Ask HN: Why the Microsoft hate?
When new the Nokia tablet was announced yesterday, submissions made it to the front page but were promptly flagged off by many saying "this wasn't relevant to HN;" regardless of all the excitement over the new iPad.
So is HN basically becoming Slashdot where Microsoft hate occurs by default? Is it ethical to flag something because the article is related to a company you don't like, even if the source is generally reputable (theverge, engadget, ars)?
Full disclosure: I work for Microsoft (research) and my wife works for Nokia; so ya, ouch.
555 comments
[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 419 ms ] threadHaving said that, launching the day before the iPad was bound to invite negative comparison without something really special, notwithstanding the good value proposition of this tablet. What has personally held me back is that Windows RT has nothing in particular for me because it can't run any x86 legacy apps, while surface Pro seems rather expensive.
As with Google & Android, and MS with many previous versions of Windows, this platform is poor for musicians and not great for visual artists. I know creatives are a small market, but they're a very influential one. I don't like Apple or iOS much, but next time I buy a tablet with a view to making music, what other choice do I have?
I agree with that personally, but I would hope that Windows RT could grow a strong enough ecosystem that this wouldn't be a big deal.
> As with Google & Android, and MS with many previous versions of Windows, this platform is poor for musicians and not great for visual artists. I know creatives are a small market, but they're a very influential one. I don't like Apple or iOS much, but next time I buy a tablet with a view to making music, what other choice do I have?
I think focusing on creatives is key also. In particular, I would like to see some decent touch-friendly programming environment on a tablet; without which I'm still stuck using a laptop for relatively dumb reasons.
Also recently I started to see posts from older HN members who don't like what the community is turning into.
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 them fail over and over again to get a foothold here.
Theverge is quite nice: they actually write decent full length articles with a graphic design that is similar to but exceeds Ars. Engadget is still useful, but theverge is my favorite. And I was blown away recently by how well Polygon was done as a gaming site. Really beautiful, with great content.
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.
I don't remember ever having this privilege, on either comments or on stories.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/shouldbefree.html
I often joke about having the nerve to set up camp in a coffee shop there and whip out my Surface Pro, fire up visual studio, and sling some C# and see how quickly I'll get hated on.
I do wonder, will that really happen? Honest question.
If you can stomach being in a Microsoft building, the Startup Masterminds group is fantastic. I go each time I can. http://www.meetup.com/StartUp-Mastermind-Groups/
Seriously C# is nice and while I am a die hard unix guy I wouldn't be caught owning a MS laptop myself I am coding with C# server code at work at am enjoying the experience. I would honestly be curious what you could do doing in C#. MS is giving no direction on the future of C#, desktop is suppose to be JavaScript now? Server isn't about C#, but supports everything? XBox cross platform stuff is shutdown, silverlight dead.... So you hacking in it in a coffee shop would be a curiosity.
What planet did that come from? Microsoft made a play to get Javascript devs to be capable of building native windows apps which all things considered was a smart strategic move - that has not worked out. So no, Javascript is not the way to build desktop apps - it is one way, to build one type of app for Windows 8.
Future of C#? Are you kidding me? That is just lazy to make a statement like that. For all the recent love of F# and the resurgence of focus on C++, C# is still the king in Redmond.
1) Web using ASP.NET MVC 2) Desktop using WPF, XAML 3) Mobile on any platform via Xamarin Mono
PS: if you see someone hacking C# in a coffee shop, than it's most likely something for mobile, highly-portable and probably a game (MonoGame and Unity are pushing C# mainstream as it's much better than dealing with Obj C or JavaScript).
I'd like to be more hipsterish and start-up with open source, but with BizSpark and free Visual Studio and Azure and being able to build quickly just because of my familiarity with the MS stack it's very hard not to stay locked in to that ecosystem.
I'm writing this now inside Microsoft on George street who let's you use their offices for free surrounded by MS <3 start-up standees and brochures.
We all know suspiciously it's MS's evil lurings to try to appeal to the startup scene so we can keep giving $$$ to them after our freebies have expired. However I'm also sanguine that they may have a change in attitude with their open source contributions and startup initiatives and linux or node images on Azure they might be genuinely wanting to be more "open".
That's what I'm hoping for. I am not looking forward to being stung with a massive SQL licence bill.
We saw a few people using Dells and other Windows laptops. No one hated on them, but they definitely drew odd looks - not of aggression, but of confusion. At worst, people would dismiss you as a banker who got lost and ended up in a tech neighborhood. You just don't see anyone here in startup-friendly places using Windows.
MS made a lot of mistakes - so did Apple. I was an Apple tech support - it really sucked not having multitasking and dealing with so many OS issues. Now I make a living off the MS stack.
I think MS sticking with RT is a bad move - go with full Windows support. I would still say a Nexus device is probably the best bang for the buck.
In the end it's just an opinion, but you don't need to jump down a company's throat because their not the ones in vogue at the moment.
That doesn't mean that the Microsoft of today, much diminished in power and much increased in reasonable behavior, deserves our continued ire. But it's hard to shake the reaction to that kind of massive mistreatment.
