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Comment by iamshs | Hacker News Reader

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 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

View on HN

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.

Thanks for the clarification. I admit that I still don't know how Hackernews works, and that opacity leads to confusion. This is the first time I took something like this personal on HN, and I have been here for awhile.

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.

Thank you for the clarification, appreciated. Yes, that thread was a flamewar in one way or another, and unfortunately it was a product that took the brunt.

About, recoiledsnake I would not know much except his posts.

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.

I like the flamewar detector removing the whole story. As PG has said in the past, flamewars aren't interesting and they do nothing but divide the community. Keeping the story on just causes more drama because the users with comments deleted end up replying asking where their comments went and then start crying about anti-Americanism and the right to comment on a private website ad infinitum. It's pointless.

On the other hand, if you are large-ish and organized, it provides an easy avenue to take down stories you don't like without the paper-trail of flagging...

Considering these flamewars typically involve at least one person who admits to being a Microsoft employee, I don't think that "false-flags flamewars" is something that we are seeing in practice.

Actually, the flamewar involved no one claiming to be an MS employee. I only commented after the submission was killed.

But feel free to believe anything that reinforces your existing beliefs.

Well you are certainly participating in this one.....

Sorry .. I did not intend to imply the flamewar detector was going to delete anyone's comment. It was going to do one of two things:

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.

> 1. Turn off comments

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."

But this is a very weak approach, as it makes it extremely easy for bad actors to 'poison the well.' If there's something you don't like, use a sockpuppet account or two to get a flamewar going, thread gets nuked from orbit, and the people who wanted to discuss it in good faith are marginalized.

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.

I often get locked out of Google and Stackoverflow for "botting" from work when its obvious I'm just a casual user. I think this has something to do with the way the proxy is setup.

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.

> Anyway, do you know what I do when there are discussions online about my employer? I stay the fuck out of it.

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?

I understand that perspective, but what I know is either public knowledge, or behind a few NDAs. Furthermore, my employer politely asks that I don't, and I'd rather not anyway. Online PR, no matter how unofficial, isn't something that I am comfortable with.

Public doesn't mean widely-known. And I feel vaguely uneasy at the idea that everything not explicity public would be NDA.

That said, I fully respect the preference not to and the request not to.

  Anyway, do you know what I do when there are discussions online about my employer? 
  I stay the fuck out of it.

This is an excellent policy. Employee participation (unless they're CEO/Founder, CTO or some combination thereof that can speak with authority) will almost invariably lead to problems. It's good that some employees feel "passionate" and "enthusiastic" about their company/product, but if that's left unchecked and they refuse to remain objective, it will not prevent the thread from going up in a passionate and enthusiastic fire ball.

Same applies to social media.

I don't think this is good policy in this day and age.

While I can see how that would explain separate IPs, I do not see how it would explain separate accounts posting agreement with themselves and it would certainly create an appearance of sockpuppetry.

Multiple users with accounts behind the same proxy could have the same IP address.

There is a perverse incentive here. If commenters can push an article off the front page by flaming, the flamewar detector would actually encourage flaming.

I think that maintaining a community like this is really a dynamic process, so while it's important to make note of bad incentive situations for the future, it's not necessarily the best choice to correct them prematurely. In theory, your reasoning sounds right. In practice, that's probably not happening right now, so the mechanism still serves its purpose with only the (presumably considered acceptable) expected collateral damage.

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.

It would be a risky strategy because those commenters could get banned.

But unlike flagging, there is no minimum karma requirement to get involved in a flame war, right?

Risky for real commenters who care about their presence on HN. Effectively consequence-free for astroturfers.

New accounts can be handled differently by the flame war flamewar detector than established accounts.

That is, if this is a actually problem and not only a theoretical one.

Not a big problem if you grow a constant number of expendable accounts.

If I were an astroturfer, grooming accounts would be part of my daily routine. I'd probably automate it too.

I didn't know I could be banned. Now that has piqued my interest, sounds like a challenge.

