zlacker

>>BellLa+(OP)
I could be missing something but this isn't exactly the smoking gun the title makes it seem. I'm sure there are proposals, plans and applications for all types of things. What I'm waiting for, perhaps naively, is strong evidence, revelated an independent investigation, that there was some foul business going on here. Until I see that, I'm more inclined to rely on the word of experts who have no connection to any of this. A novel aspect of a viral genome isn't enough for me to leap to the conclusion that it's human made.

>>chrsw+t8
The submitted title ("New Leaked Documents Point to Engineered Lab Origin for SARS‑CoV‑2") broke the site guidelines badly by editorializing. Submitters: please don't do that—it will eventually cause you to lose submission privileges on HN. Instead, follow the site guidelines, which include: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

(I'm assuming, of course, that it wasn't the article title that got subsequently changed. If that was the case, ignore the above.)

>>dang+sR
> (I'm assuming, of course, that it wasn't the article title that got subsequently changed. If that was the case, ignore the above.)

Not the first time I've seen you say this. Would it be worthwhile to fetch articles when they're submitted, if only for your own sanity?

>>klyrs+N41
Fetching them in a way that information (like titles) can be meaningfully extracted from is a lot harder than it sounds - we've worked on it in the past and got bogged down in lots of details and corner cases etc. An easier way might be to rely on one of the archiving services, e.g. archive.org. If a snapshot could be taken at submission time than it would be there to refer to later.

On the other hand, titles changing on the fly isn't that big a headache as far as sanity-affecting headaches go. NYT does it all the time, or used to. The main thing I don't like to do is scold someone for breaking the title guideline and then finding out later that it was the site, not the submitter, that changed it.

>>dang+c71
> information (like titles) can be meaningfully extracted

From a technical perspective it's probably simpler to just grep the page for the user-submitted title.

>>Squish+z91
The issue is likely mostly paywalled sites and SPAs where this isn't as simple.