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Comment by dotancohen | Hacker News Reader

What kind of journalism is this? Seriously, are these articles neither proof-read nor passed by an editor before publishing?

> The device is thin, as far as tablets go, at 5.4 mm, unfolded. Closed, it’s nearly double that, at 11 mm.

11mm is _more_ than double 5.4mm.

> with a 19:5 aspect ration.

Aspect ration? Are aspects now too precious to waste?

> ...as Richard You takes the stage...

> ...according to mobile CEO Richard Yu...

Could we at least get some consistency in proper noun transliterations?

There's so much more that I feel like I'm reading an article published by a middle-school student. If so, then he did a great job. If this is supposed to be a professional journalist, though, then he should go back to middle school.

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Posting first is a big deal for news media sites. This story will be replaced by others today so no one will care that there were problems so long as it shows up first in the Google news results this morning.

Seems like a good use of machine learning to solve. Surely tools to auto edit already exist?

Surely just a basic spell and grammar check is enough without over-engineering solutions...

My company pushes out at least 10,000 words of content each week for clients and I would fire immediately anyone that let that rookie garbage go to a client. The difference is our clients pay us to be good at this. TechCrunch readers dont really pay TC writers to do anything.

I agree with your criticism, but I don't get what is the problem with the first point (I am not a native speaker). Doesn't "nearly" just mean "close to" and not necessarily "less than"?

I see what you mean, but there's a clear implication of "less than" in that particular case. In the same way, you can't say that a runner has "nearly crossed the finishing line" a few moments after they cross it.

Not to mention that it doesn't take a genius to see that a solid object folded in half is not going to be less than twice as thick!

That's precisely why I immediately thought of "nearly" meaning a bit more instead of a bit less.

It is still no clear to me what makes "nearly" in this particular case to mean "less than". Curiously enough, "nearly crossed the finish line" indeed sounds totally wrong to me.

It's context dependent. "nearly" means "not quite reaching the target", so if you are talking about "doubling" something, then "nearly doubling" it would mean to end up with slightly less than double.

That said, I believe it is usually used to mean "less than". In this case, I would use "just over" instead, ie, "closed, it's just over double that".

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