Who cares what Microsoft did to the community. They changed SMB protocol to screw up open source devs. They intentionally fouled up Kerberos authentication. They added API after API in part to foul up WINE. Not only that, but then they continuously stagnated on any sort of browser development until Mozilla kicked in.
But that's the past.
Now, we have them to thank for 'trusted computing', where the computer trusts the owner (hint: we aren't one). We can thank them for bringing in the forefront HDMI and trusted video/audio path. I can only remember how many sound/graphics cards were trashed after the newest Win Vista refused to even work with them. And I now do tech support for the industry that requires 'secure boot' turned on all newer machines. If you're one of them unlucky ones running SurfaceRT with an ARM, sorry, it's not compatible with anything other than what the owner wants (another hint: you still aren't the owner).
Yeah, the MS dev team does seem pretty cool. But you all get criticized over what the whole company has and still does. If you don't like it, dnot tell people you work for them. There are other research places other than MS, if you don't like them.
Also, most of these researchers do not collaborate or are otherwise unaware of similar product projects going on in-house. For example, we have a ZooKeeper committer and contributer from MSR, yet we ended up building a distantly similar one in azure only to find out later that it existed (this was in it's early days).
They both have bad sides, it just seems one is ignored.
Never forget.
It's -ethical- to flag comments that are false, off-topic, or do not contribute to the discussion; not ones of differing opinion.
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 uses a mix of MS and OSS, and I take every chance I get to swap out the MS tech with OSS. The devs love it and it makes me happy.
$ sudo apt-get mono-complete $ echo "using System; static class Entry { static void Main() { Console.WriteLine(\"Hello World\"); }}" > hello.cs $ mono-csc hello.cs $ ./hello.exe Hello World
Downloading MonoDevelop as we speak, thanks for the reminder :)
I don't mean to imply any judgment here, I'm just noting another difference between F# and OCaml.
Most people seem to think it's not syntactically very different: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/179492/f-changes-to-ocaml
And VS is I think one of the best IDEs out there.
I mostly use WebStorm, while having pretty shitty intellisense for JS itself, is a much better experience for node.js development. Second would probably be MS's Web Matrix, and I'm disappointed that MS chose not to include the, imho (with an addon) much better support for node.js into VS.
I'll say that for C# development, I really like ASP.Net MVC, I've used classic ASP in the past (both JScript and VBScript) and also used VB.Net with ASP.Net. I've used PHP in the past (hate it with a passion), as well as a dabble of Ruby (like some aspects, not as much with others). I'm warming up to CoffeeScript, and have also done a bit of Python (desktop UI) and currently toying with Go.
I'm not really tethered to MS by any means, I'm pushing for moving away from what little MS tech we're using in the product I work on. That said, VS is pretty damned good, and on a whole, I haven't used better.
Don't let prior experience prevent you from seeing when great stuff is happening.
A member of the legal team cannot decide to NOT extort e.g. Patent fees from e.g. Android handset makers, or allow e.g. BeOS to be installed by licensed vendors that were forbidden to do so.
A company behaves like an individual, sometimes schizophrenic, often psychopathic or sociopathic. But policy, and reponsibility is not, in fact, up to individual employees.
What you say is true of a group of sports fans, not of a company. And having watched Microsoft's stacking of the ISO committees, patent extortion and chilling effects, SCO proxy war, scathing disregard for industry standards etc - I'll say that I think they have earned all the hate they get here, and then some. The fact they they are not doing as much damage these days is mostly thanks to sliding away from the dominant position - but the culture is still one of bullying.
I've heard nothing but good things about RubyMine, but few people use it because a good text editor is all you need to work with most dynamic languages. C# is practically unusable without Visual Studio.
I've worked with both, give me Rails any day.
Why?
a) Rails is an actual MVC framework. b) ASP.NET was an over-complicated, leaky, fairly opaque abstraction for web programming. c) It took years for MS to then come out with their own MVC framework.
Not all devs. Microsoft tools have contributed to a long, successful, and enjoyable career for me, and I have yet to find an IDE as nice as VS (any contemporary version). The MS toolsets have been mostly good to work with, a few warts not withstanding.
What OSS tools and IDEs are making your devs so happy, and making their jobs better than say, VS 2012? (serious question)
• Replacing Windows servers with Redhat has opened up a wealth of automation opportunities
• RoR on the frontend has allowed a much faster development and deployment pipeline (ASP.NET and Java are still used for the high-ceremony stuff)
• Our monitoring and alerting is much more straightforward and comprehensive for the OSS components
• I am so tired of propping up sickly MS servers, the Redhat servers are rock solid straight out the gate
OTOH for large enterprise, Sharepoint and Office integration works very well, that's really the MS sweetspot. I'm also interested in their new ALM offering (TFS), I haven't seen an OSS equivalent as yet. However these are not dev stacks.
I'm not saying you can't do great stuff using MS tech - stackoverflow is proof of that. But I have extensive experience in both worlds, and I'll take OSS any day.
