This is a news website article about a scientific paper | Hacker News Reader

This is a news website article about a scientific paper

guardian.co.uk

124 pointsharscoat21 comments

This is a clever and witty comment which points out that the original paper couldn't possibly have meant what the journalist said it did.

This is a reply to your comment pointing out that you missed one tiny fact and disagreeing with your comment on the basis of that fact, regardless of your arguments merits.

In this unbearably nitpicky reply, I point out that you forgot an apostrophe in your penultimate word.

This angry reply rants about how you clearly never read the article, or the paper, or in fact anything ever, and ends with a comment about the writers mother.

He forgot the part where he claims the paper demonstrates a causal link from A and B, when in fact the paper merely demonstrates a correlation, and the scientists explicitly warned that A may not cause B.

This is a comment pointing out that the idea is probably copied shamelessly from http://faultline.org/index.php/site/item/incendiary/ which in turn copies equally shamelessly and equally without attribution from David Moser's wonderful short story found here http://consc.net/misc/moser.html .

This is a comment pointing that "there is nothing new under the sun", as the Ecclesiastes puts it.

This comment also suggests that it is probable that the ancient greeks made self-referential text jokes too, thousands of years ago.

The final part of this comment bemoans the lack of progress of humanity from this and other standpoints.

The way news website don't cite the actual papers they are writing about bugs me. It's not hard to dig up the paper. It's not all the journalist's fault though: Most press releases don't cite the actual research properly either.

Also, this article is right to call out the desire of news outlets to create controversy, even when there is none. However, more often they tend to just repeat the gushing, enthusiastic statements of the university or charity PR department, with no conception of when and indeed if the research will actually lead to anything in the real world.

And this news article format is why I mention Peter Norvig's online essay about how to read research reports

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

in comments to most HN submissions of such articles that I see.

Also a good proxy for recent BBC Horizon programmes, I'm afraid.

I used to watch Horizon a lot when I was a kid in the '70s and '80s (I particularly remember the "Painting by Numbers" program where they covered the state of the art in computer graphics).

However, when I have watched it more recently it seems terrible - very "pop science" with lots of annoying repetition. What I don't know is whether the old Horizons were actually any better or whether it is me getting a lot older, or a combination of both!

Seem here, except I was a kid watching it in the 90s.

Thinking about this a bit more I suspect it is largely the quality of the programs. I watched Sagan's Cosmos when it first came out and have watched it recently and I thought it stood up pretty well.

The thing I love on TV programmes is when the show you a clip of what they are going to show you, show you it and then go back and recap it for you in case you didn't bother to watch the first half of the programme. I think I would cry if I had written a decent documentary and then seen what the producers do with it. Cookery programmes are terrible for this — you never see people actually doing the bloody cooking.

Here's a recent example of a news website writing a good article about a scientific paper:

http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/09/gamers-make-fast...

How meta :-)

Reminds me of CNN's "Nothing is happening" and another BBC news cast "tutorial", I think it was done by Ricky Gervais. These things just sink into the web somehow, does anyone have a bookmark left?

Charlie Brooker - How To Report The News

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtGSXMuWMR4

Is this actually about something? The "journal link" goes to creationist site Answers in Genesis and its "journal", however I cannot find anything relevant there...

This is the paragraph where the research is described as a significant step in fighting terror, curing cancer, or solving world hunger.

This is a comment asking if someone can provide a tl;dr version.

He described generic New York Times article about "science." Academic physicists know that a mention in the first page of the New York Times earns them more professional points in the form of fame than the actual article.

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