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Comment by avar | Hacker News Reader

I really wish HN had some policy/method of changing the links to such pop-sci articles to the actual source. The paper they're talking about is much more readable. These news articles manage to spread all the information in the concise abstract over multiple pages without adding anything of value.

Here's the paper: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/201...

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The reason this article was written was because Wired paid a journalist to peruse a bunch of academic journals looking for interesting stuff. If you cut Wired out from the profit loop, you’d have to read those academic journals yourself, or depend on other users on this website to do it. I don’t see either happening reliably enough to compete with a paid professional.

It's really time for hn to acknowledge that stories have multiple links, perspectives, and chronological events and allow groupings. Take techmeme for example https://www.techmeme.com/191010/p17#a191010p17

To the left of the story, click the down arrow, thats every repost or perspective of the original story. Then the indented stories are followups.

Circa also designed itself around this, having a story and when you clicked it, THEN you would see the overall structure of the stories development timeline.

It wouldnt even have to be a chance to the existing hn site, somuch as an additional view that allows stories and comments to be stitched together and intermixed.

More on the topic of this post, I love the wired headline, how it reads "lightening strikes twice" and then the sentence continues, modifying twice into "twice as."

Never heard about Circa before, but just read a little about them and their feature that has the goal

> "to break down a story into its core elements: facts, stats, quotes and media", as opposed to a summary where content is reduced for quicker reading or users are linked elsewhere for the full story

Do you know of any other [general, not tech-specific] media outlets with this philosophy? I find most sources these days are unhelpful even though they think they're adding value with emphasis on narratives.

it flies in the face of "chronological feed culture" (twitter, rivers) and "algo popularity" to have people clicking the same story multiple time for updates. chron/ai feeds are meant to let you ever feast on the new without ever going back to the old. that philosophy you are looking for has a hard time competing with out of context constantly breaking news blips. (short answer to your q, I cant think of a good one off the top of my head.) Does wikinews have that sort of metastructure above stories? https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Main_Page

personally id love a menu in a news app that says "updates to stories youve clicked" without having to follow a story. then separately i would have "followed/starred" stories as a different menu entry. they might sort differently, such as, since last clicked vs since most recent update.

Look at the hyperlinks in the Wired article:

https://www.bls.gov/ooh/transportation-and-material-moving/w...

https://www.wired.com/story/no-more-screen-time-navy-reverts...

https://www.washington.edu/news/2017/09/07/ship-exhaust-make...

https://www.wired.com/story/cleaner-ships-more-expensive-hol...

Five links, three back to their own site, two away from their site. But none of them link to the academic paper! This is totally unacceptable. Is this not the web, aren't hyperlinks the most basic tool we have when creating the web? Aren't hyperlinks what make the "web" a web in the first place? So why then do media organizations refuse to use them properly?

(Sometimes they have the excuse of "not wanting to send precious eyeballs to somebody else's site" which I don't think is an excuse that should be tolerated but isn't even relevant here since they did include two links that leave Wired.)

I don't think we should be rewarding this sort of gatekeeping behavior. This isn't a one time fluke. Refusing to link to source material even though it's available on the web is the status quo for scientific journalism in particular. It's gatekeeping, and shouldn't be accepted as the status quo.

i can nearly guarantee you that the “journalist” found it on twitter just like the rest of us

Thank you! The Abstract and especially the "Plain Language Summary" are written great. Sometimes even abstracts can be hard to understand if you are not experienced in the field, and I appreciate news sources summarizing those papers in more layman language, but in this case the article just makes it worse.

I do like the "Plain Language Summary", but as a non-scientist (but hopefully reasonably smart person), there's still some jargon in there that's confusing (had no idea what "graupel" was, nor "microphysics of cloud drop formation").

Credit to them for including something like that and definitely needs to be done more from the primary source, but think it needs a bit more work to be properly "plain language".

> had no idea what "graupel" was

funny. Here in Germany, "Graupel" is commonly used in normal weather reports. I didn't even know the word existed like that in english and didn't realize it when I read the paper. It's weird that you don't really notice words of your native language in a foreign language text. Or at least I rarely do. Same with the (originally German) words "Doppelgänger" and "Kindergarten".

Interesting, I tend to find the opposite - I outweightedly find the English words (or at least, the English versions of words probably derived from another language...) in text more often. Probably because my additional language skills are really bad.

Feel like, "oh, I definitely know that word!"

I would really dislike it if somebody had the power to swap out links like that. The whole purpose of social voting sites is that we get to to decide what links we see as a community. Plenty of folks prefer casually summarized content, ads and all.

This is also why I only click through to comments, and then to the link, if the comments deem it worthwhile/primary source

There already is such a policy, though enforcement depends on somebody complaining and the mods following through.

>Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter.

Thanks! Not to mention how annoying paywalls are...

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