That's a pretty arrogant take based on zero actual evidence. When "in my experience" is "randoms on the internet who I've never met and occasionally argue with online", I don't think we can draw many conclusions.

I know for a fact that many people who worked on this are also on HN. You should know that scientists see posters on this site mostly as representatives of the software engineering world. Seeing this kind of sneering attitude so frequently on display here is pretty embarrassing and casts the whole profession in a poor light.

The average HN reader who is probably a generic software engineer in their 20s/30s will know more about nuclear fusion than scientists at LLNL?

Listen man, remembering the names of all these JavaScript frameworks is hard!

They think they do, but don't...I think that's the point that's trying to be made here

The average HN reader strikes me as someone who can talk big, spout buzzwords, and play skeptic, but make them actually solve something and they crumble instantly.

Maybe the average HN reader is smarter than the average reddit reader (very slightly if at all), but they're not more useful than someone who actually did work and shared it publicly.

>The average HN reader strikes me as someone who can talk big, spout buzzwords, and play skeptic, but make them actually solve something and they crumble instantly.

I'm sure many have experienced the phenomenon where they read some HN comments that sound authoritative and give them that level of credulity. And then they get into a discussion on a topic they may literally be an expert in and it's made glaring obvious the person they are in a discussion with only has a superficial understanding, yet takes the same authoritative tone.

Surely this is sarcasm?

In my experience the average HN reader is slightly above the general population average.