Okay, looks like I am on track. Attempt at humour is a gateway drug to being banned.

It would be neat if the flamewar detector buried threads instead of entire submissions. It could work the same way as hellbanning, where the users involved would have no idea that no one else could see their posts, except it would be local to the thread in question. (Ideally, it wouldn't even hide the entire thread, it would just stop showing new posts from the users involved after a certain "flamewar" threshold--that way there wouldn't be the possibility of burying someone's legitimate commentary by starting a flamewar with them.)

Would you say you are catching 20%, 80%, or an unknown number of PR/shill type accounts on HN?

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.

Speaking of the flamewar detector, I'm curious: what's the balance to be struck between discouraging flamewars (or encouraging civility) and discouraging groupthink? If certain topics are in effect verboten due to the types of discussions they tend to breed, does that not induce a sort of hivemind effect that reinforces prevailing views?

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?

People that think this community is pro-Apple should stick around some more. This is the only place were I'm constantly seeing Apple (and Google) badmouthed with good arguments. Personally I hate Apple's products and most of my anti-Apple rhetoric received up-votes.

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.

Says the new account just created :)

Don't you see how paranoid this kind of comment comes across to anyone that doesn't buy the whole anti MS-conspiracy thing?

Grand parent's comment:

> 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.

> created: 803 days ago

803 days is 'just created'? Are people aging accounts on HN now?

While I may not contribute much to the chatter here on HN, I have recognized an insane amount of whining from the MSFT community. Again, this is based upon my experience and observations during my time here :)

Being driven off the front page due to lack of upvotes is completely different from having the article killed due to flagging or automatically for other reasons.

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.

I said "some Microsoft proponents", as in a couple, a loud minority, etc...

Can you provide me with examples that you've had experience with? If anything, I've noticed that any remotely pro-MS gets drowned out very quickly.

Agreed, as happy Apple customer I see plenty of anti-apple sentiment. I suppose I'm a little more sensitive to it. This is a common issue on many forums.

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.

> Anti-X sentiment takes a lot less effort than writing a cogent pro-X message supporting something

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.

While I love macs and some Google services, I think the critique Аpple and Google receives here in HN, about some annoying decisions they make, is completely justified.

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.

> 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

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.

Agreed. I'm a mostly happy Aple user, however some of my most up voted comments have been those pointing out deep flaws in Apple systems and tool. Discuss iTunes hatred, iCloud pain, design failings or shines screens and watch the up votes roll in.

I don't see it, I commented against apple in minutes some one immediately quoted a comment from another post which seemed anti-apple. Yea I'd say HN is pro Apple.

I'm not arguing that HN is pro-Apple, I was just using it as an easy counter-example to the anti-Microsoft phenomenon raised by OP. It could be any stance on any issue and the mechanisms I described would still be in play.

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.

> Speaking of the flamewar detector, I'm curious: what's the balance to be struck between discouraging flamewars (or encouraging civility) and discouraging groupthink? If certain topics are in effect verboten due to the types of discussions they tend to breed, does that not induce a sort of hivemind effect that reinforces prevailing views?

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.

Huh, maybe cooldeals and recoiledsnake were the same entity; looks like both stopped commenting at exactly the same time.

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?

Ironically, this submission is at #8 even though it has 290 points and was submitted just 4 hours ago

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.

> it is unfortunate that pg is unwilling to admit that this is a problem

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.

Good point. It's an error tradeoff between detecting too many false flamewars and not detecting enough flamewars. It might be kind of interesting to study the effects in terms of bias on the actual reported articles vs the submitted articles.

Ironically, this submission is at #8 even though it has 290 points and was submitted just 4 hours ago

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.

Are you speculating that this is an invalid comparison or do you actually know that the only reason (or even ... primary reason) for the push-down was the fact that it was a "Ask HN" post ?

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.

It is an invalid comparison. That isn't to say that the community doesn't punish Microsoft-related posts, but self-posts are penalized by the algorithm. Specifically, the score is multiplied by .4 if it doesn't contain a URL.

