skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: The Selfish Gene theory, Covid-19 and Arranged marriage?
This week I finished reading "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins. And here are a few thoughts/questions I have in my mind. I will write them down with numbers so you can choose to respond or share your opinion on it. Appreciate it.

One thing we should avoid is a personal attack on Richard Dawkins. Not no place for hate here. Please.

1) Is there a compelling counter-argument against the whole idea of "The Selfish Gene"? Or alternate theory for this whole evolution saga?

2) What you think personally after reading this book? If you wrote a blog or something, please share a link.

3) How do you explain "Dying for the country" in terms of The Selfish Gene?

4) Is arranged marriage another kind of "smart" survival strategy by "bad" genes?

5) So Covid-19 is just another mutant gene that found a way to replicate without eggs/sperm and decide to
first, kill "smart ass" replicant a.k.a genes inside a human to level up the field?

6) What happens we found out a way to "edit" genes using genetic engineering in future? What happens to evolution then?
We create "Anti-virus" for humans so these mutant genes cannot harm us?

7) I liked the book. Except for the idea "meme". I still think replicators are still physical entity and not thoughts.
I don't know why Mr Dawkins went that far to extend it till "meme". Maybe his selfish gene. But I think consciousness is not the final step in evolution. I think there is more to come in future - something better than consciousness.

8) If we accept the whole "Selfish gene" theory, does it make everything more depressing in life? What is the point of all this?
I mean we just vehicles for stupid genes trying to make copies?

I am curious what other people think about this. Thanks
Interested to know as well. Does comment OP have an answer?
Why has no one made a better Goodreads
Also frowned upon when done to humans, but accepted by most humans in regard to animals: slavery, raising for food, taxidermy, hunting for sport, neutering and keeping as pets, etc.

Some people don't think this treatment is appropriate for non-human animals either.

Personally I eat other animals, but I'm against both eugenics and cannibalism.
Your point is valid, but this is almost certainly a shuttle run, so it won't be even one full wafer.
Creating the JAMstack Logo with CSS – A Step-by-Step Guide
Here is a question: imagine you could double performance of cockroa hDB by making the executable 2000MB - every db admin would make that choice
To claim this is the whitest ever is dubious. First, things like spectralon have existed for a while. Second, a team at UCLA already demonstrated a barium sulfate paint last year: https://www.intelligentliving.co/amp/ultra-white-paint-refle...

I’m sure there’s some good incremental improvements here but this is over the top marketing.
And yet golang passes empty interfaces everywhere and generics is still a proposal. /salt
You can write java with vim, without any trouble. It’s just that Java has the very best IDEs available and I would be stupid to not use them.
php -S

if you want a quick script up and running
I'm now imaging some dystopian future where the polar ice caps have melted but we saved the planet by just painting all the bare rock white...
I have done 10+ years of Java development and 1 year of Python. And I disagree, Java packaging is better. You can package all your dependencies in a fat jar like Spring boot does and you only need to run it with java -jar lib.jar and you are good to go.

Dependency management is a mess in the Python world and my number 1 complaint. You have pip, pipenv, poetry, anaconda, to manage your 3rd parties. And if you want to avoid conflicts and have consistent runtime you need to create a virtual environment to install these libraries and redownload everything.

Otherwise libraries are installed user or system wide, in a directory that depends on the Python version that you use but they are not versioned there.

With Maven you don´t have the issue. Your 3rd parties are downloaded in a global cache directory (the Maven repo) and are all versioned. For the delivery you can either provide them all and have the runner set the CLASSPATH or have them packaged into a single jar.
He doesn't mention that it's an alpha feature
Morse may not be the oldest but my bet is on it being by far the most widely still used of anything nearly two centuries old. I got into ham radio a decade ago and learned Morse (poorly) just because. It already wasn't a requirement, but so many still use it.
Now I have read an earlier version of this paper, which is freely available:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.01161

The main points are:

1. The more common white pigment titanium white is not good for cooling something exposed to sun, because it strongly absorbs ultraviolet light. (Besides generating heat, this ultraviolet absorption also causes photo-chemical reactions that degrade in time the organic paint binders.)

2. So they have chosen barium sulfate, which reflects not only visible light, but also ultraviolet and near infrared.

3. Barium sulfate not only reflects solar light, but it also emits efficiently in the far infrared, which cools the painted surface.

4. Barium sulfate was traditionally considered a worse white pigment, because it has a lower refractive index than other pigments, like titanium white.

5. The Purdue University team has overcome this disadvantage of barium sulfate by designing a manufacturing process for the pigment that not only ensures a very small average pigment particle size but also a broad distribution of the particle sizes, which results in good reflection properties over the entire solar spectrum.
Wait, you are using shortcuts instead of bookmarks or just keeping the tabs opened and that is the reason to use Chrome?

