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Comment by hwillis | Hacker News Reader

This is a low-impact segment. I skipped around a lot but it's incredibly light on information. Like 20% is spent on explaining what fusion is, which is just wasted air. The only substance is a super-light overview of ITER. No mention of the couple dozen fusion startups.

>Nuclear fusion is on the brink of a major milestone

ITER is supposed to ignite in 2025 if it stays on schedule. The project is in continual jeopardy from people pulling out. Fusion is bleak despite large variety in research[1]. This whole thing could be reduced to a 30 second endorsement soundbyte. Instead it's a longform that gives no actual idea of the state of fusion.

[1]: http://fusion4freedom.us/intensive-analysis-lockheed-martins...

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Really appreciate a summary like this, even when brief. I wish people would take a cue from academia and post more abstracts/tldr's.

The 80k Hours podcast does a fantastic job at this, providing a full transcript, a summary of the key points, and a time-indexed table of contents.

https://80000hours.org/2017/08/podcast-we-are-not-worried-en...

> I wish people would take a cue from academia and post more abstracts/tldr's.

Then they get downvoted by people who think "TL;DR READ IT" is a masterful blow against everything wrong with Kids Today.

To be more serious, there's enough people who apparently regard summaries as lazy that it's hard to predict whether they'll be welcome in any given forum. Caring or not caring about downvotes aside, posting stuff that's unwelcome isn't very sociable.

It is lazy, but only if the summaries are replacing actually reading the content.

Also a summary is only as good as it is accurate. If the piece being summarized has sufficient nuance it can't be summarized well, or is at a higher risk of being summarized incorrectly.

There's a joke here somewhere about judging a book by its cover.

This is the mandatory class attendence problem from college in a nutshell: if you have to require people to attend class, then you're obviously not delivering value in class.

If a summary covers all the relevant information in the article, then actually reading the article is a waste of time. And note how GP used compression to excise pieces that would be repetitious for an average HN reader.

Different articles are worthwhile to different people. Abstracts help people find content they are interested in, reduces incentives for clickbait and burying the lede, and focus discussion on the main points. Of course bad summaries can be bad for the discussion, but that's what downvotes and criticism is for. The same is true for normal comments.

> Then they get downvoted by people who think "TL;DR READ IT" is a masterful blow against everything wrong with Kids Today

How many articles are released every day? The sheer number of words published every minute, all with titles designed to demand attention, is truly staggering.

Assuming that everyone who wants an abstract/tl;dr is lazy is ridiculous (though, as always, not completely inaccurate). Anyone who enjoys staying up-to-date on a broad set of topics can hardly expect to maintain a functional lifestyle without some help in picking which articles and reports get read in-depth.

On a separate note, the bigger problem with Kids Today (imo) is the pursuit of arbitrary social points (karma/upvotes/likes/retweets) when engaging in discussions online. This seems to drive the trend toward low effort memes, jokes and pop culture references which decrease the signal/noise ratio.

I used "downvotes" to represent what they're meant to be used for here: "Is this content HN-worthy?"

I keep an eye on my total karma because I want to know whether I am, on the whole, fitting in around here, and which comments contribute to that the most one way or the other. Speaking truth to power can be useful, or fun, but if you're saying things that aren't being heard, you're just wasting your time and everyone else's screen space.

And some venues want the entertainment. That's signal in their world, and they deserve to have it.

I've got severe ADHD so I detest audio/video as a communication medium. A minor break in focus causes a huge time penalty on any serial information. Not to mention it limits you to a 10x slower bitrate.

With text you can tell by skimming if something is worth your time. Even with video preview you can get a bit of a gist. I hate audio with no context.

I can't see a startup cracking fusion.

They may be called startups but they still have hundreds of millions in funding and large intellectual resources. Many of the ideas are wildly off the wall but they're backed by a lot more than a few guys in a garage.

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