Why are we posting things that come from explicitly biased political websites that have nothing to do with tech? I can understand it if is breaking news, but this is an opinion piece.

I have noticed more political opinion pieces posted here recently. Did the scope of this website change in the past few months?

Do you post this under every NYT article too?

If NYT is allowed then so should be this

"Free Speech" issues are usually welcome here.

OP has a point. The NY Times recently began a process of shedding their ideals of objectivity too. They claim the views and inclinations of whiteness are accepted as the objective neutral.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/23/opinion/objectivity-black...

I agree that NYT has a bias. But they at least _try_ to appear objective (or at least objective with a left leaning slant). The article you linked is an opinion piece by a NYT writer and not the official stance of NYT (as far as I know).

Also, I am not fighting for NYT articles here. I wish that there would be no opinion pieces that are not tech related. This post just seemed particularly egregious because it is an opinion piece from a new outlet that is openly and explicitly biased.

Enable 'show dead' and review these.

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=fee.org

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=mises.org

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=theatlantic.com

Overall this site's moderation is hostile to free-market views. The goal is "promoting intellectual curiosity", as long as the goal posts are positioned according to the prevailing biases.

Obviously if you are not writing your programs in binary by manually magnetizing a hard drive, you are not a _real_ engineer.

I personally only use CPUs that I have hand made from the organic metals mined in my backyard.

I cant stop laughing!!! I may die soon! Awesome reply!

It means he makes money off of it, i.e. he works in the field.

The perl here is not really that crazy to remember.

-a autosplits each line by whitespace and puts each element into the array F (this was inspired by AWK).

-n loops through each line of the file, and -E executes the perl.

$. (NR in AWK) is the line number.

As others have noted, you can write the same thing in ruby on the command line already with `ruby -ane 'puts $F[1] if $.>1'`

(Notice the similarities?)

If you write one liners in AWK, Perl, or Ruby often the "odd" variables look more like useful shortcuts.

*edit You could also write the perl without any of the special variables, but it would be much more verbose, hence the special characters and flags.

It will be different, but concurrency, mutability, structured programming, and scope are very relevant.

Concurrency: Not all genes are run at all times. Gene regulation can look a lot like code. Ex: if(curr_temp > DANGER_TEMP){temperature_defense_gene.activate()}.

Mutability & Scope: Cells that have the same genome can act very differently (all of your cells have ~the same DNA, but act very differently) and some cells in your body can change roles.

Structured Programming: Biological pathways use a lot of control flows. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_pathway

While there's truth in the paradigm you advance, it's not anywhere near as binary or direct as you might me suggesting.

There's a ton of leakage and noise at most stages in biological pathways. Biology actually spends enormous amounts of effort to reduce the noise and leakage, but it's really hard to eliminate entirely.

Lets take the danger temp gene you use as an example. In bacteria that's mostly true, but even there what if we're low on nutrients? Or low on a particular nutrient? Or what if we start producing too much protein which is aggregating because the concentration is too high? Each cell is balancing all these concerns simultaneously, so even very simple biological circuits work/don't work in unexpected ways. What the OP is suggesting is that you're always concurrent with a huge number of different things going on that are far less isolated from your "process" than is traditionally the case in CS.

I agree that concurrency, mutability, scope, all that is relevant, but I think the OP's point that we don't have the theory on how those will apply in a biological context is correct.

Edit: for those interested, some papers on biological noise and the efforts cells use to reduce it:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1610.00820.pdf https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4006352/ https://www.cell.com/molecular-cell/abstract/S1097-2765(12)0...