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This is offtopic insofar as it’s meta but: the HN attitude of telling me why everything won’t work is really depressing. If I took many of the top comments on h

This is offtopic insofar as it’s meta but: the HN attitude of telling me why everything won’t work is really depressing. If I took many of the top comments on here seriously: pretty much every new technology or breakthrough is nonsense. Surely doing things that are new and challenging mean some hyperbole, but it doesn’t make you sound smarter when you’re constantly telling me why things don’t work.

compcoffee 8y ago
>why everything won't work is depressing That's funny, because I find the Silicon Valley attitude of "no one knows how to do anything but us" equally depressing. Tesla is a great example of this hubris.
Gargoyle 8y ago
As far as I can tell, that's what the people running the site want it to be. It's been a problem for years and years now and no action has been taken to stop it.
- s_kilk 8y ago
  Why should it be stopped?
- JackCh 8y ago
  I prefer critical analysis to unthinking yes-men. To the extent that HN administration agrees with me, I appreciate them.
syntaxing 8y ago
I'm surprised how many people on HN has a problem with this ide...Engineers are trained to be pessimistic opportunists (for good reasons IMHO). The thought process is always This doesn't work > ask myself why it doesn't > prove my wrong and show me how it works. There are many foundational rules and laws that are easy to disprove especially when it comes to something mechanical. That's one of the beautiful thing of mechanical and manufacturing engineering. Knowledge from the past tend to be relevant for a good reason.
ummonk 8y ago
That's reality. Most pie in the sky ideas won't work because of fundamental constraints of reality. The trick is to find the leveraged areas where you actually can do something groundbreaking. E.g. solar roadways was a ridiculously stupid idea but solar shingles was brilliant.
ubernostrum 8y ago
I'm unsure what it is exactly Tesla's doing that's supposed to be such an earth-shattering heart-breaking staggering-ten-quintillion-Einsteins-level genius unprecedented changes-the-course-of-history-forever thing. As far as I can tell, the thing they are struggling to do is... build and run a car factory. And this runs through everything Musk does. His more successful ventures like SpaceX have basically consisted of taking something where someone else already did all the expensive fundamental R&D, doing some iterative improvement on it, and promising to use economies of scale to bring down the price. Except, because it's Musk, it's buried under a Mount Everest of breathless superlatives praising him for doing it. Dude's trying to build a car factory to churn out cars that are incremental improvements on the prior state of the art. A rolled-up combination of Galileo, Copernicus and Newton he ain't. Maybe he'll succeed at it and make some money. Maybe he'll get his lunch eaten by people who know more about (and don't disdainfully sneer at existing knowledge of) building and running car factories. I have a hard time caring, but HN seems to worship the ground he walks on, and I simply don't understand why.
JackCh 8y ago
Find reasons in the present to appreciate life. Anticipation of new things shouldn't be your sole source of happiness. Criticism of flashy and ambitious but unworkable ideas shouldn't make you depressed because there should be plenty that already exists that keeps you happy. It's a big world out there.

compcoffee 8y ago

>why everything won't work is depressing That's funny, because I find the Silicon Valley attitude of "no one knows how to do anything but us" equally depressing. Tesla is a great example of this hubris.

Gargoyle 8y ago

As far as I can tell, that's what the people running the site want it to be. It's been a problem for years and years now and no action has been taken to stop it.

s_kilk 8y ago
Why should it be stopped?
JackCh 8y ago
I prefer critical analysis to unthinking yes-men. To the extent that HN administration agrees with me, I appreciate them.

syntaxing 8y ago

I'm surprised how many people on HN has a problem with this ide...Engineers are trained to be pessimistic opportunists (for good reasons IMHO). The thought process is always This doesn't work > ask myself why it doesn't > prove my wrong and show me how it works. There are many foundational rules and laws that are easy to disprove especially when it comes to something mechanical. That's one of the beautiful thing of mechanical and manufacturing engineering. Knowledge from the past tend to be relevant for a good reason.

ummonk 8y ago

That's reality. Most pie in the sky ideas won't work because of fundamental constraints of reality. The trick is to find the leveraged areas where you actually can do something groundbreaking. E.g. solar roadways was a ridiculously stupid idea but solar shingles was brilliant.

ubernostrum 8y ago

I'm unsure what it is exactly Tesla's doing that's supposed to be such an earth-shattering heart-breaking staggering-ten-quintillion-Einsteins-level genius unprecedented changes-the-course-of-history-forever thing. As far as I can tell, the thing they are struggling to do is... build and run a car factory. And this runs through everything Musk does. His more successful ventures like SpaceX have basically consisted of taking something where someone else already did all the expensive fundamental R&D, doing some iterative improvement on it, and promising to use economies of scale to bring down the price. Except, because it's Musk, it's buried under a Mount Everest of breathless superlatives praising him for doing it. Dude's trying to build a car factory to churn out cars that are incremental improvements on the prior state of the art. A rolled-up combination of Galileo, Copernicus and Newton he ain't. Maybe he'll succeed at it and make some money. Maybe he'll get his lunch eaten by people who know more about (and don't disdainfully sneer at existing knowledge of) building and running car factories. I have a hard time caring, but HN seems to worship the ground he walks on, and I simply don't understand why.

JackCh 8y ago

Find reasons in the present to appreciate life. Anticipation of new things shouldn't be your sole source of happiness. Criticism of flashy and ambitious but unworkable ideas shouldn't make you depressed because there should be plenty that already exists that keeps you happy. It's a big world out there.