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Comment by jwr | Hacker News Reader

So, a story about SV being polluted has 156 points right now, and sits nicely in the middle of the front page. It's an important story, apparently.

Meanwhile, Nature's story about climate change (The hard truths of climate change — by the numbers) got flagged and disappeared quickly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21042101

There is no better way to show what "tech bubble" means.

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Eh, I don't think "tech bubble" is appropriate to nail down the problems. Egotism and hubris, along with thinking being above the rest of society is the problem. And to be fair, it shows up here in HN too. There's a weird mentality of "Well I'm smart in computers and programming, that automatically makes me an expert in civil infrastructure, economic theory, social support programs, agriculture, etc". I mean, seriously, it's really weird and it's happening constantly. It's like a lot of this "revolutionary SV agriculture startups". They're bunk and retarded. They're just 1940s-1970s research projects without ever citing or learning from trails already blazed. They act like "No one has ever researched how to grow food, here I come to rescue with my power of programming and social media posts! Venture capital firms, I'm ready for money!" Not a single one realizes that a lot of large scale, efficient and affordable farming practices were pioneered by people like Norman Borlaug. But they "draw inspiration" from a random SV ceo. Just pisses me off.

Plus, "The people's voice matters. We must democratize everything... as long as they only agree with me."

Reality is, silicon valley is not really different from the old titans of industry. One difference, the old assholes were upfront "You need something, I hire people to make it, and I'm in it for the money." The valley, "I'm here for you. You giving me your money is the best way to make the world a better place through [insert disruptive product]. You'll be happy with a lighter wallet. We're going to save the world together."

I agree with your overall perception of SV as an outsider myself. There are very smart people doing big things alongside starry-eyed naive people doing silly things. Sometimes it's a blurry line between the two and sometimes I can't help but facepalm at some of the stories I hear coming out of SV...

Well, let's be honest about the "intelligent" part. Sure, there are some brilliant computer engineers out in SV. But would you say they're necessarily smart financial planners? The cost of living in a lot of parts of Cali in generally are ridiculous and some of the most expensive in the country. A lot of SV companies complain that there are not enough capable programmers in the area. Well, if a 50k-70k salary in other parts of the country gets you a decent sized house, a car, cheaper food and cheaper well... everything. While a 120k in SV gets you a studio apartment and reliant on public transpo... I mean, what makes more sense? God have mercy if you have kids.

So if you have a segment of engineers who believe living in SV is "smart" financially... do you really want them to make opinions on government spending? I'm not saying that "people not living in Cali" are instantly money smart. But, you don't quickly take financial advice from a friend that's gone bankrupt twice, is always in crippling debt due to overspending and throws money at ideas largely based on keywords.

I guess my long drawn out rant is just the problem where lots of folks consider SV "smart". Thus they're allowed to have an affecting opinion on things they're truly not "smart" about.

> The cost of living in a lot of parts of Cali in generally are ridiculous and some of the most expensive in the country.

A lot of these arguments could be made about New York, specifically Manhattan. There are people there that can genuinely afford it, and there are people that struggle financially because they want to be there (for whatever reason).

There are obviously lots of people in the Bay Area struggling to make ends meet, including some software engineers. But the reality is most talented people here are so well-paid it's not an issue. You're talking about $120k salaries, I'm talking about $100k signing bonuses. Of course the average engineer here isn't swimming in money, but there are plenty of people who make so much more money here that it's a wise financial decision to stay. Personally I ran the numbers and I put more money in my savings every year here than I would anywhere else.

I completely agree with the general sentiment that software engineers in particular suffer from the Dunning-Kruger effect and I regularly have to explain to engineers that the world outside of software is not so neatly contained. But the notion that most software engineers here are not smart because they choose to live somewhere expensive is irrelevant if you aren't also talking about how much more money they make to live here.

