In memory of the man who put red and green squiggles under words

Posted by saikatsg 2 days ago

In memory of the man who put red and green squiggles under words(devblogs.microsoft.com)

602 points | 118 commentspage 4

maxignol 1 day ago|

Great way to honor Tony and his work

QuesnayJr 1 day ago||

The first time I saw the red squiggles is one of the few times I thought "Good job, Microsoft".

jojobas 2 days ago||

Teachers put red squiggles under misspelled words long before Word.

JsonDemWitOster 1 day ago||

This gonna blow your mind: https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Skeuomorphism

utopiah 1 day ago||

[flagged]

tomhow 1 day ago||

Please don't sneer like this on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

utopiah 23 hours ago||

Hmmm guidelines do exist and I don't think toxicity is a good thing so thanks for pointing that out. Still here I'm not attacking an individual but a large corporation that's been punished multiple time for terrible behavior and now with a founder and former CEO entangled in terrible affairs so I admit I'm not sure how wrong a bit of sarcasm truly is. I do genuinely believe Microsoft is a terrible company which entire business model is going against open source, locking IP down and thus truly claiming that they did "invent" more than they did. Is it more justified with this background than random sneering?

tomhow 20 hours ago||

It’s not really about who the target is, it’s about the kind of conversations we want to have here. The guidelines ask us to converse curiously, avoid fulmination, and to avoid internet tropes. When we depart from that to vent at a megacorp, it has no effect on the corporation but does have the effect of making this place more miserable.

There are plenty of opportunities to critique the megacorps when the topic is something they’ve actually done wrong, and we have many discussions about those cases.

utopiah 20 hours ago||

My phrasing might be off putting and even against guidelines but, even through jest, the idea itself still remains : Microsoft does have a history of claiming a lot more than they did. It's a brilliant, albeit illegal, series of business decisions but it has not invented as much as it claims it had.

tomhow 17 hours ago||

Can you please just follow the guidelines? You can make any point if it’s on-topic and expressed according to the site’s intended spirit. We can’t keep debating whether the guidelines apply to a specific topic. You can’t run a forum that way.

utopiah 15 hours ago||

I'm not going to blindly follow guidelines if I believe they are unjust. I'd rather be banned from a forum that has oppressive guidelines than be a "good" netizen of a bad place. If I can't openly criticize corporations then maybe HN isn't for me.

tomhow 14 hours ago||

It’s fine to criticize corporations, thoughtfully. It happens all the time here. And YC exists to challenge major corporations and continues to work hard every day to help startups challenge them. My request to you has nothing to do with criticizing corporations and everything to do with posting lame comments that drag this place down and do nothing at all to diminish corporations.

utopiah 13 hours ago|||

Anyway, apologies for the whole thread, I'll be more mindful both of the guidelines and how to provide a better avenue for meaningful conversations, thank you for trying to make this a better place.

tomhow 2 hours ago||

Many thanks :) We know it can be hard to stay on the right side of the guidelines and we don't expect everyone to perfect (how boring!) but we just need people to keep them in mind and do their best.

utopiah 14 hours ago|||

Honestly I think labeling the comment (which is justified and involves a pun, sure might be dad-joke level but still) as "lame" is more toxic, or bring the forum down, than mine but OK, maybe I have a bias.

Strike through all this and see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48673613 instead

monkamonme 1 day ago|

What strikes me about stories like this is how many invisible decisions shape the interfaces we can't imagine living without. The squiggle wasn't a product requirement or a committee decision — it was one person's intuition about how to surface information without interrupting flow.

The analog31 comment about "yellow squiggles for logic errors" is a genuinely interesting design problem. Linters do this in IDEs, but the reason it hasn't made it into general productivity software is that spell errors have a clear ground truth (the dictionary), while logic errors require understanding intent. The difficulty scales completely differently.