John Gruber about Papermaster and "That Damn Antenna" | Hacker News Reader

John Gruber about Papermaster and "That Damn Antenna"

daringfireball.net

18 pointsbarredo29 comments

It's so boring to read Grubers fan posts over and over again.. Why are they so popular on HN? They are usually full of subjective opinions on how great Apple is, nothing more.

I always presumed that's why the originating website appears in brackets next to a headline. So you can avoid reading sites you aren't interested in.

I'm surprised this so far has alluded you.

No, I think he's asking a legitimate question. Who finds these enjoyable to read? iPhone fanboys that love being told what they want to hear? What other purpose does it serve to not only write about the antenna for the dozenth time, but to post it on HN yet again?

I shouldn't have gone sarcastic at the end there, but I was quite serious.

I presume the front-page algorithm has some sort of "magic" in it so that the only articles making it to the front page are that which a significant proportion of the user base would want there. Is that not correct?

Not every post is going to be interesting everyone, but as I mentioned before, the originating URL makes it easy to spot ones from URL's you know that you're not interested in.

Myself, I am a bit of an apple fanboy - and seeing what other HN-ers opinions are on Grubers posts does interest me. I think there are probably a fair few apple fanboys on HN who agree with me.

On a similar, but unrelated note, most (not all) of the articles I read on HN I've already seen through some other means anyway. It's really only the comments that I'm interested in, which are generally of vastly superior quality than that of the originating site (if it has them).

edit: at the time of writing, the story does only have 8 votes. Is HN using popularity of previous stories from that domain to push it to the front page quicker? It does seem a little odd - maybe I'm wrong, and the users of HN really don't care about this story anymore.

HN does not use the popularity of previous stories from that domain as a weight. It uses the number of votes, adjusted for the amount of time it's been since the link or comment was added. So if a story has 8 votes after 1 minute, it will rank much higher than a story that has 8 votes after 1 day.

details: http://blog.linkibol.com/2010/05/07/how-to-build-a-popularit...

I understand this. Which part of this particular Gruber post was new, interesting, analytical, etc? It was repetition of news that surely everywhere here is aware of, along with Gruber's double think to explain that an antenna antenuating when touched is not a fundamental flaw of an antenna.

"seeing what other HN-ers opinions are on Grubers posts does interest me".

This seems exceeding obvious at this point, the comments are nearly identical on any of Gruber's latest posts.

No, I think he's asking a legitimate question. Who finds these enjoyable to read?

Most likely, the people who voted it up.

I meant "why". I thought that was obvious from how I asked my question.

What was obvious from how you asked your question was that you have some sort of grudge and wanted to bash on people you didn't like (e.g., "iPhone fanboys").

At any rate, other users aren't answerable to you for their votes.

But i didn't ask how i can avoid clicking those links.. i asked why they still are so popular and frequent to see on HN. I guess every blog post of Gruber is posted here (which in itself is fine), but every blog post of Gruber also gets enough votes to stay on the frontpage for a rather long time.

I've seen more interesting (and objective) posts that didn't even make it to the frontpage. Of course, "interesting" is rather subjective, but i guess you understand what i mean.

Re-reading your comment, you did ask why they were so popular. Must have mis-read that at the time - sorry.

I was a little twitchy, as I'm tired of seeing "why has this been posted" style comments.

As I said in one of my other comments though, I think there is a large proportion of Apple fans here on HN, who are genuinely interested. Most of those are probably subscribed by RSS anyway, but are curious as to what other HNers think.

I'm smart enough to not try talking Apple to the majority of people I know IRL, and I'm not quite brave(?) enough to browse the apple-specific discussion forums. They tend to be filled with too many fanboys and haters, whereas HN tends to be a little more something-inbetween.

edit: fixed minor typo

yes, correct.. Here is how i think of it: For me HN is still one of the best pages to look for news, and everytime one of those fanboy/flamewar topics makes it to the frontpage, another interesting topic doesn't make it. I would have thought people are mature enough not to upvote those random subjective blogs, it's just not objective enough to be news for me, that's why i don't like them. I can live with the smartphone market share news, because they tend to be based on some companies numbers... Anyway, i guess this will be downvoted again, whatever.. i'll just shut up and try to ignore daringfireball links.

Agreed. He's become a whiney apologist. Every post is more infuriating. And I love Apple.

I think he's gone downhill a bit since Jobs referenced his blog a few months back.

(a) A significant chunk of HN'ers tend to agree with Gruber, (b) a significant chunk of HN'ers at least tend to learn things from Gruber posts (ie, the scuttlebutt that antenna-exec-guy was canned), (c) Gruber tends to be addressing issues that have captured the attention of HN, (d) Gruber captures the "quasi-official" "pro-Apple" side of those issues better than any other blog, and (e) Gruber's posts are extraordinarily well-written and people like reading them for that reason.

