i_cannot_hack

I think the unease many people feel here is that this strict bureaucracy taken to its extreme conclusion would become something akin to a tragicomical farce: "No posts about the controversial nukes raining over Europe allowed, such flamewars would destroy our valuable forum for discussing the really interesting and intellectual political topics".

Clearly there must be a line somewhere. It was not here and today, but when and where is it? Trying desperately to cling onto normality at every cost when the actual reality is far from normal becomes a destructive endeavour in the end.

I have been a regular visitor on this site for 14 years, and have have never spoken up about this before. In fact I have always stood by the moderation policy and appreciated it. But I have a line where avoiding "inflammatory discussions" simply becomes obstinate and clueless, and harmful in the way that it gives convenient cover for the actors committing the real inflammatory acts, counting on people not caring enough to give them grief for it. And for me, that line has been crossed.

I'm curious: Have you not noticed any increase in people saying "this time it's different", or that different kinds of people are saying it now? Is it really just the same old people repeating the same old phrase to you?

> a repetitive topic

Small note: It has never been a repetitive topic, since all discussions about ICE performing extrajudicial killings have been quickly flagged of the front page and never (as a topic) discussed by the wider community.

> FWIW, here's a short version: users flag things for various reasons; we turn off flags on a few such stories, but not more; that's because HN isn't a political or current affairs site;

I think you have misunderstood the request. The request was not to clarify the general moderation policy, but rather clarify the reasoning why this specific story was not considered as one of the few stories where such action was taken.

I have already clarified my specific concerns regarding flagging and this specific story in another post in this discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46745562

People are curious to hear the reasoning for keeping the flag on this specific post, since thought has obviously been put to it and a decision to keep it was made after thoughtful consideration. I.e. which of the several different policies you highlighted had the most weight in this decision, and which mitigating circumstances were considered as reasons for bypassing this policy and removing the flag (even if they were discarded in the end).

It is precisely because consistent moderation is not possible that this is needed (otherwise it would be easy to just refer to the consistent guidelines). The quality of the moderation depends on the judgement and reasoning of the moderators, and the only way for the users to form their own picture (good or bad) of this judgement is to ask to hear how it is applied to specific scenarios where it is ambiguous.

I am very sympathetic to the fact that it must be tedious and sometimes repetitive, but if the decision is controversial I think it is an important part of moderation and important for the community as a whole.

It seems you are purposefully removing all the specific context to be willfully indifferent.

You would need to actually grapple with the specific context to be convincing. Otherwise you could just as well respond to a police officer smuggling an automatic weapon into the senate chamber and unloading the magazine into the lawmakers with "hate to break it to you - but officers killing people in the US is not new".

I have sent an email linking to this discussion, but I think it would be more constructive if the helpful and forthcoming answers happened in public rather than in sent in private email threads to everyone wondering.

Calling discussing something on HN "hypothesizing into the void" is a strange choice of words, either meant to be patronizing toward me specifically or toward all HN users.

> "flagged" always means that users flagged it, not moderator action. And there are a lot of readers who will flag all submissions about US politics, no matter the polarity of the article.

The thing is that dang has generally not unflagged any posts about topics like these in the past, so there's little reason to think the flagging is only a result of temporary inaction by the moderation team. Rather it is a consistent pattern permitted to exist by said team.

I second this question, @dang. I would like some explanation of the moderation policy here to at least understand the reasoning.

With posts such as "Donald Trump is the president-elect of the U.S." and "Trump wins presidency for second time" being allowed (just to pick the top two Trump submissions), there is a clear precedent that big events in American politics are considered suitable for the front page.

I can see only two stances justifying removal here

(1) someone winning the presidency is considered an important event, but that same president then organizing a paramilitary force of lackeys to unlawfully execute protesters in "enemy states" without any repercussion is not considered as an important event but simply normal politics (which is not an apolitical position but rather a radical and controversial political opinion enforced by the moderation team)

(2) the topic is expected to cause anger, and only well-mannered and jovial discussions are suitable for the front page. This completely disregards that sometimes the rational and constructive response to these kinds of developments are anger, and a discussion about how to direct and act on such anger within the tech community should happen.

Everything is politics. And enforcing (or not correcting) mandatory silence on certain political topics is a political decision by the moderation team, colored by their priorities and their word view.

I also want to re-iterate and highlight the excellent summary made by lynndotpy:

> For anyone wondering why this is relevant to HackerNews: > - There are tech companies and workers in companies outside California, > - A government deploying a militarized police force to execute people in the streets is bad for the economy, > - That government is the United States, and so this is bad for the world economy, > - A lot of the people in our industry are immigrants from outside the United States, > - If you're a HackerNews user in the United States, you can be shot and killed just like this.

> That said, you're totally right nobody can truly know except him and who he spoke to.

