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Comment by saagarjha | Hacker News Reader

I'd rather not judge the journalist's sourcing abilities by a perception of their expertise in the field that comes from two words. To put it another way: assuming good faith, it's entirely possible that the journalist was told some sort of statistic that agreed with the statement they made; I'm simply curious as to what it might be.

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That's too charitable. I wouldn't accept the vetting of any football-related news by a journalist who referred to the NFL as a "ball management organization."

I would if they cited their sources so I could verify their claims for myself. In my eyes it's OK for the journalist of an article like this to not to be an expert in the field, but they should be able to provide a somewhat coherent summary of a topic and allow readers to perform their own analysis on the parts they care about.

We're not talking about whether or not someone is an expert, we're talking about whether they have even a passing familiarity. What an operating system is isn't esoteric knowledge.

Linux isn't an operating system.

"Linux" is as much "an operating system" as "Windows" is. Single words aren't expected to catch the nuances of decades long ecosystems, but are still very useful.

You'll find that it's not common knowledge among the general population, and presumably to some extent among the readership and authors of a financial newspaper.

It's fine to not know what an operating system is. There are lots of areas of life where I'm almost totally ignorant. The difference is I wouldn't try to report on them before I learned very basic, elementary things about them. It's not too much to expect someone to learn "it's like Android or iOS" before professionally writing about it.

I would argue that one of the foremost responsibilities of a journalist is to make a condensed and correct retelling of a story. If any part of the story could be wrong and requires readers to second-guess and look up stuff for themselves, the article is basically worthless or perhaps even of negative value, since people may have to spend resources correcting its misconceptions in the future.

Right. The specific part that made me second-guess it was a counterintuitive statement about Microsoft's support to Linux, not the choice of words or nontechnical background of the author.

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