jgruber

Agreed!

Indeed.

I make a real fact-checking effort. In this case, the developer (Godier) sent me a video of the app in action. It’s a real app. He couldn’t send me a TestFlight to run (he said) because TestFlight submissions are taking a week or longer to get approved.

Obviously what I did wasn’t enough, but trust me, I try.

It's a little simplistic, sure, but I mean how much nuance do you expect me to fit into a HN comment? What I left out is Windows Mobile, which was Microsoft's attempt to extend the Windows hegemony to mobile devices. Here are Windows Mobile's US market share numbers, per Wikipedia:

    2004 11%
    2005 17%
    2006 37%
    2007 42%
    2008 27%
    2009 15%
    2010  7%
    2011  3%

What do you think happened in 2007?

Just fixed the /painstaking/painstakingLY/ typo in this sentence. Thanks for quoting it here.

No. It’s broader than that. The market forces are the entire realm of what’s possible, now and in the future. When Windows seemed entrenched forever, the platforms that eventually surpassed weren’t the competing desktop OSes (Mac and Linux). It was the web first, in the late 1990s-2000s, then mobile (iPhone and Android) in the 2010s.

Necessity really is the mother of invention, and the more we need something new, the sooner someone will invent it. But it will look no more like an iPhone than the iPhone looked like a PC.

Same. The GPT5 “Robot” persona does what no custom “be terse”, “no fluff”, etc. custom prompt ever could. It actually makes ChatGPT terse and to-the-point and eliminates (or at least greatly reduces) fluff. I love it.

I’ll bet this will fix HN’s transparency issues.

No, but it did seemingly peak a decade or so ago and stay there.

“I have strong opinions about something I proudly admit I’ve never read” is quite the take.

This is fantastic, and I'm embarrassed I didn't think to do this year-by-year analysis myself. But then how do you square up the tepid response here to

https://daringfireball.net/2025/03/something_is_rotten_in_th...

My first retort would be: do you read HN because you think it surfaces articles that are trending in the world at large?

I don't get it. You think my "Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino" piece was not suppressed here on HN?

My thesis is that HN would like you to think their moderation is highly transparent, and it's very clear that the core HN audience believes that to be true, but that in fact it is not transparent at all.

If the problem is with my writing "being not that interesting or useful and also contentious", how then do you explain Daring Fireball ranking #3 here from 2007-2021 but dropping to #78 from 2021-2025. Do you think my writing was that much more interesting and useful (and less contentious?) for the first 14 years of HN but changed suddenly in 2021?

Or do you think HN's hidden admin moderation changed suddenly around 2021?

> Apple is know for stopping shipping pre-release hardware to people that are honest in their review and that might call out questionable choice.

I've been doing this for a long time and I'm not aware of a single case where this has happened. I'd love to write about this, so please let me know which reviewers, who had previously been seeded with review unit hardware from Apple, were dropped after they wrote honest review. (I don't think what you're describing is, in any way, an accurate description of Apple's relationship with Lewis Hilsenteger.)

How then do you explain DF ranking #3 from 2007-2021, but dropping to #78 from 2021-2025? Are you saying my writing was significantly more interesting and useful for the first 14 years but dropped off a cliff starting in 2021, and the keen HN audience noticed the change immediately?

You're making a perhaps-legitimate case for why DF should never have ranked well at HN. But the data shows that the opposite is true: for 14 years it was very popular here.

How is it hypocritical to hold the view that some places are intended to be open forums for comments from anyone, and others are not?

Also, by not hosting my own comments, all public commentary on my writing is thus out of my control. I don't get to block comments I don't like here, or on Mastodon, or Twitter/X, or Bluesky. I think that's actually for the better.

How then do you explain DF being HN's #3 personal blog from 2007-2021, but #72 from 2021-2025? Do you recall HN announcing a major algorithm change?

What exactly do you think my "tactics" were/are?

I've only ever submitted one article of my own to Hacker News. This one.

But the only post on the recent submissions list that is actually marked "[flagged] is this one. If it's because enough high-karma users are clicking "flag", wouldn't they all show up as "flagged"?

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=daringfireball.net

Correct.

> Case in point: just the other day, he equated the EU's rulings about Apple's ecosystem to the dystopian short story Harrison Bergeron. Rah, rah, Goliath! Sis boom bah!

That was actually just over a year ago, and was in response to the US DOJ antitrust investigation (and didn't mention the EU at all). But, perhaps the fact that you remember it as "just the other day" is a hint that my suggesting "Harrison Bergeron" as a metaphor was uncomfortable but apt?

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/03/23/harrison-berger...

So you think I was consistently at #3 “as much and as well” from 2007-2021, and declined to #72 “as much and as well” quality in the last 4 years?

How then do you explain DF being #3 from 2007-2021 and #72 from 2021-2025?

Me too.

How then do you explain DF being #3 from 2007-2021 and #72 from 2021-2025? It’s clearly not blacklisted, but clearly is shitlisted, no?

No.

Stopped clock right twice a day, perhaps.

> there is great potential to have finally good documentation

Yes, true, no good documentation has ever been written in Markdown. Good point.

The comparison JSON is apt.

The first few years after I released Markdown, it was far less popular than I expected and hoped it would be. But it grew, and then for a years it was as popular as I’d expected. But then it kept growing, and now it’s far more popular and widely used than I’d ever thought possible. I genuinely now think it’s used in many cases where it shouldn’t be, and exposed to non-technical users who should be using something WYSIWYG, not markup.