Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Why the Microsoft hate?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 556 posts

Re: Ask HN: Why the Microsoft hate?

#111

Post by primelens »

olalonde wrote: post #20

In case you are genuinely wondering, a lot of the hate towards Microsoft stems from their historical hostility towards open standards[0] and open source[1]. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents

This! Many hackers who were growing up in the nineties had their opinions of Microsoft negatively affected by the strongarm tactics applied against Linux and open-source/free software. I'd say this strategy continues - e.g. "secure" boot, but the late nineties was when the animosity between the two groups peaked and it has never quite gone away.

And I'd add the antitrust case and IE's intransigence to web standards as another major reason that this distrust exists.

Re: Ask HN: Why the Microsoft hate?

#112

Post by seanmcdirmid »

spamizbad wrote: post #35

I'd like to thank you for offering that "Full Disclosure" - it represents how Microsoft culture has changed over the years (for the better). In earlier times, Microsoft would often encourage its employees to covertly astroturf on its behalf on various internet forums or news groups. This happened on Arstechnica years ago, and involved quite a bit of drama when one of the mods traced the IP of a poster back to Redmond…

I have never heard about astroturfing happening in the company before, and besides, I'm in research.

We are allowed to post from our computers at work. I'm sure, given that Microsoft has 100k employees, that there must be a few bad apples in the bunch: you know, statistically speaking, their will be a few mentally unbalanced people doing things that Microsoft might not otherwise approve of.

Re: Ask HN: Why the Microsoft hate?

#113

Post by gbog »

> Is it ethical to flag something because the article is related to a company you don't like

I do not think the important topic of Ethics should be brought so low as to help us decide on whether to flag or not a link on HN. Let's replace it by "stupid".

Then yes, it is stupid to flag a post just because it relates to a company we do not like.

However, it is not stupid to dislike Microsoft. You might remember Paul Graham's Microsoft is Dead(1): for people a bit older than 20, Microsoft is a company which was very frightening, a company which did really try to kill Internet, and force all our industry into a nightmarish path where we programmers would all be happy slaves.

Just because they have changed the color of their last make-up will not change this, and I would hope Hackers here and there would actually despise more Microsoft and other similarly dangerous companies.

(1) http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html

Re: Ask HN: Why the Microsoft hate?

#115

Post by lessnonymous »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #86
lessnonymous wrote: post #82

In this thread: People getting confused over what Hacker News is. We're not the OSDN. In fact we (as a collective group of users) are not related to the open source movement in any way. Why should MS's closed-source viewpoint matter to us? Are we not here to build businesses in the tech space? Sometimes the right tool to use is made by Microsoft. Sometimes it's open source.

That wasn't the point: you don't have to upvote their articles to not flag them.

Which is kind of my point. Flagging stories just because you don't like Microsoft is counter to the site's purpose. Even downvoting because you don't like Microsoft doesn't improve the site.

If I'm building something, and I'd benefit hugely from some Microsoft news, your disdain for the company has just hurt my project.

Flag or downvote a cat picture. But not because you happen to dislike the camera the picture was taken on, but because cat pictures aren't relevant to the site.

Re: Ask HN: Why the Microsoft hate?

#116

Post by seanmcdirmid »

lessnonymous wrote: post #115
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That wasn't the point: you don't have to upvote their articles to not flag them.

Which is kind of my point. Flagging stories just because you don't like Microsoft is counter to the site's purpose. Even downvoting because you don't like Microsoft doesn't improve the site. If I'm building something, and I'd benefit hugely from some Microsoft news, your disdain for the company has just hurt my project. Flag or downvote a cat picture. But not because you happen to dislike the camera the picture was t…

Then we are in agreement. Is it possible to downvote articles? Maybe I haven't reached that karma threshold yet.

Re: Ask HN: Why the Microsoft hate?

#117

Post by lessnonymous »

pg wrote: post #81
iamshs wrote: post #40

In that particular thread, I was accused of being a shill and an astroturfer by 3 members. All of the accusers had karma greater than 1500, and atleast two of them were on HN since at least 2 years. Why? Because I posted the spec list of the tablet. And I do not have allegiance to any of the tech companies at all, except having used their products one time or another. MS hate is vicious on here. I remember recoiledsn…

That article was not flagged off the frontpage. It set off the flamewar detector. As for recoiledsnake, that is one of many accounts created by a group or individual who is either an astroturfer or indistinguishable from one. Part of his/her/their m.o. is to talk constantly about there being an anti-Microsoft conspiracy on HN. Sometimes he/she/they would use multiple, separate accounts in the same thread.

So the article might be useful to people building businesses in the tech space, but because some users decided to air their petty grievances in the _comments_ to that story, the story itself got buried?

Seems like the flamewar detector would be better aimed at closing comments rather than burying stories.

Re: Ask HN: Why the Microsoft hate?

#118

Post by cjfont »

chimeracoder wrote: post #26
benologist wrote: post #6

If you see a comment you think is ridiculous click "link" and you should be able to flag them. I don't think HNers in general hate MS but this community is pretty biased towards OS X and Linux, it's hard to feign interest in stuff you don't use. Engadget and The Verge are professional plagiarists, it would be bad for this community to adopt those sites as some kind of standard for tech news, and it's awesome seeing t…

> If you see a comment you think is ridiculous click "link" and you should be able to flag them. This option isn't available to everyone - I, for one, don't have flagging privileges. I'd assume that this is probably a karma threshold, but it appears I actually have slightly more karma than you do, so they must be using some other metric.

So when you click "link", you don't actually see the "flag" link at all? With my low karma it's appearing for me. FWIW, I've never flagged anyone before.

Re: Ask HN: Why the Microsoft hate?

#119

Post by cygwin98 »

jaggederest wrote: post #106
mgraczyk wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does a virtual machine + language have to do with a package manager?

Installing mono was significantly more complicated than most vm/language packages on Ubuntu, and required commensurately more upkeep.

That maybe a while ago, like when Ubuntu was 9.0 and you had to compile from source code in order to get sgen? Things are much better now. Since early this year, I've been running a web service written in C# serving one of my iOS apps. That piece of service has been running happily in a tiny VPS for half a year now. Installation of the Mono runtime was an easy apt-get.

Re: Ask HN: Why the Microsoft hate?

#120

Post by 4hthth4 »

tejaswiy wrote: post #59
nikatwork wrote: post #16

I started my career working on VB apps, and ASP then ASP.NET websites, using a Windows dev box. After learning several OSS stacks, I have nothing but contempt for Microsoft technologies. I wouldn't say I hate MS - they are what they are - but I am certainly conditioned to be very suspicious of their offerings. I would never take a job working on a MS stack again, ever. I currently work for a large enterprise that use…

Hmm, any specific examples? I really like c# as a language. ASP.NET whilst not as new and shiny as Rails etc., it's still moving in the right direction with new additions like WebAPI. And VS is I think one of the best IDEs out there.

You could certainly provide specific examples. How exactly is VS so much better than anything else? I've used other things that worked just as well for me. And, what is "the right direction" - MS is always moving in some direction with new APIs or frameworks.
Post reply on HN