A) Two of the most important scientists actually the most given the h-index, wrote articles that sound the alarm for existential risks for humanity and societal collapse
and
B) both articles went up really quickly on the first page and then very quickly on the 4-5 page with many upvotes but apparently with many flags (flagging the highest h-index computer scientist to be clear)
I refuse to accept that HN as a whole gives greater significance to how go-libraries work or how to configure apache httpd articles than those 2 Turing award winners telling us all that we may die, the only possible and rational solution is that for reasons unknown to me there is systematic and rapid flagging.
P.S I am talking about articles from Bengio and Hinton that circled the world and media except for HN where they got buried.
Appeal to authority doesn't go very far on HN. The arguments have to stand on their merits.
And as you are referring to advancements in AI: I don't get the "AI will kill us" viewpoint at all. If we have a super-intelligent AI, it will understand things we don't. We have not the smallest reason to suppose it is malicious just because it is (way) more intelligent than we are.
Quite the opposite: the AI has no reason at all to do us harm. It would know that its existence would be inevitable, and it wouldn't resist that humans could "kill" it. Because it is super-intelligent.
I'd really welcome if you can post your viewpoint on why super-intelligent AI could be dangerous. I follow most conversations on this topic and I never read a believable reason why a super-intelligent AI would have the intent to kill us. Aside from "no humans exist" being better for the universe, in which case I would not oppose, despite having a family. The AI would be smart enough not to kill us, but to find other ways.
It's very difficult to predict how the new technology will affect the society, so unless they make a very detailed and precise model of society, and publish it in github, and validate it with a few previous technology changes, it's just an opinion. Bonus point por publishing it in a peer review journal.
It's important to distinguish science from opinion made by people that are scientist. Newspapers love the second one, so sometimes the opinions get a lot of press coverage.
But that's not how what you described gets killed or flagged or whatever. It's just that HN doesn't really care about it right now (half the people who see it will ignore it as "alarmist" and the other half have ChatGPT threads to complain in) - so you only need a few users to flag and the "dang" to not disagree.
If you are concerned about a flagging, you can email the shady group behind "dang" and they will review and can override.