I think this is against the site guidelines but will try and phrase it so that it's compliant because I'm curious if others have noticed this. Waymo threads seem to always end up on the HN front page, but then the last few ones quickly end up off of it (I assume because of downvotes?). There's so much investment in a company like Tesla where they've hitched their wagon to self-driving cars that my knee-jerk reaction is that folks are downvoting because "good press" for Waymo is not great news for Tesla (at least until Tesla releases a comparably or better-performing robotaxi).
I might also be that I'm in some odd Waymo bubble because I'm impressed with their performance and also incredibly hopeful it will greatly help usher in the era of self-driving vehicles more broadly, which I think is a net positive for humanity (I get it if folks find that thought ridiculous, but just the amount of brain damage (literal and figurative I guess!) we spend driving when we could be doing other things, how cars have been such a driving force for our built environment, etc., etc., etc.).
Posts with more comments than upvotes trigger the HN flamewar detector, and are penalized. This thread is at 300 comments for 200 upvotes.
There's no downvotes for submissions. There's flags, but it'd be quite hard to coordinate a submission to be flagged just enough to get it off the front page but not enough to actually mark it as flagged.
I might also be that I'm in some odd Waymo bubble because I'm impressed with their performance and also incredibly hopeful it will greatly help usher in the era of self-driving vehicles more broadly, which I think is a net positive for humanity (I get it if folks find that thought ridiculous, but just the amount of brain damage (literal and figurative I guess!) we spend driving when we could be doing other things, how cars have been such a driving force for our built environment, etc., etc., etc.).