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Comment by melling | Hacker News Reader

Exciting times is a bit of a stretch. I was cutting black and white pictures from newspapers of Viking on Mars when I was a kid. 40 years later we're finally checking out Pluto.

Things will get exciting when the cost drops 100x and we're beaming back hi-def video and images 24x7 from all the planets and moons in our solar system.

Let's dream a little bigger and set the goal much higher.

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This mission was launched 9 years ago. I'm surprised it even had 40GB of storage space.

Mars gets within 0.3 AU of the Earth when the orbits line up. Pluto is at best 29 AU away. That's almost 100x harder, and it's amazing it took only 40 years.

Well it doesn't :) It has 8GB storage (and the backup has that much too).

Hm, maybe it was 40 gigabits = 5 gigabytes of data that it gathered from the flyby?

And all those other problems like getting people to Mars, or the moons of Jupiter, for example, will be easier?

All things with space are difficult, expensive, and possibly dangerous. Sure, getting to Pluto was difficult and cool, but that's the nature of space exploration.

Folks, I appreciate that you don't like melling's opinion here, I have problems with it too. But can we not create an echo chamber by downvoting it into oblivion? That's not what voting is for. Let him have his say, if you disagree, then post a response. The way to win an argument is not to bludgeon the opponent into silence.

On HN, it's completely appropriate to use downvote for disagreement (this has came up over and over again, but I doubt it's gonna change). Generally, I tried not to downvote for just disagreement, but melling's comment is pretty much the text book sample of the middlebrow dismissal, or gratuitously negative that we try to avoid.

I felt like melling was pointing out something valuable---putting current achievements into perspective with a little history.

That's incorrect. Why don't you read this 10 times then reread what I said.

" We live in some exciting times. Every few months we have a new probe somewhere teaching us so much about our tiny corner of the universe."

It's simply not accurate.

I was not one of those who downvoted you. And on further reading of your comments, it looks like you are commenting on the political climate of our society (no one cares about space/ science etc.), rather than specific engineering ability of the probe/ the team involves.

It is a popular sentiment, and I can say that a lot of us would agree with it. But your original comment read very much like belittling the current Pluto mission, which is a different thing and very much not welcomed here. I mean, we even try not to complain too much for the 10000 JS frameworks being posted here, let alone another probe in space.

> very much not welcomed here

While I agree with your first paragraph, I have issues with sweeping statements as to which viewpoints are welcome here. While I, as stated, disagree with melling's opinion in this matter, he is more than welcome to have it and make it known. Just as those who don't agree, through downvote or response, are welcome to their view.

"I know it when I see it"

Middlebrow dismissal isn't even a real phrase.

It sure is. It even originated here on Hacker news.

http://www.byrnehobart.com/blog/why-are-middlebrow-dismissal...

Right, so its part of the circle jerk. Once again, not a real phrase.

> On HN, it's completely appropriate to use downvote for disagreement

No. It is not appropriate at all! You reply for disagreement. You do not downvote.

Downvotes are for useless messages, flamebait, off topic, things like that.

Downvote for disagreement leads to reddit and no one wants that.

Check out what PG says about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

I don't agree with him there, because unpopular opinions should still be expressible. The downvote allows you to suppress opinions that you don't agree with which I don't think fits with the spirit of discourse that a good community should have. If someone says something inflammatory, suppress it. If someone says something you don't agree with, disagree with it.

I agree.

Is it time we move on and form our own opinion about the use of the downvote as a community instead of always deferring by quoting pg, whilst whose values and contributions are obvious, has only posted 1 comment[1] (and no submissions[2]) since his last active day 475 days ago?[3]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=pg

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=pg

[2] I do not know however if he reads or still votes on HN.

It's not really interesting what he has to say there. He never returns to address any of the valid criticisms of his post.

That's one opinion and it's doesn't jibe with what the site creator has stated previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=658683

  "IIRC we first had this conversation about a month after launch.
   Downvotes have always been used to express disagreement. Or more
   precisely, a negative score has: users seem not to downvote
   something they disagree with if it already has a sufficiently
   negative score."

He did also say this in a discussion about problematic downvotes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1057347

So his position did seem to be a bit more nuanced than "downvote what you like".

