Hacker News Reader

Comment by rdtsc | Hacker News Reader

If the server closure F, besides it's own messages can also receive a `{become, F}` message, then you can then keep changing the server to something new again and so on.

Completely unrelated, but I remember talking to Joe at one of the Erlang conferences. He was always excited about technology and always happy to chat with anyone. He was dismayed how Windows had gotten worse and less usable over the years, and how one day we won't be able to browse our own files on it until we sit and watch advertisements for a while to unlock them. Joe was nearly right! Sure enough, years later I hear there are ads in Windows 11 and you have to go out of your way to remove them. Not quite the same yet, but by Windows 13 I am sure we'll get there.

View on HN

I use Linux at home, and use Windows for work. Outside of the ads, I've been most surprised by

1. My Windows machine has a lot more of the weird issues I used to see on Linux like 6-7 years ago. Like nothing showstopping. More like quality of life reducing stuff, like the volume in one headphone will be far louder than in the other, despite the mixer showing them the same. Or weird crashes in applications (specifically with Microsoft software). Or Windows documentation pages not resolving in any browser, forcing me to use an archive site to view them. Or my laptop occasionally not detecting my external monitor after detecting it fine for weeks. Or the monitor will flash occasionally

2. Less surprising, more dismaying: Office software by default tries to get you to save files to the cloud instead of locally. Yes, having your files everywhere across all devices is nice, I know, but I would rather have my files local first, with cloud backup, rather than have my files in the cloud first. I'm old fashioned, I guess

3. WSL is pretty jank, but it is probably the only reason Windows is usable at all for me

More topically: I've always heard that about Joe being a wonderful human being, and it makes a lot of sense. When I was first teaching myself to code, I came across his book on Erlang, and it had a huge impact on me. I loved the playfulness, humility, and imagination that he brought to his work. Even though I hardly ended up writing any Erlang, reading his writing changed the way I think about so many things related to code. It's clear he cared a lot about pedagogy. I have a math background, and wish that both math and software engineering and CS culture embraced playfulness and humility more

> My Windows machine has a lot more of the weird issues I used to see on Linux like 6-7 years ago. Like nothing showstopping. More like quality of life reducing stuff, like the volume in one headphone will be far louder than in the other

A while back I installed a Windows update that permanently prevented my existing Bose headphones from being able to connect to my laptop over bluetooth.

I've had a headphone balancing issue on MacOS as well, probably my previous one (intel, 2016 model I believe), ended up installing a tool whose sole purpose was to rebalance the audio every once in a while if it detected it went skewed. I have zero clue how that would happen, I can't see any practical purpose for any application or subsystem to be adjusting the audio balance.

Probably it’s headphones doing spatial sound wrong?

In my case at least, my Windows laptop is the only device that has this problem. It works totally fine and as expected on several Linux laptops, my iPhone, my android, and my partners phone.

Microsoft fired their entire QA team.

They also fired their entire technical documentation team.

They now treat Windows like freeware/shareware, and monetise it the same way -- selling ads, collecting telemetry, bundling, and being pushy.

Windows Server is abandonware, Microsoft only cares about Azure now. As far as they are concerned, hosting software yourself on-premises is a strange aberration and will eventually just go away.

Entire categories of their products are no longer available for on-prem installation, such as: CosmosDB, Data Factory, Purview, Logic Apps, etc...

> Microsoft fired their entire QA team.

> They also fired their entire technical documentation team.

Explains why I, when I tried to use the new Clipchamp app, I first had to look for the docs because what should have been obvious wasn't obvious

... and when I find the docs

- they are translated (which is bad because it makes it harder to search in online resources when you have to guess what the concepts are called in English)

- and it is impossible to change language

- and navigation is so badly broken that the only way to navigate reliably between pages is to scroll to the top of the one you are currently on, find the link tree and choose another

- oh, and the translations are hilariously bad: "to share" (as in sharing, which in my language is "å dele" or "deling") was consistently translated as "a share" (as in stocks, which in my language is "aksje"). As someone who knows English reasonably well and will even sometimes translate it is easily enough to understand, but really really jarring for me and probably not understandable for someone who doesn't understand English and needs translations.

They seem to be going cloud only even on the desktop.

I tried to use the built-in video editor in Windows 10, and it told me to start using Clipchamp instead. A few clicks later the new program was installed and running, and before I could do anything it asked for my name. This is normal in many office programs that want to embed author info in metadata, so I entered it without any hesitation. A few seconds later a new email pops up in my inbox - I apparently had signed up to an online video editor service using my Microsoft account without knowledge.

"Microsoft fired their entire QA team. They also fired their entire technical documentation team."

Honest question: Is this a scurrilous rumor or the actual truth?

If you're just being hyperbolic, I'm down with that, no complaint, I'm just curious how literally true this is.

(I have to admit it'd explain a lot of what I see lately; I've observed for well over a decade now that if people held Windows to the same standards they do for "the Year of the Linux Desktop!" claims that Windows doesn't necessarily pass the test either. But it does seem to be getting worse lately, and with things like ads it's downright broken by design. Windows now survives in my house by the skin of its teeth, only because I haven't found a Linux Cricut solution and we use that every few months.)

They essentially eliminated the SDET role across the company. There may be a few left here and there, but it used to be a whole thing of its own.

The book How We Test Software At Microsoft describes in detail what the SDET role was about and how Microsoft used to approach quality.

I think it’s a tragedy that they eliminated the discipline entirely.

They still hire SDETs so I assume it's not true, however I did have a manager who said his whole team were laid off from Microsoft so I imagine they had some substantial downsizing from these days [0].

[0] https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/exchange-team-blog/wh...

Your first paragraph. This is actually a feature of the Actor model. I didn’t realise before that it’s possible on the BEAM.

I thought this was basically the whole argument for Erlang, continuous hot-replacement of running servers and resilient server-cluster upgrades. Basically everything that kubernetes offers (from an operational perspective) has been available as a first-class programming construct in Erlang for decades. That was my understanding, anyway.

> Sure enough, years later I hear there are ads in Windows 11 and you have to go out of your way to remove them.

The intrusive ads are not new to Windows 11. They're already there in Windows 10.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com