He has on the tiniest of ideas of what he's doing; he might be breaking the law; he's audacious and realized he could just do it; he wants to be in California because that's where dreams come true; he's probably from an upper middle class white family with parents who didn't pay him enough attention.
And he's doing it all because he wants a status symbol of wealth and prosperity, and someone told him he couldn't.
Personally, I feel that there is a little boy/girl in everyone of us and quite many tech-immigrants to SFBA went there to chase their own Lambo type dreams. This isn't something reprehensible but in fact part of the american fabric (liberty and the pursuit of happiness).
But of course the metaphor ends at the absolute danger of the situation the boy is causing. A startup is comparatively safe to what the little guy did.
>“She told him she would not buy him a Lamborghini,” the Highway Patrol said in a tweet. “He decided to take the car and go to California to buy one himself.”
Definitely looks more “Hispanic” than “white” to me. Googling his surname also shows (mostly) Hispanics. The photos also don’t scream “upper middle class” to me, but that’s harder to judge.
I'm actually from Ogden, and I love it so much. The population is probably about 33% hispanic.
https://www.ogdencity.com/1466/Demographics
I love hackers like this. So awesome to see.
https://twitter.com/mikeandersonKSL/status/12577783769258024...
Not to mention that the ethnicity of the person in question in this story is pretty clear from the photographs.
We're here for curious conversation, not smiting enemies. If you want the latter, please do it elsewhere.
https://kutv.com/news/local/5-year-old-recounts-being-stoppe...
Honestly, as far as children doing stupid shit like this goes, that describes pretty much all children.
It’s not like the thought he might hurt someone ever even entered his mind.
From a five year old?
I would call it "being a kid and not knowing the impact of those things"...
Deep disregard mostly fits some kind of sociopath or delinquent...
Well, the car features the new UWP UI. Even e 6 yo can drive it. /s
It's good for HN to defy expectations, because predictability and repetition are the worst things for curiosity. But it's good to defy expectations in an interesting way. The distribution of defied expectations is bimodal; when it's bad it's very bad.
On the third hand: it's also good if—more rarely—there is an occasional bit, just a wafer-thin bit, of "why is this on HN" agitation of the bad kind too. It gets the juices flowing. It means readers care. I think it bonds users more closely with the site in the end. But it should be rare. Since there's so much variance in what people like to see, and HN is a non-siloed site (i.e. we're all in the same theater), every user sees a lot of things they dislike, so we mostly have the opposite problem.
One other point. People sometimes react to these unpredictable submissions by saying "oh, so stories about little kids driving [or whatever $story was] are on topic now?" But of course that is exactly the wrong conclusion. Since this story made HN's front page, a follow-up about, say, a 7-year-old driving a tractor, would have power-law-dropoff levels of uninterestingness. And a 3-year-old driving a motorboat would be right out. Rather, there's some other unexpectedly interesting off-beat story waiting to play this role for next time, and the point is that you can't predict it from any sequence. Actually such submissions are surprisingly uncommon—I feel like they show up maybe 2 or 3 times a year, if that. That's why I'd be curious to see links.
Edit: just to be clear—I'm not criticizing your comment! I'm saying you're an ideal HN user.
That's not what the guidelines say. They say:
>>Anything that good hackers would find interesting.
There are all kinds of things I find interesting but which would not be interesting to "good hackers" generally. I would think you'd expect posters to make the distinction and separate "what I personally like" from "what I personally like due to hacker-related reasons".
As an example of the difference, I'd be really interested in an article on how to do better on doubles mode on Dance Dance Revolution, but that's such narrow interest that it doesn't really belong here; me finding it interesting isn't enough.
An article on doubles mode in DDR might be interesting in HN's sense, or it might not. If it were just a basic tutorial, that probably wouldn't be—tutorials are useful to people who are working on a specific task, but have little appeal to the general reader. If, on the other hand, it went into the design of doubles mode, the history of it, why it is the way it is, what makes it harder than you might expect, clever things that have been discovered about it—all of that would be on topic. Something that could go either way might be a story about, say, a couple who met because they were good at doubles mode in DDR. That would depend on how good an article it was.
This is such an important point because the kind of story that gets excluded this way—the kind that people find interesting but assume that it's not hacker-related enough—can be the absolutely best kind of HN submission. Why? Because it's unexpected. It's the one you can't predict from any sequence.
(Edit: Unpredictability isn't the only quality that matters, but it's the rarest. Actually, maybe it is the only quality that matters. For a while I was thinking otherwise, because a front page consisting of random numbers would be unpredictable, but not interesting to read. On the other hand, it's unpredictable only along one axis. From another point of view it would be fully predictable: random numbers again?)
