Ceci n'est pas une pipe. The features are exciting. Google I/O, the conference with talks, is seen as less so. Notice how all the comments are about the talks. Yesterday's Apple announcement was _not_ a conference, and the comment thread was about the new app. It's not the same thing at all.

Here are some snippets from top-level comments in this discussion thread.

> It's all business talk

> I for one benefited so much from Google Developer Groups

> looking forward to the event and plan to watch it

> just corporate talk

> alternate conference

> separate conference

> I can understand now why my company is less eager to send developers to events

You see it, right? They're all about the talks at the conference and not the features. This HN post is specifically about the conference, that's why the title is "Google I/O 2023".

To be fair, the comments on that article were peak 'Orange Site' - the discussion seemed to be mainly around subscriptions.

What does “Ceci n'est pas une pipe” mean in this context? I ended up on https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images but I’m not sure what it means here.

I took it to mean: "This is not the thing it looks like."

But, I agree, it's not an exact match context wise.

You can make fine images and fine presentations, but they are not the reality.

The reality is what people can really use and what really does hit the road.

Right now, everything google presented in the keynote is vapourware for anyone that doesn't have access to it.

I just meant that the conference is not the features. The conference is about the features, but they're different things. Much like the Magritte painting is not a pipe, it's a painting of a pipe. The analogy was not very good.

I've noticed that the sentiment on HN tends to skew heavily against Google and more towards Apple. When I go to in-person tech meetups it's usually not at all like that. Not sure why.

It's an expectations mismatch. Google used to be the most loved company by developers. It was confident, strong, did wonders for dev comp and gave away lots of cool stuff for free. The only way from there was down, really. Then they did a bunch of things that upset people like getting buy-in into platforms and products only to then constantly kill them off, refuse to release their AI models as APIs on the grounds that devs weren't ethically pure enough to use them, as well as doing stuff that shows a lack of confidence, mostly me-too products like GCP or Bard.

Apple was never particularly loved by developers. Respected yes, tolerated yes. But they were always a bit aloof, separate, never bought into the 2010s era of free love and open source. And that's exactly the way they still are today. Apple has been remarkably stable over time, culturally speaking. It consistently meets people expectations for how it behaves, both good and bad. So there's nothing really to be disappointed about there. It is what it is.

Even outside technology, Google went from that cool "don't be evil" company, to suppressing search results so that people would vote the way Google wanted.

Add a few cases of Glassholes[1], killing products people loved, and it eventually piles up.

I will add though, that just because the company has lost its lustre, doesn't mean the people working there are any less talented. I just think that on a long enough timeline, Google becomes IBM[2].

---

[1] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Glasshole

[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/04/hitlers...

Great analysis. Stability of culture means no room to disappoint like Google.

I think the sentiment is more complex than that. In general, I think the sentiment is against large corporate interests, and in favor of small, focused technical improvements. And improvement here is not the same as change. Often, sentiment is pretty negative towards changes made by large corporations which could be interpreted as strategic decisions made to control an ecosystem.

In this specific case, things are high level and generic, so at this point the framing is closer to big corporation than it is to anything specific or technical.

It's because I'm here.

I’ll be more interested in Google’s ML when they use it as a competent spam filter for Gmail. As it stands the false positives and false negatives are baffling. Maybe it’s unfair but to me that directly reflects their ML abilities

I'm not denying your experience, but I have almost zero problems with the Gmail spam filter. Never false negatives and almost never false positives. I wonder why different users have different experiences with this?

5-10 years ago I’d agree they were very good. My suspicion is that the base spam filter is not very good but it trains on your email history and becomes better. So my “newer” gmail accounts have very poor filtering.

Like I get all caps subject lines with spammy content that my grandmother would recognize as spam, but it blocks some personally written emails from other gmail accounts.

I get about one "you've been chosen! stanley tool" email every day. They all look the same. I click spam on every one. Still get 'em.

I'm not an Apple follower, what innovation have they produced in the last 5+ years that the sibling comments deride Google for? I would argue the TPU is far more interesting than the M1, other than that, is it not just marginal improvements on existing products?

I personally would argue the M1 is more interesting than the TPU, but I think the general answer to your question is “nothing”. Apple and google both churn out research, google maybe a bit more. Beyond that though, both of their product lines reach such a scale that requires the tech to be mature (aka no longer an innovation).

Apple has really strong chip prowess, eg the M1 or the battery efficiency vs size of AirPods and AirTags. But a lot of that is resting on TSMC which anyone can contract. Google has some impressive research into things like AI, database, K8, etc - but today others seem to be catching up.

Yep, neither one is really innovating, except for the examples you named.

Airpods are in a category of their own. Multibillion dollar business that redefined the headphone industry

Great as a business and it's made well, but not much interesting for tech.

