[akamaka]

Users can press the “flag” button for content that is off-topic. I flagged this article because it is an unreviewed pre-print paper that has been rushed out by its authors, who clearly have not investigated any of the most obvious follow-up questions, such as “what is the probability of this occurring naturally?”

[ctoth]

Okay so we definitely need to flag any machine learning papers from Arxiv because hey preprint.

Further, do you assume that other members cannot read the preprint warning and decide for themselves? This strikes me as some sort of bizarre way to patronize the entire community.

[akamaka]

I’m not a biologist, so I’m really not interested in this type of paper, and I expressed my opinion through the voting mechanism.

Also, there are thousands of researchers studying this new virus. If this turns out to be an important finding, I can wait until it is validated. At this point, this paper looks poor quality, and it was a waste of time for me to click on it and read it.

[Tenoke]

There are no post downvotes on HN for a reason (or at least normal users dont have them) - flag doesn't and shouldn't mean the same thing as a downvote.

[akamaka]

I don’t flag things often, as one might downvote a comment they disagree with. The flag mechanism is for off-topic or spam content, and I consider this way off-topic for this site. There have already been hundreds of published articles about this virus, and if I was interested in seeing them, I would use a site like PubMed to see them.

[ngcc_hk]

Need summary otherwise bad coin drive away good coins. What are the good one?

[himinlomax]

> it is an unreviewed pre-print

Any relevant work on nCoV will be unreviewed at this point.

[mcantelon]

>who clearly have not investigated any of the most obvious follow-up questions, such as “what is the probability of this occurring naturally?”

If it's true then the cause is an entirely different question.