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Comment by stcredzero | Hacker News Reader

In conventional guns, a bullet loses velocity from the moment the gunpowder ignites and sends it flying. The railgun projectile instead gains speed as it travels the length of a 32-foot barrel

Even the Wall Street Journal has science/engineering illiterate idiots writing for it? If engineered properly, a conventional naval gun will also continue to accelerate its projectile all the way down the barrel. Why does this idiot think there are various guns that have long barrels? It's to give expanding gasses a longer time to accelerate the projectile.

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You make good points, but I wish you'd express yourself more nicely. You really don't need to call the authors idiots (twice!) To make your case.

This is how I genuinely feel about the level of scientific illiteracy our society has fallen to. We literally have people at an executive level who are functionally illiterate in science, making decisions on the basis of their ignorance. (The editors of the WSJ could be seen as examples of this.) "Solar Freakin Roadways" got almost $2 million from the public. Are we functioning with a viable educational system for a complex technological democratic society? Heck no. Even the people in charge are riddled with ignorance on basic levels.

Not knowing what you don't know can literally cost untold treasure and many millions of lives. There are tons of examples of this in history. I'm pretty sure we're not doing so great a job teaching that either.

And yes, it even goes to examples of basic Computer Science knowledge on HN!

The sincerity of your feelings is not the point. The point is that calling people names reduces the quality of the comments.

I think that calling people names here was making the comment much closer to what 'stcredzero actually thinks. I.e. it boosted accuracy and clarity of the comment.

Also, personally I don't have any other idea how to fix journalism than calling them out every time, and calling them out hard.

You literally used "accuracy" and "clarity" as synonyms for intensity of emotion. Under that logic, everything becomes a screaming match, and the comments devolve into a competition to see who's feelings are the most virulent.

I meant something else. When you write a comment, you transcribe your thoughts and feelings into text. That text may or may not be close to what you actually think - e.g. to the words you use in your internal monologue. In this case I think the word choice serves to portray the actual thoughts and emotions of the author more clearly/accurately.

What ideas, as opposed to emotions, can't be communicated without name calling?

High quality comments are written to convey an idea or present an argument (low quality comments are often written to make the writer feel good about themselves without conveying any meaningful idea).

Removing words with high emotional charge but low signal (such as "idiot") will increase the quality and effectiveness of the comment. Others will view the comment more favorably, and any additional discussion is likely to be more productive this way.

I don't disagree with the sentiment, although I think you go a little too far - not everyone can be an expert in everything, and journalists have a genuinely hard problem of trying to a) learn something well enough and quickly enough to get it to print within a few hours, and b) manage to reduce it to a form that the average reader will understand. These are genuinely hard problems.

P.S. Either way, the house rules here are to "be nice". You can argue (and many do in this thread) whether this is a good policy, but it is the policy.

I'd otherwise agree, but this is journalism. Even here people seem in need to be reminded that the quality level of news media, even those reputable ones, fell down to ridiculously low levels.

This serves as yet another visible instance (out of countless) that shows they have no fucking clue what they're writing about and they don't even care.

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