Harvard Accused of Bias Against Asian-Americans - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/asian-american-organizations-seek-federal-probe-of-harvard-admission-policies-1431719348 <comment><USER2> Personally I'm not too concerned about this at the undergrad level. So you don't get into Harvard and you have to go to a state school or whatever, that's not really an impediment to your life and career unless you want to become a congressman or a supreme court justice or whatever.

Where it does bother me is med school. I've seen several of my Asian friends who were just ridiculously obviously great applicants either fail to get into med school or struggle to get into med school over several years. I'm not talking about someone who you see and think "yeah he could be a doctor", I'm talking about someone who you see and think "wow this person has it all - smart, charismatic, hard working, intellectual curiosity, top notch GPA, tons of extracurriculars - this is a no brainer, he'd be a great doctor".

All my friends of other races who seemed similarly qualified to me had no trouble getting in on their first try. And getting into med school or not is a big fucking deal. In some cases, we're turning away people who would be incredible doctors and making them pursue other careers, which is a huge waste.

Those are just anecdotes of course, but I wonder if anyone else has noticed the same thing.

<comment><USER3> > Personally I'm not too concerned about this at the undergrad level.

But if you accept it here, why _not_ accept it everywhere?

Either race-based discrimination is bad and should never be done or acceptable in some cases. If it's bad, Harvard (and others) should stop immediately. End of story.

If it's acceptable in "some cases" the next question is: Who determines those cases? And then: Are there a set of fixed criteria or is it a case by case basis? If it's case by case, who empowers and chooses the group making the decisions? What oversight and rules are on this group?

The "some cases" scenario is ripe for malfeasance and influence peddling.. which is just another "good old boys club."

<comment><USER2> Harvard vs. state school is far less important than med school vs. no med school.

The broader problem with med school is that we should have more med schools accepting more students, and then there wouldn't be such a stark "med school vs. no med school" scenario. So the root cause of that problem isn't racial discrimination, it's just that racial discrimintation in that context might have a much bigger impact due to some other unrelated factors.

Beyond the med school issue, racial discrimination in college admissions is pretty far down the list of issues in society that I'm worried about, because it just doesn't have that big of an impact.

<comment><USER4> > Harvard vs. state school is far less important than med school vs. no med > school.

> The broader problem with med school is that we should have more med schools > accepting more students, and then there wouldn't be such a stark "med school > vs. no med school" scenario.

Since the bottleneck is _residency programs_ , not the number of people who receive MDs, all this would do is increase the number of people who have taken on hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt without being able to legally practice medicine.

There are more people who graduate medical school than there there are residency slots available, and since residency slots are government-funded (through Medicare). Establishing new medical schools won't do anything.

<comment><USER2> I figured we could use more doctors because doctors are so busy and expensive. Economics 101 type reasoning. Am I missing something? Would having more doctors not be a good thing?

Also, what do you mean residency programs are the bottleneck? Do we really have tons of MDs running around who aren't allowed to practice medicine? Then we should increase residency programs. Whatever. I'm no expert in the field, just seems to me like more doctors would be a good thing, same way it would be good to have more of any profession that's highly in demand.

<comment><USER4> > I figured we could use more doctors because doctors are so busy and > expensive. Economics 101 type reasoning. Am I missing something? Would > having more doctors not be a good thing?

I never said that it wouldn't; I said that having more medical schools would have literally zero impact on the number of doctors practicing medicine.

> Do we really have tons of MDs running around who aren't allowed to practice > medicine?

Yes, because medical school isn't where you learn to practice medicine; residency is.

> Then we should increase residency programs.

There are so many political barriers to allocating the kind of funding necessary for this that it's not a realistic expectation anytime for the foreseeable future.

> I'm no expert in the field, just seems to me like more doctors would be a > good thing, same way it would be good to have more of any profession that's > highly in demand.

Sort of - but the medical field is rather complicated to a degree that would be tough to summarize in an HN comment. In short, yes, this general principle is true, but in the case of medicine, there are enough confounding factors that it's not as simple as "more residency programs → more and better care". If you could hold everything else constant, yes, that may be the case, but in practice, this wouldn't happen in isolation, and there would be a lot of other effects.

<comment><USER2> [http://www.post-gazette.com/news/health/2014/05/26/Some- med-...](http://www.post-gazette.com/news/health/2014/05/26/Some-med-school- grads-fail-to-get-residency/stories/201405260083) says this year there were 26,678 residency positions and 412 people who didn't match. Even if we opened more residency positions, we'd still need more medical schools too, right? Because 412 doctors isn't enough to make a dent in the status quo. I mean, we'll need another 412 doctors just to account for population growth in a couple years.

But the whole system seems weird to me as an outsider.

<comment><USER4> > this year there were 26,678 residency positions and 412 people who didn't > match. Even if we opened more residency positions, we'd still need more > medical schools too, right? Because 412 doctors isn't enough to make a dent > in the status quo.

Well, for starters, some of that is self-selecting, in that the only people who feel they are competitive candidates for a residency even apply. Overall, there are about 15,000 more applicants than first-year residency positions as of last year - 40,394 total.

Also, that 412 number is looking at the people who didn't _match_ , which isn't actually the same as saying how many were "unaccepted". Residencies don't work like undergraduate admissions. The residency matching is a complicated two-way process that separates by field, so the 412 aggregate number isn't actually answering the same question. This is implied by the discussion of primary care residencies halfway down the article you link, but if you're not already familiar with the process, you wouldn't notice it.

Finally, that is only looking at students _in the United States_ who did not match. Many residents in the US attended medical school outside the US. In fact, it's very common for US students who don't get into medical school in the US to go to medical schools in the Caribbean instead, and then come back to the US to do their residency so they can practice in their home country.

