What's with the propensity for the typical HNer, and the tech demographic in general, to subscribe to the whole alpha/beta charade in the first place? Your average programmer isn't usually a bodybuilder or even what you may call a 'Chad'. Even on social media, blogs, and generally speaking the whole ecosystem of believing dumb evopsych crap, the most prominent speakers aren't exactly paragons of traditional masculinity themselves. And conversely, Joe Rogan himself (if you're willing to consider an MMA pro 'alpha') probably doesn't care at all about the Google memo.

So, like, if you're soft-spoken, introverted, maybe effete, maybe overweight, what's the point of doing all this? Why fantasize about an immutable, evolutionary-driven hierarchy of males if you're not even putting yourself at the top? Does that stem from self-loathing? Maybe a fetish of some kind? I'm curious to read different perspectives from HNers.

Some people can't or won't do those options though, so their brains move to the next option to preserve their sense of self-worth: deflection. They believe they are unsuccessful or unattractive, but they can preserve some of their self-worth by believing that their perceived lack of success or attractiveness is due to factors outside their control. They were born into a hierarchy stacked against them, or they just weren't born with the right genes to concede. They're caught between a rock and a hard place; they either tell themselves that they're failures but it's okay because it's someone else's fault, or they tell themselves that they're failures and they only have themselves to blame. They literally can't see the third option, which is to tell themselves they aren't worthless.

People who would genuinely consider themselves alphas don't generally subscribe to these beliefs. There are some that claim it, but I'm frankly convinced that deep down theyre terrified they might be a beta, which is what causes the constant dick measuring in those communities as they fight to prove to themselves they really are alpha. Joe Rogan doesn't give a shit about the alpha/beta male thing because he's confident that his life has value. I'm a casual, occasional listener, and I wouldn't accuse him of being overly macho. He speaks confidently, but I don't think arrogantly. I don't think he's as clever as he's often given credit for, but that's not a mortal sin. Schwarzenegger is an even better example. Physically, the man is a paragon of traditional masculinity, but he bears no resemblance to the alpha male persona.

I genuinely have a lot of empathy for people that subscribe to the alpha male thing. I can't imagine the mental anguish of living an existence where you construct a mental hierarchy you are at the bottom of, because it's the best light you can think of yourself ever being in. It's easy to get lost in hating them because of how toxicly they expose their views, but underneath it all is just a person who's lashing out because they hurt.

The HN bubble is real and it's easy to be derisive but the OP you replied to doesn't seem to be a troll. Sincere people are easy targets for the cynical but the flawed opinions of real people are more interesting than whatever sanitized death waits by appeasing something like n-gate.

Also, this doesn't explain Joe's appeal toward men. If the meanest monkey has the most offspring, then his appeal should be with women.

[0] https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/how-to-really-be-alp...

Anyone that has a work flow, even a personal workflow having nothing to do with actual earning of income, that updates as soon as an update is available, is an asshole to themselves, and a compulsive one at that. If there are no security patches, bug fixes or features that I desperately need, I don't update. I'm still running iPadOS13.4 and I may never update.

The problem here is not Apple's. Apple can do as it wants, and is under no obligation to make things convenient for the egotistical developers. From my perspective, (and fallacy argument from authority here, but fwiw, I studied computer science, flunky career in systems administration, and I am perfectly aware I rarely did any computer science, but am also aware programming is not computer science, either... CS is just math, and that is all... I personally just liked the problem solving necessities that sysadmining provided me, along with a decent living... I enjoyed solving those puzzles), developing for iOS sounds easy as snot. Developing a killer app is more difficult in that it must be innovative, clever, beautiful, and useful. But 99% of the apps on AppStore, and including 90% of the games, are duplicates of stuff that has been around forever. Where is the innovation?

And I have very little sympathy for developers because most of them made my life a living hell for 20 years. It is that precious few that did the opposite that I love, nay, that I worship. What are the chances anyone in this group of developer blamers and complainers, borderline narcissist egoists, are among them? Slim to none.

