[jcranmer]

As noted by the sibling comment, the physicists (especially those who specialized in superconductor research!) were the ones who were the most skeptical of the announcement, partially because claims of room-temperature superconductors are actually relatively common, and partially because the evidence in the paper was just atrociously bad [1].

One of the things I look forward to in an HN discussion is the comments of people who can collate expert opinions on the subject and surface these kinds of points in a more ELI15 kind of way. But despite there being ~a week of LK-99 stories permanently on the front page, there wasn't much of that (a little on the initial thread, and virtually nothing for the next several days)--and it's not for lack of physicists commenting on the topic (in other forums)!

[1] I saw someone point out that, when you translate the units on the resistivity/temperature graph, it is a worse conductor than copper at room temperature, below its claimed critical temperature.

[chefandy]

> One of the things I look forward to in an HN discussion is the comments of people who can collate expert opinions on the subject and surface these kinds of points in a more ELI15 kind of way.

HN is full of subject matter experts on computing-- that is, software, and to a lesser extent, hardware-- beyond that it's a mixed bag at best. Even as an interface designer, I see so much confidently presented and totally bogus pseudo-expertise on art and design here that it's actually kind of funny, and that's much more closely related to software development than physics is. That BS sounds credible to other developers because it's in a developer's voice and trips on misconceptions common among developers. I suspect that's true with the other non-computing topics discussed here that I don't know enough about to give an expert opinion on.

As a long-time developer myself, I've been on both sides of assuming our astonishing intelligence and analytical capability can make up for lacking the requisite expertise. The mistake is expecting the HN crowd's musings about things outside of it's expertise to be more trustworthy than any other internet forum. If this were some physics subreddit or something like that, the criticism would make more sense. This is just people being excited by something a lot of other people were excited by.

[light_hue_1]

> One of the things I look forward to in an HN discussion is the comments of people who can collate expert opinions on the subject and surface these kinds of points in a more ELI15 kind of way.

I can tell you from first hand experience, much of the time subject matter experts are often downvoted into oblivion by the HN hive mind. To the point where you only see clueless people at the top.

Happens to me regularly when it comes to machine learning, neuroscience, education/university threads.

For example, people say crazy things about things like university admissions or grad student salaries. Never mind about ML where most of the information here is just wrong.

[kaba0]

I have no qualms one way or another, but afaik conductivity in small samples is insanely hard to properly measure even when the synthesis process is more deterministic/efficient.

That’s why many started with dimagnetism indeed.