Let me be clear about this, I would definitely assume it did not happen without really strong evidence of the contrary. Based on my assessment of his character and the details of his story.

Assuming anything else is giving him way too much credit, and the effect of giving benefit of the doubt here is likely allowing a known racist to spread a false narrative that is based on lies and engineered to sow discontent.

What makes his story unbelievable is that it happened in corporate America in the 1980s (that you have a different experience in 2020s Sweden is not really a counterexample to what makes his story hard to believe) combined with the fact that he is a famously unreliable narrator. He has previously offered conflicting narratives about similar scenarios, changing the story to be about race only in his later years.

> Ideally her relatives could then SUE

Ideally a lawsuit? The only sane outcome of this in a civilized society is that the perpetrator stands trial for murder.

If that does not happen the already slim distinction between US law enforcement and a paramilitary execution squad loyal to the president will have dissappeared entirely.

If you want more freedom to design medical devices for people where there is an actual need, it would easily be done by expanding the exception for medical devices that already exists in the law.

If you think people to be able to sell unsustainable and mostly superfluous electronics because any improvements there might eventually trickle down to hearing aids, your argument is basically "we should accept the millions of tonnes of unnecessary e-waste in order to get slighly smaller hearing aids", which think many reasonable people would disagree with.

> If i understand that correctly the "energy required to grow" would be bigger than the "enthalpy of formation"?

They are almost completely unrelated concepts. The enthalpy of formation from the paper is the free useable energy that would be generated if you assembled all the molecules in the biomatter from the constituent atoms. E.g. the energy that would be released if you took pure hydrogen and pure oxygen and combined it into 1 gram of water. But the fungi takes in water from the environment to grow, it does not make it's own water from pure hydrogen, and it certainly does not generate any free energy from growing larger. With some margin for error in my understanding, since I'm not a chemist (but neither are you, and neither is the chatbot).

> It was really just food for thought.

It was more poison than food, since you just parroted randomly generated misinformation from the chatbot and passed it of as authentic insight.

> Initially i asked a AI for standard values

Don't do this, and don't then share the resulting numbers as fact publicly without disclosing you just asked a chatbot to make up something reasonable sounding.

If the chatbot refers to a source, read the source yourself and confirm it didn't make it up. If the chatbot did not refer to a source, you cannot be sure it didn't make something up.

The property measured in the source you linked, "enthalpy of formation", is not the same as the energy required to grow 1g of biomatter. One clue of this is that the number in the paper is negative, which would be very strange in the context you requested (but not in the context of the paper). For the curious: "A negative enthalpy of formation indicates that a compound is more stable than its constituent elements, as the process of forming it from the elements releases energy"

You're feeding yourself (and others) potentially inaccurate information due to overconfidence in the abilities of LLMs.

> I can tell you down to the day how many bitcoin there will be decades from now.

As this story itself demonstrates, you clearly can't, and it already has the potiential to affect markets: "18.04 million bitcoin sits in dormant accounts. Sizable inactive accounts that wake up after years of dormancy draw investor attention because of the potential market impact if those coins are sold."

It's impossible for you to know if the accounts are dormant intentionally or because the owner has died or lost access - and in the latter case the coins are effectively lost or destroyed in every practical sense. So you can't even say how many usable bitcoins exist at this very moment, and it is even more impossible for you to tell exactly how many accounts will be lost in the future.

It's an example showing that institutions elsewhere are actually responding to this (a question asked by the parent post), and Norway will very likely not be alone here.

Not really true. Kiwi birds are very furry (unless you define furry as having mammalian hair, which sort of defeats the point) and are more related to lizards than to mammals.

> If accurate, I still prefer ChatGPT.

It looks like you are using ChatGPT too much and feeding yourself untrustworthy information for no reason.

Internet search still exists, there is no need to use ChatGPT for this. Simply typing "how much water per btc transaction" into Google will give you this top response much faster than ChatGPT would:

> Buying or selling bitcoin uses 16,000 litres of clean water for every single transaction.

This is reported by New Scientist, who's reporting is based on actual calculations (using real data) from a PHD candidate at the Amsterdam School of Business and Economics.

Whereas the number given by ChatGTP is based on nothing but the statistical probability of what would sound correct in this context, and has no guarantee of accuracy at all. In this case it was off by an order of magnitude compared to the number based on real data.

The internet search probably used a lot less water as well (beside being both faster and more trustworthy).

I can't really follow your arguments.

Wether the actions have been approved by a democratic majority seems orthogonal to whether human rights have been violated (if a government performs torture on some humans it would still be a human rights issue even if there's democratic support for it).

The fact that this would imply that other countries, such as India and China, also would have similar human rights issues doesn't seem very strange either - several countries often violate human rights in the same way.