> What OSS tools and IDEs are making your devs so happy, and making their jobs better than say, VS 2012?
It depends to a large extent on what people are doing. To be honest, I have become so happy with VIM, BASH, base UNIX utilities, and such that I don't think I am ever likely to achieve the same productivity in an IDE. The thing is that IDE's are a fundamentally different paradigm and they make easy things a bit easier, but I think a text processing paradigm is better for the hard problems.
You will believe that I am joking, but Vim, bash, git, grep, gdb, valgrind, llvm and lots of UNIX tools. We use IDA Pro a lot too.
Most of the people that work with me learned with Microsoft tools, myself included but we can't stand it anymore. Why? They are so powerless and limited, specially in the extension mechanism: extending it using your own tools, which basically do 90% of our work.
The main reason for that is that commercial companies can't let you do what you want, they can't let you do what you need like reading the system internals like with linux system utilities(Windows or Apple monopolizes access to it making amazing tools like Numega SoftIce dead) and even reading the source code.
We use VS 2012 and Xcode for compiling Windows and Mac versions of our software, that is mainly designed and tested in pure Unix.
I really like all the consumer products by Microsoft, but never liked or got into the development stuff.
At the same time, I've tried OSX a few times (I have both a Windows and a Mac), and just never got into it as an OS.
It is a silly comparison but it is so unbelievably common here. Try comparing it to ASP.NET MVC and you'll see that Microsoft actually has a modern and compelling offering. They really haven't sit still since you've been gone.
BTW I had to bandage up a limping ASP.NET MVC app about three years ago for a large Canadian telco. Nothing I saw under the hood changed my mind about MS.
As for your claim to have "bandaged a limping ASP.NET MVC app about three years ago", you might not be aware that version 1.0 was only released about 4 years ago and that they're currently at version 5.1. How much work with Razor syntax have you done considering it didn't exist three years ago?
Not that I care, not having used any of the technologies discussed here other than a little VS, that a I liked, and a little VSS, that I hated.
Crappy work can be done in any language/framework
There is a difference between being keen to see the new features in the next version of .Net, and having Microsoft suddenly decide, actually, we dont care about .Net anymore, XNA is cancelled, metro apps are javascript only now. All that WFC stuff you were doing with windows phone... yeah, forget that.
People invest their time and knowledge in a technology stack, and Microsoft just seem to love throwing things away rather than improving them.
When you set fire to the developers that use your technology, are you really surprised when they don't want to have anything to do with you?
I've only seen this anecdotally, but new developers who haven't yet been set on fire seem to be very positive about the integrated MS stack.
...and slightly older jaded developers who are on fire, and looking for jobs using technology no one cares about anymore say things like 'I'll never use microsoft technology again'.
That's just been my personal experience, but I've got to admit, seeing it, I'm pretty skeptical about investing any more of my time in learning to use MS stack for anything.
...but yes. C# is quite a nice language. I fully endorse the use of Xamarins offerings (ie. C# .Net outside of microsofts control)
Xamarin deserves particular mention as the ability to share 80-90% of your core codebase between all mobile phone platforms is just stellar. It makes absolutely no business sense to re-write your core business logic for each platform and in that platforms language. So much less project risk, merge three/four code bases into one. Do it once then implement native UI's for each platform and bind back to the core library? Spot a problem in the core library on iOS? Android gets the hotfix for free. Just ask Rdio ;-)
Other hotness:
- https://www.nuget.org/ - http://www.servicestack.net/ - http://owin.org/ - http://nancyfx.org/ - https://github.com/MvvmCross/MvvmCross - http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/pex/ - https://github.com/swax/CodePerspective - http://signalr.net/ - https://github.com/Redth/PushSharp - https://github.com/Squirrel/Squirrel.Windows
Last but not least:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudioalm/archive/2013/06/26/d...
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents
And I'd add the antitrust case and IE's intransigence to web standards as another major reason that this distrust exists.
I owe Microsoft a huge debt of gratitude for stoking the fire. As much as I zealot-level hate them, we're all better off because they put the debate front-and-center.
So Microsoft in the 90s was like bulldozing an eclectic downtown to build a Walmart. (The same way Facebook is destroying the Internet, but I digress.) At the time Windows was compelling to Joe Blow, a straightforward, boring UI that anybody could figure out. Computer technology was just not very popular yet so there was only room for so many players.
But thanks to Linux I'm finally free of Microsoft! I can't remember the last time I used Windows for anything. OpenOffice and GIMP are totally awesome BTW if you are still stuck with Windows.
To add to the MS complaints: random reboots to update the software while you're working on something important. This is typical of Microsoft's poor treatment of the user. To Windows you're an idiot child. Linux is respectful and assumes you're an adult.
Texas A and M Linux, Yggdrasil...
In all that time I used and tried to function with Windows, starting with 3.x. It didn't really work for me. Add to that the bundled aspect (which pissed me off greatly, I had to pay for a DOS/Windows license only to wipe the machine and install OS/2 or Linux)
I spent ~$2000 with Microsoft for their OS/2 SDK only to have it abandoned a short time later with no refund available.
