The most recent peer-reviewd survey I can find on the topic is [1], which is the 2nd followup by the same author doing survey reviews of the scientific literature on origins of Covid-19.
His summary conclusion: "There is much greater scientific support for the [zoonotic hypothesis]. Conclusion: The main gap in the zoonotic hypothesis is the lack of a detected intermediate host, which has not been found yet. In turn, although the hypothesis of a laboratory leak has not been supported by sufficient scientific evidence, it cannot be definitively discarded."
The weight of scientific evidence is AGAINST the lab leak hypothesis, but the waters are so muddy from politicization of the topic that consensus or proof will likely never be achieved. This is the same conclusion at [2]:
"The consensus among scientists is that, although a lab leak origin is possible, the scientific evidence points to a natural, zoonotic origin from wild animals."
I'm not an expert, but to my understanding that is exactly the version of "lab leak" that is not able to be conclusively ruled out by the publicly available evidence.
It is a shame also that this topic is deemed too hotly political for HN and hence the flagging. We are lacking in good forums for measured discussion of what is happening in this country right now.
HN has had a huge number of political threads in recent months, including quite a few about funding cuts along the lines of the present story. These submissions don't end up with specific discussions about the specifics of a given story; they end up with generic discussions repeating how people feel about the larger topics. Those topics, and those feelings, are certainly important—but it makes the threads largely interchangeable, and therefore even more repetitive.
This feels unreasonable to me. It isn't like these are all the same political story. A lot of politics is legitimately happening very fast and "we can't talk about the next thing because we just talked about the last thing" is a structural weakness, not a benefit.
Are there other topics besides politics that regularly get flagged for being repetitive?
I agree—they're not all the same story. On the other hand: stories in an ongoing sequence usually lead to repetitive discussion, which is bad for HN—especially because people get angrier as they repeat things [1]. So the question is: how do we decide which stories should be treated as new discussions, worthy of major new threads, vs. repetitive follow-ups, which should be downweighted [2]?
HN has had a well-defined and stable set of principles for answering that for many years now. It goes back to the Snowden avalanche of 2013 [3], when the front page got overrun by follow-up stories and duplicate discussions, and there was a user backlash to that.
(I call these principles well defined and stable because they've held up well over the years, and because once we figured them out we haven't had to change them.)
It goes like this: when there's a Major Ongoing Topic (MOT) [4], we try to reserve frontpage time for articles that contain Significant New Information (SNI) [5], and which seem like they have a chance to support a substantive, and substantively different, discussion. Articles which don't contain SNI, we tend to downweight as follow-ups [2].
This applies to flags too. When an article meets the above criteria but has been flagged by users, we're open to turning off the flags [6]. When an article has been flagged but doesn't meet those criteria, we tend to leave the flags on.
Sometimes, an article contains SNI but also is written in a way that seems to have no chance of supporting a substantive discussion, for example it's so inflammatory or one-sided that it seems doomed to instant flamewar. In cases like that, we wait for a more neutral article about the SNI. If the information really is significant, one should come along soon enough.
That is the answer to your objection here: "we can't talk about the next thing because we just talked about the last thing".
We can and do talk about the next thing, but it's a question of what the "next thing" is: how do you define what counts as a next thing (a new story) rather than a repetitive variation on the last thing [7]? We do that according to the principles I just described.
Of course, this shifts the question to "which articles contain SNI", and users frequently disagree about that. But I'm not talking here about specific calls on particular articles, but rather the principles by which we make those calls.
The specific calls we make are inevitably inconsistent and sometimes mistaken. That's ok; we can't be consistent at the level of individual cases (though we're consistent at the level of principles [8]), and we can't not make mistakes, but we're open to reversing a call when users make a good case for why an article meets the principles and we made a bad call about it.
To make such a case, you have to know what the principles are and make your argument based on them.
Most users don't do that—rather they post blanket complaints about how "all $FOO stories are suppressed on HN", the mods are imposing their pro-$FOO or anti-$FOO agenda, and so on. This is understandable as a reflexive response to seeing things one dislikes [9] (e.g. an important $FOO story being [flagged]). But it doesn't help us do a better job as moderators.
To help us do a better job, you (I don't mean you personally, but anyone) need to address what HN moderation is trying to achieve: what kind of site HN is supposed to be (optimized for intellectual curiosity [10], not current affairs [11]), what the fundamentals are (e.g. frontpage space is the scarcest resource [12] and we can't simply turn off flags on all political stories or even all important ones), and what the principles are, as I've described them above.