HN's ranking algorithm[1] (as of 2010-10-12):

    (= gravity* 1.8 timebase* 120 front-threshold* 1
       nourl-factor* .4 lightweight-factor* .17 gag-factor* .1)

    (def frontpage-rank (s (o scorefn realscore) (o gravity gravity*))
      (* (/ (let base (- (scorefn s) 1)
              (if (> base 0) (expt base .8) base))
            (expt (/ (+ (item-age s) timebase*) 60) gravity))
         (if (no (in s!type 'story 'poll))  .8
             (blank s!url)                  nourl-factor*
             (mem 'bury s!keys)             .001
                                            (* (contro-factor s)
                                               (if (mem 'gag s!keys)
                                                    gag-factor*
                                                   (lightweight s)
                                                    lightweight-factor*
                                                   1)))))

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1781417

Flamewar detector sounds like a bad solution IMO. Why not warning/banning system to handle comments? As long as the argument is factual, without fallacies (and not subject to Poe's law), I would be glad if we could keep the discussions open even if people have radically different views.

If 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?

Not all factual discussions free of fallacy are productive. An Emacs user and I could easily talk past each other for hours.

> It set off the flamewar detector.

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?

OK, I didn't accuse you but I did accuse another poster of being an MS shill. I'll admit I could have been more diplomatic. Still, as I recall, the person I accused was a professional "evangelist" (or something similar) for MS by their own admission writing an article about, what do you know, hatred of MS.

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.

>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.

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?

I think you are describing things from the point of view of the aware, tech-savy user. The average user buys stuff and things happen.

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.

I can understand from a moral/business perspective that drastic changes should be avoided in new releases but how is that an abuse of monopolistic power?

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?

The majority of users don't live in a Ubuntu world, they have to deal with Microsoft at their job or school. Corporations are demanding Windows 7 over Windows 8.

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!

I'm no fan of MS: see my comments in general. But your criticisms are a bit too extreme. MS announces EOL dates well in advance of stopping sales [1]. Those who want to hoard up on licences can do so. Windows 7 is still available for sale [1]. Those who did not want Metro could still have used Win 7. In any case, MS listened to its customers and brings back these features in Win 8.1 -- or so I hear: Linux single-booter here.

[1] http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/products/lifecycl...

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.

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...

Umm... You are accusing MS of just forcing their choices upon their users? Isn't that Apple's standard (and actually well documented. Remember that article about Innovator's dillemma and jobs?) policy? I thought apple was famous for completely ignoring their users and telling them WHAT they want. Now THAT is use of monopoly. Google does that too (remember closing off gtalk?).

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.

The problem is not that MS is forcing choices on their desktop users. Apple, Google, Yahoo, and everyone else does that. The problem is that MS is forcing terrible choices on their desktop users.

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."

You sound like someone who hasn't used Windows 8 before, or not for longer than half a day anyways. Windows 8 in desktop mode really isn't any different from Windows 7, except for the fact that the Start menu is now fullscreen instead of a popup menu. Metro a mistake? That might be your opinion, but I fiercely disagree with it.

Just because you don't like Metro, for whatever reason that might be, does not make it a mistake.

14 years experience in IT. Had to google to find the shutdown switch. Sorry but Win8 is absurd.

I wouldn't say absurd... just different. I mean, if you have been using windows for 14 years and are used to teh Maximize button, and then you use MacOS and click the box button beside the x and.. something COMPLETELY different happens. does that make MacOS absurd? or does that make windows absurd to Mac users? (while proponents of both OS would tell you YES it DOES make it absurd, but they are both WRONG aren't they?) Different isn't necessarily a bad design.

Your computer's power button functions as a shutdown switch. After 14 years in IT, you have never realised that?

My computer's power button is on the other side of the room.

Don't break useful, common functionality because you think it's not important.

I was using it in a touchscreen tabletop.

Sticking to my guns on this one and choosing to let your sarcastic tone slide.

