You're my hero! This attitude is why I quit regularly contributing to this site. Any time any single person does something positive, some armchair "expert" comes out the woodworks to tell you how it won't work or can't work.
What would you prefer? Rolling applause for every idea anyone presents?
One benefit of criticism is we might get to read an angle of attack we hadn't thought of and thereby improve our ideas and designs.
Sure, when people blow off an idea by saying "pointless, let's save the baby dolphins first" I don't find those comments helpful, but HN almost always has far more in-depth critiques.
Compared to reddit, you're 100% on the money. At least here, I'm looking at the news/writings I'd be looking at elsewhere, but the discussion is much closer to humane than some things I've seen elsewhere on this internet.
We'll all in this game together, learning how to be a single mind. Be nice to your fellow human-cells no matter their goal, if their goal is for the greater good. The thing is - we can save the dolphins && live on Mars, not mutually exclusive goals.
If somebody told Elon "don't go Mars, do something like cure cancers first" what would he say? Thye're missing the point altogether, right? People are curing cancer, saving dolphins, working on hunger. The reason Musk is so successful and iconic is because specifically he followed things that interested and mattered to him, i.e. energy and colonization.
If someone is following their passion and investing enough energy to be recognized on the level of these people, they're assuredly more cognizant of what's in the realm of reality in their scope than the average journalist/internet commentator. I can glean so much from just listening to the man react to the audience's question.. the one about the Funny or Die video, he's sending "you're wasting our time" body language... I get it, though, this is a pointed, focused thing they're working on; grandiose and monumental indeed, focused nonetheless.
Considering progress humanity made this letter is more actual than ever. So I wish more people understand that it's super important to work on what you like and can do the best since there always chance that space exploration help to solve other problems too.
> What would you prefer? Rolling applause for every idea anyone presents?
Skepticism is a good thing but it's unevenly applied in the weirdest way. Solar Roadways, it seems like the smallest amount of skepticism would have dismantled the entire idea. Two nobody snake oil salesmen from out of their garage were roundly applauded by everyone to such a degree that competitors opened up.
When Musk presents a design on a much larger scale following a career of related success, it's called down?
Therefore I appreciate criticism but I'm skeptical of its sources.
Exactly. HN is not a fanboy driven community usually, so it's where rational and educated conversation can take place. On the contrary I find criticism helpful in this kind of context.
As engineers (or hackers, whatever) we are supposed to be naturally skeptical, in the words of someone wiser than me, "good programmers look both ways when crossing a one way street."
Biking in New York City taught me that. I know it wasn't the programming, because that came second. Funny how many pedestrians look the wrong way when crossing a two way street...maybe they're going with 50/50 chances?
It's helpful when the critic poses at least a fraction of expertise and experience as related to the subject of the people who's idea is being criticised.
No but it would be cool if critics would adjust the language based on their realistic understanding of their level of expertise in the subject matter. Posting very arrogant and dismissive comments just because one had read a semi scientific book on the subject or watched a documentary is not very helpful.
For sure, agree with you here, and I just scroll past those comments that come off as arrogant and dismissive, maybe I down vote them. Definitely do a lot of up voting of those comments that are more in-depth critiques, in the hope they rise to the top and help sink the arrogance.
From the formal standpoint he is not, given his knowledge and expertise he pretty much is at least according to Space X engineers I know or that publicly spoke about it. There is obviously a very talented team at Space X and the things he presents are obviously a result of team effort.
And the negative comments help wipe out a great bit of future competition. If you kill an idea before it gets started, you reduce the risk of it actually working.
I completely agree with you. The frustration I feel, in the case of SpaceX, is that I am perceiving most of the criticism to be "It's hard, so don't try". That's not helpful or constructive.
> Any time any single person does something positive, some armchair "expert" comes out the woodworks to tell you how it won't work or can't work.
All public forums go bad once they reach a certain size. Since everything is on a gaussian curve (fat mediocre middle, and two asymptotes, one for greatness, the other for the opposite end), it's just pure statistics that junk comments will start creeping in once the population grows beyond a certain threshold.
In some ways HN is designed to combat this. You need to "earn" downvotes with contributions, and the sites UX is designed in a way to slow down low effort comments, and to make comments sit for a bit before allowing replies (with workarounds if needed).
The things that aren't features (like the lack of notifications) also help.
There's also a quite-active, and largely effective, moderation effort by @dang and ... I forget the other mod, scbc or something like that.
