from Hacker News

The web did not turn 30 years old four days ago

by tmhrtly on 12/24/20, 8:18 PM with 7 comments

• by tmhrtly on 12/24/20, 8:22 PM

  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.

  Shoutouts to tobr [2] who noticed - and rurban who posted similarly [3].

  [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25485651

  [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25486398

  [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25487207

• by BearOso on 12/25/20, 2:15 AM

  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.

  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.

• by uberman on 12/24/20, 9:01 PM

  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"

  "I wanted to see how many people would..."

  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.