The Asian flu epidemic of 1957 was a turning point for antibiotics (2007) | Hacker News Reader

The Asian flu epidemic of 1957 was a turning point for antibiotics (2007)

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43 pointsHooke49 comments

It's probably not a stretch to say, that if there's one good thing coming from this pandemic then that's (probably) the mainstream adoption of mRNA technology. I'm very curious to see how this will help us fight other diseases or even create small amounts of vaccines dynamically on the go.

I wonder if there's a way for the testing to go faster. Maybe now we've tested one mRNA vaccine you could get away with a bit less on a similar one.

Thalidomide, anyone?

The antibiotics was for secondary infections, not the virus itself.

This time it looks like a turning point for authoritarianism.

Why is HN so censorship heavy now? This really was one of the last places to have discourse...

Only in the US, you are four years off on it, and since the results of the election are likely to actually be honored, it is, in a way, reverting to the mean.

I would like to point out how this story is an excellent example of the @mods power to manipulate stories on HN.

This nice little pro-mask antidote made it to the front page and yet this thread [1] get marked so it won't be moved out of the Newest and onto New. I watched thread get 30+ upvotes and 50+ discussion points yet it never never showed up anywhere on New.

I like you mod but people like me can see the patterns where it's very clear that the owners and moderators have the ability to weight and manipulate the placement of stories in New.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25320778

It's pretty well known that the HN algorithm punishes stories which have a lot more comments than points. So describing them as "discussion points" exactly misses the mark. You're likely wrong (and a bit silly).

The submission was put in the second-chance pool by a moderator. This is explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380 and the links back from there. Note that I described it as "long-running" and that was 4.5 years ago. None of this is secret.

I haven't looked at the article but if a mod chose it for second-chance submission that's because they thought it might interest the community, not because we care about "pro-mask antidotes". The complete list of stories hasn't been published yet (it's on my list, I just haven't gotten to it), but you can see a subset of them at https://news.ycombinator.com/invited. That's entirely representative of the sort of stories we choose, and if anybody notices any bias in there at all, other than towards what HN might find intellectually interesting, I'd love to hear about it.

As for https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25320778, it set off the flamewar detector. No mod touched it.

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