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Comment by craftyguy | Hacker News Reader

> I don't understand why this hasn't been all over the front-page of HN

Probably because the discussion is entirely political, and political discussions on public forums rarely end well.

> This is pretty clearly a freedom of speech issue

Would you also support someone publishing instructions on building your very own nuclear weapon? If not, where do you draw the line between 'free speech' and 'free speech that is very likely to end in tears'?

I'm generally very much against limiting the spread of information, but I believe there are some things that we humans are not mature enough as a species to have freely available. Hell, we're not even mature enough when it's restricted.

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We already have instructions in widespread circulation about how to build your own nuclear weapon--the googling for it is pretty trivial.

We're not up to our ears in homebrew nukes because making them is expensive, and that doesn't change. People have been able to make zipguns for over a century with nothing more than a few bits of pipe and fittings.

It's queer that merely the idea of knowing how to do something should be so distressing to policymakers.

> We already have instructions in widespread circulation about how to build your own nuclear weapon

AFAIK (without enough searching to land on a no-fly/watch list), those instructions are at a very high level and are not enough to produce a working bomb without further extensive research/experimentation. That at least accounts for some of the 'expensive' part, getting appropriate fuel being the other portion.

Not to be pedantic, but 20 years ago the idea of having a microwave sized device on your desk that could make anything you wanted out of plastic seemed so impossible that someone could have (and probably did!) published firearm CAD files online and people would have laughed it off as well.

I wonder if in the future we will think back to this comment and say "man, we were so short sided to not recognize the emerging hobby of home nuclear fission!"

You do bring up an interesting point, but I think there's a key difference between posting instructions that require unavailable/unproven technologies and technology that is widespread. If I posted plans on how to build a warp drive, it probably won't enable you to build a warp drive, even in the theoretical future when the necessary materials/technologies might exist.

There's also a key difference between uncontrolled fission and controlled fission. Both are bad for your health if you are too close, but one of them is immediately bad for your entire neighborhood/district/city.

This is in line with what I was thinking. The constitution is not a suicide pact, and at some point we're going to say you can't distribute certain knowledge. (How to destroy the world in one easy step).

Give that, there's going to be lots of debate where to draw the line, and that's ok. But arguing that there can't ever be a line is the kind of thing which gets people into untenable positions.

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