I've been making comparative studies of a few communities (HN, Reddit, G+, Imzy, Ello), and it's interesting to see how various ones work. In particular, there's a tremendous culture against the types of even indirect personal attacks at HN which fly in spades elsewhere. I saw @dang inveighing against a comment which began with "<sigh>", on the grounds that that is the equivalent of an internet eyeroll.
On G+, discussion quality depends very much on the host and how they manage a particular thread. I've got problems with Google itself, but the platform can support quite good discussions. Overall participation has always been small (6-12 million users posting publicly per month, a value I'd had a hand in determining), but in corners, that's still a good crowd. The best circumstance is to cultivate a small group ~30-100 members or so, set firm expectations for participation, moderate aggressively (that is, promptly), though fairly and starting with social nudges. There's a balance between topic drift and derailment.
Reddit varies hugely by subreddit, the good ones are exceptionally good. The site as a whole has some faults that leak through even to the good subs though.
Ello has a very small (~10k or so daily, ~200k or so monthly visits) userbase, but it strikes me as quite well behaved for the most part, something I've commented on specifically to the site's admins.
Imzy, the "kinder, gentler Reddit" has largely proven not to be. For reasons not entirely suprising when you combine an on-tap, ad libitum anonymity access, lacking leadership, overtaxed / AWOL moderation, exceptionally ill-conceived notifications, threading, and response mechanisms, and a community drawn from SRS and similar beds of vitriol. It's not the issues advocated for, but the methods of advocacy, including ample amounts of friendly fire and hypocrisy, which generate problems.
I have tried most of them and feel largely the same.
HN seems in that sweet spot for me where it is large enough to have a good amount of discussion but still has very good quality.
Most "reddit but more free" sites turn into imzy or even worse voat. G+ communities are too small for me, and finding a good community is proving to be hard. And I've given up on reddit for any larger scale technical discussion (there's just too much vitriol and "my team is better" sentiment there. It always seems to focus on the negative, and creating a "positive only" subreddit seems like a bad idea, and it attracts the users that will fight that idea on principle)
I'll need to try Ello though. Have you looked at lobsters? It's much smaller than HN but also more technical (and with its own share of bias against anything newer in my experience)
G+ communities, as a rule, are simply broken. I created one of my one with a carefully selected set of members, and that worked well for discussion. It's limited in specialised knowledge, though not bad.
Ello is tiny, though there are again some interesting folks. I'm simply impressed by the healthy socialisation.
I've done some rigorous "tracking the conversation" studies, which are based on terms I have interest in, across numerous sites. Blogs are still surprisingly relevant.
Lobsters is another technical-oriented HN-like site.
You need to be invited by someone there, and they actually show the full invite graph, and I believe will somewhat hold you accountable if you invite spammers or trolls.
That being said, if you won't cause trouble I'd be willing to send you an invite if you email the account in my userpage on HN ;)
<sigh> and what level of derailment would you call this thread? it has probably two comments on the video contents, and all the rest is about which community stays on topic better.
I'd comment on the video itself if I could watch it, but local systems aren't cooperating.
That said: discussions can be about the nominal topic, or they can drift, naturally, to other areas of interest. I find the meta-topic of "where is a good place to discuss the things I'm interested in discussing" to be generally on-topic. HN isn't a bad place for that.
With the ability to collapse threads baked into the HN page design, if you're not interested in a discussion, you can simply collapse it an move on.
On which: I'm increasingly hitting long threads from the bottom, for a few reasons:
1. The top-ranked post often isn't particularly on-topic, and attracts diversions posted for visibility.
2. It's easier to tell if a thread is of little concern if you follow it from the bottom.
3. It's easier to track a conversation from bottom to top and collapse going up, than it is to backtrack back to the top and collapse that. There's a subreddit which runs the collapse bars down the side of the thread, allowing a subthread, or entire thread, to be collapsed in one go.
4. There are often downvoted or flagged items which I feel are incorrectly tagged. It's usually faster to assess if something has some merits than to see if it's solid, and I'll nudge stuff up -- even if I substantially disagree with it -- if it seems it's been overly penalised.
HN, as with other online discussions, does poorly for deep and complex posts. One standout was The Edge Question issue a few years ago. There were a handful of comments on the first few essays, but given that there were ~100 - 150 total responses, it's not the sort of thing you can digest quickly.
