You're my hero! This attitude is why I quit regularly contributing to this site. Any time any single person does something positive, some armchair "expert" comes out the woodworks to tell you how it won't work or can't work.
One benefit of criticism is we might get to read an angle of attack we hadn't thought of and thereby improve our ideas and designs.
Sure, when people blow off an idea by saying "pointless, let's save the baby dolphins first" I don't find those comments helpful, but HN almost always has far more in-depth critiques.
Edit: fixed a word
We'll all in this game together, learning how to be a single mind. Be nice to your fellow human-cells no matter their goal, if their goal is for the greater good. The thing is - we can save the dolphins && live on Mars, not mutually exclusive goals.
If somebody told Elon "don't go Mars, do something like cure cancers first" what would he say? Thye're missing the point altogether, right? People are curing cancer, saving dolphins, working on hunger. The reason Musk is so successful and iconic is because specifically he followed things that interested and mattered to him, i.e. energy and colonization.
If someone is following their passion and investing enough energy to be recognized on the level of these people, they're assuredly more cognizant of what's in the realm of reality in their scope than the average journalist/internet commentator. I can glean so much from just listening to the man react to the audience's question.. the one about the Funny or Die video, he's sending "you're wasting our time" body language... I get it, though, this is a pointed, focused thing they're working on; grandiose and monumental indeed, focused nonetheless.
http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/08/why-explore-space.html
Considering progress humanity made this letter is more actual than ever. So I wish more people understand that it's super important to work on what you like and can do the best since there always chance that space exploration help to solve other problems too.
Anyway success of people as species is through specialisation. Side effect is that we also have specialist naysayers
Skepticism is a good thing but it's unevenly applied in the weirdest way. Solar Roadways, it seems like the smallest amount of skepticism would have dismantled the entire idea. Two nobody snake oil salesmen from out of their garage were roundly applauded by everyone to such a degree that competitors opened up.
When Musk presents a design on a much larger scale following a career of related success, it's called down?
Therefore I appreciate criticism but I'm skeptical of its sources.
You don't need to be an expert to understand the limitations of rockets as a means of getting to space.
Here to the crazy ones.
I encourage people to say, "This won't work, here's why, but here's how it could."
All public forums go bad once they reach a certain size. Since everything is on a gaussian curve (fat mediocre middle, and two asymptotes, one for greatness, the other for the opposite end), it's just pure statistics that junk comments will start creeping in once the population grows beyond a certain threshold.
The things that aren't features (like the lack of notifications) also help.
I've been making comparative studies of a few communities (HN, Reddit, G+, Imzy, Ello), and it's interesting to see how various ones work. In particular, there's a tremendous culture against the types of even indirect personal attacks at HN which fly in spades elsewhere. I saw @dang inveighing against a comment which began with "<sigh>", on the grounds that that is the equivalent of an internet eyeroll.
On G+, discussion quality depends very much on the host and how they manage a particular thread. I've got problems with Google itself, but the platform can support quite good discussions. Overall participation has always been small (6-12 million users posting publicly per month, a value I'd had a hand in determining), but in corners, that's still a good crowd. The best circumstance is to cultivate a small group ~30-100 members or so, set firm expectations for participation, moderate aggressively (that is, promptly), though fairly and starting with social nudges. There's a balance between topic drift and derailment.
Reddit varies hugely by subreddit, the good ones are exceptionally good. The site as a whole has some faults that leak through even to the good subs though.
Ello has a very small (~10k or so daily, ~200k or so monthly visits) userbase, but it strikes me as quite well behaved for the most part, something I've commented on specifically to the site's admins.
Imzy, the "kinder, gentler Reddit" has largely proven not to be. For reasons not entirely suprising when you combine an on-tap, ad libitum anonymity access, lacking leadership, overtaxed / AWOL moderation, exceptionally ill-conceived notifications, threading, and response mechanisms, and a community drawn from SRS and similar beds of vitriol. It's not the issues advocated for, but the methods of advocacy, including ample amounts of friendly fire and hypocrisy, which generate problems.