> I mean, we'll need another 412 doctors just to account for population growth > in a couple years.

The number of residency programs is increasing, so population growth isn't the concern. The original topic of discussion was increasing the availability of doctors - in other words, increasing the number of residency programs by an order of magnitude, rather than incrementally, as has occurred almost every year since 1952.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Harvard Accused of Bias Against Asian-American === Harvard Accused of Favoritism towards African-Americans/Latinos/etc.

The former just has a sexy title. The latter we've known all along because these schools openly state that they embrace affirmative action.

The matter of fact is that the school is incredibly strategic in how it makes its admissions decision, taking into account not only race, but geography, and a whole host of other factors. The complaint is utterly silly, because it fails to realize that nowhere is the claim made that the admissions process seeks to select the best students according to the SAT -- it seeks to select the students who best add something novel to that year's entering class.

A VERY STRONG argument could be made that race ought to be something which can't enter into that calculus. And I agree with that. But, from the moment a school adopts Affirmative Action (and the US supreme court upholds it), then this is just the sort of thing we can expect to see.

<comment><USER6> Discrimination is a bad thing that should be rooted out and stopped. The most insidious is of course the very PC "positive or affirmative discrimiation" \- where a group of people decide discrimination is now ok, just because. It ends up with parody situations, like here in the UK, there is the joke about a lady making an absolute fortune, companies being desperate to hire her, because she is disabled, ethnic, lesbian, has diverse politics - and so in one hire, the company can tick every positive discrimination category.

Back to the real world though - what a shitty thing to do to someone - to care so little about them as an individual, but to only give them a place because they meet this week's PC hiring criteria. For shame all of those who promote or continue with positive discrimination.

<comment><USER7>
      > Discrimination is a bad thing that should be rooted out and
      > stopped. The most insidious is of course the very PC "positive
      > or affirmative discrimiation" - where a group of people decide
      > discrimination is now ok, just because.

Seriously? "Just because?" The ignorance here is staggering. Or there is dishonesty. There's lots of room for arguing the theory what should be done about America's racism problem, or whether anything will work at all, but none whatsoever for suggesting that people are doing things "just because."

Next, your use of the word "insidious." This means something that appears innocuous but is actually a creeping evil. There is nothing "innocuous" about affirmative action. It's not banal. Nobody thinks it makes no difference.

Insidious is something like claiming to strengthen democracy by eliminating voter fraud, but actually attempting to suppress the votes of African- Americans. THAT is insidious.

Openly favouring applications of one group while openly claiming that you believe this will right a systemic wrong is not insidious. You may feel it is wrong-headeded, but there is no deceit involved.

Finally, you may not intend it this way, but your phrasing is misleading. It makes it seem as if affirmative action, by being "the most insidious discrimination," is somehow more dangerous and damaging than the everyday discrimination minorities face every day in North America and have for more than a century.

Affirmative action may be misguided, but under no circumstances is it the same level of threat to our stated principles of equality as the existing systemic and cultural discrimination minorities face. To use words so carelessly as to equate the two is irresponsible argumentation.

<comment><USER8> Racism is intrinsically wrong because it is discrimination for discrimination's sake. Races don't exist, they're a fiction.

Ethiopians and Papuans are both "black", Japanese and Indian people are both "asian", Spaniards and Bosnians are both "white", and nobody can agree on what the hell "hispanic" means.

None of these people have anything in common, culturally, genetically, linguistically, you need a bogus concept like 'race' to do that.

It's fine for universities to use a form of affirmative action to correct society, they're called _grants_.

<comment><USER9> So then you're saying that Harvard is being discriminatory right? Because they are accepting students with test scores WAY below those of the superior test scores of the asian pacific islander visual demographic. In that way they are being discriminatory, in other words, they don't want too many asians around and they have a certain look for the school they wish to achieve or maintain. So racism. People these days aren't used to hearing about Asian discrimination because black discrimination is thrown in our face so much it's almost fatiguing.

This instance is very much a first world problem (I couldn't get into harvard because I'm asian, but that white or black person did even though they scored lower.) but it's one we have proof of and it's very much worth fixing to set an example everywhere.

You read harvard's reply or reasoning that what they do is ok. Actually depending how you interpret it it could be a complaint by harvard. They said are following STATE Law. Maybe, if we interpret what they said another way, we learn they don't like doing things that way and really shouldn't be held accountable for any so called legal discrimination because they are following the law. Maybe harvard wants us to blame the law and not them. Maybe harvard would like to bring on more asians or more whites but can't even though they perform better and do more research.

Any attempt for harvard or any other school to bring up the holistic student argument is ridiculous. Because Asian students very much participate in extracurricular activities here and in asian countries, objectively so. You won't see a lot on the football or basketball team. You will see a lot of them in other things sports and clubs of all kinds.

Also what do you mean to affirmative action will "correct" society? In what interpretation is a society "corrected" if as you said races are a fiction in your mind? If there's no race, then there's no racism, it's just a bunch of people interacting with a bunch of other people of various colors and any "trends" are meaningless.

You can't have it both ways. You can't say it's a fiction but then wish that any places you go was would be more "correct" if it were more color diverse, (tossing out all concept of people's personal choice or their capabilities.)

Races do exist because groups of people evolved based on their environments and their ancestors ability to procreate. We may not know exactly why because people move and separate and that long span of time has no written record really. But we do know people look different, their languages are different behaviors however "anecdotally" are often different. Their prevalence of various conditions, disease and health are different. Artifacts were different too. Their capabilities on tests across the world are clearly different.

