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no shade but this is peak "can't we just" hacker news energy
by ftxbro 3y ago
no shade but this is peak "can't we just" hacker news energy
- chmod600 3y agoWhat's wrong with "can't we just" questions? Lots of curious laypersons here, and it's often a useful way to learn. Usually it's pretty easy for an expert to answer such questions.
- ftxbro 3y agonothing wrong with it that's why i put no shade
- SideburnsOfDoom 3y agoIt's only wrong if you push the follow-through onto others. That's lazy. If you're really curious, spend 5 minutes on it. In this case, if you ask "can we just do this" you should follow through with "how big is that actually, what's of comparable size?" We can all google this, or learn how to. It's a useful way to learn. You won't learn how to find things out, by always just asking "can't we just" questions and walking away. In this case, soon you'd find out that 0.2nm is on the same scale as the spacing between individual atoms in a silicon crystal. Literal "drill" bits for removing 1 atom at a time are obviously out of the question. It is 10x smaller than the 2nm, the scale of the best x-ray lithography computer chip manufacturing processes.
- comex 3y agoI’d say that peak “can’t we just” comes with an assumption that we could just, which is quite different from this comment which comes off to me as hoping to learn why we can’t just.
- derefr 3y agoI often want to honestly ask "why we can't just do X", but I feel like I end up coming off as asking "can't we just do X" no matter how hard I try to phrase it otherwise. I feel like this is a place where English grammar just doesn't give you any good options.
- helianer 3y agoI’ll often ask “what are the problems with doing X?”. It doesn’t imply that there should be a solution but you still want to learn why it might not work. Often you can continue the conversation enough to either exclude it or think some more about the problems that are described.