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HN tends to bias towards pro Apple. You would see people doing mental gymnastics trying to defend their closed anti competitive practices, disregard for standa

HN tends to bias towards pro Apple. You would see people doing mental gymnastics trying to defend their closed anti competitive practices, disregard for standards. I would cheer a Sennheiser/Bose more than any version of Airpods, I would rather not have a multi trillion dollar company gobble up other industries through unfair advantages. Seeing a hacker crowd do this is just beyond bizzare.

seanmcdirmid 3y ago
It seems quite the opposite: HN biases towards anti-Apple, often for bizarre reasons that require lots of mental gymnastics to justify. You don’t really have to buy AirPods, there are lots of products out in the market that compete in that space. Just because Apple provides a certain product doesn’t mean you are being forced to buy it.
- actuator 3y ago
  No one is forced to buy Airpods, but the first class integration that the product gets which others can't gives it a competitive advantage. This is besides the power to push the product through different channels to customers of iPhones, iPads etc. Another example is, no one is forced to buy Apple Music, but for sure it pops up front and center when you buy a iOS device or Mac. In fact, even when I keep removing the application from the Mac, on a version update it comes back again. It has integrations into the system and other core system apps that other products can't get and defaults matter. On top of this they will give you free subscription for 3/6 months when you buy a new device knowing full well that most customers won't bother cancelling. All of this behavior takes the air out of competitors like Spotify and is extremely anti competitive. I don't even want to get started on iCloud etc.
  - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
    > Another example is, no one is forced to buy Apple Music, but for sure it pops up front and center when you buy a iOS device or Mac. I never noticed, having never bought Apple Music before and just using spotify instead. I guess if I wanted it to run on a HomePod, I would need it? > On top of this they will give you free subscription for 3/6 months when you buy a new device knowing full well that most customers won't bother cancelling. All of this behavior takes the air out of competitors like Spotify and is extremely anti competitive. Doesn't Spotify do the same thing?
    - actuator 3y ago
      Spotify doesn't get to offer you that when you are setting up your new phone. You have to know about the company and go and install it. It is good that you are using Spotify and supporting an independent company, but as I was saying defaults and ease of access matters. Spotify is not playing in a level field and regulators have failed to ensure that they are able to.
      - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
        There are plenty of non-apple speakers that come with Spotify trials. I get that trials are hard to back out of, and I've never activated my Apple Music trial. > Spotify is not playing in a level field and regulators have failed to ensure that they are able to. Spotify is still dominating music streaming, more so than Apple Music or Amazon Prime Music (which we used to use since it came free with prime).
        actuator 3y ago
        > There are plenty of non-apple speakers that come with Spotify trials. Spotify has to pay for these and has to compete for this with other music streaming companies. Also, comparison with smart speakers is disingenuous. There are a billion iPhone users itself. No non big tech company smart speaker comes even close. > Spotify is still dominating music streaming Because of nailing the product early on and being world class in playlists and music recommendations. Even if Apple music comes 80% close, just by holding distribution advantage, they will capture that market.
  - flamwenco 3y ago
    My god the increasing services push is awful; I used to be an Apple Music subscriber but left eventually because at launch it was a clusterfuck with personal libraries, just destroying metadata and deleting 'duplicates'. And I now have to use a 3rd party music app to listen to my local library on my phone because the system one likes to pop up a fullscreen ad for Apple Music what feels like every time I open it. I like my Apple products but this services thing is truly destroying a lot of the good experiences they can provide.
- lern_too_spel 3y ago
  Let me hit you with some anecdotes. I regularly disparage both Apple and Google in my comments, typically Apple for being user-hostile and lying in marketing and Google for being incompetent and user-hostile. My Apple comments get downvoted more than my Google comments (I'd guess due to fanaticism that I see with no other company), although the gap has been steadily closing.
  - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
