I think articles that over hype lab results make it to the top of HN because there is no downvote button and flagging them doesn't seem appropriate. I wish there was a "meh" option.
"Meh" is about right. Various people have been making fuel-from-water-powered-by-sunlight announcements for years. This group is not the only one working on this. Lots of research groups have something that sort of works, but has some practical problem, such as the cell lasting only 40 hours.[1] But the press release ("Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago have engineered a potentially game-changing solar cell that cheaply and efficiently converts atmospheric carbon dioxide directly into usable hydrocarbon fuel, using only sunlight for energy.") is written as if they just achieved the big success that makes it commercially feasible.
There are startups in this area. Here's HyperSolar. They have their own proprietary "nanoparticle" technology.[2] They announced success in 2012. No product yet.
That's why reports of "breakthroughs" in this area have to be viewed skeptically. There have been a lot of claimed breakthroughs that didn't pan out.
This problem looks more like a long, slow slog to something that works well enough to use. Silicon solar cells were like that. Efficiency has slowly improved since the 1950s. Manufacturing processes have slowly improved. There was no "breakthrough"; the curves of efficiency and cost per unit over time are smooth, not discontinuous.
Is it excessive? It certainly doesn't seem to be BS. It's published in a reputable journal (which doesn't make it true). It discusses several of the questions raised by Animats directly (though I wouldn't say it answers them conclusively).
I do agree that the university press release isn't going to critically evaluate the work of its own researchers. That's too bad, perhaps, but it hardly renders the original result uninteresting.
Artificial photosynthesis may be old, but the advances in this work appear aimed at overcoming precisely the problems Animats raised, like catalyst preservation and efficiency.
Put another way, just because a university gushes about the work of its faculty doesn't mean the faculty's work is crap.
I think the main reason is the exact same one why wireless energy transmission, instant cures for cancer, harebrained windpower schemes and so on get hyped. They all fall in the 'wouldn't it be great if this were real, therefore it must be real' category.
The number of solar cell 'breakthroughs' that you read about in a given year is >= 5 or so, but 3 years later nobody even remembers what they were about. Meanwhile, the real improvements are incremental and process cost related, and those improvements then get eaten up by tariffs.
A high rate of comments without upvotes degrades a story's ranking, you seem to have done the right thing. I don't know exactly how much flaming there has to be before that kicks in, though.
With the majority of articles about cutting edge science, very few HN readers would be qualified to state whether or not it's a breakthrough or bullshit. The option would protect HN from the bullshit, but it'd also hide the breakthroughs that people believed too good to be true. I think that'd be an overall drop in the quality of what we read here.
You're not wrong, but maybe on HN at least many of those people can be counted on not to vote out of reflex, unless they do really bring something to the table.
The other simple, sad fact is that the big breakthroughs that have some initial traction issues stick around. Often people point to the very early history of SR/GR, but it's worth pointing out how that turned out. When a shocking breakthrough is actually a shocking breakthrough, it ends up producing results that speak for themselves.
Until then, when it comes to extreme claims, so many more are just "bullshit" than "breakthrough". Our lives are finite, so it's not wise to ignore the role of triage in those lives.
Don't care, Dislike, Disbelieve, Downvote, Doesn't belong on HN. It just feels like a spectrum. Maybe we could rate each thread on a scale of 1-30, ranking where we think it should be on the page?
Or maybe pick from a number of descriptors just like the ones you listed, and if one breaches a certain threshhold, it gets tagged with "Widely Disbelieved" or the like.
I think articles that over hype lab results make it to the top of HN because there is no downvote button and flagging them doesn't seem appropriate. I wish there was a "meh" option.