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Darpa is testing a completely novel type of flight control and all these HN comments are just nitpicking irrelevant things, missing the forest through the trees

• deleted 3y ago
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• robertlagrant 3y ago
  Honestly, the quality is only lowered by this comment. You already replied to the drones thing. Writing a second, ranting, comment at the top level scaling up that comment to represent all of HN discussion of all time is just a bit silly.
  • LargeTomato 3y ago
    Anything about foreign policy, IR, and aerospace is reddit-tier. Probably more subjects too but they are out of my area of expertise.
    • mdhb 3y ago
      Add in anything that’s even remotely related to intelligence or defence which is typically just filled with qanon style nonsense. I’ve noticed it for years as well, you aren’t wrong.
      • bombcar 3y ago
        Except for some very specific knowledgeable posters, the vast majority of all Internet comments could be replaced by a LLM. Including this one. The key is to not post them yourself and to let the good ones shine.
        • ChainOfFools 3y ago
          I don't know, I think there needs to be some form of unambiguous BS pushback signal, a gradient that starts with minimal intrusion on discussion along the lines of "people are starting to notice that some of us are talking past our pay grade." Not saying anything at all amounts to an endorsement of penalty free bullshiting, and after enough of this the hard-won cultural expectations start to shift about what constitutes acceptable participation. There's a spectrum between Reddit on one end, and the typical IRC channel fiefdom with its mod-permissioned voicing, invisible banhammer tripwires, and admonitions to LuRK MoAR, on the other, and I think HN is in a sweet spot/zone somewhere between those extremes, but perhaps might need an adjustment in the direction of the latter. Downvoting/flagging somewhat furnishes this signalling, but it's too ambiguous of a signal and is often abused by people who simply want to suppress information that is perfectly valid but not to their liking. This is where a slashdot type of lightly sentiment-coded moderation system really may be worth bringing back into fashion.
          • lamontcg 3y ago
            It might be useful to have LLMs do automoderation on forums, tweaked by the moderators to shift the discussion the direction they want it to go. Have it so that the feedback is immediately on pressing the submit button rather than after-the-fact. And probably with more useful information to the poster than the "our users don't post messages like this" message. I think it'd be useful to ban pun threads and other low effort shitposting, but it would probably have issues determining actual expertise from faux expertise. With the wrong settings it would be frustratingly useless, but over time some useful defaults should emerge.
• lupusreal 3y ago
  You're correct and flagged for it. HN sucks for discussing aviation, ships.. just about anything other than computers.
  • LargeTomato 3y ago
    What does it mean to be flagged for it?
    • lupusreal 3y ago
      When I read it, your comment was invisible to most users and at the bottom of the page. Flagging is done by other users who are offended at what you say (presumably by the 'experts' who dismiss an experimental prototype aircraft because the new tech doesn't make sense for quadcopters..)
      • firebaze 3y ago
        You can vouch though after clicking on the "... minutes ago" field, which is what I did in this specific case and apparently enough others to undo the flag.
  • Rastonbury 3y ago
    Physical engineering stuff isn't so bad, sometimes people in the industry pop up, the most egregious is economics or finance discussions
    • throw1234651234 3y ago
      There is very little to discuss in finance / economics except insider trading. I am NOT into politics and am NOT posting this for it's value to republicans, but just look at Nancy Pelosi getting 65% returns and beating out every hedge fund this year. Furthermore, finance is dead - it's the "hot field" of the 80s / 90s. It has been commoditized and isn't interesting. I say this as a CFA who also had various useless finance licenses like CFP, Series 7, 63, 6 etc and worked both on the sales / "advisor" (read Fidelity call center out of college, where I liked to point out that we wear suits and make less than garbagemen to coworkers) side of things and real analysis and still chose to go to IT the first chance I got.
• 3327 3y ago
  HN has become arm chair reddit except most people are mid level engineers instead of gamers
• huppeldepup 3y ago
  You need a very diverse community to address these subjects. HN is IT-centered, there’s overlap with a lot of fields and occasionally you’ll get a (few) people who are at home with the subject at hand to explain the subtle intricacies. But this also relies on the size of the HN populations. Too many and the noise takes over, making it difficult or even frustrating to participate. Stick to what you know and plough on.
