8 ms·

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 t

by iamshs 13y ago

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 https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=recoiledsnake [2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5716419 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5716419

tptacek 13y ago
Nobody in the history of HN has ever made themselves look smarter by calling someone else a shill, and that thread is no exception.
- jesserosenthal 13y ago
  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.
  - notaddicted 13y ago
    I doubt anyone would disagree that triple negatives aren't easy to parse.
    - girvo 13y ago
      Now I'm curious how natural language parsers handle triple negatives.
      - JacobAldridge 13y ago
        You'll be pleased to know that they don't not do them unwell.
        Lerc 13y ago
        I'm not sure if I wouldn't be dissapointed to hear that they couldn't.
    - troels 13y ago
      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?
      - Dylan16807 13y ago
        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.
    - im3w1l 13y ago
      If that sentence hadn't mentioned triple negatives, I don't think I would have noticed anything abnormal about it.
pg 13y ago
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.
- seanmcdirmid 13y ago
  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.
- iamshs 13y ago
  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.
- lessnonymous 13y ago
  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.
  - rmrfrmrf 13y ago
    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.
magicalist 13y ago
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
- iamshs 13y ago
  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.
  - tracker1 13y ago
    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
joe_the_user 13y ago
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.
- cwoods 13y ago
  >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. 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.
- nivla 13y ago
  >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?
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
marincounty 13y ago
This karma is just so ---. Sorry, dudes, I think some of you act like petty Hens sometimes. Watch--I get banned?
sudomal 13y ago
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.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
Kungpaoshizi 13y ago
I get made fun of at work for USING Windows.. I usually revert to, "Let me know when Apple has something along the lines of Direct X" but the local Apple guys still think Apple is perfect. My boss sent me the "8.1 update for RT recalled", I asked about the SSD recall, or the bluescreening phones, or the recent contact bug, or iMessage debacle... They never listen to reason and there's always some sort of excuse, to them which is legitimate, in which they defend Apple but continue to bash Microsoft.. It's like arguing with a 5 year old why Heman is better than GI Joe

by iamshs 13y ago

tptacek 13y ago

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

jesserosenthal 13y ago
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.
- notaddicted 13y ago
  I doubt anyone would disagree that triple negatives aren't easy to parse.
  - girvo 13y ago
    Now I'm curious how natural language parsers handle triple negatives.
    - JacobAldridge 13y ago
      You'll be pleased to know that they don't not do them unwell.
      - Lerc 13y ago
        I'm not sure if I wouldn't be dissapointed to hear that they couldn't.
  - troels 13y ago
    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?
    - Dylan16807 13y ago
      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.
  - im3w1l 13y ago
    If that sentence hadn't mentioned triple negatives, I don't think I would have noticed anything abnormal about it.

pg 13y ago

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.

seanmcdirmid 13y ago
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.
iamshs 13y ago
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.
lessnonymous 13y ago
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.
- rmrfrmrf 13y ago
  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.

magicalist 13y ago

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

iamshs 13y ago
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.
- tracker1 13y ago
  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

joe_the_user 13y ago

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.

cwoods 13y ago
>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. 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.
nivla 13y ago
>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?

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

marincounty 13y ago

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

sudomal 13y ago

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.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

Kungpaoshizi 13y ago

I get made fun of at work for USING Windows.. I usually revert to, "Let me know when Apple has something along the lines of Direct X" but the local Apple guys still think Apple is perfect. My boss sent me the "8.1 update for RT recalled", I asked about the SSD recall, or the bluescreening phones, or the recent contact bug, or iMessage debacle... They never listen to reason and there's always some sort of excuse, to them which is legitimate, in which they defend Apple but continue to bash Microsoft.. It's like arguing with a 5 year old why Heman is better than GI Joe