I am consistently surprised by the battery life and quality of noise cancellation given their size. Although none of that is revolutionary and just improving on existing tech, I think the complete package (hardware+software integration) was leaps better than what came before.

That's a brand thing, not innovation

There's one thing that made Google great and it was search. It's no longer great and hasn't been for some time. I don't even think it's entirely their fault, but their brand and sentiment has taken a hit from that.

Also, the data harvesting is much more common knowledge.

Apple has been increasing their own data harvesting and advertising, so same shoe different foot.

Google Cloud is fantastic compared to the others. I don't know why people still go to AWS, nothing interesting has happened, it seems like very little has changed. My biggest gripes are the cookie cutter EC2 vs the flexibility of GCP VMs and the account/project switching in AWS vs GCP.

Google is also one of the few companies at the forefront of AI. There is definite innovation there.

This is due to Google's track record on killing products.

Plenty of products are still alive and kicking. AppEngine is a great example of that. Initial release date: April 7, 2008.

No one wants to play the guessing game of which products will live and die (well, maybe those who are compulsive gambler do)

https://gcemetery.co/

Ok, so nothing in about 2.5 years and some of these I wouldn't even call products. They also haven't deprecated anything on GCP since March 31, 2021.

https://cloud.google.com/terms/deprecation

At the end of the day, I'm super glad they have experimented with things and it seems weird to hold that against them.

It all goes back to reader. That's when it went sour. They eroded all trust. No one forgets that one.

March 13, 2013, a decade ago and RSS effectively died along with it. Being upset at this for 10 years is right up there with being upset that Gopher protocol never took off.

Ok, consider me pissed about gopher too then I guess? I mean, you knew the exact date and all didn't you?

I looked it up.

I think they've just stopped updating the cemetery page. Google killed Stadia this year.

If you need to list out apps that haven't been killed, I think that kind of proves the point :)

And Google’s disregard of Android devs outside the America/Europe. I have been doing Android development since 2011 and still impossible to get my hands on a Pixel or Chromebook directly from Google. On the other hand, I could get the latest iPhone shipped in a month.

Google just doesn't have the volumes to provide products in all countries. Providing sales integrations and support is costly and if you don't have volumes, your amortized cost over a device is high.

How much support is required ship internationally? Tiny Shopify stores can do it.

I don't feel like the parent comment was asking for first-class support, just access to the device.

HN tends to bias towards pro Apple.

You would see people doing mental gymnastics trying to defend their closed anti competitive practices, disregard for standards. I would cheer a Sennheiser/Bose more than any version of Airpods, I would rather not have a multi trillion dollar company gobble up other industries through unfair advantages.

Seeing a hacker crowd do this is just beyond bizzare.

It seems quite the opposite: HN biases towards anti-Apple, often for bizarre reasons that require lots of mental gymnastics to justify.

You don’t really have to buy AirPods, there are lots of products out in the market that compete in that space. Just because Apple provides a certain product doesn’t mean you are being forced to buy it.

* * *

I'm pretty sure everyone feels that their opinion is the underdog opposed to the other sheeple side.

It is like people who think they are being hip for either hating or loving X, when lots of people love or hate X already, so it isn't really weird either way.

No one is forced to buy Airpods, but the first class integration that the product gets which others can't gives it a competitive advantage. This is besides the power to push the product through different channels to customers of iPhones, iPads etc.

Another example is, no one is forced to buy Apple Music, but for sure it pops up front and center when you buy a iOS device or Mac. In fact, even when I keep removing the application from the Mac, on a version update it comes back again. On top of this they will give you free subscription for 3/6 months when you buy a new device knowing full well that most customers won't bother cancelling. All of this behavior takes the air out of competitors like Spotify and is extremely anti competitive.

I don't even want to get started on iCloud etc.

> Another example is, no one is forced to buy Apple Music, but for sure it pops up front and center when you buy a iOS device or Mac.

I never noticed, having never bought Apple Music before and just using spotify instead. I guess if I wanted it to run on a HomePod, I would need it?

> On top of this they will give you free subscription for 3/6 months when you buy a new device knowing full well that most customers won't bother cancelling. All of this behavior takes the air out of competitors like Spotify and is extremely anti competitive.

Doesn't Spotify do the same thing?

Spotify doesn't get to offer you that when you are setting up your new phone. You have to know about the company and go and install it.

It is good that you are using Spotify and supporting an independent company, but as I was saying defaults and ease of access matters. Spotify is not playing in a level field and regulators have failed to ensure that they are able to.

There are plenty of non-apple speakers that come with Spotify trials. I get that trials are hard to back out of, and I've never activated my Apple Music trial.

> Spotify is not playing in a level field and regulators have failed to ensure that they are able to.

Spotify is still dominating music streaming, more so than Apple Music or Amazon Prime Music (which we used to use since it came free with prime).

> There are plenty of non-apple speakers that come with Spotify trials.

