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by Jimmc414·4y ago·view on hn ↗
Previous post was taken down within a few minutes by an unhelpful poster causing it getting it flagged with an abusive post. Two good questions were asked there so I will repost them here:

>Posted by 'version_five'

"This sounds like one of those "bible code" things. As someone who knows nothing about DNA sequences, what is the probability that two codes could be matched? (In a birthday paradox sense where you can go looking anywhere)"

>Posted by 'whoomp12342'

"isn't it well known that one of the main reasons why we got a vaccine so quickly was because we had done a ton of research when SARS originally broke out?"

3 comments
>This sounds like one of those "bible code" things. As someone who knows nothing about DNA sequences, what is the probability that two codes could be matched? (In a birthday paradox sense where you can go looking anywhere)

The genome in question is about 30000 bases long, which isn't nearly long enough for the outcome space size issue to come into play. Assuming independence, the probability is still very remote, effectively zero.

However, there is in no way any expectation of independence. SARS-CoV-2 is obviously closely related to SARS-CoV-1, which is obviously closely related to 2015/2016 ongoing vaccine research. (And perhaps gain of function research.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29938340 was flagged by other users—quite a few of them. We can only guess why users flag things, but I doubt that it had anything to do with that trollish post. We've banned the latter account now.
Why is it taken down?
Someone with a 3 min old account posted a threatening message unrelated to any ongoing discussions.
3m old accounts can't flag (a certain karma level is needed to be able to flag).

An unrelated threatening comment would have gotten the unrelated comment killed, but not the main posting.

If the main posting was flagged, that is because some number of users with enough karma to flag clicked the "flag" link on the post.

Maybe that is the case, but they did not flag it, they posted a message with several violent keywords and the post was immediately flagged. It seemed different from normal flagged posts because all of the reply buttons disappeared and as I hit reply on a comment I was in the process of writing, I got the message "You can no longer reply in this post" or something to that effect. I looked at other currently flagged posts and this seemed atypical. You can still reply within the flagged posts comment section. I assumed it was some sort of auto moderation action.
The reply buttons likely disappeared because it was also made "dead". Looking it up in your profile it shows "[flagged] [dead]". As to why it was made dead, I do not know.
SARS-CoV2 is in the title, that may be enough for being taken down automatically to avoid flamewars.