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Comment by isoprophlex | Hacker News Reader

Is it me or is this article especially poorly worded? It took me a little too much effort to figure out what this figure caption even means:

> Negative ions typically have a geometry that is very close to the transition state of the corresponding neutral reactions

CH3OHF anion is prepared and de-ionized with laser light. It dissociates into methanol and F radial, under very slight changes of the involved molecular geometries...?

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Phys.org is a roaring dumpster fire, and frankly the domain should never show up on HN. If it’s on phys.org, they found it somewhere, and that original source will be far better than the half-assed version on phys.org.

Actual original paper... https://www.nature.com/articles/nchem.2804

The content at the phys.org link was written by the University of New Mexico press shop (see my other comment).

And? HN deserves better... click on the DOI link at least and submit that, not this garbled secondhand trash.

My point is mostly that the problem is larger than phys.org. UNM itself is the source of the lesser article.

That phys.org just aggregates material available elsewhere is also an additional reason not to link it. It's suggested to link original articles (in a different sense than you are using) in the submission guidelines.

You’re certainly not wrong, and the endless parade of press releases and aggregators of press releases are indeed, terrible. Having said that however, I’ve never come across a site as popular and worthless as Phys.org (edit: in this space at least). The AAAS, iiie and other maintain decent aggregators, or the original is best.

It does seem to be rather poorly written, e.g. the next paragraph

> they actually don't follow Newton's Law, they follow Schrodinger's Law so that theory is what we call quantum mechanics. The quantum mechanical interpretation tells scientists a lot of insights.

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