Microsoft has earned my dislike. But still, it's hard to get a quality laptop without Windows, unless you want to way overpay for Apple or deal with not getting exactly what you want (Linux based laptops).
Microsoft has, without a doubt, the best overall bunch of development tools but feels the need to break things every year or two...
sigh
Idiot child indeed. :)
And don't forget Microsoft took a big crap on the Internet with free copies of Frontpage ;-)
Note: writing this in Google Chrome on my Macbook
This was before the current tumult caused by the internet and mobile computing. It kind of seemed, back then, that things were going to just continue as they had been, only more so, and everything would be built on top of Windows.
This reaction (over-reaction?) to MS, then, comes from historically-rooted fear. It's a powerful emotion, and sometimes it can be correct.
You know, maybe there's an argument that the Unix world has a persecution complex, because there have been license and freedom debates since the very beginning. Here's an illustrative fragment: http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/10/origins-of-geek...
WebKit was not established, Apple forked it from KHTML and it would not be the dominant engine without Apple.
Let's also not forget that BSD would be a rare sight at this point if not for Apple.
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.
I gotta say it weirds me out when people assert that everyone loves Apple, because it happens a lot; almost as often as people go on vitriolic rants against everything Apple-related.
Perhaps, but the HN sample population is still biased favorably towards Apple.
And I think that while there are some MS haters around here. There are not nearly as many as die hard MS fans would have us believe.
http://www.salon.com/2001/02/15/unamerican/
Or is it just another 'me too' product? It is.
I remember my HTC Diamond on the original Windows Phone failure.
Oh, and sticking a UI designed for touch-screen tablets on ordinary desktops and laptops is just stoopid. They have become a Blackberry-esque laughing stock as far as making terrible business decisions and missing opportunities.
How does your wife think Nokia would be doing if they had released Android phones instead?
I'm a 90's linux user so my hate for MS is self explanatory and these days mostly irrational. Recently I found myself working with a group of Microsoft employees and it's tough to "hate" them, their company or the really nice products they flaunt around (Surface, Windows Phones, etc).
There are a lot things that continue to feed my dislike for the company though. It's silly things, like the way they continue to ignore the existence of industry standard protocols (ssh! there is BSD code! just copy it!!).
In day to day dealings with the company I sometimes still get a sense of arrogance and not-invented-here type scenarios that prevent a better solution from being perused.
I definitely empathize with much of what you are saying. But many of us are just average joes working for a big company with diverse interests. You might still want to interact with us because we know things and have interesting stories to tell. Even if you hate a certain team, would you really give their players a cold shoulder?
Although today, it looks like it's not as bad as it used to be, but I would never forget about that. Around that time, I was high school age, so I guess I was more susceptible, too :-)
Why should everything be Unix based? Aren't alternatives and competing ideas a good thing? Adoption of open standards isn't enough. Just look at Google's tactics with Android as described in the recent Ars article or Apple's control over iOS. In many ways classic Windows (and MacOS) were/are more open than either of those systems. It's too bad that Microsoft is being forced (by the market)to follow that model. In the end companies will do what they feel is in their own interest limited only by government regulation. That's the capitalist way. Enlightened self interest will result in benefits for all that are worth the cost of creative destruction. No need to hate on any company. The market and the system will self correct.
Can you link to one of these stories that got flagged off the site?
I'm asking because there is more than one reason why a story might drop off the front page; flagging is one of them, but so is the voting ring detector.
I do not know what the correct interpretation of it is though. Not at persons flagging will write a comment though.
I am now extremely sorry that I have participated in that thread at all (before it got off the front page and especially after it got off the front page) since now instead of one crappy thread taking place on the front page of HN we have two and we might have more in the future.
With my disclaimer out of the way I would be extremely glad if you tell my why you think I abused my flagging privilege (besides breaching guidelines by talking about it).
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.
"Some years back, Microsoft practiced a lot of dirty tricks using online mavens to go into forums and create Web sites extolling the virtues of Windows over OS/2. They were dubbed the Microsoft Munchkins, and it was obvious who they were and what they were up to. But their numbers and energy (and they way they joined forces with nonaligned dummies who liked to pile on) proved too much for IBM marketers, and Windows won the operating-system war through fifth-column tactics."
Also, googling "Steve Barkto" will turn up interesting information.
But if I had to choose between IBM and Microsoft, I think Microsoft wins as the more ethical company. IBM seemed like a very shady place to work business practice wise. And no one is talking about IBM these days on HN, unless they happen to do something like Watson occasionally.
After MS has already sent the original OS/2 2.0 SDKs to developers. I wrote a blog post about this entire fiasco you should read: http://yuhongbao.blogspot.ca/2012/12/about-ms-os2-20-fiasco-...
However I have trouble getting too excited about a lot of Microsoft technologies. There are some good ones out there for some things, don't get me wrong. Microsoft SQL Server has some really nice features for developers, for example, and Microsoft Access is a really nice db front-end RAD tool, if you pair it with a real database server.