Not saying I agree with the legal case, but your explanations of why it's "insane" doesn't really hold water to me.

Your analysis is contradicted by the evidence presented in the article.

> One study took 1,600 men with low-risk prostate cancer in the U.K. and randomly assigned them to get surgery, radiation or active surveillance. Fifteen years later, the researchers found that mortality rates for all the men were low, and similar for each group no matter which approach they took, according to the study which was published last year in the New England Journal of Medicine.

If aggressive treatment regularly saved lives the healthiest 35% of the population, one would probably see a noticeable difference in mortality between the randomized groups.

Maybe it would be possible to find flaws in the study, or an interpretation of the results that would align with your analysis, but it seems like you haven't engaged with the evidence at all.

Worth noting here is that "proton flash therapy" is a new therapy, but "proton therapy" is not. Proton therapy is a lot more recent than x-ray therapy, but still a conventional therapy.

Flash therapy is the part is which just now entering clinical trials, where you treat the patient with ultra-high dose rates (so you deliver the same dose of radiation, but in maybe 90 ms instead of 90 seconds). There are indications that healthy cells are better at recovering from the ulra-high dose rate than tumor cells are, which means it would have a protective effect on healthy tissue, but the mechanism behind it is not known. The type of radiation is not specified, it can be protons, electrons, x-rays, etc.

So "proton flash therapy" is a Flash therapy that uses protons. Other clinical trials are using electrons instead, i.e. "electron flash therapy".

That anecdote is not necessarily true. The combination world be very rare even if blindness offers no protection, and it seems to simply not have been studied enough to be confident those rare individuals have been identified as such and published as case reports.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/z9Syf3pGffpvHwfr4/i-m-mildly...

> The review was triggered by the Icelandic medicines agency following reports of suicidal thoughts and self-injury in people using liraglutide and semaglutide medicines. So far authorities have retrieved and are analysing about 150 reports of possible cases of self-injury and suicidal thoughts.

> Liraglutide and semaglutide medicines are widely used, with an exposure of over 20 million patient-years to date. It is not yet clear whether the reported cases are linked to the medicines themselves or to the patients’ underlying conditions or other factors.

I think 150 case reports (3 reports from Iceland) across 20 million patient-years, with no evidence of a causality, seems to be very far from a "high likelihood" at the moment.

Lead is already a commonly used material in the sheath for medium and high voltage cables[1]. It is not considered a problem for industrial applications, where proper disposal of the cable at end of life is regulated, as far as I know.

[1] https://www.htwirecable.com/products/cables-by-type/medium-v...

A good reason to want self-absorbed bullies to publicly fail rather than publicly succeed is to discourage others from adopting similar attitude and methods.

Every even item is the corresponding digit, every odd item is a word that rhymes with the corresponding digit.

A continuation could be "6, heaven, 8"

I'm not a domain expert either, but to me the results seem to be entirety what you would expect from a model trained to pattern match very well on existing content.

That is, the ideas, strengths and limitations of the current well-known theories are very well explained and mostly correct. However, the "novel theory" is mostly filler words around some very thin concepts to make it sound like an actual theory with some depth to it, but in reality saying nothing more than that spacetime is granular and there could maybe be some matrices.

Clarification for those only reading the comments: This is in laboratory mice, not humans.

I agree it would be user error, but it seems to be a particularly easy mistake to make compared to the REST example, where you explicitly create REST endpoint to send a value to the client.

If you accidentally move filtering of a list of users from server-scope to client-scope during refactoring, everything will still work just as you expect it to and you'll be none the wiser – but suddenly every user has access to all the user data in the list. There's not many other frameworks I'm aware of where moving an operation to an adjacent row or forgetting to change a word suddenly (and silently) exposes the data to the client – except perhaps PHP, which does not have a good reputation when it comes to security to say the least. Altough to be fair adlpz mentioned something similar with Next.js in another thread.

Tagging values as server-only mostly seems like another thing that could be easily forgotten. Personally I would feel more comfortable if values intended to be sent from the server to client had to be explicitly tagged as mutual, with an optional compilation flag that enforces this, such that the intent to share it with the client must always be stated in plain text during creation.

I don't know much about this kind of architecture, but wouldn't it be problematic from an infosec standpoint? It seems like it would be very easy to accidentally leak information from the server to the client in a subtle manner if the developer makes a mistake somewhere. And in ways which would not be obvious from reading the code unless you carefully consider the implications of each e/server and e/client with respect to the mentioned graph analysis?

Are there any mitigations in place to prevent this, except the obvious "be careful and don't write bad code"? Or have I misunderstood things completely and it's a non-issue?

You can use one less calculation

50/25=2 2*6=12 100+75=175 175+12=187

Then they chose a poor example to illustrate their point, since anyone is free to book a cancer screening even if they are younger than the recommended age, if they so prefer.