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HN, what the heck has happened to you? What is with all of these cynical comments? Helion is an awesome company, their technology is real, and this is cool.

• deweller 3y ago
  8 years ago, HN was a place full of optimism and excitement. I've noticed a marked increase in cynicism in this place. Like most of the world, it suffers from extreme tribalism and group think. I miss the former positive HN. And the positive world. sigh
  • throwawaysleep 3y ago
    > And the positive world. sigh It turned out to be a lie and a scam, so now people are more skeptical.
    • Gud 3y ago
      No it didn’t. The world is an amazing place. I am thankful to be alive.
      • throw9away6 3y ago
        Must be nice to be a 1% er
        • deleted 3y ago
          [deleted]
        • Gud 3y ago
          I'm not rich, I'm broke af. Doesn't stop me from choosing happiness. What's the alternative? Spend my life in misery? I tried that for a decade, didn't work out well for me. Now I choose to be happy. I choose to be the best I can be. Moping around sure as shit didn't fix my problems
  • jackmott42 3y ago
    The cynicism for me at least is a result of reality actually getting markedly worse (at least in the USA) over the last 10 years. However, none of that has anything to do with fusion tech, so I remain hopeful about that!
    • SeanAnderson 3y ago
      It's admittedly a 12 year old YouTube, but I always liked watching this when I was feeling especially cynical about the overall trajectory of the world: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo
      • nindalf 3y ago
        Before clicking that link I wondered what I would recommend to people who were feeling cynical about the world. It's a book by Hans Rosling - Factfulness, and it turns out that's the guy in your video.
        • jackmott42 3y ago
          Sadly he is no longer with us to let us know how things have gone the last 10 years :(
    • haswell 3y ago
      I think it’s worth examining what we believe to be “reality”. If your reality is the Internet, the apocalypse is upon us. I’ve spent the past year reducing Internet one and increasing immersion in my local community and the world looks like a very different (better) place.
  • rf15 3y ago
    Maybe we just grew up? There is still plenty we are enthusiastic and positive about here, but discussion sure has become more nuanced.
    • piloto_ciego 3y ago
      Getting older is no excuse for cynicism.
    • sebzim4500 3y ago
      Cynicism has nothing to do with nuance.
      • DubiousPusher 3y ago
        Nor does unbounded positivity and optimism.
        • switchbak 3y ago
          Honestly I think in this case the subject is so complex you'd have to be an expert to separate the wheat from the chaff. The techno optimists really do a lot of grifting these days (especially on YouTube), and the knee-jerk cynics are predictably annoying as well. The fact that a knowledgeable fusion insider is criticizing this speaks volumes to me, and his criticisms seem on point. I'm a lay person so my take on it is effectively of zero value. And I don't think I'm the only one in this thread in that position :)
        • sebzim4500 3y ago
          I agree. I have nothing against the people sharing actual technical critisisms of the approach.
  • casey2 3y ago
    It's pretty easy to find comments of people complaining about cynicism 11+ years ago.
  • piloto_ciego 3y ago
    The cynicism is an op, or something - because I don’t have the evidence to say it’s definitively an “op” - as the kids say. But legitimately, there is a strong cynical bubble in the zeitgeist now, and it’s dangerous. There are a few things this cynicism says. 1. “People suck and are terrible.” 2. “People are stupid.” 3. “We can’t change anything.” 4. “Great calamity is going to happen and we are powerless to stop it.” This is a lie. The world doesn’t suck, it’s much better than it used to be, people aren’t terrible - if people were more bad than good on average we’d still be hitting each other with clubs and going Conan on people. We aren’t stupid - it’s just that the stupid people are louder. And while the possibilities for great calamity exist, they are not guaranteed. This may be more emergent than anything else, but trust your neighbors, treat people nicely, and you - yes individually each of you - need to start trying to make the world better. Nobody is going to do it for us. I know what it’s like to feel bleak, trust me I do - but that’s just a call to action. It’s not “techno optimism” we need - it’s optimism, there are radical solutions that don’t use a single transistor.