Apple gave you excellent tools. You have your own source code. Get something done! It doesn't matter how long it takes. But with the tools Apple provides, seems to me it is loading the tools, loading the source, grooming the source for the update, clicking a few radio buttons, compiling, and publishing. Shut up and get something done, or bail and go develop for another platform. Jeesh. Make install not war.

You're not getting it. With global environmental catastrophe the concern is not about the deaths of millions of people. It is about the deaths of all people everywhere. A symptom of the problem of environmental catastrophe is those that are cavalier about the deaths of entire species of wildlife. The planet will be fine, the plant and wildlife will recover... though it may not be the same plant or wildlife. But once humans are gone, there is very little change we are coming back. So, to be clear, though humans have and are making he planet uninhabitable for myriad of species, reducing the available variety of species, which we, in fact, depend on... it is a web... but we are also making the planet uninhabitable for people.

Serious and monumental efforts in conservation of plant and wildlife and habitat is a damn good place to start. The more natural habitat there is, the more plant and wildlife there is, the better it will be for us. First thing is first... the oil industry and the chemical industry needs to go away within the next 10 years. Government, which people control, needs to make all that crap unprofitable. All pollution must cease, and we need to figure out how to clean up what has been done. Let's not bitch about energy, nor evangelize nuclear power. Let's just bite the bullet for a few generations and force everything and everyone to generate their own energy, and require that it be clean.

No, I think I am. Your comment actually misses my entire point and instead just explains climate change?

My point is that a common sentiment I see articulated in response to someone saying that the biosphere soon might not be able to support humanity is "Good, humanity is a cancer on this planet and we've shown we don't deserve it."

I think that statements like that should get a comparable amount of social ire to someone blithely stating that the Holocaust was good population control. It is unacceptable to view the death of millions or billions (after a long period of extremely impoverished living) as a good thing to me.

https://github.com/lunixbochs/meta/tree/master/utils/brew_al...

I have been doing this for years. The only thing it breaks for me is casks that try to install applications, and I don't mind.

MacPorts has excellent housekeeping, which is controlled through port command arguments. One can choose to leave everything from the entire build, or have everything cleaned up as it builds, or clean it up after the build. Showing and eliminating leaves is also pretty simple.

Uninstalling MacPorts with these 3 commands leaves absolutely nothing behind:

>$ sudo port -dfp uninstall --follow-dependencies installed

>$ sudo port -dfp uninstall all

>$ sudo rm -rf /opt/local /Library/Tcl/macports*

Good luck completely uninstalling Homebrew without having to look everywhere to make sure it is all gone. It requires downloading and trusting the Homebrew uninstall script.

When I first got a Mac about 4 years ago moving from Linux, the first thing I did was compare homebrew and macports.

homebrew was such a cluster-fuck in how it screwed around in /usr/local and its requirements for root etc, especially with Apple's move to basically own most of /usr under SPI.

Macports follows the BSD ports model and since Apple is a BSD based unix underneath, it makes sense. I haven't found anything I've needed that hasn't been ported.

It installs by default in /opt, which is where it should. When needed it will create the appropriate startup configurations for services as part of launchd and in the correct locations.

Capable of installing both source and binaries. Works well in my experience.

(No experience with MacPorts so I can't compare; but coming from Linux/apt I didn't feel much was missing, just a little different)

I haven't been involved with macports recently enough to compare, but one advantage of Homebrew's popularity is the depth of package specifications and how quickly they're updated

Let that stand as a symbol for all the other horrible things Edison did, like electrocuting a number of dogs and cats, and killing his assistant.

Tesla is not exactly overrated, but at least he never stole credit for inventions, and he never killed anyone, unlike Edison (his assistant, glassblower Clarence Madison Dally, who died a rather horrible death).