Spotify has to pay for these and has to compete for this with other music streaming companies.

Also, comparison with smart speakers is disingenuous. There are a billion iPhone users itself. No non big tech company smart speaker comes even close.

> Spotify is still dominating music streaming

Because of nailing the product early on and being world class in playlists and music recommendations. Even if Apple music comes 80% close, just by holding distribution advantage, they will capture that market.

My god the increasing services push is awful; I used to be an Apple Music subscriber but left eventually because at launch it was a clusterfuck with personal libraries, just destroying metadata and deleting 'duplicates'. And I now have to use a 3rd party music app to listen to my local library on my phone because the system one likes to pop up a fullscreen ad for Apple Music what feels like every time I open it.

I like my Apple products but this services thing is truly destroying a lot of the good experiences they can provide.

Let me hit you with some anecdotes. I regularly disparage both Apple and Google in my comments, typically Apple for being user-hostile and lying in marketing and Google for being incompetent and user-hostile. My Apple comments get downvoted more than my Google comments (I'd guess due to fanaticism that I see with no other company), although the gap has been steadily closing.

Well, today I learned that it was possible to go to -4. But I'm not sure we can tell anything from that really, just that there are a lot people who (a) don't like apple, and (b) are sure they are in the minority rather than the majority. Which is a bit contradictory.

The AirPods are capitalizing on lock-in. iPhones have always had Bluetooth, but almost nobody used BT headphones cause they suck. Then Apple released AirPods with first-party integrations to make it usable, and to make sure people would buy them, they also took out the jack.

I mainly care what my options are at the end of the day, and Apple limited my options compared to before. The end result is I don't listen to music from my phone anymore. And I held onto my old iPhone as long as possible to avoid this.

(The result for probably most other iPhone users is that they bought the damn AirPods and none of the other BT headphones)

> I care what my options are in the end, a lot more than ideology or something, and Apple worsened my options compared to before.

How did AirPods existing ruin your options? You can choose to not buy them, I don't, I like conductive head phones better anyways (non-Apple, before the AirPods came out, and they don't suck, so I don't get what you mean by apple producing the only BT headphones that don't suck?). Or do you mean you want to buy AirPods but you don't want to use an iPhone, or you want to use wired headphones only and don't care for dongles?

> The end result is I don't listen to music from my phone anymore.

Seriously, this is the mental gymnastics I'm talking about. None of this is really stopping you from listening to music on your phone.

So my chosen option before was to just plug my earbuds or car aux into my phone.

Now my choices are:

- AirPods, which I don't want to shell out more money for and deal with charging/caring for them, but otherwise they'd be the best option.

- Non-AirPod BT headphones. I have nice Bose ones from work. These lack Apple's extensions to improve pairing and headset (mic) mode. In headset mode, the earphone quality drops to like worse than early 2000s cellphone. Standard pairing is annoying. It's a bit annoying having to charge them. I also don't want to shell out more money for earbuds (the headphones aren't so portable).

- Dongles, which I tried. Turns out they don't work with inlined mics, don't work with older iPhones (so I can't leave them on a shared car aux), are fragile, and are really easy to lose. Can't charge while using one either, but that's nbd. My car seats ate two and the last one broke. It also just feels stupid having to use these.

- Old iPhone. I kept my 6 until it broke. I still have a spare 5, no longer usable with AT&T, which I use to play music in the car.

Yeah I want to listen to music on my phone, but they've made it sufficiently annoying that I don't anymore. It's a clear regression.

This sounds like a bunch of unique requirements.

You have a wired car aux solution that...provides a microphone, which I've never seen before but lets go with it. There are dongles that have microphone inputs (Cubilux Lightning to 3.5mm TRS Microphone Adapter with Headphone Jack), but I'm assuming you can't use those because the microphone and headset are sharing the same jack somehow?

Your car doesn't support bluetooth, and you use multiple generations of iPhones so you can't just leave the dongle in the car. This is unrelated to airpods since you can't use those while driving anyways.

AirPods are expensive, I get that, and you aren't satisfied with cheaper non-Apple options on amazon. I'm happy not using airpods, since I hate earbuds anyways, but I guess not everyone is like that. Would the non-existence of AirPods make things better? I haven't had trouble pairing my conductive headphones, I guess I don't notice any distortion because it is going through my bones anyways, and I'm not using mic.

The issue is removing the jack. AirPods by themselves aren't a problem, but Apple removed the jack to sell more of them, so I'm considering them related. Perhaps if Apple couldn't make proprietary extensions, they'd try to improve the BT standards instead, but I'm not interested in that.

> You have a wired car aux solution that...provides a microphone

No, by mic I mean taking calls and meetings on my earbuds/phones, which is a common requirement. Most earbuds have inlined mics sharing the same jack.

