I think we're in violent agreement.

But we can summarize the vast majority of Grubers posts thusly:

"Something about Apple = Great"

then generate a dozen or so threads of nothing but either fawning praise for Gruber or the same repeated complaints about his bias.

At this point Gruber posts and the follow up "conversation" (I'm using it charitably at this point) are something one could probably machine generate, then randomly insert the entire thing into HN's new queue and it would be virtually indistinguishable from the real thing.

in other words, Gruber fails the Turing test and I for one (among apparently several HNers) are tired of having what are essentially Markov chains jamming up the front page.

The problem is everyone coming out and saying "let's ban Gruber" every time one of his stories are posting. This compels people like me to respond because I think he posts interesting stuff. If it weren't for the knee jerk reaction from the haters then we could have a decent discussion. I certainly wouldn't come in here unilaterally praising Gruber, I would respond to his points just like I do with any other post (except Dvorak, I always propose banning Dvorak because he is actively corrosive to intelligent discourse).

I ask this as an absolutely honest question, when Gruber writes (as he is prone to do) a piece that consists pretty much entirely of Apple praise, what exactly is it about that you find interesting?

I'm not trying to troll, it's clear that there is a minority here, including myself that can't find any possible information in them, but the HN majority clearly find his writing absolutely fascinating and full of all kinds of information nuggets that pass me and others right by.

I always propose banning Dvorak because he is actively corrosive to intelligent discourse

No argument from me at all.

Why can't his articles just be well written opinion pieces? He's making observations and drawing conclusions from them about a company (and their products) that he clearly loves.

If one isn't interested one can just move on just as I move on when I see a post about Java or politics.

If you can write a bot that posts cogent arguments in favor of Apple products, you can put Gruber out of a job. Kill two birds with one stone!

Now that's not a fair competition! If you drop the requirement for "cogent" and make it equal then I could probably muster something up.