Four days ago this post hit the top of hacker news [1]. It goes to show how easily misinformation can spread - the correct date was even in the article. I'm as guilty as everyone else for taking this in.<p>Shoutouts to tobr [2] who noticed - and rurban who posted similarly [3].<p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25485651" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25485651</a><p>[2] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25486398" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25486398</a><p>[3] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25487207" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25487207</a>
I’m conditioned to let these anniversary things claim what they want, since they’ve started becoming arbitrarily long events. Companies will do things like “the 25th anniversary of x product,” and use it as marketing for as long as a year.<p>Plus, Wikipedia links to an archived CERN page (read: not vandalized) that reports in a timeline widget that the first web server went live at CERN on December 20, 1990. So, through lack of research, this attempt at misinformation wasn’t actually spreading a complete untruth.
Rather unethical of this researcher fellow to test to see if they could publicly shame people. No IRB would ever approve this kind of "research"<p><i>"I wanted to see how many people would..."</i><p>This is what every researcher says to themselves and is exactly why real researchers at real research institutes are subject to human subjects IRB reviews.