  • pdpi 3y ago
    It’s not even a matter of sticking to what you know. Recognising non-goals is a core skill for any technical profession. This is a research project doing completely novel things, and specifically mentions some of the intended use-cases. Of course they’re not the least bit concerned with propeller drones.
  • rthomas6 3y ago
    I wish there was a forum like this for engineers. I'm really a CompE/EE masquerading as a programmer.
    • 7thaccount 3y ago
      There are a lot of subreddits out there for engineering. They vary in quality and moderation.
  • LargeTomato 3y ago
    A diverse community would help but it would also help if people would recognize when they don't know what they're talking about. I don't make strong statements about ML because I don't know ML. That's just maturity.
  • mlrtime 3y ago
    Thew few topics that I'm "at home with" come up on HN rarely, but when they do 90%+ comments are just so out of touch with the industry it makes me question anything that isn't deep in SV/YC territory.
    • 3y ago
• epolanski 3y ago
  And yet you lack the self awareness of realizing you're contributing even less and making the whole discussion worse.
  • LargeTomato 3y ago
    The signal to noise ratio is so bad that addressing the problem head on seems like a valid solution. Is it the best solution? Maybe, maybe not, but I disagree that mentioning an acute problem is a self-awareness-less action. I doubt most readers are able to truly tell just how bad these comments are so I'm doing some sort of service to some people by calling it out. Let me give an example for myself. I am not an expert in ML. I come to HN to learn about ML and I feel like I learn a good amount. I try to grok the comments, read the articles, etc. If I stumbled upon a bunch of very, very misguided comments I'd expect or hope that someone would say something so I could save myself some time. I see that kind of behavior a lot when users on HN call out "bad physics" but no one calls out bad aerospace.
    • 4ndrewl 3y ago
      The phrase "pissing in the wind" springs to mind.
    • junofan 3y ago
      Eh I guess it’s supposed to be water cooler talk for startup founders. The vibe would be different if people stuck only to what they know. We all know we’re ignorant, but it’s more fun to be interestingly wrong than boringly correct. I feel like any learning is sort of a bonus.
• fidotron 3y ago
  It isn’t completely novel as I linked elsewhere https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BAE_Systems_Demon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BAE_Systems_Demon Such UAV prototypes have been flying for over a decade.
  • nativeit 3y ago
    You’ve linked to an experimental prototype that had a production run of 1. Any more? Still seems pretty novel so far.
  • blincoln 3y ago
    Thank you for sharing that. Not only is it an interesting aircraft, but the page answered my main question about this type of control system design, which was "is it using the Coandă effect?" Years ago, when I read about the original grandiose plans for the Air Force's Y-2, one of the aspects I thought was very interesting was the ability to create a "virtual airfoil"[1] via the Coandă effect. It seemed like one of those designs that was impractical with a human 100% in control, but that might come around again with computer assistance or a fully computer-piloted aircraft. Pretty neat that someone already made it happen. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avro_Canada_VZ-9_Avrocar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avro_Canada_VZ-9_Avrocar has a brief discussion of this.
• lwhi 3y ago
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• 7thaccount 3y ago
  HN is really good at programming language, IT, and computer science discussions. It really varies once you get outside that bubble. Sometimes you get a topic on mathematics and a few mathematicians are on there answering questions directly and it's great. In my own field of energy markets and power grid operation, I've noticed the comments have a good mixture of informed folks and those that are way off base. I'm sure it's much worse on some topics and that I'm just as guilty at times :) Hopefully there are enough experts in an area to drown out the noise.
  • red-iron-pine 3y ago
    Engineer's Disease: the idea that domain competence translates to anything out of that domain. Put another way, the most hardline, fundamentalist Mormon I've ever known was a former boss, who was a fantastic engineer -- and completely incapable of challenging his assumptions in any other area. Ruthlessly logical when it came to system design, but couldn't apply that to anything else. Point is, you have a lot of adaquate STEM types talking out their ass about stuff outside their domain. Plus a non-trivial amount of marketing and agit-prop bots, which shouldn't come as a surprise to the crowd that was talking about GPT long before it was cool.
    • ngngngng 3y ago
      Just to be clear, fundamentalist Mormon means he had multiple wives, and most likely lived on a secluded compound or in one of the surrounding areas of one of these compounds. Your likelihood of interacting with such a person is near zero.
