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Comment by chucky | Hacker News Reader

This seems like a more general problem with the Internet or even of people (and in particular men of a more technical and nerdy persuasion, in my own experience).

The majority have nothing of value to say, so will post nothing. The only ones who can realistically offer comments on this article are experts and those who will offer "back of a cocktail napkin" comments (as you put it), and the latter group is so much larger than the former.

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Agreed, I wasn't going to comment on this post because this is something I've never heard of before. There's no point for me to add a comment like "I don't know the reason behind this" because that adds no value to the discussion. Actually discussing ideas whether or not they are researched for years or not adds value to the discussion, because then you can actually discuss where those ideas are wrong or where they could be right.

The point is that any idea you could come up with in 5 minutes has probably been done to death by researchers who actually focus on the topic so no, you're not contributing anything.

But it's beside the point because HN isn't there to add anything to actual research, nor is it going to. It's for people to discuss random interesting Internet things, it's for entertainment. But there does seem to be a nerd contingent that can't accept that it's entertainment and have to believe its some kind of intellectual pursuit.

Exactly, I'm not claiming to be contributing anything to the research, but contributing to the discussion of the research.

which is great, as long as you're not deluding yourself into thinking that researchers would benefit at all from reading HN discussions of their work. Some people seem to think that they would.

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