I hope you participate in the conversation in a better manner in the future.

I wonder why the parent comment is downvoted. To a layman like me, it sounds completely reasonable.

Maintaining an exact copy of RNA/DNA through generations and generations is a real challenge, right? Loosening up the copying mechanisms to allow for more mistakes would probably be quite easy to achieve, if that was beneficial, right?

I’d be interested to hear what makes the idea wrong.

I’m no expert in the field and the only remotely relevant experience I have is a tiny amount of genetic algorithm programming at a rank amateur level.

I assume that making perfect replicas is the default way for a given type of life to dominate. Making “random copies” (an oxymoron) is not likely to result in domination of any individual type (of building block, single cell, or multi-cellular life). Making perfect copies allows a build-up of “winners”.

If that implies a very strong selection process for perfect copies, then after that a selection process for increased (but still small in aggregate) mutation rate would seem globally helpful.

Please don’t.

Still the same answer, I develop the firewall app Radio Silence (https://radiosilenceapp.com) for macOS.

It covers all my basic living costs. But I kind of got bored (again) of being happily unemployed (for the second time), and started a small consulting business on the side. A four-day workweek in addition to the Radio Silence stuff keeps me quite content.

I think your original hunch is correct. This is a little too stackoverflow-y.

This is not a very helpful comment. And nobody knows anything about JPEG when they are born.

I thought HN is a venue for advanced to highly advanced topics?

Hacker News is a social news website focusing on computer science and entrepreneurship. It is run by Paul Graham's investment fund and startup incubator, Y Combinator. In general, content that can be submitted is defined as "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" [1]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_News

99% of the technical articles posted on HN are very accessible if you have just the very basic understanding of CS without diving into any specific areas. I.e., lots of breadth, but little depth that is required for understanding (even if the articles themselves dive into depth).

I would count knowing the JPEG spec as a depth, rather than breadth.

Have you actually tried this?

I think this is not related at all to the linked article.

If you have a story about this, could you post it as a separate link and see how it does on its own? Trying to hijack other threads with politically loaded stuff usually goes sour here.

Hacker News isn't all about tech or startups. It's about things that interest the tech & startup crowd.

I agree but there was no special tech involved or anything specifically interesting, it was a normal gun.

One of the best things about HN is how joke comments aren't usually upvoted, even if they were funny. It makes room for other kinds of conversations.