Hacker News Reader

Comment by ants_everywhere | Hacker News Reader

I say this as someone who has been cautioning about Microsoft's ownership of GitHub for years now... but the Zig community has been high drama lately. I thought the Rust community had done themselves a disservice with their high tolerance of drama, but lately Zig seems to me to be more drama than even Rust.

I was saddened to see how they ganged up to bully the author of the Zig book. The book author, as far as I could tell, seems like a possibly immature teenager. But to have a whole community gang up on you with pitch forks because they have a suspicion you might use AI... that was gross to watch.

I was already turned off by the constant Zig spam approach to marketing. But now that we're getting pitchfork mobs and ranty anti-AI diatribes it just seems like a community sustaining itself on negative energy. I think they can possibly still turn it around but it might involve cleaning house or instituting better rules for contributors.

View on HN

> seems like a possibly immature teenager.

What makes you say that? Couldn’t it be an immature adult?

> because they have a suspicion you might use AI

Was that the reason? From what I remember (which could definitely be incomplete information) the complaint was that they were clearly using AI while claiming no AI had been used, stole code from another project while claiming it was their own, refused to add credit when a PR for that was made, tried to claim a namespace on open-vsx…

At a certain point, that starts to look outright malicious. It’s one thing to not know “the rules” but be willing to fix your mistakes when they are pointed out. It’s an entirely different thing to lie, obfuscate, and double down on bad attitude.

I just want to point out that even if you are correct, as a Zig outsider, none of this is obvious. The situation just looks bad.

I’m a Zig outsider. I gathered the context from reading the conversation around it, most of it posted to HN. Which is why I also pointed out I may have incomplete information.

If one looks past the immediate surface, which is a prerequisite to form an informed opinion, Zigbook is the one who clearly looks bad. The website is no longer up, even, now showing a DMCA notice.

The way these sorts of things look to outsiders depends on the set of facts that are presented to those outsiders.

Choosing to focus on the existence of drama and bullying without delving into the underlying reason why there was such a negative reaction in the first place is kind of part and parcel to that.

At best it's the removal of context necessary to understand the dynamics at play, at worst it's a lie of omission.

The claims of AI use were unsubstantiated and pure conjecture, which was pointed out by people who understand language, including me. Now it appears that the community has used an MIT attribution violation to make the Zigbook author a victim of DMCA abuse.

That doesn't look great to me. It doesn't look like a community I would encourage others to participate in.

> tried to claim a namespace on open-vsx

It seems reasonable for the zigbook namespace to belong to the zigbook author. That's generally how the namespaces work right? https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Aeclipse%2Fopenvsx+namespa... https://github.com/eclipse/openvsx/wiki/Namespace-Access. IMO, this up there with the "but they were interested in crypto!" argument. The zigbook author was doing normal software engineer stuff, but somehow the community tries to twist it into something nefarious. The nefariousness is never stated because it's obviously absurd, but there's the clear attempt to imply wrongdoing. Unfortunately that just makes the community look as if they're trying hard to prosecute an innocent person in the court of public opinion.

> At a certain point, that starts to look outright malicious.

Malicious means "having the nature of or resulting from malice; deliberately harmful; spiteful". The Zig community looks malicious in this instance to me. Like you, I don't have complete information. But from the information I have the community response looked malicious, punitive, harassing and arguably defamatory. I don't think I've ever seen anything like it in any open source community.

Again, prior to the MIT attribution claim there was no evidence the author of Zigbook had done anything at all wrong. Among other things, there was no evidence they had lied about the use of AI. Malicious and erroneous accusations of AI use happen frequently these days, including here on HN.

Judging by the strength of the reaction, the flimsiness of the claims and the willingness to abuse legal force against the zigbook author, my hunch is that there is some other reason zigbook was controversial that isn't yet publicly known. Given the timing it possibly has to do with Anthropic's acquisition of Bun.

> The claims of AI use were unsubstantiated and pure conjecture

It seemed that way to me at the start too, but it quickly became apparent. Even the submitter thought so after going through the git history.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45952436

> It seems reasonable for the zigbook namespace to belong to the zigbook author. That's generally how the namespaces work right?

Yes. Bad actors try to give themselves legitimacy by acquiring as many domains and namespaces as quickly and as soon as they can with as little work as possible. The amount of domains they bought raised flags for me.

> IMO, this up there with the "but they were interested in crypto!" argument.

No idea what you’re talking about. Was the Zigbook author interested in cryptocurrency and criticised for it?

> The nefariousness is never stated because it's obviously absurd, but there's the clear attempt to imply wrongdoing.

That’s not true. It was stated repeatedly and explicitly.

https://zigtools.org/blog/zigbook-plagiarizing-playground/

Them stealing code, claiming it as their own, refusing to give attribution and editing third-party comments to make it seem the author is saying they are “autistic and sperging” is OK with you?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46095338

You really see nothing wrong with that and think criticising such behaviour is flimsy and absurd?

> I don't think I've ever seen anything like it in any open source community.

I’m certainly not excusing bad behaviour, but this wouldn’t even fall into the top 100 toxic behaviours in open-source. Plenty of examples online and submitted to HN over the years.