"Relatively unknown," is a better description for Tesla. Edison invented a few things, the telegraph... no that was David Alter. Edison invented something to copy telegraphs, and he invented the phonograph, which was truly revolutionary, a way to record sound... but he did not invent the record player... he made lightbulbs practical... but he did not invent the electric lightbulb, of course. Edison did not invent the kinetoscope, or movie camera (that was Edward Muybridge) and he knew very little about it, but he took credit for it anyway. Edison took credit for wax paper, but he had absolutely nothing to do with that invention (invented by Gustav Le Gray). He did not invent storage batteries, but he made a lot of money with them. Edison did not invent the power generator, though he is credited for it (his assistants, Charles Batchelor and Francis Upton, were the true inventors of this).

Nearly all the other great achievements attributed to Edison were actually invented by his rival inventors or unknown (to the masses) employees, the researchers he hired, (such as the electric chair, invented by Harold P. Brown).

Tesla was a lot smarter than Edison. He never wrote anything down, and was able to keep his designs in his head. He invented the Tesla coil, the Tesla Turbine, The Shadowgraph, the Neon Lamp, The Niagra Falls Transformer House, the Induction Motor, the RC boat, Alternating Current, and Radio. Tesla held over 300 patents across 5 continents, and all of then were his innovations. God knows how many of Edison's 1000-some patents were actually his.

I don't understand how you or anyone can believe what you wrote. Edison was a major douche bag, an obvious sociopath, which sort of overshadows what he actually invented, which actually number in the low double digits. Tesla's inventions number in the low-mid triple digits

Tesla is not overrated, quite the opposite, apparently, and Edison certainly is not better in any regard than Tesla.

But Tesla was weird, and not all that popular. Edison, like all successful sociopaths throughout history, was hugely popular.

This is some sort of urban legend/myth that came about sometime in the early 2000s. Probably due to the Oatmeal.

Edison was not a sociopath. Specifically with respect to Dally, Edison kept Dally on the payroll even when he was too sick to work, and IIRC personally paid out Dally's immediate family a coninuing pension after Dally's death. For the era around 1900 that was unheard of, and at the very least, evidence of humanity that you don't seem to be willing to admit.

When one actually studies the History of Science, one discovers shocking things. None of the ideas attributed to Einstein were actually Einstein's. I don't want to bash Einstein. He was truly brilliant. So another way to put it is Einstein stood on the shoulders of giants. Though I can and will bash the notion that Einstein was so innovative that all the ideas were his. None of them were. Let's examine all the original insights traditionally attributed to Albert Einstein. Comment too long, I will reply to my own comment and continue...

continues in reply to my own comment...

And Poincare never developed it from first principles, elevating the speed of light being fixed in all frames. Poincare only noted that this was a solution to Lorentz invariance.

Einstein did take this as a first principle, and demonstrated what follows: time dilation (something completely alien to all before him, including Galileo). He then derived E=mc^2 from relativisitic momemtum (another completely alien concept to those before him).

> and it's deeper origins first appears nearly 300 years earlier in the 1632 Galilean Invariance, aka Galileo's Theory of Relativity

Galieo's view of the word is that velocities add, which Special Relativity shows to be incorrect. Galileo's theory of relativity is that the laws of physics are the same for all observers, which no one claims Einstein created.

Galileo had zero idea that velocities are sub-additive.

No, not so much.

You missed this in my GP comment: "Hendrik Lorentz proposed that the motion of the apparatus through the aether may cause the apparatus to contract along its length in the direction of motion, and he further assumed, that the time variable for moving systems must also be changed accordingly ("local time"), which led to the formulation of the Lorentz transformation."

>Hendrik Lorentz prop

Lorentz did not think that time actually dilated; his notion of "local time" he considered purely a mathematical trick, unrelated to actual physics, in the same manner that renormalization sweeps away infinities in a clever manner.

Here's the quote: "While for Lorentz length contraction was a real physical effect, he considered the time transformation only as a heuristic working hypothesis and a mathematical stipulation to simplify the calculation from the resting to a "fictitious" moving system. " [1]

So no, Lorentz absolutely did not think physical time actually dilated. Stop repeating this nonsense.

