You’re not kidding. From the earlier discussion:

> this is the exact same technology Apple lets China use to hunt down their religious and political minorities

> one thing is for certain; Apple doesn't treat privacy as a human right. If you can live with that, then more power to you.

Something tells me people won’t use this as an excuse to accuse Firefox of human rights abuses though.

Anything Apple gets peoples hackles up. I think it’s because “favourite tech stack” is such a tribal thing, and there’s so many more Windows/Linux/Android users in tech communities

I know someone that doesn’t tell people they work at Apple. They say it’s a death blow to making new friends, always resulting in in the same “well, I don’t like Apple because” or “well I prefer Android because” conversations (or their inverse).

I thought they were exaggerating until they proved it to me, by letting me witness the train wreck, at a social gathering.

People seem to have _really strong opinions_ about Apple. I’m in an IRC group and the people in there are great but then very tribal when anyone mentions Apple.

It’s a little bizarre to me, the litany of things they can talk about. I’m pretty sure I spend just about 0% of my energy thinking about where people get their phones or which mobile operating system they use.

What's worse is that the brands they use have became the extension of their identity, or even their complete identify. I once mentioned online that FaceID has failed for me almost once a day, I got attacked online by fanboys.... very strange behaviour

I doubt it. All of bigtech gets the same deranged treatment: Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc.

It was a weird moment when I found myself defending fb on hn more often than I criticized them (I think they're atrocious), but the comments on bigtech stories are just that stupid.

I agree that all big tech gets it, and to be honest anything that’s not FOSS gets shit on a ton here.

But I do think Apple get it worse than other companies.

Android posts don’t get as many comments that range from conspiracy to calling users sheep.

Google gets ribbed for their ADHD but rarely criticized anywhere as much if Safari or Chrome both add their web proposals before standardization.

Apple hardware gets trivialized when performance comes up whereas Intel, AMD and NVidia get vaunted.

So I agree every big tech company gets railed on here, but I think Apple gets a disproportionate amount of it.

Before someone says it, That’s not me defending them as a company, it’s me tired of the terrible discourse on every post that mentions them. There’s lots of things that would be interesting to criticize them for and read about, but every thread divulges into the same exact community talking points.

I suppose I haven't noticed that myself. Though I spend less time on hn than I used to, and the consensus on Apple used to be dramatically more positive, so it's possibly that colors my perception

This potentially troll comment from the first thread:

> That's It. I am done. Back to Debian Linux full time for me. Anyone want to buy a lightly used MacBook Air M1?

I hope they didn't already sell their M1 MBA!

I hope they did sell it. It’s right for there to be consequences for not being a critical thinker.

Not that Debian Linux is bad. But selling a machine and setting up a new one is friction that I don’t mind seeing imposed as a cost of unthinkingly following cognitive bias.

> one thing is for certain; Apple doesn't treat privacy as a human right. If you can live with that, then more power to you.

You're inferring that the commenter deduced this solely from the new (incorrect) info. It seems a lot more plausible that they already hold the view (as I do) that Apple's privacy-friendly image is overblown, and used a separate issue to belabor that pt.

Though I do agree that this incident seemed unlikely w/o further evidence, even given Apple's traditional disdain for the user's control over their own system. And Apple has firmly joined the ranks of bigtech cos that HN threads are absolutely deranged about.

Yeah and to be clear, that's not merely an HN thing, or an internet thing. People - even people who seem very clever - generally have no idea what they're talking about.

It's sort of exhilarating to truly understand just how much of the world is built on absolute bullshit.

You're right of course.

However, I think it's more dangerous on sites like HN where it's wrapped up in this illusion of rationalism, intelligence and elitism along with HN reputation for a "higher level of discourse" which makes people more likely to believe.

Turns out HN falls prey to all the same human biases as everywhere else.

A quick way to see it in action is find a thread about something you know deeply and read the comments.

At the risk of falling into the age old Eternal September trap, I do feel like I've become significantly more disillusioned in the last year or so at the quality, or rather the lack thereof, of discourse on HN. It's as tribal as Reddit is, and not consistently higher quality discussion.

What we do have here is dang, though, which is a lot more than Reddit generally has.

> It's sort of exhilarating to truly understand just how much of the world is built on absolute bullshit.

Exhilarating perhaps if the goal is to bullshit through life. Fake it until you make it, as it were.

If you hate bullshit, on the other hand, it's exhausting.

Just read through the comments on any popular hacker news post. So many divergent opinions, many conflicting. People are sure they are right.

Some of us are right ;-)

But at least I’ll admit that I’m not always right.

Why bother calling them out? That would require considering and denying their claims. It is much easier to make your own stuff up.

Hackernews has a whole lot of smart people, but the dark matter of the Hackernews universe is the much larger number of schlubs who cosplay as smart people online.