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Comment by dllthomas | Hacker News Reader

From France, there's not so huge a difference, is there? You're still probably flying into SFO.

A factual error is a factual error. Definitely lowers the credibility of the article for me.

That's a foolish and shortsighted way of looking at it. My company's headquarters is in Newton, MA, but if we're flying people in to talk, they universally say "Boston". Because to people not from the area, that's what it is.

Synecdoche is a part of English (San Francisco being the most notable part of Silicon Valley). It may upset the overly pedantic, but...oh well?

I agree with you from the perspective of people of France (or anyone outside the area). And that point is not lost on me.

I am talking about the credibility of the author. The line referenced in the article is written by the author. They are not words attributed to others in a quote. If it's not in a quote, the author takes on the responsibility with respect to the correctness of the fact. If the author can't verify this simple fact, I don't know if I can trust the article with all the one-sided claims presented.

That they can't be troubled to verify facts that don't have any relevance whatsoever to the content of the post should only very weakly effect your expectation of whether they verify facts that are central to the content of the post. Granted, here on the internet, that's not as high a prior as it might be.

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