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A lot of the posters on hacker news have just mastered the cynical take. It’s an ego booster for people who can’t handle that there are other people out there a
by shusaku 5y ago
A lot of the posters on hacker news have just mastered the cynical take. It’s an ego booster for people who can’t handle that there are other people out there accomplishing things.
- wallacoloo 5y agoA HN user’s cynical take on other HN users’ cynical takes. Masterful.
- pfdietz 5y agoThe cynical take is a product of talking to engineers, not scientists. The tragedy of engineering is that in any market niche, generally only one technology can win. The others are driven to extinction. It's like ecology's "one niche, one species" rule. As Freeman Dyson pointed out, this is not like science, where multiple complementary theories may coexist. We build chips from silicon, not GaAs or superconducting niobium or any of the other possible technologies that were considered over the decades. An engineer, if he's old enough, will have seen many technologies come up then fail and die. There are more ways to solve problems than there are sufficiently distinct problems, so this is inevitable. When fusion competes with fission, and wind, and solar, and geothermal, and..., it's a fight to the death. The notion that fusion is inevitable is a stacking of the mental deck to just assume fusion will win this competition.