Keep in mind that finding something interesting isn't quite the same thing as liking it, and also when we say "interesting" we mean intellectual interest, not all kinds of interest. For example, there is social interest (the sort that powers celebrity gossip). There is political interest (wanting to know how one's side is doing against the other side). There is sexual interest (no comment needed). These things all have their place, but not here. On the other hand, there can also be overlap with intellectual curiosity, in which case it's fine, though the bar is higher in some cases than others.
> we mean intellectual interest, not all kinds of interest
> For example, there is social interest (the sort of thing that leads to celebrity gossip).
> These things all have their place, but not here.
I'd challenge the idea that this got upvoted for intellectual interest or that it belongs here.
Of course we can only guess about that. No doubt the users who flagged the article feel the same way as you. On the other hand, I disagree because I can feel it touching my own intellectual curiosity: it's extraordinary that a 5-year-old could and would do that. Yes it's strongly sentimental, which is not usually our thing here, but it's important for HN to have the occasional story in that overlapping part of the Venn diagram.
This is one of the cases where a moderator's individual taste affects the site. Is that fair? No it is not, but there's an interesting reason to do it anyway: you need some sort of individual judgment affecting the site, in order to prevent it from converging into the brown noise of everyone-put-together. A system like HN can get itself into a rut otherwise, becoming too predictable and too common-denominator. I don't think that I'm the best individual to supply the perturbations; it's just that someone needs to, and for whatever reason I ended up in that role. Since this function is about bumping the system out of its grooves, sort of like the mutations in a genetic algorithm, it probably doesn't matter that much if I do a fabulous job on that point. I just need to not suck at it, and if that were the case, HN would probably be screwed for more significant reasons.
IF he was using Tesla autopilot to drive the car, then I'd find it HN worthy. ;-D
I think you're wrong about the article not being technical though. In a deeper sense it is.
I've posted it as a separate story, I wonder if that will work? For now at least it seems I cannot add comments there.
HN used to have a software penalty on wikipedia.org submissions and I was persuaded to remove it. For the time being.
I'm often tempted to flag submissions for lesser reasons, so I'd like to know.
I'm curious how this fits, also:
(I wouldn’t consider this submission off topic)
If you or anyone would like to understand how we approach the problem of submissions with political overlap, I've written a lot about it: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... Some good threads to start with might be https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607844 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22902396. Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869, if you think HN has gotten more political lately.
If you or anyone takes a look at those past explanations and has a question that's not answered there, I'd like to know what it is. If anyone knows a better solution, I'd really like to know what it is. Just make sure you've familiarized yourself with the material first, because if it's something simple like "just ban politics" or "just allow everything", I've answered many times already why that won't work.
I'm thinking the kid must have played a fair amount of driving/racing games. And he said he was going to Cali to buy a Lambo...
Hey, interest rates as low as they are, there's always credit.
Just let us have this one, just for today.
A 5-year old who manages to get his hands on something that could kill dozens of people if used incorrectly is not something I call cute. I don't understand the excitement everyone seems to have.
If a 5-year old got his hands on a semi-automatic weapon, fired rounds on a wooden fence in his backyard, and managed to draw a dinosaur out of bullet holes, would that be cute, strange, audacious?
Don’t get me wrong, it’s great that this story didn’t end up with someone dead. But 5 is way too young to be doing stuff like this.
I find myself simultaneously admiring the kid's chutzpah, horrified at what could have gone wrong, and grateful that nothing did.
At least he didn't move fast and break things!
Kid is jumping the whole unicorn step to Lambo, maybe another example of how Knuth was wrong.
But someone did post it, and it seems to have done rather well, so I guess that makes us both wrong in this case.
Either this is a globally interesting story, or someone here and someone there happens to pull stories from the same source, or someone’s flexing propaganda muscle
Because people are submitting them.
> This is not the place for it.
“This is not the place for it” is what story flags are for.
I haven't been tracking "submissions that don't seem to belong", so I don't have a position on the parent's claim. But let's say they are right, and there have been increased submissions that don't belong here. And let's say that you are right, that this is caused by 'redditization'. (Based on dang's argument, this may be entirely temporary.) I'm interpreting 'redditization' as a shift in the impressions of a significant subset of the HN user base, such that various reddit-like behaviors are seen as desirable here.
