News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Windows Package Manager 1.1 by 908B64B197 on Monday October 11, 2021 @01:31PM (#28830760)
This story again?

I once interviewed a smart guy from a certain UC across the bay. Still undergrad, he played a lot with Python and wished he could have something similar to pip when doing C/C++.

So he wrote himself a "package manager" that could fetch binaries, place header files correctly and add them to his build. Neat little project.

That's basically what this guy did. It reads a YAML file and exec() whatever build instruction is in there. The CS102 guy I hired could do it as well.

Keivan was brought in by Microsoft for an interview and he didn't get the job. He kept talking about how "he could have patented this" or how it was an "acquihire" but there's nothing new to acquire in there! I mean it's not like he invented package management (NuGet, Chocolatey, Scoop all predate his attempt).

But hey, he flunked his interview and got a lot of eyes on his startup thanks to some well placed clickbait on HN...

Re:Windows Package Manager 1.1 by bobthebuilders on Monday October 11, 2021 @02:01PM (#28831056)
Wow, I didn't know Microsoft was that shady. The original story was bad enoguh, but this makes it even worse. So they took the time to get ideas out of him and do the exact same thing he did, when a CS 102 guy could do the same thing when YAML files and exec... wow. I have no other words.
Re:Windows Package Manager 1.1 by 908B64B197 on Monday October 11, 2021 @04:33PM (#28832716)
> So they took the time to get ideas out of him and do the exact same thing he did

No. Both package managers are open-source and share no code. They aren't even written in the same language. [0] [1]

It seems the author of AppGet wanted to sell it to Microsoft and Microsoft didn't see anything worth to acquire. He never even spoke to the people who could make the purchasing decision. Then they gave him a regular PM interview and it seems he failed it.

[0] https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli

[1] https://github.com/appget/appget

Re:Windows Package Manager 1.1 by still_grokking on Monday October 11, 2021 @03:07PM (#28831790)
We had the shady Microsoft topic just yesterday:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28794352

I can only repeat myself: Microsoft is Microsoft, whatever they do.