gwerbret

The article was written, from soup to nuts, by AI. I suspect the person who threw his byline on it barely glanced at the text.

Unfortunately, the equipment and reagent vendors in the very unregulated life sciences/biomedical research world constitute a racket. Serial buyouts over the last 10 - 15 years have led to a ridiculous degree of consolidation -- the sort that wouldn't fly in a regulated industry, or even one in which regulators are paying any attention at all -- so it's now dominated by two players: Merck (through its MilliporeSigma arm), and Thermo Fisher. The existence of this cartel means that they can essentially get away with murder, both from a fraud angle (which is exactly what the Western blot manipulation is) and by fixing prices to whatever degree they please.

Also unfortunately, biomedical scientists are not known for their tendency to collaborate to face a mutual enemy (the mild pushback against the Elsevier/Springer Nature publishing cartel has come less from scientists and more from university systems whose libraries have to foot most of the bills). From their perspective, it's "What am I gonna do? Raise my own antibodies? Start blowing my own glassware?" So they grimace and bear it.

For reference, here's how their workflow for research antibodies goes (and it's been like this for decades):

1. Produce an antibody the research world needs. Do no QA, that's expensive and unnecessary.

2. Claim with usually no evidence (and apparently by forging evidence) that the antibody works in certain applications.

3. Let researchers buy the antibody and do your QA for you. Even if the antibody doesn't work, only a tiny percentage of buyers will go to the effort of getting a refund.

4. Profit. Keep selling the antibody even when the rare scientist with time on their hands demonstrates beyond doubt that your antibody clearly doesn't work.

5. When sales start drying up because enough people are catching up to the scam, discontinue the antibody. Give no explanation.

6. Repeat from 1.

NMDA receptor encephalitis is usually associated with a particular ovarian tumor, so the first thing I did on seeing this article was to check if the author is male or female (he's male). It is the habit of certain cancers to present with bizarre symptoms (so-called paraneoplastic syndromes) including psychosis as in this case, and often it can be months before someone thinks to look for cancer. I'm glad the author's okay.

> Can you elaborate? What's unique about the nations for which democracy isn't the best form of government? What's unique about their people?

Not the person you responded to, but functional democracies require either an already-established functioning government, which can be efficiently perpetuated and controlled by elected leaders (think the United Kingdom); or a non-functioning government which can be effectively reformed and then perpetuated by elected leaders (think Taiwan). In both cases, functional democracies also require an electorate who can be brought to work towards a nation's major development goals.

There are countries for which none of these criteria can be reasonably met in the context of a democracy. One reason is if the electoral processes are so corrupt that no one competent is actually elected or, if they are accidentally competent, are too busy working towards their own and their cronies' ends to be effective leaders. The second is if there is underlying social strife which prevents people from working collaboratively towards nation building.

India fails in both counts: the corruption at all levels of government is nothing short of legendary, and the country as a whole is comprised of very diverse peoples who, historically, have had little reason to work together. Many African countries, rather tragically, are in the same boat: during the colonial era, "countries" were almost randomly assembled out of groups of people who historically had almost nothing in common. When the colonial powers left, they typically left nothing behind -- no knowledgeable and experienced administrators, no established universal education, and little or no social infrastructure. The people were then left to reinvent government from scratch, and the "country" more often than not was actually five separate nations of people who hated each other.

In sum, democracy is sort of an advanced form of government which, when introduced, really does need a somewhat coherent nation to already exist (in more cases) for it to work well. An autocratic or authoritarian government is usually the on-ramp, so long as it's reasonably functional and stable for long enough. Wherever democracy has persistently failed to take off, it's invariably a place in which the underlying foundation didn't exist to begin with.

Well, mainly in the fact that Anna's has several orders of magnitude more books, and includes research publications and more, ah, contemporary materials to boot.

I love Project Gutenberg, don't get me wrong... but frankly, Anna's is better.

Methinks someone's experimenting with a botnet -- "can we bypass HN's checks and balances to get an entirely-irrelevant topic to the front page, and keep it there for x hours?"

You've had enough arguments with people in both this thread and the previous that I'm pretty sure you understand what the issue is with your use of the word "free".

What you are offering is NOT a free tool -- it is a demo, for a tool for which you are charging $12/month. No reasonable person would interpret a grand total of 3 exports as enough to justify calling this a "free" tool.

This is to say nothing of your violation of AGPL on the use of MuPDF, which has been pointed out here and elsewhere.

But of course, you're free to Show HN a paid product; just kindly don't insult our collective intelligences in the process.

As do most of the associated comments. I think we're surrounded by bots.