Also, Lorentz was not the first to publish the time dilation formula. And, like Lorentz, all before him thought it a neat mathematical trick, devoid of actual physics.

Poincare did think it may be actual time dilation, but he too lacked the insights that Einstein had that put these dilation and stretching concepts not as ad-hoc after effects, but that they come from a simple, single physical principle. What's more, Einstein's way of looking at it all was the one that turned out to match reality the best.

For example, in 1905 Poincare introduced "Poincare stresses", another fictitious set of forces, to reconcile the math they didn't like from what they thought of as reality.

Lorentz and Poincare used the now-disproven aether as the basis for their theories. Einstein did not.

Spend a moment reading that wiki page, replete with sources, and especially the section on "The shift to relativity." It's abundantly clear that Einstein was the first to publish the correct interpretation, devoid of all the ad hoc (and physically incorrect) assumptions that Lorentz, Poincare, and others, used to reconcile their belief with the evidence. Einstein, in one simple argument, showed that one simple physical idea - light has the same speed regardless of observer - leads to the correct equations that model reality, needs no other ad hoc forces or aether or any other items.

Here's [2] notes from a talk I gave (and still give from time to time) on a simple derivation of all these things from the one principle.

You spend an incredible amount of time misrepresenting and discounting the work of Einstein, so much so that you're posting many, many wrong items. I gave up listing them since the sheer amount of it baffling. Why?

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

[2] https://lomont.org/papers/2011/SpaceTimeTalk.pdf

To Einstein's credit, one of the hallmarks of his genius, he had an ability to take complex ideas and describe them very simply, so that any might understand.

It is General Relativity that is Einstein's really only major contribution worth noting. And that is enough! Though he was first to describe Special Relativity, had he not, someone else would have within a few years of his publication. But had Einstein not given us General Relativity, it might have taken another 50 or 75 years for that to appear. But it also absolutely would have come from someone else had Einstein never existed.

Einstein is amazing, he is just not at all the myth that everyone thinks he was. He was just a humble theoretical physicist.

Special relativity was a leap no one else was making, despite 20+ years of people knowing enough to make the leap. He also postulated light was made of photons (which was correct) to explain the photoelectric effect, which is another amazingly important thing. That one a Nobel Prize, but according to you, this is not a major contribution?

He developed the quantum theory of heat, also correct.

He gave solid empirical evidence for atomic theory using statistical physics.

He showed energy and mass are interchangeable (E=mc^2).

He predicted gravitational waves, just recently demonstrated, giving Thorne and other a Nobel. Had this demonstration been during Einstein's life, he would have gotten another Nobel prize.

He discovered the field equations predicted a dynamic, changing universe, something so far from thought at the time he tried to fight it by adding a cosmological constant, but he published the dynamic possibility anyways.

He (with Rosen) created a model of wormholes in 1935.

He invented Bose-Einstein condensates (Bose published statistics on photons, Einstein modified that to apply more widely and demosnteated completely new states of matter).

I could go on and on.

It's baffling you consider all this, especially one Nobel prize and enough for a second, to not be major contributions to physics.

>had Einstein not given us General Relativity, it might have taken another 50 or 75 years for that to appear

Also not true. As you yourself pointed out, Hilbert was right there, and if Einstein had not published, it would not have been more than a year until Hilbert (or a host of others) would have made the same discovery.

This "50 or 75 year" claim is just pulled from nowhere, like a lot of your other claims.

Rereading your posts on this, you clearly have selected at every possible point an anti-Einstein view, far more than is reasonable from the evidence. I could go on to post a ton more sourced items you get wrong.

Oh well, hopefully anyone reading this deep doesn't just believe the things you wrote, but takes some time to check them. I've provided enough places for them to start.

