paidleaf

Cruelty was par for the course when it came to nature documentaries unfortunately. Most nature documentaries of the past were staged. One of the most infamous one was where they would trap and drug jaguars and them dump them on the riverbank and wait for caimans to kill it.

https://youtu.be/huGJmQU4Piw?t=159

Notice how the jaguar can't move from that spot even with a bunch of large caiman right in front of it? It's almost like one of the jaguar's paws were pinned down to keep it in one spot. Wonder why? Could it be cameras were heavy and clunky contraptions back then that you could realistically focus on one area at a time? Can't capture jaguar footage if the jaguar is allowed to move out of frame. Or it was drugged so much that it had no idea what was going on.

I had a huge argument with my philosophy professor about this. Our class was discussing the distinguishing characteristics between humans and animals. Someone brought up humans commit suicide while animals don't. The professor claimed that was false and brought up lemmings as evidence. I chimed in that lemming suicides were most likely myth and even if it was real, we shouldn't accept the idea of lemming suicides until we have definitive proof. He claimed lemming suicides were established fact and that if I or anyone rejected the idea in our papers on the topic, we'd be penalized for positing a factually incorrect statement. A bit of back and forth later, he said he was the ultimate authority on the topic and ended the discussion.

Naturally, in my paper, I wrote that lemming suicides were likely myth ( with sources ) and naturally I got penalized.

I still remember it years later and whenever the topic of lemming suicides come up, I make it my business to correct people. Years from now, on my death bed, my last words will be "lemming suicide is a myth".

> How is a company that had a net loss of $933 million and that owes $18 billion in rent even remotely worth $35 billion.

Theranos had a valuation of $9 billion not too long ago. Did we forget about Pets.com and all the "valuable" properties during the dotcom boom that became worthless in a manner of months? Or the shacks worth hundreds of thousands during the 2000 housing bubble?

> I'd consider the lemonade stand on the corner to be more of a business than WeWork in the true sense of the word.

You should. There is so much money out there looking for assets that you could start a lemonade franchise business and you are sure to get investors bidding up your property even if it makes no money.

The current economic environment is dotcom bubble + housing bubble combined on steroids. There is lots of money to be made if you are willing to suppress your morals and just take the money.

> One of the best decisions I've recently made is starting my morning by reading a newspaper back to back.

That's the worst thing you can do.

http://time.com/5125894/is-reading-news-bad-for-you/

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-ro...

That's one of the useless things to do and a terrible waste of time. For major news, the best thing to do, which most newspapers don't want you to do is, compare reporting across newspapers and regions. It's why newspapers forced google, social media, etc to limit news to be region specific. It takes more work to find news from around the world, but you'll see how biased most news are.

Take the recent Trump-Kim meeting. The reporting from korea, singapore, china, russia, europe and the US were so different because all news exist to push an agenda. Of course this applies within the nation as well. The leftist media and foxnews covered the meeting very differently.

Most "news" is just noise. It's nonsense journalists make up to push a narrative. There are only a handful of important news items each week. It's better to focus on those than reading a useless newspaper end to end.

That's something I did in high school because I saw an ad saying it increased you SAT score. What a waste of time. There are far better ways to spend your time than reading nonsense from someone who isn't an expert in anything.

> Its relatively new. Put there by State street[1] to promote gender diversity.

It was put there to promote State Street, one of the oldest and biggest financial institutions in the country.

> I shorted (a very small amount) from about $320 down to about $270. That's when Elon had his very standoffish and defiant earnings call.

It's pretty dangerous to short high flying stocks like TSLA in a major bull market. Especially when most of the shares are owned by Musk and his institutional backers. It's not intuitive, but highly shorted stocks like TSLA in a bull market is a recipe for a significant price rise to burn the shorts and steal their money.

> Elon promises they won't need to raise capital

He's been saying that for a while and he keeps raising capital and diluting the shareholders.

> If he's right, great.

I suspect TSLA's recent layoffs are to work some accounting magic and show "profits" in the coming quarters. If so, it'll get big pops come earnings.

> But I'm not betting on it one way or the other.

In the long term, I'd watch oil prices and FED rates. If energy prices stay relatively low, if governments end subsidies and of course the FED decides to pop this bubble, I could see TSLA bankrupt in 5 - 10 years ( like it was in 2008 before the bailout ).

Maybe after a big price spike flushes the shorts, then it might be time to start averaging in short positions. But either way, it's a gamble.