Car aux issue is separate. One of my cars does have BT, but that's even worse because the phones fight over it or the pairing sometimes doesn't happen. Maybe "pass the aux" is not a thing anymore and I'm the only one who wants passengers to play their own music sometimes, but this wasn't a problem before.

I’m with you on the dongle issues, it’s a tremendous pain to find consistently working equipment that allows charging, in-line mic, and durability.

That said, I hate BT more and have been using the same Bose QC20 wired earbuds and Belkin adapters for 4+ years. There are semi-decent options out there.

Weird, I think you left out the part where they did include the dongle for the 3.5mm jack for at least 2 generations after they removed it and still offer one. But to each his/her own.

Anyone who's actually tried the dongle doesn't consider it a solution, which I explained in a sibling thread. If it were, then people wouldn't buy AirPods, so Apple would get rid of the dongle like they got rid of the jack :)

Can confirm, dongle's not an actual usable alternative for most situations. IRL you'll lose the little fuckers, they'll be in the way for any devices without missing hardware (and get lost when you remove them for that device), they're fragile, and you'll never have them when you need them anyway. They're theoretically a replacement for the removed headphone jack, but in actual fact they're worthless.

I just use my phone for fewer music-playing situations than I otherwise would, and when I do use it for playing music, it's a mixed bag. Controls on the car console are nice (aside from that the UI sucks and exhibits all kinds of glitches, but that's not Apple's fault), but BT is BT, so, more annoying and less reliable than a cable. My $120 BT headphones are... fine, but I'd rather have better wired headphones for the same price and not have to charge them. Being able to connect to a bluetooth-enabled receiver across the room is handy, but also janky, because of course it is, because it's bluetooth.

If they'd just kept the jack, everyone could be happy. Except Apple, from the somewhat-lower sales of wireless audio devices and especially AirPods.

> IRL you'll lose the little fuckers, they'll be in the way for any devices without missing hardware (and get lost when you remove them for that device)

1. I plug dongle into car aux for my iPhone 12 mini to use.

2. Next day, girlfriend wants to play her own music from her iPhone 6, I say to plug the Lightning in.

3. Dongle doesn't work with iPhone 6 despite being same connector -_- She takes it off to plug into the 3.5mm.

4. Dongle falls beneath car seat and is never seen again. Presumably it's next to the other one that got lost the same way.

Went from "it just works" to screwing up the most basic functionality ever, plugging in the damn aux. And it's while you're driving.

Yeah, I lost my first one like a week in when it fell into the (automatic—I'm not cool, I don't drive a manual) shifter. It was so small it managed to fit into the little gap in the rubber guard around it. Lost forever, or at least until someone tears apart the center console of that car for some reason. Only time I've managed to lose something that particular way.

So you dropped your headphone converter next to your torque converter.

> Anyone who's tried it doesn't consider it a solution, and I described in a sibling thread why.

Universals are always wrong of course: we actually used a dongle for the kid's wired iPad headphones. It doesn't suck for us using a dongle, so I'm guessing our experience was really different from yours.

> If it were, then people wouldn't buy AirPods, so Apple would get rid of the dongle like they got rid of the jack :)

Nope, our 6 year old is not getting AirPods anytime soon.

If you are on HN, you are more likely to be

a) rejected in a Google interview

b) worked at companies that got crushed by Google.

c) have tall-poppy syndrome against success. (anti-zuck, anti-Elon, anti-Bezos)

d) have general anti-corporate anti-capitalistic sentiment, thanks to university brainwashing

e) mostly clueless about actual innovation and tech progress in areas other than their own narrow scope of work.

So, any Google article is a rant/vent fest for them.

Worked at Google, pro Elon, anti Zuck but mainly for his failures (Metaverse), not from the far left and still think it's clear Google's last major product (major meaning category defining, like Search or Maps or Android) was 15 years ago.

Lot of Googlers are anti-big-tech, anti-corporation :)

1) If you think Transformers weren't category defining, I don't know what to say.

2) Metaverse isn't a failure. That's like saying in 2019, "Chat Agents are a failure"

1. Wow you think transformers are a product. That's great.

2. I think most people consider both Metaverse and chat agents as failures. ChatGPT isn't a 'chat agent' and most chat agents still don't work.

Watching the keynote and Google are expecting developers to cut and paste code into Bard rather than releasing a Bard plugin for their editors and taking on Microsoft directly. Weak.

Most people lack the vision beyond 15 minutes. Of course Metaverse is a failure for them, just like how Internet was just a glorified fax machine for luddites. So, popular opinion is the worst indicator of anything. Happy to make a public bet that Metaverse will consume 25% of a person's day for at least 4 billion people by 2035

If transformer doesn't excite you (mostly due to anti-Google bias), Google has a dozen products that has over a 500 Million users. It takes an unprecedented amount of anti-corp brainwash to say Google isn't successful or innovative.

