Hacker News: jgruber

New comment by jgruber in "Mea Culpa – Dark Hours"

jgruber — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 01:55:13 +0000

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.

New comment by jgruber in "App Store Rejection of the Week: Dark Hours"

jgruber — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 00:31:30 +0000

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:

What do you think happened in 2007?

New comment by jgruber in "App Store Rejection of the Week: Dark Hours"

jgruber — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 23:58:44 +0000

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

New comment by jgruber in "App Store Rejection of the Week: Dark Hours"

jgruber — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 23:42:55 +0000

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.

New comment by jgruber in "ChatGPT Atlas"

jgruber — Sat, 25 Oct 2025 03:36:03 +0000

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.

New comment by jgruber in "Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator"

jgruber — Wed, 02 Apr 2025 20:39:21 +0000

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

New comment by jgruber in "The Website Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss"

jgruber — Sun, 30 Mar 2025 03:04:08 +0000

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

New comment by jgruber in "The Website Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss"

jgruber — Sun, 30 Mar 2025 03:00:55 +0000

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

New comment by jgruber in "The Website Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss"

jgruber — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 23:09:47 +0000

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...

New comment by jgruber in "The Website Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss"

jgruber — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 23:04:45 +0000

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

New comment by jgruber in "The Website Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss"

jgruber — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 22:55:58 +0000

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

New comment by jgruber in "The Website Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss"

jgruber — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 14:27:31 +0000

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?

New comment by jgruber in "The Website Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss"

jgruber — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 14:23:10 +0000

> 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.)

New comment by jgruber in "The Website Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss"

jgruber — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 14:16:01 +0000

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.

New comment by jgruber in "The Website Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss"

jgruber — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 14:06:48 +0000

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.

New comment by jgruber in "The Website Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss"

jgruber — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 14:02:16 +0000

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?

New comment by jgruber in "The Website Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss"

jgruber — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 13:48:19 +0000

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

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

New comment by jgruber in "The Website Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss"

jgruber — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 13:44:18 +0000

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

New comment by jgruber in "The Website Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss"

jgruber — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 13:38:49 +0000

Correct.

New comment by jgruber in "The Website Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss"

jgruber — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 13:36:49 +0000

> 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...