With Apologies to John Gruber | Hacker News Reader

With Apologies to John Gruber

oldfireball.com

20 pointssramov19 comments

Stupid name. It's more like you're trying to steal some thunder and grab his users.

This feels like the "how to get a hit in the App Store" articles. Take someone elses idea and redo it and make lots of money. Rehashing someone elses project to turn it into your own and make money.

Whatever happened to people having their own thoughts these days? Then again, with stupid articles on here about how ideas are worthless I guess this just comes down to the same ol thing. Beg, borrow and steal your way to success. Not that this is a bad thing for everything, but when we're talking about the written word and original thought is better than trying to be someone you're not.

Grabbing users from John Gruber? That’s impossible as his writing and style is impeccable.

I could’ve gone explaining myself for hours, but I like short and to the point writing. It was just an idea to build a Mac centric site, covering more technical things, as Gruber obviously swayed in another direction.

As you may know, thinking of a name and registering a domain is not easy today, so I went with the simplest path, a play on well know brand.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGRiTpCji0I

Sorry, but quite honestly it's a low budget wannabe.

Daring Fireball is almost a brand name in the Mac power user world. Love him or hate him, most users that are more than mouse clickers on a webpage typically know about the site by now.

"Anything Fireball" is a rip off of the name, or brand. Whether you implied it or not, you're kinda sorta stealing his hard work to try to make yours more popular. Of course, you won't admit it because that would make you look bad. But it's pretty doubtful you'll fool anyone here even if you deny it.

You'd do yourself a real favor by coming up with a name based on your own creation, not someone else's. I doubt John will care, but you'll alienate your user base a bit by being so "copy-cat-ish."

First post tells me what to do with scant justification; a thing DF has never, despite its other flaws, done.

Yes. If this is what Daring Fireball was like [1], then it's better off today.

That said, I feel like John Gruber used to be more of a curator that showed cool projects and things, and less of a market share analyst. I kinda miss that.

Anyway, you can't just replace John Gruber. As a writer, he's kind of one of a kind.

[1] http://www.oldfireball.com/apps.html

>Why install another browser if Safari is already included?

Because Safari's about third on my list of browsers I'd use, below Chrome and Firefox and tied with Opera above IE.

Sorry, this first post didn't do anything for me. Also, exhorting us to on the one hand, avoid proprietary formats, and on the other, to use what Apple has given us and little else is either very clever satire or the height of fanboism.

Safari is most polished of them all. I am not even considering non native apps (Firefox, Opera). While Chrome is good, it has various little interface, implementation and behavior oddities.

As for the second part, I am all for Crux, Slackware, JFS, OpenBSD, cwm, evilwm, ratpoison, urxvt etc. I am also tired. And MacBook Air gives me little friction.

I would love to have an RSS feed so that I can add it to my RSS reader.

I’ll consider it, but sites are meant for visiting and reading. I am old school like that.

Then it is highly likely that I will never visit again. These days RSS is how I keep up with all the blogs I want to keep up with, with all the ever changing content. I don't have the time to go to all of my bookmarks one by one and try to figure out the new content from old content.

Seconded. If it's not in my Google Reader, I'll never visit it again, unless somebody happens to post a link to it on FB or HN or I accidentally google it.

TBH, I have zero interest in this site to begin with, but assuming it was covering topics I cared about, I would "thirded" this.

For a site like this that claims to not be about sponsorships/ads and is mostly just plain text... not having an RSS feed is either lazy, stupid or both.

Yes, an RSS feed please. I liked what I've seen so far, and would like to follow...

OK, there’s a feed now available.

You don’t read like Daring Fireball, old or new.

Gruber is an excellent writer, no denying. I am not even going there. English is not my native language.

My idea was 'Back to Mac' version of Daring Fireball.

Daringfireball was lovable when Apple was the underdog, but now it's just annoying. If you want to use the old daring fireball as inspiration, you should find a more interesting subject that you're in love with that nobody else is. Then once they make it big, you can sit back and gloat like Gruber does now.

Bookmarked. I like the idea, and where you're going with your first post. I literally stopped reading daring fireball because of the politics posts.

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