    • hutzlibu 3y ago
      "The world doesn’t suck, it’s much better than it used to be" Better then when and by what meassure? It is quite subjective I think. One satirical person offered this quote: We optimized for the minimum of individual luck, to get the maximum of people. I am not fully behind this quote, it is satirical, but I think there is too much truth behind it. Ecologically things look bad. Geopolitical the same. But yes, the sun is still shining and spring is nice and we do are progressing to new technological heights every day. It is just how this awesome tech is used overwhelmingly, that is a bummer.
      • SeasonalEnnui 3y ago
        "Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World" is a book that makes an excellent attempt to answer this.
        • moron4hire 3y ago
          Isn't this book about the low-hanging fruit stuff like universal access to healthy drinking water? And isn't it about basically the course of history through the 20th century compared to the previous millennium? That's much more macro, world-wide kind of stuff than whether or not startups in developed countries nowadays feel almost exclusively exploitative versus how they felt innovative 15, 20 years ago.
  • ohgodplsno 3y ago
    Because the world has gotten markedly more shit for the vast majority of people, and YC is directly one of the reasons. Most of us have seen our disposable income drop, seen bullshit companies making connected dog feeders get funded dozens of millions by money-centralizing VCs, and overall have seen the world get more and more unfair, unbalanced and unjust. Major climate disruption is underway, wars are hitting all over the globe and governments are all getting more and more undemocratic. Needless to say, the world doesn't exactly lend itself to positivity about yet another fucking startup promising you fusion powered dog feeders.
  • haarts 3y ago
    Is that feeling of yours actually founded in reality? You can have a look! https://hackermoods.com/ https://hackermoods.com/ (I only did a quick search)
    • deweller 3y ago
      This is a very interesting site. I'd love to see the analysis extend beyond 2016.
  • matrix_overload 3y ago
    Startups used to be a way to create your own solution to a non-trivial problem, and make money off selling it to people that will benefit from it and enjoy it. It was a highly rewarding experience for those who didn't want to play corporate politics (or at least, play it to a lesser extent). But then it attracted too many people that would just emulate the KPI in order to get funded, and instead of letting it crash and rise from the ashes, we lowered the interest rates and bailed out a bunch of "too big to fail" banks in 2008, pretty much guaranteeing viability of shitty investments. Oh, and when people started calling it out in 2012 with Occupy Wall Street, they were redirected using the centuries-old divide-and-conquer techniques. So now it's a shell of former self. Founders try to create something that looks like a great company. VCs pour money in, hoping to resell to the next fool. Founders are now more like figureheads than idea-driven people. Most big successes (Uber, AirBnb) could be attributed more to regulatory capture than a revolutional way of doing something. Smart people understand it very well and it doesn't make you very optimistic. You can pretend well enough to convince an average layperson, but deep inside you know the game is fake, and it kinda builds up. Notably, game-changers that are appreciated by users (rather than speculative investors) now mostly come from China (e.g. TikTok), because the vibe there (with all the downsides) is now closer to the "good old SV" than the current SV.
    • MichaelZuo 3y ago
      To be fair to Uber and AirBnB, they did introduce some genuinely novel innovations. But the business model does heavily rely on the non-technological aspects for their competitive advantage.
      • tokai 3y ago
        Non-technological aspects is an interesting euphemism for breaking the law.
        • MichaelZuo 3y ago
          Not in all jurisdictions. But granted in quite a few there are violations of the spirit of the law.
  • skrebbel 3y ago
    Fwiw to my memory, 8 years ago people complained about cynicism and negativism on HN just as much. Eg people never stopped quoting that famous top comment on Dropbox's HN launch (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863#9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863#9224). I strongly doubt this attitude ever changed. It's always been - first comments are dismissive gut reactions - a bit later some nuanced/positive comments arrive - depending on mood and luck, one or the other kind floats to the top I mean how often have you read a super positive top comment that starts out complaining about all the negativism in the thread? It's super commonplace! HN is still full of optimism and excitement, and also middlebrow dismissal. Just give it a few hours for every topic.