I've tracked down other issues of the Question and gone through it. I have to say on balance I'm fairly disappointed in the quality -- much is narrow self-promotion of research, another large set is rampant speculation. The short an humerous responses are often disarmingly refreshing. And every so often there's something quite good. Sturgeon's quality estimate though seems generous.
And there is an aspect to that ability that I know people don't like.
The ability to collapse means you feel less bad about somewhat-off-topic conversation, which in a way can create worse discussion for the actual topic.
But at the same time some of my favorite HN threads have been offshoots of the submission's topic.
Pedantic point: not everything is Gaussian. Income, for example, doesn't go below zero. It may not even be log-normal, but rather a power distribution.
Pedantic point aside, you bring up an important point. Can behavioral incentives be aligned to avoid the bottom side of participation?
This is less of a pedantic point than might be assumed.
The Gaussian depends upon a notion of independence and identical distribution: independence can be dispensed of when one thinks about power laws.
If you can soberly state the assumption that the effects of a comment on any other comment is completely negligible, or falls into a couple of other strange exceptions that leads to the universal phenomena that generates the Gaussian, then and only then can you state that any quantity associated with comments is Gaussian. I do not think that this can be soberly stated as such.
If you measure income as change in net worth minus expenditures, it could go below zero. That might not be an appropriate definition in all cases, but, for example if you incur debts without acquiring an offsetting benefit (maybe by being compelled to pay damages to someone for something you did that you didn't derive much or any value from, like causing an accident?), it might be reasonable to say that you had negative income. Or maybe due to capital losses -- you own something that gets stolen or destroyed or damaged, or whose market value falls a lot.
(That doesn't mean that it will follow a Gaussian distribution, just that it could be defined in a way where it makes sense that it can sometimes be negative.)
This is what happened with Reddit. It used to be a lot more enlightened discussion and now it is a gutter of memes, paranoia, puns, and debased comments.
It's the puns. Some are funny, but it's just not funny anymore. I go on that site a few times a year, and the jokes never stop.
It's a pretty old website now. I thought the hilarious banter/play on words would have run its course. There must be some psychological thing going on?
I am reminded we are just monkeys, hitting buttons when I'm there. (No offence to monkeys. I like you guys. I think you're better than us.)
Some fads just take longer to run their course? Skinny jeans for men--done. Guys buying $500 tennis shoes--still going on. Guys that have the semi-Mohawk. Just enough on the sides to get a job--almost done. I can't think of anything that doesn't have a beginning, and end. All I can think of, right now, is life is too short. Depressing. This summer went by way to quick for myself. I wasted it.
I want to, but it got to the point where the hivemind has pushed me away. I have noticed recently that HN is becoming self-aware. More than ever, I'm seeing comments by good users telling the bad ones to take their bad attitude elsewhere. The contrarianism going on really drove me away. I started to believe that there were people feeling the need to be contrarian just to appear more intelligent than the other users.
It's a mistake to anthropomorphise HN. I've made it too. We're all in this together, and we're all individuals.
True, people here can be frustrating at times. But the mod team is one of the sharpest, and they cull abuse. And they do it well.
When the abuse is removed, what's left is substance. Sometimes that substance is disagreeable, and sometimes even hostile, but never personal.
It can be un-fun sometimes. But it's been rewarding to watch this place grow and see all of the new and old opinions intermix. Sometimes you end up learning about yourself more than other people, which are special moments. I haven't really felt that on other sites, so HN feels unique and worthwhile.
It's a journey. The community has ups and downs, but Dan (and now Scott) have always taken care of it.
The community has to take part in the culture to ensure it doesn't get corrupted too. The mods can't do everything.
Total side anecdote about this: I was at the airport check-in counter. At the only open counter was an obvious hoarder with many trash bags as carry ons asking all kinds of vague questions about if the TSA was going to take his stuff. The guy behind the counter kept answering his questions politely. I guess policy was never to tell a customer to get lost. This was taking a very long time, so a little old lady at the front of the line went over to him and told him to hurry it up. He looked a bit shocked and moved on. I guess companies are so scared of bad reviews or creating controversy that they indulge these people for as long as it takes and it's up to the other customers to put a stop to it.
>More than ever, I'm seeing comments by good users telling the bad ones to take their bad attitude elsewhere.
That's been happening since I've been here, since around mid 2007. Not to dismiss what you're saying, I just want to say that there have always been people fighting the good fight.