    Well, today I learned that it was possible to go to -4. But I'm not sure we can tell anything from that really, just that there are a lot people who (a) don't like apple, and (b) are sure they are in the minority rather than the majority. Which is a bit contradictory.
- r0m4n0 3y ago
  People are anti everything on HN… the question is how much on what. There are a lot of people that defend the far and few apple negative comments. The only way to prove this would be by doing some data analysis. Maybe worth it’s own post
  - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
    I'm pretty sure everyone feels that their opinion is the underdog opposed to the other sheeple side. It is like people who think they are being hip for either hating or loving X, when lots of people love or hate X already, so it isn't really weird either way.
- hot_gril 3y ago
  The AirPods are capitalizing on lock-in. iPhones have always had Bluetooth, but almost nobody used BT headphones cause they suck. Then Apple released AirPods with first-party integrations to make it usable, and to make sure people would buy them, they also took out the jack. I care what my options are in the end, a lot more than ideology or something, and Apple worsened my options compared to before. The end result is I don't listen to music from my phone anymore.
  - hot_gril 3y ago
    (The result for probably most other iPhone users is that they bought the damn AirPods and none of the other BT headphones)
  - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
    > I care what my options are in the end, a lot more than ideology or something, and Apple worsened my options compared to before. How did AirPods existing ruin your options? You can choose to not buy them, I don't, I like conductive head phones better anyways (non-Apple, before the AirPods came out, and they don't suck, so I don't get what you mean by apple producing the only BT headphones that don't suck?). Or do you mean you want to buy AirPods but you don't want to use an iPhone, or you want to use wired headphones only and don't care for dongles? > The end result is I don't listen to music from my phone anymore. Seriously, this is the mental gymnastics I'm talking about. None of this is really stopping you from listening to music on your phone.
    - hot_gril 3y ago
      So my chosen option before was to just plug my earbuds or car aux into my phone. Now my choices are: - AirPods, which I don't want to shell out more money for and deal with charging/caring for them, but otherwise they'd be the best option. - Non-AirPod BT headphones. I have nice Bose ones from work. These lack Apple's extensions to improve pairing and headset (mic) mode. In headset mode, the earphone quality drops to like worse than early 2000s cellphone. Standard pairing is annoying. It's a bit annoying having to charge them. I also don't want to shell out more money for earbuds (the headphones aren't so portable). - Dongles, which I tried. Turns out they don't work with inlined mics, don't work with older iPhones (so I can't leave them on a shared car aux), are fragile, and are really easy to lose. Can't charge while using one either, but that's nbd. My car seats ate two and the last one broke. It also just feels stupid having to use these. - Old iPhone. I kept my 6 until it broke. I still have a spare 5, no longer usable with AT&T, which I use to play music in the car. Yeah I want to listen to music on my phone, but they've made it sufficiently annoying that I don't anymore. It's a clear regression.
deltree7 3y ago
[flagged]
- nailer 3y ago
  Worked at Google, pro Elon, anti Zuck but mainly for his failures (Metaverse), not from the far left and still think it's clear Google's last major product (major meaning category defining, like Search or Maps or Android) was 15 years ago.
  - deltree7 3y ago
    Lot of Googlers are anti-big-tech, anti-corporation :) 1) If you think Transformers weren't category defining, I don't know what to say. 2) Metaverse isn't a failure. That's like saying in 2019, "Chat Agents are a failure"
    - nailer 3y ago
      1. Wow you think transformers are a product like Search and Maps and Android are. That's great. 2. I think most people consider both Metaverse and chat agents as failures. ChatGPT isn't a 'chat agent' and most chat agents still don't work. Watching the keynote and Google are expecting developers to cut and paste code into Bard rather than releasing a Bard plugin for code editors and taking on Microsoft directly. Weak.
      - deltree7 3y ago
        Most people lack the vision beyond 15 minutes. Of course Metaverse is a failure for them, just like how Internet was just a glorified fax machine for luddites. So, popular opinion is the worst indicator of anything. Happy to make a public bet that Metaverse will consume 25% of a person's day for at least 4 billion people by 2035 If transformer doesn't excite you (mostly due to anti-Google bias), Google has a dozen products that has over a 500 Million users. It takes an unprecedented amount of anti-corp brainwash to say Google isn't successful or innovative.
