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Here's an ongoing list of comments/threads on hn that I think are special and worth taking some time to think about:
(removed briefly for editing/re-organizing/they killed my two best men in Hong Kong just to get to this profile)
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This is the only location on the web where I use this handle. Imposters are admired yet not acknowledged.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIM-104_Patriot#Failure_at_Dha...
Whether or not this can be attributed to technical debt, I don't know. But it is an instance of a software failure that resulted in death.
More cynically, I've noticed that it's a relatively benign form of hoarding. i.e. I get the quick dopamine rush of "oh this is interesting, now I have it" without, say, crowding up my living space with trinkets. With an abundance of storage that is essentially invisible to me when I don't want to think about it, I can keep what I want, when I want; often while fully aware that I'll never look at most items individually again. I think of it as a kludgey form of external memory / internet butterfly collecting. The only downsides I've thought of are: time frittered revisiting archives, the (small) transaction cost of tagging and placing items into the archive, and the externalized costs of maintaining the hardware.
Basically, trying to give an example of the grandparent's point. (i.e. fewer nucleotides to be flipped -> more likely that an important one will be). I agree that it was a poorly executed analogy. The metaphor I was trying to make is that on the 'vast field' a random single point mutation is probably going to land on an individually unimportant nucleotide, and in the 'narrow beach' (the smaller strand/higher geninfo density) an individually important nucleotide is more likely to be hit. I'm still probably not articulating my point well, sorry.
But I think your analogy is better for a subtly different point; describing how DNA replication works in a system, where stands can be selected out, errors corrected, and genetic information can be preserved at a systemic level.
The artillery that lands on the plain may strike an advancing unit, or it may fall (possibly harmlessly) between a set of advancing units. The artillery that lands on the narrow beachhead is more likely to hit a unit.
This analogy is far from perfect: sometimes mutations are good, which is one primary driver of evolution. Non-coding regions and/or "baggage to be refactored" (paraphrased great-great-gp comment) in DNA (the regions of the plain/beach not occupied by an advancing unit) can absorb "errors". Also, there are other types of mutations (insertions, deletions, ...), aside from the single point mutations that this analogy was attempting to help convey.
The point is: it's like bunching up a lot of important things over a few points of failure. If you increase "the genetic surface area", you lower the chance of the important thing getting hit.
On evolutionary scales, viable DNA has been selected with a lot of non-coding (and sometimes useful) regions, we know that if we reduce that down, we are more likely to be susceptible to fatal mutations on coding regions (e.g. a region that codes for a vital protein).
If you accept this, no matter how great We make this simulation (of objective physical phenomena and our best theorized non-human perceptions of these phenomena), this game is always false.
(For what it's worth, I'm not sure yet if I hold any firm viewpoints on this. The essay (at least partially) is an argument against reductionism, but I'm no philosopher; to be honest I'm still wrapping my head around the entire argument. I just think it's interesting to think about.)
Here is the essay if anyone is interested:
In the set of nation state funded research facilities (e.g. funded by US Dept. of Energy, European Research Council, etc.) I'm willing to bet that most of the facilities are more often relatively near cities (greater than 150K pop). Many (high energy / high capital cost) facilities, employ on the orders of 1-10K staff alone.
[] (... and that Basic Science, High Energy Physics, Computational Science, Basic Tech, Corporate Research, and/or Public Policy/Economic/GeoPol research are the hard problem spaces you are alluding to...)
I was responding to the 'I'll trade this time now, for more time later' line of reasoning (which I believe is a false transaction). Not only should one recognize that each epoch is unique (in a child's life, in a relationship, in a career, etc.) and therefore not interchangeable with later epochs; but one should also recognize that "selfish" (OP's word choice) actions now are usually not offset by generous actions later.
I suppose one can recognize those tradeoffs and traverse "borrowing time" reasoning with a bit more self awareness, though not many do. Especially those that subscribe to the 'compress your 40 year career into a 4-10 year startup' meme without reading the fine print.
Epochs are not fungible, especially when raising children. Missing a toddler play at the beach for the first time cannot be reclaimed by sharing their first scuba lesson.
He covers his background, early computer games, the origins of Sim City, the Sims, as well as more abstract/high-level discussion of game design and simulation.
Some high level themes of the talk: using the computer as a modeling tool, simulation design, Will Wright's game design principles and philosophy, programming for two dynamic processes "the software" and "the player's model of the system", and traversal of possibility spaces in game design and simulation.
It's excellent otherwise. Especially in that it doesn't romanticize "the lifestyle"; which is a rubbish cliché, endemic in many criminal enterprise films. Other films that I think are successful in this sense are: "City of God" (Portuguese title: "Cidade de Deus") and "Maria Full of Grace" (Spanish title: "María llena eres de gracia").
Protip: If your business model relies on "fear factor" you may have failed to satisfy the "completely legit business" specification.
http://arxiv.org/abs/1405.5563
Edited to steal more screenspace/add context:
Authors:
https://web.archive.org/web/20120402224250/http://193.189.74...
http://edge.org/memberbio/chiara_marletto
You may also be interested in this paper:
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~christos/classics/Deutsch_quantu...