  • foobiekr 3y ago
    HN is not actually good at programming and CS, either.
    • bunderbunder 3y ago
      No large, well-known open discussion venue is really very good at discussing any topic. I'm not sure it's even possible for one to be. As the saying goes, "None of us is as dumb as all of us."
• fao_ 3y ago
  Yeah. The Hacker News Guidelines say "No the website is not going downhill". But I can point to a shitton of threads from 2018 on often identical topics to threads today, where the quality of debate is quantitatively higher quality than it is today. Most of the people I know in Technology(tm) have not only stopped reading HN, but also derisively refer to it as The Orange Hellsite, because the quality of comments is often consistently worse than Reddit for comparable topics, these days.
  • drakenot 3y ago
    Where are people going?
    • avery17 3y ago
      Outside.
  • radiojosh 3y ago
    Where have your technology acquaintances gone instead? It seems like the entire Internet is declining in quality.
    • fao_ 3y ago
      Mostly they use private discord servers and self-grown communities. Fediverse, IRC, XMPP, etc.
  • username332211 3y ago
    > Most of the people I know in Technology(tm) have not only stopped reading HN, but also derisively refer to it as The Orange Hellsite, because the quality of comments is often consistently worse than Reddit for comparable topics, these days. That's very unlikely. This website has not implemented the features that continuously make Reddit worse as time goes by - self-segregated communities and extensive down voting.
    • renewiltord 3y ago
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• chiefalchemist 3y ago
  Yeah, often enough it feels like there a lack of imagination, as well as a lack of appreciation for the history of progress (i.e., it's not linear, it's littered with it-can't be dones that get done, etc.) Most everything here is literal, to a fault. Also there's quite a bit of band wagon jumping. That is, there'll be an initial nearly pointless comment and the conversation takes off from there (nearly void of addressing the original article). Finally, mention any of this and you get a lesson from HN down vote gang bangers. Sometime I feel like the only free-thinking adult in the room.
• ravenstine 3y ago
  Tech people tend to be "what about" types. You will always find armchair experts in this crowd making an argument why something isn't good enough or unacceptable. I guess it's intellectually stimulating to them. It's a big part of why things like software engineering have become a self-licking ice cream cone; actual problems are set aside to squabble over minutiae and reinvent things all the time because everything is wrong regardless of costs vs benefit.
  • tbrake 3y ago
    There's a phenomenon where a lot of tech types begin treating discussions and conversations as adversarial pursuits instead of collaborative exchanges. I definitely recognize that behavior in young me. It has a side benefit of being a subtle intelligence signal if you're the "what about" person, i.e. "I saw the gap/flaw that OP missed, therefore smarter". This, I think, is an "I'm smart" feedback loop that promotes more of the same behavior. It's a powerful motivator when you're on sites and boards also populated by ostensibly smart people. No one wants to be the dumb one. So you start to get wrapped up in being the bug finder/doubt-conjurer/"what about"-er. Enough time goes by with those types being uncorrected and you wind up with comment sections that just turn into TTFC (time to first complaint) races, often by people with no practical experience in a domain save a quick wikipedia search or who don't even read tfa but boy howdy they've sure got some thoughts about that field as a "science" and gosh i can't wait to read them. Of course this is all just an old man grumbling out a theory on a Tuesday. I'm not sure how to fully solve it and doubt there's a general solution. For myself, I was eventually broken of shitty habits like that through what would probably now be considered bullying. Gotta say though; sometimes it works. Sometimes your brain needs its ass kicked into realizing you're a smart cookie but you're not the smartest, and that's okay.
    • Enginerrrd 3y ago
      I think the phenomenon you're describing is just a big part of the engineering skill set. In my field, Civil Engineering, I get paid mostly to figure out all those things that could go wrong and mitigate or account for them within the budget and constraints available. Experience is valued in engineering because you can see the probable future on things are likely to break/fail/go wrong, BEFORE they actually do. It's not surprising to me then that a bunch of engineers who spend all day thinking in this way do the same in different contexts where it may be less appropriate because they are less knowledgeable. I don't think it's necessarily a way to try to look smart or something.