And if various experiments weren't shunned we'd likely understand more about race. They acquired various levels of intelligence and physique due to conditions. The problem is a lot of these things that make people different aren't studied enough. Because universities fear their reputation because even true scientific findings can and have been hidden due to political implications. Thankfully learning about the brain and understanding people are sciences that won't be stopped. So we'll probably learn more over time about race. We most certainly won't be able to find ways to boost equality in humans or find how or where they best flourish if we can't study and be able to honestly interpret the differences in humans.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> anon-obviously _The complaint argues that elite schools "that use race-neutral admissions" have far higher Asian-American enrollment than Harvard. At California Institute of Technology, for instance, about 40% of undergraduates are Asian- American, about twice that at Harvard._

Interestingly, Ron Unz did a lengthy expose on this issue in 2012, and arrived at similar conclusions: [http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the- myth-of-...](http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-myth-of- american-meritocracy/)

He found ample evidence of anti-Asian quotas at Harvard, Yale, and other elite institutions, and perhaps more controversial, evidence of what appears to be a form of affirmative action in favor of Jews:

 _In fact, Harvard reported that 45.0 percent of its undergraduates in 2011 were white Americans, but since Jews were 25 percent of the student body, the enrollment of non-Jewish whites might have been as low as 20 percent, though the true figure was probably somewhat higher.51 The Jewish levels for Yale and Columbia were also around 25 percent, while white Gentiles were 22 percent at the former and just 15 percent at the latter. The remainder of the Ivy League followed this same general pattern._

Jews comprise a mere 2% of the population yet a massive 25% of the student body at Harvard, Yale, and Columbia. The contrast with Caltech and UC schools with more merit-based admissions processes is quite stark:

 _But Caltech's current undergraduates are just 5.5 percent Jewish, and the figure seems to have been around this level for some years; meanwhile, Asian enrollment is 39 percent, or seven times larger. It is intriguing that the school which admits students based on the strictest, most objective academic standards has by a very wide margin the lowest Jewish enrollment for any elite university.

Let us next turn to the five most selective campuses of the University of California system, whose admissions standards shifted substantially toward objective meritocracy following the 1996 passage of Prop. 209. The average Jewish enrollment is just over 8 percent, or roughly one-third that of the 25 percent found at Harvard and most of the Ivy League, whose admissions standards are supposedly far tougher. Meanwhile, some 40 percent of the students on these UC campuses are Asian, a figure almost five times as high. Once again, almost no elite university in the country has a Jewish enrollment as low as the average for these highly selective UC campuses_

(Unz himself is Jewish, in case you're wondering.)

<comment><USER10> It's partly location. Asian-Americans are more heavily concentrated on the West Coast (hence Caltech and UC's high Asian admissions). Jews are more heavily concentrated on the East Coast (hence Harvard, Yale and Columbia's high Jewish admissions).

<comment><USER11> Not really. Harvard is 20% Asian. Stanford is 22.6% Asian. (according to their respective official websites)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This doesn't surprise me, as an Asian American myself. I went to a high school that, while it wasn't the greatest in my county, routinely sent a student to Harvard every year - it was one of those schools that Harvard & other Ivy League schools tended to cherry-pick its minorities from (over 70% black/hispanic I was told the statistics were, in one of the wealthiest counties in the US).

I had extremely strong credentials overall - generally strong standardized testing scores (1250 on the SAT in 7th grade with a 740 Math/510 Verbal split, 800 on the SAT II Math 2C in 8th grade, 780 SAT II Biology, 780 SAT II Physics, 750 SAT II Chemistry, 750 SAT II Writing, 1450 on the regular SAT with a 750 Math/700 Verbal split), college math & physics credits while in high school (Calculus III/Multivariable Calculus, Linear Algebra, Differential Equations, etc.), lots of extracurriculars & achievements, and a recommendation from an Ivy League physics professor. However, I slipped up on my essay since I wasn't a good writer then (which clicked for me the summer before college strangely enough) - that slip up was all it took to get deferred rejection from schools like Harvard in a year where a lot of the private colleges were weakened by the Enron scandal & consequently took 3/4th of the normal enrollment.

On the flip side, in just the class before mine, there was a girl who had nowhere near my scores or achievements (in fact, I heard her SAT score was a 1320) who was accepted to Harvard - the kicker was that she was half latino.

At the time this happened, I was extremely angry/bitter - I ended up attending a public university, which ended up being a blessing in many ways. I ended up learning a lot in non-academic aspects, but a lot of that was from force of character as someone who pushes himself to break barriers and challenge himself to succeed on difficult situations. I still believe those schools made a bad mistake, but I've accepted that admission is not necessarily a merit based decision for these schools, and to concern myself with what I can control.

<comment><USER13> I have a story very similar to this as well. I'm glad you got over the anger/bitterness, but I and many of my friends have not. It's tough when your friends and family still consider you to have failed. I'll never forget the shame and disappointment after sacrificing so much of my life. It makes life hurt when you have to work an order of magnitude harder to achieve the same result.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm not even going to post this with my real account. I wonder if we'll even be able to have a discussion about this without me getting downvoted into oblivion.

Asians have the highest GPAs and SAT scores, followed by whites, followed by Hispanics, followed by blacks. As such, blacks are given the benefit of the doubt, where as Asians are judged more harshly.

Statistically, these groups have differing average IQs in the same order that I just described, with Asians at the top (actually Ashkenazi Jews at the top, followed by Asians) and blacks, sadly, at the bottom. This isn't to say a black individual can't have a high IQ or an Asian individual can't have a low IQ, just that on average they cluster around certain numbers, so a black with genius-level IQ is rarer than an Asian one.

Whether or not you believe IQ measures intelligence accurately or comprehensively, the fact is that it correlates strongly with academic performance and SAT scores. I also will concede that "race" has questionable biological validity, and it gets really fuzzy when one is the offspring of one or more "mixed-race" parents". Still, race/IQ statistics in all of their generalities are a source of existential depression for me. Most of the data is touted boldly by people I despise and used to bolster viewpoints that I find deplorable, but there seems to be at least some truth to it.