Your blocks of text didn't read like someone engaging me in conversation, they read like a political flyer stuffed under my windshield wiper.
But that supposes that 14-month-old news of a temporary response to customer complaints over a mediocre video game (which have been covered ad nauseam) should be on Hacker News in May 2014. I may be wrong, however. It received at least 3 upvotes in its first 5 minutes.
Not that it takes away from your concern, which is valid. It is possible that ubiquitous deployment of this device could select for more resilient phenotypes on human-observable timelines (See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppered_moth_evolution)
If one thinks of fire as a common evolutionary ancestor of all human technology; I wonder if there is, in the same sense of fire on land, a branching point of technological evolution in an aquatic society; a branching point that humans do not comprehend, acknowledge, or notice.
I'm probably missing the point and taking this too literally, but I think a few primers should be written for this book: "A self referential guide on learning to read (bootstrap your English!)" and "A contextual dictionary for out of vouge 21st century terminology."
It seems as if you were to do this as an explicit "restart guide" for society (and not an otherwise cool book on human technological development), you would need to account for the fact that a person born a generation or two after the collapse would likely have little access to education, the English language (or at least the ability to read), and context for understanding phrasing, terminology, and grammar like: "Yet beyond drunken party snapshots...", "Photographic emulsions are also sensitive to X-rays... allow you to create medical images...", "We often hear about the Industrial Revolution and ... mechanical contraptions ... transforming eighteenth-century society", [... and other concepts that likely require the context of a basic, first world, 21st century education...].
As a thought exercise, I think it would be really cool to figure out how to create primers that build on top of this book, ones that help bootstrap collective knowledge from all the way down to the core concepts and fundamentals; perhaps starting with the concept of language itself.
It is very useful in laboratories. On demand printing of labware with custom geometry is wonderful. Also, it enables certain geometries and properties that would be very difficult (for an unskilled operator) or impossible to produce via subtractive means, like CNC mills. For example: custom reaction chambers with complex internal geometry. Iterative, "in-lab" design cycles are also pretty nice.
More directly, the book also addresses examples of swarm dynamics and intelligence.
"Self Organization in Biological Systems"
> That's how Nature works.
More accurately, "That's how Nature works, sometimes."
The statement "...some mutant gene will eventually emerge ... that will inhibit [another gene]" describes one subset of the set of all possible causes of future genetic expression branching from this point. There is no law (that we are yet aware of) that allows us to say conclusively that a certain genetic trait will be selected for or against with any meaningful certainty. Furthermore, we have no scientific footing on which to say 'we are sure that a specific mutation will arise that will inhibit this other mutation' as decreed by Nature. In order for the claim to always be true in all arbitrary subsets of Nature, we would need to at least know: whether or not the gene will be selected against, specifically how the gene will be selected against, and nearly all nth order organism-local and population-global effects of a specific mutation or selection event. (We can play Nature in the lab and make approximations of the claim, though! Sort of.)
We can make statements like "If the oxygen content of that atmosphere or environment increases, it is possible that many anaerobic organisms will be selected against." Or, "If low hemoglobin production becomes advantageous, at some point after that, conditions x, y, and ... will likely exhibit reciprocal selective pressures."
Of course, we can also say things like, "All species are statistically likely to go extinct." (That's not very interesting.)
Essentially, we can make broad guesses about future states of genetic expression (and implied warranties and effects) under certain specific contexts. But we cannot say that a specific genetic cause and effect will occur as derived from an inherent property of Nature and a specific sub-state of the universe. As far as we know, genetics, mutation, evolution, and selection are just functions in a mostly random, iterated chaotic system that we are just beginning to comprehend.
We cannot say that 'a particular gene will be selected against, because it is inevitable that specific genes are invariably inhibited or selected against by subsequent shifts in population genetics.' In a sense, that's partially accurate. All species, and by extension, each gene and all genomes, are likely to be selected against. But not always via mutation. It's about the same as saying that species go extinct because of x; it's not certain to be true and may not yield any new information.
There is no law (that we know of) that allows us to make deterministic statements like 'X% of the genome will be inhibited because of the emergence of another mutation'.
For all we know, a rogue asteroid might hit Earth on Tuesday during rush hour in Hong Kong. Or, that particular gene may end up surviving until the closest possible moment before the heat death of the universe. On a more fundamental level, we'd need laws that allow us to predict specific future events (with interesting and meaningful degrees of certainty). We would need to be able to identify and map the exquisitely threaded chaos woven throughout Nature before we can be reasonably certain that 'a mutation will eventually arise to inhibit this other mutation.'
My guess is that there is more upside to creating unique areas. This affords more creative freedom and the luxury of changing the simulation in accordance with constraints and resources.
