A comment[1] somebody made yesterday on the "Twitter apologizes" story reminded me of this. I think it's an important story regardless of your opinion on Microsoft specifically, exactly because it highlights the risk inherent in building something on top of a platform you don't control. I wanted to highlight that that particular bit of wisdom isn't exactly something new.

Looking at the submitter's background I don't see any professional experience with Microsoft tech.

FWIW, I have spent plenty of time working with Windows and DOS in my life, I just don't highlight it, because it isn't really relevant to what I do now. I also don't mention OS/2, AS/400, RPG, Visual Basic and a laundry list of other things I've worked with that now seem more or less irrelevant.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10427499

Exactly.

But nobody said "building on a Microsoft platform is a bad idea". What is being said is that "building on anybody's platform involves risk, whether it's twitter, microsoft, facebook, google, IBM or $WHOEVER". The point of this post was to highlight an example of the discussion around this topic and to emphasize that it isn't a novel thing.

So, if your purpose was indeed to highlight that, you obviously failed since nobody here seems to be discussing that.

Here are some articles that say what you allegedly wanted to - https://www.google.com/search?q=risks%20building%20on%20some...

That's the reason I don't use .NET and I have never poked inside a metro app.

And it is a reason for the explosion of the Appstores for mobile and webapps in general, startups want to bet on something that's not MS.

I guess not a single one of the YC companies writes exclusively windows software.

Multiplatform software for the win.

But in general, it's beyond me at this stage why people single out Microsoft for being anti-competitive. It's completely unbalanced.

What do you know about lizard people?

"The government is using mobile phone technology to track people all the time. Yes/No."

Also includes an interview with David Icke.

I don't think that question is decisive anymore...

I actually fall into the group of people who can see the possibility of conspiracy everywhere. While I don't believe in lizard people, I do believe in the strong possibility that the US gov't was at least partly behind 9/11. Matter of fact - I believe the lizard people story was put out there to make conspiracy theorists look ridiculous. I also believe, for instance, that the CIA runs the illicit drug trade...and I believe that Mao Zedong was a controlled assets of the western elite, just like China is today and that this will all culminate into a really scary new world order with China as the only superpower. My favorite thing about being a conspiracy theorist is that it has actually freed my mind up a bit because I don't sweat the small stuff so much anymore and I have fully accepted the fact that I am going to die one day since I have spent so much time thinking about all the ways I'm going to get killed by the Illuminati :)

I very much like Microsoft too, but I also get the hate. Even this move of nagging you to update to Win10 seems to come out of the brain of marketeers, not engineers. When companies get big enough, they often lose some of their engineering/academic spirit to commercial thinking. Understandable, but annoying, as it becomes less about building a great product, but more about building great profits.

I do not think the US gov had anything to do with 9/11. I think they just didn't share information correctly and it could have been avoided (dropped the ball). I am always a bit mystified when Americans say that 9/11 was an inside job. If true, their government would be directly responsible for the deaths of 1000s. That should cause riots, not conspiracy theory forums. I think 9/11 conspiracy theories are interesting, because I have a conspiracy theory that most of these theories are propagated by the Middle East (shift the blame) and Russia (destabilize US politics, comparable to Operation INFEKTION, where they tried to paint the US as creating AIDS).

I think the lizard people are the product of a troubled mind and plain old antisemitism. In an allegorical sense it may hold some truths though. The crack cocaine flights of the CIA are no theory anymore, these have been pretty much confirmed, culminating in the "suicide" of Gary Webb by two(!) bullets to the head.

I like Robert Anton Wilson when he says that belief in the Illuminati is driven by our current information overload: The brain wants to make sense of it all, and that is easier when you picture an evil force behind the curtains pulling the strings. But also that there simply are a lot of people conspiring to do evil things (for instance the P2 lodge). So it is a balance between reality and psychology.

My favorite thing about conspiracy theories is that it allows you to draw all sorts of connections. It's a form of data analysis to occupy the mind with, only bounded by your imagination.

I think the China-themed conspiracy theories are very US-centric. Europe seems less afraid of China as a competitor, decreasing the popularity and adoption of such theories.

The question is - how can you fight it? If the plebes could get laws made in their interest, they would. But they can't, so some of them do the next best thing - break the law. And I don't see anything wrong with that. Might makes right is the ultimate rule here. If nobody can stop you from doing what you want, then it's OK. That's just how the world works.

