469 karma · joined March 12, 2019
Not necessarily, that's an implementation detail. The result of an XPath query is not an array, it's some object that accepts integer indices for lookup.
If you were to return an array, there would be no way to break out of iteration early without paying for every lookup. For something like XPath, breaking out early is a likely scenario.
Your mileage will vary.
[...document.xpath("//text()[contains(., 'Hello')]")]
.forEach(node => node.textContent = node.textContent.replace("Hello", "Greetings"));
for (const node of document.xpath("//text()[contains(., 'Hello')]"){
node.textContent = node.textContent.replace("Hello", "Greetings");
}
The point of a private API not security, it's to distinguish between the public interface that is meant to be stable and implementation details that might change.
They might do some rudimentary checks to catch obvious usage of private APIs, but it's not part of the security model and still apps show up on the App Store that use private APIs, all the time.
This is a thinly veiled attack on evolutionary biology, which keeps coming up with plausible explanations that are nevertheless utterly disturbing to the self-image of a moral human being and must therefore be suppressed from its consciousness. This is an undue conflation of science (is) and morals (ought). Morals are an artifact of human experience with nature, nature itself is amoral.
For instance, let's ask: Why does rape exist?
Sociologist: writes twenty paragraphs on patriarchy and rape culture while ignoring the rest of the animal kingdom
Evolutionary Biologist: It's a successful strategy for reproduction, the selfish gene promotes its continued existence
If the sociologist is right, then rape should disappear in an enlightened culture that has abolished all male dominance (utopianism). If the biologist is right, then rape will not disappear without identifying and muting all gene sequences that might lead an individual to be a rapist (eugenics).
In reality, neither are practical solutions, both explanations are bound to be contributing factors, but with one disregarding the other, we lose the ability to draw rational conclusions and devise functioning systems.
That's not the point though.
Remember, the article proposes to draw a random sample from all applicants who are "good enough", so you would have some sort of aptitude test. However, instead of selecting the best N results from that test, you select a random N.
I wouldn't hypothesize that the results are going to indistinguishable or even that they will be better. I would argue that total welfare may improve as a result and that is worth testing.
The reason is as follows: If you only take the "best and brightest", there's little room for improvement.
For all we know, those universities that only pick the best and brightest may actually produce inferior results that are nevertheless still very good.
Thomas Sowell, when challenged on the success of charter schools in New York as being biased due to a "better selection" of students, was able to point out that this bias was limited by the fact that admission was based on a lottery.
Call it a myth if you will, blame it on overzealous lawyer who just want to create work for themselves.
My only point is that this "myth" is so powerful that it creates a business reality where these suits are ubiquitous, but it's only news if a company like Apple does it.
Of course in reality women aren't going to reject males on arbitrary and exact thresholds, but on what they consider "too short", which is also related to their own height.
I would agree that online dating is a very tough dating pool and that many other pools exist and that those thresholds are always relative to who is in the pool.
> I don't know, on reading this I was inclined to agree. But on further reflection, speaking as a man, I know there are plenty of other men who have differences of opinion with me about what they care about in a woman - height, body type, etc. There are the endless discussions of "are you a chest man or a butt man".
That's another point I keep making: Men's preferences generally don't matter to the outcome. Average men have far lower standards and are willing so settle for less, because the pool is far smaller. Beggars can't be choosers.
Women have higher standards not only because it's their biological imperative, but because they generally can afford to, at least in a free sexual marketplace.
> That said, you're also making another mistake in your reasoning IMO - you're assuming attractiveness is the only thing that matters in finding a mate. That is simply not true - both in what people say they care about, and by simple observation of actual people.
I'm not exactly saying that. The evidence shows that - absent any societal or economical pressures - attractiveness is the overwhelmingly important factor in mate choice. What people say is irrelevant, studies show that people are not honest about this. People don't want to be seen as "shallow" or "superficial", they also want to believe in a just world.