But, in the end, I there are only so many things one can get excited about. I find PostgreSQL more exciting than MS SQL Server, for example.
Microsoft has become a lot more accepting of FOSS than it was when I was first hired (I watched some of this shift while I was there, but it has gone a lot further since I left). This is good. But in the end, it feels like so much Microsoft stuff is legacy technology for those of us who have made the switch that it is just hard to stay excited.
In early Steve Jobs/Apple meetings their was a lot of hate for IBM. After some time the hate was reserved for Bill Gates/Microsoft. The latest enemy is Google.
Apple has a cult following. As such it also might be boring but it's sometimes interesting to even non cult followers what the cult is up to.
MS hate is vicious on here. I remember recoiledsnake [1, 2] alluding to it, and not that particular topic, infact lots of MS topics are bumped off the frontpage while having lots of points. Not on this site, I made a point on neoGAF debunking a point regarding XboxOne related to a technology that I am very much familiar with. I was ambushed by 15-20 people in matter of 10 minutes and banned. One single post, nothing inflammatory. On this site, yes I do see MS hate from lots of members. I do not think I remain enthusiastic in posting on here. Some of the members call themselves veterans and use that status to just point barbs. Disagreements are one thing and can be deliberated in civil manner, but downright unencumbered hate and allegations is another.
[1]- https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=recoiledsnake [2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5716419
So my answer is mu.
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.
It might be nice to mark why article have been killed so we don't go off and make the wrong assumptions about what happened.
About, recoiledsnake I would not know much except his posts.
Seems like the flamewar detector would be better aimed at closing comments rather than burying stories.
But feel free to believe anything that reinforces your existing beliefs.
1. Turn off comments
2. Turn off comments and hide all comments to date.
You can't have it electing to remove one comment or another. At most it could delete a top level comment that was the spawn of the flamewar. But still, I say hide all comments and turn off further comments. That way we still get the benefit of the story.
A few days ago, on the topic of turning off comments when there is a flamewar, instead of knocking the entire post down/off the front page, I said this:
"[killing the discussion entirely] is a good thing, if something is on the front page then comments should be enabled, if only in case something in the article desperately needs to be corrected. If we get a post on here about a new study suggesting that vaccines may cause autism, that would almost certainly generate a flamewar but the absolute last thing we would want is for the post to remain on the front page and not permit anyone to post comments that may refute claims made by the study. In situations like those, it is better to kill the discussion and to take the post off the frontpage than to leave it there but disable commenting."
Is it possible they post from work, and hence share the same IP address with other HN posters? Microsoft is a big place.
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.
That's a shame, since as an employee you have an unique and very valuable perspective on the company. Why not participate, perhaps add a disclaimer?
That said, I fully respect the preference not to and the request not to.
Same applies to social media.
The important thing with a situation like that is to be ready to kill the feature as soon as people learn how to exploit it. It's one thing to see that it's theoretically exploitable. It's another to actually figure out how to selectively engineer flame wars to make a significant dent in the front page.
That is, if this is a actually problem and not only a theoretical one.
If I were an astroturfer, grooming accounts would be part of my daily routine. I'd probably automate it too.
http://pastebin.com/gRHH0LFG
Given the size of the PR industry and the relatively low cost of posting on forums where influential people hang out I would think HN would be a tempting target, although it would have to be a sophisticated effort to go undetected.
For example, if articles on Microsoft tend to get driven off the front page, while articles on Apple dominate it, that presents the appearance of the HN community being pro-Apple and anti-Microsoft, which affects the types of submissions and comments that are made, which affects the types of views people feel comfortable expressing, and eventually the types of people who choose to participate. The end result is that the community actually is more pro-Apple and anti-Microsoft, and the cycle intensifies until something close to homogeneity is reached.
As desirable as it is to discourage low-signal discussion threads, is there any thought given to the side effects of doing so?
I've seen plenty of Microsoft related stories, but if Microsoft tends to be driven off the front page, maybe it's because Microsoft is totally uninteresting and some Microsoft proponents behave like shills, especially because they bitch and moan about the lack of interest in Microsoft, as if it's some kind of conspiracy or as if it's our duty to have an interest in Microsoft.
> Agreed. The cry for attention from the Microsoft community is becoming a bit annoying, especially on HN.
Implies that they aren't a new user. I guess they just don't post much.
People who think all Microsoft proponents are shills are...well, Slashdot already exists, so why do they bother hanging out here? If you aren't interested in something, don't upvote it, but please don't take a dump on it either.
Anti-X sentiment takes a lot less effort than writing a cogent pro-X message supporting something, and everything has it's pro- and anti- crowd. I've seen plenty of posters complain that this, and other forums are anti-Apple, anti-Linux or anti-Microsoft when in fact there's a fairly healthy mix of opinion.
Maybe there is a trend against Microsoft in the news and forum world though. It doesn't seem all that long ago that most tech news and most interesting tech articles were about Microsoft products and technologies. Maybe that's still the case and I'm living under a rock, I doubt it because I still use mostly Microsoft platforms at work but it's possible, but there just doesn't seem to be all that much new and interesting stuff coming out of Microsoft these days. It's fairly rare that anything by them moves the needle in terms of tech punditry. They need to radically increase the value proposition of Windows and Metro just doesn't cut it. Maybe the Metro version of Office will help it get some traction but at this stage even that may not be enough.
