I've never noticed abundance of Apple articles, until this morning. Out of 13 top articles over half of them were leading to apple.com. Some feature to filter out unwanted links might be useful here.
On the topic of voting, I've been thinking about two parallel scores - one could be traditional up/down vote, which, alas also traditionally, signifies agreeing/disagreeing; the second could be valuable/not valuable score. Perhaps by splitting these into two distinct parts would allow to improve accuracy in scoring. Represent up/down vote with some clear graphics, so as to give that feeling of accomplishment when you press the big red downvote button and hopefully you won't feel the need to seek some smaller "not valuable" link below.
It used to be that every Apple announcement no matter how minor produced links to every Mac related site...for days before the event so that people could speculate. Then the day of the announcement there would be links to live reporting, links to every 'first look' article on every Mac site and the official Apple pages. As a bonus there were always many 'Ask HN:' companion threads.
As personally disinterested in the subject as I am, the current situation is much better, and the number of articles is unusual these days but justified because of the scale of Apple's announcements. While HN exposure is as usual disproportionate to actual relevance within computing, the Apple news is actually big Apple news.
As for comment scores, there's no such thing as accuracy independent of the actual score. Life's not fair and neither is internet commenting. Upvotes and downvotes are multivalent except in so far as they express a user's inclination to upvote or downvote or not vote. We are talking about 'Internet Points' for fuck's sake.
I totally agree. And the ultra-weird "it's awesome if Apple does a thing, but completely evil if anybody else even sniffs at the idea" groupthink that permeated almost every thread on any topic seems to have abated somewhat. It's still there on occasion, but Gruber's impossibly apologist blog posts are generally off the front page and the ultra-apologists seems to have started fading after Steve Job's death.
There was definitely an almost pseudo-religious "newly converted" component to it.
These days if I see Gruber on the front page it's usually because of something genuinely interesting.
But for a couple solid years there, you couldn't say anything that might even be assumed to be critical of an Apple product without getting downvoted. I really wanted a place of smart people who could celebrate Apple's achievements and criticize their failures without descending into religious flamewars, and HN simply wasn't providing this.
Part of the change in attitude on HN is based on four years experiencing substantial shifts in the terms of the relationship between Apple and software developers since the iPad's release. The death of Jobs made criticism of Apple more acceptable of course, but not criticism of him to any significant degree.
The bigger picture is that HN [and YC] have come off the Apple App Store bubble. Mobile apps are now seen as multi-platform programs, and the center of gravity has clearly moved toward open source tool chains and back toward the core idea of Web based software.
Much! I'm surprised to see this very ancient post resurfaced here. But this is definitely one of the way in which it's changed for the better since 2010.
I'm a pure Apple-basher, but most times when they have their big to-do, and especially if they release something as significant to many computer people's future plans as Swift, IMO HN should have a lot of Apple on the front page. I don't miss the Gruber at all, though.
> most times when they have their big to-do [...] HN should have a lot of Apple on the front page
That's certainly what was going on yesterday. Microsoft had even more stories on the front page when they held their big to-do a month or so ago. It's a side-effect of the major tech companies stockpiling their big announcements for annual conference days.
On the topic of voting, I've been thinking about two parallel scores - one could be traditional up/down vote, which, alas also traditionally, signifies agreeing/disagreeing; the second could be valuable/not valuable score. Perhaps by splitting these into two distinct parts would allow to improve accuracy in scoring. Represent up/down vote with some clear graphics, so as to give that feeling of accomplishment when you press the big red downvote button and hopefully you won't feel the need to seek some smaller "not valuable" link below.