Scott is making it really difficult for people to follow along. My initial reaction was "wtf am I looking at" followed shortly by "why wasn't the HN link pointed straight to the PBS article?". And clearly others agree given that the top comment at the moment is a PBS link.
No doubt the guy is competent but this just smells like a poorly executed attempt to move traffic to the blog. I fully expect it to get ignored as such despite the PBS article being good.
If you're not familiar, Scott is a professor of MIT, specializing in quantum computing. Many readers of his blog are also well known in this sphere, so they would have more technical insight, more in depth than the pbs layman's version.
>>If you're not familiar, Scott is a professor of MIT
As I said, I don't doubt his ability. Its the presentation I object to. The HN blog leads to some random blog that barely touches on the topic that the headline promises and the core of the story is in a link contained in the blog. By any sane definition that is blog spam, MIT professor or not.
>>Many readers of his blog are also well known
So? Its linked to his blog, not to his readers. I don't care if his readers include Albert Einstein himself. The link did not deliver despite the authors (proven) ability to deliver on the content.
If you're a writer and you have an article available on some 3rd party site, wouldn't you inform your blog readers of it? Besides, the poster of this link is not Scott Aaronson, so why accuse him of attempting "to move traffic to the blog"?
>so why accuse him of attempting "to move traffic to the blog"?
Remember what I said...one of the first responses (3rd at worst) is someone posting the "proper" link to the actual article. That was there before I posted - someone else read the blog extracted the relevant info and concluded that the single link is the core content of the blog post. Then I put the same thing into words and go downvoted to hell. Oh well.
OP has since altered the link to point at the PBS article.
As I said before I don't doubt the technical ability or integrity of Mr Aaronson. I was commenting purely on the HN submission because I felt both the HN submission and blog were subpar & did an injustice towards the actual content (the PBS post). Downvote away...
No doubt the guy is competent but this just smells like a poorly executed attempt to move traffic to the blog. I fully expect it to get ignored as such despite the PBS article being good.