especially given the fact we're a small shop.
> major organizations and industries won't use a programming platform that is entirely at the whims of a company they have no real control over
100% this, the biggest issue I see with dotnet and Swift is that they're spending too much time trying to be appealing to people who don't want to use them. Swift, as a language, really only makes sense to use if you're extensively targeting Apple systems and planning to skip Windows/Linux altogether. That's a pretty shit deal, from the perspective of developers who want to deliver software to the largest possible audience. Similarly, writing an entire program in dotnet used to be a death sentence until Mono finally got thrown together. Even still it's not a very attractive framework for most cases, which just goes to show how important open governance can be when developing such a complex system.
> Similarly, writing an entire program in dotnet used to be a death sentence until Mono
This is somewhat ironic, considering .NET is effectively "Java as rebuilt by Microsoft", and one of the original selling point of Java was... cross-platform support, "write once - run anywhere". BillG clearly made sure that particular aspect would not carry over to the MS version.
> BillG clearly made sure that particular aspect would not carry over to the MS version.
Heh, well .NET's cross-architecture support was/is still useful for allowing .NET to target Windows CE on SH-3, MIPS, ARM and more - also consider that at-the-time (1999-2001) even though Windows NT no-longer supported MIPS and Alpha, there was IA-64 (Itanium) looming on the horizon which was widely anticipated to replace x86 (hah), so even though it wasn't true cross-platform (i.e. cross-OS) it still made business-sense.
Another advantage of .NET's use of JIT bytecode was that Microsoft could sell it as a platform enabling "verifiable code": which is true: a "pure" CIL/MSIL assembly file literally cannot have any memory-related bugs to worry about and their consequential security vulnerabilities, which were a big deal at the time (this was related to Microsoft's "Trustworthy computing" initiative as well: you don't need to "trust" the programs you're running: the use of verifiable bytecode means you can verify its safety entirely by yourself).
Oh yeah, compared to what it was meant to replace (COM/DCOM, C++, VB6, ASP/vbscript), .NET was undoubtedly a massive step forward and a no-brainer to adopt, for anyone invested in the MS ecosystem.
The design and support for cross-platform use was there from the start, and most obviously manifested itself via Rotor. If I recall correctly it targeted FreeBSD rather than Linux though.
ROTOR was never production-quality though - I think it was there as a proof-of-concept and to try to convince some university professors to consider it as an alternative to JVM.
> it's more that major organizations and industries won't use a programming platform that is entirely at the whims of a company they have no real control over and without independent means to ensure it keeps on working,
That is a risk that is common to every single industry, and as such is a risk that is easily understood and quantifiable. We live in an interdependent world. You're always going to be dependent on suppliers, vendors, equipment etc. We have seen how covid related supply chain issues have affected everyone. Atleast with a S/W platform, what you have in-hand continues to work, and you can continue to use the compiler, libraries, etc to churn out new binaries.
> That is a risk that is common to every single industry, and as such is a risk that is easily understood and quantifiable.
Honestly: No
If it would be "easily quantifiable", you would not see in 2021 still bank ATM running damn Windows XP or nuclear power plant under Win2000 with some old deprecated crap supervisor tools.
It is a common drama with proprietary solutions, they are seducing to install and a nightmare to maintain.
This even more due to the decision to use these "vertically integrated proprietary (crap) solution" are generally taken by executive level without any long term thinking and that will be long way gone when the mess need to be cleaned-up
> If it would be "easily quantifiable", you would not see in 2021 still bank ATM running damn Windows XP or nuclear power plant under Win2000 with some old deprecated crap supervisor tools.
> It is a common drama with proprietary solutions, they are seducing to install and a nightmare to maintain.
The fact the software is "proprietary" or not is largely irrelevant to whether or not the systems-integrator who made those ATMs and Nuclear Power plants is acting responsibly. Had they chosen Linux then that ATM would still be sitting there with just-an-outdated version of some embedded Linux distro.
There is an argument that if they used a GPLv3 or other anti-Tivo license that the end owner or operator of the machine would be able to upgrade the host OS software themselves, however in both of those cases (ATMs and power-plants) what makes-the-thing-run is not the OS but the application software (BankAtm.exe and NuclearReactorMonitor.exe) which will have their own dependencies and (knowing most software) will just break when running on an updated OS - and it'd be even worse on Linux because Linux does not have a stable applications ABI between major releases: the software would need to be recompiled.