The idea of discriminating based on one's race seems unfair if we lived in a world where literally everyone has the same capacity to succeed but merely chooses not to. But what if that's not the case? If Asians generally can attain high test scores and high GPAs due to an innate advantage, could that mean the admissions standards _should_ be stricter for them and more lax for other groups? The alternative is that certain groups completely dominate academia with ease, while other groups are barely represented at all -- which is probably already the case to a large extent.

I don't think there are any easy answers. Trouble arises with an Asian individual with a relatively "average" IQ faces the admissions process, and trouble arises because the black individuals who manage to get in have above- average IQs. Still, I support the _idea_ of affirmative action for the reasons that I previously described.

Asians might have a harder time while other groups get a bit of a head start, but if you have a high IQ you will ultimately have the capacity to carve out a high-paying career in ways that someone with a relatively lower IQ never will.

<comment><USER15> There's evidence[1] that there's no difference in intelligence between races at a very young age, and that tested differences only emerge later. This suggests that the IQ differences seen later are a result of societal factors and not something innate.

1: [http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/fryer/files/testing_for_rac...](http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/fryer/files/testing_for_racial_differences_in_the_mental_ability_of_young_children.pdf)

<comment><USER14> That's interesting; I didn't know that. I should like to read that document in its entirety.

<comment><USER16> Science's Last Taboo

c4 docmentary [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ao8W2tPujeE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ao8W2tPujeE)

(someone with the opposing viewpoint has cunningly put a video up with the exact same name on youtube.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> So if the Ivy league schools are not actually choosing the best students, wouldn't that mean that Ivy League graduates do worse after graduation than alumni form other schools that don't use the Holistic admission process?

More simply, if the SAT is the perfect determinate for intelligence and energy, and success in life directly relates to intelligence and hard work then the SAT alone should be the prefect predictor of success after graduation regardless of which university you graduate from. Particularly if, as alleged, employers don't care about your school after you've been in the work force for a number of years.

If Ivy League's continue to generate the most successful people then their holistic approach is better at choosing the best candidate than the SAT or...

Or the ivy league diploma works like a tile of nobility to a great degree nearly guaranteeing success in life to all its holders regardless of wit. In this case the argument really is what proportion of races should get these titles, each person looking to advantage their own.

<comment><USER18> > More simply, if the SAT is the perfect determinate for intelligence and > energy

Nobody, including the College Board, has ever made a claim remotely close to this.

<comment><USER17> The article only mentions "very subjective Holistic admissions" and only mentions SAT scores, citing them alone as proof of discrimination. By looking at that nothing else, the article is implying SAT scores should be the sole criterion for admission selection. Giving the benefit of the doubt to the author, I assume he believes it corresponds to talent and post graduate success and these are the reasons for selecting candidates.

<comment><USER19> The article isn't implying anything. It's reporting on a complaint, and the author isn't taking sides.

<comment><USER17> Then change the word "article" above to "complaint" if you want. Correct the spelling and the grammar too if you wish. It makes absolutely no difference to the point at hand.

And by the way, the choice of what to and not to report on is itself a bias.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> There's bias against Asians everywhere. The difference is remarkably pronounced between asian men and asian women. Hollywood, for example: Asian women? Minority. Asian men? nonexistent.

<comment><USER13> My younger brother feels this a ton. I wish I could do something for him. Lately he's found some peace in some korean tv shows and movies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Have to wonder if it forms a feedback loop:

\- Asians are getting higher scores than others, so they're required to get higher scores to be admitted.

\- Parents of the next generation know that their children need even higher scores, so they force their children to work continuously harder.

<comment><USER22> I think the problem is that in addition to affirmative action, asians are being compared against other asians rather than against the candidate pool at large (thus effectively having quotas).

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I knew it! I had near-perfect SAT scores and a very high GPA, but I was rejected by many schools that accepted my friends with lower scores. Now it makes perfect sense. Except I'm white and my high school classmates were Asian and Indian. I'll never understand the admissions process.

<comment><USER24> Aren't Indians Asians?

<comment><USER25> > Aren't Indians Asians?

Depends on what variety of English you speak whether the term Asian normally includes Indians or not.

For Brits, Asian primarily means "From the Indian Subcontinent" which includes Pakistan for them, IIRC.

For Americans, Asian primarily means "From East Asia" which is China, Japan, Korea, and Southeast Asia.

Of course, in an academic context, Asian means "Anyone from the Asian Continent" which includes _some_ but not all Russians, all South Asians, all East Asians, all Central Asians, all Middle Easterners (except Egyptians), and whoever else depending on how certain lines get drawn.

<comment><USER26> This confuses the hell out of me as an Indian living in America. Mostly it's me wondering if I am included in the stereotype or not. Otherwise I don't really care.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Isn't Harvard allowed to do this as a private institution? What's the education department going to do about it?

<comment><USER22> Harvard is subsidized by the govt (in the form of low interest loans to students) and via grant money for research.

<comment><USER28> re, the first part: So you're saying that if I run some private business, and the gov't gives a loan to somebody else to buy the product I'm selling, that makes me a publicly funded business and forces me to abide by rules for businesses that are publicly funded? I don't think that makes sense.

<comment><USER11> Government financing / backing / regulation of student loans is much more complex and closely bound to colleges than you are making them out to be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> American uni system is so incredibly obsolete.

95% of why a college degree is valuable is for the signal "hey I went to uni of X degree of prestige [and therefore am probably of Y degree of intelligence/ambition]".

Why do young Americans need to spend $100k just to signal their iq level to employers?