spacemadness 3y ago
I think it depends on how you define Hacker. This site is very business leaning to begin with in a lot of ways which doesn’t always draw the “hacker” crowd. I will forever think of hackers ideally not being so concerned with operating businesses but being obsessed with technology sometimes at the expense of business concerns.
- ShamelessC 3y ago
  For YCombinator and the like, “hacker” is actually just code for “disruptor”. It is a subtle but powerful conflation designed to retroactively strengthen the historical positioning of e.g. Jobs, Woz, Zuckerberg while simultaneously praising disruptive technologies that will “eat the world”. Of course, none of those people ever fit the more common definition of hacker for more than a few years, if ever, even if you assume hacker means “good coder” or similar. And they certainly never fit the information security definition.
fallat 3y ago
This is why I stopped calling HN, HN. It's YCombinator news. It's not news for hackers - maybe at one point, but not anymore and not for awhile. It may even be seen as looked down on because you're posting on a site run by venture capitalists.
- throwaway894345 3y ago
  I think it's a lot less confusing when you understand that "hacker" doesn't describe a kind of politics, but rather connotes an interest in technology.
  - saltcured 3y ago
    Depending on who you talk to, hacking doesn't even mean technology. It's more of an artful blend of craftsmanship and trickery in whatever problem domain you face. But I think the confusing aspect of HN and the VC influence is the number of folks here who happily conflate technology, business, entrepreneurship, and capitalism. If you see these as separable topics, you find that a lot of the confused threads here are different cohorts in the audience who focus on one of these topics and treat the others as ancillary.
    - fallat 3y ago
      > Depending on who you talk to, hacking doesn't even mean technology. It's more of an artful blend of craftsmanship and trickery in whatever problem domain you face. Exactly this. I use the term hacker in its original form.
- fomine3 3y ago
  YC news is still weird for praising Apple
  - smoldesu 3y ago
    Not really. Every entrepreneur has to worship the Steve Jobs handbook if they want jaded middle-aged Disney investors to open their wallets for $TECH_PRODUCT. It's not uncommon or surprising to see people in the startup sphere who are unnaturally defensive of Apple/iOS/MacOS.
PedroBatista 3y ago
>HN tends to bias towards pro Apple. I'm not sure if I agree with that. I think being anti-Google and FB would be more accurate than being pro-Apple. Also, during the years I've observed the "pro-Apple" gauge changes as the time zones change, ie. it tends to be all-time high when it's noon in California - which is understandable.
- nerdix 3y ago
  There are really wonky arguments here trying to justify rent seeking in the App Store, walled gardens, and completely closed ecosystems. And I'm not sure why anyone would be supportive of any of those things outside of being pro-Apple. No other company seems to get that type of pass. There was a thread the other day where some people seemed pretty miffed that Google requires a Pixel to connect to the internet before you can unlock it's bootloader. Then you go into a thread about third party app stores on iPhones and you see people saying that being blocked from installing software that Apple hasn't blessed is actually a feature. Different people and all that. But the general sentiment on HN is definitely more forgiving of Apple than others.
timcavel 3y ago
[dead]
parasubvert 3y ago
Hacker crowds like to see underdogs win. Apple was the ultimate underdog for most of its existence, and was "doomed" every year up until around 2013. There's no mental gymnastics involved, no upstanding hacker respects "standards" unless they're better for the user (often they're not). It is a matter of taste and preference. Remember, Microsoft also was for a LONG time an attractor of hackers, until the early-mid 90s when Windows 3.1 became the focus (and it sucked for hackers, who fled to OS/2 briefly, then Linux, then Apple when they got tired of tweaking Linux, now some flowing back to Microsoft or Linux).
- nerdix 3y ago
  Maybe for people of a certain age. But there is a whole generation of people (some of whom are on HN) who have only ever known a world where everyone wanted the latest iThing. It's been probably 15 years since you could seriously consider Apple an underdog in the tech space.
  - parasubvert 3y ago
    The iPhone hasn’t even been out for 15 years. People were calling Apple dead not even 6 or 7 years ago, the Apple Watch not being enough to satiate the demand for new toys. The days of Apple basing their business on shiny new iThings are mostly past it, Airpods notwithstanding. Now they’re in pure optimization mode, and going deep into content and services.