Now if the application software itself were also open-source, then I agree: that does help, but I'm not convinced that's a solution either because I can assure you that companies like banks and infrastructure operators are not going to be happy having to do patch-tuesday and recompiling their software on a regular basis for hardware they'd really prefer to leave alone and stable. Hence why they're air-gapped (or at least meant to be air-gapped).
> Had they chosen Linux then that ATM would still be sitting there with just-an-outdated version of some embedded Linux distro.
That's wrong, they would have been in a position to update / maintain themselves their own distro or dedicate that to a third party company that has the knowhow to do so. This for more than 20 years without problems. Because they would DO have the code for it if they want it.
With proprietary solutions in the embedded system world, this is impossible to do. If your providers refuses to support your OS anymore, you're fucked and that's it. And if he wants to increase the cost of your support maintenance program per 10x because it's legacy, you're fucked too, just in an other way.
> Linux because Linux does not have a stable applications ABI between major releases: the software would need to be recompiled.
I disagre and for two reasons:
- first, if it's your software stack recompiling should not be a problem
- second, it is not true. Kernel ABI is stable (mostly). And running statically compiled binary between major kernel releases never have been a problem.
> infrastructure operators are not going to be happy having to do patch-tuesday and recompiling their software on a regular basis for hardware they'd really prefer to leave alone and stable.
Do they ?
Even on ATM, client software evolves and is updated. In their case, they just do it with the pain of a legacy system without being able to touch to the platform itself because they have no control on it.
I don't understand. Is your claim that ATMs are running Windows XP because Microsoft did get buried under a pile of ash in the early '00s and released no further OS upgrades, and therefore it would have been better for the ATM manufacturer to use an open-source OS because they, unlike Windows, survived to 2021?
Nobody in this thread is arguing that everything in the world is perfect. There are a lot of bad things in the world. (The fact that we haven't figured out a reliable, scalable way to develop major F/OSS projects without the backing of companies that either sell proprietary software or do far worse things is certainly one of them!)
The specific argument in this subthread is about whether it's okay to build your business on proprietary software or whether there's too much of a risk that the vendor will stop producing updates. If they aren't interested in updates when they actually happened, then clearly this wasn't a concern for them.
(Also, have you never seen people running extremely out-of-date versions of F/OSS operating systems?)
> The specific argument in this subthread is about whether it's okay to build your business on proprietary software or whether there's too much of a risk that the vendor will stop producing updates
It has everything to do with that and I think it's a way too narrow view.
In this case Microsoft indeed did not go bankrupt. They did however stopped to provide updates to solution "Windows XP", without giving an alternative compatible on the same legacy hardware (the old ATM hardware).
And that illustrates perfectly the problem with proprietary ecosystem. You do NOT need your provider to bankrupt to put yourself in shit, you just need him to have interests diverging of your interests.
Because at the end, he is the one controlling your software stack, not you.
> They did however stopped to provide updates to solution "Windows XP", without giving an alternative compatible on the same legacy hardware (the old ATM hardware).
Hang on there… Microsoft never did stop making updates to Windows XP Embedded - they kept it on super-extended support as “Windows POSReady” (I think the pun was intentional…) and it’s replacement in “Windows IoT” is reasonable.
Your argument is valid only if ATM manufacturers were being missold XP Embedded by Microsoft on the basis that the support lifecycle of XP Embedded would outlive the ATM hardware - but I put it to you that is not the case. The support lifeycle of MS products is (surprisingly) well-documented and transparent - and to my knowledge (and saying that as a former blue-badge myself) MS has never represented XP Embedded (or other NT-family OSes) as being suitable for a 20+ year lifespan. The blame lies squarely with the systems-integrator who built the ATMs.
>If it would be "easily quantifiable", you would not see in 2021 still bank ATM running damn Windows XP or nuclear power plant under Win2000 with some old deprecated crap supervisor tools.
Why would you not see that? The risk profile is well understood, and can be mitigated. Sandboxes, firewalls, app-containers, input sanitization, Virtual Machines, etc, etc, etc.
I don't quite understand exactly what you're disagreeing with?
Which, btw, was also thanks to the EFF. Their mission is occasionally murky these days, but their part in the subsequent restoration of youtube-dl in the face of a DMCA takedown is not to be ignored or forgotten.
