4 ms·

That's the reason the Fast franchise is some 8+ films in and still doing $500M+ box offices. It's also a good reason documentaries, classical and jazz music, a

That's the reason the Fast franchise is some 8+ films in and still doing $500M+ box offices. It's also a good reason documentaries, classical and jazz music, and non-fiction books in all but self-help and cookbooks sell poor. I'd love to see a huge textbook covering pre-Calc through intros to harder topics like Real Analysis and Stochastics top the bestsellers for 22 weeks. But instead, people are buying the 5,431st political commentary about how we'll never recover from Trump unless we do everything the author says.

eckza 6y ago
Please, continue to tell us how much smarter you are than everyone else. People love it when you do that!
ooobit2 6y ago
It'd be nice if someone would do something about Wrongthink Trolls. It's not cool to see several downvotes on a random post, three or four levels deep in a comment chain, simply because it criticizes people spending money on useless political spin. It's crazy, maybe even hate speech to suggest a math textbook should be more important than a political memoir? ...on Hacker? Is there some sudden influx of people who join forums like these so they can tell themselves they're intelligent without walking that self-talk? Quickly finding ourselves in a world that serves to do nothing more than recite problems instead of give actionable steps and vetted research toward solving them. A world where saying something nice to someone if you're not the right color or gender can be violent; where violence toward someone because of their color or gender is something nice. It's a broken record, but how Orwellian for me, at 34, to sit here and not be able to suggest I don't condone bullying, and for the self-proclaimed egalitarian activist to stand up and say, "You don't deserve to be heard here! You don't even deserve to be here!" I'm now less afraid of lonely white kids with guns than I am of anyone else. Thanks.
- bbb_hahno 6y ago
  > I'm now less afraid of lonely white kids with guns than I am of anyone else. Thanks. Oh please, get the fuck over yourself.
- lnanek2 6y ago
  I guess you are new here, but HN is heavily, heavily edited and moderated. Posts get killed all the time, if they don't have their titles changed or URLs swapped, for not being exactly what certain people want, and other posts resurrected because the founder didn't get sufficient traffic. Comments get rethreaded and killed at the drop of a hat as well. The buried comment was a non-mainstream opinion, so not welcome here. We have a flag on the profile screen to see hidden posts and they are often the best posts that point out when something makes no sense, but just happen to be worded slightly rude to someone else's point of view. It's definitely not a place for free thought and people voting up discussable viewpoints they don't happen to agree with. You should just take it as a heavily curated slice of SV echochamber that you can examine, but not modify.
  - ooobit2 6y ago
    I've been here off and on for almost 9 years. For the most part, I expect (and certainly receive) a near continuous stream of amazing, informative, creative, insightful, and above all useful content... for free... from people like you, among others. But this is a buried comment several levels deep, for which the entire stream of cascading parent comments have no votes. It may be a broad generalization to assume wrongthink trolls are the cause, but it follows an observed pattern across social media. SV circlejerk or not, I'm more uncomfortable with the passivity to "definitely not a place for free thought and people voting up discussable viewpoints they don't happen to agree with." I don't care what whomever upvotes; however, downvotes with the intent of burying comments behind a content filter is a deliberate abuse of the system. I'm sure I could find a violation in the TOS too. In the above case, I expect better from engineers, entrepreneurs, and experts in STEM and STEM-proximal fields, because everyone here knows the faulty thinking I just pointed out. If you didn't, if the next person didn't, none of you would have made it through learning basic programming, design, or business logic. No one here would have any basis for expertise in much of anything. We shouldn't defend shrugging at behavior that undermines the authority and influence of this community. Is 13 years of massive success worth shrugging away? We're all smarter than to allow this crap.