It's a structural necessity for a 30-ish things a day site vs an infinite-scroll-feed site. The world can definitely move a lot faster than a nerd messageboard that's closer in design and spirit to a crusty pokemon (or, dunno, planespotting) phpbb forum than to the news notification stream on your phone. But that's a desired feature for such places.
Right now I see one political thread on the front page. If the alternative to flagging is political threads dominating the front page then this suggests that 90%+ of political threads are flagged.
What do you find not right about it? In time of political turmoil, people start posting regular news stories to HN because there's a glut of big, activating political stories. They're still mostly offtopic so other people flag them. They seem like straightforward consequences of each other and the outlier cause driving it is the political climate itself not some particular weirdness of HN.
When I look at the number of flagged political topics on /active (often which have clear connection to the software industry) I still only see a couple. Going from one such post on the front page to three doesn't seem like it would ruin the front page.
Hang on, you've not responded to anything I've said and are just piling on the questions. You kinda have to address what this different HN would look like and how it would be different and/or better than the one now. Like, you say 'unreasonable', 'not right' and when the things you're talking about are explained, you just move on to something else. What specifically is unreasonable about 30 fp slots and users and moderators using repetition-reducing conventions? Why would it be 'not right' to have a nerd messageboard be, again, by convention, fairly light on regular news type news?
What would "glut" mean to you? [...] Why is "activation" bad? [...] clear connection to the software industry*
The first two are basic concepts of how HN works, there is endless mod commentary about them (i.e. repetition, high-dudgeonery, etc) and you're surely familiar with them after a near decade here. The last one is a common misconception but HN's remit is not 'things with a clear connection to the software industry'.
If you want a different HN, advocate for that different HN instead of having me explain the existing HN to you - you can get better explanations elsewhere, beside the fact you're already likely familiar with them.
My claim is that it would not be so different that the front page is inundated with these topics while also ensuring that people are more able to talk about these topics when they feel it is relevant without being stifled by individuals.
I believe that I am advocating for that different HN. I believe that flagging topics because "too many" other political topics have been submitted recently is bad and should stop.
My claim is that it would not be so different that the front page is inundated with these topics while also ensuring that people are more able to talk about these topics when they feel it is relevant without being stifled by individuals.
There's no evidence to suggest this claim is true and a great deal that that demonstrates it isn't. This has happened on HN several times and you were probably around for at least one of them.
I believe that I am advocating for that different HN. I believe that flagging topics because "too many" other political topics have been submitted recently is bad and should stop.
I, too, believe that you are. What is not clear to me on why you believe these things and how they would improve HN. Like, you know the design of HN because a) you're using it b) it's been explained a bunch plus there's ready access to lots more. What's your design? How is this going to work, what part of HN has to be changed and what consequences do you think that would have? What about the kind of consequences the current design tries to avoid? "I'd like more of these stories on the fp" is not that, it's just a statement of preference.
I believe that meaningful evidence is examining the volume of flagged submissions on /new and /active and noting that it is not zero but also not overwhelming.
You do you, I guess. I think that the community and industry is impoverished by these topics being limited in this manner.
What is that evidence of, other than that lots of people are submitting political stories, and that if we didn't have the moderation we have now, the front page would be nothing but those stories? It seems like you're making his point for him.
Thanks for the note. I definitely understand your reasoning. I will say that to me (a) finding out that NSF has blocked funding is a new and different point than that DOE has blocked overhead (or that NIH review panels were on hold). And (b) this news would not have reached me as soon if I hadn’t noticed it in the /active front page. And (c) that I come to the discussions partially in hope that I’ll learn more “secret” details about what is happening. (d) I recognize that much of the discussion is repetitive, but mixed in there is useful analysis and even more actual news reporting. (e) I understand that people get overwhelmed by the continued raging and conflate new news with seeming opinion. (f) I recognize that your job is hard but know that I really appreciate HN!
There is an elephant in the room. When an article comes up about the elephant's tusks or the elephant's trunk or the people the elephant has just stepped on, the discussion ends up being about the whole elephant. I know what you're saying about these threads being repetitive and interchangeable. Its just that the elephant is so big and its parts so connected, its hard to have a limited discussion about only one part of the elephant. But nevertheless that elephant is very important to the larger set of topics that this site is dedicated to! It would be good to have a solution besides not talking about the elephant.
