Hacker News Reader

Comment by foobarbecue | Hacker News Reader

According to Fortune, Hacker News "reported" on the incident. Are we journalists now?

"Popular tech site Hacker News reported many other sites were affected including Etsy, Spotify, Github, Soundcloud, and Heroku." -- http://fortune.com/2016/10/21/internet-outages/

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No, not necessarily journalists; rahter, an information source...Fortune - a site/company known for journalism/reporting - now just gave HackerNews more legitimacy as an official information source...Now with this power, please use it responsibly. ;-)

Too bad that the majority of the readers will think that HackerNews is somehow related to the "Hackers" that took down the internet.

Eh the name implies (at least in that context) this website would be used to keep track of the hackers.

No but we are a hivemind of smart individuals that correctly upvote important information and downvote irrelevant information. Most of the time, you can be sure that the top HN listings are going to be relevant.

If a headline says, "Users reported having bouts of explosive diarrhea", it doesn't make them medical journalists.

"Reported" is a generic word; it has a journalism-specific usage but also a general usage.

Perhaps they're confusing Hacker News with thehackernews.com.

I wonder if they used "Hacker News" as the source on that because it contains the word "hacker" and they wanted to say "oh, hackers read this site"... as in "the blackhat, break into stuff, steal your money, deface your website" folks.

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