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Comment by junon | Hacker News Reader

Not really low effort if it points out a huge problem in the world of scientific journalism...

The article stated exactly the limitations of the experiment. It was conducted with mice and only mice with a less common form of ALS.

I'd say the problem is less with journalism in this instance, and more-so with peoples limited attention spans.

The article didn't even name the drug. It's a terrible article.

I had a quick look around, no article seems to mention it, but the article leaves enough clues that it's pretty easy to find. The drug is curcumin derivative GT863, I'm not sure how much that enriched either of our understandings though.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/356971571_Therapeut...

It's a problem with the title.

My point regarding attention span stands. The title could certain do with improvement, but people should not be consuming their news of the basis of titles.

I do because most articles are crap. The comments are simply better quality. For example, I was able to tell in 2 seconds that this was on mice from reading the comments and so that I don't care about the article.

Quite often comments are wrong, top-rated comments are often reflective of bombastic conclusions arrived at (and upvoted) by people who had not read the article.

The first page of HN has thirty articles. I can't read all of them. I don't recognize the author's names, so I can't judge by that. The number of comments does not tell me if I will be interested in the article. The title is all I have to go on.

Admittedly, I should probably assume that anything relating to Alzheimer's or Parkinson's has an implicit "(in mice)" tag.

Isn't this more of a problem with HN guidelines for submitting articles than anything else?

If someone reads the article, they see where it says this is in a mouse model of an uncommon form of ALS.

Yes. There are lots of problems with the HN "guidelines," not least of which that they're actually rules you get punished for breaking and not "guidelines" you can choose not to follow.

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