Until I had kids of my own I did not quite comprehend just how capable little kids can be.
A 5 year old holding an AK47 is entirely capable of being a legitimate competitor to an adult holding an AK47. An average 10 year old armed with an AK47 might be more dangerous than an average 40 year old. Child soldiers are likely very effective, as depressing as this thought is.
Small children are profoundly ignorant but they're not dramatically less intelligent than adults. In limited domains, like driving or shooting, a high performing child can easily beat a low performing adult.
Also, a 10 year old child will likely not fear bodily harm or death the same way a 40-year old adult would, of course that can be an advantage or disadvantage depending on the situation.
Kind of strange comment, but one of the problems I've seen in schools is the assumption by teachers that children are not as intelligent as adults. Generally this isn't true. Usually they lack a framework for reasoning and lack experience with language for communicating. There are some differences with brain development of young children for sure, but in my experience people underestimate children by a fairly large margin. You see the same phenomenon with people trying to talk to adults who are just learning the language. There is an assumption that the person is stupid rather than that they have difficulty communicating.
People underestimate kids in some ways, and overestimate them in others. The underlying framework for highly abstract thinking takes time to develop, as does the ability for understanding empathy and moral behavior. A five-year-old kid literally has no notion that driving a car he's not the owner of is theft, and thus grossly unethical conduct. The car is just there for the taking; to him it's no different than playing GTA.
5 year old kids are capable of very complex ethical thinking and empathy, most definitely including understanding of ownership. Maybe it's not as common in the US, but you can see it clearly in any country where kids regularly go to child care from age 3.
They do, but the intelligence of kids is highly underrated. This started with Piaget, and although Piaget has been widely debunked, teachers still believe it.
To be fair, an AK47 is a hell of a lot easier to use than a car. My son was able to manage a rifle pretty well at six years old, but I very seriously doubt he'd have been able to drive a car successfully.
I knew a 5-year old that was not much below 5' tall, and built like a linebacker (hefty, but solid). Ended up being just slightly above average height when full grown. Kids are weird.
It's a small car by US standards, and the kid is wearing a sweatshirt that's incredibly baggy, along with shorts that are oversized-enough to be swim trunks. The seat is also reclined. There's a lot of optical-illusion going into the presentation there. It's actually pretty clever.
Heh, I remember being ~6 and thinking they had an age limit for driving "so you'd be big enough to operate it", but then I figured that couldn't be right because I'd seen little old ladies that were about the size of some 10 year olds.
When my Grandmother pulled up in her car, it looked like there was nobody driving. She wasn't tall enough for her head to be visible in the windshield. I don't know how she saw anything.
Are you saying there is no place for art and passion in automotive design?
Do you judge art or music that doesn't interest you personally (or which you cannot afford) so harshly?
Lamborghini cars may be impractical based on many people's measures, and their designs may not be to everyone's liking, but your critique is internet-conflict-style hyperbole.
I judge other media when they're promoting excess, particularly when it's harming others on the planet. I find Lamborghinis viscerally disgusting in the same way as a 5000-calorie burger, or a thousand-dollar bottle of champagne being sprayed over a wall.
(This is not about expensive cars in general. Lamborghinis are not bought to be fast, or comfortable, or manoeuvrable. They're bought to be big and loud and consume a lot of gas.)
It's all fair game, man. There's nothing wrong with appreciating a Lambo, there's nothing wrong with wanting a Lambo, there's nothing wrong with owning a Lambo.
I am just pointing out that it's a childish desire (not in a bad way). Inside every lambo owner, a part of them, is a little kid just like the one in the news.
How do you define 'in trouble'? An older-looking 14's the mark where I think you'd see actual repercussions, but I can't imagine people would be particularly-impressed if the boy was double his age (plenty of kids can drive at ten; plenty more kids can drive at ten as poorly as the adolescent in the article is described as doing). I think someone at the age of 13 could probably get this amount of press if they got caught in Utah or wherever coming from Georgia.
Depends on the 10 year old, I think. I'm not advocating for a lower driving age, but it seems like many of them would be better drivers than 16-18 year olds.
