While I’m not particularly hopeful for actual positive outcome of a larger study I must ask: isn’t this how studies are supposed to be done?

You devise a hypothesis, you confirm it as good as you can in an experiment and document the procedure. Someone else then peer reviews your study and finds any potential mistakes, if the research looks promising enough an independent research team will devise a larger study with more funding to verify the claims, repeat this X times until some sort of conclusion can be made.

Again, I’m partial against this study but at least it’s a study.

being dismissive of basic research is counter-productive. Would you like to suggest that their methodology or that their conclusions are suspect? Would you prefer a large-n tracking study of experiments on humans over many years?

Yeah, so would we all, but studies like this are how researchers build up a hypothesis and funding to do larger more powerful studies.

This Hacker News meme of being dismissive of research is pointless and should stop. Cynicism and snark don't add to the discussion.