Ask HN: What is going on with downvotes (lately)?
Some of them may "violate" the rules of courteous discourse or be antagonistic, but often they are not, they are simply correct factual statement with merit to the discussion and for some reason they are killed pretty quickly.
What brought this up is this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12625479 in a recent thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12623738 and I while on many other occasions I could some how convince myself of a reason for for the downvotes I could not find a reason for why anyone would downvote this one other than a few intentionall but misguided or even unintentional downvotes and a herd mentalitly then taking over to "clean up" the thread.
If anyone is wondering the poster is 100% correct, you can buy lab and machine shop equipment on the cheap, these can be bought at a penny on the dollar rates and sometimes even for "free"/Tip as the sellers just need some one to take it off their hands.
A lot of sellers are also clueless about what is being sold, it's not hard to find listing of "misc equipment HP" and see 5,000$+ worth of old HP electronic testing equipment going for only few 100's $ on some lot on Ebay or a local listing (bankruptcy/disposal auctions are quite a commonplace to find those).
It's not hard to find machine shop gear like Lathes, Press Drills and other heavy duty stuff that while might be old is still functional and fit for purpose for pretty much the transport costs.
I don't know if this actually "qualifies" for "Ask HN" but I just felt that this needs some discussion, while HN isn't reddit it has evolved into a discussion community and as a community there needs to be an internal discussion when something appears to be wrong.