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Comment by snarf21 | Hacker News Reader

Vitalik is a clearly a smart guy but I don't get this "All solvable problems" mindset of him and others. Saying stuff like "supply chain apps" is a key application at the same time global supply chain apps on the blockchain are getting shutdown. The only use case of blockchain is coins and those are merely unregulated pump-and-dump. Bitcoin was an interesting thought experiment but the probably is that you need it to be profitable for individual miners (minus pools) to drive true decentralization and as soon as that is true, economies of scale will win and there will be a drive to centralization.

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> Vitalik is a clearly a smart guy but I don't get this "All solvable problems" mindset of him and others.

It comes from a techno-optimist perspective that attempts should still be made to see if it could be solved in the first place. The binary alternative is a nihilistic "don't ever try" mindset, wherein the Nikola Tesla, Marie Curie, & Joseph Fourier shouldn't ever try to solve existing problems, and that they should just toil in misery like the rest of us.

There definitely exists gradients in between the two, but it's worrying that HN, a supposed place of hackers/experimentalists, is adopting a more "this'll never work" stance over time. The Dropbox negativity was the popular start of this downtrend, & I fear it's getting worse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

I only joined HN a couple years ago (I've been working in tech for 12 years). I also find HN to be a bit depressing and pessimistic.

It's like there is some sort of "I tried that and it didn't work, so no one should ever try it again and if you do I'll warn you and then ridicule you for wasting your time" attitude that permeates all of some people's contributions to the discussion. This attitude isn't just at the individual level but also at the team, company, societal levels.

This doesn't feel like a hacker mindset to me at all. It feels increasing defeatist.

While I can't point to HN glory days (I wasn't here), I imagine that HN is devolving from hacker news to defeatist expert news.

But maybe it's society as a whole? I don't know...

What I can say is that the real hackers (eg builders, not speculators) in the web3 communities seem to be more optimistic than the average interaction I see here.

Your comment about this place is spot on and has been for several years now. Even though it's been a tough year in crypto, one of my personal favorite HN threads and one your summary rings true for is Brian Armstrong's Hacker News post, before Coinbase blew it's top off.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3754664

Another one of my favorites is the multiple times 4Chan has made fun of HN. An example of that:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9788317

i observed quite late, that the views expressed on HN do not represent the real world views. Its not a proxy or a petri dish for new ideas.

My experience from discussions both with technical experts and non-technical layman views suggest a very low co-relation with views expressed on HN. Try it yourself, discuss some top HN posts with experts and non-experts and compare.

So i look at HN as a lopsided subset. This has 2 outcomes, on one hand, it is depressing to spend more than a few minutes a week here, and on the other hand, the real world has parts which are less so.

Another topic constantly seeing scorn is Kubernetes. This place has been over negative towards k8s since I have known about it, and yet it is getting bigger and better. The same reasons apply, we don't know it get it outta here.

I think most people concerns about crypto is either the scam (of other people) or the potential displacement of the system they are part of (which will cause its fall and a loss to them/it's a zero-sum game). Both of these are valid concerns.

What I am wondering, however, is if this scamming/pumping money will eventually make a legitimate industry. Many industries/technologies have started out of that (Military, Gambling, Sex, etc...)

He actually links to the recent Maersk/IBM supply chain blockchain shutdown in the introduction, even though he mentions supply chains again later on

"If all you've got is a distributed ledger, everything looks like a token."

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