- StevePerkins 3y ago
  This is probably the most absurd comment that I've read so far in 2023. Apple is a 2.73 trillion dollar company, and single-handedly makes up 13.3% of the entire S&P 500 index. The iPod was launched 22 years ago. Apple hasn't been remotely an "underdog" for over a generation now.
  - parasubvert 3y ago
    A generation ago, Apple was a penny stock and the iMac was released. The iPod was a success but a small fraction of the story. They were “only” a $75 billion company by the year the iPhone came out. Apple’s valuation and PE ratio only became in line with its peers around 5-6 years ago. It was priced as if it were about to go bankrupt for much of its history , even after the iPhone was released, convinced that Apple just HAD to go out of business, or hit a ceiling, or whatever. History is also littered with quotes from competition that didn’t take them seriously: Dell, HPE, Samsung, Google, Microsoft, Facebook. The absurdity isn’t that Apple was thought to be an underdog, it’s that so many never took them seriously. Perhaps the main reason Apple is as big as it is now is because wall street and the competition refused to take them seriously? If they did, we’d have a more balanced industry.
cruano 3y ago
My Sennheiser HD8s and their propietary cable begs to differ. And also keep in mind you are favoring Bose, the multi-million dollar company that didn't bat an eye when they decided to introduce spyware on their app. Apple has done the wrong thing many times, but audio is not one of them. They offered a legitimate better product, to the point the only headphones I would rather use are IEMs that cost 8 times as much.
dang 3y ago
> HN tends to bias towards pro Apple Possibly the most reliable phenomenon I've observed as a mod is that people believe HN is biased against what they like and in favor of what they dislike. This shows up most often with politics - for a recent example see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35734307 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35734307 ("HN leans left") followed by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35734354 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35734354 ("HN leans left?") and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35734392 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35734392 ("You're completely delusional if you consider HN to be left leaning"). For an amusing (to me anyway!) set of examples see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26148870 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26148870. But it works the same way with other things, like $BigCos. Each $BigCo has a fanbase and a foebase. Each fanbase feels like HN is biased against "their" $BigCo and in favor of some other $BigCo. No doubt the same mechanism makes sports fans feel like the refs are biased against their team. The feelings of a sports fan determine not only the direction of perceived bias (no fan ever thought "the refs are consistently biased in our favor") but also its intensity (the more passionately a fan is devoted to $team, the more strongly they are persuaded about the refs' "bias"). Readers with no particular passion on a topic are less likely to perceive bias or feel much about it either way. I believe that the way this works is that if we feel strongly about $foo, we're much more likely than the median reader to notice posts about $foo, especially ones we dislike (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20notice%20dislike&sort=byDate&type=story&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), and to weight them much more heavily. What starts as a feeling in us thereby turns into a perception about the world, often one that is very intensely held and impossible to dissuade. This is not to say that the community, the refs, the mods, or what have you, aren't biased! Just that the existence or quantity of possible bias can't be decided by this mechanism, which is the mechanism that drives online discussion. In fact, the primary concern of any serious attempt to decide or quantify bias would have to be making sure that it wasn't distorted by this psychological mechanism, which is so powerful. (This is a bit more than I set out to write about this! it's a hobbyhorse of mine, as it makes moderation moderately more complicated...where by moderately I mean extremely)
- actuator 3y ago
  Oh no, I didn't mean moderators are biased. I don't think that is the case at all. I was making the point of the HN users. Specially the characteristic of downvoting and negating criticism in this case. You are right though, because I strongly feel about the anti competitive issues Apple indulges in, maybe I visit those threads more and tend to notice them. Although, I think there is a positive bias as well, which I care less about. Like one of the commenter mentioned that Final Cut Pro being launched on iPad was the top post through large parts of the day.