There is no need for insults. I said elon musk has positives and negatives. How is that being a bootlicker?

And I never said I supported the objectification of women. I said I believed in independent free choice of both men and women. If a woman chooses to be a trophy wife, that's her right as a free individual. If a man chooses to marry a trophy wife, that's his right as a free individual.

Whether a man wants to marry a man or a woman wants to marry a woman or a billionaire wants to marry a trophy wife or a trophy wife wants to marry a billionaire, it's their right. As long as they are consenting adults. If consenting adults doing what they want bothers you, then the problem is with you, not them.

Certainly not the democratic or republican parties. And certainly not the government watchdog institutions which are all run by former execs of major corporations.

It's hard to imagine any organization that can stand up to such concentrated wealth and power now.

> The "Big Three" television networks will become the "Big Two". The "Big 6" film becomes the "Big 5".

Just as worrisome is the merging of delivery/distribution ( ISPs ) with content.

> You can mark this as another major event in the consolation and monopolization of news and entertainment under a rapidly growing singular corporate umbrella.

Not just news and entertainment ( and ISPs ). The past decade has seen tremendous consolidation in banking, pharma, agriculture/seed, food and even the tech industry. It's funny how a decade after "too big to fail" banks and promises to break up banks to prevent systematic issues in the future, those banks are much bigger today. They pose an even greater systematic problem.

We know with monopolistic industry, it only leads to corruption and then price fixing as there is no room to expand. When it's a handful of companies control an entire market, then the next logic step is price fixing because there is no more room to maneuver. Look at the lysine price fixing scandal of the 90s.

It is strange how both political parties are so supportive of the monopolization of the nation. All the while saying they are for competition, diversity and workers.

As more and more wealth and power is concentrated on fewer and fewer companies/institutions, politicians will be even more beholden to the interests of the wealthy.

> and so stupid hacks like MySQL’s utf8 character set (I seriously don’t know why anyone ever thought it was a good idea in 2002–2004) are now obviously insufficient for full Unicode support

If I had to guess, they did it for space and performance reasons so that their benchmark results are a tiny bit better than other RDBMs. They must've figured that their limited utf8 encoding was enough. And they reasoned the immediate benefits on benchmark tests outweighed future considerations.

I can't imagine any other reason for not implementing the utf-8 encoding completely and covering the unicode character set in its entirety.

> Just before he died, he was preparing a campaign to the WEST.

Why did you capitalize west? And I'm fairly certain this is not true. The best we know of his immediate plans prior to death was that he wanted to centralize his empire around babylon and then conquer arabia. Not quite "west".

But if you have sources backing your claim, I'd love to see it.

> I feel this whole theory misses some key elements of our ancestors. First the idea that each male was able to reproduce at the same rate or had the same opportunity to breed as each other;

The article is talking about Y chromosomes, not the rate of successful breeding of each male. In patrilineal clans, all males share the same Y chromosome since they are all related. It doesn't matter which males within the clan breed when you are analyzing Y chromosomes.

As long as a single male within the clan breeds, the Y chromosome will be passed on.

The question is why many Y chromosomes disappeared from the gene pool. Why the diversity in Y chromosomes declined so drastically.

> The alpha male will do the overwhelming majority of the breading for X number of years until displaced, i.e. dies of natural causes or is violently displaced.

Once again, that doesn't matter in Y chromosomal diversity analysis. It doesn't matter whether you or your brother was "alpha". It doesn't matter which one of you fathered most of the descendents since both you and your brother carry the same Y chromosome.

The question is, if you were living thousands of years ago, why you, your brother, your paternal related male cousins, etc didn't breed. IE, why your clan's Y chromosomal legacy didn't make it while your mother, sister, female cousin's, etc mDNA ( mitochondrial DNA ) did make it. Why did your female genetic legacy make it while your male genetic legacy did not?

It's pretty clear that warfare played a role. There is no disease that wipes out only the males and none that wipes out 100% of the male population. Even if disease wiped out 99% of the males in your clan, the 1% remaining can breed with all the females and replenish the clan and your Y chromosome would live on.

That's true. Musk, like all people, have their positives and negatives.

But he's always been this way. The question is why the sudden change in sentiment?

And as bad as elon musk is, the journalists are much worse. I'd rather have a world full of elon musks than journalists.

> Musk is notoriously anti-union

To be fair, no entrepreneur in a fledgling/new industry is pro-union. Actually, no entrepreneur is pro-union.

