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> due to some quirk of evolution, Omega-3, -6, and -9 are the ones biological life uses most. As far as I can tell, there's no specific reason they're all multiples of 3. Probably just a coincidence.

This curio bothered me as well. I didn't yet get a fully satisfying explanation for this either.

There's this diagram, showing for example the full pathway of how linoleic acid catabolizes: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Linoleic_acid_beta_o...

It shows dependencies of the process onto several very specific molecular machines we call enzymes.

(main pathway, handling saturated fatty acids)

   ° Acyl CoA dehydrogenase -- removes 2 hydrogens from carbons immediately after the carboxylic head, forming a π-bond (double-bond) between the α-β carbons;
   ° Enoyl CoA hydratase -- adds water as H-OH to that α-β carbons π-bond;
   ° 3-hydroxyacyl CoA dehydrogenase -- converts the added -OH hydroxyl group to =O keto group;
   ° β-ketothiolase -- grabs the two keto groups, and snips off 2 carbons from the chain, carrying them off in bound form as a molecule of acyl-CoA;
(unsaturated side-branch)

   ° Dienoyl CoA reductase -- collapses two neighboring π-bonds into one;
   ° Enoyl CoA isomerase -- converts cis- to trans- variants, making them compatible with Enoyl CoA hydratase. Pathway continues from there.
These, when viewed as a set of combinators, seem perfectly sufficient to metabolize any fatty acid chain. Their chemistry reads pretty straightforward — and it must deal with cis/trans isomerism shenanigans, with neighboring π-bonds, with odd/even parity of the carbon chain. But it apparently handles all that!

Besides catalysis (combustion of the acids for energy), the two other paths for consumed fatty acids are excretion, and laying them into cell walls and membranes. These two paths aren't selective; they mostly don't care about the length of the chain, and where which π-bonds occur in it, if any.

So this must imply, that the "quirk of evolution" lives somewhere on the anabolic (synthesis/production) side of fatty acids; definitely not on the catabolic side.


Idris 2 ruined it for me.

Scientifically, it's cool of course, dependent linear types yaay.

Socially though, incompatible rewrite in Scheme should've been a separate project IMO; but since it's called "Idris 2", community attention faded away from the Haskell implementation "Idris 1". Which caused bad maintenance, neglect, stagnation, of a thing I tried and liked.


CVE scoring is parasocial activity. Hence so much drama.

Similarly to SemVer, the good-faith grader attempts to convey a sizeable blob of knowledge... by compressing it into a one-dimensional number. No matter the scoring formula, this step is lossy.

On the receiving end of this communication, all you can do with the score is add a huge grain of salt to it, then perhaps use to prioritize your review queue. You still must check the details, and work out a judgement tailored to your specific context. There's no other way.

There isn't a choice for the grader either, to skip the obscenely lossy scoring step. Just like with release versions, they must do it, as the audience consists of unbounded number of engineers; faithfully doing it saves mountains of time for everyone involved (present and future).

Just like with dependency upgrades, it's the consumer's choice to disregard CVE scores (version numbers), vulnDB entries (changelogs), or even existence itself of a vulnerability (upgrade). Likewise, it's their fault if consequences arise.

Viewed thusly, can be seen: anecdotes of pointwise drama will continue (even when the bulk of activity chugs along happily, efficiently and quietly) -- because at the core of it, CVE ID's and scores are just that, a communication tool. It mostly can't make strangers exercise care or spend effort more than they're willing to. It can optimise utility of attention that they do pay.


Hey @NamecheapCEO, Ukrainian here. Thanks a lot!

Please notice, there needs to be some sort of verification mechanism. The russians have already figured out that simply setting "Ukraine" in profile data a) works b) might suffice to bypass the upcoming restriction.


I'll disagree. It seems you and GP have been lucky enough to never stumble on videos with #dislikes > #likes, for whatever (usually well-deserved) reasons.

I'd seen some; wishing I could unsee those.


To a non-aussie, the polititian speak is pretty darn bizarre. On the first read, I thought you were describing a physical assault...


Our system elects Members of Parliament (MPs), who then choose the Prime Minister(PM) from the pool of MPs.

However what that means is that at any point the MPs from the majority party can oust the PM and change them out with another MP.

This has become more common recently with several of our sitting PM's being 'knifed' aka backstabbed in recent years.


Good points. But dare you doubt human's destruction ability?..

Note also, that destroying just the thin tender habitable layer of Earth would suffice.


> dare you doubt human's destruction ability?..

