Comment by dontlikeyoueith
5 hours ago
Do you honestly think you've come up with a clever idea that none of the researchers in the field already considered?
You are describing MACHOS, which was one hypothesis for dark matter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_compact_halo_object
The thing is, we've looked for them. If they were small (asteroid sized), the amount required would be visible as dark clouds obscuring the objects behind them. If they were large (brown dwarf or bigger), we'd see gravitational lensing from them. We don't really see either of those on the scale required to explain the gravitational effect.
shit man. I was asking a question. So much for curiosity at HN.
I think it's the "can we honestly say" phrasing that got you flamed here. It reads as "those stupid scientists don't know what they're doing".
Curiosity is one thing, but in practice "just asking questions about dark matter" is uncomfortably close to pseudoscience and a lot of us are sick of it. It's similar to if you had accidentally said something similar to a young-earth creationist.
HN is less hackers than it is pedantic VC lackeys training for their aspirational role as a wealthy-and-opinionated Twitter personality.