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Comment by nilkn | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

Both are wrong. A more unassuming way of phrasing it would be "how did they rule out X", and of course the better response is to take the most generous interpretation and provide and informative response to the spirit of that generous interpretation.

> Is that level of snark necessary or helpful to anyone? I think a far more valuable and helpful response would be to point out why these are not globular clusters. Either you don't know (why reply at all?), or you deliberately chose to withhold that (again: why reply at all?).

I agree with you, that the explanation why that can't be globular clusters would be much more helpful, but if one wants to get it, they'd better do not say things like "globular clusters are not even mentioned in that article, which is weird." People see such statements and answer to them.

When you're asking a question you need to be focused on your question, a little slip can lead to results exactly as we see. If I was asking that question, I would mention my disappointment with the lack of mention of globular clusters, but I wouldn't call the article weird because of this, I'd rather mention my limited knowledge of astronomy and my curiosity and my hunger for knowledge, and I make it clear that these are the reasons of my disappointment, not the bad work of the authors of the article.

Is this level of tone policing helpful on net, though?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

> Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

> Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.

> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.

Basically everyone is wrong here

I'll say on HN I do appreciate that. This is one of the last bastions of good conversations on the net. We all try to do our best to keep it that way, and one of the methods is to call out comments as such. Just my opinion but I appreciate it, snarky or not we just want good conversation even if its among dissenting opinions.

In my estimation, yes. I'd like to see replies here focus on helpfulness and knowledge sharing. You are certainly free to disagree.

OK, even though the comment that you think is too snarky does not bother me, I will take this conversation to mean that I should use a stricter standard than merely "would not bother me" to which to hold my own comments.

The comment at which the snark was direct is a bad comment (the writer does not know enough about astronomy to make any weird feeling he has about an astronomy article to be the least bit informative) but I'll downvote comments like that rather than try to defend snarky replies to them.

Having continued the original discussion in another sub-thread, yes.

It certainly could be helpful, as it is a reminder that the people making the observations also have functioning brains and, being more expert in the topic than the naive querent, would most likely have already considered the obvious. After some contemplation of the rather mild rebuke, the querent might ask better questions, or at least refrain from asking bad ones.

Many folks on HN, when encountering non-"tech" articles in the sciences, have a somewhat distressing habit of plunging toward assumptions which suggest that the people in the article have failed to look for the obvious and/or are decades behind in what the subjects know. This is especially sorrowful, because who among us hasn't suffered through someone asking us, in our specialty, "Why don't you just hit the EASY button? It's around here somewhere! You're making this sound hard!"

> Either you don't know (why reply at all?)

Because, as a lay person, I’ve heard of globular clusters, and that means several experts in the field not talking about them points not to “weird”, but to “nope”.

I don't contest the answer "nope" (in fact, I provided an explanation) -- I contest your decision to prioritize snark over helpfulness.

I mainly take issue with the “weird” designation, as if every science article must somehow explain everything unrelated the phenomenon isn’t.

Anyone with JWST time slots knows what a globular cluster is. If they say it’s weird and unexplained, it probably is at present.

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