Rubbish. You're trying to apply thesis standards to informal conversation. It would be one thing to critique if the original commenter had built a complex theory on an invalid premise, but jumping down someone's throat over the lack of supporting data in a two-sentence comment is overdoing it. My allusion to some current facts is not meant as a complete causal description either, but merely as examples of current news coverage.

I'm all for fact-checking, but HN is not Wikipedia, in the same way that current affairs coverage does not and need not substitute for a history book.