[hn_throwaway_99]

I agree with you, but I think part of the reason people have the reaction they do is that they start with the headline, which teases people into thinking this is something that is actually semi-viable, and then when they go in to read the article they find it is basically an art project, so there is this dissonance between expectations and reality.

I almost feel like we need a "Show HN an Art Project:"-like headline prefix.

[schoen]

Compounded here by the headline starting with "Inventor".

Typically "inventor does X" reads as a proof of concept of something other people might someday want to do, too.

[ineedasername]

I suppose someone might figure a way to economically scale the methane captured here.

Of course the method this person used, agitating the bottom of the pond, could have an adverse impact of the ecosystem of the pond itself. Do they rely on trace quantities of methane in some way? Will the muddy & cloudy disturbed water make survival harder, maybe killing the biomass that was generating the methane? Who knows. Well, someone might know, but I guess my point is that agitating metastable systems can have outcomes that are hard to predict.

[Semiapies]

The downside would be that probably only a small fraction of people would read those. Which might be worth saving the annoyance of people having this reaction (and the random people convinced they are reading about anything but an art project).

[geoduck14]

Serious question, why would you use a throwaway account for a comment like this?

[NegativeLatency]

Maybe the name is just a joke?

user: hn_throwaway_99

created: February 20, 2017

karma: 28836

[ineedasername]

Really any account with less than 100k karma is practically a throwaway account.

[coding123]

whoa, even dang has only 25k. I'm not longer going to listen to him when he threatens bans.

[ineedasername]

Maybe HN stores karma as a 32-bit integer and dang had a buffer overflow and is simply wrapping back around to 25k now.