It's incredibly boring --- almost daft --- to complain that Gruber takes Apple's side in these posts. No shit, really, Gruber's pro-Apple, you say? Gruber has absolutely no incentive to be more fair to Apple's opponents than he is. He's not writing for HN; he's getting posted here by people who think he writes interesting stuff.

I get that, but that's a shame. It's like stating that the Sun (the magazine) or the "Bild" (german magazine) are well written and respected journals because they are read by millions of people. I always hated how those magazines can be read by so many people.

Or to rephrase that: If it's news (it's Hacker NEWS, right?), the first and most important point is that the article is objective and neutral. Atleast for me. And that's why i don't like those links on the frontpage, just as i don't like the suns, the mirrors or the "bilds" frontpage.

Or to put it yet another way: daringfireball.net is the subjective opinion of a single person who seems to rephrase a lot of apples marketing talk. It's not journalism, it's not news, there is often no objective proof, no scientific proof, just the personal opinion of a single person. It doesn't belong on a page that has a certain quality. In a news magazine, i'd rate that as bad journalism, bad news. And again, this page is for news, i thought.

You just ignored 2/3 of my comment to focus on "yes, Gruber is pro-Mac".

I prefer reporting with a strong point of view to that which adopts an "objective and neutral" pose.

Perhaps because he's so pro-Apple, he sometimes has new details -- as in this piece, that the internal bug for the antenna issue was two years old.

What has anyone ever learned from DaringFireball? The scuttlebutt speculation that is utterly meaningless is such an example? If that's "learning" then your bar is entirely too low.

DF caters to special interest pro-Apple-enthusiasts such as yourself. His posts gets disproportionately elevated because your small group has to up arrow every unsubstantiated, usually inaccurate thing he says, while everyone else is busy paying attention to a distributed set of submissions.

In any case, it's daft to complain that people complain about Gruber's obvious bias.

If that's "learning" then your bar is entirely too low.

You're onto a something important here, but you aren't quite embracing your own point of view. If you think about it some more, you will end up not reading, much less writing much of anything here. :)

Here's a better way to spend time: http://www.startupbook.net/

No kidding. I don't care that there is a significant portion of HN'ers that like him and agree with him. Maybe its more a problem with the HN community than with Gruber himself; a sign, perhaps, that the HN community has had its day.

I have recently tweeted about how boring and lame Gruber's posts are. I mean, kudos to the man for getting a huge following by typing out this constantly pro-AAPL drivel but it stinks when it pours over into communities I do tend to care about, or at least used to. And, when I point it out, as you have done, people here point fingers back at me defending the poor guy. Like he even needs to be defended, really?

Would you care to pick out something he said that you believe is false, and explain why?

Truly, Apple has become the most boring tech company of today. Months and months of discussions about phones, antennas, internal policies, petty theft, and now business executives. It must be hard being an Apple blogger, and feigning excitement over such trivialities.

Apple is about as boring as every other tech company when it comes to those issues. The big difference though is, that people talk about it when these things happen there. With every other company everyone just ignores it. That makes Apple one of the most (or the most) exciting tech company to many people.

Are you kidding? Every time they spew out some rubbish they make another month's rent.

Gruber claims that Apple caught the antenna bug two years ago. Why then, after all of the reports, did Apple claim to be working tirelessly around the clock for some 22 days to find the issue? Secondly, it isn't "one spot": Touching the antenna anywhere attenuates and detunes it, which is why no other phone has an antenna in places that you touch. The whole bridging antennas thing is a red herring.

I fully expect an upcoming revision of the iPhone -- perhaps even the white version and then a Rev.B black version, to have a coating on the antenna.A simply layer of epoxy and it would still look groovy and would eliminate almost all of the issues. The downside is how that will wear over time, which I'm sure they're testing right now.

Reading your comment on my iPhone 4 made me curious: after a few minutes of trying, I can't make the signal drop enough to lose bars by touching it anywhere besides the gap between antennas, which makes me lose two bars every time. Even if touching it anywhere should theoretically cause a problem, it's definitely much more pronounced when you bridge the gap.

Agreeing and adding the data point that having band-aided the "death gap" on my antenna, I get significantly better reception on my i4 than I did on my 3G. I think the original commenter's point is a crock.

Just to confirm: You believe that touching an external antenna doesn't detune or attenuate the signal. That's a fascinating belief that goes completely against all antenna design.

It's interesting that the iPhone 4 is the first device with a touchable antenna, and that was done purely to reduce the size of the device. Must be magic.

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