While I agree that it’s extremely unlikely that a lab developed this virus, it’s far more plausible for one to have manufactured it.
> “It was very unlikely that anything could escape from such a place,” Ben Embarek said during the Feb. 9 WHO press conference, citing the team’s discussions with Wuhan lab officials about their safety protocols and audits. “If you look at the history of lab accidents, these are extremely rare events.”
> Yet lab accidents aren’t rare.
> What’s rare are accidents causing documented outbreaks. But those have happened, including in 2004 when two researchers at a lab in Beijing unknowingly became infected with another type of SARS coronavirus, sparking a small outbreak that killed one person.
> In the weeks since leaving Wuhan, the WHO’s team has been questioned about its independence and depth, including by the Biden administration, amid media reports that China denied the team access to raw data on possible COVID-19 cases that were identified during the earliest part of the outbreak.
> “We have deep concerns about the way in which the early findings of the COVID-19 investigation were communicated and questions about the process used to reach them,” White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said in a statement last month. “It is imperative that this report be independent, with expert findings free from intervention or alteration by the Chinese government.”
Why is the distinction between development and manufacturing relevant here? Have you read the article?
Everything on https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html is derived from (a) HN's core value of intellectual curiosity, which is the sole thing we're optimizing for (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...), and (b) well over 10 years of experience operating this place.
Not only that, but they're garbage-collected periodically, meaning that if there's any rule there which isn't 'paying' for the space it consumes on that page, we take it out. It's like a codebase that way: complexity is the enemy, less is more, and deleting is at least as important as adding.
If anyone has a cogent case for deleting one of the guidelines, that would be most helpful. If anyone can think of one that should be added, and can't be derived from what's already there, that would also be helpful.
I realize it's annoying to be rate limited, but it's one of the few (crude) software tools we have to try to put off the descent of the forum into flamewar, so dropping the mechanism isn't really an option.
If not, what does it take to earn a permaban?