The TechCrunch formula: take any interesting rumor ("Apple is building a search engine"). Throw technical platitudes around it ("you need people who know what they're doing"). Do not commit - neither assert ("why invest all that capital into search? The answer is they’re not.") nor deny too strongly ("There are pieces of this we are still putting together"). Be sure to stick ads on the page.
Finally? Profit of course.
I'm still surprised HN hasn't banned TechCrunch stories. When they do have a good story, usually somebody else has the story as well. And TechCrunch attracts a lot of spam.
I've imposed my own ban on TechCrunch, with the BlockSite extension for Firefox (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3145). I actually installed it specifically to prevent getting lured to TechCrunch articles from sites like HN where I'm just looking at headlines. It's the only site I have listed, and the links show up as visited and unclickable, saving me wasting precious minutes everyday.
I use LeechBlock too, but It doesn't work perfectly in firefox+ubuntu, if I close the browser it loose all the previous setting. I have to import it again.
Hacker News has banned other URLs before, from what I know, largely based around the theme of "stories here are irrelevant/infactual/not hacker news." Valleywag was. TinyURL is. I think TechCrunch is similarly useless as a news source.
pg and the editors hold the reins pretty tight around here. they have much more influence than the average reader. if a site tends to run nothing but articles that run counter to what's expected around here, it gets banned.
that sounds critical, but it's not. i agree completely with his decision. if this site were run as a democracy, it would eventually devolve into uselessness, as has every other site before it.
Yeah. HN is the first "social news" site I've been on with a strong editorial staff and with restrictions on users below certain levels of Karma. And I'd suspect that that's one of the things that keeps it at the level it's at.
The problem with democracy is that it is incredibly open to the possibility of quality and focus loss. Hacker News fixes those problems. And I'd argue that losing TechCrunch might be a good move.
Um, is today the day to make up implausible rumors and then say that they're implausible?
Apple doesn't have the scale to do web services like that. Yes they have MobileMe, but that's very different - people pay for it which makes up for inefficiencies. Google (and even Microsoft and Yahoo) are very efficient (cost-wise) when it comes to web services compared to Apple. Now, there is always the possibility that Apple will replace Google with a competitor in Safari should Google's agreement become less lucrative for them.
Seriously, their evidence is Apple not liking Android? If it were a real fight Google wouldn't be developing for the iPhone awesome stuff like the street view that auto-pans as you move the phone. Companies both compete and cooperate all the time. Toyota sells hybrid technology to Ford and also produces cars that compete with Ford's. Likewise, Apple and Google will both cooperate and compete.
I think they made my all-time favorite online search engine. Try the one on their site. It indexes all their pages, including support pages, and runs basically like Spotlight does. Extended search includes iTunes music results and a bunch of other cool things.
If they could expand that unto the entire Internet, it would be glorious. But they can't, and they won't, and they don't stand to profit. So... oh well.
As amusing as comments like these are (I've seen another story today that had a "no" response), I'm worried that comments on Hacker News are starting to become diluted. A similar thing happened early on with Reddit, before it started its decline.
Ok. We get it. We've read that kind of message hundreds of times. We know the reddit/digg/slashdot decline cautionary tale. It's enough. Just stop. No more. No more!
You are right - I thought the article is useless and the discussion is also useless as there is nothing to discuss but techcrunch/news.yc going downhill etc etc.
As there was nothing to dilute I posted the "No" comment just to see what will happen with it. Reflexive voting happened, but not too much (for the quality of the story and discussion).
There's a sort of Gresham's Law of trolls: trolls are willing to use a forum with a lot of thoughtful people in it, but thoughtful people aren't willing to use a forum with a lot of trolls in it. Which means that once trolling takes hold, it tends to become the dominant culture.http://paulgraham.com/trolls.html
I think this is also true of "diluting" comments. Once they become acceptable, the forum has had it. Everyone will say "it's already diluted, so what's the harm?"
I used a lot of visualized search engine technologies being pitched by different research groups or startups in my last job. They were all pretty (well, okay, they were 50 footers) but they all had the same problem: horribly inefficient as search engines. Which is, you know, what they were supposed to be.
