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Comment by battery_cowboy | Hacker News Reader

> An engineered PET depolymerase to break down and recycle plastic

Wrong title, and it's not for all plastics. We all complain here about journalism taking the wrong conclusion and I'm just pointing out the factually wrong message in the title.

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"An enzyme decomposes 90% of plastic in 10h" is more succinct and readable than the real article title, and it's not wrong. A depolymerase is a kind of enzyme [0].

[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/depolymerase

I didn't have any trouble understanding it, but I guess we'll just dumb it down into the factually wrong message...

We've changed the submitted title ("An enzyme decomposes 90% of plastic in 10h") to that of the article.

I prefer this title, I clicked on it. I might not have with the original.

But it doesn't break down all plastics, just for PET. The title should match the article according to the HN rules.

How many people know what PET is? I'm not sure I would have got the reference. The original title has too much jargon.

So? It's not for all plastics, there are so many different kinds and they're all different! This is basically only used in food containers, not products like your TV or phone case.

Also, that's a false argument. We shouldn't dumb things down to incorrectness just so people understand them. It's not hard to look up 'PET plastic', and I see enough complex article titles on HN that I don't think that applicable to our community.

How's that a false argument? It's reasonable to avoid jargon in communication where possible - if you want to communicate to a wider audience. In this case I don't think it adds much. Once you click through you get the details.

But the mods seem to agree with you, so I'm in the minority opinion it seems.

"PET" isn't jargon, it's a designation/name, much like "relational database" or "Phoenix framework". It's a name and type of a plastic, and to replace it with "plastic" alone makes the headline wildly inaccurate, like if I said "this new medicine cures cancer in 90 percent of patients" but it was just about some rare cancer that only 100 people get a year and couldn't be applied to other cancers.

Depolemerize is jargon, admittedly.

90% PET plastic maybe. It seems PET is not the most common plastic.

"Polyethylene" might be a good compromise, I believe it's in more common usage outside of the US and would still be fairly understandable (and searchable) to those within it.

But it isn't for plain polyethylene (HDPE or LDPE). It's specifically for PET. I suggest "PET plastic bottles" in place of just "plastic".

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