• teekert 3y ago
  This is my experience with HN: First come the stupid remarks, plain wrong, people that only read the title. Then come the remarks like this one: Complaining about the abysmal quality of the remarks... Then we wait a bit longer and the sewage of remarks is voted down and this remark above remain for a bit longer... Then this remark also disappears and we are left with some insightful stuff at the top. Just wait for some time. Maybe it doesn't always happen, but generally by the time I read a remark like yours, the really poor ones are at the bottom and nice ones are lining up just below it.
• jokoon 3y ago
  I think acute pedantism often is a sign of being in the autism spectrum. either that, or it's because the internet encourages people to be passive aggressive but polite, which is a new way to fight online. it's a problem of being in front of a screen for too long, a lot of people always want to be right, and they treat scientific accuracy like it's a religion. nitpicking is the second worse thing after online trolling
  • fidotron 3y ago
    > pedantism Pedantry
    • bitvoid 3y ago
      You have passed the test. Welcome to the spectrum.
  • freeopinion 3y ago
    In the days before contact lenses people who wore glasses were in the minority. Sometimes they were ridiculed. Today it seems rare to find somebody who doesn't benefit from corrective lenses. I don't think human optic abilities have deteriorated so much as human culture has shifted. But we still think people with 20/20 vision have ideal vision. We don't consider them to have a condition with a label like "myopia". If 90% of people exhibit some characteristics of the autism spectrum, shouldn't we start to consider the people with none as the ones worthy of a label? Like people with true pitch. We give them a label, not people with less than perfect pitch. Perhaps pedantry is like true pitch or "perfect" vision. It's actually a good thing. Even if it annoys people who don't have it. I wonder if people with true pitch go through life cringing on the inside every time they hear a wrong note. But they learn to never let on that they notice. Perhaps the part of pedantry that puts a person on the autism spectrum is not so much the noticing as it is the voicing--the seeming inability to control the expression and calling out a correction instead of just letting it slide.
    • naremu 3y ago
      Well if OP's original "missing the forest for the trees" analogy is to be revisited (which I tend to agree with), it's that pedantry is sort of by (some) definition focusing on the letter rather than the spirit of what's at hand, and due to its often lack of necessity, comes across as taking the opportunity to "one up" or criticize something that doesn't end up making any pragmatic differences. I've heard some people describe the compulsion something along the lines of "I don't think of it that way, I just noticed something they said was incorrect and so I presented them the correct information", often assuming it would be appreciated. I mean, it's probably good for engineers in the engineering room, but the culture outside of maker's spaces probably won't consider it smashing conversation.
• sylware 3y ago
  "The quality of discussion on this website is abysmal." Since the advent of general language AIs, it is quite &*$%#@ to discuss anything on widely popular web sites. Some internet usages are going to shift.
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• godelski 3y ago
  The one that specifically weirds me out is critiques about how prototypes and things in development aren't products. I mean this is __hacker__ news. Aren't a lot of us aware how shitty projects begin and how long it takes to turn something from an idea into a product? Or are we all disillusioned with get right hacking over the weekend? Like once a week we see something from a uni research lab and the top 5 comments are about how it doesn't beat current industry versions. Fwiw, all my reviewers in conferences are turning into Reviewer 2. I wonder if these are related. It just seems like people don't want context and want to complain instead of critique.
• carabiner 3y ago
  HN is good at critiquing fonts and typography.
• wolverine876 3y ago
  I encourage you to read the site guidelines about commenting - because of how you've written comments, asked "What does it mean to be flagged for it?", and wrote this comment I'm guessing you're not familiar with them. A large problem seems to be that you don't understand what you are seeing or how the site works, and are leaping to uninformed conclusions. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html If you have knowledge about the technology, I hope you will share it. You've posted three-ish comments that share only a tiny amount: * This comment (and others in this thread), which contributes nothing to the discussion, degrades the dialog generally, and violates site guidelines. * "Why?" * A comment that leaps to a negative interpretation of someone else's comment and criticizes them, though also does provide some knowledge: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38923926 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38923926
• callalex 3y ago
  I don’t see a single comment chain in the top 10 that meets your description, yet for some reason your topic-detailed is on top.
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• fidotron 3y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38931993 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38931993 For context.
• RobRivera 3y ago
  Most people outside the defense sector tend to be hyper critical and not appreciate the nature of tech development, maturity, and testing.