That's one of the most unique reasons for keeping using certain browser I've even seen.
Are there discussion about java/kotlin kernel support through Graal Native?
That would have too à great value proposition
All of those companies buy their inventory and take on the full risk of potentially not selling it. They're retailers, not marketplaces.
I meant "refreshingly simple" ones, as in _antithesis of spring boot_
Tons of people who could get more money else where wont leave their employer anyway. Laziness, inertia, dont know how valuable their skillset is now, fear of change, fear of asking for money, locked to specific area by kids school or spouses job, whatever.

Company doesn't know which of their employees fall in to that group. So they could either regularly offer everyone raises that are competitive with job switching to keep the few people who would otherwise leave; or offer everyone token try not to piss them off too much raises and accept that they're going to lose some people who they otherwise would have been willing to pay more money to keep.

Those with very ambitious workforces that are largely made up of people who will job hop tend to go with the first option. Plenty of people at FANG are getting 30%+ raises in their earlier years, you see it whenever people discuss salary.

Other companies go with the latter.
Java development is like eating fish with bones and caughing to get them loose ocasionally. My stomach hurts when I think Python jobs may run dry and I'll need to go back to Java.
Maybe this is a naive question since I’ve never been involved in a hacker/computer club but why is a dedicated space required? Does the club usually purchase hardware/equipment that needs to be stored? I suppose I always assumed the members brought their own equipment to meetings.

You know, the more I think about it, I’m not really sure I have any idea what a computer club actually is and does...
So if something really harmful speaks volumes that is ok?
> main complaint about Python is trying to use someone else's software. Then it degenerates into a maze of twisty little passages of trying to install the correct set of dependencies, not knowing where those files are installed

Java is far worse on this front. Let's take a look at JEE or Spring - The entire experience is akin to summoning a demon with waving reciting correct incantations in correct places while having no idea about what even goes on in the background. There are MessageChannels, MessageProducers, ClientFactories that interact in mysterious ways and initiated in also very mysterious ways. And then there's EJB's and their containers which are just blackboxes of automagic.

Or how about Hibernate?
https://www.peachpit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=2449031&seq... I was wondering how is white the most reflective color, since there is also a thing called silver mirror
It’s not really adding any meaningful detail per se. where there’s a grass block it’s just rendering grass. All it is doing is projecting a stable image of “grass” (taken from a labeled image database) in that voxel.

Not to minimize the awesomeness of that... doing it stably in 3D while moving the camera is the point of this paper, and is amazing.

But it’s not really adding detail beyond “these are the kinds of pixels that grass has and the AI figured out we can put them in this arrangement without making things jumpy”
For what it's worth, that's definitely not my experience. I've interviewed or phone-screened at least 200 people over the last few years, and yes, there's been a handful of rejections where the major concern was social skills: abrasive, over-confident, poor communication or lacking the appearance of motivation. But I've had far more people who simply couldn't perform well enough on the technical problem or who had obviously over-stated their qualifications and knowledge on their resume. I actually distinctly remember several interviews lately where I really liked the candidate as a person and had a very enjoyable chat with them, but I just didn't think they would do the job well.

There are a lot of flaws in the way interviews are done in our industry that make it more subjective than it should be, but I still wouldn't consider the latter set of problems to be social skill related.
How much of your outsourced work actually requires site visits? It’s standard practice to simply ship parts and prototypes around, going on-site maybe for production line setup and kickoff. I’ve done distributed and remote team hardware development without major issues, but of course this depends on what you’re building.

I haven’t really felt constrained by location when doing HW startup work. Prepare for a decent sized shipping budget (overnight shipping adds up) but it’s a drop in the bucket relative to salaries.

> In our case the final assembly for the product must be done by one or more specialized (certified well beyond ISO 9001) outsourced contract facilities

If you have ultra specialized requirements that only a few facilities can meet, I’d start by vetting those potential partners.
I do all that
The canonical link for platform support is here: https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/rustc/platform-support.html
This isn't a very good use case for bitcoin. It's very easy to buy coins, but getting your money out is as difficult as various governments want it to be. Most of the major exchanges have KYC and anti money laundering laws that can make it hard to transfer large amounts of any crypto into a spendable currency.

If a government is preventing people from transferring money through standard mechanisms, it's only a matter of time until they prevent them from using crypto to do that. If the best use is circumventing the law, it isn't much of a currency at all
> "make it a website argument also fails because Apple is does not let you install a better browser".

I'm currently on chrome on my iphone. Maybe you can't install arbitrary browsers, but you can certainly install different ones. And there's always jailbreaking.
Other parties may be radical, but BJP has orders of magnitude more people and positions of power.
I think Napoleon had a set of aluminium cutlery... to show off his extreme wealth.
What sound cards support direct XLR input?

