The money men have no moral attachment to any source so given how cheap this mix has gotten it basically wins.

* I'd point out without China and its Leninist command economy (as well as publicly funded research) getting the price of these technologies down to where it is now we'd still be doomed, but we are where we are so now the system necessarily will act in its own self interest to use the basically free energy. Is it going to be enough at this stage? Who knows, but I see reasons to be optimistic.

In addition a lot of the speculation assumes something specific to the US where this is a trend in multiple countries, predominantly high income ones[0][1], but this speculation that it might be 'chemicals' is fairly dull to read and adds nothing. Why this cohort specifically? What commonalities are there between countries with an observed increase? If it's diet why would it only impact the younger cohort?

[0]: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanonc/article/PIIS1470-2... [1]: https://www.gastrojournal.org/article/S0016-5085(21)00010-X/...

Why wouldn't influence campaigns, we know every big country to be running, target this site? What reason would they have to leave it out from their list? Why not target a major news forum for the more wealthy and connected (predominantly) Americans in tech? This is not an uwu smol bean site anymore and the cost of (undetectably) botting any given site is rapidly approaching cents.

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44962005

The idea we have to treat arguments in good faith like the other user in this story excusing fascist death squads show how well this moderation approach aligns with the Thiel-ite sympathies.

As usual I feel like he overestimates the US' ability to impose rules and underestimates the Chinese ability to both circumvent those rules while developing self sufficiency. In addition we've all seen the Chinese ability to retaliate across a range of industrial sectors from rare earths to drug precursors. While these embargos would have some impact on Chinese chip development; initiatives like Huawei Ascend clusters and DeepSeek being trained on less powerful chips show that China will find a way to innovate whether or not they have access to the most powerful chips.

I feel like the piece overstates the importance of the AI race specifically. The recent field tests of the US' automated weapons systems are... not encouraging. [0][1] Unless you're an AGI booster that rather implies that crucial ability of US tech that China is missing is being able to generate Sora videos of fat people causing disasters.

In light of the 15th 5 year plan and its focus on self sufficiency without reference to the West these China hawks are increasingly irrelevant to the conversation unfolding outside the borders of the increasingly irrelevant and mistrusted US.

[0]: https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/us-navy-i...

[1]: https://www.techbuzz.ai/articles/anduril-s-autonomous-weapon...

This is because these dipshits are eagerly carrying water for a vindictive dictator. They are not operating in good faith but due to the alignment of the owners of this site with those self-same fascists you are meant to act as if they're not trolls.

In the US as elsewhere it's a combination of factors, COVID overhiring and inflation, interest rates going up, market concentration and, US specific, the since Trump-reversed Trump-imposed tax changes. While this reversal probably helps the job market some in the immediate term the indicators of the fundamentals are flashing red everywhere and outside of the US it all just continues to be part of the same Omnirecession since 2008.

Perusing active at the moment it looks like a fairly quiet time for flagging, though the example didn't get to active so it's a lopsided sample. The flagged articles are roughly:

- UBI doesn't work because the poor are lazy

- 2 different aliens/UFOs related articles

- Zohran Mamdani and reaction of tech scene in NYC

- Israeli settler violence in the west bank

I don't really see a compelling argument that any of these except perhaps west bank violence is worthy of a flag. We have tools to deal with these topics already such as the front page fall off for flame wars. I don't think the site is enhanced by flagging in it's current state and absent a larger change like increasing the flag karma to be closer to vouch karma so recovery is less lopsided, I think at least being transparent about flagging helps restore confidence in the system and would help reduce conspiracy thinking.

a) exceed the likelihood of people doing this via commenting anyway

b) justify the opaque and powerful nature of flagging as-is

Perhaps you stopping flagging if you're not willing to justify a flag is a good outcome in aggregate? We have mods to kill threads which violate the guidelines already. But looking at the /active list there's certainly an amount of (probably organic) censorship of controversial threads in either direction (though my gut feel is it biases more towards censorship of articles about the latest outrages of US government).

I'm not really interested in say, Ruby, I think people should probably use languages which are type-safe if they want to avoid catastrophes in production and 1am pager calls. However if I see an article about Ruby I'm just going to not engage with it. Perhaps your existing interpretation of the unwritten rules is too broad and actually we ought to rein in the amount of flagging anyway?

I think a lot of people agree with your reasons for flagging and wish politics didn't cross over into tech, but that doesn't really impinge either way on making flags public. (In the example article that prompted this a debate about the relative benefits of different vaccine research approaches seems patently tech/science based, but again it is not really relevant to a proposal to make the flags public record).

This would allow anyone to perform network analysis and reporting and full audit ability and is a minimal level of accountability for using this functionality to close discussions down.

We have dang's word that he hasn't detected any funky behavior with respect to flagging and that these are organic events. But I don't see a reason that the information shouldn't be available. I struggle to think of a downside.

Not really relevant to your main point but the idea there aren't social media influence campaigns from all sides is more of a tinfoil position than acknowledging that there absolutely are, whether or not they are effective.

It is my understanding that the HN code-base is pretty much write-only so it's probably a tall ask but I think it would help confidence in the site at this... turbulent time globally, if people could do their own investigation of which accounts are jumping on stories to kill them.

This would be useful irrespective of your political slant, e.g. on issues like Israel-Palestine.

For the example story there are a few possibilities:

- people are sick of 'political' stories and flag them out of tedium

- there is a prevailing pro-Trump, anti-science majority of active users on the site

- there are active influence campaigns using sock-puppet accounts to hide and prevent discussion of ongoing attacks on science

The most likely answer is all-of-the-above. But why should such anti-speech activity as flagging be private? This may already be possible via the API so I'd be interested to learn that if so.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44961584

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44962005

Points: 21

# Comments: 18

The US had no domestic production of penicillin between 2004[3] when its last plant shuttered until 2021 when a factory reopened.[1] (source 1 and 3 appear to contradict, the 2019 testimony states there was no manufacturer after 2004 whereas it sounds like the plant closed in 2020, regardless the domestic capability is extremely weak)

As usual for American sources this is painted as some nefarious scheme by the evil red Chinese to destroy America by making cheaper drugs available. To add my own editorialising I think US companies are easily capable of ruining US manufacturing and focusing on screwing US patients over.[2] The average citizen should probably be glad of low cost Chinese supply, but nurturing domestic capability as per Biden is sensible.

[0]: https://prosperousamerica.org/skyrocketing-pharmaceutical-im...

[1]: https://www.fiercepharma.com/manufacturing/reopening-penicil...

[2]: https://www.rand.org/news/press/2024/02/01/index1.html

[3]: https://www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/RosemaryGibsonTesti...

[4]: sources per https://youtu.be/hS0-ugYA-ko?si=xCNzctCGr9f2M7ct

- attempted illegal book bans

- suppression of right to protest and free speech on university campuses with lawfare

- US citizens being black bagged and deported to foreign concentration camps without due process and against court rulings

- deploying the army to the states unconstitutionally

- continued gerrymandering over the ruling of state supreme courts (Ohio)

Evidence for the Democratic party becoming more extreme:

- ... I'm struggling to think of an example, maybe you hold that prosecution of violent insurrectionists and their ring leader, the current president, was political extremism and authoritarian, but one would be so far detached from the reality-inhabiting community if so I don't know what to tell you.