> Malicious and erroneous accusations of AI use happen frequently these days, including here on HN.

I know. I’m constantly arguing against it especially when I see someone using the em-dash as the sole argument. I initially pushed back against the flimsy claims in the Zigbook submission, but quickly the evidence started mounting and I retracted it.

> Given the timing it possibly has to do with Anthropic's acquisition of Bun.

I don’t buy it. The announcement of the acquisition happened after.

I think if you take a step back and try to fight against confirmation bias you'll see that the arguments you're making are very weak.

You are also moving the goal posts. You started with it was sketchy to claim a namespace now you're moving to it's sketchy to own domains. Of course people are going to buy variants on their domains.

This is easily in the top 5 most toxic moments in open source, and off the top of my head seems like #1. For all you know this is some kid in a country with a terrible job market trying to create a resource for the community and get their name out there. And the Zig community tried to ruin his life because they whipped themselves into a frenzy and convinced themselves there were secret signs that an AI might have been used at some point.

I've never seen an open source community gang up like that to bully someone based on absolutely no evidence of any wrong doing except forgetting to include an attribution for 22 lines of code. That's the sort of issue that happens all the time in open source and this is the first time I've seen it be used to try to really hurt someone and make them personally suffer. The intentional cruelty and the group of stronger people deliberately picking on a weaker person is what makes it far worse to me than the many other issues in open source of people behaving impolitely.

This is an in-group telling outsiders they're not welcome and, not only that, if we don't like you we'll hurt you.

And yes there have been repeated mentions of their interest in crypto, including in this thread.

> You are also moving the goal posts. You started with it was sketchy to claim a namespace now you're moving to it's sketchy to own domains.

Please don’t distort my words. That is a bad faith argument. I never claimed it was “sketchy to claim a namespace”, I listed the grievances other people made. That’s what “From what I remember (…) the complaint was” means. When I mentioned the domains, that was something which looked fishy to me. There’s no incongruence or goal post moving there. Please argue in good faith.

> For all you know this is some kid in a country with a terrible job market trying to create a resource for the community and get their name out there.

And for all you know, it’s not. Heck, for all I know it could be you. Either way it doesn’t excuse the bad behaviour, which is plenty and documented. All you have in defence is speculation which even if true wouldn’t justify anything.

You may not have seen this as I added the context after posting, so I’ll repeat it here:

> Them stealing code, claiming it as their own, refusing to give attribution and editing third-party comments to make it seem the author is saying they are “autistic and sperging” is OK with you?

> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46095338

> You really see nothing wrong with that and think criticising such behaviour is flimsy and absurd?

Please answer that part. Is that OK with you? Do you think that is fine and excusable? Do you think that’s a prime example of someone “trying to create a resource for the community”? Is that not toxic behaviour?

Criticise the Zig community all you want, but pay attention to the person you’re so fervently defending too.

> I was saddened to see how they ganged up to bully the author of the Zig book. The book author, as far as I could tell, seems like a possibly immature teenager. But to have a whole community gang up on you with pitch forks because they have a suspicion you might use AI... that was gross to watch.

Your assumption is woefully incorrect. People were annoyed, when the explicit and repeated lie that the AI generated site he released which was mostly written by AI, was claimed to be AI free. But annoyed isn't why he was met with the condemnation he received.

In addition to the repeated lies, there's the long history of this account of typosquatting various groups, many, many crypto projects, the number of cursor/getcursor accounts, the license violation and copying code without credit from an existing community group (with a reputation for expending a lot of effort, just to help other zig users), the abusive and personal attack editing the PR asking, for nothing but crediting the source of the code he tried to steal. All the while asking for donations for the work he copied from others.

All of that punctuated by the the fact he seems to have plans to typo squat Zig users given he controls the `zigglang` account on github. None of this can reasonable be considered just a simple mistake on a bad day. This is premeditated malicious behavior from someone looking to leach off the work of other people.

People are mad because the guy is a selfish asshole, who has a clear history of coping from others, being directly abusive, and demonstrated intent to attempt to impersonate the core ziglang team/org... not because he dared to use AI.

I agree partially.

I do think that it was weird to focus on the AI aspect so much. AI is going to pollute everything going forward whether you like it or not. And honestly who cares, either it is a good ressource for learning or it’s not. You have to decide that for yourself and not based on whether AI helped writing it.

However I think some of the critique was because he stole the code for the interactive editor and claimed he made it himself, which of course you shouldn’t do.

You can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the actual claim was that Zigbook had not complied with the MIT license's attribution clause for code someone believed was copied. MIT only requires attribution for copies of "substantial portions" of code, and the code copied was 22 lines.

Does that count as substantial? I'm not sure because I'm not a lawyer, but this was really an issue about definitions in an attribution clause over less code than people regularly copy from stack overflow without a second thought. By the time this accusation was made, the Zigbook author was already under attack from the community which put them in a defensive posture.

Now, just to be clear, I think the book author behaved poorly in response. But the internet is full of young software engineers who would behave poorly if they wrote a book for a community and the community turned around and vilified them for it. I try not to judge individuals by the way they behave on their worst days. But I do think something like a community has a behavior and culture of its own and that does need to be guided with intention.

