I struggle to wrap my head around how this would work (and how AI can be used to maintain and refine software in general). Brownfield code got brown by being useful and solving a real problem, and doing it well enough to be maintained. So the AI approach is to throwaway the code that's proved its usefulness? I just don't get it.
Easily one of the best videos I've ever found on YouTube, it's a (difficult to summarize) combination of (wonderfully succinct) technical analysis of various creative software packages, analysis of industry trends, and philosophy around the impact of selling creative tools.
> Opinions generally do poorly here, for good reason. It is the junk food of content. It's easy and entertaining to read, especially if it agrees with our own notions so it's self-assuring, and if I think Apple are great I love to read opinions on why the EU are wrong with their DMA push, etc.
This perspective on opinions doesn't seem accurate to me, e.g., opinion pieces (especially favorable) on Emacs, Neovim, and Blender seem to do really well here. I also disagree with the junk food characterization, I think people taking a strong stance on why they like something is often really valuable.
> There is another comment that opines that they want to see more daringfireball content on HN. I mean, they could just visit his site, or they could just hit https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=daringfireball.net, but what they really seem to mean is that they want everyone else to see more content from DF.
For the record, I personally share things here when I think they're worth discussing, i.e., it isn't because I want people to see something, it's because I want them to talk about it.
>opinion pieces (especially favorable) on Emacs, Neovim, and Blender seem to do really well here
Years and years ago, absolutely. There would be endless "Why I Love NoSQL" posts, then "Why NoSQL Sucks" the next day, each getting quickly pushed to the top by factions that don't even bother reading it they just agree with the title. That sort of thing gets quickly flagged to death now[1]. If you want that sort of content to do well it often has a lot of work, graphs, examples, evidence, etc, and even then HNers seem to actively detect when sites/authors are trying to use HN as an impression funnel and start to penalize it.
On your specific examples (emacs, neovim, blender) a quick search on hn algolia returns few opinion-type piece with more than single digit upvotes for years. I actually found none but wasn't looking super hard.
HN has shifted, and I would argue for the better. If you disagree with something on here, writing a hot take counterpoint blog entry and submitting it will likely flop. A few personalities using HN as their personal traffic funnel has faded.
>I personally share things here when I think they're worth discussing
DF could add comments, though Gruber rejected them as a distraction from his own writing, so there's that.
[1] One of the flagged posts in /active is a "Why I'm Boycotting AI", which is basically a "take" piece. It can still feed that "that's my opinion" sentiment and see upvotes, but it broadly grows tiring.
This is the first thing I found searching for `vim` by date and finding something with enough upvotes to look like it made it to the homepage https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43168781
The former is fine, but says nothing that hasn't been said about Vim a million times before, the latter is a detailed analysis of the way Apple functions from a small angle with huge implications (e.g., acquisitions like Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro continue to be industry pillars).
I don't like disparaging anyone's work the first piece is fine, but this comparison easily illustrates which piece is being treated with the kids gloves, and which sends some folks fuming.
Look to be clear, I love Vim, it's the main app I use to do my work everyday, but it doesn't have the problem where you can't have a rational discussion about it like with Apple.
Hacker News used to the place where you'd have a discussion about whether Apple acquiring Pixelmator has a chance to make it a Photoshop competitor, now instead it's the place where programmer's try to tell photographers that Photoshop peaked in 2007 and that they should really try Krita (so no I don't think HN has "shifted for the better", I miss those conversations).
Can anyone name another company that has something similar to a "non-Apple tribe"? And if not, why not? Which is really the question I can't figure out, why Apple makes some folks so angry and the same doesn't happen with other companies.
(Preempting the only example I can think of, would be Internet Explorer, circa ~2000, which isn't really comparable because no one was defending IE then.)
Meta is a funny one, because there doesn't really seem to be a "pro-Meta" contingent. They have lots of users, but not a lot of people who feel warmly about them as a company.
The anger reading the comments here from the folks who don't like DF/Apple is practically palpable, and that's obviously the reason the articles get flagged.
I'm not sure where all that anger comes from (e.g., there isn't any company I've ever been as angry about as some of the commenters on this thread are). I suspect the response I'd get if I asked would be Apple did this or that, but personally, if I didn't like this or that I'd just buy a product from a different company and go about my day. I don't get hanging on to all that anger.
(And frankly, I'd love if someone did what DF does for other platforms, I like hearing from fans of products and platforms what they see in them.)
I suspect it's driven by the Olde School Linux / Free Software contingent of HN commenters / voters. Here is an example[1]:
"The #1 story on Hacker News at 2023:08:21T15:41Z is a 2021 discussion of Linux desktop packaging tools.
Hypothesis: HN story up-voters are heavily drawn from Free / Open Source Software folks interested in issues that were broadly discussed in "tech" two decades ago (Linux for the desktop!) and are much less broadly discussed today."
That anodyne observation garnered 5 downvotes. I mean, of course it was silly to treat Linux desktop packaging tools as the most important story in tech in 2023! Overall the dynamic feels like Wikipedia: people who participate are atypical, and nothing annoys them more than one's pointing out that they are atypical.