seanmcdirmid 3y ago

It seems quite the opposite: HN biases towards anti-Apple, often for bizarre reasons that require lots of mental gymnastics to justify. You don’t really have to buy AirPods, there are lots of products out in the market that compete in that space. Just because Apple provides a certain product doesn’t mean you are being forced to buy it.

actuator 3y ago
No one is forced to buy Airpods, but the first class integration that the product gets which others can't gives it a competitive advantage. This is besides the power to push the product through different channels to customers of iPhones, iPads etc. Another example is, no one is forced to buy Apple Music, but for sure it pops up front and center when you buy a iOS device or Mac. In fact, even when I keep removing the application from the Mac, on a version update it comes back again. It has integrations into the system and other core system apps that other products can't get and defaults matter. On top of this they will give you free subscription for 3/6 months when you buy a new device knowing full well that most customers won't bother cancelling. All of this behavior takes the air out of competitors like Spotify and is extremely anti competitive. I don't even want to get started on iCloud etc.
- seanmcdirmid 3y ago
  > Another example is, no one is forced to buy Apple Music, but for sure it pops up front and center when you buy a iOS device or Mac. I never noticed, having never bought Apple Music before and just using spotify instead. I guess if I wanted it to run on a HomePod, I would need it? > On top of this they will give you free subscription for 3/6 months when you buy a new device knowing full well that most customers won't bother cancelling. All of this behavior takes the air out of competitors like Spotify and is extremely anti competitive. Doesn't Spotify do the same thing?
  - actuator 3y ago
    Spotify doesn't get to offer you that when you are setting up your new phone. You have to know about the company and go and install it. It is good that you are using Spotify and supporting an independent company, but as I was saying defaults and ease of access matters. Spotify is not playing in a level field and regulators have failed to ensure that they are able to.
    - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
      There are plenty of non-apple speakers that come with Spotify trials. I get that trials are hard to back out of, and I've never activated my Apple Music trial. > Spotify is not playing in a level field and regulators have failed to ensure that they are able to. Spotify is still dominating music streaming, more so than Apple Music or Amazon Prime Music (which we used to use since it came free with prime).
      - actuator 3y ago
        > There are plenty of non-apple speakers that come with Spotify trials. Spotify has to pay for these and has to compete for this with other music streaming companies. Also, comparison with smart speakers is disingenuous. There are a billion iPhone users itself. No non big tech company smart speaker comes even close. > Spotify is still dominating music streaming Because of nailing the product early on and being world class in playlists and music recommendations. Even if Apple music comes 80% close, just by holding distribution advantage, they will capture that market.
- flamwenco 3y ago
  My god the increasing services push is awful; I used to be an Apple Music subscriber but left eventually because at launch it was a clusterfuck with personal libraries, just destroying metadata and deleting 'duplicates'. And I now have to use a 3rd party music app to listen to my local library on my phone because the system one likes to pop up a fullscreen ad for Apple Music what feels like every time I open it. I like my Apple products but this services thing is truly destroying a lot of the good experiences they can provide.
lern_too_spel 3y ago
Let me hit you with some anecdotes. I regularly disparage both Apple and Google in my comments, typically Apple for being user-hostile and lying in marketing and Google for being incompetent and user-hostile. My Apple comments get downvoted more than my Google comments (I'd guess due to fanaticism that I see with no other company), although the gap has been steadily closing.
- seanmcdirmid 3y ago
  Well, today I learned that it was possible to go to -4. But I'm not sure we can tell anything from that really, just that there are a lot people who (a) don't like apple, and (b) are sure they are in the minority rather than the majority. Which is a bit contradictory.
r0m4n0 3y ago
People are anti everything on HN… the question is how much on what. There are a lot of people that defend the far and few apple negative comments. The only way to prove this would be by doing some data analysis. Maybe worth it’s own post
- seanmcdirmid 3y ago
  I'm pretty sure everyone feels that their opinion is the underdog opposed to the other sheeple side. It is like people who think they are being hip for either hating or loving X, when lots of people love or hate X already, so it isn't really weird either way.
hot_gril 3y ago
The AirPods are capitalizing on lock-in. iPhones have always had Bluetooth, but almost nobody used BT headphones cause they suck. Then Apple released AirPods with first-party integrations to make it usable, and to make sure people would buy them, they also took out the jack. I care what my options are in the end, a lot more than ideology or something, and Apple worsened my options compared to before. The end result is I don't listen to music from my phone anymore.
- hot_gril 3y ago
  (The result for probably most other iPhone users is that they bought the damn AirPods and none of the other BT headphones)
- seanmcdirmid 3y ago
  > I care what my options are in the end, a lot more than ideology or something, and Apple worsened my options compared to before. How did AirPods existing ruin your options? You can choose to not buy them, I don't, I like conductive head phones better anyways (non-Apple, before the AirPods came out, and they don't suck, so I don't get what you mean by apple producing the only BT headphones that don't suck?). Or do you mean you want to buy AirPods but you don't want to use an iPhone, or you want to use wired headphones only and don't care for dongles? > The end result is I don't listen to music from my phone anymore. Seriously, this is the mental gymnastics I'm talking about. None of this is really stopping you from listening to music on your phone.
  - hot_gril 3y ago
    So my chosen option before was to just plug my earbuds or car aux into my phone. Now my choices are: - AirPods, which I don't want to shell out more money for and deal with charging/caring for them, but otherwise they'd be the best option. - Non-AirPod BT headphones. I have nice Bose ones from work. These lack Apple's extensions to improve pairing and headset (mic) mode. In headset mode, the earphone quality drops to like worse than early 2000s cellphone. Standard pairing is annoying. It's a bit annoying having to charge them. I also don't want to shell out more money for earbuds (the headphones aren't so portable). - Dongles, which I tried. Turns out they don't work with inlined mics, don't work with older iPhones (so I can't leave them on a shared car aux), are fragile, and are really easy to lose. Can't charge while using one either, but that's nbd. My car seats ate two and the last one broke. It also just feels stupid having to use these. - Old iPhone. I kept my 6 until it broke. I still have a spare 5, no longer usable with AT&T, which I use to play music in the car. Yeah I want to listen to music on my phone, but they've made it sufficiently annoying that I don't anymore. It's a clear regression.

