alt Hacker NewsBut the Internet nerds wish to blindly judge something they know nothing about so they can feel better with the assumption that they could have done better somehow. How will they be appeased if the document they will say they have read and understood (without having done either) is not available to point at? How, I ask?!
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It's entirely reasonable to ask for the underlying research in response to a blog post hyping up an unproven claim in an area notoriously full of amateurs making the same claim that historically fail to stand up to scrutiny.
Particularly when the only source is a friend of the author, posting on a blog named "AI Clambake" about "A weekly, human-powered newsletter for advertising folks who want to stay on top of the AI mayhem" and not a publication with any credibility in linguistics.
None of that means it can't be true, but some basic skepticism is warranted here. Otherwise we end up in a situation like the LK99 room temperature superconductor where a lot of HN commenters were also upset at the cynical "downers" who just couldn't root for a good thing/progress.
After reading too many post in HN I got two conclusions:
1) Many preprints are bad, incredible bad. I read a lot of posts about ivermectine during 2020 and the errors were obvious. Like no control groups, the control group is a bunch of unrelated guys in another city, and a weird articles that split the 20+20 cases in 10 bins with 2+2 cases in each. They had a lot of error that were easy to spot without being a medical doctor. (Ctrl+F exclusions, you may get a surprise.) (And don't get me started with Chlorine Dioxide.)
2) Perpetual mobile and mass less drive reappear every few years. I definetively can read most of them. The most interesting part is the totally broken explanation of why this new version does not break the laws of physics.
3) HN has a lot of users specialized in niche topic. A few weeks ago I wrote a comment with a joke: "the list of text transformation to allow a Spanish speaker to read German enters in a napkin" (for example v->f and w->v and a few more). Someone was surprised because s/he knows that German has more phonemes than English that has more phonemes than Spanish. There is someone wandering here that really knows about phonetics.
So, I want to see a preprint. Perhaps I can read it, perhaps someone else can read it, perhaps we have to wait a few days until someone writes a nice blog post and debunks it, perhaps it's correct.