It should also be a good reminder to all of the people on HN who jumped to the conclusion that this guy was right on very sketchy evidence. This place is influential. We should do better.
I think the vast majority of top-level comments on that item considered the information dubious or were holding out for independent confirmation; I don't think HN leapt to a conclusion. My comment, one of the less obvious, was more from a good-idea perspective instead of assuming the story was true -- I had not decided yet.
Overall in that item I think HN did better than you imply, unless you mean the upvotes the item received.
I did my part and questioned this from the beginning only to be 'corrected' by other HN commentators. A competent person would have displayed logs, packet captures, stacktraces, etc. This guy just said "my infallible tools caught it" and those who want to believe in conspiracy theories just believed it. It was obvious from the get go that Mr. Credentials was just using an off the shelf definition based scanner.
Meanwhile, the shitty media outlets that irresponsibly spread this got all the ad impressions they wanted. The problem with truth is that its not as profitable as BS. How many people will ever read the corrections?
HN had many skeptical comments right off the bat. I guess simply publicizing this story before its confirmed is bad, but it's also how you shine light on an issue - in this case, clearing Samsung of any wrongdoing.
Reddit fared much worse, IMO, in that people continued to upvote the wrong story after the truth was out. The correction has been posted but isn't anywhere near the front page.
I agree completely with this sentiment. It's important to remember that the vast majority of "journalism" on the web isn't conducted very professionally.
Thankfully, it looked to be very few people. His article was written--and his tests were conducted--just about as poorly as they could have been. It was a huge show, and HN caught on quickly as far as I can tell.
