>Why does it matter? The press does context-free puff-pieces all the time, Yes, I'm very aware of the meta-game around "puff pieces" which I've explained befo

>Why does it matter? The press does context-free puff-pieces all the time, Yes, I'm very aware of the meta-game around "puff pieces" which I've explained before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30881420 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30881420 It seems your "Why does it matter?" was just a rhetorical question as prelude to your comment about puff pieces already existing in abundance ... But I'll answer it as if you had asked that question earnestly: It matters because readers would like to know how to gauge the significance of unfamiliar tech mentioned in the article. So we have 2 interpretations of this thread's article: (a) this poacher detection tool is a true breakthrough -- and the inventor also happens to be a teenager; the tech itself is not hype. The idea is truly a game changer and while the inventor's age is very young, that's a footnote to the tech invention. ... or ... (b) the tool's tech (machine learning) is not significant and may not even work in the real world -- but the teenager's attempt at problem solving is showing promise of future things to come; let us celebrate this young person's effort. A previous example of the first (a) type of story is this one a teen discovering a new classical algorithm comparable to a quantum algorithm: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17654220 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17654220 That wasn't some pure human-interest puff piece about teenager Ewin Tang. Instead, a respected computer scientist (Scott Aaronson) said it was legitimate new work that advanced our understanding of the field. >1. Sometimes the "revolutionary tech" is not just plain evolutionary, but fake. But a layperson reading the hagiography can't tell the difference Right ... and readers don't want to mistakenly interpret the story as type (a) when it was actually type (b). The gp (Avalaxy) of the subthread tried to give us some extra perspective about this story that the journalist did not.