Comment by datawander | Hacker News Reader

Comment by datawander | Hacker News Reader

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Last time I checked this was Hacker News, not Reddit, and I am getting sick of articles like this making it to the front page (as I am aware other commenters have noted).

I didn't even need to click on the article (but did in a vain hope) to know that there was absolutely no information as to what they actually did from a technical perspective that deserves notice on HN. The most technological it gets is "Using 360-degree radar, ultrasonic sensors and cameras, the cars sense and adapt to their surroundings.", but then what does it do that is different from what the Google Car and other autonomous cars do? Is it any different from the Audi that drove itself up Pike's Peak as quickly as it could?

The rest is offtopic, but as a long time read-only user, I must come out of the woodwork and make my first comments (other than a few days ago) to be to beg of submitters and upvoters to please only submit/upvote stuff that is actually relevant to what should be the audience of Hacker News, not the general reddit population...

I got sick of reddit and 'general' news years ago and don't want to go back to it.

I agree this is a very superficial article, although it is somewhat relevant to folks interested in self-driving vehicles. Despite regular procrastination on Jalopnik, I hadn't previously heard about self-driving tech applied to anything in the motorsports arena.

Nevertheless you raise a good point re. the fluff content here and encroaching redditification. Lately a lot of "witty one-liners" have appeared up in the comment section, and downvote-enabled HN users should feel a duty to discourage them.

Audi has been doing autonomous sports cars for years. In 2010 they had a TTS climb Pikes Peak, albeit almost three times slower than the human-driven record for that course.

In the time you spent venting your frustration about this, you might have been able to dig up something interesting for the conversation in here. Also, you can beat stuff like this for raising interest in technology. Case in point: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsnKzK6dX8Q

I sympathize with your feeling but this is far from the worse I've seen on HN's frontpage lately. At least it's not about politics.

You have some control over this, by the ability to upvote stuff on the 'new' page, helping the sorts of articles you like to appear on the front page.

I try to run through it once a day. Then, whenever a story I upvoted makes it to the front page, I get a small sense of satisfaction.l

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