Hacker News Reader

Comment by ttiurani | Hacker News Reader

Looking at these comments, it's painfully apparent how many think that being polite in your communication is more important than actually doing something.

I agree it would have been nicer if the message was more polite. But if you compare that to having the backbone follow through with meaningful long-term changes against a corporation you don't trust or respect, there shouldn't even be a discussion.

And don't even get me started with the people who come in here just to point out that Codeberg isn't perfect either.

View on HN

> I agree it would have been nicer if the message was more polite. But if you compare that to having the backbone follow through with meaningful long-term changes against a corporation you don't trust or respect, there shouldn't even be a discussion.

You’re framing it as either/or when it isn’t. You can push for real change and communicate like an adult. The two aren’t in conflict; often they reinforce each other.

> The two aren’t in conflict; often they reinforce each other

I’d think they _are_ inherently in conflict. Every person has 24 hours per day, and they can spend them on researching and doing what’s right or on reaching consensus. There is some mutual reinforcement to some extent (as it’s usually right to have a reasonable consensus on what’s the right choice), but beyond some basic level there’s always tradeoff.

And for programming language designers, I really appreciate when they make the right long-term choices even if I don’t understand initially why they were made.

> it's painfully apparent how many think that being polite in your communication is more important than actually doing something

So you want people to talk about actions, not manners. Great.

> And don't even get me started with the people who come in here just to point out that Codeberg isn't perfect either.

Except actions they did with Codeberg...?

Sharing their experience about Codeberg isn't off-topic in a thread about a major repo migrating to Codeberg.

The fetish for "manners" has stood in the way of every single positive societal change. It's exactly what MLK meant with the white moderate favoring a negative peace over positive change:

the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"

MLK was, of course, famous for hurling vitriolic personal insults at people he disagreed with.

You should really take a step back and consider if MLK’s struggle for racial equality is an appropriate point of comparison for an open source project deciding to change to a different CI provider.

> You should really take a step back and consider if MLK’s struggle for racial equality is an appropriate point of comparison for an open source project deciding to change to a different CI provider.

To the type of nerds who crash out about a git hosting provider and publicly insult other developers, moving off GitHub might even be more meaningful than whatever MLK did.

A not-so-well designed CI is comparable to KKK. This is how discussions on the internet look today.

> it's painfully apparent how many think that being polite in your communication is more important than actually doing something.

The zig maintainers think that, too, thus the presence of a Code of Conduct on their website. But, as always, it's a "rules for thee, but not for me" situation - if the author was called a "monkey" by someone else, I can guarantee he would invoke the CoC to call them out, but when he does it, it's fine.

Nobody thinks that. They just don't think that "doing something" gives you an excuse to be an arsehole. Especially if you are hypocritically violating your own CoC.

Yes, it does. Given the choice of having a coworker that's a very nice 0.1x engineer and having a bloody annoying one that's a 10x I'll work with the 10x any day.

The internet has evolved such a Newspeak, censor-driven culture, it's sad to see. I want people to be able to tell each other "I think this is shit and here's why".

Given that choice, I would work with neither of them. The world has no shortage of people who are both skilled engineers and not assholes.

Politeness is free and easy, it's not a big ask and it's certainly not an either-or.

I wouldn't even call it politeness, it's more like basic human decency. Would Andrew Kelly appreciate it if the LLVM guys publicly wrote a blog post calling the Zig maintainers losers and monkeys? Just screams of immaturity, which isn't surprising seeing their political views.

Just the fact of someone migrating a project to another platform during the last week of November suggests that last straws were involved. That’s more of a January or a June thing than November/December.

Fury can be a powerful motivator to commit to doing something you’ve been putting off. It also means your community announcement is going to be pretty spicy, unless you let someone else write it.

> it's painfully apparent how many think that being polite in your communication is more important than actually doing something

I absolutely agree, but people in charge of large projects/groups, in any context, should know better than to put their personal feelings and opinion on topics into the "corporate" messages they are putting out. I am guilty of this myself, no one is holier than thou, but still. AK should know better.

This. The round & slimy language is what big corps do. I don't like how this post is written – but what really matters here is that they are doing a good job moving away from GitHub. I hope more OSS does this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com