    • soco 3y ago
      I can confirm this. If I happen to contradict some cynical comment, 5 minutes and I'm at minus-something. Then the positives start to build back up. Always. There could be some psychological explanation to this, why the quick reaction is negative and the better thought-of positive?
  • creato 3y ago
    I genuinely think HN has been overrun by influence operations designed to make people resigned to the world being terrible. It sounds stupid and paranoid, but I can’t explain the patterns I observe any other way. I think the way HN is operated makes it impossible to avoid: no real authentication other than an email address. It is (or at least was) a juicy target due to the concentration of influential people in an influential industry. I’m specifically not going to post examples because that will invite the same old conversations to be rehashed, and any one example is useless anyways. People will claim confirmation bias and they may even be right.
    • adampk 3y ago
      I agree with you. A "everything is terrible" campaign. But who stands to gain?
  • healthysurf 3y ago
    I'll be updating this in the coming weeks, and one of the features is going to be a toggle switch to "Make HN Happy" where it detects negative sentiments and rewords the comment into something constructive: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/healthy-surf/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/healthy-surf/
  • throwaway81523 3y ago
    Look for the article "Geeks, mops, and sociopaths" which has been posted here a few times. We are currently in the sociopath part of the cycle, and people recognize that.
  • adamdennis 3y ago
    There’s still time to turn this thread/site around! Let’s keep it positive! “I’m looking forward to having reached the bottom; only up from here!”
• throwawaysleep 3y ago
  Decades of tons of things turning out to be a pile of lies and fraud.
  • thepasswordis 3y ago
    Is that true? Seems like this summer I’m driving my Tesla to watch a Starship launch and using my starlink for internet access along the way. Meanwhile I’m using GitHub copilot to help me write code to uses some of openAIs products in my existing SaaS offering. There is a constant stream of waymos driving past my house (with nobody in them) and I’m playing Skyrim in VR. What technology are you talking about that didn’t pan out?
    • kredd 3y ago
      The general attitude in my circles is none of those technologies have had any positive impact on our or our loved one’s lives. Don’t get me wrong, they’re all “cool and awesome”, but when you put it into perspective of “is life easier” or “has our happiness increased”, my answer would be a strong no. This general skepticism leads to younger generation to be more cynical, especially when things that have been promised just don’t work out. I can’t really support it with any reliable data, as I mentioned, could just be my circles and nobody else. Hopefully fusion will work out though! That I’m looking forward to.
      • DennisP 3y ago
        Here's one with an impact: one of my relatives was diagnosed seven years ago with stage 4 melanoma, which a couple decades ago was a one-year death sentence. She got three doses of immunotherapy, her tumors shrank, and last year her oncologist said don't even bother coming in for scans anymore, you're fine.
        • radicaldreamer 3y ago
          I'm reminded of a coworker who asked what has been more impactful of an invention to humanity than Steve Jobs and the iPhone and was speechless when I was like how about pasteurization, penicillin, or vaccination?
• strictnein 3y ago
  Maybe I'm imagining it, but I feel like there's been a marked decrease in the quality of comments here over the past couple of months. Lots of snark and vitriol. Maybe it's just the layoffs and people are venting here for some reason?
• powera 3y ago
  This exact comment was made, repeatedly, about Theranos.
• cowthulhu 3y ago
  I think it’s a lot easier to be cynical and negative than to put yourself out there a bit and say something positive. Or - at least that’s something I’ve struggled with personally.
• ricardobeat 3y ago
  Cynism is not disencouraged in the HN guidelines, but the sneering at the community and meta complaint in your comment is. I don’t care for the tone in those comments buy they are expressing something real. Helion can be a cool company with real tech, and this deal a marketing play, both possibly true.
  • x-complexity 3y ago
    > Cynism is not disencouraged in the HN guidelines, but the sneering at the community and meta complaint in your comment is. I don’t care for the tone in those comments buy they are expressing something real. This guideline needs to be revised: It is extremely easy to be a cynic compared to being an optimist, and the rewards for being such a cynic are mismatched, as per piloto_ciego's outline on the advantages that being a pessimist/cynic has over being an optimist. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35892166 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35892166 The ever-increasing levels of dread coming from HN is a deadly combination of Neo-Luddism & doomerism that I'm an avid crucifier of.
