Why would HN be the indicator? I’m sure we all personally enjoy the ego boost of participating in such a “smart” forum, but let’s not get too ahead of ourselves here; the primary speciality that HN caters to are software engineers and startup people (usually both). There’s no particular reason to believe that HN would be a reliable indicator for such heady topics as fusion power other than “a bunch of curious nerds comment there”.
“a bunch of curious nerds comment there” beats well over 80% of new sources. Of course the Fusion Power discussion board that still uses PHP4 powered text boxes will be way better.
Of course we must be aware of our "me,me,me" tendencies, its a good warning.
“Beating 80% of other news sources” is completely orthogonal to being right. HN could indeed beat out 80% of the alternatives and still be brutally wrong.
And that’s long before we discuss the tendency of specialists to over-extend into other fields with predictably bad results.
