[lbeltrame]

Peer review, while extremely useful in bringing out some, or many warts of a work, is not a substitute for quality control, which depends only on the authors.

> Don't expect that you, the average HN reader, knows better than reviewers with relevant backgrounds.

After what happened with the Surgisphere paper, where the first problem was the statistics (caught by post-publication comments) and only later there was the problem of fake data, the mere presence of a secret review does not mean the work is up to anything.

P.S: yes, I work in the fields of biology and pharmacology and have written and reviewed a number of papers myself.

[dekhn]

I still think it's a fair comment that most Hacker News readers are not the audience for pre-prints. It's simply not possible for people untrained in the art of reading papers in a specific field to make reasoned judgements.