Out of curiosity, do you consider it acceptable to downvote a message for not contributing to the conversation, even if it is technically on topic? I try to follow official policies, but I confess that I often just think of voting as a general way to express my opinion of how a comment contributes to the quality of the discussion.

The bigger issue is that people with negative reactions are more likely to downvote than those willing to upvote on touchy subjects. That creates an imbalance and everyone has to be careful not to upset the hypersensitive SJWs as a result. The same human tendency accounts for the imbalance in online reviews.

My personal rule is to not downvote grey comments unless it's offensive or extremely wrong. Sometime I even upvote a comment I don't like when it's too grey.

More troubling than downvoting Melling's first comment (which is gratuitously negative and poorly worded) is the pile-on down-voting (and lack of corrective upvoting) of their other comments to this thread, most of which are reasonable points nicely made.

I feel like I downvote more than other people (and I'm happy for mods to say where I rank in the downvote league) but I don't like the pile on that you sometimes see on HN.

Some people will always see the glass half empty. They are no fun to be around.

Half empty? We put a drop of water in the glass! :-)

Don't worry someone is working on making space flight cheap. In 20 years, the drone craze will go interplanetary. Gonna fund my Kickstarter?

There's some real haters who are downvoting your realism. Sorry about that, I think you are simply being truthful.

It takes a certain personality flaw to belittle such an engineering accomplishment.

Either he's editing his posts, or people are going a little nuts with the downvote button. He's not belittling anything, just expressing the same impatience that many of us feel when we regard how little progress has been made in space exploration during our lifetime.

No editing. At least one person got it. Cost me a lot of karma. If you're 20 something, everything seems great. Guess we're not getting NASA's budget doubled.

Too bad "NERVA" never was developed for unmanned missions like this. Forget the little thermocouple can for electricity - give me an ENGINE, "Heinlein" style!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NERVA

I was in my teens when Voyager was a thing, and I am really impressed with the volume, variety, and quality of the modern space probe fleet. (Of course I want more, like Uranus and Neptune orbiters, but between Pluto and comets and asteroids and all those things on and around Mars, 2015 is a really incredible time for space)

I think the really unfortunate aspect of the question is highlighted by the proverbial "problems here on Earth." Namely, there are still only three DSN sites, and mission planners are said to have to fight with each other for receiver time. The fact that planetary science still has to contend with Voyager-era terrestrial resources is a crying shame.

Thanks for the turn-of-phrase, below, that made my day :-)

No, it takes a certain personality to want great engineering accomplishments to be routine. Because if they're not, we'll probably be trapped on this rock for several more centuries.

[UPDATE to answer without burning karma]

Someone says "We live in some exciting times." and I try to explain how exciting it could be.

Unless we actually have the "glass is only half full" discussion there's little chance of improving the situation. We have this political correctness problem where you need to always be positive.

Everyone wants more great engineering to happen. You're not a snowflake in that regard.

You're complaining because you can imagine it happening faster than it is, which is unhelpful and unpleasant. Thus, downvotes.

I find it neither unhelpful nor unpleasant. It could certainly be happening faster if we could persuade politicians to expend more money on space engineering or facilitate the raising of private capital. I find your argument strangely teleological.

That's a different than "this isn't very impressive because I think these achievements should be happening faster."

Everyone wants more great engineering to happen.

No, they do not. Otherwise we'd have three dozen New Horizons-class spacecraft flying throughout the solar system and Kuiper Belt by now.

Right now, there's a sizable contingent of people who are looking at the Pluto imagery and muttering to themselves, "So what? How does this affect the Kardashians?" Some of those people -- not all of them, but enough of them -- vote. All of this self-congratulatory stroking on our part just empowers them.

Absolutely true. When a co-worker saw the picture I posted on hipchat of Charon, he said "so what, looks just like our moon."

Thankfully he was chewed out by another science fan in the channel, but a sad number of people care less about this achievement than about the latest sports team win.

The pictures can be boring even if the science is exciting. Maybe we could instead talk about what this means. What we have learned from this.

I should have said "(nearly) everyone reading on Hacker News wants..."

He's complaining to the choir (of sorts) while disparaging the very real progress we are making because it isn't as good as it could have possibly been if reality were different.

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