> continually over-promises then under-delivers

That's shareholders' concern, not ours.

> has continually treated his wives as trophies

Welcome to humanity. Are you going to blame his wives who loved to be trophies? Seems like personal business between consenting adults.

> and has designed a worse subway just because he doesn't want his knees to touch some peasant's knees.

As opposed to the elitist journos who love to slum it with the peasants right?

> He's just another shitty billionaire

Who the media loved. For nearly 20 years, the media wasn't too concerned with his anti-union stance, his trophy wives, his failure to delivery on his promises, etc.

> Why is the war hypothesis considered more likely than say a widespread, long lived contagious disease that had significantly higher mortality in males than females?

Most likely because disease don't discriminate along clan lines and even if disease killed a portion of a clan's males, the other males of the clans can just breed with females and the relative diversity of the male clan line is still maintained. Also, the fact that it has occurred throughout the world indicates it wasn't disease but the structure of the clan and the warfare.

> If there was a period of widespread warfare for sustained periods, it's hard to see how "clans" would continue to engage in warfare beyond say 50% loss of the fighting forces.

Why do say that? Also, you are assuming that one clan won't have an advantage over the other clan and that one side won't be victorious.

> Wouldn't some women have joined the clan fighting forces also if it was an existential struggle?

No because it wasn't an existential struggle for women. It was an existential struggle for men. Women can breed with the conquering males. Perhaps a small number of women may fight but they'll be killed or subdued very quickly. Males are much stronger than females on average.

> - which was the pattern in many historical accounts of widespread warfare.

And the pattern is that males conquer and take the women, land, resources, etc.

If you want to see how conquerors genes spread. Look at mexico's mestizo genetics.

"A 2012 study published by the Journal of Human Genetics Y chromosomes found the deep paternal ancestry of the Mexican mestizo population to be predominately European (64.9%), followed by Amerindian (30.8%) and Asian (1.2%)"

"Also a study published in 2011 on Mexican Mitochondrial DNA found that maternal ancestry was predominately Native American (85-90%), with a minority having European (5–7%) or African (3–5%) mtDNA."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mestizos_in_Mexico

Amongst mixed race mexicans, 65% are descended from european males and 85-90% are descended from native females. And the european males didn't kill off all the native males in mexico. The european males, as conquerors, seized the most land, resources and power for themselves and their male offsprings. This gives an enormous breeding advantage that in just a couple of hundred years, native mexican male genetics is a distinct minority while the native mexican female genetics is a distinct advantage.

Keep in mind that at no time in mexican history were full-blooded european males a significant portion of the population. It's just the power of mathematics ( exponential growth ).

Think about it, if you have 10 kids and your kids have 10 kids and their kids have 10 kids, it adds up really quickly.

> It's likely that Alexander would have taken over Italy had he lived a couple more decades.

At the height of the greek empire, it's pretty much a given that alexander would have easily conquered italy. But there was no real reason to as italy/rome back then wasn't really worth conquering compared to egypt, persia, india... I suspect had alexander lived long enough, he would have move further into india and maybe even into china. Not sure how successful he really would have been, but it's an interesting "what if".

> History is full of civilizations that fought bravely against invaders and were destroyed. It's also full of examples of civilizations that surrendered and thrived. It's a hard pill to swallow that "cowardly" surrender can often be objectively better than "stubborn" bravery.

The most poignant example of this is Catholic Europe and Islamic Khwarezmia when Genghis Khan sent his emissaries to each. The leader of khwarezmia had the emissaries tortured and killed and refused trade relations with genghis khan. The pope "surrendered" to genghis khan and established trade relations with the mongol empire. Khwarezmia got destroyed. Italy/Europe got direct trade with the largest empire in the world and got immensely rich which kicked off the italian renaissance and the rest is history.

Of course there are counterexamples as well like the english stubbornness against the spanish empire ( the destruction of the spanish armada ) and most relevant to us, the american revolution.

The key seems to be, if you are going to be stubborn against a major power, be damned sure you can win.

> Seriously, what has he done to deserve this negativity?

Interesting isn't it? It's almost like someone turned on a switch and suddenly there is rampant anti-elon musk sentiment. What has elon musk done recently?

Well, he went after the biased media.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1000560049389907969?lang...

and the "journalists" have been waging a war against him. There is a ridiculous amount of news industry workers here ( one of the reasons for the rampant censorship here and on other social media sites is to accommodate the news industry ). The news companies have social media teams pushing their narrative all over social media along with their third party affiliates and ngos.