While he didn't achieve the goal to buy the lambo, the kid still get to ride in a lambo the following day. Amazing and its not too crazy to think that some rich guy somewhere decided to gift this kid a lambo after reading the story.
No thanks, would you still feel that way if the kid got into a wreck and killed himself or someone else on the highway? Do admire the hacker spirit of a small child that gets a hold of a firearm and accidentally kills someone with it?
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.
We admire the hacker spirit. Obviously, we also support the cop who saved the kid. And if something had gone wrong, our admiration would be overshadowed by grief. Yet in this situation, thankfully, nothing catastrophic occurred. I hope the kid learns a lesson but still maintains a spirit of adventure and discovery.
Obviously 5 is to young to be driving a car. Its not to young to be dreaming of driving a car.
I have noticed a huge increase in the number of comments on stories, though I felt like that started slightly before the pandemic. Does HN provide traffic stats anywhere public? I'd be curious to see when it changed, or if I'm merely imagining it.
I noticed a two to three week spread of behavioral changes as the pandemic started. That is, some people, counties, states, companies entered 'pandemic mode' two to three weeks before others. So maybe an increase in comments was both motivated by the pandemic, and also occurred slightly before 'pandemic mode' applied to your company or your area?
This site values driven young people taking risks and chasing goals that seem very far away but maybe achieving them one day. This kid has the same spirit as many startup founders have, and similarly has skills that others in his age group lack. Oh and he's after a lambo. It's a good symbol for the wealth that the young startup founders seek as well.
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.
Yeah I'm not sure whether people upvote this story because, like you, they are critics of the idea and want to make fun of it or at least highlight the dangers, or because this spirit envokes a truthfully positive association. Probably both, because it gives something to both sides.
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.
this kid really embodies the american spirit: rich white boy doing whatever the fuck he wants without the slightest concern for who he might hurt or kill in the process, all in the delusional pursuit of a meaningless status symbol he has been conned into thinking he can get because of the cultish adherence to the belief it’s the land of equal opportunity despite any and all evidence to the contrary, all while trumpeting about how great he is to anyone who will listen
Your comments have been breaking the site guidelines badly, not just in this thread but unfortunately in other threads too. Would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the spirit of this site to heart?
We're here for curious conversation, not smiting enemies. If you want the latter, please do it elsewhere.
if there were a way to delete all my posts and my account I would do that. the hacker news community has become thoroughly disappointing to
me and I retroactively want all my contributions withdrawn. i want nothing to do with it.
Is this mentioned in another article on this topic? I didn't see that in this article. This article states this as his basic motivation:
>“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 hope you are joking and I am failing to pick up on it. Because such cases can be made for many human interest stories. Unless the boy was driving a self driving car I really don't see the significance to HN. But I see that the community disagrees with me on this, evident by the points on this story.
> I hope you are joking and I am failing to pick up on it. Because such cases can be made for many human interest stories. Unless the boy was driving a self driving car I really don't see the significance to HN.
Well, the car features the new UWP UI. Even e 6 yo can drive it. /s
I never understand this comment. If it made it to the front page of HackerNews, then yes, this is the place for it. There is no "should" or "shouldn't". Upvotes and downvotes already solved that problem.
That's so far from true that I would love to see links to the posts that made you conclude it. People tend to either imagine "HN bans all politics" (if they would prefer more) or "HN has become overrun by politics" (if they would prefer less). Sometimes they even simultaneously prefer more politics (of the kind they support) and less politics (of the kind they oppose). There's something for everyone to dislike, and the mind seems to find it irresistible to connect the dots into a picture of moderator bias (always, of course, a bias opposed to what it would prefer).
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 think the history of link aggregators shows that "if it makes it to the front page it belongs here" is a race to the bottom. If one follows that guideline, content inevitably shifts to "easier" entertainment, and away from difficult, less entertaining content.
Geez. Your comment's killed already? I tend to agree with you FWIW. General-interest(ing) stuff is fine, esp for the "hacker spirit" angle, but I think there's such a thing as too much, and the whole site just degrades into quirky-insight porn -- I wish we'd see less of such stories, but not outright ban them. I also wish we could downvote submissions without outright flagging them (which is for spam/trolling).