Spot on. The amusing thing about farming is that the only thing that is hard is to do it at scale. You can make just about anything work at lab scale but as soon as you really end up having to feed a sizeable population of your product that's when all the nitty gritty little details start adding up to 'can't do'.

Everyone knows about climate change, that's not news. However there's a lot of denial about how bad rich areas like Silicon Valley and SF are today with pollution and population. The bubble is how the SV/tech community wants to change the world but has trouble maintaining its own backyard.

To be frank, there's hardly any convincing climate change science in the Nature story. It's mostly about activism, CO2 emissions with only some super high-level info of impact of greenhouse gases on people (without justifications or models given). It reads like a political story, not scientific one - I didn't know that nature is publishing such stuff.

That's a particularly uncharitable interpretation.

It's much more likely is that everyone's well aware of climate change (I'm sure I've read many hundreds of articles over my lifetime), but this is the first many people have heard of SV pollution (it certainly is for me).

This would explain one post rising quickly while another fades. When people are actively flagging, however, that's an entirely different, much more insidious action.

> much more insidious action

I'm missing something.

What exactly is the agenda?

Climate Change Burnout. I don’t flag articles on CC but I’ve been tempted to. There’s a new one every two days and they all say basically the same thing. Regardless of one’s political views, the onslaught of constant alarm can be exhausting. The people who don’t think it’s a problem are not going to be convinced by the 215th news article published this year.

There is no agenda, but people absolutely use the flagging feature for selfish reasons, e.g. “Dammit, I’m so tired of reading about this topic!” When in reality, it is intended for marking content that breaks the site guidelines.

Well, which do you think is more important/pressing right now?

The #2 story on the front page right now is “A photo survey of the blackboards of mathematicians.”

Maybe front page rank isn’t about how important or pressing the story is?

1) Hacker News ranking isn't about "what is more important/pressing right now" to a global audience. This is about what's interesting for the hacker audience at this moment.

2) It's generally frowned upon to comment about "why isn't this story getting more upvotes", etc. In other words, it's not adding value to the conversation, so please refrain from doing so and use the upvote/flagging features if you feel outraged something isn't getting the attention it deserves.

3) If you don't like something on the frontpage then don't upvote it. Simple.

4) I don't live in SV, but many people who are "Hackers" do. The article specifically targets tech companies who have offices in SV and are impacting the environment.

Can't believe that got flagged. Dang et al, are you able to see if there's some sort of flagging ring or similar going on? I get that political stories normally get flagged, but a Nature article is not that.

Even ignoring the political aspects, we don't need six articles a day on HN about climate change. If nothing else, it's preaching to the choir. There's no news in most climate change articles, to say nothing of "Hacker" news.

If HN runs simply on what people consider politically important, it might as well shut down and just be a redirect to the Huffington Post or something. There is abundant evidence that online communities end up in certain strange attractors [1], and the dominant political narrative of the day is one of the strongest ones.

I didn't flag the particular article in question, but yes, I absolutely flag any article that can be replaced with little or no loss with $POPULAR_POLITICAL_NARRATIVE_IS_TRUE, regardless of which narrative it is, even the ones I more-or-less agree with. I doubt HN is anybody's sole source of news and it doesn't need to join the stampeding horde of other websites who publish that article 20 times a day.

[1]: A math term, not a term of judgment.

There are a large enough group of people who believe that climate change is political because some deniers have politicized science as if you can debate against science and fact.

I find this kind of behavior on HN both surprising and depressing. Do we really care more about SV pollution than about the entire planet?

I am honestly not sure if I want to continue to participate in this community.

I think you're making too big a deal of this. I would be really surprised if there's a flag ring going on considering the karma you need in order to be able to flag and articles about the environment are on the FP all the time.

Ironically it’s climate change advocates who have politicized science. The IPCC, whose reports are fundamental to climate change advocacy, is an intergovernmental panel. It is the epitome of politicized science. Judge whether or not this kind of politicized science is good or not, but in general I do agree that politicizing science is most likely a negative and ultimately a corruption of science.

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