For anything Einstein is given credit for after about 1918, it was just the momentum of his popularity. Anytime another name is on anything, it is that other name that did most of the work, and because it was based on Einstein's earlier work, his name went on it also. And this is absolutely normal and expected in academia. Nearly all physicists do their life's work before they are 30, usually by the time they are 23. Einstein was nearly 40 when he published his Theory of General Relativity, and that is extremely out of the ordinary. You are seeing things, perpetuating the myth, when you place Einstein, the man, central to any breakthroughs after about 1918.

Over all Nobel Prizes, it happened around 1/3 of the time. In Physics since 2000, it happened 80% of the time [1]. Care to rethink this claim?

Have you read the original papers? I have. Do you understand the math, and can do calculations related to relativity? I can.

Again the claim General Relativity was not being solved by others? I just demonstrated Hilbert was right on Einstein’s heels, with a paper published right after Einstein, with the same results.

Why stick to that gun when I just cited the evidence, that you can check yourself? The original papers are both online for you to read.

Einstein and Hilbert even worked quite a bit together on it. Of course Hilbert was interested and working on it too.

By several decades do you mean a few months? Is this time dilation?

I get the feeling you do not know either.

[1] https://www.livescience.com/16911-scientific-breakthroughs-g...

No, I meant what I said. Special Relativity would have appeared within a few years of Einstein's publication had it not occurred, but for General Relativity derived elsewhere would have taken decades at least. Hilbert didn't have it and wasn't on anyone's heels.

Is this based on the quality of evidence you used when you claimed people over 40 don't do much science? That turned out to be wildly incorrect.

What do you base the "decades" claim on? There was no new math needing invented, no new empirical evidence needed, no new physics needed, and many people were close at the time, and certainly more and more physicists were heading down the same paths.

BTW, Einstein's most cited paper, by far, is from 1935, written when he was 56. I suspect that's some evidence he did good work after general relativity.

It is simply my opinion that GR was so amazing, insightful, and non-obvious that it would have taken a similar miracle as Einstein himself for someone else to have intuited it and worked it out, but given enough time, eventually it would have appeared.

BTW, Einstein's most cited paper, by far, is from 1935, written when he was 56. I suspect that's some evidence he did good work after general relativity.

OR it is evidence that he had decent research assistants.

Yes, plenty of people were working on similar stuff - this is true for every single case I've ever dug into (Newton, Gauss, Tesla, Einstein, Witten, Feynman, Wright Brothers, Marconi, transistor, laser, fission, fusion, ...), but to claim (as you did) that the person who actually make the breakthrough did not do it (and backing it by lies, as I sourced), is deceitful.

I've yet to see someone create something so vastly improved from the world around them that it would not have been made by another person or group immediately. But that does not mean it's fine to discount the work of the person who did it first, especially if that requires falsehoods.

My point was very simply was that Einstein did not walk on water nor did he operate in a vacuum. I am not sure why this is so difficult to believe.

Ad hominem is not simply an attack; it's disparaging someone to undermine their argument.

>I have not attacked you, and I do not see how you could find ad hominem in my replies.

I didn't say tou attacked me. You threw in Einstein being a womanizer in a discussion about people worthy of Nobel Prizes. I don't think the Nobel comittee takes that into consideration.

>Unfounded paranoia is probably not something you should ignore.

Agreed. Since you brought up unfounded paranoia, and since you thought the ad hominem was about you attacking me when that is not what I wrote, you should get that paranoia checked :)

>My point was very simply was that Einstein did not walk on water nor did he operate in a vacuum. I am not sure why this is so difficult to believe.

I never claimed anything like that. Strawman?

I agree he didn't operate in a vacuum, which is why I think there's ample evidence his work would have been done by others soon after he did it if he did not exist. This is true for just about every person and discovery.

You're the one arguing that all of mankind could not have developed General Relativity for decades without Einstein.

Which is it? Was his work able to be done by others around the same time (i.e., not in a vacuum), or was his work so spectacular and impossible for all of mankind to not be able to produce it for decades (i.e., the walks on water argument)?