Why do young Americans need to compete with each other to do so?

Maybe to get into Harvard you need iq > 130\. As the population grows, there are more kids with iq > 130, but # of Harvard seats does not increase.

There needs to be a low cost and widely accepted way to signal iq that does not create unnecessary competition and cost for people starting out.

Also with AI coming along the corporate obsession with iq will be obviated as well. Nobody gives a shit how well you did on the SAT when goddamn Skynet can diagnose 5000 medical conditions per second with quadruple human accuracy.

</comment><comment><USER30> I wonder what the basis of their complaint will be considering that race-based preferences in admissions has already been upheld in the US supreme court.

</comment><comment><USER31> This focus on affirmative action is sort of like people who say they are against "government handouts", and focus on welfare, while ignoring corporate subsidies.

It's misplaced attention on what "minorities" are (or should be) getting, while overlooking the benefits that the wealthy receive. Also, many people's understanding of the minority groups at Ivy League institutions seems flawed.*

The reason affirmative action exists is only partially as a benefit to minorities. Sure, they benefit (as do some whites and Asians), but _affirmative action also acts as cover for legacy benefits in the admissions process._

You see, the day affirmative action falls, lawsuits will be filed to remove legacy preferences. If you're going to get rid of preferences, the argument will say, then get rid of them all! Do you think that wealthy donors will have the incentive to lay heavy money on the endowment if they don't receive some benefit for their children in the form of legacy admissions?

Or, as Sandra Day O'Connor said in the oral arguments in one of the affirmative action cases related to a state school: "I want my sons to go to Stanford" (paraphrased), her alma mater. Did I mention that the Supreme Court justices attended Columbia, Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Northwestern?

If you think this is primarily about minorities, think again. Wealthy people will protect themselves, but in this case, people are so focused on race that nothing need be done--legacy clauses continue to fly under the radar.

You can expect to see Affirmative Action end when the wealthy are prepared to give up the benefits their children receive.

How long do you think that will take?

*In terms of African-Americans/Latinos, consider the following:

1 - Many of black students admitted to Harvard aren't black Americans, they are Africans, with test scores and grades on par with Asian-American students.

2 - The first black student graduated from Harvard in 1869. Over the past ~150 years, there have been enough black graduates such that a fair number of black applicants now have the legacy boost to their admissions.

3 - Affirmative Action was meant to rectify the disadvantages minorities received. Such as denying black soldiers access to the GI bill, while white soldiers used it to receive an education. Was that fair? And how much does education impact the future of a family? Multiply that by a few generations and you see why Affirmative Action still exists.

<comment><USER16> > 1 - Many of black students admitted to Harvard aren't black Americans, they > are Africans, with test scores and grades on par with Asian-American > students.

i've heard of african immigrants doing better, economically. but never students, any sort of supporting link to this point?

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> reminded - our professors at the University love their Asian students (Russian Universities got a lot foreign Asian(China) students in the recent decade) because, as one professor put it, "they are hard-working and eager to learn, not lazy arrogant bums like you people were back then".

</comment><comment><USER33> The population continues to grow while people continue to value a handful of schools with fixed campus sizes. What a nightmare it must be to be a parent or a high schooler these days.

</comment><comment><USER34> What would be interesting to see if we replace all applicant's informations were anonymous and everyone got reviewed strictly based on merits.

<comment><USER35> Sure, but children from poor (or inexperienced) communities have fewer opportunities to do what Harvard considers to be merit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Affirmative Action is to care for minorities, aren't Asian Americans minorities in this country? What's the definition of Minority in US? Why are so many blacks in NBA?

The best solution is to set up a few Asia-American self-funded private schools across the country, where academics becomes the major admission criteria and your race does not matter, of course this has to be stated carefully otherwise you still could be sued for "discrimination" becomes some group of people will be least represented as expected.

Affirmative Action will not make those who can take advantage strong, as strong comes from serious competition only, they will make that group stay weak for good. It's simply unfair to those kids who spent most of their time learning, what a shame to Harvard and the Supreme Court.

</comment><comment><USER37> Go to any engineering school in the US, especially grad school, and it's almost all Asian. Out of 28 students in my DSP class, 25 were Asian, and that was 20 years ago, although maybe it has changed.

</comment><comment><USER38> Yeesh. The basis of their complaint seems to be rooted in test score (and possibly grade analysis) but they neglect the increased homogeneity that it represents. Asians may have a tighter distribution of metric based qualities with a mean at the higher end of the spectrum when you cut by race but it's quite possible that there are other deficits that cannot easily be highlighted through a metric based comparison alone.

It's hard to form a full opinion without the type of information you'd only have access to as a member of the admissions comittee.

<comment><USER39> Would you defend Harvard if they had a de-facto quota for Jewish applicants? This is a trick question. Harvard (and other Ivy League schools) _did_ discriminate against Jews[1], and their justifications were quite similar to what we're hearing today. These universities switched from grades and test scores to a more "holistic" evaluation, allowing them to surreptitiously limit the number of Jewish students. The game is the same, only the names have changed.

Use all the rationalizations and euphemisms you want, but the truth is this: Ivy League schools are rejecting many of their most-qualified applicants solely because of their race[2]. These policies need to end.

1\. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerus_clausus#Numerus_clausus...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerus_clausus#Numerus_clausus_in_the_United_States)

2\. [http://www.theamericanconservative.com/wp- content/uploads/20...](http://www.theamericanconservative.com/wp- content/uploads/2012/11/asians-large.jpg)

<comment><USER38> I responded to another comment below[1]. I understand that it is easy to view these policies as racism but if you think about the people that spots are being freed for there is a larger net social gain.

I knew this would be unpopular when I posted it, and I am personally biased, but I don't think one can make the argument that Asian's lack socioeconomic mobility in the same way as some of the other races.

