Shawn Blanc

My blog and podcast feeds go around these few main interests of mine: software, art, design, music and Apple.

Podcasts:

Varieties, science, design.

* This American Life. http://www.thisamericanlife.org/

* Radiolab. http://www.radiolab.org/series/podcasts/

* Planet Money. http://www.npr.org/planetmoney

* Stuff You Should Know. http://www.howstuffworks.com/

* The Infinite Monkey Cage. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00snr0w

* The Weekly Briefly (Shawn Blanc). http://feedpress.me/weeklybriefly

* Actuality (from Quartz). http://www.marketplace.org/topics/world/actuality-marketplace-and-quartz

* Anticast (for Portuguese speakers out there - the best Brazilian podcast I know). http://www.brainstorm9.com.br/anticast/

* 99% Invisible. http://99percentinvisible.prx.org/

Technology, programming, Apple, etc.

* Debug. http://www.imore.com/debug/

* Mac Power Users. http://www.relay.fm/mpu

* Accidental Tech Podcast. http://atp.fm/

* Overtired. http://www.esn.fm/overtired/

* The Vergecast. http://www.theverge.com/verge/verge_archives/show?mode=EntryGroup&slug=the-vergecast

* What's Tech (also from The Verge, fun show). http://www.theverge.com/whatstech

* Pragmatic. http://techdistortion.com/podcasts/pragmatic

* Iterate. http://www.imore.com/iterate

* The Changelog. http://5by5.tv/changelog

* Build Podcast (each post is actually a screencast about some technology). http://build-podcast.com/

* The Talk Show With John Gruber. http://daringfireball.net/thetalkshow

*…

Have you tried emailing hn@ycombinator.com and asking?

From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

How are stories ranked?

The basic algorithm divides points by a power of the time since a story was submitted. Comments in threads are ranked the same way.

Other factors affecting rank include user flags, anti-abuse software, software which demotes overheated discussions, account or site weighting, and moderator action.

I expect there's been an increase in user flags.

BTW "Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."

Same rule applies for submissions.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

FWIW, I'm a regular reader of your blog and have not flagged any daringfireball submissions. But this article is asking to be flagged. It's a needlessly provocative title and not all that interesting to discuss.

I'd also like to point out a bit of hypocrisy on your part. You don't accept comments on your site. If you want folks to comment on your blog, maybe reconsider hosting the comments yourself?

https://shawnblanc.net/2007/07/why-daring-fireball-is-comment-free/

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/06/16/powazek-comments

https://daringfireball.net/2010/06/whats_fair

I don't know if I want to value your opinion on browsers of the top feature for you is custom font download.

Not the top feature, but one of the most glaring. At the time I was working on a site that used TypeKit and the only platform I was using that TypeKit didn't support was webOS. The whole thing seemed quite odd as they essentially yanked out a working feature of WebKit when making the browser. Flash, OTOH, was something that didn't die soon enough. I'd've much rather seen support for actual standards than Flash, but HP made a bunch of odd decisions with webOS and the Touchpad. There's some pretty delicious irony in a platform with web in the name having a mediocre web browser.

I also had a bear of a time getting email and WiFi set up for whatever reason, I relegated my Touchpad to paperweight status pretty quickly though. Even basic UI things like scrolling and copy-and-paste just didn't work all that well. Here's a review I found that highlights the distinct lack of polish that webOS had.

https://shawnblanc.net/2011/07/hp-touchpad-review/

Overall I thought RIMM/BlackBerry did a much better job with BB10 than Palm/HP did with webOS.

A quick search of Wikipedia leads to an interview (link below) with this:

Now, correct me if I’m wrong – and please fill in any gaps – but here’s what your story looks like to me:

In 2002 you were doing freelance consulting, web-development and tech writing. Meanwhile, after months of picking out the right “slate blueish background color” you finally launch Daring Fireball and begin writing articles for which your wife was the first reader. Two years later you start offering the membership and also end up working at Bare Bones. Then two years after that, in 2006, you quit your day job and now spend your time publish DF from home.

JOHN: Your chronology is a bit off. I worked for Bare Bones from 2000 to 2002. I started DF a few months after that. Joyent was the company I worked for while writing DF, from January 2005 through March 2006. When I left Joyent was when I started writing DF full-time.

http://shawnblanc.net/2008/02/interview-john-gruber/

That doesn't sound like he ever worked for Apple. I think the interviewer would have mentioned it as part of Gruber's story in this context.

I find that page hard to read due to its huge font-size. Also when I am somewhere in the text and there is a headline, I have a hard time guessing its level. Some additional decoration or indicators on the side might be nice. The screen highly limits the overview as you cannot scroll away and quickly refind your position, you lost the position. So additional marking of the place in the text would help a lot with those "very few of many lines visible on the screen" pieces.

edit: There is a similar problem on several of the namedropped sites too, http://www.marco.org/ http://shawnblanc.net/ and http://www.loopinsight.com/ all have a weird mixture of title formatting of the posts. Sometimes it is big, sometimes small, I have trouble seeing where are post starts or ends and what are just smaller headings within one.

I agree with you, Gruber's posts are indeed sometimes tainted, but Gruber has always claimed that DF is a column, as he explained in an article [0]:

If asked to describe Daring Fireball with just one word, I would not choose weblog. Rather, I would call it a column. Given a few more words, I would call it as a Mac column in the form of a weblog.

He stated it again in an interview[1]:

In 2002, when I started Daring Fireball, doing a sort of columnist-style weblog simply felt like something I was compelled to do. I could write whatever I wanted, however I wanted.

[0]: http://daringfireball.net/2003/07/independent_days

[1]: http://shawnblanc.net/2008/02/interview-john-gruber/