In the face of widely popular de-platforming of some individuals, it's not clear to me what the EFF's position should be. I don't want them to ignore current affairs (aka how to counter cultish indoctrination of people with totally bonkers lies like "the covid vaccine has a microchip in it") while at the same time preserving the freedom of speech we believe in (in the US).
I once posted on here to give feedback about the new UI they were testing out at Github. The UI that you now see.
All I said was that it's cool but I can't see the latest commit status (the result of your CI pipeline) any more, and that I sent that feedback through the official channels as it were. I think I tacked a less favourable comment on the end and that was also answered.
First reply to my HN comment was from Nat, acknowledging it.
I’m still personally waiting on “leveraging the vast resources of Microsoft will have the greatest likelihood of affecting public policy” regarding ICE.
That was 2019. It’s almost like he didn’t actually intend on doing anything about it.
Most people probably say this just to be like “I know Nat, look at me.” I don’t know how to phrase this to avoid that:
Nat is an incredible person. I’ve been lucky to get to know him over the past couple months. Not only is he super chill, but he’s also not afraid to ask basic questions. Many of you might roll your eyes at that, but it’s a real problem: when you’re organizing something, you feel pressured to know everything, or else you’ll lose people’s confidence. So all the people who try to act confident also rarely ask basic questions.
Hackers are the opposite. We’re always focused on breaking down problems into the most basic components, and then building up complexity once we understand the system.
When Nat reached out to me, I didn’t know what to expect. But I certainly didn’t expect him to be a fellow hacker that happened to be famous. I think it’s incredible that someone can go so long without losing that spirit — imagine suddenly having a boatload of money. Most of us would probably take things easier.
Another surprise is how incredibly chill he is. When things go seriously wrong, he’s totally cool about it, in a way that’s hard to put into words. I learned the phrase “No stress, friend” from him, and I’ve used it a few times to soothe other people. As cliche as it sounds, sometimes it’s the one thing in the world you need to hear.
I wish I could tell a certain story to underscore the point, but Nat’s stories are his to tell. I hope he writes a book someday — nothing fancy, just a raw thought stream of all his experiences.
And I wish I could share his future ambition. It’s so exciting that I can hardly contain myself. It might not work out, but that’s true of everything.
I don’t know if anyone will see this. But I just wanted to write a little note to say how rare Nat is. He actually cares — deeply — and also cares about you. Most leaders don’t.
If someone reading this has the opportunity to work with him on his new project, I encourage you to leave your cushy job on that basis alone. It’ll be fun in a way you won’t experience elsewhere.
> I don’t know if anyone will see this. But I just wanted to write a little note to say how rare Nat is. He actually cares — deeply — and also cares about you. Most leaders don’t.
That's the worrying thing - how will Github be 5 years from now without Nat at the helm.
He (unless someone impersonated him) made some quite undiplomatic remarks regarding CoPilot here on HN. As an OSS author, I was offended by those remarks.
I think it's fine that someone shares their bold opinions on future technology and puts it out in the public without hiding all this discussion in private where the public can not interact with them.
I'd rather have someone be direct and honest about things instead of the corporate "thank you for your feedback, it is very valuable to us!" Not only is it devoid of any real content, at least half the time it also means "we don't care" or even an outright "fuck off".
Maybe he could have communicated things better? I don't know which remarks specifically you're referring to. But "undiplomatic" is not a bad thing IMHO (within bounds of reason).
This person at MSFT who got promoted is the one that caused the problems in the dotnet community where features that had a go-live RTM license (as in merged and ready for long term support) were removed from the programming language so that more Microsoft Visual Studio licenses could be sold.
I use Visual Studio to develop software ( C++ ) for Windows and Linux targets. I do not find it slow and rather than being "pain" it is actually way above other development IDEs in my opinion.
Ok, just rebooted PC. Less than 2 seconds from clicking VS icon till the first prompt asking what do I want to do. After that again less than 2 sec to open previous project.
Mind you this is first restart of Visual Studio in however many days had passed since the last update. Hence "cold boot time" is largely irrelevant to me.
I value VS for reasons other than "cold boot time". IntelliSense and debugging features weigh way more in my decision to keep VS as my main development tool for C++.
All my C++ servers are multiplatform: Linux/Windows. Usually I develop and debug on Windows and deploy on Linux. Deployment on Linux is handled by simple script that pulls from repo, builds and runs tests. However if needed VS can deploy, compile and debug straight on remote Linux server. I use this feature sometimes.
