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Comment by wpasc | Hacker News Reader

HN has always seemed to me to be a great place to get a cold shower against all AI/NN hype, generally where I go to for a sober evaluation.

I dont think the comments will reflect "gobbling up"

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HN may provide a good reality check for AI/NN (I'm not equipped to say). But HN is not a physics site, and it's really not such a good place to go for a reality check on physics. (Not really a criticism. HN doesn't claim to be a physics site.)

For the small minority who are going to say "I'm really smart and I've taken some physics classes" ... please consider how far "I'm really smart and I've taken some programming classes" would get you on HN.

Not that that's a real physics paper, but HN has many former physicists; for example, my Ph.D. thesis had the words "three body problem" in it, and it wasn't about Chinese science fiction.

Yeah we were doing numerical linear algebra before everyone though it was the key to replacing call centers (well in my case after, but the field generally)

So the tech companies hired a bunch of us

For sure there are physicists reading HN. Absolutely. My claim, which I probably expressed clumsily, is that the majority of commenters here are not physicists.

I think there is quite a large overlap in audience - quite a few of the readers here will have PhDs in physics in a way that few internets forums will.

There are physics people on HN. I'll stick by my claim that the crowd here is not a physics crowd. I'm confident that among web sites HN scores well above average on physics ... but discussions of physics on an average web site aren't something I really want to even think about.

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