4 ms·

Thank you! I would very much appreciate it if Hacker News could conveniently replace these newsbite-extracted-from-university-press-release-about-a-paper links

Thank you! I would very much appreciate it if Hacker News could conveniently replace these newsbite-extracted-from-university-press-release-about-a-paper links with the paper itself as the main focus and then the university press release as supplementary material. As it is, this is a game of Chinese whispers, and it’s a subtle infohazard. To begin with the university press release tends to subtly misunderstand the paper and misrepresent it and its context. For instance there is a tendency for the PR team to claim that the results are unprecedented and hitherto unknown, simply because the PR team isn’t a field expert and doesn’t know that they don’t know what is known. (Let alone the impact of PR incentives.) Then the aggregator-newsbite-feed site misunderstands and misrepresents further.

O__________O 4y ago
While I agree having the best source is better, which is in my experience is better is random; sources including: press releases, press, paper, demo, Twitter, YouTube, etc. In my opinion, defaulting to only one would be bad idea; better to just review them and if needed on case by case basis email the mods to make a change it needed. I do think having a fields for “official source” or “notable coverage” might be a good idea, since it’s common to have a better non-official source or review an independent notable coverage — and dumping that into the comments in my opinion takes away from the core value of the comments.