What irritates me most with HN crowd is that there're several "sacred" topics that you either agree with, or you better shut up because you're clearly wrong and you'll be downvoted to hell. I understand that the voting system can represent your agreement or disagreement with someone, but downvoting valuable opinions just because they're controversial is immature.
I used to think feminism was very a sensitive topic, thus untouchable like you describe. It appears not. Most times I've posted skeptical comments against the current form of feminism, I expected to be told off and maybe excluded from HN. I have seen a workmate being fired for such a discussion. In reality, my upvote balance was between 4 and 35 points. It doesn't mean I'm the one who's right, it means it's possible to gain upvotes by echoing part of the people's opinions.
That said, I still feel I'm earning a Godwin point for evoking this topic.
Being critical of feminism on a forum full of young single guys isn't the big contrarian display you seem to think it is. HN and reddit are the only places I see this hyper critical attitude and its generally well accepted. Hell, reddit is famous for its popular "red pill" forum.
The problem with controversial topics (not just this one) is that people who disagree with you are much more likely to down-vote you than the crowd who agrees with you to up-vote you.
I've found that HN demonstrates this problem far less than other sites (which have a similar format). That's not to say that this isn't a problem on HN, it just seems to be the best of the breed.
My favorite one is self-driving cars. If you say something factual and obvious, like for example that self-driving cars don't in fact exist yet and zero people are able to use one today, legions of flying monkeys will swoop in to call you a backward thinking luddite.
If that's your example of a "fact", then maybe some criticism is expected? It's no surprise that some people are going to think that Tesla's Autopilot (driver must be present and alert) or actual autonomous cars driving on private property are examples that you didn't think of.
If you were hoping for a good discussion, being clear is extremely important.
Since self-driving cars do in fact exist and people are in fact using them today, your example is not terribly useful unless you were actually trying to demonstrate the opposite of your ostensible point.
Show me a link to a situation today where I can take a person who doesn't know how to drive a car (or is sleeping, drunk, a child, etc) put them in a car and have the car drive them to a location over public streets and highways.
Your refusal to accept basic facts of reality don't make for a very compelling argument, but I do admire your sticktuitiveness. You'd make an excellent Presidential candidate.
Electric cars are useless for everyone because Real Americans(tm) require (X time 1.25) miles of range where X is whatever is commercially available now and has varied from 25 (lead acid conversions) to 400 or something over the past decade(s). With a side dish of all vehicles must be suitable for all people, despite the differences between mining trucks and pickup trucks and sports cars and commuter cars being order of magnitude greater than the difference between a gas powertrain and an electric powertrain.
Our current political, social, and economic hierarchy is inherently by definition ideal and permanently unchanging and all disagreement is thoughtcrime to be voted down. Everything we've been indoctrinated to believe is right, because might makes right.
In a virtual world, nothing matters more than geography, specifically where you live, and that's not a bug but a feature. With a side dish of urban bicycle riding apartments are the only politically acceptable to discuss solution for humanity. Seriously HN may as well be an urban bicycle blog some days.
There's something inherent about the nature of writing code that means programmers should not only tolerate and expect extremely low corporate social status (think of working conditions and hours and position in the hierarchy and respect (or lack thereof) for ideas), but should embrace the low status and attack outsiders who disagree.
A secular prosperity gospel along the lines of who cares how many become unemployed, let them eat cake, I don't care about historical analogies and guillotines. Sure I was born on third base and think I hit a home run, but they can pull themselves up by their bootstraps, if they really wanted to.
Although nothing is more important than internalizing and understanding technological scaling problems, all macro level problems in economics, business, finance, culture, or international relations merely requires replicated and "turned up to 11" micro level solutions. You know, just like when bubble sort is too slow , the best solution is more faster processors, right?
(added another sacred topic: Much as young adults always believe their generation invented sex, drugs, and rock and roll, they are the inventors of the concept of combining arts and science to earn a buck, nobody has ever earned a buck by putting an artistic face on a boring engineering project)
(and a second added sacred topic: New means better, and new means less bugs than old. New is good inherently because its new. Also technology in IT isn't an endless rotational circular wheel of the same old ideas over and over again with the same old problems over and over again, its strict linear progress like an infinite highway to the promised land of suburban paradise or something)
(and a third sacred topic: voting should indicate how well the voter agrees or disagrees with the opinions expressed in a comment, not how well its written or how interesting it is, voting should solely be a popularity contest.)
I didn't downvote you, but are you sure you meant to go as far as calling those things sacred topics? I've seen plenty of comments disagreeing with several of the propositions in your list.
I actually wanted to upvote you because of a few points but for some reason I can resist. I didn't downvote either but your final remark paints a target on your commentts
Its kinda like the first rule of fight club is not to talk about fight club, so here I am listing sacred topics, but I forgot not to list the most sacred topic of all...
