Steve Klabnik is no longer involved with the book The Rust Programming Language | Hacker News Reader

Steve Klabnik is no longer involved with the book The Rust Programming Language

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40 pointscassepipe22 comments

I am a bit uncomfortable with how people air dirty laundry when leaving something behind. It just feels like unnecessary drama that doesn't reflect well on both the person leaving and what they are leaving behind.

Maybe it is because I see twitter as a "Work" related social media platform where personal details are more... "sanitized".

Regardless of all of this, I am extremely grateful to Carol and Steve for writing such an approachable book and making it available for free.

Wonder if it also had something to do with the possibility of Amazon trying to influence the direction of the Rust Foundation which that is already unsurprising given how the foundation allows board seats to be bought these days and there were some concerns by some users warning him about this in the last HN thread [0] and another one replying directly to him. [1]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28513316

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26125591

Has there been any update on the Great Klabazon Schism of a month or so ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28513130)? It felt like that was the start of a protracted 'leaking against' campaign, but then nothing really came of it.

That's the book called "The Rust Programming Language", as opposed to the Rust programming language itself. I assume he's still involved with the latter.

Really sad to see Steve go. That book is half the reason I'm excited about Rust. As the first thing I stumbled on when approaching the language it gave off such a strong vibe of wanting to help developers instead of trying to make them feel stupid. Much love Steve!

Twitter is such a horrible way to convey information with all these small snippets of text and no sensible way to get more context.

All I understood is that he "refuse[s] to do it with her and also without her" which is just confusing.

> Twitter is such a horrible way to convey information with all these small snippets of text and no sensible way to get more context

I wouldn't say horrible, just different. It's a list of small texts, but they're consecutive so you only need to scroll down.

When you open a tweet, it shows its direct replies below, prioritizing the author's own replies so it forms a coherent string.

Each reply can have its own replies, but you don't have to read those subthreads. Think of it as HN with all first-level comments collapsed by default.

Then imagine if HN comments could only be 280 characters. And instead of seeing all the branches of the conversation tree, ordered by the vote count of the parent node, you instead saw a random subset of them, chosen on the basis of what Twitter thinks will optimise engagement for your specific account. Once you finish your assigned selection of replies, you're not able to see – hell, you're not even able to elect to be shown – the rest of the thread.

Instead, you're shown more tweets Twitter chooses for you, except this time unrelated ones, such that I recently followed a link to a Brendan Eich tweet about JavaScript and ended up being shepherded to the latest and greatest anti-vax thought leaders, in keeping with his current political leanings: https://imgur.com/a/755aOwI

I'm not going to make any grand claims about it being 'toxic' or 'destroying democracy', or how it ought to be banned, or about tHe AlGOrIthMs, or any of that. I'm just going to say that it's an extraordinarily, exasperatingly stilted way of structuring a conversation. And I'm mystified by that, given the size and success of Twitter, and the relative ease of just showing you the straight conversation like HN does. Hell, if they did that, I wouldn't even care about the character limit.</rant>

Ah, to be fair, I only read the author's replies, and those are already shown first. The rest only if something catches my eye. Fortunately the bulk of replies are inane, and Twitter does a good job at weeding them.

Imagine if HN had hundreds/thousands of first-level comments. Upvoting/downvoting alone wouldn't be enough to weed them or showcase the best of them.

Ah, sorry I missed this. This is true in general, but I'd like to be able to control whether, and in what way, I 'load shed' comments. I also don't trust the design priorities of Twitter's logic which selects for me.

If you think criticizing covid vaccines makes someone "anti-vax" as a binary all-or-none, Pharma-all-good-versus-all-bad binary, then you're the one politicizing the issue. I know one of the three people in your Imgur screencap, and we're not on the same page politically. Good luck with that false binary!

Can someone give context on this?

I don't have a reference at hand, but Klabnik has expressed significant dissent in relation to Amazon's involvement (which could be interpreted as a takeover).

EDIT: the post title may be misleading :) for general information, my reference was to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28513130

This is about the book, not the programming language. He seems to have fallen out with his co-author and walked away.

He said it's about Amazon later in the thread.

https://twitter.com/steveklabnik/status/1445926703256281090

Seems to be right on the mark.

https://twitter.com/steveklabnik/status/1445926703256281090

Oh, I thought the whole Rust language. Turns out it’s just a book titled “The Rust Programming Language”.

Rule in 2021: Never contribute to "open" source unless you are in the correct corporation.

C, C++ and Lisp are still free because they have standards and many implementations.

Not sure I'd point to C++ of all things as being free from the concerns of large corporations lol. This is just such an uninformed take.

And who do you think are members of those standards boards/committees? Employees of corporations!

Influence is not always overt or malicious, but it happens. For example, a corp wants a new feature in C++ stdlib. They hire someone (or get an existing employee) to build the new feature, submit for adoption to the standards committee, present at conferences, handle RFC feedbacks, etc. until finally the feature is accepted.

It's exactly how the process is intended to work.

In reality, usually they just release their own implementation with non-standard features and popularize them, resulting in either compiler lock-in or de-facto adoption in the standards as other compilers adopt them as well.

Why is this news? It would be more newsworthy if he decided to stick with updating it.

Generally, it's considered news when things change in important ways

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