deltree7 3y ago

[flagged]

nailer 3y ago
Worked at Google, pro Elon, anti Zuck but mainly for his failures (Metaverse), not from the far left and still think it's clear Google's last major product (major meaning category defining, like Search or Maps or Android) was 15 years ago.
- deltree7 3y ago
  Lot of Googlers are anti-big-tech, anti-corporation :) 1) If you think Transformers weren't category defining, I don't know what to say. 2) Metaverse isn't a failure. That's like saying in 2019, "Chat Agents are a failure"
  - nailer 3y ago
    1. Wow you think transformers are a product like Search and Maps and Android are. That's great. 2. I think most people consider both Metaverse and chat agents as failures. ChatGPT isn't a 'chat agent' and most chat agents still don't work. Watching the keynote and Google are expecting developers to cut and paste code into Bard rather than releasing a Bard plugin for code editors and taking on Microsoft directly. Weak.
    - deltree7 3y ago
      Most people lack the vision beyond 15 minutes. Of course Metaverse is a failure for them, just like how Internet was just a glorified fax machine for luddites. So, popular opinion is the worst indicator of anything. Happy to make a public bet that Metaverse will consume 25% of a person's day for at least 4 billion people by 2035 If transformer doesn't excite you (mostly due to anti-Google bias), Google has a dozen products that has over a 500 Million users. It takes an unprecedented amount of anti-corp brainwash to say Google isn't successful or innovative.

spacemadness 3y ago

I think it depends on how you define Hacker. This site is very business leaning to begin with in a lot of ways which doesn’t always draw the “hacker” crowd. I will forever think of hackers ideally not being so concerned with operating businesses but being obsessed with technology sometimes at the expense of business concerns.

