johncena33

> Have you considered the possibility that it first appeared in the vicinity of a lab that experiments on similar viruses is because if it had appeared elsewhere, there would have been no sufficiently-equipped lab to isolate it?

You are essentially arguing for lab leak theory. Initially there was only one cluster of COVID and that was at Wuhan. That's why lab leak hypothesis is more plausible.

It was not the case that there were dozens of clusters all over the world and Wuhan lab was first able to identify the virus. Your argument would have _some_ validity if there are lot of clusters of outbreaks at the same time. But that was not the case. The initial cluster was only at Wuhan.

The author is making the "vast network of scientists, govt. officials, and civillians" argument, which doesn't even pass the BS test. Few dozens researchers in Wuhan lab and CCP officials are more than enough to accomplish the cover up.

> People are terrible at keeping secrets.

Not unless their lives are at risk. You do understand that we are talking about CCP?

> vast network of scientists, civilians, and government officials

Few corrections:

* CCP government officials, who have every single incentive to participate in cover-up

* I am not sure how much cover-ups needed by any civillian, let alone vast network of civillians. An average civillian is probably not aware of lab leak to begin with, unless they were informed by media.

* again, not vast network of scientists is needed for cover-up. Mostly researchers and officials in Wuhan Lab. Like CCP officials, who have every single incentive to participate in cover-up

Amazon was also included in the article. I don't see Amazon on the title. And the submitter even put Google in front of Microsoft. The submitter not only added Google, also changed the order.

Probably not random. Since there is always _at least_ one anti-Google article makes to front page every day. And the quality of discussion on Google related is probably the lowest on HN. The mod team didn't seem very eager to moederate Google related threads so far.

Worst of it is Google was not even in the title of the article. The title was editorialized to include Google.

I have submitted this yesterday [1]. The submission didn't make the front page. The title of the article is "Microsoft and Apple Wage War on Gadget Right-to-Repair Laws". When the title was editoralized to insert Google, it made to front-page. Can someone explain why the editing of the title?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27225003

A simple explanation is product-wise this feature request doesn't make sense. The number of users will be using the said feature is not worth the effort the amount of effort needed to implement, maintain and operationalize in a product of literally billion users.

Of course certain virologists would be eager to dismiss lab leak hypothesis. Just think about the implication of this hypothesis turns out to be true. Virologists have very strong conflict of interests. If these people have any integrity they'd refrain from commenting.

Yes. By that logic, why start punishing people for vehicular manslaughter? Just spend the effort on educating perpretrators so that they don't kill someone next time.

What does a sci-fi author or book have to do anthing with actual investigation of a real-life pandemic?

By that logic there shouldn't be any murder trials. Eventually everyone will die.

It is sickening that millions of people died, more will die, hundreds of millions of people have been pushed below poverty line, almost every single person's life on the planet is affected in some way and some people think it's unnecessary to investigate.

I see this argument pop up quite frequently on HN with good amount of upvotes. I am guessing this type of arguments are motivated by and upvoted because of poltical and ideological ulterior motives.

I think there's also something more insidious at play. In western countries lot of people have become rich by exporting manufacturing to China. If somehow it is found that COVID was a lab-leak, there'd be a huge amount of backlash against China. It will harm the business, who are doing their manufacturing in China. There's a lot of money involved if lab-leak hypothesis turned out true.

This sort of reasoning seems very ideologically and politically motivated. It's sad that we live in political climate where millions of people died and almost every single person's life in the planet has been affected and it's absolutely okay to make a statement that "no investigation is necessary".

North American culture is individualistic in theory, not in practice. Coming from a very collectivistic culture, I can tell you people care way less about number of followers and number of likes than North American people do. You'd expect in an individualistic culture, people wouldn't be obsessed about curating perfect image in social media or dream about being a social media celebrity. That goes against the very idea of individualism. What's happening here isn't individualism, it's validation seeking. That's why I used the word narcissism. Because narcissism at its core is insecurity and validation seeking.