[1] - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9557216](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9557216)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> This is the same problem as the housing crisis.

What happens when you have limited resources (housing, dorms, teachers) and a group of people who are superior in some way end up wanting to use all your resources (buy all housing, be smartest and get admitted everywhere)?

With money, we end up with capitalism doofus blindness and say "you got money, you _EARNED_ that money, clearly, so do whatever you want" even though in modern "foreigners buying real property" practices, it's corrupt/graft money breaking SF/London/NYC/LA/Seattle/Vancouver housing markets in a worldwide government sanctioned oligarch money laundering scheme.

With intelligence/capability, it's trickier. The popular belief is every human brain starts as a blank slate with unlimited capability. By that logic, if you don't get accepted somewhere, it's your own damn fault. But, that's so obviously wrong. I know plenty of people who are physically smarter than me. In certain problem-solving capacities, they think faster, better, and in more immediately creative ways than I do (what I lack in immediate ability I make up for in long-term effort). And so do their siblings and their parents and their grandparents going back many many years. But, just because I'm lesser, should I be thrown to the gutter while _only_ high quality education goes to the "truly smart" people?

Then that's where race rears its ugly head. If you only select people with a certain strand of hereditary smarts, you end up with a campus with a majority of people from background X where X feel "at home" there and welcome, but then your minorities C, D, E, F, G, H feel, well, minority. A popular solution to the "too many high achieving people from the same background" bugaboo is to try and make the minorities less minority by boosting their numbers though allowing sub-perfect acceptance (not sub-par, just sub-not-the-absolute-best- ever). But, you have a fixed resource to allocate (class sizes, dorm rooms), so that kicks out some of the (glut) of perfect achievers you would have otherwise accepted.

Then it comes down to politics. Conservative = "me me me, i'm perfect me me me, kill the lessers." Liberal = "we're all in the together, so maybe you should step aside from this opportunity to let others advance too."

You end up with a spectrum from top-down solutions ("no more than 20% of people from X background") to a bottom-up solutions ("only compare people of Y background from other Y background, then start acceptance from non-majority application piles first"). Neither is "fair" to the other, but if you don't pick a society-optimal fairness system (which is inherently unfair to those rejected), you get a completely unfair system of privilege boosting privilege (inherent privilege obtained by upbringing or genetic lottery). (Completely ignoring the other soft acceptance categories of "will this student eventually give us (or will their children eventually give us) lots of money in donations or bring us fame as a legacy.")

There's no actual solution to preventing the over-allocation of fixed resources in the presence of superior consumers; all we're left with is compromises on the spectrum of "superiors only" versus "helping everybody in society."

Thought experiment: if space aliens (superior consumers) landed and offered to sell us antigravity fabric and replicators for $9 trillion USD ('fixed' resources), would we just give them all the money? (Extension: what if they wanted $1 trillion USD worth of bitcoin and you can't even generate that much? Fiat wins again!)

<comment><USER9> You've got a couple problems in your argument here. Your "thrown in the gutter" argument is pretty silly. People not accepted at harvard (if harvard actually were more honest about qualified admissions) would't fall down a slope into a gutter. They would find their place and ranking elsewhere. Just like you said, you aren't the smartest quickest, you work hard to attempt to make up for it. Clearly you have a place, maybe not at an elite environment where the smarter quicker will save a life or solve a critical failure or set up an infrastructure more efficently. And sure academic testing is flawed and outcomes are chaotic but a school accepting based on various rankings should do so honestly.

The next thing is this. You say, well people of other races might feel uncomfortable if it's too much asian on that campus. So the white or black will feel out of place. But you're being a sort of coddling racist with that kind of thinking. You know what will make somebody out of place in an elite school? Somebody who didn't actually measure up to the standard and got in anyway. Somebody who starts to suspect they don't really deserve to be there and realizes they don't fit and they will take a lot more personal and school resources and probably won't fit much better and so are really a drain on others rather than a contributor.

Because a person who achieves something honestly will have the confidence that they belong and even if the first few days feel weird to them, their work and intelligence will quickly bring them into the fold with their academic peers and teachers. The current biased admission methods will inevitably create tensions too and a bad long term result. If harvard is now confirming a bias, then they leave an elephant in the room. The asians at harvard will look around and notice, say on of their latino classmates is clearly not capable. And that asian will think "my cousin is WAY better than him / her" and she couldn't get in with me. Who is this clown? And so it breaks down their own belief in the school they got into and a tension with their classmates. A non- biased academic admission would mean that conflict or tension like this would be dissolved, the asian would give the latino the benefit of the doubt

It also breaks down the reputation and brand of harvard and so people of minority races with harvard might be suspected as lucking their way in due to color.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> The article is not true, Chinese president Xi Jingping's daughter goes to Harvard and many her high school class mates in China think she is just an average student.

</comment><comment><USER42> "It cites third-party academic research on the SAT exam showing that Asian- Americans have to score on average about 140 points higher than white students, 270 points higher than Hispanic students and 450 points higher than African-American students to equal their chances of gaining admission to Harvard. The exam is scored on a 2400-point scale."

It's odd that affirmative action is basically basing everything on color of your skin and not the content of your character. I was under the impression that it was supposed to prevent this.

<comment><USER43> The entire point of affirmative action was to provide unearned opportunities based on the color of your skin. With the theory being that over time it would help boost the well being of minorities (at the time mostly African Americans). That by forcing open opportunities, the next generation would do better, and the generation after that would do even better, and so on.

<comment><USER44> "Affirmative action programs" differ. But in general, they're to control the racism of gatekeepers, these bureaucrats who choose who gets a decent education.

