johncena33

I only see just one ad.

It's also the demogrpahic of the internet. Internet is abundant with, for a lack of a better term, toxic people. Which makes sense if you think about it, since on the internet you can be toxic with very very little to no consequences. Lot of toxicity comes out in the form of criticisms. On a moderated forum like HN it's not easy to criticize a person, so you go for the next good thing - a company or a new area.

If one just reads the HN solely, they might get the impression that Google is the most evil company on the earth since the beginning of time. In reality very few people actually have that kind of view. It's mostly toxic people need to find a target to unleash their toxicity; on HN it's Google.

Since you are young, I'd advise to be very cautious on internet. Never take internet crowd as a proper sample of real world population. It's very skewed and almost always not in a good way.

You should use bing or duckduckgo. I've been hearing lately on HN that they are many orders better than Google.

The problem with this kind of requests if you comply with it, then you've set a precedence. Then who knows who else is going to get offended and then start demanding something else to be taken down.

And the worst case scenario in this attention hungry culture how many others will start making demands like this just for more publicity? I can't read minds. I didn't know this artist before this debacle. It certainly brought him a lot of free publicity. How many people are going to start doing the same now given the amount of free publicity?

I think there should be a separate section on HN just for Google related discussions, given that the amount of threads pop up everyday on HN.

The wild speculation that I've read that is somewhat related to the grant proposal, because it was submitted to DARPA. The speculation is following (paraphrasing):

> WIV is a dual research institution. What that means is there's been military research done by PLA at WIV. Ecohealth Alliance is a front for two different things: 1. outsource risky pathogens experiments, which is done by NIH, NIAID and other organizations 2. spying on Chinese military operations at WIV, which is done by US military and intelligence organizations. That's why Daszak is intricately linked to US administration and has been untouchable so far. EHA has been essentially voilating NIH grant terms and denied NIH requests to submit all the experiments data. That explains US govt's reluctance to have a proper investigation.

I am in no way claiming there's any evidence to it, especially EHA is partially funded by US intelligence operation. You be the judge.

I think the parent poster was talikng about BANAL virus discovered in Laos, which apparently is closest to SARS-CoV2, but it doesn't have Furin Cleavage Site.

> The Laos study offers insight into the origins of the pandemic, but there are still missing links, say researchers. For example, the Laos viruses don’t contain the so-called furin cleavage site on the spike protein that further aids the entry of SARS-CoV-2 and other coronaviruses into human cells.

From [1]. So yes, the claim made by the parent poster is patently false.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02596-2

> Correction, October 25, 9:50 am: A previous version of this story stated that SARS-CoV-2 had been definitively proven not to be a bioengineered virus. While an August 2021 US intelligence report concluded, “Most agencies … assess with low confidence that SARS-CoV-2 probably was not genetically engineered,” and many scientists agree with that assessment, it was an overstatement to claim that the theory has been definitively ruled out. The introduction and conclusion of the story have been updated to reflect this lower level of certainty. (h/t to Alina Chan, biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, for her critique and input)

From https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22734496/genetic-engineer....

So yes, your claim is false.

Amazon has also done the same [1].

[1] https://theintercept.com/2021/02/10/amazon-alabama-union-bus...

First of all, if a transmission can happen at a wet market, it can also happen inside a lab. One doesn't need a virology degree to understand something this simple. As a matter of fact that's exactly what happened in a Taiwan lab [1].

[1]: https://fortune.com/2021/12/10/taiwan-investigates-covid-lab...

The reality is not so rosy. Many virologists know that if lab leak is true their careers will be over. So I am very skeptical of how much obfuscations and disinformation spread by virologists is for the good of humanity and how much of it is just to protect their self interest.

That would only disprove the genetic manipulation part, but not necessarily lab leak. A WIV lab staff can easily contract virus from a bat inside the lab. This essentially what happened in Taiwan, where a lab staff got infected with COVID from a mouse [1]. To disprove lab leak you also have to show either 1. WIV or any other labs in Wuhan didn't have any virus samples that can be an ancestor of SARS-CoV2 2. we can establish a very clear and well understood route how the ancestor of SARS-CoV2 arrived at Wuhan from Yunan province, where the horseshoe bats live, including how it became so good at infecting humans in a very short period of time.

[1] https://fortune.com/2021/12/10/taiwan-investigates-covid-lab...