I agree, and expressed something similar in another command on this thread here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43493805 that HN is trending more and more from a general site for software/hardware makers, and more towards a Linux/OSS specific site.
That's a notable trend overall, but not really a problem on its own. Every community is inevitably going to lean a certain way.
But it doesn't really explain the anger. To be blunt, most of the comments criticizing DF/Apple in this thread sound unhinged to me, e.g., like Apple goes around living in these folks head rent free. I have difficulty understanding that mindset with something you can so easily avoid just by buying a product from another company? E.g., there are countless companies whose values don't align with my own, so I don't use their products, and that's the end of it. Why are these folks spending so much of their energy on hating this company that they can so easily avoid? And why is it just Apple that garner's this hatred, e.g., why not Nintendo for example, a company with a similar approach overall (closed, emphasis on product experience over specs) for example.
My hypothesis is that about 300 people whose identities were formed by participating in the Slashdot / LWN / etc. communities c. 2000-2005 are active HN participants in 2025. They saw the dream of Linux beating Windows fail—and worse, they saw Macintosh become the high-status alternative to Windows. They saw the Olde Internet of hand-coded web sites be swamped by the arrival of humanity using smart phones, and they hate it. They are like 60 year old sports fans upset about the rise of analytics, or '70s rock fans bemoaning hiphop, or Socrates berating scribblers for displacing orators. Evidence: the 400-point popularity of dozens of recent stories on Firefox minutia—Firefox does not matter, nor does Brave (note: I worked for Mozilla for four years). The many, many stories about reviving the pre-smartphone Web. Probably other topic clusters I am forgetting—Web standards?
Are you saying these things make you angry at Apple? I.e., I'm still having trouble understanding, e.g., why not just make software for the many other platforms that are more aligned with your values? E.g., if I made games, I'd probably ship on Steam and not even try to ship on Nintendo, but I wouldn't hate Nintendo for that, I'd just target platforms that I'm more aligned with. I'm just having a hard time picturing hating another platform for having values different than mine when there are so many options available, why not just focus on the other options?
> I'm still having trouble understanding, e.g., why not just make software for the many other platforms that are more aligned with your values?
I want to make software to users of smartphones, not to Apple users. There is nothing related to values. Gatekeeping the whole apps ecosystem for their own profit isn't a value anybody should share besides the shareholders.
What's the most sympathetic way to state your position? E.g., I'm struggling with "I'm angry because I can't make money off of iPhone users the way I want to" that just doesn't sound sympathetic to me? Does it to you? (This may just be a conflict of values again, i.e., it sounds entitled to me to want to have equal access to sell your products to all smartphone users, regardless of their choices, that sounds super invasive to me in fact.)
Also be curious what you think of console makers like Nintendo who have a similar approach regarding revenue cuts and access as Apple? Specifically why is there so much hate at Apple using this model but not Nintendo?
Why do you think criticizing Apple's predatory strategies comes from hate? Do you hate everything you think it is bad? The sympathetic way is to not take disagreement as hate. Why do you hate people that dislike Apple's way of doing business? Do you hate everybody that dislike things you love?
About Nintendo, I don't develop games nor play them, I couldn't care less about what the market leaders do.
As an Apple user, I'm happy with the gatekeeping, it's why I use their products, and frankly I want more of it. If it was up to me I'd like to see them enforcing their human interface guidelines a lot more.
Why can't you just develop for Android or Palm or Windows and be happy while leaving us alone to enjoy what we like? Can you at least appreciate the irony of calling Apple greedy when your main beef is they get in the way of you making money?
There are also a lot of older Windows users, and users of failed platforms from the 80s and 90s, that absolutely hold deep seated anger at Apple and Steve Jobs. There were similar attitudes about Microsoft and Bill Gates in the 90s. After Gates left Microsoft a lot of that vitriol seemed to have dissipated, but some still aim it at Apple. The anger seems to usually be economically rooted, i.e. in terms of how Apple charges high prices for their hardware.
I've been thinking about this for a long time, and I don't think it's unique to DF. As someone who values design, I've noticing for a long time that it's become harder and harder for design-related content to gain traction on HN (e.g., https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26901208).
I think the explanation here is that HN has taken a hard turn towards Linux/OSS. Not to say those weren't always popular topics, but HN used to be a place for software and hardware generally, with an emphasis on making things, OSS being an obviously important component of that. Now OSS is emphasized more. To illustrate, let's do a thought experiment: Let's say someone in the industry does a detailed explanation of the VFX pipeline for a blockbuster movie, and compare that with an someone doing the same for an indie side-project using Blender. There was a time both of those would have been popular on HN, today I'd only bet on the second making it to the front page. Note I'm not making a value judgment here, just something I've observed.
You've gotten a couple of other answers, here already. I'll just add that unfortunately I don't have link but there's a podcast interview with Andreas out there where they go into more detail about this. He said that they tried write some features in Rust and the development team just didn't like working in the language, I think the overall reason was that object-orientated programming was not a first-class citizen in Rust.
One other interesting tidbit is that the development team was excited to try Rust, but in practice disliked it, and the reverse was true for Swift.