There are better solutions. For instance: free lifelong quality education to all. But naturally, elites would rather waste society's wealth on wars (international killing) and prisons (the most jailings in the world)... than silly things like knowledge and healthcare.

Affirmative action is a modest, successful effort to chip away at the self- destructive inequalities of society. Naturally, many try to attack it to claw back more unearned white privilege for themselves.

<comment><USER25> > Naturally, many try to attack it to claw back more unearned white privilege > for themselves.

Since when do Asians have white privilege?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Softlayer Plans to Block Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria - <AUTHOR> http://knowledgelayer.softlayer.com/faq/softlayer-network-wide-ip-blocking <comment><USER2> It's hilarious that the sanctions listed go completely against the nuclear deal made with Iran. So is the newly passed HR158.

</comment><comment><USER3> Perhaps it is an old page, out of date?

<comment><AUTHOR> This appeared in the SoftLayer console as a planned event, scheduled to take effect 01-Feb-2016.</comment></comment>


Cyberspionage aufgedeckt: "Größter bekannter Hackerangriff"| STERN.DE - <AUTHOR> http://www.stern.de/digital/online/cyberspionage-aufgedeckt-groesster-bekannter-hackerangriff-dauerte-jahre-1712799.html <comment><USER2> Most of the people here understand English and another language. You should at least translate the title of the submission to get the people interested in it.

Title: "The largest known hacker attack" took years

Autotranslation: [http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&...](http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.stern.de%2Fdigital%2Fonline%2Fcyberspionage- aufgedeckt-groesster-bekannter-hackerangriff-dauerte-jahre-1712799.html)</comment>


Ask HN: Why do referendum polls suck? - <AUTHOR>

With the 2014 Scottish Referendum [1] and with the 2015 Greek Referendum [2], opinion polls indicated that results might be "close" (say around 4%), but the former ended with a 10.3% lead, and the latter with a 22.6% lead. But why? Does this reveal a systematic problem with polling? Is it a problem with the sample (e.g. size, distribution, etc.)? Is it the nature of the questions in a referendum that make choosing a sample harder than in traditional elections?<p>[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_Scottish_independence_referendum,_2014#2014 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_bailout_referendum,_2015#Opinion_polls <comment><USER2> I don't know how polls are conducted over in Scotland but around here they are either annoying (like telemarketing calls), sometimes worded to encourage an outcome "Dihydrogen monoxide is the top ingredient in your tap water. Would you drink your tap water?"

Even if the questions are straight forward, folk usually are reluctant to share their political standings or religious views with strangers. I think some polls might use non-direct questions as indicators to what direction you had voted, again, may not indicate how they vote.</comment>


The Great C Runtime Refactoring - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vcblog/archive/2014/06/10/the-great-crt-refactoring.aspx

<comment><USER2> All very well, but I'd be really happy once (if) we ever get proper C99 support in MSVC. We basically need that at the neovim project if we want our code to compile with MSVC. We don't want to compromise either, by for example compiling as C++ and not using some C99 features (we do use compound literals, we don't cast from void pointers, et cetera). The CRT improvements in MSVC 2013 and 2014 are a step, but only a small one. Sadly, compiling as C forces some kind of old mode where we can't even use declare-anywhere. For now, it seems like we'll need to let MingW and its offspring do it. Does anyone have a workaround?

<comment><USER3> Is there any problem with MinGW ? From my very limited experience gcc is just a better compiler than MSVC: it generates faster code, has more options to configure it (more optimization options, more options for displaying warnings, all the new floating point stuff available, actually supports new standards and let you choose which language version you want etc.).

<comment><USER4> _it generates faster code_

Not sure if that is true in general - the few proper benchmarks I found indicate that there is no clear winner. (Except for the Intel compiler, which beats both)

<comment><USER3> Right. I am speaking from experience with relatively simple number crunching code. It became faster once I upgraded to newer version of gcc. Now even very simple things (like say 8 queens) are just 5-10% faster when compiling with GCC 4.8 comparing to MSVC.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> From the blog post: >We have eliminated most of the manual resource management in the code through the introduction of several special-purpose smart pointer and handle types. Enormous functions have been split into smaller, maintainable pieces. We have eliminated 75%(2) of the conditional compilation preprocessor directives (#ifdef, #else, etc.) by converting internal implementation details to use C++ features like templates and overloading.

FYI... The author of the blog post (James McNellis) also has an excellent video presentation that explains that paragraph in more detail.

[http://channel9.msdn.com/events/TechDays/Techdays-2014-the-N...](http://channel9.msdn.com/events/TechDays/Techdays-2014-the- Netherlands/Modernizing-Legacy-C-Code)

</comment><comment><USER6> I kind of joked here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7843301](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7843301) \- but now I can't really wait for it. This is huge! This means that once major products pick up and develop their creative tools (Maya, MotionBuilder, Photoshop, etc.) - plugin developers no longer have to ship for multitude of CRT versions.

Also finally things like Python, Perl, etc. can stick on one runtime and not care for a very long time.

Great stuff Microsoft! I really really can't wait for it. I don't care even if no new C++ features are implemented - only this is that important.

</comment><comment><USER7> Nice to see them talking about C99, even after they said the focus is only C++... when for everybody else, the horizon is C11. Guess it's something along the lines of "let's handicap a bit all open-source projects that want to support Windows by forcing them to use an older language version that also has platform specific gotchas, maybe even rewrite the runtime to add more platform specific goodness"...

</comment><comment><USER8> I was expecting them to figure out symbol versioning (eg how glibc deals with the similar problem). It isn't clear if they have done that, or instead are hoping to always have backwards/forwards compatible code and data structures.

</comment><comment><USER9> "We have converted most of the CRT sources to compile as C++, enabling us to replace many ugly C idioms with simpler and more advanced C++ constructs. "

+1 I love it.