I would say that both take equally little effort to do lazy, and both take equally large effort to do good.
If someone goes around and say that windows version so and so has great battery time, a lazy response is to simply disagree with it. A good response looks for benchmarks and ask why said sources do not support the original commenter's arguments, and if the commenter himself/herself has any sources to support the claim.
The reverse is equally true, in that finding sources takes equally efforts no matter what point of view one try to share.
So, I guess Microsoft news/posts get pushed back simply because most of the people here are not interested in them and don't want to see them. And I totally don't see how this is a problem.
Anyway, OP, either deal with it or stop posting here. In any case, please stop creating meaningless threads like this one.
Well if that would be the case, the vote counts would look a little bit different. MS related submissions do not lose by votes, they face the problem that a few HN mechanics gives veto powers to small groups that are loud and pissed enough. Likewise, it is very difficult to argue that the whole NSA shit is not an indicator for the US heading towards fascism or that the tech scene may have a problem with sexism.
In fact, it doesn't even need to be specifically pro- or anti-anything. Apple and Google are both companies that generate a lot of discussion on HN, with people both supporting and criticizing them. By contrast, one could argue that HN seems largely apathetic to Microsoft. If this perceived apathy on the part of the community is being amplified by the flamewar detector, then the perception is strengthened until it becomes reality: the people who want to discuss Microsoft simply go elsewhere.
I'd like to stress that this is not an issue I think is leading to the imminent demise of HN, but rather simply a potential long-term problem that should at least be recognized.
I'm really interested in this basic question as well. I come to the comments section to see discussion, even if it may sometimes be somewhat violent discussion. I don't really find I learn much from agreement.
This particular mechanism feels flawed to me because it's so invisible. I don't know what I've missed.
But the more salient point is, were he/she/they completely wrong in their accusations? Were all the examples he/she/they presented of articles dropping off the frontpage just instances of flamewar detection, or natural HN ranking at work, or something else?
Meanwhile the #2 item was submitted 5 hours and it only has 90 points.
IMO anyone who observes HN reaction to any Microsoft topic (that isn't a virulently anti-Microsoft submission) knows that these topics will get pushed down to the back pages. In some cases, the reason may be flagging, in other cases, it may be the flamewar reason (that pg cites above)
Regardless of the reasoning, it is unfortunate that pg is unwilling to admit that this is a problem (and unfortunately, he does also reflect the thinking of most HNers). Fwiw in terms of disclosure, I was an SDE, then dev-lead at Microsoft in the 90s/00s and dev-manager for a few years later on, but I left the company in 2007 and since then, I've been running the company I founded.
I think pg thinks there is a problem, and is almost surely willing to admit it.
I think he just doesn't see a way of solving it that doesn't involve the discussions here on HN becoming flamewars... Which is also a serious problem...
This looks to me very much like a doctor prescribing a drug with unfortunate side effects. You still do it, but you're also keeping an eye out for new drugs that don't cause as many headaches.
This is a selfpost, and selfposts are automatically penalized.
I.e. it's an invalid comparison, because the #2 item is a link to a URL, whereas this post isn't. Selfposts require many more votes to keep pace with URL submissions.
I've been on HN for much longer than your 2-month old account and (based on the ranking of other "Ask HN" and "Show HN" posts I've seen), I suspect that you're speculating and that your assertion is incorrect.
The huge inconsistency between points and ranking happen on a large number of Microsoft-related posts and almost all of them point to external websites.
[update:Reply to LukeShu] Thanks LukeShu, it is good to know how ranking is implemented.
Btw I didn't question whether the absence of URLs reduced the ranking or not. My question was whether the absence of URLs was the only reason (or at least the primary reason) for the push-down of this specific post.
It seems clear that the .4 multiplication rule could not have been the only reason.
As per the .4 multiplication rule, the post with 290 points should have been downgraded to 116 points. Yet, 4 hours after submission, it was at #8. The #2 post only had 90 points and had been submitted 5 hours earlier. So it seems like the push-down was partly caused both by the 0.4 rule and partly by other factors.
Anyway, I appreciate your investigation. In spite of being on HN for the past few years, I never knew that posts without a URL, got hit by this 0.4 rule.
HN's ranking algorithm[1] (as of 2010-10-12):
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1781417If you indeed insist on closing the comments on flamewar detection - good courtesy suggests keeping the comments open for public review.
As for the conspiracy folk, why not make a multiple account detector and ban such folk?
This seems to be a recurring issue on HN, and a reliable generator of conspiracy theories. Would it be possible to have a small label signaling when a given article was flagged by the detector?