In nearly every case, a dedicated usb interface is going to have better quality ADC and mic preamps. High-quality sound cards are not prioritized by consumers, so they remain rather poor quality in most laptops and pcs. Even something like a focusrite scarlett is going to improve the signal chain immensely (plus you get the added bonus of a decent DAC as well).
Turning electricity into money is different from using some electricity while you make money.
Entrepreneurs Share Priceless Advice
thanks for the explanation!

i personally dont have this need at all (all in on AWS, and am ex Netlify and very friendly with Render) so havent really needed a unified integration for multiple vendors. good luck!
You can consider it a successor protocol :-)
I don't know enough about the specifics to really say. I do know there's interest.
> To deprive any adults of the ability to procreate would be considered barbaric

There are two ways to look at this. There is a difference between forbidding people to procreate, for example by forced sterilization, and simply not forcing things with unnatural interventions, for example with IVF for people who cannot conceive in a natural way. I don't think it's barbaric to see IVF as detrimental to the human gene pool.
The history of 'scientific' human eugenics is absolutely full of controversies and links to controversial things like involuntary sterilization campaigns, genocides, etc.

Oddly, people tend to get touchy when someone starts trying to provide justifications that decide who will live well, poorly, or not at all.
Sounds a lot like Google's GAN for fantastical creatures[0]. Labels to photorealism seems to be the core idea behind both

[0] https://ai.googleblog.com/2020/11/using-gans-to-create-fanta...
Windows Mobile was the pinnacle of the smartphone experience.

The release of the iPhone imo was the Eternal September of the mobile experience in so far as it was the tipping point wherein a demographic of users who didn't even need to be convinced that yielding full and openly adversarial control over the hardware to the network operators and advertisers became an uncontested majority.

They came with a text editor, a calculator, and a file browser out of the box -- can this generation even imagine not having to run the app store gauntlet of monetization and fraud to Open Files, I wonder?
In my college comp-sci networking class, one of our projects was to figure out a system for sending messages visually between two parties spaced 100 yards (91 meters) apart as quickly as possible.

Each team of four came up with their own signaling method, trying to balance how many bits were transmitted with each symbol with how quickly we could encode/decode the message.

Binoculars were not allowed. We were outside, so we didn't know how windy it would be.

I seem to recall on my team, we were sending two bits per symbol. I think it was just a large cardboard box, we colored each of the four flaps visually distinct, then unfolded one of the flaps for each symbol.

I don't recall a single team thinking to re-purpose naval flags.

Duh.
This can't be good for cryptocurrency as a whole right?
That's great, it loaded with a hideous green that made it so unreadable I suspected it would have a different color on reload. It of course did, so I refreshed three more times until it had a very comfortable pastel red background.

I'm not 100% certain what that means for the whole bikeshed discussion..
Monetizing such a site would be difficult unless you happen to be already the world's biggest bookseller. Thus, any person/organisation with skills and talent to undertake such a task would be better off promoting something with wider margins.

Discounting this reason, and supposing it happened, then amazon could just turn up the dial and throw some resources at it. As things stand, they don't need to.
Does scala compiler still does 25 or something like that passes? It won't ever be fast when doing this.
Agree re: silly OP post. I read it thinking: Eventually this guy will move to sales and marketing majoring in language wars. So I'll further the silly follow-on as follows:

Guys, c'mon, get your head in the game. Before we tech out how under hyped JAVA is we still never sorted out just how awesome VI is and how VI is way better than EMACS, Code Lion, and whatever other crazy complex IDEs are out there. Once we figure that out, only then can we afford to resolve the lesser pressing problems.
I've helped scan and archive Timothy Leary's stuff (I was dating his testamentary executor for a while). He certainly had an interesting life! I don't see how he made a mess of things.
LLDB Support for Fork(2) and Vfork(2)
If you're looking for someone to ask, the expert is nikic, author of the grandparent to your comment. They have worked on many of these specific improvements in LLVM, from which Rust has benefited.
GM, LG Energy Solution to build 2nd U.S. battery plant in Tennessee
My elders where in contstruction with fairly low pay for lots of physical work. So my elders saw my interest in electronics and afforded me every opportunity to do something not in the same line of work they endured. That included buying me books to further my studies. They also bought me electronic toys knowing that once I got "bored" with the toy, I would at some point be opening it up to see what made it tick.

There are all sorts of electronics besides computers. A CPU is a very small shrunken sets of transistors that are too small for anyone to interact with other than through software (realistically that is). However, older "computer" devices used components large enough you could see and manipulate by hand. The traces on the boards were large enough you could physically scratch/break, and re-wire (reprogramming) causing the device to do something new. To the point, at some stage, stickers reading "No user servicable parts inside" became a thing so people would stop tinkering. That sticker has now been replaced with an apple shaped logo, but they pretty much mean the same thing now.
Maybe actual clock differences? Not sure if that's the case, but in audio engineering, a separate clock may be used to keep all devices involved in-sync (many pro-level audio devices have a "clock" input for this very reason).
I'm a DevOps and Python Developer
Lot of the mining infrastructure could quite easily be converted to distributed computing resources doing useful work.