While I am skeptical about the finding of this particular study, I also think social media gets blamed for lot of cultural problems unjustifiably. Being an immigrant, one of the culture shocks in North America for me was how much narcissistic the culture is. In a very weird way people are encouraged to have grandiose self-image in the name of high self-esteem. Social media has definitely excerbated self-centerdness. But the self-centeredness is a cultural issue, social media just made it more visible.

> First it was YouTube and the Firestick

The whole spat started because Amazon removed Chromecast devices from their retail platform.

May I ask why did you change the title to begin with?

> Kudos: Compliments, highlighting successes, lauding positives.

I think advices can be without providing proper context can not only be counter-productive, it can also create toxic cultures. I've been part of a company where the CTO was a very self-help guru type "positive" person. There were compliments, positivity, motivation etc. everywhere. There was no bar for excellence. Everything was excellent to begin with. Everyone was congratulating themselves not only for doing the miniscule things, but also for bringing in a good team spirit. The whole culture ended up being a participation trophy culture.

All the good employees left the company, and the medicore ones were still doing the same thing last team I heard. This toxic positivity has become very popular in pop cultures. Unfortunately it's all appearances, underneath the positivity is the thriving mediocrity.

I see this a lot. Is there any reason why this particular region will have so many issues?

By that logic, we shouldn't have judicial systems. We shouldn't have any post-mortems. There shouldn't be any kind of accountability.

How does this impact the company behind Mesos and products based on Mesos, e.g., Mesosphere etc.?

I listened to a psychology prof., who said "the probability of encountering a person with anti-social trait in real life is extremely low, OTOH the probability of encountering a person with anti-social trait on internet is extremely high". Because internet provides a safe way to act toxic without any repercussion in real life.

When I see the OP comment which claims WFH is the only way and any other way to is just "backward thinking" in a very self-aggrandizing manner, I just remind myself that internet is safe haven for the type of people, whom I will rarely meet in real life.

Can we please stop hijacking threads with unrelated or barely related rants?

That doesn't mean what OP has mentioned is wrong. NYT has a history of misleading headlines [1].

[1] https://thepostmillennial.com/nyt-makes-terrorism-story-into...

Yet, being a minority male in tech industry, I am regarded as more privileged than white women just because people of my skin color are more successful in tech industry. It reminds me of the quote from The Office "Andy Bernard does not lose contests. He wins them. Or he quits them because they are unfair." If there's evidence that supports my ideology then it's fair, otherwise, there's oppression.

I personally think it's post-modernism and the adjacent ideologies are responsible for this. Since everything is subjective and there's no objective notion of truth and it's all moral relativism, one has the license to do anything they want. That's why activism and ideologies took over professional integrity.

I agree with you. The TCP/IP header argument is really bad. It shows how internet is full of people who will keep arguing for the sake of argument instead of trying to have a reasonable, pragmatic and honest discussion.

> Once again, this is the status-quo for for-profit businesses, so I am not exactly trying to criticize Google for this. That being said, I do think that Google's (increasingly tarnished) reputation as a champion of open source work is largely undeserved because of their tendency to pull stuff like this.

This seems like "damn if you do damn if you don't" situation. Android OS and security upgrade is a mess just because OEMs are not willing to provide upgrades to customer in timely manner. That's one of the reasons a lot of functionalities have been moved to Google Play where customers can easily get updates of different components of Android even if the OEMs are unwilling to do so. Sure, this also serves business purpose of Google. But it's not the whole truth if we omit the OEMs and Android OS upgrade situation.

> I think addressing one issue does not 'trivialise' everything else.

Yes, it does. On my Twitter I have "racism" and "race" including many other trendy SJW keywords blocked. The reason is I simply don't have the time and energy to tend to every single accusation of racism or whatever-isms is out there. And most these accusations have nothing to do with racism. It's just some bully has found a new target to harass.