Which is why it is also fallacy. Attacking the man does not undermine the argument, so the argument stands unassailed. Anytime we say "you..." it is the beginning of an ad hominem fallacy. Informal fallacy is invalid argument.

The rest of your last comment is all ad hominem fallacy. It's all you you you with you.

If I only got one cite, id be interested in the empedocles...

>I have read your paper with the utmost interest. I had not expected that one could formulate the exact solution of the problem in such a simple way. I liked very much your mathematical treatment of the subject. Next Thursday I shall present the work to the Academy with a few words of explanation.—Albert Einstein

Schwarzschild's struggle with pemphigus eventually led to his death on 11 May 1916. He was only 42 years of age and at the height of his achievements when he died. Schwarzschild's work encompassed a wide range of scientific topics: he not only studied observational astronomy, but also furthered the development of astronomical instrumentation, and he was the first to give an exact solution to Einstein's (ahem, Grossmann's) field equations, which is now known as the “Schwarzschild solution."

In 1905, Albert Einstein postulated that the speed of light c with respect to any inertial frame is a constant and is independent of the motion of the light source. But he didn't just pull this rabbit out of his hat. There is a long history of science of at least the notion of the finite speed of light, and Einstein is standing on the shoulders of giants when he publishes his Special Theory of Relativity, and heavily relied on the work of three mathematicians to develop General Relativity, and a forth for his work on Black Holes. But neither Relativity nor the constancy of the speed of light were Einstein's ideas, and not remotely so. History just gave him all the credit.

He became a rock star, world renowned, and for some reason Niels Bohr gave him a lot of attention (Bohr was a the real hero scientist, sort of a manly man scientist for all seasons), but all of Einstein's decades of thought towards a GUT produced no results. After 1915, other than his plagiarism of Schwarzschild's work (following his plagiarism of David Hilbert's work), Albert Einstein did not again contribute anything to the annals of Physics or Cosmology. He became somewhat of a unfaithful husband and womanizer of his own young female students at Princeton. No judgements here. Who wouldn't have done similarly given the same opportunity? Coeds, right? They were randy for him. He had no ability to resist it.

None of these ideas are mine.

Albert Einstein's friendship with Marcel Grossmann began with their school days in Zurich. Grossmann's careful and complete lecture notes at the Federal Polytechnic School proved to be a salvation for Einstein, who missed many lectures. Grossmann's father helped Einstein get his job at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern, and it was Grossmann who helped to conduct the negotiations to bring Einstein back from Prague as a professor of physics at the Zurich Polytechnic. Grossmann was an expert in differential geometry and tensor calculus; just the mathematical tools providing a proper mathematical framework for Einstein's work on gravity. Thus, it was natural that Einstein would enter into a scientific collaboration with Grossmann.

It was mathemetician Marcel Grossmann who emphasized the importance of a non-Euclidean geometry called Riemannian geometry (also elliptic geometry) to Einstein, which was a necessary step in the development of Einstein's general theory of relativity. Abraham Pais's book on Einstein suggests that Grossmann mentored Einstein in tensor theory as well. Grossmann introduced Einstein to the absolute differential calculus, started by Christoffel and fully developed by Ricci-Curbastro and Levi-Civita. Grossmann facilitated Einstein's unique synthesis of mathematical and theoretical physics in what is still today considered the most elegant and powerful theory of gravity: the general theory of relativity. The collaboration of Einstein and Grossmann led to a ground-breaking paper: "Outline of a Generalized Theory of Relativity and of a Theory of Gravitation," which was published in 1913 and was one of the two fundamental papers which established Einstein's theory of gravity.

continues in reply to my own comment...

That's pop nonsense. The quote people take out of context was not applicable to what you're implying. Simple googling shows this claim to be a misconception.

Not correct. Hilbert submitted a paper before Einstein, but the paper did not contain the field equations. After seeing Einstein's field equations, Poincare added them to his paper.

Also, Hilbert's paper didn't get published until 1916, after Einstein's.