> Google has a dozen products that has over a 500 Million users.

So did Microsoft in 2005. That doesn't mean the Ballmer era was innovative. If you need other examples of companies with hundreds of millions of users that aren't relevant, there's also Oracle.

Microsoft didn't have dozen products over 500 Million users in 2005. They only had Windows, Office and IE.

Ballmer set the foundations for many of Microsoft's success today, including Azure

Messenger? Skype? All were category defining products. What are Google’s twelve plus?

Metaverse is DoA. Public perception is that it is either too complicated/expensive to use or that it is essentially a worse VRChat. More technically inclined circles see it as a data harvester and crypto-scam breeding ground. Facebook itself does not use it for its supposed intended purpose of virtual conferencing, instead mandating that all employees return to the physical office to work. It has next to no adoption and is the butt of many jokes. Romero abandoned the project with a public statement saying how out of touch and inefficient the workforce behind it is.

Your outlandish sweeping claims about the users of this site aside, sticking your neck out for the Metaverse is just not the hill to die on.

The Public's lack of imagination / vision is the worst indicator of anything. There is a reason there are only a handful of Jobs, Zuck, Elon, Bezos, Gates, Buffett in the world but 15 Million people on Wallstreetbets.

They fired entire orgs that were working on metaverse at facebook. Spoke about it with a sad friend yesterday. At least the facebook metaverse has but cut down.

> The Public's lack of imagination / vision is the worst indicator of anything

So? Most great ideas end up as objective failures. Also great visionaries generally actually have some at least somewhat specific vision of what are they trying to achieve, neither Zuckerberg nor anyone else were yet able to coherently explain WTH is the Metaverse supposed to be.

IMHO whatever Meta is doing seems much more likely to end up as the Apple Newton than the iPad/iPhone... (which to be fair is not a bad thing).

And they would've been right in 2019. The hype was not matching the technology. The fact that gpt got so good is pure coincidence and not a result of the chat agent folks being some kind of visionairies.

Maybe some technological breakthrough comes along that makes the metaverse not suck. But if you're gonna build your company around such hopes and it works, then you're not smart, but just lucky. Or you need to build the breakthroughs yourself, but it doesn't look like that's what zuck is doing.

Transformers??? GCS is a very solid alternative to AWS and leagues ahead of azure.

How do you have time in the day for anything other than wild assumptions about strangers?

If you have a near perfect model of the universe, it isn't hard to predict stuff. It just needs prompting.

Next question

Have you tried prompting it for "Dunning-Kruger effect"?

yes, most HNers are affected by it. That's why you see a massive anti-corp, anti-tech, anti-capitalist despite data screaming at them the massive benefits of tech, capitalism and corporation.

I believe one of it's defining features is that if you are experiencing the effect, only the people around you know it.

Not that that would, by definition, affect anyone possessing a near-perfect model of the universe.

yes, that's why I'm the one who is pointing the following trait to the HN crowd who are blissfully unaware of it -- "Irrationally Hating things / people that have provided net benefit to the society (utility, pension plans, 401(k)s, employee salary, productivity, standard-of-living)"

And it took years to get it with them kicking, screaming, and trying to take it away the entire time. Who has a pension plan these days?

My hunch is that’s a little less than half of HN posters. I notice that a lot on reddit and much less here.

I think it depends on how you define Hacker. This site is very business leaning to begin with in a lot of ways which doesn’t always draw the “hacker” crowd. I will forever think of hackers ideally not being so concerned with operating businesses but being obsessed with technology sometimes at the expense of business concerns.

For YCombinator and the like, “hacker” is actually just code for “disruptor”. It is a subtle but powerful conflation designed to retroactively strengthen the historical positioning of e.g. Jobs, Woz, Zuckerberg while simultaneously praising disruptive technologies that will “eat the world”.

Of course, none of those people ever fit the more common definition of hacker for more than a few years, if ever, even if you assume hacker means “good coder” or similar. And they certainly never fit the information security definition.

This is why I stopped calling HN, HN. It's YCombinator news. It's not news for hackers - maybe at one point, but not anymore and not for awhile. It may even be seen as looked down on because you're posting on a site run by venture capitalists.

YC news is still weird for praising Apple

Not really. Every entrepreneur has to worship the Steve Jobs handbook if they want jaded middle-aged Disney investors to open their wallets for $TECH_PRODUCT. It's not uncommon or surprising to see people in the startup sphere who are unnaturally defensive of Apple/iOS/MacOS.

Woz and Jobs started out building Blue Boxes (https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/blue-box-designed-an...) They then created Apple as a hobbyist outfit in a garage, soldering chips together so they could demo a DIY computer programmed in Assembler at a computer club. As opposed to what, a company that exists to sell the equivalent of billboard ads on the Internet? Out of Big Tech, Apple has the strongest claim to any kind of hacker culture.

