Hacker News Reader

Comment by bigdict | Hacker News Reader

Why is it never mentioned that Sam the lone genius Gross who is "interested in PyTorch training workflows" is a fulltime Facebook employee?

Not that it's bad but it should be mentioned that it's a corporate initiative.

View on HN

Why is that relevant? Many of the people contributing significantly to CPython also have full time jobs elsewhere. Sometimes their full time job overlaps with their contributions and sometimes it does not. For example Guido works for Microsoft and is working on CPython performance there, does that mean all of his work needs an asterisk saying it's actually a Microsoft corporate initiative?

PyTorch seems to obfuscate its Facebook ownership in general. At least I could find no mention of it on their "About" page or in the documentation, where the only mention of "Facebook" is a link in the footer to the PyTorch project's own social media page: https://pytorch.org/features/

At least the "Brand Guidelines" PDF makes it clear that “PyTorch, the PyTorch logo and any related marks are trademarks of Facebook, Inc.”: https://pytorch.org/assets/brand-guidelines/PyTorch-Brand-Gu...

Also a small hint in `CONTRIBUTING.md`: https://github.com/pytorch/pytorch/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING....

Is it actually a corporate initiative? The project is hosted on Sam's personal GitHub[1].

[1]: https://github.com/colesbury/nogil

It may not be a Facebook initiative in the corporate strategy sense, but it's definitely a Facebook project, done on Facebook's dime. From the horse's mouth: https://lwn.net/ml/python-dev/CAGr09bRSwfinXNe4acTrpR8bM7nYh...

Would you consider python a Dropbox or google product given that Guido worked for both of those companies on python for close to 15 years?

Any component he soloed while on company time, yes, I would consider that an $employer project (not product, the work is donated under the PSF license and a CLA). We’re talking about ~2 years of paid full time work here.

There's funding and then there's research. I'd share headline credit about initiative to the person as well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com