testUser69

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 Git community strongly suggests and prefers developers have more and smaller repositories. A Git-clone operation requires copying all content to one's local machine, a procedure incompatible with a large repository.

They aren't copying all the files like you do with Git. They have a custom set up that sounds like it lets you checkout just the parts you need. I don't have time to read the whole thing, but it sounds like it works by breaking down a "super repo" into small "sub repos". This actually makes sense.

There is no way working with a 300gb git repo is fun or efficient, and they've probably been doing that for years at Microsoft.

Why is that so hard to believe? America is run by Donald Trump.

The problems with these companies is that developers aren't making technical decisions, it's executives who know nothing about computer science. That's why Windows 10 is such a mess with spyware and adware.

Now they have some FOSS advocate who doesn't really know anything about software or VCS but saw that an internal problem they were trying to solve was making their code base work with git. So he decided it would be really cool for Microsofts image to develop an open source extension of git, instead of actually solving the underlying problems (because he didn't recognize them). Now he's probably got a promotion at Microsoft for "fixing" their problem with git.

I think it's more naive to believe that large companies always make the right decisions. We see Microsoft make mistake after mistake (look at windows 8, windows vista). The only time they fix their mistakes is when they're made public.

So there is no reason to fix their mistake of a code base.

Out of Jobs, Gates, and Torvalds, Jobs and Gates are some of the worst people to become part of the tech industry. Microsofts anti-consumer practices lead to it's world dominance and now the world is ruled by closed standards. Here is the Bill Gates copy pasta (and it's all true):

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/3aicvf/what_vill...

The worst thing Torvalds did was say some mean things on a mailing list. It's strange that so many people on HN seem to circle jerk around Bill Gates.

Disable spyware and adware. I don't think you can really disable all the spyware though. We're talking about a company that participated in the NSA PRISM program. That means that Microsoft has an agency within it that works closely with the government. I like to think of MS as an extension or a branch of the NSA.

I didn't see any progressives (or conservatives) marching against the Obama administration. I'm sure they had some small rally, but look at what's going on now.

Under Obama if you got detained at an airport (which happened all the time, possibly every single day) no one gave a shit. Now apparently it's the end of the world as we know it.

All editors support go really well, that's because go has official tools that integrate with editors (guru, for example).

At the top of the read me is the feature list for the vscode-go:

https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode-go

This is the feature list for vim-go:

https://github.com/fatih/vim-go

looks a little longer, but if you notice they both use the same back end tools. I see that VSC has partial delve integration, but vim running inside tmux makes delve (and every other CLI tool) feel like it's already integrated. I don't use debugging that much with Go though.

Most HN readers probably don't even use Windows. I think it's objectively the worst OS for a tech enthusiast.

It looks pretty bad on Linux too. Somehow they managed to transport the crappy font rendering from Windows to Linux. It really feels like it's not built for Linux, but just shoe-horned in.

The business world has been even more recalcitrant. In a recent study by Softchoice, an info-tech consultancy, corporate computers were found to be running a whole gamut of legacy versions of Windows. Fewer than 1% of them had been upgraded to Windows 10.

One thing I've learned over the years: you don't need a high IQ to run a successful business. Without a lot of smarts you're never going to compete with google, but you don't need to compete with google to make a living running your own business.

Chromebooks are now outselling MacBooks in the crucial education market, where long-term preferences tend to be established.

It's unfortunate that proprietary software ever came to dominate schooling. Hopefully ChromeOS will open things up just enough so that cross platform tools become the norm. Schools using both Windows and Chrome will be more aware of proprietary/incompatible software and file formats and choose to use open formats.

It is impossible to retrofit older Windows versions with the sort of defense-in-depth that has been built into Windows 10. Nor would Microsoft do so even if it could. If anything, it is about to do the opposite. Windows 7 users will soon lose access to a stand-alone toolkit for mitigating zero-day exploits.

Another reason why Windows is a joke OS for serious tech enthusiasts.

A word of warning, though: such upgrades do not necessarily go without a hitch. A Windows 10 tablet your correspondent relied upon for much of his mobile computing was broken irreparably when a recent update corrupted the display driver, rendering the touchscreen useless.

......... makes you wonder why they lock these things down, are tech enthusiasts even designing them?

But he has also dusted down his four-year-old Apple MacBook Pro and upgraded his Windows 7 desktop to the latest version of Linux Mint rather than Windows 10.

Yes I prefer Linux to Windows in most cases too. I never have good long term experiences with Windows.

It used to be that only free software came with advertising; users paid a fee, if they chose to do so, to get the software free of advertising. Microsoft charges top dollar for Windows 10 ($120 or $200, depending on the edition) and now wants to bombard users with sales pitches to boot—without so much as by your leave, let alone the option to turn the nuisance off. Despite their idiosyncrasies, Macintosh and Linux have never looked so attractive.

Yeah these days pretty much the only people who are using Windows are people who don't know any better. Most people aren't even exposed to Linux except those of us in the tech sector, and it seems to be just as popular as windows and OS X at the shops I've worked at.

Wealth has gravitated around massive city centers since time immemorial

Well yeah, but there were times when wealth was more evenly distributed within America.

When we first started taking in immigrants (when America was founded), we were in a state of high-economic entropy, meaning that there were so many jobs and things to do (and no minimum wage) that we NEEDED to import people from around the world.

Times have changed and the world is changing faster and faster. America is now in a state of low economic entropy, and having a free-for-all international jobs market is not helping that situation.