And when Jobs got the contract from Atari, he lied to Woz about how much it paid so he could take the lion's share. Fraud culture is unfortunately part of their blood too, something we ought to excise if we want the tech industry to be taken seriously in the long-run.

Everything I read leads me to believe that Steve Jobs was not a virtuous person, though I keep trying to find the silver lining.

How should one test for ethics? A reference check comes to mind, but it is not a test that you can apply fairly.

> How should one test for ethics?

You ask if that's how you'd like to be treated.

I think it's a lot less confusing when you understand that "hacker" doesn't describe a kind of politics, but rather connotes an interest in technology.

Depending on who you talk to, hacking doesn't even mean technology. It's more of an artful blend of craftsmanship and trickery in whatever problem domain you face.

But I think the confusing aspect of HN and the VC influence is the number of folks here who happily conflate technology, business, entrepreneurship, and capitalism. If you see these as separable topics, you find that a lot of the confused threads here are different cohorts in the audience who focus on one of these topics and treat the others as ancillary.

> Depending on who you talk to, hacking doesn't even mean technology. It's more of an artful blend of craftsmanship and trickery in whatever problem domain you face.

Exactly this. I use the term hacker in its original form.

the fallacy you have is that all hackers are socialists or folks that dislike venture capital or capitalism.

I can assure you many hackers are libertarian or anarchists of some flavour (from mutualists to anarcho-capitalists). Many celebrate Apple because they want to build the next Apple some day.

HN has always slanted for the latter crowd, though certainly open to everyone.

>HN tends to bias towards pro Apple.

I'm not sure if I agree with that. I think being anti-Google and FB would be more accurate than being pro-Apple.

Also, during the years I've observed the "pro-Apple" gauge changes as the time zones change, ie. it tends to be all-time high when it's noon in California - which is understandable.

There are really wonky arguments here trying to justify rent seeking in the App Store, walled gardens, and completely closed ecosystems. And I'm not sure why anyone would be supportive of any of those things outside of being pro-Apple. No other company seems to get that type of pass.

There was a thread the other day where some people seemed pretty miffed that Google requires a Pixel to connect to the internet before you can unlock it's bootloader.

Then you go into a thread about third party app stores on iPhones and you see people saying that being blocked from installing software that Apple hasn't blessed is actually a feature.

Different people and all that. But the general sentiment on HN is definitely more forgiving of Apple than others.

Hacker crowds like to see underdogs win. Apple was the ultimate underdog for most of its existence, and was "doomed" every year up until around 2013.

There's no mental gymnastics involved, it is a matter of taste and preference. Remember, Microsoft was for a LONG time an attractor of hackers, until the early-mid 90s.

Maybe for people of a certain age. But there is a whole generation of people (some of whom are on HN) who have only ever known a world where everyone wanted the latest iThing. It's been probably 15 years since you could seriously consider Apple an underdog in the tech space.

The iPhone hasn’t even been out for 15 years. People were calling Apple dead not even 6 or 7 years ago, the Apple Watch not being enough to satiate the demand for new toys.

The days of Apple basing their business on shiny new iThings are mostly past it, Airpods notwithstanding. Now they’re in pure optimization mode, and going deep into content and services.

This is probably the most absurd comment that I've read so far in 2023.

Apple is a 2.73 trillion dollar company, and single-handedly makes up 13.3% of the entire S&P 500 index. The iPod was launched 22 years ago. Apple hasn't been remotely an "underdog" for over a generation now.

A generation ago, Apple was a penny stock and the iMac was released. The iPod was a success but a small fraction of the story. They were “only” a $75 billion company by the year the iPhone came out.

Apple’s valuation and PE ratio only became in line with its peers around 5-6 years ago. It was priced as if it were about to go bankrupt for much of its history , even after the iPhone was released, convinced that Apple just HAD to go out of business, or hit a ceiling, or whatever.

History is also littered with quotes from competition that didn’t take them seriously: Dell, HPE, Samsung, Google, Microsoft, Facebook.

The absurdity isn’t that Apple was thought to be an underdog, it’s that so many never took them seriously. Perhaps the main reason Apple is as big as it is now is because wall street and the competition refused to take them seriously? If they did, we’d have a more balanced industry.

My Sennheiser HD8s and their propietary cable begs to differ. And also keep in mind you are favoring Bose, the multi-million dollar company that didn't bat an eye when they decided to introduce spyware on their app.

Apple has done the wrong thing many times, but audio is not one of them. They offered a legitimate better product, to the point the only headphones I would rather use are IEMs that cost 8 times as much.

> HN tends to bias towards pro Apple

Possibly the most reliable phenomenon I've observed as a mod is that people believe HN is biased against what they like and in favor of what they dislike. This shows up most often with politics - for a recent example see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35734307 ("HN leans left") followed by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35734354 ("HN leans left?") and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35734392 ("You're completely delusional if you consider HN to be left leaning"). For an amusing (to me anyway!) set of examples see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26148870.

