To be fair, being enthusiastic and positive about the future isn't that useful of a comment. There is only one way to say 'Elon's vision is right and it will happen,' but there are countless, interesting, ways to point out how it might fail. So after the first few excited comments come in, often the only novel thing to contribute is a counter point.

This doesn't mean that the majority of people aren't optimistic about the future, just that their opinion has already been expressed.

>To be fair, being enthusiastic and positive about the future isn't that useful of a comment. .... but there are countless, interesting, ways to point out how it might fail

Sure, but there is more than one way to say it:

"I live in the mountains of Virginia and this will never work here with the snow, therefore it's crap, therefore it will fail!!!!"

OR

"It's going to be really hard for them to solve the problem of heavy snow. I wonder if they'll use <something interesting we can all learn about> or <something else>. I wonder if they've teamed up with <who knows> to research <something interesting>. I think the best approach would be x,y,z and I read the Google are using a,b,c".

etc.

I mean, we're talking about a multi-billon dollar company trying to push forward - OF COURSE there are tons of hard parts. Pointing them out it not useful - thinking about (and working on) how to solve them is what HN should be about.

That's a bit pessimistic.

"I wonder if Elon will go down path A...." "Interesting that the battery is now x, this is probably a result of Y technology they developed last year." Etc. I don't find it hard to discuss a topic in a positive light at all.

It's interesting to think about the ways your opponent might capture your pieces, but it's just as interesting and just as important to think about the ways you might capture theirs.

Time we spend bickering about whether electric cars are ready is time not spent talking about the new grid, the new architecture, the new social organization that will form around these (to me obviously) imminent technologies.

I don't think "how it could succeed" is less interesting than "how it could fail". And if I expect something to succeed, frankly the failure speculation starts to get a bit boring.

It's a bit personal for me because I am pursuing a high-setback business model in my startup and so people always want to talk about the looming dangers they see. It starts to get boring, because I expect a certain number of failures, and I intend to work through them. What's interesting to mr is whether the first principles analysis is right, and how the plan looks from a Zen perspective... Not is everything right, but am I applying pressure in the right place today given the conditions.

I agree this attitude is common on HN. But is it really a recent development? Engineers are skeptical by nature. I feel like engineers are especially skeptical of marketing and "idea" people.

It is not a recent development. Sometimes an early attitude correction can divert the still-growing thread into more constructive comments.

>Unfortunately this is really common on HN nowadays.

I see things differently. Anyone who criticized Theranos was met with the same reaction, "Everyone on HN is so negative!" But the questions were valid. Look what happened.

The same thing is occurring with Tesla. Yes, there is fantastic work being done, but many people here can't separate marketing from the real world. It's shocking, frankly.

Are you suggesting that Tesla is defrauding investors and regulators, as Theranos did?

When I looked into the Solar City after the announcement of the Tesla buying them, these "Solar Bonds" did make me a bit uneasy. Their interest rate implies junk...

https://solarbonds.solarcity.com/

>Are you suggesting that Tesla is defrauding investors and regulators, as Theranos did?

I'm suggesting that there's a lack of critical analysis applied to what are, essentially, Tesla press releases. Like when it was implied that people were sexist for questioning the genius of Elizabeth Holmes, because she was changing the world and all that, according to the press releases.

Again, I have no problem with being a Tesla fan. I probably come off as a "hater" here because I like to play Devil's Advocate and it's a pretty one-sided discussion on HackerNews (expectedly). I think what they're doing is fantastic. But give some credit to other companies who are also doing good things for this space, people's safety and the planet.

No, he's suggesting, in exactly his own words, "many people can't separate marketing from the real world".

If the "marketing" Tesla is putting out is not part of the real world, that would be fraud, which was the situation with Theranos.