I really like the phrasing ‘quirky-insight porn’, I think it captures this sort of thing exceptionally well. I have, at times wanted less of said QIP, however, because of my personal interests I would like to never see a JavaScript, webdev, Rust, etc article posted either. However, I still browse, still read the comments, and even sometime read TFA and don’t consider it a waste of time, so all in all I’m pretty okay with the state of things.
Just because people have complained about something long ago, and were sometimes wrong, sometimes partly right, doesn't mean that some form of it isn't in progress at the moment, during this pandemic.
I'm not saying this as a challenge to what you said, but what about the concept of the Eternal September? How does that play into your assertion that the "tale as old as time" is, in fact, false?
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.
Well, I can tell you my answer to that, but it's just my answer, and I'm biased and don't really know. Others' answers may be just as good or better. Every HN user has their mental model of the site and these models disagree wildly. Users tend to be passionate about their model, which is more important.
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.
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.
It's true that "HN is turning into Reddit" is classed as an Eternal September-style complaint in my mind, and I think also in the minds of most people who make those comments. You're the first person I've heard suggest that it might be a cyclical ebb and flow. The comments we're talking about never have anything that subtle to say.
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.
Yes, what a weird comment. It is the same type of comment of the people who say scientists have been warning about global warming for more than 20 years now so there is nothing new. So basically, you put that comment in your guidelines and cover yourself for ever and ever of any form of criticism,not matter how mild.
The guideline is not about criticism, it's about a particularly tedious form of repetition. It's a bit like its neighbor, the guideline that asks people not to comment on comment voting in comments.
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.
Superficially, your comment could look like a dismissive over-simplified answer to the question "why are these sort of articles popping up on Hacker News?" But I interpret your statement as a suggestion that there may be value in investigating questions of cultural norms.
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.
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?
It always fascinates me when a comment says "I find this interesting but it doesn't belong here". Finding this interesting is the definition of it belonging here (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). Of course there are different kinds of interesting and HN is for some and not for others.
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.
In my mind it's not really a technical article at all. Usually when we cover current events they have some connection to either science or technology and have some sort of intellectual quality to them. This story strikes me as an amusing news article that I'm sure is going viral on every social media outlet, so it feels like it's going to get plenty of exposure through those sources. That's the main thing, for me.
IF he was using Tesla autopilot to drive the car, then I'd find it HN worthy. ;-D
HN is definitely not just for technical articles. You're on stronger ground with a "they'd cover it on TV news" argument (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). Then again, note that word probably (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4922426). In this case, the story is just so...uncorrelated that it manages to wrest on-topicness back from TV news. That's how I see it anyway, and of course many people disagree.
I think you're wrong about the article not being technical though. In a deeper sense it is.
One of the funniest things I've read on HN is Gluten Free Antarctica (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18729224), which didn't have much to do with tech. I was glad to have come across it.
That one was correlated by author, though, because Maciej's a tech person and his articles have been prominent on HN for years—rightly so, because he's such a good writer, but not an example of the "you can't predict it from any sequence" test.
>It always fascinates me when a comment says "I find this interesting but it doesn't belong here". Finding this interesting is the definition of it belonging here (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). Of course there are different kinds of interesting and HN is for some and not for others.
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.
That guideline isn't limited to what good hackers would find interesting for hacking-related reasons. It's simply: what good hackers would find interesting. The key phrase is "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity".
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.
> I'd challenge the idea that this got upvoted for intellectual interest
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.
Given that it took me a year to learn to drive, I wondered how he managed it. I had realised that given he wanted to buy a Lambo, he obviously loved cars. But eventually I realised it was probably an automatic not a manual transmission. It's still impressive that a 5 y.o. could manage to navigate that. I wonder if he was using turn signals and stopping at intersections and traffic lights.
I just saw this story popping up in a completely different place.
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
I believe the majority of incidents where young kids "drive" end very quickly as minor parking lot or driveway accidents. The above comment might not actually be too far off the mark.