Personally I don't flag submissions for the submission itself unless I find it completely egregious, either from a journalistic perspective (many techcrunch-like articles) or just flat out lying/snake-oil, but I will at times flag a story if the conversation here on HN has gone well past the net-negative for humanity limit IMO. It doesn't happen often, but it does happen. My understanding is that HN has systems designed to discourage things like that (eg rapid flamewars) and mods may do the same as me. The Nokia tablet story, while fine itself, was attracting pretty shitty comments. I wouldn't be surprised if it was getting knocked for those and not people trying to suppress Microsoft news. (and, yes, that does suggest a DoS approach, but hopefully there are other things (permadeath, etc) keeping that in check).
edit: ninja'd
As a recently added employee at GoDaddy, not by acquisition, I was a bit surprised by the visceral hate coming from the buyout of Media Temple.. my understanding is that MT will operate as a separate unit, and a lot of its' practices are moving into GoDaddy. I had a lot of anxiety at first, and sometimes still do. It's a culture that is dramatically and rapidly changing, but it does take time.
I've known plenty of people who work for MS over the years who are pretty bright, and do good work. I happen to be one of those people who like .Net (C# in particular), and can appreciate a lot of the very thoughtful decisions that have been made. On the flip side, I feel that the brand affiliation between products, while keeping windows alive for a long time, at the expense of potentially greater revenues (Office for iOS/Android), has hurt them a lot.
I've been spending roughly half my server-side dev time in node.js, and recently even more than that. I feel that docker.io + LXC + node.js is an incredible combination that MS doesn't match. I think that WebStorm is good enough, and VS is really getting a bit bloated and slow (plugins make it more effective, but more bloated and slow).
Who knows where things may go, I don't always choose MS, but I don't hate them. I currently have my HTPC running Linux+XBMC, my desktop at home and work are Windows (with VMWare for some linux work), and my laptop is a Mac. I use what I feel is best for a given task.
/$.02 + inflation
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
And that's the thing. By the evangelist's own admission, MS is deeply hated in society at large. It's understandable but unlike a lowly MS engineer (who I do pity), a professional corporate "face" can't play the innocent victim.
Just consider. The very recent imposition of the Metro/Windows 8 interface on a widely unwilling public is prima facie evidence of MS' continuing abuse of it's particular monopoly.
The point isn't that MS has more of a monopoly than other corporations. It is that MS has a long, long history of wielding the big stick of their monopoly openly and brutally against enemies and "non-combatants" alike. A huge number of Windows users woke up without a Start Button because Balmer was gunning for a new market. Lie all you want about this being for the average person's benefit, you only prove my point. Yeah, I just don't think you can spin maneuvers like that into "we just build the future".
Edit: Just to note, I don't do editorial flagging. I'm not out to "get" MS but, well, they bring up feelings.
Sounds like an interesting thread, care to link to it? I have been an avid HN reader, but I don't remember seeing a thread like this and suspect it may not exist.
How is that in any way an evidence for abuse of monopoly? I have Windows 7 on my laptop and have no immediate plans to upgrade it to Windows 8. Unless they force it through automatic updates or cancel my Win 7 license, there is clearly no abuse. You can still vote with your wallet.. you know?
>A huge number of Windows users woke up without a Start Button.
Huh?
People bought laptops and the laptops weren't what they were expecting. There's a lot they could have done in the abstract. There's a lot less they were capable of doing in reality.
Would you call Ubuntu's decision to suddenly switch all the window controls (Minimize, Maximize, Close) from left to right in one version an abuse of their "monopoly" in the Linux desktop world?
And Linux users have a full spectrum of distributions to choose from. If Ubuntu acts like an ass-hat, I can easily switch to Mint when the LTS version is no longer supported. I have a choice of desktops environments that all run the same services and applications. I'm not locked in, nor is my data. Squeeeeeee!
[1] http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/products/lifecycl...
Huh? First of all, companies impose new things on their customers all the time. Secondly, I thought a company was abusing their monopoly when they use it to extort profit where there was none before? Changing the UI doesn't seem to be exploiting monopoly power for profit...
Secondly, the Metro UI thing, IMHO wasn't a forceful use of power. It was a bet (a lost one) that touchscreen laptops will become predominant. And So they created a UI based on that bet. They (incorrectly) thought that people want exactly the same UI on all their devices. So it's not that they are EVIL, just misguided.
So i don't HATE Microsoft, i just pity them.
They had one job. One job. Don't screw up Windows. And what'd they do? They screwed up Windows.
Metro was a mistake. And again, everybody else makes mistakes, too. But then they went full retard, and refused to backtrack. That part is the reason for the "hate."
Just because you don't like Metro, for whatever reason that might be, does not make it a mistake.
Don't break useful, common functionality because you think it's not important.
Sticking to my guns on this one and choosing to let your sarcastic tone slide.
Criticising Microsoft is like shooting fish in a barrel, so it's odd you'd pick on them for innovating without thought to convention and backward compatibility - an area where they're generally more cautious than the peers you named - and a product that actually has plenty of fans.
I don't understand why so many people fall for this misdirection.
Also, what kind of drugs does one need to ingest to make it seem like a good idea to enforce UI conventions optimized for 4" cell phones on a user with a pair of 30" desktop monitors? Are we talking plant-based alkaloids, aromatic hydrocarbons, or what?