Putting all of this together, your comment suggests to me an actionable strategy. If there is in fact an increase in inappropriate submissions, and if this is due to redditization, then pushing back (via voting, flagging, and feedback via comments) on redditization in all of its forms (not just inappropriate submissions) could shift the culture of HN in such a way that inappropriate submissions become less likely in the future.
> sometimes partly right
They weren't, because it didn't happen. Now if you put it this way, I'd agree:
Just because people have complained about something long ago, and were wrong, doesn't mean that some form of it isn't in progress at the moment.
But what are the odds? By the same argument, masturbation might still make you go blind. More likely the claim is as mistaken as it used to be.
Edit: I don't mean you personally!
Assuming even the most conservative parameters in some kind of diffusion model, one could easily see a solution converge upon the steady state being more disorganized and less coherent than the initial state, feeding into a lower signal to noise ratio.
My view is that HN has managed to stave that fate off so far. If so, that's not by accident—it was one of the founding intentions of the site to stave off Eternal September, which was just as well-known an issue amongst internet forum types in 2006 as it is today. You can see this in the second paragraph of https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html. (Also https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...)
If that's true, how have we been able to escape entropy? The same way anyone does: by spending a lot of energy. In particular: a lot of worry and hard work, patient engagement with particular users about specific issues, stubborn focus on optimizing for one thing (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), the ability to modify the software to adapt to problems, and the fact that growth has been linear over 10 years and that we're not under pressure to make it faster, which is a historical accident of HN being part of YC—sort of a felicitous one-off, like Iceland having a mild climate.
I do think there are trends in an entropic, Septemberesque direction, but there are also counter-trends in more organized directions, with the net result being that the site has changed but not yet become uninteresting. Other things I think are that there's a cap on how good HN can ever get (boo), but that there are gradual things we can do to make it better (yay). They just need to be slow.
>They weren't, because it didn't happen.
My understanding of some of the redditization claims I have seen was that, during some periods of time, HN was "becoming relatively more like reddit." This is different than claiming "will inevitably and permanently become 'like reddit' " (Where 'like reddit' might mean "suffer certain reddit-like dysfunctions" or simply "be sufficiently similar to reddit by some other criteria.") In the first, reddit is a direction. In the second, reddit is a state.
If someone claims to observe or have observed a trend of redditization, sometimes I become curious and want ask questions like "in what way" and "to what degree" and "did this trend continue unabated, for how long" etc. (Also, can we quantify this, maybe with lexical analysis?)
You seem to argue that HN must become permanently "like reddit" by some standard of similarity in order for a prior suggestion that "HN was becoming more like reddit" to be a valid observation. I disagree. Redditization is a matter of degree, and it might be cyclical in nature, or you and the claimant might be focused on different aspects of reddit culture.
I understand it can be tedious to have ongoing comments from people who lack a larger perspective making similar, repetitive claims of temporary or alleged redditization of HN. But the argument that is made in the site guidelines, and the one you make here, is not a compelling justification for the claim that every one of us is always wrong when we claim or suggest that some form of "redditization" is occurring. (That's how I interpret the comment about "semi noob illusion" and also your comment "They weren't, because it didn't happen.") The redditization influence doesn't need to 'win' in order to be real. A shift in the reddit direction doesn't need to become comprehensive and permanent in order to have occurred.
>But what are the odds?
The odds that HN is currently experiencing some degree, of some form, of redditization is quite high in my opinion. I've seen entire subthreads of reddit-like nonsense in the past two months, with everyone upvoting each other. It remains to be seen the degree to which this wanes in the future.
What is redditization? I'd like to see the people who complain about redditization enhance their criticism with a list of specific qualities they associate with redditization.
For me, redditization may be suspect whenever I see a great deal of highly upvoted comments in most or all of these categories: (a) inane comments, (b) rhetorically rich but otherwise empty comments, (c) snark or trollish sarcasm, and, less often, (d) entire threads of mutually upvoted thematic ironic humor. I'm sure others would list other factors, or other ways of characterizing 'redditization'.
By focusing on specific characteristics, granted, the community could talk about comment quality without mentioning reddit at all. For better or worse, this ignores a real cultural dynamic involving a subset of HN users who have a comfort and familiarity with (and preference for) reddit cultural norms.
I think you're underestimating how common this trope is, and how mechanical and vacuous it is. It has been that way for well over 10 years—since before HN was even called "Hacker News" in fact. It got so tedious that pg added that site guideline a decade ago.
HN users are not shy about making criticisms, and any HN user who has one can easily find a more substantive way of making theirs. Actually, if a comment showed up that broke that guideline and had something genuinely interesting to say, it wouldn't be a problem—it's just that they never do.