Could be a nice alternative to the few monopolistic public clouds with arbitrary rules and one could even use the crypto stuff to pay for using the resources.
As someone currently trying to juggle a massive, extremely complex Python project, our code looks very Java-esque just so we can actually understand what's going on. Java/C# absolutely have a place, but the heavy startup mentality here will always lean towards "whatever lets me pump out my crapware and go to market fastest". Startups aren't known for producing well maintainable code (not that you can't make maintainable code with JS/Python, it just gets much harder at higher complexity scales).
Encode English in Binary in 5th grade? You must be a smart cookie.

In 5th grade, I had the attention span of a fruit fly. Probably would have tried drawing phalluses in ascii if I had known about it.
The field you're looking for is called "tech transfer" - many universities have technology transfer offices that help research connect from a lab to industry, usually enriching researchers through the sale of patents or consulting contracts.

I don't know of any compendium on the web, but if someone were looking to get started there is a field to dig into where people do this kind of work full time. It's essentially a two-sided market making process of curating useful innovations and building up a sales function to close deals.
> Fabs love them because they can do process optimization using them, without impacting production customers.

I didn't realize that, but it makes a lot of sense. I assumed that they acted more like the downstream manufacturers that I'm used to dealing with, that don't even want to talk to you unless they think you're going to place a huge order.
The same things were said against Walmart, the exact same arguments word for word.

And yet we saw the rise of independent stores, gentrification, Whole Foods, the rise of e-commerce, the rise of etsy, amazon, ali, ebay, the rise of the Apple Store, the rise of...

And then we saw an explosion of "third party" brands. Millions and millions of alternatives flooded the market despite Walmart "undercutting everyone of their suppliers". From soda to nailclippers, to phone cases to chairs, to spoons, to...everything. Despite all the fear mongering, today there is not a single product category where only one brand exists, there is not a single product category where only the Walmart brand exists.

Competition cannot be stopped, the business cycle cannot be stopped. Birth, growth, death, repeat. Amazon is huge today because Walmart was so huge before it; people actively went out of their way to avoid it just out of spite.

Competition cannot be stopped, except by regulations. Give amazon by law a pen to play in and you are making sure they'll never let anyone else in.

Things never stay as they are, and retail has never been so competitive. Amazon won't be top dog forever, just as Sears wasn't, just as Walmart wasn't. Just as the mighty GE wasn't, or the even mightier East India Co. wasn't.
Except you will be robbed in a second.
I’ve already moved to Kotlin. I love the language other than the fact that JVM objects are just too heavy. Nothing against Java but language has aged like milk, the readability and writability is just too bad. Recent strides with records and project loom etc are evident efforts to make it evident again.

I’ve kinda started to like Kotlin from syntax perspective & Go’s nature of compiled and low overhead prospective. I wish somebody can combine those together (don’t tell me GraalVM).
Flags are juvenile. When I was young I used to play with flags. Now I set environment variables.
I've seen ones in MBs with alpine
Read from Databases, Write to APIs
Coinbase: Another Crypto Stock HSBC Won't Touch
Burning natural gas, as in the plant referenced by the article, also produces CO2.
> browsers should be able to alter the system outside the browser (e.g desktop shortcuts and notifications).

I've not seen the argument about desktop shortcuts?

Notifications are one of those features which has already been added and is a nuisance in 99% of cases, but I can see there being one or two use cases where a website sending notifications without requiring a full native app (and approval process!) is worthwhile.

The "should this hardware be available to the browser" fight happens for every feature.
Except in this case the PUD are not for profit and do not have a monopoly. So they are forced to compete. Sad that so many public utilities have screwed up so bad and ruined the idea for the rest. The customer service at the local PUDs are quite simply amazing. They pay and treat their employees incredibly well also.

In this case I think the PUD can actually undercut the existing providers as they already have support staff in place, linemen, etc. but aren’t allowed to take a profit.
The list goes on, I have a pet peeve with matomo (aka piwik) for example. Impossible to do immutable containers --- it's just bad software design, not a fault of the language itself. But because these softwares are old and have an user base, design errors remain throughout decades.
I tend to have a time management application that monitors my schedule. Do this. It helps.

I develop my skill outside of office hours by joining a group with similar interests as me.

This way, learning can become fun, and you're interacting with different perspectives simultaneously.
But the object of knives isn't to stab people to death; a vanishing number of knives bought are used to stab people to death, and "lunatics" are not a core base for any knife seller.

A well-designed system does what it's supposed to. Facebook's either supposed to be addictive, or it just is by accident. If it's by accident, it's poorly designed. If it's not, it has an objectionable purpose.