I have it running for weeks sometimes. My development desktop has 128GB RAM so VS just stays there. I frankly do not care about hot/cold reload time of this IDE at all even though it is very fast in my case.
>"When I learnt to debug remote code from my Visual Studio, I was blown away."
You should try VS 2022 preview. All you need is SSH access on remote comp. You do not have to deploy anything to target. VS does everything it needs
There’s a large conflict of interest when Visual Studio is a paid commercial product, while VS Code is free yet gaining marketshare even in C#/C++ work. When someone is willing to sacrifice the OSS-licensed product (even after the feature was already coded[0]), it shows Microsoft’s true colors in that they “embrace OSS” only to the extent select teams at MS choose too; the culture isn’t one that puts OSS first over sales.
- "We have at the time of writing, 5 core developers who contribute part time to the development of CPython: Brett Cannon, Steve Dower, Guido van Rossum, Eric Snow, and Barry Warsaw"
- "also employs several core contributors and maintainers of key open-source projects in the Python ecosystem, including pandas, Dask, Jupyter, nteract, scikit-learn and Apache Arrow"
- "$150K financial sponsorship of the PSF"
- "long-time sponsors of PyCon US, having been the top-tier Keystone sponsors of the event for four years and continuing" (and other conferences too)
“Microsoft doing shitty/shady things is nothing new, especially here, but seeing as they've recently started advocating for open-source, this seems like quite a step backwards. Some background first. Microsoft has been working on an open-source Python type checker called pyright for some time now. The first public commit dates back to 2019-03-11. It seems quite promising, though I haven't tried it myself yet, with them advertising "speed" as its main characteristic. All fine and good so far. Then, in October of this year, they released PyLance, a VS code extension that serves as a language server for Python and uses pyright for type checking. PyLance is not open-source”
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."
As acquisitions go, this has probably been one of the best executed ones in recent history. MS deserves a lot of credit for having managed that very well. And I'm sure a lot of that is also due to Nat's management.
I'll take the "con" side. A lot of the core Rubyists left for Shopify after the sale, and I'm sure Nat had a contract to stay on for X amount of time, where Microsoft would make no major changes. Now that this is expiring, I fully expect Microsoft to start making changes with the site that will appeal to large corporations, at the expense of what I would prefer, as an individual user. I guess time will tell.
You misunderstand why I brought up him being from Xamarin.
The initial conversation was about how Nat was likely leaving because his contract ran out. The counterpoint was that he was from the Microsoft side and therefore he didn't have a retention contract. I brought up Xamarin because he was likely under a retention contract from that acquisition.
That being said, these contracts probably had little to no effect on his decision though, as I'm sure he would have made more money than he could spend in a lifetime regardless of whether he had stayed or not.
> I brought up Xamarin because he was likely under a retention contract from that acquisition.
Microsoft bought Xamarin in February 2016. I'm sure five-year retention contracts are possible, but that seems extraordinarily long; I've rarely seen longer than two years.
To me, Nat and Miguel come from Xamarin Desktop, which made Linux on the desktop an actual pleasure in the late 90's/early 2000's. They're a couple of my heroes.
Aside that Nat came from Microsoft, they made already tons of changes to GitHub. Both for the Enterprise and for the public open source.
I do not see any indication about that being bound to a contract. They are also promoting the chief product officer which indicates that he did so far a good job. Which means, we can expect that they continue like they have done in the last year.
I don't see it. MS has Azure DevOps for their Ms-specific stack and Enterprise. GH is the closed source app where people come to do open source, and way too valuable as-is.
In the grand scheme of things it does make sense to focus on one or the other. However, they better execute this with precision because they risk interrupting big business in both products
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]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Microsoft buying Github was the best thing that could've happened to Github/open source in general.
Screw the people who still spread MS FUD. I cannot think of any other company, certainly not FB/Goog (Amzn has nothing in this space and no interest outside paid AWS services) that would've done anything close to what MS have done.
Everything is better, tons of things are now free, integration has improved, there's full transparency. It helps that MS's own tools like VSCode, VS online etc are best in class by some margin and used by everyone.
I’m rolling my eyes hard at your claim of VS Code as best in class. If the category is JS-powered code editors then I’ll surely give them that title. However BS Code has many flaws compared to other IDEs. One being that it’s restricted in performance by the language it’s written in. I don’t use those products so I must not be apart of everyone?
