I can’t believe I watched a story of using AI to drop hats on people and calling it drop shipping turn into a debate about parties, buzzkills and the risk of addictive substances vs “annoying” people against hat drop shipping and similar ideas, a discussion on the legal bounds of unwanted hat drop shipping, the effect of stray hats on babies and a quantitative analysis on the environmental impact of objects dropped from apartment windows in NYC. Followed by another debate on the mental effect of objects dropping from apartments in cities with skyscrapers. This is amazing.
Hacker news was traditionally an audience that's very hacker orientated. Over the years it's gained a significant portion of audience that are just 'in tech'. Some threads really show the clash between the two IMO.
I agree (though I don’t know if you agree with me)!
I think this post captures what I’d expect from hacker news quite well. A cool single person project messing around, creating something a community can enjoy.
What I don’t like are these weird doom mentality discussions over AGI (as an example), they just make me cringe really badly.
Then again I really can’t complain, all in all I love Hacker News, great topics, great comments!
First there was the excessively dismissive era that spawned the infamous Dropbox comment (Which was widely misunderstood).
Then came the functional programming era, where people worshipped Haskell and frequently got posted to /r/ProgrammingCirclejerk. Eventually we got past that one as people discovered that Haskell isn't really useful for anything besides showing off how you can implement Quicksort in a single line or starting arguments over what the hell a Monad is.
Then there was the needlessly pedantic era, which basically spawned the "ACKCHYUALLY" meme. The pedantry was often a huge distraction, never added anything to the conversation, and often was actually incorrect. If you've ever said "Actually, that's not ray tracing, that's ray casting!", then congrats, you're part of this era.
We're now in the era of being dismissive, not for technical merits like the previous dismissive era, but for being unproductive. Any time a project is done purely for fun or personal reasons (ie, nostalgia), there's someone in the comments talking about how useless it is, and that the time could be better spent Making The World A Better Place(tm)[0].
But we don’t know that and call me naive, but I see this as something that is done on a very small scale, by people who booked a “dropship” on his website. I don’t think you’ll find even a single of those hats in streets around his apartment. The humor is my flavor, and most of the imagine this as a viable product I take as such humor.
That's what a message board does, you post a thing and people say things about it. Not necessarily nice things, if only nice things were said that would be kind of pointless.
I wonder if there's a way to get data on this, even if it's only 'sentiment.' A bit hard to validate actual experience on what's effectively anonymous without intentional disclosure or a whole lot of rep.
I've been told repeatedly about the caustic nature of the HN crew, and it makes me wonder what steps could be taken to shift the culture in a healthier direction while not losing... well, HN haha.