ShamelessC 3y ago
For YCombinator and the like, “hacker” is actually just code for “disruptor”. It is a subtle but powerful conflation designed to retroactively strengthen the historical positioning of e.g. Jobs, Woz, Zuckerberg while simultaneously praising disruptive technologies that will “eat the world”. Of course, none of those people ever fit the more common definition of hacker for more than a few years, if ever, even if you assume hacker means “good coder” or similar. And they certainly never fit the information security definition.

fallat 3y ago

This is why I stopped calling HN, HN. It's YCombinator news. It's not news for hackers - maybe at one point, but not anymore and not for awhile. It may even be seen as looked down on because you're posting on a site run by venture capitalists.

throwaway894345 3y ago
I think it's a lot less confusing when you understand that "hacker" doesn't describe a kind of politics, but rather connotes an interest in technology.
- saltcured 3y ago
  Depending on who you talk to, hacking doesn't even mean technology. It's more of an artful blend of craftsmanship and trickery in whatever problem domain you face. But I think the confusing aspect of HN and the VC influence is the number of folks here who happily conflate technology, business, entrepreneurship, and capitalism. If you see these as separable topics, you find that a lot of the confused threads here are different cohorts in the audience who focus on one of these topics and treat the others as ancillary.
  - fallat 3y ago
    > Depending on who you talk to, hacking doesn't even mean technology. It's more of an artful blend of craftsmanship and trickery in whatever problem domain you face. Exactly this. I use the term hacker in its original form.
fomine3 3y ago
YC news is still weird for praising Apple
- smoldesu 3y ago
  Not really. Every entrepreneur has to worship the Steve Jobs handbook if they want jaded middle-aged Disney investors to open their wallets for $TECH_PRODUCT. It's not uncommon or surprising to see people in the startup sphere who are unnaturally defensive of Apple/iOS/MacOS.

PedroBatista 3y ago

>HN tends to bias towards pro Apple. I'm not sure if I agree with that. I think being anti-Google and FB would be more accurate than being pro-Apple. Also, during the years I've observed the "pro-Apple" gauge changes as the time zones change, ie. it tends to be all-time high when it's noon in California - which is understandable.

nerdix 3y ago
There are really wonky arguments here trying to justify rent seeking in the App Store, walled gardens, and completely closed ecosystems. And I'm not sure why anyone would be supportive of any of those things outside of being pro-Apple. No other company seems to get that type of pass. There was a thread the other day where some people seemed pretty miffed that Google requires a Pixel to connect to the internet before you can unlock it's bootloader. Then you go into a thread about third party app stores on iPhones and you see people saying that being blocked from installing software that Apple hasn't blessed is actually a feature. Different people and all that. But the general sentiment on HN is definitely more forgiving of Apple than others.

timcavel 3y ago

[dead]

parasubvert 3y ago

Hacker crowds like to see underdogs win. Apple was the ultimate underdog for most of its existence, and was "doomed" every year up until around 2013. There's no mental gymnastics involved, no upstanding hacker respects "standards" unless they're better for the user (often they're not). It is a matter of taste and preference. Remember, Microsoft also was for a LONG time an attractor of hackers, until the early-mid 90s when Windows 3.1 became the focus (and it sucked for hackers, who fled to OS/2 briefly, then Linux, then Apple when they got tired of tweaking Linux, now some flowing back to Microsoft or Linux).