• ramraj07 3y ago
  You can be optimistic when you’re just making an app to rent your room out or to find a dog walker. You can hustle and sell useless SaaS services long enough to get acquired for no real reason except managerial power plays in large companies. In the world of software you can kinda make almost any idea work with sweat and political maneuvering. You can literally see that they’re trying to play the same games here. However when it comes to startups dealing with biology or physics you’re literally battling the laws of nature. You can’t just hustle out of it. I’ve been laughing at the type of biotech companies that get funded by SV (nano diamonds for cancer detection? Gut Micro biome sequencing?) and it’s looking like similar story with fusion. In this case if you want real reasons why Helion looks suspect check out this good summary of all the issues with their approach and promise: https://youtu.be/3vUPhsFoniw https://youtu.be/3vUPhsFoniw I won’t get my life against someone figuring out fusion in the next two decades but I wouldn’t bet money towards it either.
  • sebzim4500 3y ago
    That's almost exactly what they said to Elon Musk when he started SpaceX, and now they are on a streak of >100 successful missions in a row.
    • slaw 3y ago
      SpaceX uses technology that started to work in 1961.
      • sebzim4500 3y ago
        And if you squint a lot then Helion is continuing a development process that started in the 1950s.
        • slaw 3y ago
          Yes, Helion is continuing what didn't work since 1950s.
    • ramraj07 3y ago
• aww_dang 3y ago
  Why is the tech real this time? Why is it an awesome company? Give us some substance. Dismissing critics as cynics doesn't tell me anything as a layman. A good exchange between a booster and a debunker adds something to the discussion.
• jbverschoor 3y ago
  See Dropbox’ first post on HN. Nothing new
  • crmd 3y ago
    The infamous Dropbox thread is a good example of old HN culture - shitting on a billion dollar business idea because the tech problem is “so easy to solve I could build it over a weekend”. In this thread people are arguing that the problem is too hard. It does lately feel to me like a culture shift.
• anonuser123456 3y ago
  >Do you guys not understand that you’re posting on the forum of a venture capital firm/startup accelerator? Sure, but people here realize there is a difference between hand waving away the complexity of a potential software implementation and hand waving away how you are going to overcome the strong nuclear force.
• corndoge 3y ago
  Bear market, come back in a year
• zackmorris 3y ago
  I feel some guilt about this, in that the vast majority of my comments are critical in some way. Mostly because I'm trying to dig deeper into the truth and expand the discussion into a meta-analysis. That style of big-picture thinking often reveals conceptual flaws, which is the point! Anyway, we have the math and experimental evidence now to show that fusion reactors work, and it's just a scaling problem. Sure, it may cost a billion dollars, but Elon Musk could pay that 100 times over. Not only that, but science has become distracted by expensive projects, to the point that it would pour another billion into a particle accelerator rather than fund 1000 research projects for $1 million each. So the main thing stopping us is that financial barrier between the status quo and scalable progress for everyone. And the power of choice in the hands of the wealthy to deny us the catalyst (money) to overcome that barrier. I thought that life was a meritocracy until the Dot Bomb, Great Recession and concentration of wealth post-pandemic revealed that a few key players pull all of the strings. The amounts of money we're used to dealing with are largely meaningless. So our life's work at countless dead-end jobs is just a rounding error for the wealthy. Cynical comments could be seen as the outward projection of the jealousy we feel having to go to a job every day instead of doing meaningful deep work on projects like this. And sure, fusion might deliver 1 cent/kWh electricity. But it only costs 10 cents now. So it will not trigger a material improvement in quality of life like we might expect. Meanwhile a fusion plant might make another billion dollars for its owner, which is a material improvement. This is how injustice works as the primary commodity throughout history, and why seemingly egalitarian tech like fusion could and should be looked at with healthy skepticism. Because the people pursuing it would do more for us by taking on the real challenges like ending subjugation and empowering others (through education, automation, UBI, etc), but for all their wealth, they're fixated on egocentric solutions which may never materialize.
