anyone found anything interesting in the emails? it just says they're evil, and the download's slow.
Furthermore as others have pointed out (as well as myself in another thread) CoS has deep pockets and I imagine that serves as a decent motivation for big media to not publish the incident.
Would you say that these decisions are "counter to the spirit of HN"?
Of course, Paul Graham started HN mainly to have intelligent, on topic discussions about technology and startup issues. And in that sense, apart from my aside about "data scoops", I am probably posting contrary to the spirit of HN, since the bulk of this message and the one before it are just simple opinion expression, rather than anything more susbtantive. Heck, now that I think about it I'm tempted to delete them both!
[1]http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_email_... And for the record, those emails are pretty disgusting and I'm surprised and disappointed at the reaction.
By hearing the cherry-picked quotes from those e-mails, you could get the impression that they're full of fraud, but now that the dust has settled and the investigations have been made, do you really think they're disgusting?
I think this example is counter to your point. The initial media reaction gave the complete wrong impression, and the later findings that the story is nonsense went completely unreported.
Actually, you're right! I read (some of) the original 'climategate' emails, and my opinion was quite contrary to virtually every independent committee. Those scientists were dirty. And clearly so.
I guess the real upshot is that "the spirit of HN" is to check original sources for stuff you really care about. It's important to do so, just in case the "experts" get it wrong.
If Scientology is important to you, then check those emails!
This is why you need to inform yourself about what's going on in the world. At least look at things with a critical eye, and not just throw up your hands and say "Oh well, the journalists will filter the important bits for me."
You don't have to do everything yourself and find every data problem interesting to keep within the 'spirit of HN'.
And whats with the "we are free" language, its not a cable news show. When did I ever say that anyone lacked the liberty to do something?
up until they overthrow the government and appoint L. Ron's disembodied head as ruler for life.
Extracting the MIME attachments is pretty straight forward:
ls *.txt |xargs -n1 munpackUnfortunately, as can be seen by the bloody awful mess they make of almost any scientific or medical or technical press release, it's unwise to rely on a journalist to provide sensible analysis.
Maybe there's some great crowd-sourcing website that could do this? (A bit like the "Human Flesh Search Engine" in China, but different.)
Or perhaps as a MVP someone could just write a script that turns many words into links to a wikipedia entry?