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What is going on with the reflexive upvoting of articles arguing against new technologies here on HN? Are there any upcoming technologies HN does not have an a

• politelemon 3y ago
  All tech should be subject to multiple angles of scrutiny. That's a good thing. Else HN just risks become an echo chamber like many subreddits about specific things
• bmitc 3y ago
  "Self-driving" cars is not necessarily new technology in the sense of people shooting down new ideas. It's been shoved down everyone's throats for over a decade now. It's not coming any time soon, despite the unending promises and claims, and companies have gotten away with pushing regulations and skirting the law to perform R&D and testing on public roads that has killed several people. I think it's pretty reasonable to be tired of this. Same goes for VR, crypto, "AI", and every other over-hyped and over-promised technology over the past decade. In particular to self-driving cars, it is a distraction from other technological development we could be doing, it continues to hold up the car as a source for peoples' affection and keeps cars relevant, and the need for self-driving cars has never been articulated in a way that makes any sense.
  • PrimeMcFly 3y ago
    > It's not coming any time soon Uh, it's literally already here and being extensively tested in cities.
    • forgetfreeman 3y ago
      Uh it literally isn't here. It'll be here when you can let a tesla off it's leash in every form of adverse driving conditions known to man and it consistently out-perform a human driver, including in novel situations. What's being tested is the minimum viable approximation that legislators are willing to tolerate on our roadways.
      • pksebben 3y ago
        It’s okay though, we don’t need self driving cars. We can all just tie a toboggan to your goalposts.
        • forgetfreeman 3y ago
          Excuse you? How is demanding self-driving cars demonstrably improve on the performance of their human counterparts shifting goalposts? What, we're all supposed to just sit with our hands in our lap and accept sharing the road with a mediocre implementation of what humans can already do?
          • stonith 3y ago
            > in every form of adverse driving conditions known to man I don't need, for example, a self driving car to be able to handle snow particularly well, because it does not snow where I live. I don't need it to be able to drive well off-road because there are roads everywhere I go. I don't need it to be able to tow a trailer or a caravan, or drive a heavy vehicle. Self driving technology does not need to surpass humans in every single driving condition in order to be useful to a large number of people.
            • forgetfreeman 3y ago
              Vehicles get sold to people that live in places with snow. Snow exists in the world ergo self driving tech is dangerously incomplete if it can't cope.
            • bmitc 3y ago
              It sounds like you need buses, subways, and trains.
              • threatofrain 3y ago
                And if self driving cards are cordoned off to special areas, they are just another extension of buses, subways, trains, but with less manual operation needed. The criteria that self driving vehicles perform very well everywhere is extreme when we already have so many modes of transportation designed for specific contexts.
  • TekMol 3y ago
    Ok, you are tired of Self-Driving, VR, Crypto, AI and other upcoming technologies. Is there anything on the horizon you are interested in / enthusiastic about?
    • forgetfreeman 3y ago
      Nothing even tangentally related to the software industry, no. There's some exciting stuff in the biotech pipeline but software has been a dumpster fire of grift, hype, bullshit claims, and labor issues for at least couple decades now.
      • bruce511 3y ago
        You're right. Software peaked in 2003. There's been no useful things added since then. Personally I never use Google Maps to find my way, I never use Uber to commute, I always book hotels and flights through a travel agent, all my computers run XP, I watch all TV from plastic DVDs, I listen to music on more plastic discs, I go into the bank or write checks to do any transactions. Or maybe, I do none of that anymore.
        • forgetfreeman 3y ago
          Would you care to review the social and geopolitical impacts of social media, how walled gardens have destroyed the original promise of the internet, the financial and labor impacts of Amazon's near-monopoly on online sales, crypto's blistering track record at separating dumb from money at the modest cost of the energy consumption of a medium sized industrial nation, VR & AR's notable lack of life/world/job/industry altering implementations, vendor lock-in, the industry's holy war perpetual motion machine on thick vs thin clients, a few hundred waves of clients having their investment cash set on fire by dev shops platforming on tech only truly suitable for a FAANG because "it's the great new thing", FOSS's implosion into a free labor pool for private companies, or the successive waves of failure of software .orgs claiming to improve everything from healthcare workflows to the functioning of municipal governments by adding software? No? You can take your strawman and go.
• forgetfreeman 3y ago
  Burden of proof is on the technology, not it's skeptics.
• damiankennedy 3y ago
  Upvoting can mean you support the discussion, not just that you support one view or another. To your point though, I think two shifts in attitude are in play. One, technology has a higher bar to reach when it comes to safety. We accept that to err is human and expect that a human driver will have remorse and shame and may even be punished. With a self-driving car these things don't exist. Two, we have a lower tolerance to death and injury. Imagine cars didn't exist (but for some reason roads did) and you invented the car with all of today's safety standards. You would never get it approved.
  • tsimionescu 3y ago
    Just a nitpick, but roads are a few thousand years older than cars. Even societies which didn't know about the wheel still built roads.
• pengaru 3y ago
  I've never understood the frequent techie blindness to bad ideas because New Technology Ooooo Shiny!
• bruce511 3y ago
  Upvoting promotes discussion which is good. Upvote interesting topics, whether you agree with them or not. It's not a vote on the point of the article. Same for comments, voting is not agreeing, its saying that a point us well made and adds to the discussion. As to HN aversion to new technologies - thats a mix of an aging demographic (fear of making my job obsolete), a reflexive aversion to hype over substance, (a thing which nerds have tradionally been against because, well, we are bad at hype and view people good at it as undermining our substantive work), and in some cases because there's objectively not much value in the tech even if it succeeds. It's the way of the world. People whine about new stuff all the time, from their hand-held-hi-tech computer, over the connect-everything network, while binging their favorite sitcom from the 90s. Because, you know, those techs are from the oldentimes .
• CountHackulus 3y ago
  A car autonomously drove across the US in 1996. Self-driving cars aren't a new technology. Check out Drive: The Race to Create the Autonomous Car by Alex Davies for some good background.
• sofixa 3y ago
  Self-driving is not an upcoming technology, we've had self-driving trains for decades.