Hacker News is heavily curated. Do you think there's an echo chamber effect? I frequently encountered opinions that differ from mine, sometime completely on the opposite end.
It's impossible to discuss health care approaches for example. Americans believe in for profit Healthcare, while (most everyone else) tend to favor universal health care (despite its many imperfections. )
And that's before we discuss other tricky topics like the military etc. There are plenty of folk ready to downvote based on opinion rather than discussion.
So yes, there's plenty of echo chamber here - but equally plenty of alternate thinkers, not to mention nutters.
This is ultimately how human societies work.
Even if you write a well argued and decently sourced comment, it's very likely to get flagged by people with ideological disagreements to this. And there are a lot of them on HN, so your comment will likely disappear pretty quickly.
Those are both the same example, and sometimes comments get downvoted because they're just making a bad or vacuous argument for an indefensible position.
It's obvious why intelligence agencies want to do bulk data collection, and the reason is related to why it's a problem -- the public needs to be protected against bulk data collection by foreign intelligence agencies, and by domestic ones with insufficient oversight. "Oversight" in a democracy means the public knows about it, otherwise how can there even be a debate about whether it's worth it? But intelligence agencies aren't in favor of oversight of intelligence agencies, so they'll always be in favor of surveillance even if it isn't worth it, which is why they can't be allowed to do it in secret and anyone bringing it into the light is acting in the public interest.
Moreover, bulk surveillance isn't worth it, because if you don't build technology that can resist bulk surveillance then foreign governments will do it to your population and the cost of that exceeds any benefit from you being able to do it to others, even before you account for the domestic cost of having a surveillance apparatus already in place in the event that an oppressive administration comes to power.
Even the fucking salad, such as they are, are in plastic bags and dumped into a bowl. Pointing this out though, was worthy of more than one downvote. Why? Does HN have some deep bench of experts on American casual dining chains? Is it a technology topic? No, the echo chamber had already decided, and going against this insults the echo chamber even if there is no emotional investment.
When I said there was an echo chamber, I pointed out that I was excluding politics because you kind of just expect that. But it's literally about everything no matter how trivial it should be. I have had many examples over the years, and if there were a point to it I could give you an exhaustive list. This is the human condition. Forever arguing over stupid shit for the rest of eternity, or at least until doomsday, which I suspect is less than a century off.
I mean, what?
So for example, Thai Chicken Salad:
https://www.thecheesecakefactory.com/menu/salads/thai-chicke...
It has leafy greens that would get soggy if frozen or combined with the other ingredients for shipping. There is a slice of lime on the side. I doubt they ship them pre-sliced or heat the lime with the rest of the food.
It's presumably "from scratch" in the same way that Blue Apron is and not in the sense that there is a local chef shopping at the local wholesale market to decide what to put on the local menu. But it's possible to distinguish the former from the thing where your meal comes out of a freezer and goes into a microwave as a single unit, with the latter implying that it contains no ingredients that haven't been frozen or stuffed so full of preservatives that they'll biodegrade some decades after the wrapper does.
And even if some items have ingredients that could be frozen, that doesn't tell you whether or not they actually were. Or, for that matter, that a meal made "from scratch" couldn't have any frozen ingredients.
> It has leafy greens that would get soggy if frozen or combined with the other ingredients for shipping.
You know those plastic bags of chopped lettuce, often with carrots and cabbage in them too, you can buy at the grocery store? Sysco has those in their catalog, bigger ones.
Everything's in a package, dumped in a bowl or on a plate, reheated (if needed) and sent out to your table. But all of HN was absolutely certain that they were some gourmet operation, and that some very large majority of their menu was made there, in the restaurant. And everyone still thinks so. Who thought this originally (if anyone) I do not know, but then you all sort of agreed. Enough of you agreed that disagreement wasn't welcome, and that was that. We live in giant echo chambers, and it's not just the polarized politics doing it.
> And even if some items have ingredients that could be frozen, that doesn't tell you whether or not they actually were.
I'm telling you that. I'm giving you an educated opinion, having worked in restaurants and knowing what non-previously prepared food looks like, having eaten in the restaurant in question multiple times, having studied the menu the day the story hit HN.
No sauce, no pasta, no soup, no meal, no dessert, absolutely nothing there is "made from scratch". No primary ingredients are even available in the kitchen of that restaurant save tapwater and the few spices they would sprinkle on their overpriced sirloin steak on the grill are back there. And it's bizarrely naive to think so.
It's also weird how insulted this forum is from people who don't sit in an office chair to earn their living. I guess there's only one Cheesecake Factory in all of San Francisco though, and the workers there live in the homeless tent camps so none of you talk to them.
Slashdot had a superior moderation system whereby the ability to downvote (mod points) was given out selectively and in limited quantity. In all honestly it was years ahead of its time.
Was it the hot grits ?
I say this as someone who still has an account over there with a lowish UID.
I vaguely remember such was their commitment to free speech, if you browsed at -1 they allowed posts to remain up that broke the HTML and page rendering, and refused to take them down on principle, until they could update their filters. Those early days of the web were a wild west.