It's the hacker news "culture". As much as this site loves to hate on reddit (and I don't disagree with reddit hate), this community has its own cringe and pretentiousness which can be seen in silly articles like this reaching the front page.
Edit for the downvoters: what does this article have to with technology besides the fact that some self proclaimed hacker thinks this article is interesting? This isn't hacker news, this is an attempt at hacker "community" and all the off topic articles are so random it makes me cringe and not visit this site anymore. This site comes off as a lifestyle magazine anymore.
I didn’t downvote, but just to explain what I see here: you used negative value judgements with words like “cringe” and “pretentious”, and then your question assumes that HN articles must be about technology.
It’s worth re-reading the guidelines, because the definition of what’s invited and acceptable here is (and always has been) precisely that which hackers find interesting:
“On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.”
Also, stories don’t get to the front page on their own. They get there when a lot of people upvote them. Since your insults are directed at the people that upvoted this, and are being read by the people that upvoted this and visited the comments section, downvotes are quite predictable. It’s perhaps a good idea to upvote the things you like, and visit those comment sections instead of complaining.
Research, design, printing, assembly...it's all there in the article. I find it thought-provoking that an extremely complex machine can be represented in great detail with so mundane a material.
The re-creation of a 3D form from a non-rigid, non-ductile 2D material requires a surprising intuition for topology and projection.
Even if you just see this model as a low-tech knick-knack, I don't see what's pretentious about appreciating a model of one of the world's best-known aircraft, made of one of the most ubiquitous and accessible materials on earth. You could show this to a group of children in the countryside of a third-world country and they, too, would be amazed by it.
Nobody cares if you don't want to visit HN any more because you don't like the articles that are collectively upvoted here.