Is the goal to move the entire world into a state of low economic entropy? We can have big wealthy countries running the world like we're use to, or we can have big wealthy cities running the world like we're aiming toward.

I think concentrating wealth in these big tech centers makes it harder for people in the US to work their way out of poverty. It will be great for the people in Africa living on two dollars a day when their wages go up to 15 dollars a day, but it's going to be hell for people in the US who are use to 50-100 dollars a day going down to $15.

Everyone will be equal though (well, all the poor will be equally poor, and all the rich will be equally rich).

If an interpreter is so rare that one can't be found in the US and they need to be hired internationally, then maybe it's worth it to pay $100,000?

Americas "tech dominance" threatens the breadbasket.

The coastal areas, mostly certain cities, have become "international" and any worker from a rural area who wants to earn a living wage doing a technical job (e.g. STEM) now not only has to compete with other Americans, but everyone in the world.

What exactly do the elites expect people in the breadbasket to do? If America is an international country then we're going to see wealth distribution change. The coastal tech cities may accumulate all the money and have an average wage of $100,000, some of the highest wages in the world, but the inverse will happen to the rest of America. If you aren't in a tech city near the coast you're going to be on the lowest rung, not in America, but internationally. Think about the poorest communities in the world, and as the poor of America merge and become the international poor, we'll see incomes fall to well below poverty levels. Some of the lowest wages in the world.

Look at China, they already have a similar situation where all their wealth is accumulated in their big international cities.

Let China become the world international tech center. Their "breadbasket" is already use to being poor.

The thing about these tech centers is that they are international, it doesn't matter where they are.

As long as the rural areas get a vote and as long as the coastal areas continue to concentrate all wealth in smaller and smaller areas, the more we will see people like Trump get elected. Corporate tech-elitists living on the coast are in a huge cultural bubble. All of our news and media come from these areas too btw.

What I think would really help America (and the world by proxy) is if for every immigrant a tech company imports, they must hire two rural American workers from a community that's average income is less than the national median.

Hopefully in 2050 our corporate overlords will still spend a week discussing how to patch vulnerabilities in our 3D printed food databases too.

That assumes that the sole reason America has tech dominance is because of international diversity. But we've always been tech dominant, and according to many people we're not even diverse.

I've used Fedora on the desktop for about five years and never had this issue. Maybe they were thinking you shouldn't change permissions on files in /etc unless you know what you're doing?

What specific software causes problems? I use SELinux on the desktop and have no issues with it other than occasional warnings which don't seem to effect anything. I develop a lot of networked applications and do a lot of stuff with Linux containers.

On the server I usually use Ubuntu and run custom server software running in a container and never have problems.

I wonder if he really thinks holding the world hostage with proprietary software is ethical? You would think the guy would be 100% aware of the barriers Microsoft creates for people struggling in third world countries, yet MS has no problem handing out free copies of Windows in third world countries to to get people hooked into the closed system so that they can eventually create profit which Bill Gates claims to be using to fight malaria, yet he just keeps making more and more money.

I just wonder if he's aware that his OS is the least accessible to the poor, and that proprietary software is generally bad for developing societies.

I wish the circle jerk around this guy would come to an end.

Proprietary software was a mistake.

The press was asking for this though, at least the mainstream press like CNN and MSNBC.

Not only did they push the Hillary Clinton agenda, but it was obvious to anyone with a brain that the liberal news networks didn't mind that they were helping Trump win the republican nominee, because they thought he would easily loose, and be a great figure head to point at next time someone tries to claim not all white men are racist.

Their plan back fired though and now this is what we have.

The left kept saying the right was going to destroy our rights and every day it gets worse and worse. They act as if we're in the end times. What's going to happen when Trump actually does something insane? No one will take the media seriously then (most have already lost faith). It's like the boy who cried wolf, but the media who cried fascism.

Part of me wonders if maybe the media is trying to destroy the American empire, they seem to be spiraling out of control.

I think the "business people" are people who hide their technological inadequacy behind supposed business expertise. A businesses success is not determined by whether or not they use tools that adhere to business micro-cultural "values".

If "too much transparency" is a turn off for you, you're probably just an authoritarian trying to scheme and scam your way into profit, and you probably lack the confidence required to put whatever skill you think you have on display.

The fact that they were upfront and honest about it and that they even live streamed themselves fixing the problems makes me want to use gitlab even more. If anything I have even more confidence in them. You didn't hear a peep from Microsoft when the forced windows 10 upgrade bricked thousands of laptops. Perhaps that's why such a huge portion of developers prefer OSX/Linux to Windows? I've run six businesses over the past decade and when windows 10 started rolling out I was in a Houston office that lost nearly a hundred terabytes of client data. We did everything by the books, paid for the business and enterprise editions of Windows, used their servers, used their proprietary software stack, used their support service, and they still fucked us and didn't really seem to care or think they did anything wrong.

I have another company that runs on a completely open stack, where pretty much nothing is integrated by a specific vendor. We have hiccups, but we've never had the OS get hijacked and upgraded.

I've noticed most start-ups run by devs run on a more open stack and hack their way through problems on the cheap, and the ones run by corporate executives try to keep things as closed as possible, but end up spending millions to solve problems that they could have had some people solve for fun on the internet.

I prefer to use the right tool for the right job, but I wish companies like Microsoft would be more open when they cause huge issues that end up causing monetary loss. I make sure all my critical infrastructure is open source these days.

I don't know why people on hacker news are against transparency. I'm glad you guys are live streaming this, others would feel too inadequate to do so. Being this transparent only makes me want to use (and contribute to) gitlab even more.