The media's current punching bag is zuckerburg ( hence the nonstop facebook stories here ). But zuckerburg is giving in to the media, so I suspect the new punching bag will be elon musk.

Expect a lot of negative stories, comments and threads about tesla and elon musk going forward. At least until musk apologizes or gives in to the media.

Pretty much every major website does this. Not only that, if you are using windows 10, it does this too. Not only does windows 10 track your mouse movements, it tracks your keystrokes and it scans your filesystem and sends the meta data info back to microsoft.

It's a very anti-privacy environment we live in right now. But it's for our own good or so we are told.

Netflix isn't your ISP. Netflix doesn't control the means of delivery/distribution. They rely on Verizon, Comcast, AT&T, etc to deliver their data.

Netflix can't just decide that they don't want to compete with Hulu and therefore throttle or block Hulu from their customers.

We know that controlling the means of production and the means of distribution is highly anti-competitive. All you have to do is look at rockefeller and standard oil in the 1800s. Rockefeller bought or threatened his way into controlling the railroads which allowed him to put most of his competitors out of business or forced them to sell to Standard Oil. Controlling the means of delivery allowed rockefeller to monopolize the oil industry in the US.

With the repeal of net neutrality, we are getting to the point where verizon, comcast, at&t, etc can be their own little "internet". And this really hampers future entrepreneurs. If you wanted to start a netflix, youtube or twitch today, but you can't rely on verizon, comcast, at&t, etc to give you fair access to their network, then why bother and who will invest in your company?

But this is the overall direction of the internet and social media the past few years. Less freedom, less openness and a move towards more of a corporate tv/news format.

> The /bin/sh stuff is due to Ubuntu symlinking dash to /bin/sh and that reacting badly with both the R shell wrapper and some Microsoft R Server features.

Which is understandable considering the switch from bash to dash as the default shell has tripped up even open source software.

> I believe we fixed the R shell wrapper features last release by explicitly requesting bash and we will be fixing the R server features next release.

So #!/bin/bash?

Doesn't seem like this was a big deal. Just an oversight fixed quickly.

> In other words, the field just has very low standards for truth, in a scientific sense.

The field has little to no scientific sense. It's why psychiatry/psychology is a soft science. It isn't based on the scientific method or reproducibility and testing. It's mostly based on consensus driven by a handful of powerful practitioners.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_science

What sigmund freud did wasn't science. His oedipal complex theory isn't a scientific theory. There is no scientific test to refute it. You just accept it or not.

The biggest problem of our generation is the conflation of science ( hard science ) with pseudoscience ( soft science ). Because both has the word science in it, people give soft sciences far more credit than it deserves.

If anyone is interested, Richard Feynman had a very interesting interview about it.

https://youtu.be/tWr39Q9vBgo

Saying it was "common" is simply a lie. I would love to see her stats because I've been working in tech for a while now and I've never seen the term "coding ninja" in a job ad.

I've seen ludicrous demands like more experience in a tech than the tech has been out.

Like "must haves : " - 5 years experience in visual studio 2017 and sql server 2017. Non negotiable.

> 1958 is when men had the best wage to rent ratio, and that helped create families and have children.

I don't think it is necessarily the current state, but our view of future prospects that may matter more. I wonder if there are yearly studies of people's outlook on employment prospects/etc broken down by age. Having children is a future oriented endeavor. Your current situation absolutely matters, but I think your outlook on future prospects is the driving factor. I suspect it is so for women too. If you think your purchasing power, ability to own a home, etc in the future is diminishing, it would affect both the male and female positions on whether to have or the number of kids to raise.

It's not the lone bureaucrat. Do you really think one guy is behind this? He had support from the industry, the media, politicians and the elites. If you haven't noticed, the elites ( not just in the US ) but in europe, china, russia, saudi arabia, etc have all worked hard to take control over the internet.

In the US, the battle has been going on for more than a decade. Look at how google search, youtube, reddit and even HN has changed. The last major holdout was facebook, but we've seen what happened to them. It wasn't by accident or because ordinary people wanted it. It's what the elites wanted. What the people want has never really mattered. Not in the US, not in europe, china, russia, etc.

And with the constant merging of content providers and ISPs, the internet will become more like TV for most people.

