Since you've done this repeatedly and ignored our request to stop, we've banned your account.
Actual astroturfing, when it occurs, is an abuse of HN that we crack down hard on. Defending this community against gaming and abuse is a huge priority for us. Any user who thinks they might be seeing it happen on HN should email us right away (hn@ycombinator.com) so we can investigate.
Imaginary astroturfing—the bug that causes some users to be certain that those who disagree with them can only be nefarious shills because otherwise the pure reason of their own point of view would be fully accepted—is also an abuse of HN. This one is orders of magnitude more common, and it is poison. It eats away the heart of civil, substantive discourse, the assumption of good faith on the part of others.
Therefore we ban astroturfers, and we also ban users who accuse others of astroturfing or shilling without evidence. An opposing view does not count as evidence, and playing this card as a rhetorical device in an argument breaks the HN guidelines.
This shouldn't be downvoted. There is definitely at the minimum Microsoft employee vote brigading at this point. HN needs to start making upvotes, downvotes, and time of vote public.
Accusations of astroturfing or shillage without evidence are a serious breach of civility on HN. Since you've done it before and ignored our request to stop, we've banned your account.
Exactly, the top comment in this thread claims MS is the only company doing cool things (which is 100% not true). The top comments in the Windows 10 thread yesterday were mostly people claiming "it's sad to see such negativity toward MS" and there was maybe one or two negative comments followed by a circle jerk about how good MS and their software is.
Microsoft has historically been one of the worst tech companies for tech enthusiasts. We can ignore all the awful things they did in the 90's that stifled open standards (because apparently that doesn't matter anymore?) and just look at 2013, when they were exposed to have been participating in the NSA PRISM project. That means there is a whole team at MS that worked on a secret government project to help violate our fourth amendment rights. Even much of congress didn't know about NSA mass data collection, but Microsoft did.
People who trust MS these days are either naive or employed by them.
The project is Open Source, MIT licensed. If they break compatibility you (or someone else) can just fix it. No difference from any other OpenSource editor.
I used VSCode once and in just ten minutes, I helped a repressive megacorp meet their HN marketing goals, instead of supporting developers who might actually need it.
hm, I also don't like MS. But kudos to this open source editor and what it can do with Python and JS code. It is by the way developed in Switzerland by a former Eclipse founder (Erich Gamma).
You should read some of Buffett's voluminous writings. There is nothing like a lottery going on, he's the most skilled investor the world has ever created.
In his twenties and thirties he ran the Buffett Partnerships and averaged around 35% a year returns, over 13 or 14 years, beating the market by a massive amount.
He retired around age 40, then bored went back to full time work running a company he controlled, Berkshire Hathaway. At one point he had beaten the market all but a couple of 50 years.
In his shareholder letters he describes very clearly how he does it. Its a combination of being an excellent value investor, understanding which companies have competitive moats, and working very hard at reducing negative psychological biases.
We can't be as good as investor as WEB, but reading and understanding his shareholder letters will make you a much better one in anything you do (buying a house, car, etc), and understanding the psychological biases that drive you to bad investing decisions can be applied in many areas.
Completely agree. I honestly believe reading the shareholders letters is one of the best "life lessons" readings I have come across. One of the reasons for this is that it's written consistently across the span of one (intelligent) person's life, spanning decades of changes and challenge. WB is transparent about making predictions, and likewise reflective when they don't turn out. He's extremely gracious to everyone around him (constantly calling out great attributes about business partners, colleagues, and even competitors). He's got this consistently optimistic tone about him which is hard to ignore - what could be brittle-dry business writing, instead is full of cheeky humor, anecdotes, advice, etc.
In contrast, when I read [auto]biographies of notable people today, we are ONLY seeing the life from a snapshot in time - n accumulation of their life, from deliberately chosen points of view - and we never get to see that relatable part of "what was this person thinking when they were 35 years old, stuck in a panicked business climate".
I also think its fascinating to see people's decision-making processes and attitudes change over time. For example, anyone who has read WB's shareholder letters see his attitude change from "buy cigar butts, and sell those" (basically, find OK assets which are undervalued) to "pay a premium for great things, and hold them forever". WB even reflects on this attitude change at times - some of his earlier purchases (like the actual textile mill) was an attempt to identify decent businesses in a bad spot, buy them on the cheap, and turn them around. Later, he basically said - that was just a bad idea, and it's buying trouble for years. Instead, pay a premium for a company which is solid, run by solid people... and let that naturally appreciate in value, and get out of its way.
WB mentions Dale Carnegie frequently - I do think reading both "How to Make Friends & Influence People" and Berkshire's Letters to Shareholders could basically be a business course itself - how to do business honorably, ethically, and respectfully. Lots of lessons to be learned there.
What would happen if the vendors got together as an organizational body (or their employees as a union/guild) and decided to just not provide the enterprise market with even one locked-down-and-supported option?
Then the one company that either bucks the trend or decides to enter the market after them with a locked down and supported option wins the market by default.
Are you imagining a union without any sort of industry-wide enforcement of disbarment for professional malfeasance? That's a pretty nonstandard interpretation of "union."
Presumably, if it's a union disbarring people for doing something, then it's something the majority of its members feel strongly about. Like how, say, civil engineers feel about buildings being built to code.
Given that the union I was talking about above is specifically one that would be formed by ISVs to protect its member employees from being coerced into bad working conditions by their managers or the clients their demands come on the part of, I assume that "not having to maintain software in perpetuity with increasing labor-load" is probably one such ideological point they'd be likely to stand behind, among others. (Or it might not be; either way, I still think "union that can disbar programmers" is an interesting solution to the problems that programmers do care most about, whatever they may be.)
Remember, the point isn't to punish the disbarred engineer--they likely were coerced into the practice. The point is to signal to the companies who would attempt such coercion, that it will result in their engineers being removed from them, so they shouldn't bother. (Yes, the company's name might also be blackballed in the industry, but that might not matter to the company if they're still able to make money. On the other hand, having no engineers who would ever want to work for you, for fear of what it would do to their careers, would matter.)
This is only partially true. A large issue is that most of the software that runs on top of their products is also locked down. So when people have business critical software that's no longer supported by the original developer there's no way to fix it if the operating system gutted support for something they depend on.
Tailor-made business-critical software is supported in a completely different way than your average shrink-wrap.
"Sure we can update from Win32 to $modern. We estimate it to take between thirteen to seventeen man-months. You know the usual rate for a man-month, let us know when you want to start the project."
The open web and open frameworks supporting it have changed significantly over the past 10 years. It's "keep the old stuff running" or "rewrite" there too.
Yeah, one distribution tried this a few years back, got grilled to a char by the community for it, and swiftly trashed the idea. This is nothing like Microsoft turning Windows into one giant dark pattern and trying to convince the world that it's progress while showing no signs of backing down despite the overwhelming backlash.
Ubuntu's Amazon integration was a failed experiment in an ecosystem with literally hundreds of other players to choose from while Microsoft's Windows telemetry is an inescapable dogma forced upon all Windows users.
