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Comment by the8472 | Hacker News Reader

Looks they're gonna investigate and perhaps post something next week. https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/journalistic-standards...

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For anyone who comes across this in the future, Ars published an official retraction: https://arstechnica.com/staff/2026/02/editors-note-retractio...

And Benj posted an explanation & admitted fault: https://bsky.app/profile/benjedwards.com/post/3mewgow6ch22p

I haven't decided whether or not to cancel, but even after these explanations I'm still pretty disappointed in this event & how it was handled.

Yeah, “we just made shit up in an article, destroying trust in our publication, but we will get around to investigating when we have a little free time in the next week or so.”

No, you just shipped the equivalent to a data-destroying bug: it’s all-hands-over-the-holiday-weekend time.

It's the weekend and Monday is a holiday in the US.

Yes, hence “holiday weekend” in my comment. They posted an article that had fabricated quotes. When might it be appropriate to start investigating that problem, and work on ensuring that it doesn’t happen again?

On Tuesday, when they get back to work.

We'll be sure to get the Avengers on it real quick! Thanks for helping us understand the urgency required.

I don't think you get to be this snarky about helping people understand things, when your initial contribution was to read "it's all hands over the holiday weekend time" and reply by saying it's a holiday weekend.

They did a stealth edit to not look as foolish. They didn't mention the holiday or weekend in what I replied to originally. That's why I snapped back with snark.

There was no stealth edit, you just didn’t read with comprehension the first time. Though the fact that you think those words weren’t there explains your weird reply to my original comment.

Oh, and then they basically lied about it? That sucks.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47029103

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