Can anyone tell me why this matters? In the context of "hacker" "news", I mean.
Why do you think it doesn't matter?
A: Why does it need to be posted to HN [by HN users] every quarter and make top story [because HN users have voted it up]?
The community (which is why the site exists) hath spoken!
Sites have purposes (otherwise, there would only need to be one website on the Internet, that served everyone's needs equally.) Letting the community decide both what, and who, the community is to be composed of, leads inevitably to every community being composed of "everyone," and having a purpose of "general interest." I, for one, would rather have a place that just has "Hacker News."
So the question becomes: what's the definition of "hacker news", if not a user-submitted aggregator? And where do you define what is and what is not HN-worthy? It's apparently not age-related, nor precedence, nor community, and I don't know how you'd define what's hacker-related and what's not, barring strict, literal "hacks" (and then how about circuit bending to make music?).
Amen, brother.
I come here to read news about startups, not to indulge in Apple lovefests. If I wanted to do that, I'd be over at TechCrunch.
I'm simply asking a question - why is this news relevant to this community and why do we have to have a top-story post on it every quarter? What use is that to anyone here?
And for this simple question, I have lost almost 40 points of karma in the last hour.
Thanks everyone. What a great community.
http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=schammy
The single submission you've made has been a link to a picture of Jobs in a 1984 motif - clearly negative about Apple.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1517087 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1306919 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1306321 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1306314 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1306310 NOTE: Those last two are the exact same comment posted twice on the same article! You literally copy and pasted an anti-Apple comment so that it appeared multiple times for the same article. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1281192
So, looking over your past 30 comments here on HN, 20% of them are negative about Apple.
You wanted people to look at your history and your history shows a negative bias against Apple.
What does that say about this community? Nothing good in my opinion. But obviously, anyone who doesn't drink the Apple kool-aid doesn't have a valid opinion around these parts.
I expect to lose another 20 points of karma from this post. Have at it, sheeple.
Edit: Ya know what, after all this, I just don't see the purpose of participating in this site anymore. I was asking a perfectly valid question and received almost nothing but hate in response. Obviously I'm not welcome around here. I will send an email to HN to have my account deleted.
So long.
If you're being genuine, there's no need to leave - just try harder to understand or ignore the Apple stuff. If not, whatever.
p.s. for someone calling others "sheeple" I just want to point out that you seem rather concerned and emotional over your karma, with karma simply being an average of how those around you tend to see you.
Sheep?
We do what we can to discourage repetitive whining. I'd say it works pretty well, because the site as a whole is remarkably free from it.
- Mobile is still growing like crazy
- People are willing to pay a premium for quality even in tougher economic times
- Digital distribution of Music and Software is the future (I left out movies here because Apple doesn't give a detailed breakdown, but I think this is a significant part of the iTunes revenue as well)
Information exists everywhere, the truly successful are those that can extract it.
So if you didn't get a top-story post on Apple's revenue from HN every quarter, you would have no idea how fast mobile is growing?
> People are willing to pay a premium for quality even in tougher economic times
So? Unless you're in the business of selling expensive hardware - and my guess is that you are not - this is irrelevant.
> Digital distribution of Music and Software is the future
We're already living in this future. The last time I bought a hard-copy retail version of software was in the 90's, and for music, at least 5 years.
Interestingly this site has a great feature that allows you to ignore things you believe are irrelevant: if you don't click the link you don't need to read it.
The Pre is a good example of corporate results being interesting, but that's because they were the huge underdog. Reporting that the top dog keeps getting more toppy is not interesting.
I know I can ignore stories I don't find interesting, but I usually read almost all of the top 10 stories on HN every day and Apple's quarterly results always gets in there (typically #1 for a while), so it's hard to ignore.
Hey everyone on Hacker News, please ask schammy before up voting any story so that nothing he isn't interested in doesn't make it to the front page!
Seriously, if you only read the top 10 stories you're missing the best stuff on this site. Try not to only read popular opinion, most people are sheep
Sure, location-detection portable devices have been out for a long time, but not until the iPhone did it actually take off.
The most striking difference between modern location based startups and ours is how easy it is to get your application on a phone these days. I don't care how draconian Apple seems to be with getting your app on the phone, it just doesn't compare.
The company worked for months (if not years) to get the app distributed with a phone automatically (or nearly automatically), and the best we could get was that the enterprise sales group at the carrier could sell the solution to a company. You could still get our app on a phone w/o that, but it required a whole bunch of proprietary tools (that nobody would know how to get) and a serious amount of technical know-how at that. In other words, there was zero chance of someone saying, "hey, why don't we try this out for free to see if it can be of any use to us"
Perhaps this is why I don't get all in a tizzy about Apple's draconian app store practices (though, the last bits finally did get to me). I'm like a transplant from Czarist Russia who has come to post Patriot Act America.
Also, there was no way prior to this article to know that this was the Mac's best quarter ever, or that the iPad outsold the Mac. Knowing both these facts now, I'm much more focused on adding integration and syncing features to the Mac application and iPad companion app I'm working on.
This is big news for the Hacker community that is interested in creating new startups. Clearly, the Apple Ecosystem has both legs and inertia for another quarter.
I continue to look forward to Google's, and, oddly enough, Micrsoft's response. I'm guessing we're going to see a lot of Mobile and Tablet news in the next 18 months based on Apple's most recent quarter. Less so on the Cloud - until, of course, Apple has a blowout quarter based on the revenue from their new $1B NC Data Center. :-)