• userabchn 3y ago
  What percentage of the negative comments come from chatbots that are part of foreign influence campaigns to spread negativity in this largely Western world (or even largely US) forum?
  • speed_spread 3y ago
    Don't forget fission industry shills. They are quite active here and are happy to remember everyone that "fission is our only way out" (TM).
  • throw9away6 3y ago
    Probably lower than you expect a lot of people have done basic research on fusion and understand it makes no economical sense.
• ren_engineer 3y ago
  one of the most famous posts on this site was shitting on Dropbox and dismissing it as a weekend project. HN has always been this way
• p_j_w 3y ago
  The cynicism may come from the fact that no one has been able to generate system level break even on a fusion plant in a lab setting after decades of work. How can one be anything but skeptical that it'll be commercially available five years from now?
  • hoseja 3y ago
    A lot of it is because nobody has actually really tried in a serious enough way. Nuclear technology would also be a pipe dream without the insane frenzy of mutually assured destruction.
• PurpleRamen 3y ago
  > Helion is an awesome company, their technology is real How do you know? Have you seen it? The website itself is very sketchy, full of unrealistic claims and very vague explanations, it reads like a fanfic. Of course do people not buy this, it just smells too hard of scam.
  • deepspace 3y ago
    This whole comment section is bizarre. It looks like the fusion-promoting bots and shills are out in full force. It might even be a pump-and-dump scheme. There is certainly nothing about what Helion is willing to say about the technology that inspires confidence, and many glaring problems with their approach. A healthy dose of skepticism is absolutely warranted.
• random_cynic 3y ago
  The "cynicism" is what happens when you have a bunch of armchair critics who've done nothing significant in their life except engage in pointless nitpicking and flame wars on internet, see that their fantasies are being brought to life by more determined and talented people than they can ever be.
  • hoseja 3y ago
    Or, maybe, seeing hustlers destroy last shreds of credibility of the incredible promise of fusion - which is what this is until they actually go energy positive in a sustainable manner. SpaceX also wasn't worth praise until they actually put payloads into orbit. Now they are worth extreme praise and people hate them instead. Everything is backwards.
• DubiousPusher 3y ago
  Just maybe the trajectory of some of tech's most hyped companies has had some impact on this: WeWork, Palantir, Theranos, Uber, etc?
• credit_guy 3y ago
  It's 2023. Even if they had a reactor ready and functional today, the NRC would not give them the approval by 2028, and once they gave them the approval, it would take them a decade to build a reactor. In a world where the NRC does not exists maybe this makes sense, but that's (thankfully) not the world we have.
• hoseja 3y ago
  >their technology is real Clearly not yet.
• ChatGTP 3y ago
  This is what happened: "Microsoft's CEO Says No Raises for Full-Time Employees This Year" and then in the article [1]: Satya Nadella, whose salary ballooned to $55 million last year, wrote to employees: “As a senior leadership team, we don’t take this decision lightly." More and more of this, ad infinitum. It's really hard to be excited about tech when your told your job is soon to be replaced with little recourse, "CDC data shows U.S. teen girls ‘in crisis’ with unprecedented rise in suicidal behavior", AI might kill humanity within 5 years etc. I'm keeping an open mind about it all and the future, but there is also a thing called toxic positivity and I think this is what's creating the cynicism. There's not enough actual healthy critical debate and skepticism about tech and where it's taking us and it's role in causing the issues mentioned above. It's just rich people getting richer at the moment. So I can't say I blame people for being cynical, even though it's not very healthy or constructive. [1] https://gizmodo.com/microsoft-no-raises-full-time-ceo-satya-nadella-1850424823 https://gizmodo.com/microsoft-no-raises-full-time-ceo-satya-...
• Apofis 3y ago
  Considering less than 30% of startups are successfully by any measure, HN should be way more optimistic. I wonder where that sentiment is coming from.