In a "merged thread" the title could have more than one link value (but still have a canonical (by mod standard) top ranked url.) And the discussion could be merged to one thread (or version controlled in correspondence with a particular top level link.)
I also think it would have some other benefits:
I'm not sure what you mean by the last sentence. Not incorporating a full simulation of genetic expression does not preclude the authors from incorporating a simulation of C. Elegans reproduction or the reproductive system in some capacity.
DNA is just a container of letters that ultimately form the words that are amino acids. These amino acids are formed into sentences and phrases that are proteins. Should these proteins be arranged in a functional grammar, their structure and actions collectively express the language of life.
DNA is just the machine code for the emergent system that is life.
A biological system, such as the reproductive system, is comprised of some components that are several layers of abstraction above the DNA; as each system is an emergent property of the symphony of molecular machinery and interaction that constitutes a living organism.
Since many authors were already able to simulate abstractions over other structures and systems, there is no reason why the C. Elegans simulation could not extend their model further. As far as I know, they were not simulating gene expression at all.
Saying that a particular biological abstraction cannot be simulated because it does not contain a lower level simulation of genetic expression is a bit like saying you cannot simulate a ball bouncing because you do not include an atomic resolution molecular force simulation of rubber molecules. Or, that you cannot program a football simulation, like FIFA, because you do not include lower level simulations of aerobic and anaerobic respiration.
Obviously, molecular force dynamics and respiration are integral phenomena that enable bouncing balls and football matches, respectively. (I'm unaware of existing respiring balls.) But those phenomena can be closed over by abstraction, in order to create sufficiently educational simulations for particular scopes of understanding.
Of course, it would be computationally difficult to simulate each level of abstraction, all at once, at atomic "resolution" (or molecular or macromolecular etc. "resolution"). It would be impractical to simulate molecular dynamics, or transcription and translation, or protein folding; when all you care about is the general concept of reproduction and the more abstract structures involved.
You could certainly produce a sufficiently useful naive simulation that is faithful to the spirit of an organism's reproductive system.
There is always a hard boundary on the "resolution" of a biological system simulation, limited by computational power, but there is no logical limitation preventing some simulation of the reproductive system at some educationally valuable level.
Selective sexual reproduction and genetic engineering are actually markedly different. Genetic engineering involves precise splicing, insertion, or rearrangement of an organism's genome (or subset of genes). Selective sexual reproduction is a directed random rearrangement of genetic material over successive generations based (on often poorly understood) "meta-characteristics" or traits.
The critical distinction is that genetic engineering is the deliberate editing of exact genetic information, whereas selective sexual reproduction is a gradual, iterated, locally-random mixing of genetic information with imprecise results.
Furthermore, genetic engineering enables genetic mixing that aren't possible with selective sexual reproduction. For example, the insertion of genetic information into E.coli in order to produce human insulin for diabetics. Or, the modification of a particular cyanobacteria to secrete petroleum after photosynthesis.
http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2014/gc/c3gc42...
>> ...eliminating allergies, Alzheimer's, and cancer...
> That's all been doable for a long time, using controlled breeding...
This is incorrect. You may be surprised to learn that those deeply complicated, diverse families of afflictions would not be effectively treated via 'controlled breeding'.
A simple, naive disproof of the assertion that cancer can be eliminated in domesticated or selectively selectively bred animals (via artificial selection): pigs, huskies, and laboratory mice all get cancer at rates that are more or less congruent with wild boar, wolves, and rats.
I'm not sure where you are disagreeing with me. I wasn't really trying to simplify anything. I was just saying that genetic clones already exist.
Identical twins are clones. They are genetically identical barring mutation. That's basically a catch-all for copying errors, environmental mutations, fetal environment, etc.
> Artificial cloning methods as I understand them are distinct from the way natural identical twins form.
Correct, artificial cloning is commonly divided into therapeutic cloning and reproductive cloning. The pop culture idea of cloning is closest to reproductive cloning. You mentioned that we were close to creating a 'human clone'. I was just pointing out that there already are clones. We might be talking past each other, I was not saying that we have reproductively cloned (or that the two methods are the same). I was just trying to highlight the fact that twins are essentially genetically the same as what reproductive clones would be, as in the outcome isn't that much different.
People do take issue with reproductive cloning. Reproductive cloning in humans is still hypothetical at this point, but it is theoretically possible and could yield people that are 'identical' in the same way that identical twins are 'identical.'
> If it were so simple to reproduce "natural cloning", it would already done and commonplace. In reality, it seems to require quite a bit of hacking.
I didn't really say it was simple or currently possible, I said people take issue with it.
> I don't think something having a natural analog makes it any less unsettling.
Suppose, that whether we like it or not, for better or worse, somewhere cloning occurs. Through no choice of their own, these clones exist. They are exactly the same as the natural analog. They are people that would deserve the same treatment and consideration as you or I. The thought of these people being oppressed is unsettling.
That really depends on how you define "cloning". It absolutely can be considered therapeutic cloning, and it would serve as an initial step in reproductive cloning.