Agreed. This was painful to read until I clicked "About" and realized the author was on some sort of... self-exploration mission.
The need to publish this stuff is debatable. I don't think promoting it -- without clear caveats -- is particularly helpful. Self-submitting it to HN borders on naive arrogance.
Frankly you don't know what you don't know and the amount of cultural damage you can do in hopes of finding the one person who'll risk downvotes to say "nope, that's sorta wrong" doesn't seem like a great use of everyone's time. I'd prefer we reserve that for bigger, broader, riskier, innovative concepts. Not e^-x.
For me, one of the great things about Hacker News is that every person on the site is a new comer to some of the topics presented. Perhaps more importantly, for any technical topic there is a high probability that there is a user for whom the article is so basic as to be technically uninformative...I mean there is a reasonable probability that one or more of the people who use HN actually rode in Feynman's van at some point.
To me, the risk to Hacker News is that comments inconsistent with HN's ethos of civility, dissuade people from the vulnerability that comes when one posts original work. And I'd prefer people put a bit more effort into writing thoughtful and reflective comments.
Agreed. However I draw the line at obvious amateurs submitting their own articles. I fail to see why we need to celebrate every dope making a lounge chair out of packing crates.
Coincidentally I've driven Feynman's van. In fact it's the quality of Feynman's highly accessible writing that has me so disappointed in half-assed articles such as this one.
A young, knowledge-hungry, enthusiastic crowd such as HN deserves BETTER input, not junk like this. Surely we can retain the positivity while culling the crap.
In my opinion, comments lacking civility and passing relevance to the discussion at hand trump technical error as a bane of Hacker News. Charitably, I realize that some people might be new comers to the relevant skills just as others are to technical knowledge.
My observation is that community moderation seems to be working for one of those cases but not the other. Therefore an increase of meta-discussion on goofy posts might be expected.
If tpacek downvotes a crypto post it probably shouldn't sit on the homepage all day. But that's not the structure here.
So instead of calling someone's work "half-assed", how about cutting your elitist crap and putting it in larger context with good explanation, like other commeters did? Then you would (1) help others to learn something new and (2) spare OP's feelings. Both outcomes are good and highly desirable. You achieved the opposite.
I, for example, haven't driven Feynman's van and my math is quite rusty, but I sure enjoyed the post and the following discussion.
If the point of Hacker News is to be a sewing circle where we slowly reveal first principles of introductory textbooks, after someone makes the top of the homepage with a fundamentally wacky and incorrect analysis -- just so you can enjoy the comments -- then everything you propose makes perfect sense. Same process also works great in kindergarten classrooms. But at some point you have to stop rewarding people for drawing a yellow sun in crayon with a happy face on it or they never grow up.
Last week's idiotic neural net post involved data compression. It's now a top Google result atop research papers from the people who actually figured it out 30 years ago. I'm eager to see next week's thriller... see ya in the comments. If I get in early enough I'll fix it with love; if I get in late again I may or may not take the time to question why we keep doing things this way. And if I do a half-assed job with either, I'll certainly appreciate people telling me so. Might not work for everyone, but seems to open doors for me--including driver's side on the van.
Please stop making the thread worse. Other people already pointed out problems with the article; there was no need to pile on by calling names—which the HN guidelines ask you not to do—let alone take the thread so tediously off topic.
Even assuming you're 100% right, hauling in barrels of garbage and dumping them in the commons is not a good reaction.
The need to publish this stuff is debatable. I don't think promoting it -- without clear caveats -- is particularly helpful. Self-submitting it to HN borders on naive arrogance.
Frankly you don't know what you don't know and the amount of cultural damage you can do in hopes of finding the one person who'll risk downvotes to say "nope, that's sorta wrong" doesn't seem like a great use of everyone's time. I'd prefer we reserve that for bigger, broader, riskier, innovative concepts. Not e^-x.