I'm all for applying the principle of charity when it comes to "someone just heard of this and that was their first idea", and even with "there are maybe some responsible use cases involving driving".

But the blue founders here don't fall into the first category, and they made a 2 minute ad advertising their product that doesn't fall into the second category either. Charity only stretches so far.

I'm not a startup investor, but I'm quite serious when I say that ad would give me serious doubts about doing business with this founder for purely practical reasons (on top of other ethical ones). That doesn't mean the product is bad, but a business is more than a product.

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HN definitely does have a dog piling problem where one issue is picked out by the community and discussed ad nauseam to exclusion of all else. To be honest between the magnitude of this issue and the fairly significant discussion downthread about other topics I'm not particularly feeling that it is a problem in this thread though.