Interesting comment but this is nothing new. Hacker News threads have been suffering from "Eternal September" for years — opinions were always better and more interesting in the old days. Putting down original reporting as an example of "seen it all before" is disingenuous at best — according to the unwritten rules, one never scores points with "this is nothing new"; it's practically expected.

Frankly I'm a bit tired of all the negative comments about the NYT, The Economist and other respected establishments by simple reflex. I can scroll through comment threads or posts in the archives and describe an HN where "middlebrow dismissals" rule the roost — but we all know that those do not (or should not) represent Hacker News as a whole.

Edit: HN top comments have problems everyone knows that, I would just like to see more relevant thought coming out on top. Talk about the specific technology and techniques being used, a response to the article that demonstrates you actually read it, or compare these "new news" approaches to attempts that were made in the '00s.

;)