When is the last time Microsoft "EEE"-ed anything? The most recent examples are 20 years old.
And look, you should never trust $bigcorp blindly, that would be naïve, but people have these 20-year old grievances that have little bearing on the situation today.
"[Strategy for entering product categories involving widely used standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and then using those differences in order to strongly disadvantage its competitors. "
So pray tell me, how does one either "embrace" or "extend" a product that has always been proprietary, has never used open protocols or standards, and never had any interoperability with anything else?
EEE is about making standards and protocols incompatible with competitors. This literally cannot apply to Skype as it was never compatible with anything. I don't know what part of that is so hard to grasp. You seem intent on using your own definition of "every bad decision Microsoft ever made" or some such.
I never indicated that the definition couldn't include open implementations, just that the definition wasn't limited to ONLY openness. There are plenty of examples of this behavior not even exclusive to Microsoft. Proprietary products can build on an open protocol and attempt to change it, sometimes for the worse.
I didn't bring Skype into this, so I'm not going to comment on it as an example.
Have you used Atom, Sublime etc? VS Code is far better than them, and its an actual IDE. I don't know how much you work in JS but VSC is the defacto choice for everyone and has a million extensions while still being fast. If you don't work in that area then its understandable but you really shouldn't comment on it in that case. Its not competing with VS for instance.
So you say that VS Code is best in class IDE, without specifying any scope.
Then when someone calls that out, they shouldn't comment if they don't work with Javascript?
Which one is it, best in class JS editor (which yepthatsreality actually agreed to), or best in class IDE (but only people who work on JS can comment on that...)?
I have used Atom, VS Code, Vim, Nano, SublimeText, Notepad++, Jetbrains IDEs, etc. I currently use SublimeText and Javascript is the primary language at my employer (beating out Perl, PHP, Ruby, Python, Groovy, Java, and Typescript). SublimeText has plenty of supported plugins and is even faster and can handle larger files than VS Code. I'm not here to dick measure though.
There is never "Just Best".
Its always very much subjective.
And speed is not always everything, as long as it is fast enough.
And for example.. For me, my use case, emacs is best.
It can do anything. It is best as Swiss Army knife, because it can do anything. JS IDE? Sure here. Clojure? Here you go boss. Haskell? Hell yeah. Especially, since introduction of LSP stuff (Emacs LSP and Eglot).
Simultaneously it can do IRC, note taking, literate programming, statistics, and much more, like remote editing with TRAMP. So in that case, it is best.
I considered it, briefly changed it, but reverted it.
Reason for changing: probably the most important exception to HN's title rule ("Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.") is in the case of corporate press releases, whose bland titles are usually a kind of misdirection (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).
Reason for reverting: on reflection I think the title is more Nat's voice than corporate PR, and I'd rather respect that.
There seems to be a lot of confusion in the HN community about Nat originally coming from Github. He was already a Microsoft employee at the time Github was aquired.
That confusion alone speaks books on how well Microsoft integrated Github under his tenure. Kudos.
I fully agree, I was one of those until 5 minutes ago. I'm happy that GitHub managed to stay being what it used to be, and has the strong financial backing of Microsoft.
Stack Exchange, GitHub and Wikipedia, God bless them.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
it's `cd $_` with the underscore, it repeat the last argument.
from bash man page
> _ At shell startup, set to the pathname used to invoke the shell or shell script being executed as passed in the environment or argument list. Subse‐
> quently, expands to the last argument to the previous simple command executed in the foreground, after expansion. Also set to the full pathname used
> to invoke each command executed and placed in the environment exported to that command. When checking mail, this parameter holds the name of the
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].
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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"?
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 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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
As a newer user that's actually one of the things I love about HN, that people accurately and succinctly summarise the link's content in the title. And if not, someone will ask them to do so in the comments.
That's actually (generally) the opposite of what happens. Usually someone will editorialize the title and the admins will change it to the contents of the title tag. If you see a good synopsis it's probably because the author of the piece took the time to write a hook-ful title.
> 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.
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.
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The one time that I won't forget about Github under Nat, was when they stood up for Iranian developers [1]. They went the extra distance to get a permission/license from the US government specially to offer full Github to developers from Iran. Many other companies didn't do something similar.
[1]: https://github.blog/2021-01-05-advancing-developer-freedom-g...