IANAL but I believe so. When I was very young, long before a license, but probably closer to 10 than 5, my parents taught me to drive the tractor around the field. I think others here will have had similar experiences as well.
Still normal as soon as they can reach the pedals. If they're on a farm they're probably also riding on (or driving) small tractors and four-wheelers, and maybe riding horses, all of which are a hell of a lot more dangerous than towing a trailer of square bales a quarter mile over a private dirt road in the old '94 Ford, from the field to the barn, probably not going over 15mph because you'll rattle your bones out of your skin and the windows out of their frames if you go faster. Hell driving on a farm is probably safer than wandering around the more developed parts playing. There are lots of ways to get hurt on the kinds of structures, equipment, and junk in the more developed areas of a farm, and there's the livestock, if there is any, which can also be very dangerous.
Yeah young children are pretty bad drivers, I can attest to that. Sometime around age 4 I swiped my dad’s car keys from the kitchen table (I recall I had to climb a chair to reach the top of the table). I think I wanted to mimic how adults operated cars.
Luckily, I didn’t make it far. When I finally got it into gear I crashed into the viaduct paralleling our house blocking the road until another motorist found me.
My parents didn’t spank us often but I sure caught hell for that stunt and my allowance was garnished for a very long time!
Son, now that you're in high school, it's time you start getting an allowance. However, remember that incident with the car ten years ago? It's time to start paying it off.
Our kid, who is 5, gets an allowance. It's nominal, but it teaches her to save/spend/share money and it's a good way to teach numbers and basic math.
So far, she's managed to set aside enough to get a dinosaur lego set she really, really wanted and also gone on some carousel rides and bought candy once or twice. It's been a benefit for everyone, I think.
Yeah, we've taught or kids those things from an early age as well, but I* think it's a bit early for an allowance. I think the biggest reason for that is not wanting to couple the idea of routine chores with the allowance.
There concept of routine chores (keep your room clean, help keep shared spaces clean, etc) should be well established before an allowance enters the picture. The allowance isn't for doing those things that are just a basic expectation of family life, and starting them both at an early age risks coupling them.
* This is my own personal opinion about our family, and not in any way a value judgement on differing approaches
We don't couple it to chores. Chores are something everyone does because it helps the family. We're trying to be intentional about not connecting those concepts.
I think we started "chores" when she was 3. Obviously a three year old doesn't really do much, but she showed interest in feeding the dog and folding some blankets so those became her chores. We make a point of having both parents visibly do chores together.
We'll see how effective this is in another ten years, I suppose.
you are underestimating kids... given a proper sized car where they can reach the controls, they do pretty good. My kid has been driving a 12V electric car from age two.
Not many 5 year olds are tall enough to see the road and push the gas pedal at the same time though. The article states that this specific boy looked like he was 8 or 9.
Yeah, not even only farm kids driving tractors. I was riding a motorcycle in first grade and not long after came the era of go-karts (my dad and friends build the local go-kart track). When dad broke his right arm, I learned to shift left-handed from the passenger seat. There was always a bunch of stuff like going to get the car out of the garage and up to the front door that you just let the kids do.
The proportion of traffic offenses that result in police stops is not consistent across all types, grades, and natures of offenses. I would guess that five year olds driving are vastly more likely to be stopped than the average (median or mean) traffic offender.
This is nothing. At the tender age of three years old, I had been driving cross-country for five years. After the first six years of that, my 10 year-old adopted daughter would switch off with me in the semi, so we could make deliveries around-the-clock.
Well, if you had an AI aware car, then this would’ve prevented that from happening. Thus saving your 5-year-old life.
Now, this would be newsworthy. And Tesla’s stock price would probably increase from the positive news, as well as the increase from additional car sales for its AI safety features.
Because no crime has been committed. If we locked up everyone who had left their keys out or some equally dangerous thing, we would have to lock up every parent out there.
Meanwhile 100% of parents are going "there but for the grace of God..."