When a discussion forum discourages skepticism and criticism, you tend to end up in an uninteresting "That's awesome, bro!" echo chamber. There's a big difference between trolling / negativity and battle-hardened cynicism / constructive criticism. Good mods help sort it out.
It's these armchair "experts" which make hacker news interesting. It's certainly preferable to Youtube +1s or emoticons to say how wonderful someone's comment is. The root comment is fine and makes a good point about how most billionaires outsource jobs and don't think big like Musk does, but this reply I am not so sure about.
That's just part of the hard work of producing something and distributing it. You have to overcome criticism. Both armchair experts and real experts will shit all over what you do for different reasons. It's a necessary evil, you have to pick out the good feedback and ignore the bad.
While this does happen, I think it's because some on HN enjoy spirited argument and aren't intending to hurt anyone's feelings, just issue a worthy challenge.
It's especially exaggerated here -- almost comically so -- when the subject is JavaScript or when something isn't quite right with a project's website.
Being cynical comes with experience. You get exposed to tons of ideas and hype over time. Some of it is warranted, and some of it isn't. You realize that marketing and lowest common denominator play a big role.
Well I think it depends on what kind of code you work (or worked) on. My first two jobs were on decade-old PHP codebases with thousands of global variables and copy pasta galore. Only the damn cynical can survive in that kind of mess, because it literally feels like the system is trying to fight you. I imagine legacy COBOL programmers can also relate. Now if most of your experience is working with green field systems, such a level of cynicism is not needed and may even be detrimental.
I would never say "it won't work", but I do think we humans have a tendency to turn to technology to solve our most basic problems, while the real solutions lie within us (where most people never look).
I believe we should first learn to clean up our act on planet Earth before we export anything of our existence and what we do.
To me, the real revolution that needs to happen is a spiritual one - a statement that will only be understood by those practicing meditation. Our brain has so many "undiscovered" capabilities. Discovering them will change our behavior and ultimately allow us to survive on Earth.
It's weird for people to suggest that "we" as a human race should/can only focus on one goal at a time. There are enough humans on the planet that different people can focus on different goals at the same time.
It's not like Elon Musk building this rocket is at the expense of SolarCity (improving the environment through solar energy).
The more I look around, the more I'm opposed to that concept.
Sure, I've seen humans change - but only under heavy "brainwashing", i.e. internalizing an ideology that values being fair, helpful and truthful, and that only holds with a support structure of adherents. And I doubt it scales.
If you look at the world, a lot if not most changes for the better are technology-driven. Technology alters the economical landscape, which makes people do things better, even though they're still following the same behaviours as they always did.
TL;DR: I think individuals have much less agency than we'd like to think.
> the real revolution that needs to happen is a spiritual one
I think the only "spiritual" anything we need is to drop anything spiritual and focus more intensely on reality and evidence based reasoning. Spirituality has done plenty of harm and it is not hard to argue more harm than good if you can lump religion in there with it.
Your ridiculous claims about undiscovered capacities in our brains allowing to to survive is non-sense. Our ability to problem solve base on past experience/evidence is the real miracle and our gradual takeover of every ecosystem is why we have survived this far. Now we need to use this capacity we already demonstrated to not kill ourselves. Going to space is one possible option.
Meditation can go hand in hand with space exploration.
Besides that, Musk is doing two things at the same time. He tries both to protect the earth (Tesla, solar power), and initiate a base in case something happened to our home.
Spirituality alone won't help you survive winter, regardless of how developed your mind is.
There is no good scientific evidence that Hof's breathing techniques account for his ability to withstand cold temperatures, rather than some kind of genetic difference. Four people have died while attempting to follow his 'technique'.
It's sad, but also stupid, to be brutally honest. You don't do these exercises in water (btw, they always have these warnings everywhere in their material).
I'm becoming more and more convinced that these magical guru stories are the south Asian equivalent of the National Enquirer, except more aimed towards gullible foreigners.
Ultimately allow us to survive on Earth...until the next major extinction event. Meditation won't allow us to survive a massive meteor impact (which is just a matter of when, not if).
It is important to people do things whichever areas they are interesting. Everybody knows many problems around us, but nobody cares until it is a priority or if they are not interested.
So, let him do what he is doing, he is doing everything right, now if you are communicating with people through mobile phones is just because of satellites, that happened only because people explored the space and it's application.
So, the final goal of Elon is great, support people so that you will also get good support when you have a great idea.
True, technology doesn't necessarily make a person better, but it does make being a good person easier and more probable, and in a large population that probability makes all the difference.