But it works the same way with other things, like $BigCos. Each $BigCo has a fanbase and a foebase. Each fanbase feels like HN is biased against "their" $BigCo and in favor of some other $BigCo.

No doubt the same mechanism makes sports fans feel like the refs are biased against their team. The feelings of a sports fan determine not only the direction of perceived bias (no fan ever thought "the refs are consistently biased in our favor") but also its intensity (the more passionately a fan is devoted to $team, the more strongly they are persuaded about the refs' "bias").

Readers with no particular passion on a topic are less likely to perceive bias or feel much about it either way.

I believe that the way this works is that if we feel strongly about $foo, we're much more likely than the median reader to notice posts about $foo, especially ones we dislike (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), and to weight them much more heavily. What starts as a feeling in us thereby turns into a perception about the world, often one that is very intensely held and impossible to dissuade.

This is not to say that the community, the refs, the mods, or what have you, aren't biased! Just that the exi

Oh no, I didn't mean moderators are biased. I don't think that is the case at all.

I was making the point of the HN users. Specially the characteristic of downvoting and negating criticism in this case.

You are right though, because I strongly feel about the anti competitive issues Apple indulges in, maybe I visit those threads more and tend to notice them.

Although, I think there is a positive bias as well, which I care less about. Like one of the commenter mentioned that Final Cut Pro being launched on iPad was the top post through large parts of the day.

I mostly understood that you were talking about the community, not the mods, but now that you mention it, I confused the two in my reply. The first two paragraphs were about the community but then the bit about refs was about the mods. Interesting—thanks for pointing that out!

> maybe I visit those threads more and tend to notice them

You may be the first person who has ever indicated that they've gotten that point!

I would characterise the "losing their minds all day about Final Cut Pro on iPad" that went on as... moaning about subscription pricing. So not positive either.

I've been deep in the Google ecosystem for 10+ years and my sentiment has changed simply because their products suck now. Every offering they have is worse today than it was a year ago. Google assistant is borderline unusable in it's current state, and I used to sing it's praises from the mountain tops.

> a massive lineup of a bunch of new AI features to be announced

man I don't know about everybody else but I'm pretty burned out on the never-ending deluge of AI-related chatter at this point.

>> Yesterday we had an Apple post where everyone was losing their minds all day about Final Cut Pro on iPad

Were we reading the same thread? My take away was mostly complaints about subscriptions and people asking why you would use it on an iPad instead of a laptop.

I think the problem here is that this was posted hours before the keynote - meaning there is actually nothing of value to discuss yet. Now the thread that should be about todays even is full of “back in my day” comments.

I am slowly feeling like I should move on from HN. I used to find comments much more mature in the past and learned a lot. Lately I predict the general trend I'll see in the comments before even opening the page.

Somehow that has been my experience as well. I used to love HN for the rational and mature comments. Now, I find more of the comments to be idealistic and biased. More of the comments are from people who don't seem to have read the linked post.

I feel the same. Comments used to be more thoughtful and nuanced, and I often found comments that changed my perspective on things. Now so many comments are massively negative and sweepingly generalize in uninteresting ways, eg just to pick a random example from replies to this current post:

"Every offering they have is worse today than it was a year ago."

HN should be better than this.

One of my least favorite trends about how HN comments go these days is that nearly all of them are reflexively supporting the company over the employees in any sort of story involving conflict between employer/employee. It's like, goddamn, y'all can stop bootlicking for companies already, as I know most of you are employee class rather than owner class.

I used to like it when I didn't live in the Bay and avoided all the "local news" threads because it was not interesting to me. I kinda left after I moved because I don't wanna be in a site where the consensus solution to poop on the street on some neighborhoods is basically concentration camps.

My account is new but I've been reading HN since the late 00s. There has definitely been a slow redditification of HN over the years.

I've had the same feeling. I've also noticed what feels like an increase in shallow, emotionally driven "gotcha" replies that are almost always from post-2020 accounts.

But I have to wonder if it's because as I have tried to quit Reddit and other mass market social media, I'm browsing this site a lot more. So I'm seeing more comment sections in general and clicking more threads than I would otherwise.

It's even in the community guidelines.

> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.

And that links to comments all the way back in 07!

Final Cut Pro is a thing people already use in their workflow, becoming more convenient for them. People have depended on this as part of their production-ready workflow for over 20+ years now, and FCP-folks seem to have a lot of trust in the application and related tooling, that Apple isn't going to leave or abandon Final Cut anytime soon.

Google's AI features are not something most of us use in our workflow, and are (arguably/debatably) not making anything more convenient for us. That's all in addition to it being Google, so there's a built-in assumption that no one can depend on any of this, because it might be discontinued at any point with little notice.