Kids get up to crazy shit all the time. There's no way to be up their asses enough to stop something like this if they get it in their heads and don't let on ahead of time. There's no way to hide or lock up everything that could be dangerous all of the time. Maybe today one of the many, many things in your house they've always left alone, that could be dangerous, they'll decide to screw with. You just hope they get out of your house before they harm themselves or others too badly.
The difference between these parents and any other set of average to good parents, judging solely from this having happened, is that they were unlucky. Are they bad? Maybe. This doesn't give us much info one way or the other. Are they really really bad? Well since the call to the cops didn't end with one or both parents in jail on drug charges and the car was theirs, not someone else's, and the kid appears to have been fed, I'm gonna go with probably not. And yes those are all real things that it wouldn't even have been that weird to have ended up in a story like this.
I was fascinated when I crossed this story. The mechanics of driving a car aren't that hard once you've done it a couple of times, but to get the car started, into reverse, back up, into drive, navigate surface streets, accelerate onto the freeway (ok, he was going slow), change lanes into the "fast lane" etc... Pretty impressed. I was theorizing that maybe he had played car racing video games (hence the Lambo) and had enough of an understanding of distance perception and braking time not to kill himself. While this is a cute feel good story, that kid is really lucky not to be injured or worse.
You guys don't generally use a stick shift. A clutch would probably have caused a few teeth marks in the steering wheel rather than a car hurtling down a motorway.
I too am impressed that a child so young managed to get out so far but yes, he had a very long run of luck and so did a lot of other people.
Go to an RC field. Nobody above the age of 30 comes close to the childrens in terms of skill. Video games and gravity engines are sufficiently real, I would trust a 12 year old on the track more than myself. Here’s betting that they have video game consoles at the five year old’s house!
Huh, the videogame generation has had a terrible time getting my '72 Dodge started and moving forward. Heck, many can't remember that you have to release the key when the engine catches (modern cars do that for you, and everything else).
Of course, there's that delicate dance pumping the throttle just enough to keep the cold beast from stalling.
I had a classic, DS 21 with a semiautomatic gear box and a bunch of non-standard controls. I'd get a lot of requests from people that wanted to take it for a spin and I always handed them the keys with confidence: "If you can get it started you're allowed to drive it". Nobody ever managed. The reason was that the gear shift lever was used as a very clever lock-out to the starter motor, you started the engine with the gearshift lever in neutral, then moved it to a special position that engaged the starter motor. The key only enabled the contact, not the starter. This was to avoid having the car take off immediately after starting the engine. It also served as a very effective deterrent for wanna-be joy riders.
> This was to avoid having the car take off immediately after starting the engine.
I think modern cars have taken all the ‘fun’ out of learning to drive. Bunny hopping a stick shift along a parking lot used to be a rite of passage, and provided a chuckle for onlookers.
RC cars and video games are much more forgiving of mistakes than driving a real car through a populated area.
Also, the kids who are good at driving RC cars have probably practiced it a lot. I played a lot of Gran Turismo growing up, but it required a lot of practice to get comfortable driving a real car. Video games don't teach you how hard to push the gas pedal.
234 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 183 ms ] threadA 5 year old holding an AK47 is entirely capable of being a legitimate competitor to an adult holding an AK47. An average 10 year old armed with an AK47 might be more dangerous than an average 40 year old. Child soldiers are likely very effective, as depressing as this thought is.
Small children are profoundly ignorant but they're not dramatically less intelligent than adults. In limited domains, like driving or shooting, a high performing child can easily beat a low performing adult.
Once they turn 12 or so they lack that "bounce", it becomes much more difficult or impossible to teach at a certain level.
"At first, he thought the boy appeared to be 8 or 9 years old."
Source: https://www.ksl.com/article/46749182/uhp-5-year-old-boy-pull...
" Our cars are so amazing, even a five year old would drive by himself on a highway to buy it."
It's only fitting that a kid would want one-- badly.
They're toys after-all, expensive, but truly they're toys.
Do you judge art or music that doesn't interest you personally (or which you cannot afford) so harshly?
Lamborghini cars may be impractical based on many people's measures, and their designs may not be to everyone's liking, but your critique is internet-conflict-style hyperbole.