> Put another way, let's do this experiment: someone takes a hundred couples (let's assume straight couples), takes a picture of the man and the woman separately, then mixes up the pictures. Do you think you'll be able to match the couples based on attractiveness alone? I'm sure there's some correlations here, and you'll be able to do it to some extent, but certainly nowhere near 100%.
Looking at couples is "survivorship bias". You would have to be taking into account the population that fails to find a mate.
Again, just because you can find a short guy with a mate doesn't mean there's mate for every short guy.
> I'm not sure what our point of disagreement is at this point.
I guess you're being "too optimistic".
> 1. It's very rare to be unable to find a sexual partner.
Finding sex - if we were to include prostitution - is very easy. Finding a sexual partner with which to produce offspring is another matter. I would suggest that the number of males that fail at this, particularly in a free sexual marketplace, would be relatively high, perhaps in the double-digits percentages.
> 2. Physical attractiveness and other physical (immutable) attributes, while certainly mattering a lot, will almost certainly not preclude anyone from being able to find a sexual partner.
I disagree with this, at least if we exclude prostitution.
> 3. If you're an around-20-year-old incel, the chance that you will never be able to find a sexual partner, assuming you make some steps to change things you can change for the better, is incredibly tiny. Most people posting in incel forums are not in that situation, and if they think they are, they are mistaken.
I'm not interested in the question of "how many self-described incels on the forums are real incels?", because it's just not measurable. Like I said, people are dishonest in what they say, people like to harbor victim identities, and so on.
At the very least, I doubt only a "incredibly tiny" amount these people couldn't be turned into a reproductive success, because I already ballparked the amount of reproductive failures at over 10% and it makes sense that these would be overrepresented in an incel community.
To that end, I would count an incel not as "someone who can't have sex" but someone fertile who involuntarily fails to sexually reproduce.
Research suggests that historically, the ratio of females to males that reproduced is 1.1 (Asia) to 1.4 (West Africa)[1]. Of course that doesn't prove all of these male individuals were incels, but we're not a naturally monogamous species, so you would have to explain why a female would not choose only the best males for reproduction and ignore the rest.
Many (if not most) societies have historically suppressed female mate choice, likely as a measure for maintaining social order. This would suggest that as females are able to be more picky, the number of incels should rise.
I believe that's exactly what we can observe right now in affluent western societies: Women have been financially independent from males for decades, and now that online dating shows women the abundance of mate choices they never knew they had, less attractive males suddenly appear much less desirable. Consequently, the threshold for successful reproduction rises.
Tall women have trouble finding partners because women not just want a tall man, they almost universally want a man who is taller than them. It's the same for high-earning women, they almost universally want a man that earns more than them. The same is true for education or job status and many other factors, and they compound.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypergamy
Women who are exceptional in one or more of these traits face a commensurately smaller pool of men that are acceptable to her, whereas every man in that pool is attractive to a commensurately larger pool of other women. However, men are not hypergamous, they do not care about earnings or education and they prefer shorter mates. Therefore, the males in that pool are more likely to end up with another female than the exceptional one.
Unable to find an acceptable partner and absent societal pressure in western societies, those exceptional females may defer or give up on reproduction.
Being short is in fact a huge disadvantage for dating, this is well established, for example in the study I gave you. Most females will indeed disqualify a short male from consideration.
Of course every dating pool is different and it might contain the odd exception where a female prefers to date a short guy, but then she will still prefer the affluent or handsome short guy over the other short guys, which are now out of mates.
> People aren't ranked in some kind of linear way from "more attractive" to "less attractive", lined up, and then can only find partners who agree with their level. There are many reasons...
I'll call this the "cosmic justice fantasy". In reality, attractiveness is fairly objective and measurable, with fairly low variance across individuals. There are of course always exceptions at the tail ends, but it doesn't make much of a difference.
> All of these combine to make it so that effectively, almost everyone can find a sexual partner.
At this point, I think we should differentiate between finding a a partner and having a sexual encounter at least once in your life.
> And this is not just a theroetical idea either - as I posted in another comment, according to some random studies I just Googled, <0.5% of people have never had a sexual experience by age 40
What this actually says is that less than 0.5% of people admit to never having had a sexual experience, which also would include an encounter with a prostitute.