The site's moderation system needs to change. There's near infinite power to suppress & deny. That's unhackerly in extreme.
There should be some skin in the game for suppressing. If you want to participate in moderating things away, at the very least you should be willing & able to put your name on that act of denying the public.
I specified factual, because anti-Trump blog post with opinions and theories without much facts do not get flagged. It is not that any anti Trump article is flagged, but the factual dry ones are more likely to be flagged.
I have seen maybe 1 pro Trump article being flagged. From what I have seen, they tend to be ignored rather then flagged.
If you don't have 'showdead' turned on in your profile, what could be happening is that those articles are so heavily flagged that they're almost all [dead], in which case only users with that setting turned on would see them.
Articles that show [flagged] but are not [dead] have actually been flagged less (relative to upvotes) than articles which get flagkilled, i.e. flagged all the way to the [dead] state, where they cease to be visible to most users.
Has this been confirmed? The original channel also posted a comparison video [1] showing what seems to be the same cylinders tested against titanium and tungsten cubes (though it's difficult to be sure they are identical)
There's also footage from another channel [2] showing a Prince Rupert's Drop bursting at 20 tons with significant damage to both the steel plate and the press.
Why is it that a constant curvature is preferable for a builder? Is it that construction forms etc are fabricated basically by compass and straightedge still?
As the author puts it [0], the issue is that if you expand or contract an ellipse by a fixed radius in every direction (e.g., if you create inner and outer walls for an elliptical corridor of constant width), then the resulting curve is no longer an ellipse. In contrast, piecewise-circular arcs can be expanded or contracted and remain piecewise-circular, though the control points will shift around as you transform it.
If you want the resulting geometry to be precise you are pretty much limited to equivalent of compass and straightedge (or well, in mechanical engineering lathe and mill, which are basically the same things). if you start somehow calculating the geometry you are limited by precision of the calculation, but more importantly by precision of measuring distances you can achieve.
Agreed. I was the same place: do they mean an imprint of a face? Or a partially preserved ancient artwork? No, they mean fossilised bone fragments comprising upper mouth and cheekbone areas of a human skull.
Is this some kind of fake AI written article? I'm skimming along and see a passage:
Recent theoretical and experimental studies have produced
several unusual and interesting results on the cold fusion
of matter experienced on dense lithium [24]. The existence
of this exciting propriety of matter relates to zero-point
energy estimates that suggest quantum effects play a
significant role in shaping the phase diagram of lithium.
From the beginning of the abstract it looked like this might be an interesting article, but the probability is basically zero that a genuine advance in stone-structure-tomography for giant structures would include such an aside on "cold fusion" and "zero-point energy".
Its a giant peeve of mine that automatic memory management, in the C language sense of the resource being freed at the end of its lexical scope, is tied to the allocation being on the machine stack which in practice may have incredibly limited size. Gar! Why!?
Ackshually, it has nothing to do with the C language. It's an implementation choice by some compilers. A conforming implementation could give you the whole RAM and swap to your stack.
Yes, but does any implementation actually do that?
AFAIK Ada is typically more flexible, but that has to do with the language actually giving you enough facilities to avoid heap allocations in more cases - e.g. you can not only pass VLAs into a function in Ada, but also return one from a function. So it becomes idiomatic, and compilers then have to support this (usually by maintaining a second "large" stack).
His summary conclusion: "There is much greater scientific support for the [zoonotic hypothesis]. Conclusion: The main gap in the zoonotic hypothesis is the lack of a detected intermediate host, which has not been found yet. In turn, although the hypothesis of a laboratory leak has not been supported by sufficient scientific evidence, it cannot be definitively discarded."
The weight of scientific evidence is AGAINST the lab leak hypothesis, but the waters are so muddy from politicization of the topic that consensus or proof will likely never be achieved. This is the same conclusion at [2]:
"The consensus among scientists is that, although a lab leak origin is possible, the scientific evidence points to a natural, zoonotic origin from wild animals."
[1] JPMCHR 2024 https://doi.org/10.38207/JCMPHR/2024/JAN05020519 https://www.acquaintpublications.com/article/four-years-late...
[2] BMJ 2024; 386 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.q1578 (Published 09 September 2024) https://www.bmj.com/content/386/bmj.q1578