nerdix 3y ago
Maybe for people of a certain age. But there is a whole generation of people (some of whom are on HN) who have only ever known a world where everyone wanted the latest iThing. It's been probably 15 years since you could seriously consider Apple an underdog in the tech space.
- parasubvert 3y ago
  The iPhone hasn’t even been out for 15 years. People were calling Apple dead not even 6 or 7 years ago, the Apple Watch not being enough to satiate the demand for new toys. The days of Apple basing their business on shiny new iThings are mostly past it, Airpods notwithstanding. Now they’re in pure optimization mode, and going deep into content and services.
StevePerkins 3y ago
This is probably the most absurd comment that I've read so far in 2023. Apple is a 2.73 trillion dollar company, and single-handedly makes up 13.3% of the entire S&P 500 index. The iPod was launched 22 years ago. Apple hasn't been remotely an "underdog" for over a generation now.
- parasubvert 3y ago
  A generation ago, Apple was a penny stock and the iMac was released. The iPod was a success but a small fraction of the story. They were “only” a $75 billion company by the year the iPhone came out. Apple’s valuation and PE ratio only became in line with its peers around 5-6 years ago. It was priced as if it were about to go bankrupt for much of its history , even after the iPhone was released, convinced that Apple just HAD to go out of business, or hit a ceiling, or whatever. History is also littered with quotes from competition that didn’t take them seriously: Dell, HPE, Samsung, Google, Microsoft, Facebook. The absurdity isn’t that Apple was thought to be an underdog, it’s that so many never took them seriously. Perhaps the main reason Apple is as big as it is now is because wall street and the competition refused to take them seriously? If they did, we’d have a more balanced industry.

cruano 3y ago

My Sennheiser HD8s and their propietary cable begs to differ. And also keep in mind you are favoring Bose, the multi-million dollar company that didn't bat an eye when they decided to introduce spyware on their app. Apple has done the wrong thing many times, but audio is not one of them. They offered a legitimate better product, to the point the only headphones I would rather use are IEMs that cost 8 times as much.

dang 3y ago

> HN tends to bias towards pro Apple Possibly the most reliable phenomenon I've observed as a mod is that people believe HN is biased against what they like and in favor of what they dislike. This shows up most often with politics - for a recent example see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35734307 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35734307 ("HN leans left") followed by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35734354 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35734354 ("HN leans left?") and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35734392 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35734392 ("You're completely delusional if you consider HN to be left leaning"). For an amusing (to me anyway!) set of examples see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26148870 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26148870. But it works the same way with other things, like $BigCos. Each $BigCo has a fanbase and a foebase. Each fanbase feels like HN is biased against "their" $BigCo and in favor of some other $BigCo. No doubt the same mechanism makes sports fans feel like the refs are biased against their team. The feelings of a sports fan determine not only the direction of perceived bias (no fan ever thought "the refs are consistently biased in our favor") but also its intensity (the more passionately a fan is devoted to $team, the more strongly they are persuaded about the refs' "bias"). Readers with no particular passion on a topic are less likely to perceive bias or feel much about it either way. I believe that the way this works is that if we feel strongly about $foo, we're much more likely than the median reader to notice posts about $foo, especially ones we dislike (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20notice%20dislike&sort=byDate&type=story&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), and to weight them much more heavily. What starts as a feeling in us thereby turns into a perception about the world, often one that is very intensely held and impossible to dissuade. This is not to say that the community, the refs, the mods, or what have you, aren't biased! Just that the existence or quantity of possible bias can't be decided by this mechanism, which is the mechanism that drives online discussion. In fact, the primary concern of any serious attempt to decide or quantify bias would have to be making sure that it wasn't distorted by this psychological mechanism, which is so powerful. (This is a bit more than I set out to write about this! it's a hobbyhorse of mine, as it makes moderation moderately more complicated...where by moderately I mean extremely)

actuator 3y ago
Oh no, I didn't mean moderators are biased. I don't think that is the case at all. I was making the point of the HN users. Specially the characteristic of downvoting and negating criticism in this case. You are right though, because I strongly feel about the anti competitive issues Apple indulges in, maybe I visit those threads more and tend to notice them. Although, I think there is a positive bias as well, which I care less about. Like one of the commenter mentioned that Final Cut Pro being launched on iPad was the top post through large parts of the day.