I don't doubt human's ability. Which is why I fight those who don't seem to care about preserving earth. Who seem to overlap quite strongly woth those who believe that other planets may provide a viable alternative.

I don't doubt our ability to destroy earth, but I do doubt our ability to successfully live somewhere else.


I might be a counterexample to your perceived overlap. 3 points:

* It seems that, as a species, we have deep issues rooted in our tribal upbringing. Reaching a global actionable consensus seems as hard (if not harder) as colonizing another planet. The internet only catalyzes the "us vs they" thinking people struggle to get rid of. In one of its many incarnations, it's a nurture of horribly mistaken worldviews — and here I imply climate change denialism, in context. But also flat earth, etc.

* Viewed independently from antropogenic climate change catastrophy -- living on another planet would be extraordinary achievement, would you disagree? Launching a "toy" helicopter is kinda cool, but... living? For some of our greatest ancestors, the coolest achievement has been building millenia-lasting megastructures. Our generations are building fusion testbeds, orbital telescopes & commsat constellations; why wouldn't, say, a giant Earth-shaped globe monument on Mars be great? Perhaps not a globe, yea... but a Statue Of Liberty? Dao temple maybe? A hammer-and-sickle impact crater giga-egraving? Whatever.

* Both viewed together, rationally, Mars colonization is an option to escape extinction on Earth. Not a priority, sure; more like, a backup-of-backup-of-backup plan -- for when all else failed (see point 1). It's not like we can do it soon, either; advance preparations and long practice needed. I won't express any judgement of viability. I do see, however, how ambition and inter-tribe competition can drive this plan to a ready state (see point 2) -- sooner than fossil fuel combustion stops across the world.


Mars is not a viable safety hatch for continued human existence. It will simply be too dependent on resupply from the Earth for the foreseeable future (on a timescale measured in generations).

All of the following are easier to accomplish than colonizing Mars: solving global warming, colonizing the ocean floor, colonizing the Moon. Indeed, the technologies we would need to terraform or colonize Mars to a sufficient level to be an escape hatch would necessarily involve solving all of those first.


I do not yet think that humanity's capability to destroy is stronger than nature's capability to heal and grow.

But ask me again in a couple decades.


I'll cross-post instead of guessing. Another comment here:

> URVs were quoted in cruzeiros reais and its intrinsic value was pegged to three price indices and had a fixed parity of 1-to-1 to the daily U.S. dollar exchange rate. [0]

> The problem with pegging your currency is that you get a disconnect between the official value and the private value. So introducing this new currency which was pegged, and transferring over only once the disconnect was resolved was the stroke of genius.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unidade_real_de_valor


The gimmick here was that there was no actual URV currency. No notes or coins, no bank accounts denominated in it. This prevented developing a free-market exchange rate that undermined the abstract value the state was trying to establish.

I could say "I'm only willing to pay 0.50USD for 1URV". If someone takes me up on it, the fulfillment would have to take place in cruzieros-- the transaction becomes "I'm paying 0.50USD to 15 cruzieros" or whatever. This sort of transaction would have more impact on the cruziero's exchange rate than the URV's.

I could imagine trading some sort of "osudeo-URV" derivative product that was basically a prepaid purchase contract, but its value would be heavily affected by cruziero-related risk.


> [...] So a quantum computer would be pretty bad for Bitcoin in its current state.

Your reasoning is sound. But it won't be as bad. I'd claim, not much worse than dealing with leap seconds.

For 2 reasons: • Post-Quantum Cryptography exists. • The updated (quantum-resistant) Bitcoin will get renamed back to Bitcoin.

I agree your parent could use a review. I failed to read them any far.


This is exactly my grudge with boilerplate. Code is being read much more often than written.

I don't care if you hand-coded all those buckets of accessors, or your IDE has generated them -- that's irrelevant to that they're still overwhelmingly useless noise. Which I need to read through, which I need to review in PR diffs, skim in "find symbol usage" output, class interface outlines, javadocs, etc etc -- all that 10 as often as during writing. Somehow I'm expected to learn to ignore meaningless code, while producing it is fine?..

Remember the point made in "green languages, brown languages" recent post here on HN? The insight for me there was the source of "rewrite it from scratch" urge which should be very familiar to engineers working in the field. It comes from incomprehensible code or weak code reading skills. Either way, boilerplate does nothing but harm.

So no, while I agree on your point that code exists principally to be read by humans (and as a nice secondary bonus, executed by machines) -- I disagree that boilerplate is "fine" whatever its incarnation. It's not, because it directly damages the primary purpose of code: its readability.


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