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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

These events have a reaction time, a response time, and a validation time. It is critical that legitimate news outlets keep their validation time small so that they can accurately report events.

The danger is pretty clear, if response time is shorter than validation time, people or systems will respond, perhaps irreversibly, before validation can be achieved.

That is how you do real damage in a system. Hopefully a very public critical response to the Washington Post here will help extend their response time again past the validation time.

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The Washington Post corrected their story. This is a key differentiator for higher quality publications. They try to get it right but if they don't, they must prompty correct their article.

The article from The Intercept comes across as more alarmist than the original one from the Post. The second paragraph reads:

> While the Russians did not actively use the code to disrupt operations, according to officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a security matter, the discovery underscores the vulnerabilities of the nation’s electrical grid.

There's a nuance that seems to be lost in Greenwald's interpretation of the article.

Greenwald is like Assange in that regard. He's more interested in scoring points against the bad guys than doing a public service. Any public service he has provided in the past is purely coincidental.

Nobody[0] reads corrections. The damage is done when the original, incorrect, inflammatory article is published. You can't unring that bell, and the Washington Post editors know that.

[0] To within experimental error.

I would argue that a reasonable person would actually read a correction. it's not exactly un ringing a bell but many of us come away with the truth even if we believed the original at first

I don't think that's reasonable at all. How often do you return to story URLs you've already read to check whether they've changed or not?

This too charitable to the Washington Post, who recently published that ridiculous PropOrNot piece.

It's much more likely that they know they can publish something fake, get the desired public impact, and then retract it and retain credibility.

The Washington Post is not a "higher quality publication".

An interesting showhn project would be to continually scrape a story and make an externally visible commit log for it so that you could see how it changed over time.

Like this one? http://newsdiffs.org/

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