Founders of Amazon and Microsoft funding little-known fusion energy companies • Hacker News Board

Re: Founders of Amazon and Microsoft funding little-known fusion energy companies

#51

Post by sberder » Mon, May 02, 2016, 3:52 PM UTC

fhrjfjc wrote: post #6

Maybe it's just me, but I wish our society's future wellbeing wasn't placed at the whim of a handful of oligarchs.

I think it's debatable, do you prefer our energy future being at the hands of lobbyists? Because that's what's happening today in the US and Europe as far as I can tell.

EV were always dubbed too complex and impossible in Europe until tesla came around and made it happen.

I follow the general skepticism about money and control of mankind's future (space resources, energy, water, etc) but also have to keep faith in a certain humanity.

Re: Founders of Amazon and Microsoft funding little-known fusion energy companies

#52

Post by pierrebai » Thu, May 12, 2016, 4:15 PM UTC

dang wrote: post #35

Angostura wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it comes from long experience and reflection about what makes for good HN conversations. In your long experience, how is this detrimental to good HN conversations?

There are a bunch of reasons. Here are two: In real conversation, people don't recite summaries at one another as if into a parliamentary record—everyone would tune out long before they finished. Second, the purpose of such summaries is to save people having to read the article, which is exactly the wrong way to go if we want to have thoughtful discourse in the comments. I wrote about this at https://news.ycombinator…

Well, I'm going to disagree and hope you stop doing that.

Better, I'll even tell you why: I use summaries to decide to read the original article or not. Your argument seems to stand on the idea that a short title is enough to decide if an article is worth my time to read. It often is not. The first thing when I see a title that looks interesting is to read the first few top comments to see if other HN reader have found it interesting and get more information about the content.

The extreme version of your position would be that we don't need titles either: HN reader should just trust that top links are intersting since they made it to the top and the title line would just give them incorrect information to discuss, everyone should just read every article that appears in the top 30.

This is obviously ridiculous.

You think titles are enough. I don't, and otehr obviously also disagree.

Re: Founders of Amazon and Microsoft funding little-known fusion energy companies

#53

Post by exodust » Thu, May 12, 2016, 6:20 PM UTC

pierrebai wrote: post #52

dang wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a bunch of reasons. Here are two: In real conversation, people don't recite summaries at one another as if into a parliamentary record—everyone would tune out long before they finished. Second, the purpose of such summaries is to save people having to read the article, which is exactly the wrong way to go if we want to have thoughtful discourse in the comments. I wrote about this at https://news.ycombinator…

Well, I'm going to disagree and hope you stop doing that. Better, I'll even tell you why: I use summaries to decide to read the original article or not. Your argument seems to stand on the idea that a short title is enough to decide if an article is worth my time to read. It often is not. The first thing when I see a title that looks interesting is to read the first few top comments to see if other HN reader have fou…

> "...to see if other HN reader have found it interesting"

A summary doesn't tell you that though. The comment ceases to be a comment and instead functions as a sort of mechanical interpretation. As technical people concerned with taxonomy, we can't have "summary comments", that's just crazy talk!

Not only that, but what of the ethical dilemma of posting a "TL;DR" for something that isn't your own writing? That's self-appointed editorial control when nobody agreed to that.

That said, I like summaries, but only when a genuine opinion comes with them. The summary service I see mentioned sounds interesting for sure, definitely a good idea. Although it's not quite clear to me how I would access that.