So for someone like me, isn't the Metro Start menu good design? It has both the type-to-search thing and a full screen menu of icons i usually use.
Look i admit it seemed a little intimidating when i first saw it. Heck we have been using the start menu for more than a decade! It's almost part of our DNA now, so seeing the entire screen change in place of a menu is.... unexpected. But is it really that bad? Do you REALLY still browse through the start menu?
This debate was settled when Windows replaced MS-DOS. Most users do not want to remember, or type, the names of the programs they want to use.
Do you REALLY still browse through the start menu?
Yes, frequently.
Btw I presume from the bit about ms dos that you dont llike shells. But thats ur preference
The difference between me and the people at Microsoft is that I understand that there are different user types. None of which asked for their desktop PC to behave more like their cell phone.
And even if you do need Windows, Win7 works fine. I feel forced to switch from XP to 7, but that's not such a terrible move. I'll skip Win8, and maybe there won't even be a Win9.
If they were truly a monopoly, they would not have seen it as important to respond and revise Windows 8. Real monopolies can abuse their customers and have no qualms about it. Microsoft is no longer in that position, so they changed direction once they saw what was happening in the market. The fact that they responded to the market and changed course is evidence that they have no monopoly power in this matter. They simply made a huge mistake due to being terrified of what iPad was doing to them, and they decided wrong. It's nothing more than that.
And besides, it's not like they didn't have a public beta program in the first place.
Obviously things aren't black and white, we're arguing the degree of monopoly of MS. Consider, yes, eventually you hit the elephant hard enough with a 2x4 and it responds. It didn't respond much even then. And even government granted, official monopolies respond a little bit criticism.
Real monopolies can abuse their customers and have no qualms about it.
Many people would view MS as being just that way. But sure, maybe there's some leeway. But "no monopoly power" is bending the stick ridiculously far in the other direction. I mean, MS is convicted monopolist. They already lost a lawsuit in the 90's. [1] MS' strangle-hold PC operating system remains the same even if other markets (the web, the phone etc) have risen. (Edit: Consider, if MS did face competition in the PC operating system market, they might feel pressure to improve the PC rather than just milking their position for the purpose of entering other markets.)
And besides, it's not like they didn't have a public beta program in the first place.
Now there's some counter evidence to all your earlier argument. All the beta people were expressing shock and horror and MS did ... nothing.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp.
Eventually HN will become /. or reddit and we'll move on. It's essentially nerd fashion.
It is all about your community and once it becomes too biased one way or the other, everyone else moves on.
Or perhaps I'm just projecting my own experiences with /., digg, reddit, et al.
They begin as the news site with articles that only about 1000 people care about. So you'll go there because reading every single post on Lambda the Ultimate takes too long and you want a community that does the hard work for you of picking out the wheat from the chaff.
Then, after about three years, articles that compare the performance of subroutine threading vs. switch statements in interpreters slowly disappear and are replaced by articles about how the new Apple product is ingenious because it's the size of most people's thumb. Then comments become shorter, and you realize you no longer read the comments to gain a depth of knowledge. Where before you were continually amazed at some people's insight, now when you ask an honest question you are more likely to be flamed by a nerd with a chip on his shoulder that's desperate to start and win an argument.
For another year or two occasional glimpses of the better articles and comments keep you coming back, but after a while you start to go looking for the next site that's long on interesting and short on raging arrogance.
Then, five years after that, you might go back to the old site to see if it ever changed, and instead marvel at the cesspool it's become.
As a techie, you will have this experience once or twice a decade. Slashdot in its heyday (1997-98) was the HN of its time.
I spend about 50% of my time developing .net apps and the other half on linux/web stuff so I'm pretty familiar with the MS tech stack and it always feels very clunky and outdated.
MS hasn't created a really compelling consumer product since the Xbox and they have just totally lost consumer mindshare, they are the slow, clunky old thing you use at work because you have to, not the thing you buy when spending your own money.
In my view the future is(at least in the medium term) Linux on the server and mobile devices, Unix on the laptop/desktop in the form of OSX and maybe MS on the console and Windows running legacy systems and some servers.
I'm not a particular fan of Apple either(I've never purchased any of their products) and only use Linux(Ubuntu) and Windows in a VM but it seems to me consumers just don't care about MS any more and I'm not sure that MS has the skills to change that.
Also I find the licencing really irritating when creating VMs and servers. In the end thinking something "feels" old and clunky is a subjective perception but every time I use MS products it feels like they were created with little or no insight or knowledge into what anyone else is doing, leading to a lot of NIH syndrome.
Absolutely garbage browsers are also a big problem, I know IE 10 is passable but in 4 years when it hasn't been updated and people using Win7 and 8 are stuck using it, it will be the IE6 of its day.
Don't get me wrong, I used MS products basically exclusively for the first 5 years of my developer career, and still use them a fair bit now, and thought it was amazing, it's not until you move outside that bubble and start using better tools and methodologies that you realise how far behind they are.