NYT posts correction due to effects of “Millenials to Snake People” extension | Hacker News Reader

NYT posts correction due to effects of “Millenials to Snake People” extension

nytimes.com

23 pointsCyberdog22 comments

Link: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/millennials-to-sna...

I also enjoy "bullshit to bullshit": https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bullshit-to-bullsh... (disclaimer: I'm friends with the author of this one)

"cyber" to "spider" is an excellent replacement too

I like to get a fair and balanced view on things. I love "racism simulator"

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/racism-simulator/d...

Use it for a week while visiting leftist websites. It will show you how obsessed they are with people's melanin and chromosomes. Shocking beyond belief...

Interestingly, 5 star rating

Of course it is. It allows for fantastic commentary on how bad race relations in America are, and where the division is actually coming from ...

My friend made a really nice chrome extension that allows you to replace whatever you want in web pages: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/replacerator/gaajh...

I use it to replace "neural network" with "dog" so from my perspective people talk about training their dogs for image recognition :P

While the existence of a "Cloud to Butt" extension makes me inordinately happy, both for reasons of security[0] and ensuring business-critical mistakes like this don't happen, I can't imagine actually using such an extension.

[0]Seriously, you shouldn't run any extensions at all that aren't by very trusted parties. Especially ones that can see and modify the contents of websites you view.

I'm more surprised that a journalist, whose job is ostensibly focused on the accurate reading and writing of textual information, would run such an extension on their work device.

FWIW, in the BYOD era, it's no longer a safe assumption that they were on their "work device", or that their "work device" was not also their personal one.

Or in the case of Chrome, that the extension didn't auto-install on a work device when they logged in.

I probably shouldn't use it but it's so funny. Probably the most interesting effect is that the two words "cloud" and "butt" are becoming conflated in my mind. If someone said that it was "butty" out today I would know exactly what they meant.

If I remember correctly, "Cloud to Butt" was completely open source and easy to self-install if you didn't want any updates added. You could see that it just ran through the DOM and did a text replace.

After installing the extension, the wikipedia post provided to be entertaining: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennials

Could those who have flagged this post please explain why they have done so?

I didn't flag it myself but I think it is good for the site that people did. It is amusing but not really interesting. Maybe if someone interviewed the journalist about what happened (or the journalist wrote a blog post) it might be interesting (or it could be an amusing side note in an interesting article about something else). But people make mistakes all the time so there is an infinite amount of such content that could be posted. This is similar to how comments that are amusing but don't really contribute anything interesting to the discussion are discouraged (but sometimes get upvoted).

I use hckrnews.com and this is only one of many things that I enjoy reading and wouldn't have seen otherwise but really doesn't fit well with HN. Many people also flag articles that generate poor discussion for any reason in addition to when the article itself does not meet site guidelines.

> It is amusing but not really interesting.

Then I think just ignoring the submission will suffice; check out the "new" link and you'll see that happen constantly. At any rate, the submission ended up with 23 points despite the flagging, so some people found it interesting before it was killed.

The "flagged" term just implies I did something wrong here. Perhaps I needed to add a comment clarifying that the correction part appears at the end of the article; I figured later that maybe people were clicking through to the article, seeing a seemingly unrelated article with nothing to do with the snake people extension, and flagging it for that reason. If that's the case, fair enough, I suppose.

> (Pro tip: Disable your “Millennials to Snake People” extension when copying and pasting.)

I don’t think this is the right Pro Tip. Also, what a sad day for journalism when we learn of a journalist who has deliberately installed a bias-introducing technology on their computer, uses that tech to cite sources for an article, and nobody seems to care.

What am I looking at here? This just seems to be another anti-Trump piece? What is this extension?

>Correction: March 7, 2018

Because of an editing error involving a satirical text-swapping web browser extension, an earlier version of this article misquoted a passage from an article by the Times reporter Jim Tankersley. The sentence referred to America’s narrowing trade deficit during “the Great Recession,” not during “the Time of Shedding and Cold Rocks.” (Pro tip: Disable your “Millennials to Snake People” extension when copying and pasting.)

Hah! Guess someone's editor will be hoping the blogsites don't read the corrections today...

Ya, seems like the wrong article was posted?

scroll to the bottom (corrections)

Ah right thank you, I figured it would be an article about millennials that was corrected and not Trump.

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