AFAIK the known animal reservoirs got it from humans. Do you know any animal reservoir that we still don't know how the animals have got it?

Also Ecohealth Alliance and WIV collected viruses in Laos. So in terms of natural origin vs. lab leak the viruses found in Laos don't increase probability on either side.

> warned it could damage “international harmony”.

"international harmony" is just a front for hiding self-interest. Many elites, including the said virologists and bureaucrats, have significant financial or other ties with China. That's why any discussion of China and pandemics is very quickly buried with bullying and force [1].

[1]: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FI3V-gdWQAkWyJS?format=jpg&name=...

That doesn't stop at least few "I Hate Ads" (read "I Hate Google") threads popping up every single day. For some reason this "tedious" tag only applies when it comes to Lab Leak or any China related threads.

In my experience, that's how left wing disinformation works. Using rhetorical tricks to mislead the audience. It's even more ironic when most left wing journalists and pundits are followers of Foucault and Derrida.

Yes, there are two groups: pro-MS and anti-Google. And maybe there is a large overlap between these groups. Not some privacy warriors as many of these anti-Google jihadists claim or pretend to be.

Snopes have made lot of dubious and misleading claims on lab leak [1][2]. Politifact literally retracted their claims on calling lab leak a conspiracy theory [3]. Reality is all these mainstream media is trying to control the narrative with rhetorical tricks.

[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cruz-wuhan-tweet/

[2] https://www.snopes.com/news/2021/07/16/lab-leak-evidence/

[3] https://www.politifact.com/li-meng-yan-fact-check/

This is a common tactic of left wing media. They use rhetorical tricks to mislead the audiences. Lab leak has been tarred as conspiracy theory because of political and financial gains through very dubious rhetorical tricks.

[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cruz-wuhan-tweet/

[2] https://www.snopes.com/news/2021/07/16/lab-leak-evidence/

Snopes have made lot of dubious and misleading claims on lab leak. Reality is the whole Acitvist Industrial Complex and many elites, who have financial ties w/ China including HN favorites like Apple and Amazon [3][4], are trying to regain control of the narrative they lost because of internet.

[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cruz-wuhan-tweet/

[2] https://www.snopes.com/news/2021/07/16/lab-leak-evidence/

[3] https://www.macrumors.com/2021/12/07/apple-ceo-tim-cook-secr...

[4] https://www.reuters.com/world/china/amazon-partnered-with-ch...

Interesting how when MS is on ad market justifications like this pop up all the time on HN. Meanwhile, quarter of HN is nothing but a jihad against Google for its advertising business.

You should see how HN would react if Google has done anything remotely close to it. If it was Google your comment would be downvoted to oblivion instead of being the top comment. Not to mention you'd be disparaged for protecting your employer.

> Also, roughly 100% of the companies who are asked, "are you about to be disrupted by new technology that you didn't create and is totally different then the way you do things?" answer, "Nope!".

I don't know anything about protein folding or drug development. But you brought up a very good point. Sometimes insiders and experts are the wrong people to ask, because they are not impartial. In the worst case we've seen so many virologists are on a campaign to paint lab leak as conspiracy theory just because their careers at risk. In similar vein it's also not the best idea to ask Wall St. who is responsible for 2008 financial crisis.

Well, it's HN. HN has become a FUD machine.

I've noticed the quality of conversations on HN have deteriorated drastically after dang took over. There're simply too many threads where the whole conversation is complaining, whining, dunking, outrage etc.

Anytime there's a thread on Netflix, there'd be a group of users who would start complaining about Netflix recommendations. Even when the article has nothing to do with recommendations. I am using Netflix as an example, this pattern you'll notice in many other HN threads.

I've heard it from another Chinese student that a lot of Chinese students come from families that are blessed by CCP. So naturally they are very loyal to CCP. Very few students/people in general can make it outside of China without being blessed by CCP. Hence very high loyalty to CCP among international Chinese students.

It wouldn't be HN if someone doesn't do hot takes.

Yes, Google used to have this feature. I was probably one of the tiny percentage of the users who used it. My guess is it's one of those features where very few people used it. So the cost of maintaining a feature like this on a scale like Google search with tiny percentage of users is not worth it.

I am looking forward to people getting outraged once again when Android does not allow third-party apps to handle 911. There'd be dozens of articles on HN about how Google is being anti-competitive and outrage will keep pouring in.