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Comment by ojbyrne | Hacker News Reader

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ojbyrne

Not actually a tank. No tracks, no turret, no armor piercing gun.

EDIT: it does have a turret. Still not a tank.

EDIT2: the main armament is a machine gun. Totally not a tank.

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Story is not titled "how I bought a tank" but "how to buy a tank". Rolling +20 pedantic, you are defeated.

the title is still misleading. when you read the title you really think the guy actually bought a tank. most people, even military amateurs, don't know what a BRDM2 is. it could have been a 70s tank.

I know what it is because it was the throwaway target in the M1-Abrams Battletank game; not heavily armed, one shot to kill.

It's not pedantic to critique misleading titles.

Imagine article "How to build website in assembler" to learn author meant writing it in javascript but it's close enough.

Ah you mean asm.js? :D

Like you could write website in it :) At some point you need strings.

(You do know that the programs compiled down to asm.js do actually have strings, right?)

This is my personal pet peeve.

Press will write "Poland to buy 1000 tanks". Inside the article 100 tanks and 900 support vehicles, most of them wheeled.

It's not a huge stretch to conflate the category armoured vehicle with its sub-category tank. Normal people aren't into browsing Wikipedia articles about weapons.

Its the same thing as the attempt to label main battle rifles and sniper rifles and deer hunting rifles as "assault weapons"

So if you don't like what he did, its a tank.

I was annoyed to see the same mistake in this article (and its headline) when it first went up. They've since corrected it, but you can see the note at the end.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/14/us/police-armored-vehicle-...

yeah, even some armored vehicle have 20mm cannon that can pierce other APCs. I guess this one just has a big machine gun, something like a .50, but nothing really bigger.

syrians built their own armored vehicles.

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