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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

With three phones and a one-in-eight chance of being unaffected (assuming 50% for each phone) that still leaves a very large number of phones out there that are potentially affected. 100's of millions of devices. The article is pretty clear that it doesn't seem to affect every phone, but that there are numerous complaints.

I'm always imagining 'Some' in front of headlines like these unless it says 'All'.

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That's probably a good policy, but it isn't good English. Any formulation of X has Y characteristic where X is a group implies all members of the group unless the "some" is explicit.

It's a total clickbait headline, but you already knew that hence your policy.

> With three phones and a one-in-eight chance of being unaffected (assuming 50% for each phone) that still leaves a very large number of phones out there that are potentially affected.

Sure, but isn't it the primary job of journalists writing about subjects like this to figure that stuff out before publishing? This is a headline that clearly implies "all" phones. Now we're in a subthread where it seems like the fraction is "<12.5%" (actually we have four in my household, so that gets us to "less than one in 12" I guess).

Do you genuinely believe that "Pixel phones unusable" is a correct characterization of the situation given the data at hand? If you were an editor, would you have published that headline?

No, I wouldn't have published that headline, I would have put 'Some' in front of it, because that's the part that I could be reasonably sure of.

> a one-in-eight chance of being unaffected (assuming 50% for each phone)

Where are you getting 50/50 odds of being affected? Is that cited somewhere, or just a random possible percentage?

(I own one unaffected Pixel.)

Out of thin air...

> With three phones and a one-in-eight chance of being affected (assuming 50% for each phone)

1/8 would be the chance to have all 3 affected. The chance of having at least one affected would be 1-1/8.

Correct, I meant to write 'unaffected'. I'll fix it, thank you.

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