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Comment by robgough | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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