Oh come off it. Name me an established software company that hasn't forced choices on their desktop users that many of them have considered "terrible". Over a similar timescale Apple has been responsible for the debacle that was Apple Maps (to reduce dependence on Google) and the dubious aesthetics of iOS7 whilst Google and Yahoo have forced millions of users to choose other services as they go on shutdown rampages (to focus on more profitable areas) and in Yahoo's case, touted the availability of your old Yahoo email addresses to phishers (because they're crazy?). Meanwhile, despite your "refuse to backtrack" claim Microsoft has brought the much-missed Start button back in the first major patch and continues to ship Windows 7 - you can even downgrade your 8 license if you miss it too much. You can't do that with iOS7 which despite being a relatively conservative update had equally mixed reviews...

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.

The issue was never about the loss of the Start button. It was about the loss of the Start menu. That hasn't been fixed.

I don't understand why so many people fall for this misdirection.

I don't understand why so many people think a small text menu is better than a full page customizable selection screen with decent built-in search...

It's called "mental context."

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?

I guess it's a person to person thing. I am still on win7 and i usually have a lot of windows open, and i rarely ever browse through the start menu. What i usually do is press the windows button, and start typing the name of the program i wanna use. OR I press win+D to get straight to the desktop (a full screen menu consisting of things i frequently use) and choose from there.

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?

What i usually do is press the windows button, and start typing the name of the program i wanna use.

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.

Then you are simply a different user type.

Btw I presume from the bit about ms dos that you dont llike shells. But thats ur preference

No, I live at the Windows command prompt, pretty much. But like you said, I'm a different user type.

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.

Exactly. That was the big mistake behind windows 8. Their "one interface for all devices" idea. We didnt WANT same interface on all devices

But they're not forcing you to use Windows 8, do they? In the days of DOS and Win 95, they used every dirty trick in the book to force competitors out of the market. Nowadays they can't do that anymore. A lot of software that was only available on DOS or Windows is now available on Mac and Linux.

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.

Or maybe it'll be better. Microsoft has a history of alternating good and bad products. XP, Vista, win7, Win8... just one example

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.

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.

If they were truly a monopoly, they would not have seen it as important to respond and revise Windows 8.

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.

Wait... how is getting rid of the start button monopolistic, exactly?

Oh how you must suffer typing that comment on the Surface RT you've been forced at gunpoint to use.

Nobody in the history of HN has ever made themselves look smarter by calling someone else a shill, and that thread is no exception.

Pleasingly ambiguous phrasing. The first two times I read it, I got that this was the smartest anyone had ever looked (no one has ever looked smarter). Apologies for going off-topic, but I hadn't come across this particular cramp in the language before.

I doubt anyone would disagree that triple negatives aren't easy to parse.

Now I'm curious how natural language parsers handle triple negatives.

You'll be pleased to know that they don't not do them unwell.

I'm not sure if I wouldn't be dissapointed to hear that they couldn't.

It's not the triple negative that is the culprit here though. It's the inherent ambiguity in a phrase such as "never been better", which could be either a negative or positive statement. I'm sure there's a name for that construct?

I think tptacek's sentence would need a 'than' to have a valid reading as a positive statement. 'never been better' is ambiguous by itself, but by the time you put it into a sentence it may or may not be ambiguous.

So my answer is mu.

If that sentence hadn't mentioned triple negatives, I don't think I would have noticed anything abnormal about it.

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 raising any flags.

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

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.

Microsoft vs Apple vs Google vs ??? ... It's all the same, religion by any other name. They've all done things that aren't exactly in the best interest of the users of their systems... and sometimes act against even their own best interest.

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

> 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

Bear in mind that Microsoft isn't exactly a well regarded player with the tech crowd. Many of us grew up watching our favourite technologies being assimilated and/or wiped out by them, so there is always going to be suspicion and resentment.

This karma is just so ---. Sorry, dudes, I think some of you act like petty Hens sometimes. Watch--I get banned?

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