(I say this as someone who does not own an iPhone or Mac, and has been on Android for over a decade) -- I can see why Mac folks would be excited by the Mac announcement, and why some aren't that excited by Google right now.

Final Cut is definitely not the industry standard - most pros abandoned it after they completely rebuilt it from the ground up years ago and it sucked hard

Do not know about Final Cut (it's well optimized for Silicon by the way), but Logic Pro is definitely one of the music industry standards.

Since other semiconductors like Germanium aren't used to build CPUs, I would argue all current software is optimized for Silicon?

SCNR...

What is? Adobe? Davinci? My assumption was also that Final Cut Pro was _the_ one.

FCP 7 was dominant but the disaster of early versions of FCP X forced a bunch of shops to switch to Premiere.

There are still things that make Premiere better. Recently I couldn't get an mp4 from a Sony cam to play at the right speed in FCP no matter what I tried, and it just worked in Premiere. I'm more fluid in FCP but I will probably switch too as Premiere just "feels more pro" now to me.

I've heard some great reports about Davinci, especially for post.

Most big-budget feature films are cut on Avid and that's been the case for a while now; for indies my impression is that it's 50/50 Premiere and Resolve, yup.

> Final Cut Pro is a thing people already use in their workflow, becoming more convenient for them. People have depended on this as part of their production-ready workflow for over 20+ years now, and FCP-folks seem to have a lot of trust in the application and related tooling, that Apple isn't going to leave or abandon Final Cut anytime soon.

All of that may be well and good, and yet I can't remotely get excited by an announcement that it's being ported from PC/laptop to iPad. Are professionals really going to be using iPads for this use case en masse? Was there a lot of people upset that they had to use a PC/laptop for this, and a lot of pent-up demand for an even more portable version?

It's hard to think of any platform port that would be amazing exciting news, let alone this one!

My theory is there are a lot of folks that needlessly bought expensive ipads that sit around and collect dust when their kids aren't doodling on them. Finding out that Apple is bringing an app that could bring potential productivity to a bad investment got a lot of people excited. People will soon learn that another app was not the reason why they aren't using them.

I have an iPad sitting around collecting dust (literally), but I'm not about to pull it out to use for something that works better on a desktop.

I tuned into the livestream for a minute and they were just demoing things I’ve been using in GPT for months. They’re playing catch-up, it’s boring.

>They’re playing catch-up, it’s boring.

yeah, doing pretty bad at that. I just tried out Bard by asking it a question on an almost 10 year old .net library for interacting with a popular CRM platform's API. It came back with:

"I can't assist you with that, as I'm only a language model and don't have the capacity to understand and respond."

Went over to ChatGPT and asked it the same question in the prompt word for word. It came back with a concise explanation on how to use the library. Specifically one specific set of API calls. Bard is a joke.

And yet the only people laughing are Altman and Nadella.

What's even more surprising is that Google has spent almost 2 decades collecting text, image, geospatial and video data. You'd think they would be ahead of everyone in this space. With all they've spent on research - they've got nothing meaningful to show for it.

They never figured out how to diversify away from targeted ads. All that AI prowess was mainly to figure out how to manipulate people to click on the steadily increasing number of ads.

Meanwhile they gamified display ads to the point that the web slowly turned into pure clickbait so there’s nothing even left to search for - 99% of content from the last decade is dogshit.

With ChatGPT my web searches are down by at least 50% and more than 80% of the ones I still do are on DuckDuckGo.

HN crowd and devs should know better than most that you can’t depend on anything from Google. Kind of surprised this conference is still being held given where they are at right now.

This guy used reader.

I don't understand the point of your comment.

Are you comparing discussion of a (relatively legacy) software application to an entire developer conference with a mostly singular focus on a newer, evolving technology?

I'm not trying to be an Apple apologist here but maybe this discussion would be better discussed in roughly a month when WWDC happens.

I’m comparing sentiment, hype, upvoting, etc on a particular topic. I think HN isn’t what it used to be but maybe that’s me having old man syndrome. People on HN are happy discussing boring apps on iPad and crapping on all things Google instead of the gold rush of new functionality driven by AI. I’ll just say I’m not the only one that thinks this judging by the response and upvotes on my observation

The Hacker News community are mainly "doers" - action-oriented individuals who prefer a hands-on approach. I think we yearn for opportunities to experiment with new technologies, not simply hear about their potentials.

This year's Google I/O appears to be heavy on talk about new technologies, but light on tangible releases for us to explore.

In order words, the true value lies not in the promise of a product, but in its practical application. So, I urge Google to present us with tools, APIs, products, we can actively engage with, rather than just talk about and endless "waiting lists".

Bc none of the features are actually live yet. We keep hearing about what will be released and demos - but HN is mainly do-ers. Their launches would have 100x the impact if people could see and play with it in real time right after the announcement.