I watched a trainwreck explode simply trying to discuss anonymity itself: https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/qdxyzy2x4lbaq_4rx81nnw
HN seems in that sweet spot for me where it is large enough to have a good amount of discussion but still has very good quality.
Most "reddit but more free" sites turn into imzy or even worse voat. G+ communities are too small for me, and finding a good community is proving to be hard. And I've given up on reddit for any larger scale technical discussion (there's just too much vitriol and "my team is better" sentiment there. It always seems to focus on the negative, and creating a "positive only" subreddit seems like a bad idea, and it attracts the users that will fight that idea on principle)
I'll need to try Ello though. Have you looked at lobsters? It's much smaller than HN but also more technical (and with its own share of bias against anything newer in my experience)
Ello is tiny, though there are again some interesting folks. I'm simply impressed by the healthy socialisation.
I've done some rigorous "tracking the conversation" studies, which are based on terms I have interest in, across numerous sites. Blogs are still surprisingly relevant.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/trackin...
I'm not familiar with lobsters.
You need to be invited by someone there, and they actually show the full invite graph, and I believe will somewhat hold you accountable if you invite spammers or trolls.
That being said, if you won't cause trouble I'd be willing to send you an invite if you email the account in my userpage on HN ;)
the irony is too damn high
That said: discussions can be about the nominal topic, or they can drift, naturally, to other areas of interest. I find the meta-topic of "where is a good place to discuss the things I'm interested in discussing" to be generally on-topic. HN isn't a bad place for that.
With the ability to collapse threads baked into the HN page design, if you're not interested in a discussion, you can simply collapse it an move on.
On which: I'm increasingly hitting long threads from the bottom, for a few reasons:
1. The top-ranked post often isn't particularly on-topic, and attracts diversions posted for visibility.
2. It's easier to tell if a thread is of little concern if you follow it from the bottom.
3. It's easier to track a conversation from bottom to top and collapse going up, than it is to backtrack back to the top and collapse that. There's a subreddit which runs the collapse bars down the side of the thread, allowing a subthread, or entire thread, to be collapsed in one go.
4. There are often downvoted or flagged items which I feel are incorrectly tagged. It's usually faster to assess if something has some merits than to see if it's solid, and I'll nudge stuff up -- even if I substantially disagree with it -- if it seems it's been overly penalised.
HN, as with other online discussions, does poorly for deep and complex posts. One standout was The Edge Question issue a few years ago. There were a handful of comments on the first few essays, but given that there were ~100 - 150 total responses, it's not the sort of thing you can digest quickly.
I've tracked down other issues of the Question and gone through it. I have to say on balance I'm fairly disappointed in the quality -- much is narrow self-promotion of research, another large set is rampant speculation. The short an humerous responses are often disarmingly refreshing. And every so often there's something quite good. Sturgeon's quality estimate though seems generous.
Yeah, those things are an example of something that sounds great in theory, but doesn't work out in practice.
I don't remember wanting for collapsable threads and such four or five years ago, but now I can't imagine sifting through all the junk without them.
But I also feel like my karma goes up faster now too, but that could just be in my head.
The ability to collapse means you feel less bad about somewhat-off-topic conversation, which in a way can create worse discussion for the actual topic.
But at the same time some of my favorite HN threads have been offshoots of the submission's topic.
Pedantic point aside, you bring up an important point. Can behavioral incentives be aligned to avoid the bottom side of participation?
The Gaussian depends upon a notion of independence and identical distribution: independence can be dispensed of when one thinks about power laws.
If you can soberly state the assumption that the effects of a comment on any other comment is completely negligible, or falls into a couple of other strange exceptions that leads to the universal phenomena that generates the Gaussian, then and only then can you state that any quantity associated with comments is Gaussian. I do not think that this can be soberly stated as such.
All this said, I'm hugely and awesomely excited by the future prospects of becoming a multiplanet species.
(That doesn't mean that it will follow a Gaussian distribution, just that it could be defined in a way where it makes sense that it can sometimes be negative.)
It's a pretty old website now. I thought the hilarious banter/play on words would have run its course. There must be some psychological thing going on?