Look at the big picture. We live in a society full of corruption and greed; people are naturally going to "steal" from the big greedy corporations who constantly use their advantage to turn the screws and make society pay for their faulty business plans.

Did the cable company lie to you and say that their contract covered indefinite access to their content after termination of their service? Because if they did, you probably have some serious grounds for a lawsuit. If not, how would you feel if your employer decided he paid you for years, so he is justified in just stopping.

Ah, but I forgot! You're dealing with a corporation, which means that you can m̶o̶r̶a̶l̶i̶z̶e̶ justify doing anything when they are involved. Sorry for the misunderstanding.

Secondly, I don't care about your moral code or your justifications, I care about mine - but I guarantee you that you personally don't live by the letter of the law or every contract you've ever signed. So, why should anyone listen to you? There are no absolutes and your laws and contracts are basically for people who wish follow them, but they're not for me because I don't live in a fantasy world where everything is perfect and everybody follows the rules.

Then you should've just said this from the start instead of trying to justify it by past spending.

And it's continued spending, not past spending...and my justification also reflects on the actions of my adversaries.

I don't know, but these hoverboards probably won't be as popular as those sneakers.

Except speed, a really nice IDE and good Windows support.

> The Ruby ecosystem is so perfectly suited to web development that one hardly needs to go elsewhere to get what one needs... > I think the main problem is that .NET tries to be all things to all devs...

So Ruby is all things to web devs, but it's a bad thing that .NET has the same goal for Windows-centric devs? That doesn't make any sense.

> C#...it's pretty damn far from being spectacular.

OK, why? Your response is full of opinion but you don't really back it up with any reasoning - so why should any value your words?

Web dev doesn't need any of these things. If you need them, then what you are doing isn't web dev, it's something else.

> it's a bad thing that .NET has the same goal for Windows-centric devs?

What is "Windows-centric" development? That doesn't even make sense. Web dev is a fairly specific domain with a standards-based protocol stack that's been iterated reliably on for 30 some-odd years. The sources of variability, the browsers themselves, are well-documented now and even when the variations weren't, you could earn a pretty good living specializing in them.

Microsoft seems to throw their devs under the bus with every new release.

Dynamic typing adds an entire layer of depth to the things you can do with tooling, over and on top of what you can do with reflection. If I don't know what's going on in a web app, I can load it up in a developer console, get right to where it's going wrong, and start inspecting everything I can see, even looking up the source code of the methods, whether in my app or in the framework, right in the REPL.

You mention LINQ, that makes C# dev bearable by cutting down on the syntax you need to do basic functional programming. I wouldn't call it "enormously productive".

And LINQ isn't an isolated example. There's an asynchronous solution for asynchronous programming built in the language (async/await since C# 5.0).

There's reactive programming - RxJava is most popular these days, and most major languages have their RX thing now, but it was in the .NET world where Reactive Extensions saw the daylight for the first time.

Or MVVM (10 years later, Google began introducing it to Android, though it's not production-ready yet).

I use a keyboard all day with Windows. I can do every single thing that I need to do with just the keyboard, no problem.

I also use Gnome 3 and OS X and I honestly don't think keyboard support is as good in either of those. So I am sure that I don't know what this gentleman is talking about.

Re: this comment, if you just don't make huge comments inside the body, but rather above it - as is the usual standard - this is less of an issue.

The toString() on a function is very useful in more ways than awful eval hacks. The most useful way is how I use it in msngr.js for creating keys for methods that handle events.

So let's say your custom object has a way to handle events. Surely you want to allow more than one method to be hit for each event, right? So internally to your object you keep track of this by the method's contents as a sort of key or hash that always points to that specific method. Then you can remove handlers by simply passing in a method. No requiring special keys or anything to identify a function as a function is its own key.

Make sense? It's most useful for developers who work on frameworks or objects that require some custom eventing that can be used by multiple places.

If you really want to deprecate this functionality then you need to provide a way to hash to create a unique key based on a function itself. The only other way around it is adding more verboseness to the language or event handler calls which doesn't add anymore clarity.

I think all the dissenters missed that part (about it being "one point" in favor/not in favor). I thought programmers were supposed to be good with subtle details, but it seems like the majority of them lose that ability when talking about religious topics.

You can of course strip comments when making builds. In fact you can even write functions of more than 600 chars and get away with it as long as you use a minifier. If you have a minified function of more than 600 chars then that's a bulky function which should instead be split in smaller ones.

In frontend JS code sure, but minifying backend node.js code is certainly not "best practice".