> The authors brazen reaction another
When I first read about the MacOS port from HN, I also assumed it was blessed by Don Ho. I was fooled by the new website. Now that I know it was not coordinated, it looks weird (even creepy/uncanny valley'ish) in hindsight, especially using all the same icons and branding, and including Don Ho on the author page.
Aletik can fork n++ and find a name for it, but can't use the brand and logo, and should be stopped by all means necessary if he does not comply ASAP. Tech bloggers should know better than to promote this without checking.
Agreed, and it also seems unlikely this will be their takeaway. They now get to report on the drama which will probably get more clicks.
Imagine being slapped across the face, and instead of saying you were slapped, you say…”in coordination with the back of their left hand”.
This entire thread actually makes me so angry for the N++ team. He was being so kind in his wording and was clearly being taken advantage of.
“I’m in NYC you have my WhatsApp” wtf does that even mean…you eat chopped cheese and have a cell phone?
Already ignoring the authors wishes. He said clearly it is not OK and wants the name changed. That's it - but he keeps ignoring it.
I fail to see good intentions here.
It's not rocket science. Pretty sure even his LLM would give that strategy and implement it without burning too many tokens.
More than inexperienced, either he really can't read a room or he knows very well what he is doing.
- Saying he's hoping Don allows it
- "I actually did nothing wrong"
- "I actually did nothing wrong" part 2
- "I actually did nothing wrong" part 3
- Why are you so mad? Give me a week
- Why are you so mad? I added more lies to the website
- Why are you so mad? I'm working on it
... over the course of 2 days. Shutting down the website and pulling the app offline should have taken minutes.
Is it big?
Notepad++ is big in the Windows world but I am not certain that it is automatically big on Mac. They have much more Mac-native feeling editors like TextMate, Nova, Cot, even SublimeText feels more macOS-ishy than Notepad++
I am on Linux, Notepad++ is not a name of concern on here at all and if it ever came to Linux most people wouldn't notice.
If you're in the Windows world that might seem like an improbability given how big it is there, but trust me, it's not a well known name anywhere else.
Strong disagree. The thing I miss in linux most is notepad++ or something as capable and usable (open for suggestions, but chances are I already tried them)
Never attribute to stupidity (incompetence|naivety) that which is adequately explained by malice.
Maybe there's no malice intended and this is just a colossal pile of honest mistakes. Maybe this author is as clueless as he appears. Maybe, but until he appears at the United Nations and doxes himself before embarking on a world wide apology tour, nobody in their right mind should install that binary. I wouldn't even run the build script in a sandbox.
Also, his medium avatar looks awfully generated.
Make your own conclusions
From the fork's authors page
> Andrey Letov is a New York product leader and software engineer.
And then a long list of professional achievements follows.
He knows exactly what he's doing
I assume it is the "fake it till you make it" mentality, like "fake the endorsement until they actually endorse your project". Clearly doesn't work like this, but if this mentality has gotten you far, why not try it here too?
You can be inexperienced and naive, and at the same time understand when you make a mistake. Being "inexperienced" because you actively refuse to learn from what people tell you that you do wrong is not inexperience anymore.
I’d pay more attention to his behavior.
No inexperience here. It is malice
Regardless, he absolutely deserves to be shamed on GitHub for this. I don't like the online culture of public shame and sandbagging - I think this GitHub thread should be closed now that it's viral - but sometimes people actually do things they should be ashamed of. This needs to be a tough lesson.
> I've shipped fintech and risk products at Moody's, BNY, AxiomSL, Amex and many more. I've built platforms, designed user experiences, assembled portfolio analytics and worked on professional services teams.
Also' he's not young. Check his github avatar
This from his website is pretty funny:
These days I'm deep in multi-agent AI and honestly it's changed everything. I build with both hands, one on the code, one on the vision. I can finally bring to life ideas I've been carrying around for years that always needed too many people and too many quarters.
What I find baffling about that conversation are the people having their LLMs weigh in on what the author should have done. Verbal takedown by LLM is a new level of cringe.
Edit: There are some replies I hadn't seen, their confusion and request for patience sounds like they still don't fully appreciate their mistake.
Okay that might not be okay. So you take screen shots, release notes and feed that to the AI. Now it's fine.
Even better is if you can get the data trained into the model! Because then it's totally different right?
1 shotting companies is the future and that's why so many companies are accelerating ai by giving all their code and plans to the leading ai providers for money.
Seems he’s ignorant of the ecosystem too (or possibly disingenuous, or maybe doesn’t realise he’s done something wrong or why). Notepad++ runs perfectly on macOS under Wine. I’ve been using it that way for two or three years now. Wasn’t a struggle to set up either: I simply ran the installer as if I was running Windows and then it #justworked.
In Linux, the only things I don't have with Wine are whatever the other clipboard is that highlighting text gets filled with and access to network shares. Such nothingburgers that I've never spent real time to figure out if there's a solution.
It's not the end of the world, but the Windows version of Excel is streets ahead of the macOS version, which is why I was keen to make it work.
Otherwise, everything I really care about from Windows - the odd utility, along with retro computing emulators - seems to run fine on Wine. I haven't got into more modern games so can't speak to how well they tend to run.
When someone has an issue getting something like Notepad++ running with Wine, they have the option to inform the Notepad++ project or if they possess the skills, submit a change so that Notepad++ will run smoothly on Wine. Or, inform Wine and they may figure out how to fix the issue within Wine.
I haven't bothered getting Office running on Linux in a very long time. The only thing I miss is a convenient way to print envelopes, as LibreOffice is incapable of doing this. However, I mail far less than I used to so I just hand write the addresses.
I think the only real way to run Office is on Windows in VirtualBox, which I still haven't had any need to bother with.
If I fork a repo on GitHub and the name of the project is trademarked, have I committed trademark violation?
In this case he just went a little too far by cloning the whole website. Even then tbh I still take his side because it's in the spirit of the Wild West Internet culture to have done something like this.
"No, I'm not going to do that."
"Okay fine, I'll report you to Cloudflare now."
"BROOOOOOOO you said you'd give me a week?!?!"
"Stop using my trademark." [1]
"OK, give me a couple of weeks. I was intending to expand your brand." [2]
"No. I've reported this to your CDN." [3]
---
[1]: This is the correct way to handle things.
[2]: This has the appearance of being evidence of -deliberate- fuckery.
[3]: This kind of action is the inevitable result of deliberate fuckery.