I am reminded we are just monkeys, hitting buttons when I'm there. (No offence to monkeys. I like you guys. I think you're better than us.)
Some fads just take longer to run their course? Skinny jeans for men--done. Guys buying $500 tennis shoes--still going on. Guys that have the semi-Mohawk. Just enough on the sides to get a job--almost done. I can't think of anything that doesn't have a beginning, and end. All I can think of, right now, is life is too short. Depressing. This summer went by way to quick for myself. I wasted it.
True, people here can be frustrating at times. But the mod team is one of the sharpest, and they cull abuse. And they do it well.
When the abuse is removed, what's left is substance. Sometimes that substance is disagreeable, and sometimes even hostile, but never personal.
It can be un-fun sometimes. But it's been rewarding to watch this place grow and see all of the new and old opinions intermix. Sometimes you end up learning about yourself more than other people, which are special moments. I haven't really felt that on other sites, so HN feels unique and worthwhile.
It's a journey. The community has ups and downs, but Dan (and now Scott) have always taken care of it.
Total side anecdote about this: I was at the airport check-in counter. At the only open counter was an obvious hoarder with many trash bags as carry ons asking all kinds of vague questions about if the TSA was going to take his stuff. The guy behind the counter kept answering his questions politely. I guess policy was never to tell a customer to get lost. This was taking a very long time, so a little old lady at the front of the line went over to him and told him to hurry it up. He looked a bit shocked and moved on. I guess companies are so scared of bad reviews or creating controversy that they indulge these people for as long as it takes and it's up to the other customers to put a stop to it.
That's been happening since I've been here, since around mid 2007. Not to dismiss what you're saying, I just want to say that there have always been people fighting the good fight.
To quote from Elon's Q&A, "space questions only".
“Always listen to experts. They'll tell you what can't be done, and why. Then do it.” - robert-a-heinlein
"This is nice, but my cousins, uncles, framework that's coming out next week is way better!"
I believe we should first learn to clean up our act on planet Earth before we export anything of our existence and what we do.
To me, the real revolution that needs to happen is a spiritual one - a statement that will only be understood by those practicing meditation. Our brain has so many "undiscovered" capabilities. Discovering them will change our behavior and ultimately allow us to survive on Earth.
It's not like Elon Musk building this rocket is at the expense of SolarCity (improving the environment through solar energy).
Sure, I've seen humans change - but only under heavy "brainwashing", i.e. internalizing an ideology that values being fair, helpful and truthful, and that only holds with a support structure of adherents. And I doubt it scales.
If you look at the world, a lot if not most changes for the better are technology-driven. Technology alters the economical landscape, which makes people do things better, even though they're still following the same behaviours as they always did.
TL;DR: I think individuals have much less agency than we'd like to think.
I think the only "spiritual" anything we need is to drop anything spiritual and focus more intensely on reality and evidence based reasoning. Spirituality has done plenty of harm and it is not hard to argue more harm than good if you can lump religion in there with it.
Your ridiculous claims about undiscovered capacities in our brains allowing to to survive is non-sense. Our ability to problem solve base on past experience/evidence is the real miracle and our gradual takeover of every ecosystem is why we have survived this far. Now we need to use this capacity we already demonstrated to not kill ourselves. Going to space is one possible option.
Besides that, Musk is doing two things at the same time. He tries both to protect the earth (Tesla, solar power), and initiate a base in case something happened to our home.
Spirituality alone won't help you survive winter, regardless of how developed your mind is.
It's funny that you would say that - you may want to take a quick look at this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6XKcsm3dKs
(The main site is: http://www.icemanwimhof.com/)
http://www.parool.nl/binnenland/-iceman-oefening-eist-opnieu...
You also don't drink and drive.
http://loweringthebar.net/2016/09/frozen-guru-update-iii.htm...
So, let him do what he is doing, he is doing everything right, now if you are communicating with people through mobile phones is just because of satellites, that happened only because people explored the space and it's application.
So, the final goal of Elon is great, support people so that you will also get good support when you have a great idea.