This particular story is the moral equivalent of a company breaking the million dollar barrier. From a certain point of view, it's big news... but from another

This particular story is the moral equivalent of a company breaking the million dollar barrier. From a certain point of view, it's big news... but from another more objective point of view, "a million dollar income" is completely arbitrary. The set of caveats they add to "got more energy out than we put in" in this particular story is equally arbitrary. Or, in other words, yes, this isn't as big a deal as you think, because they are... well... at least shading the truth. They've created a fairly arbitrary and practically useless measure for which this is "over unity". What's more, this isn't just me being negative; as many people observed in the HN comment chain there are ways in which it's kind of arbitrarily low too, like, we already apparently have lasers that would be more efficient and make the overall ratio of input to output look better. It's arbitrary in a lot of ways, not just self-serving ones. It's not a huge breakthrough. It's an incremental step. That's fine. There's nothing wrong with that. We're going to see a lot of incremental steps between here and where even we finally land on with fusion. But there's been so many and will be so many more incremental steps that they aren't really newsworthy for a general audience.