  - blaser-waffle 6y ago
    > if they don't have their titles changed or URLs swapped, for not being exactly what certain people want, and other posts resurrected because the founder didn't get sufficient traffic. Disingenuous headlines are a huge problem and are part of "spin" (aka marketing or propaganda effort). All available research -- plus tons of anecdotal experience on /. or HN or reddit -- shows that people never read the links that are posted, and, if they did click the link, probably won't read 100% of it. Most people share links without reading articles as well. The headline is what generates the controversy, and should reflect the actual or original content of the piece. I am okay with mods changing headlines to reflect that. I have no doubt this is a SV echo chamber -- but it's a news aggregator run by Y-combinator, what the hell did you expect? See also: https://www.patheos.com/blogs/nosacredcows/2018/09/study-confirms-most-people-share-articles-based-only-on-headlines/ https://www.patheos.com/blogs/nosacredcows/2018/09/study-con... https://slate.com/technology/2013/06/how-people-read-online-why-you-wont-finish-this-article.html https://slate.com/technology/2013/06/how-people-read-online-... https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/why-we-dont-read-revisited https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/why-we-do... http://thesciencepost.com/study-70-of-facebook-commenters-only-read-the-headline/ http://thesciencepost.com/study-70-of-facebook-commenters-on...
- d_e_solomon 6y ago
  I preface my comment with, I have a math degree. First, I'm not sure what politics versus math reading has to do with the topic at hand - namely, car headlights. Second, you're complaining about downvotes. Third, you're complaints sound like "kids get off my lawn". So yeah... that's why you're getting downvoted. To more directly engage with your point, politics isn't just an exercise in group think. It has very real consequences for many people - consider the number of deaths per capita in Germany versus that of Sweeden. The difference in response is one partly of politics and resulted in unnecessary deaths.
  - ooobit2 6y ago
    I appreciate your argument. What I was trying to point out was that the obsession with car modding is why films in the Fast franchise, even a decade after the first one debuted at the box office, still do extremely well. They're sheer entertainment, just fast driving with some plot points to justify the next action sequence. What didn't land for you, maybe for more people, was that documentaries, classical and jazz, etc. are not as appreciated because they require some effort to understand and thereby appreciate. That was my point about wishing a textbook would top the bestsellers list and not yet another book shilling apocalyptic hypotheticals about Donald Trump that the author always has some magical cure for. It's like self-help politics, but The Secret is "impeach Donald Trump", every time. It's easy. It's low brow after the first dozen books, as it only intends to satisfy helpless aggression in readers. And while it's nothing new, I wish people were as enthralled with a book teaching math or chemistry or accounting. You know, stuff that's useful to people. If someone wants to write a book about the process of governance, that's one thing. But if it's another pseudo-analysis-by-way-of-emotion book, it's disingenuous to suggest an anti-Trump political commentary is any more useful today than anything written by Ann Coulter.
- eckza 6y ago
  I wanted to respond to your comment that started > I've been here off and on for almost 9 years. But it's flagged / dead. Anyway. I'm not a Wrongthink Troll. Just a guy, probably more like you than not in most ways... that has a low tolerance for self-aggrandizing behavior. The tone of the post I replied to just rubbed me the wrong way. I apologize for the unconstructive nature of my comment. I should have said nothing. Now I just feel like the Tone Police... And nobody likes that.

