It breaks my heart when I see a comment like this because I know how much hard work goes into the design, but I can't blame people for not seeing it. It's sad. I wish they would differentiate even if it's just for the sake of differentiation.
Yeah, but I mean elementary OS is something that you can actually give to people that have never used Linux before and they will like it. Unity is, well, divisive to say the least.
elementary is what Ubuntu should have been. Basically, they've built a new desktop environment from the ground up with focus on design and usability. This the first release of the DE (first release was based on Gnome), so it's still a bit immature, but there's already a big following.
TLDR is just a warning to the reader that the rest of the text might not be worth his time. It also helps to make explicit that the paragraph following it is a summary of the post.
This post is very long and probably not worth the time of HN's readership. On this thread[1], there's an explanation of why it is like this:
"The Simple Truth" was generated by an exercise of this discipline to describe "truth" on a lower level of organization, without invoking terms like "accurate", "correct", "represent", "reflect", "semantic", "believe", "knowledge", "map", or "real".
And a summary:
The only way you can be sure your mental map accurately represents reality is by allowing a reality-controlled process to draw your mental map.
A sheep-activated pebble-tosser is a reality-controlled process that makes accurate bucket numbers.
The human eye is a reality-controlled process that makes accurate visual cortex images.
Natural human patterns of thought like essentialism and magical thinking are NOT reality-controlled processes and they don't draw accurate mental maps.
Each part of your mental map is called a "belief". The parts of your mental map that portray reality accurately are called "true beliefs".
Q: How do you know there is such a thing as "reality", and your mental map isn't all there is? A: Because sometimes your mental map leads you to make confident predictions, and they still get violated, and the prediction-violating thingy deserves its own name: reality.
The new icon solves the problem of being yet another thing people will point at and say they were just copying Apple. It might not be totally original, but that's okay, everyone borrows from everyone, and I don't think they will get any flak just because it somewhat resembles Firefox.
The problem arises when you can trace so many ideas back to a single source that it makes it look like you're just making a cheap copy, which sadly is what is happening with elementary.