I judge other media when they're promoting excess, particularly when it's harming others on the planet. I find Lamborghinis viscerally disgusting in the same way as a 5000-calorie burger, or a thousand-dollar bottle of champagne being sprayed over a wall.
(This is not about expensive cars in general. Lamborghinis are not bought to be fast, or comfortable, or manoeuvrable. They're bought to be big and loud and consume a lot of gas.)
I am just pointing out that it's a childish desire (not in a bad way). Inside every lambo owner, a part of them, is a little kid just like the one in the news.
I was left a bit confused.
Though this lead me to look up development stages which was interesting [1]
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_the_human_bod...
Cracks monster
Sips
- yuuup
https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/10/us/florida-ups-truck-police-c...
Lot of things disrupt people's day on the road...
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6065434
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!
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.
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.
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.
We're here for curious conversation, not smiting enemies. If you want the latter, please do it elsewhere.
https://twitter.com/mikeandersonKSL/status/12577783769258024...
>“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.
Not to mention that the ethnicity of the person in question in this story is pretty clear from the photographs.
Well, the car features the new UWP UI. Even e 6 yo can drive it. /s
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...
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 often tempted to flag submissions for lesser reasons, so I'd like to know.
I'm curious how this fits, also:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23087769
(I wouldn’t consider this submission off topic)
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> 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.
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.
Kid is jumping the whole unicorn step to Lambo, maybe another example of how Knuth was wrong.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
But someone did post it, and it seems to have done rather well, so I guess that makes us both wrong in this case.
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.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/build-your-own-supercar-on-your...
Luckily, I didn’t make it far. When I finally got it into gear I crashed into the viaduct paralleling our house blocking the road until another motorist found me.
My parents didn’t spank us often but I sure caught hell for that stunt and my allowance was garnished for a very long time!
So far, she's managed to set aside enough to get a dinosaur lego set she really, really wanted and also gone on some carousel rides and bought candy once or twice. It's been a benefit for everyone, I think.
There concept of routine chores (keep your room clean, help keep shared spaces clean, etc) should be well established before an allowance enters the picture. The allowance isn't for doing those things that are just a basic expectation of family life, and starting them both at an early age risks coupling them.
* This is my own personal opinion about our family, and not in any way a value judgement on differing approaches
I think we started "chores" when she was 3. Obviously a three year old doesn't really do much, but she showed interest in feeding the dog and folding some blankets so those became her chores. We make a point of having both parents visibly do chores together.
We'll see how effective this is in another ten years, I suppose.
This is irrelevant tabloid level news.
Now, this would be newsworthy. And Tesla’s stock price would probably increase from the positive news, as well as the increase from additional car sales for its AI safety features.
Kids get up to crazy shit all the time. There's no way to be up their asses enough to stop something like this if they get it in their heads and don't let on ahead of time. There's no way to hide or lock up everything that could be dangerous all of the time. Maybe today one of the many, many things in your house they've always left alone, that could be dangerous, they'll decide to screw with. You just hope they get out of your house before they harm themselves or others too badly.
The difference between these parents and any other set of average to good parents, judging solely from this having happened, is that they were unlucky. Are they bad? Maybe. This doesn't give us much info one way or the other. Are they really really bad? Well since the call to the cops didn't end with one or both parents in jail on drug charges and the car was theirs, not someone else's, and the kid appears to have been fed, I'm gonna go with probably not. And yes those are all real things that it wouldn't even have been that weird to have ended up in a story like this.
I too am impressed that a child so young managed to get out so far but yes, he had a very long run of luck and so did a lot of other people.
Of course, there's that delicate dance pumping the throttle just enough to keep the cold beast from stalling.
I think modern cars have taken all the ‘fun’ out of learning to drive. Bunny hopping a stick shift along a parking lot used to be a rite of passage, and provided a chuckle for onlookers.
Also, the kids who are good at driving RC cars have probably practiced it a lot. I played a lot of Gran Turismo growing up, but it required a lot of practice to get comfortable driving a real car. Video games don't teach you how hard to push the gas pedal.