What's funny is how we had so much facebook spam here ( when it was really a non-story ) and so little coverage of such a monumentally important tech topic like net neutrality. I'm guessing between facebook and net neutrality stories only, facebook accounted for 99% and net neutrality accounted for 1% on HN.

One would think that "hacker" news would care about the important story and not political fluff. But hacker news hasn't been "hackerish" for a while now.

> Plain "Chinese" commonly refers to Mandarin in English usage.

What we call "chinese language" has historically been cantonese as that's what we are mostly familiar with ( mostly via immigration ).

Most of us don't even know there are different chinese languages. I know I didn't until someone corrected me on social media.

What clickbait nonsense and misleading nonsense.

Solar accounts for 1.3% of our electric production.

https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427

Saying that solar is the biggest source of "new" US Power is like if bill gates picked up a penny from the street and bloomberg saying picking pennies from the street is bill gates' biggest source of "new" wealth.

I understand being pro-solar, I am too. But why is HN and much of social media rife with lies and misrepresentations about solar?

Reading bloomberg and HN, you'd think solar was a significant contributor to energy and coal was dead. But that's just factually incorrect. And they been lying for years now. But most importantly, it's the scientific lies about energy production and solar that is bothersome. As if solar panels are the answer for coal.

Natural gas ( a fossil fuel ) is why coal has leveled off ( not died but leveled off ). Solar had nothing to do with it. And coal is still the biggest source of electricity around the world and the 2nd biggest source in the US.

Solar energy is going to be a minor part of the world's energy strategy unless a revolutionary breakthrough happens ( a significant breakthrough on par with cold fusion ). That's a basic fact of current state of physics.

So sick of misleading clickbait from media outlets like bloomberg.

Edit: If you want a total world view of energy sources.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9d/Bp_world...

> He also said "real fighting was in the east", so you can guess the source.

It's called stats.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_casualties_in_World_War...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Front_(World_War_II)

The vast majority of the german military and casualties, were in the eastern front.

> Edit: also the claim "most of our casualties on that day was friendly fire and accidental drowning" is pretty ridiculous.

It's pretty much common sense. Considering the low number of german troops, the poor coordination on our side and of course the odds of accidents and friendly fire incidents. It's pretty much a statistical certainty that most of the deaths on D-Day were accidents and friendly fire. But lets throw out common sense and statistics out the window.

The germans had no navy. They had no air force. They had nothing. Against the might of the US and British power on D-Day. But we can pretend that the germans managed a 2 to 1 casualty victory. Or I'm sure that's what your "sources" will try to convince us.

There is no such thing as a "chinese" language. Your statement is akin to saying "You'd better start learning european then".

China is a region with a far greater linguistic diversity than europe.

It has nothing to do with advertising. It's about control and propaganda. The elites want to take control over social media. They want social media to be like the rest of media. Where the masses see what they want us to see.

It's why europe has been on a censoring rampage. It's why china/russia/etc are very strict about social media.

Do you think that advertisers, who are stepping over each other to advertise in china ( where they kill prisoners to harvest their organs ) or saudi arabia ( where they stone rape victims for adultery ) have any morals?

Ultimately, reddit, facebook, youtube and others doesn't need advertisers. The advertisers need them. That's why the establishment has been waging a war to take control over social media. Social media is where the people ( young and increasingly the older ) are.

> though surely recognising that some of his policies are heading in the same direction and that his followers espouse much of the same views are worth noting.

So trump ( pro-israel zionist ) with a jewish daughter and a jewish son-in-law is hitler? Do you work for CNN or the washingtonpost by any chance? The current lunacy is eclipsing the teaparty lunacy when obama got elected.

> The historical directions are striking. while he's not yet another Hitler, the risk may well be there...

What policies and what historical direction? Your statement is as absurd as the teaparty fanatics claiming obama was born in kenya.

Yes. Trump, a protege of a jewish businessman ( Cohen ) and a father of a jewish daughter married to a jewish man is "literally" hitler.

Is this really what has become of hacker news?

> With Oracle remaining evil and Microsoft making waves in open source these days

MSFT is not making as big a wave as you'd think. A lot of the hype is MSFT PR machine running rampant.

I use Visual Studio/.Net on windows and only on windows because it's what many corporations use. But I use linux and bsd + vim/etc at home.

A lot of MSFT software may be going open source but they also bring with it "spying telemetry" and I suspect eventually ads. It surprises me how little outrage there is over MSFT spying as there is with facebook. Windows is literally a keylogger and scanner all in one. It's pretty much spyware.