I was disappointed that the Nokia thread was nuked. I was interested to see HN's take on it. Instead it ended with a silly flamewars about astroturfing and we ended up with half a dozen articles about OS X and the iPad on the home page.
Ask HN: Why the Microsoft hate?
201–210 of 556 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why the Microsoft hate?
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember that recoiledsnake post and found it baseless then as well. Not only is a claim like that basically impossible to verify using the information we have, it's also a perfect case study of selection bias, since of course the thing that you care about jumping down the page is going to stand out to you, while the many many stories you either don't care about or don't notice sail up and down the page without rai…
I do not have qualitative data backing up my conjecture, but i do think MS stories/products tend to have a short life on frontpage. This maybe selective bias at play, but maybe in future I will scrape some data from hnrankings about this. Even though interpretation will still be flimsy. The reason behind flags will not be known and can be various. That particular thread ticked off flamewar detector though.
> i do think MS stories/products tend to have a short life on frontpage. [...] That particular thread ticked off flamewar detector though.
If you look back on times that people have complained about Microsoft posts being persecuted by flagging rings, you will (as far as I can see) without fail find a flamewar.
I don't mean to gloat, but I've been pointing this out for months. It is nice to be vindicated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5759369 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6030087
Re: Ask HN: Why the Microsoft hate?
#203In 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
Apple maintains many of the same positions, yet they are loved. Apple actually uses a lot of open source, yet rarely contribute back. Microsoft Research contributes a ton to computing research. Note: writing this in Google Chrome on my Macbook
Apple maintains many of the same positions, yet they are loved.
There are more than a handful of us who despise Apple, and for mostly the same reasons we despise Microsoft. They pimp their closed-source, proprietary, locked-down bullshit, and it's "walled garden", closed-off ecosystem just like MS pimp theirs. I have no use for either of them.
Note: written using Chrome on Fedora Linux.
Re: Ask HN: Why the Microsoft hate?
#204People in tech, including those on HN, are often prone to hyperbole (myself included).
I've got a bunch of example topics: MS, the NSA, F/OSS, Google & privacy, CISPA, etc.
In each of these cases, there's usually some voices of reason (grellas, anigbrowl, tptacek, masklinn, gruseom, I'm looking at you) and a lot of people who treat the story as life and death.
CISPA is the END of net neutrality. Google is the END of privacy on the internet. F/OSS is about what's RIGHT and what's WRONG and F/OSS is RIGHT and proprietary software is WRONG. MS SecureBoot isn't about addressing a well-studied security problem by Microsoft and the security industry, it's about PUTTING DOWN the Linux desktop. The NSA is the END OF ALL PRIVACY.
I'm not sure what the reason is but people just overreact.
So here's my take on MS. It's a software company. Use their stuff, don't use their stuff: whatever. The days when it was THE software company are over. If we don't ship you a compelling experience, use something else.
Re: Ask HN: Why the Microsoft hate?
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Sometimes he/she/they would use multiple, separate accounts in the same thread. Is it possible they post from work, and hence share the same IP address with other HN posters? Microsoft is a big place.
This is PG. If he doesn't think it is just a bunch of well-meaning commenters coincidentally behind the same NAT, then I am inclined to believe him.
Anyway, do you know what I do when there are discussions online about my employer? I stay the fuck out of it. I think that is good policy, unless participating in those discussions is part of your job description. Best case scenario here: a bunch of well-meaning Microsoft employees got into an internet fight, got mistaken for a sockpuppet ring, and got a discussion about their company pushed off of HN? If that's in their job description, I don't know why they're still getting paid; if it isn't, maybe they should consider spectating next time.
Re: Ask HN: Why the Microsoft hate?
#206Do you recall anything of the 1990's? IE 6? Embrace, extend, and extinguish? The Halloween documents? Microsoft's conviction of anticompetitive business practices left unpunished when the Bush administration took over? The decades of terrible products?
Re: Ask HN: Why the Microsoft hate?
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
Since you work for MS Labs, I beg you to investigate the state machine possibilities of tools like Reaktor and Flowstone, which are geared towards signal processing but which are plenty versatile, and seem like they'd be ideal for touch deployment in principle. I can rant on about this at length in email if you're interested.
Let me take a look. This isn't my field but I have a couple of colleagues who might have an interest here.
Thanks for being so open to an off-the-wall suggestion. You're welcome to contact me any time if I can help.
Re: Ask HN: Why the Microsoft hate?
#208I'll tell you the story of my friend Greg. Greg has been a believer in Microsoft. He went to all the Tech-Ed conferences, attended every MSDN event he could. Conferences are grand stages that leave an impression. He drank all the cool-aid that was served at these conferences. Things were really good early on, this was the last decade. The computing scene at that time revolved around Microsoft like the many moons of J…
When I was trying to get into the developer game (I'm self-taught with no degree so couldn't follow the normal progression) the biggest market in my hometown was (and still is) for .NET developers.
So, I joined a .NET user group, I installed VS, I started learning.
Problem was, MS was churning out the "next great thing" faster than I could learn the last great thing. While I was getting my head around WinForms, WPF came out. I started using WPF, then Silverlight arrived, which was like WPF, just a subset of it, and therefore different enough to be problematic.
But that wasn't too bad. It was the 'blessed' data layer stuff that threw me. When I started it was DataSets etc. Then it was LINQ-to-SQL, then it was very much not LINQ-to-SQL, but instead was Entity Framework.
As a newbie who was trying to make myself marketable, it felt like a bit of a hamster wheel, but then through the user group, I met .NET pros who felt exactly the same way.
And at the end of the day, the greatest irony was that when I finally broke into the market, it was a Java-based developer role on the basis of my JavaScript. So all my years of frantically spinning the .NET wheel was for naught.
I still do love F# though.
In hindsight, the thing that strikes me about .NET development is that most businesses using it really want the whole stack to be from one provider whom they trust - and as a result, third party alternatives never really get a look-in if an MS or MS blessed technology such as JSON.net (http://james.newtonking.com/json) can do the same job.
That is a massive sweeping generalisation of course, and only applicable to the limits of my experience in a small city in a small country.
Re: Ask HN: Why the Microsoft hate?
#209The main reason I hate Microsoft is because of all the time I had to waste getting websites to display correctly in their browser. And the fact that I know they made it incompatible on purpose.
Re: Ask HN: Why the Microsoft hate?
#210I'll tell you the story of my friend Greg. Greg has been a believer in Microsoft. He went to all the Tech-Ed conferences, attended every MSDN event he could. Conferences are grand stages that leave an impression. He drank all the cool-aid that was served at these conferences. Things were really good early on, this was the last decade. The computing scene at that time revolved around Microsoft like the many moons of J…
If Greg is a real person, he's in great shape job-wise. There's incredible demand for .NET developers right now. Not so much in the West Coast startup world, but nearly everywhere in the corporate world.