> This is the first time it's been posted where most of the comments appear to be resentment that you could afford to do the project at all.
Despite the negativity, I'm glad that we can at least talk about the topic of wealth and privilege on HN now, rather than comments pointing it out being flag/voted down into oblivion. I don't harbor any resentment about OP's home/project, but I can totally understand the resentment from others, especially in these times, and it at the very least deserves to be mentioned.
By contrast, I think that every post on HN doesn't need a bucket full of crabs complaining that they can't do the same thing. It's not intellectually stimulating.
You don't think questions of how we design our societies, who gets to benefit from it, how power is distributed, of systems design and how we relate to each other socially are intellectually stimulating?
May I suggest the problem is not with the questions then?
I don't see any of those discussions. I see people complaining that Kenton is "privileged", that him enjoying himself his somehow harmful, that his house is too big, and implying that all is a problem; with little to no specifics on how or why.
You're completely welcome to make a post that raises those questions, but I think its irrelevant here. I don't think its productive for every fun project posted to have an inquisition in the comments on whether or not the project deserves to exist.
> May I suggest the problem is not with the questions then?
It's against the guidelines to make swipes like this.
I find it frustrating that people cannot have a conversation about what enables a project to exist without people going shhh just look at the shinies.
To me, it is a very surface level uncritical attitude directly counter to the hacker ethos of looking at how systems work.
We tend to examine projects by their inputs and outputs. I don't think it's fair to exempt capital and resources, one of the key inputs, from examination.
That's not to say this isn't a cool house or the person building it did anything bad themselves, they're just an actor in the bigger incentive system.
Despite the negativity, I'm glad that we can at least talk about the topic of wealth and privilege on HN now, rather than comments pointing it out being flag/voted down into oblivion. I don't harbor any resentment about OP's home/project, but I can totally understand the resentment from others, especially in these times, and it at the very least deserves to be mentioned.