> You can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the actual claim was that Zigbook had not complied with the MIT license's attribution clause for code someone believed was copied. MIT only requires attribution for copies of "substantial portions" of code, and the code copied was 22 lines.

Without including proper credit, it is classic infringement. I wouldn't personally call copyright infringement "theft", though.

Imagine for a moment, the generosity of the MIT license: 'you can pretty much do anything you want with this code, I gift it to the world, all you have to do is give proper credit'. And so you read that, and take and take and take, and can't even give credit.

> Now, just to be clear, I think the book author behaved poorly in response

Precisely: maybe it was just a mistake? So, the author politely and professionally asks, not for the infringer to stop using the author's code, but just to give proper credit. And hey, here's a PR, so doing the right thing just requires an approval!

The infringer's response to the offer of help seemed to confirm that this was not a mistake, but rather someone acting in bad faith. IMO, people should learn early on in their life to say "I was wrong, I'm sorry, I'll make it right, it won't happen again". Say that when you're wrong, and the respect floods in.

> By the time this accusation was made, the Zigbook author was already under attack

This is not quite accurate, from my recollection of events (which could be mistaken!): the community didn't even know about it until after the author respectfully, directly contacted the infringer with an offer to help, and the infringer responded with hostility and what looked like a case of Oppositional Defiant Disorder.

> I do think that it was weird to focus on the AI aspect so much. AI is going to pollute everything going forward whether you like it or not.

The bigger issue is that they claimed no AI was used. That’s an outright lie which makes you think if you should trust anything else about it.

> And honestly who cares, either it is a good ressource for learning or it’s not. You have to decide that for yourself and not based on whether AI helped writing it.

You have no way of knowing if something is a good resource for learning until you invest your time into it. If it turns out it’s not a good resource, your time was wasted. Worse, you may have learned wrong ideas you now have to unlearn. If something was generated with an LLM, you have zero idea which parts are wrong or right.

I agree with you. It is shitty behavior to say it is not AI written when it clearly is.

But I also think we at this point should just assume that everything is partially written using AI.

For your last point, I think this was also a problem before LLMs. It has of course become easier to fake some kind of ethos in your writing, but it is also becoming easier to spot AI slop when you know what to look after right?

> I agree with you. It is shitty behavior to say it is not AI written when it clearly is.

> But I also think we at this point should just assume that everything is partially written using AI.

Using "but" here implies your 2nd line is a partial refutation to the first. No one would have been angry if he'd posted it without clearly lying. Using AI isn't what pissed anyone off, being directly lied to (presumably to get around the strict "made by humans" rules across all the various Zig communities). Then there was the abusive PR edits attacking someone that seems to have gotten him banned. And his history of typosquatting, both various crypto surfaces, and cursor, and the typosquatting account for zigglang. People are mad because the guy is a selfish asshole, not because he dared to use AI.

Nothing I've written has been assisted by AI in any way, and I know a number of people who do and demand the same. I don't think it's a reasonable default assumption.

> turned off by the constant Zig spam approach to marketing

? what? from my experience zig marketing is pretty mid. it is nowhere at the level of rust.

heck, rust evangelism strikeforce made me hate rust and all the people promote it, even for now.

You're assuming they are a teenager but you don't know. They used code without attribution and when asked to do so, they edited the comment and mocked the requestor. And you're calling the zig community the bully? They lied about not using AI. This kind of dishonesty does not need to be tolerated.

Disservice? Rust is taking over the world while they still have nothing to show basically (Servo, the project Rust was created for, is behind ladybird of all things). Every clueless developer and their dog thinks Rust is like super safe and great, with very little empirical evidence still after 19 years of the language's existence.

Zig people want Zig to "win". They are appearing on Hacker News almost every day now, and for that purpose this kind of things matters more than the language's merits themselves. I believe the language has a good share of merits though, far more than Rust, but it's too early and not battle tested to get so much attention.

> very little empirical evidence

Evidence is easy to turn up and cite:

https://security.googleblog.com/2025/11/rust-in-android-move...

https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/news/urgent-need-memory-saf...

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/msrc/blog/2019/07/a-proactiv...

https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-security/memory-safet...

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/02/rewriting-a-browser-compon...

FWIW, all of those links compare Rust to languages created before 1980, and are all projects largely and unusually independent of the crates ecosystem and where dynamic linking does not matter. If you're going to use a modern language anyway, you should do due diligence and compare it with something like Swift as the ladybird team is doing right now, or even a research language like Koka. There is a huge lack of evidence for Rust vs other modern languages and we should investigate that before we lock ourselves into yet another language that eventually becomes widely believed to suck.

Here's what Microsoft decided after a comparison to C#: https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/31/microsoft_seeks_rust_...

Microsoft isn't going to abandon C#, it's just using the right tool for the right job. While there are certainly cases where it is justified to go lower level and closer to the metal, writing everything in Rust would be just as dumb as writing everything in C# or god forbid, JS.

I'm not claiming otherwise. I'm just saying that saving some hundreds of millions of dollars on compute is what Rust as a language can enable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com