eckza 6y ago

Please, continue to tell us how much smarter you are than everyone else. People love it when you do that!

ooobit2 6y ago

It'd be nice if someone would do something about Wrongthink Trolls. It's not cool to see several downvotes on a random post, three or four levels deep in a comment chain, simply because it criticizes people spending money on useless political spin. It's crazy, maybe even hate speech to suggest a math textbook should be more important than a political memoir? ...on Hacker? Is there some sudden influx of people who join forums like these so they can tell themselves they're intelligent without walking that self-talk? Quickly finding ourselves in a world that serves to do nothing more than recite problems instead of give actionable steps and vetted research toward solving them. A world where saying something nice to someone if you're not the right color or gender can be violent; where violence toward someone because of their color or gender is something nice. It's a broken record, but how Orwellian for me, at 34, to sit here and not be able to suggest I don't condone bullying, and for the self-proclaimed egalitarian activist to stand up and say, "You don't deserve to be heard here! You don't even deserve to be here!" I'm now less afraid of lonely white kids with guns than I am of anyone else. Thanks.

bbb_hahno 6y ago
> I'm now less afraid of lonely white kids with guns than I am of anyone else. Thanks. Oh please, get the fuck over yourself.
lnanek2 6y ago
I guess you are new here, but HN is heavily, heavily edited and moderated. Posts get killed all the time, if they don't have their titles changed or URLs swapped, for not being exactly what certain people want, and other posts resurrected because the founder didn't get sufficient traffic. Comments get rethreaded and killed at the drop of a hat as well. The buried comment was a non-mainstream opinion, so not welcome here. We have a flag on the profile screen to see hidden posts and they are often the best posts that point out when something makes no sense, but just happen to be worded slightly rude to someone else's point of view. It's definitely not a place for free thought and people voting up discussable viewpoints they don't happen to agree with. You should just take it as a heavily curated slice of SV echochamber that you can examine, but not modify.
- ooobit2 6y ago
  I've been here off and on for almost 9 years. For the most part, I expect (and certainly receive) a near continuous stream of amazing, informative, creative, insightful, and above all useful content... for free... from people like you, among others. But this is a buried comment several levels deep, for which the entire stream of cascading parent comments have no votes. It may be a broad generalization to assume wrongthink trolls are the cause, but it follows an observed pattern across social media. SV circlejerk or not, I'm more uncomfortable with the passivity to "definitely not a place for free thought and people voting up discussable viewpoints they don't happen to agree with." I don't care what whomever upvotes; however, downvotes with the intent of burying comments behind a content filter is a deliberate abuse of the system. I'm sure I could find a violation in the TOS too. In the above case, I expect better from engineers, entrepreneurs, and experts in STEM and STEM-proximal fields, because everyone here knows the faulty thinking I just pointed out. If you didn't, if the next person didn't, none of you would have made it through learning basic programming, design, or business logic. No one here would have any basis for expertise in much of anything. We shouldn't defend shrugging at behavior that undermines the authority and influence of this community. Is 13 years of massive success worth shrugging away? We're all smarter than to allow this crap.
- blaser-waffle 6y ago
  > if they don't have their titles changed or URLs swapped, for not being exactly what certain people want, and other posts resurrected because the founder didn't get sufficient traffic. Disingenuous headlines are a huge problem and are part of "spin" (aka marketing or propaganda effort). All available research -- plus tons of anecdotal experience on /. or HN or reddit -- shows that people never read the links that are posted, and, if they did click the link, probably won't read 100% of it. Most people share links without reading articles as well. The headline is what generates the controversy, and should reflect the actual or original content of the piece. I am okay with mods changing headlines to reflect that. I have no doubt this is a SV echo chamber -- but it's a news aggregator run by Y-combinator, what the hell did you expect? See also: https://www.patheos.com/blogs/nosacredcows/2018/09/study-confirms-most-people-share-articles-based-only-on-headlines/ https://www.patheos.com/blogs/nosacredcows/2018/09/study-con... https://slate.com/technology/2013/06/how-people-read-online-why-you-wont-finish-this-article.html https://slate.com/technology/2013/06/how-people-read-online-... https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/why-we-dont-read-revisited https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/why-we-do... http://thesciencepost.com/study-70-of-facebook-commenters-only-read-the-headline/ http://thesciencepost.com/study-70-of-facebook-commenters-on...
d_e_solomon 6y ago
I preface my comment with, I have a math degree. First, I'm not sure what politics versus math reading has to do with the topic at hand - namely, car headlights. Second, you're complaining about downvotes. Third, you're complaints sound like "kids get off my lawn". So yeah... that's why you're getting downvoted. To more directly engage with your point, politics isn't just an exercise in group think. It has very real consequences for many people - consider the number of deaths per capita in Germany versus that of Sweeden. The difference in response is one partly of politics and resulted in unnecessary deaths.
- ooobit2 6y ago
  I appreciate your argument. What I was trying to point out was that the obsession with car modding is why films in the Fast franchise, even a decade after the first one debuted at the box office, still do extremely well. They're sheer entertainment, just fast driving with some plot points to justify the next action sequence. What didn't land for you, maybe for more people, was that documentaries, classical and jazz, etc. are not as appreciated because they require some effort to understand and thereby appreciate. That was my point about wishing a textbook would top the bestsellers list and not yet another book shilling apocalyptic hypotheticals about Donald Trump that the author always has some magical cure for. It's like self-help politics, but The Secret is "impeach Donald Trump", every time. It's easy. It's low brow after the first dozen books, as it only intends to satisfy helpless aggression in readers. And while it's nothing new, I wish people were as enthralled with a book teaching math or chemistry or accounting. You know, stuff that's useful to people. If someone wants to write a book about the process of governance, that's one thing. But if it's another pseudo-analysis-by-way-of-emotion book, it's disingenuous to suggest an anti-Trump political commentary is any more useful today than anything written by Ann Coulter.
eckza 6y ago
I wanted to respond to your comment that started > I've been here off and on for almost 9 years. But it's flagged / dead. Anyway. I'm not a Wrongthink Troll. Just a guy, probably more like you than not in most ways... that has a low tolerance for self-aggrandizing behavior. The tone of the post I replied to just rubbed me the wrong way. I apologize for the unconstructive nature of my comment. I should have said nothing. Now I just feel like the Tone Police... And nobody likes that.