Even at that low-ball rate, we'd be talking about millions of people in the US.
> Let me just close by saying that if you truly believe you (or some/most people posting on incel forums) are incapable of ever having a sexual relationship, I empathize with you - it must be very unhappy to believe you will never have something that you want and see so many other people enjoying.
To be clear: I'm neither short, nor bad-looking, nor do I lack sexual experience. I'm neither an incel, nor incel-affiliated, nor do I personally know any actual (self-identified) incels. I don't read discussions on incel forums. You may well be right in that a large amount of incel forum dwellers really only look blame personal failures on some immutable characteristic, because that's just what people like to do.
I happen to be interested in the some of the science that an incel might be interested in, because I prefer to know what's real, as opposed to what people would like to be real.
Generally, the preferences and concerns of disadvantaged males do not matter. Females choose the males, and they almost universally choose taller males.
By the way, 100ppm of mercury or 10ppm of uranium aren't that high, you can find that in nature as well.
That might actually be an odd but perfectly rational dating strategy for females that want to make absolutely sure they are not being cheated on, to be in a relationship where they have all the power, because they damn well know how hard it would be for that guy to find another partner.
Of course you have exceptions like this, for all kinds of reasons. There are people who fetishize morbid obesity or amputation. That doesn't mean that for every morbidly obese amputee there's a matching partner.
Can I take the other side of that bet?
If there are more short men than women that are willing to date short men, some short men will still be able to find partners, but not all of them.
More generally speaking, some men have so many unfavorable traits that no female would accept them, because females almost always have more and better options. Those unfortunate individuals are discarded from the gene pool.
I'm not saying that every self-described incel is actually in that set of unfortunate individuals, but this is how sexual selection works in lots of species, including our own.
I'm not going to an enter into an armchair-lawyer contest with you. My understanding of the law is indeed limited, but it reflects what is going on in actual business.
If you have a trademark, you have to defend it, or you risk losing it. Is it ridiculous? Yes. Is it incomprehensible to an outsider? Yes. Nevertheless, it's par for the course.
It's not that mutable attributes do not matter, but sexual selection is more a like a sales funnel than a breakdown of pros and cons. If you are very short, your attire can not make up for it. If you have an ugly face, muscle mass isn't going to revert that. Very high earning potential can make up for these shortcomings, but at that point you might question the motivation of the potential partner. See Table 5.4 (looks) and 5.5 (height):
http://home.uchicago.edu/~hortacsu/onlinedating.pdf
We'd all like to live in a world where we can tell everyone "If only you work hard enough, you will find success in the end". We like to believe in cosmic justice.
Unfortunately, that's not how nature works. Evolution works by discarding the weakest contenders from the gene pool. That ungrateful job is performed by the females, and it's unsurprising that those rejected males would harbor resentment, power fantasies and other moral delusions.
People are also more paranoid today than in 2016. If the communists take over, you do not want to be on some voted—nazi list.
I do not think one should equate Tory and Trump either. Like I said, it is a new variable.
My subjectively positive experience of video games already declined, right around when yours peaked, even though by pretty much any standard, these newer games were better than the ones that came before them.
How many people are going to lie about or refuse to admit voting for a candidate like Donald Trump?
I would expect this bias to be greater today than in 2016.
Here's a legal analysis that predates the ruling:
https://scholarship.law.tamu.edu/facscholar/489/
It outlines the requirements for a successful antitrust case, particularly that simply having a monopoly is not enough.
The problem is that Atari already failed in court against Nintendo back in the eighties, so the chances of winning that suit appear slim.
If I don't want to sell my product on the App Store, or if I have to make you pay more for it, I risk losing you as a customer. That's a trade-off every developer is aware of. Most apps that can publish on the App Store, will still publish on the App Store. On the PC, Epic sometimes has to shell out a lot of money to get an exclusive release, because a lot of people just use Steam.
However, a lot of apps can't publish on the App Store, because of the strict anti-competitive rules.