<comment><USER10> Do I smell irony?

<comment><USER9> Yeah, eventually people will have to accept that C is dead on Windows (Visual Studio), unless Microsoft's management decides otherwise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I doubt that GCC (MinGW) will be able to use this. What a pitty.

MinGW relies on the CRT that ships with every Windows since Win95 (and Visual Studio 6).

Microsoft could fix this situation by merging the CRT that ships with Windows (the original one) and Visual Studio (the forked of version madness) together. A simple Windows update for Windows NT 5.x+ would be great (of course it should be backward compatible).

</comment><comment><USER12> "Before this refactoring, the sprintf functions, which write formatted data to a character buffer, were implemented by wrapping the result buffer in a temporary FILE object and then deferring to the equivalent fprintf function."

*headdesk*

<comment><USER13> That's actually common practice. Look at other libc implementations.

Even the original implementation did that:

[http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi- bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/src/libc...](http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi- bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/src/libc/stdio/sprintf.c)

[http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi- bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/src/libc...](http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi- bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/src/libc/stdio/fprintf.c)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Books to learn Python for beginners (Business School) - <AUTHOR> I am in business school and one of the course requires us to learn Python language. Any recommendation on books to get started? <comment><USER2> Apart from ATBS [1] I'd highly recommend Think Python [2] and its derived interactive version [3]

[1] [https://automatetheboringstuff.com/](https://automatetheboringstuff.com/)

[2] [https://greenteapress.com/wp/think- python-2e/](https://greenteapress.com/wp/think-python-2e/)

[3] [https://runestone.academy/runestone/static/thinkcspy/index.h...](https://runestone.academy/runestone/static/thinkcspy/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> If you're starting from zero, a reasonable curriculum might be to work through these courses:

1\. Learn python 3 the hard way (book by Zed Shaw) as mentioned by trcarney) 2\. Build a saas app with flask (Nick Janetakis, on Udemy or his own site)

Use these resources to look up things and get more context: \- real python \- stack overflow

After finishing #2, try to build a different saas project from scratch, using what you learned.

If your interest is ML/DS, then replace #2 with something like 'deep learning for coders' parts 1 and 2. Or work through pandas exercises.

</comment><comment><USER4> Automate the boring stuff by Al Sweigart. Good practical one for beginners.

</comment><comment><USER5> Learn Python3 the Hard Way by Zed Shaw. Great for beginners. It is written as the readers first exposure to programming.

</comment><comment><USER6> The best book is Python Crash Course</comment>


Ask HN: How do you get people to show up for their scheduled demos? - <AUTHOR> Hey HN,
We recently opened up live demos for our software and people are signing up but not showing up. 1/5 people show up. One booked 3 hours prior and still didn't show up.
What do you all do to improve the show up rate?
Thanks! <comment><USER2> Offer a gift card incentive.</comment>


101 ways to save Apple (1997) - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.06/apple.html

<comment><USER2> So many of these are really funny in retrospect. It's almost like Apple just did the opposite of a lot of this advice: compete on specs, become more open, license their products, rent generic PC store space.

On the other hand, in retrospect, some advice is really good. Buy a song, invest in gesture based and mobile tech, switch to Intel, build OSX only applications, LISTEN TO STEVE, change the logo/branding, and simplify the product line stand out as keys to Apple's success since then.

</comment><comment><USER3> In a single page: <http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.06/apple_pr.html>

</comment><comment><USER4> _71\. Become a graphic design company and dominate your niche the way Sun and Silicon Graphics do._

Er, that worked out great for those two.

</comment><comment><USER5> does anyone know how much the stock price was at this point?

<comment><USER6> In June 1997, about $3.60.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Well, they were right about Netscape.</comment>


The best way for Adobe to save Flash is by killing it - <AUTHOR> http://www.stevenwei.com/2010/01/31/the-best-way-for-adobe-to-save-flash-is-by-killing-it/

<comment><USER2> The reason that the Flash authoring tools work in a sane manner is because there is a single, consistent runtime that they target.

There is a vast graveyard of tools that tried to wrap html and javascript so you could make reasonable GUI authoring tools. To my knowledge they were all plagued by consistency and performance problems, or placed severe limits on what you could author.

This is less of a way forward than it is a pipe dream, no matter how promising Canvas looks.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes the existing tools are pretty awful... but they're generally made by small companies that don't know how to build tools, building on the _current_ implementations of HTML, CSS, and Javascript. Has anyone given it a real shot, targeting the newest features of HTML5?

Adobe on the other hand has built industry standard tools over and over again (Photoshop, Illustrator, etc). They've proven that they can export their apps to other platforms (iPhone). What they're not so good at is building open browser runtimes...

<comment><USER3> I'd argue that they are good enough at building browser runtimes that theirs has 90%+ market saturation, and is an industry standard.

Now open is another issue...

<comment><USER4> Seriously? Did Adobe beat you guys up and take away your computer? Did they say "no no no mine?"

Where is the "not open" you guys claim? Flex SDK + Eclipse == free Flash development.

I swear HTML5 fanatics just make stuff up these days. You'll use Windows, Flickr, Google, and Hacker News - all privately owned systems. But god forbid Flash is bad because... why?

<comment><AUTHOR> Open != free.

Lack of openness: a browser plugin that is less stable and slower on Mac and Linux that noone else can fix except Adobe...and only if they choose to do so.

Lack of openness: a browser plugin that doesn't properly utilize cookies on non-IE browsers that noone else can fix except Adobe...and only if they choose to do so.

Lack of openness: a browser plugin that doesn't properly return HTTP status codes on OS X that noone else can fix except Adobe...and only if they choose to do so.

<comment><USER5> I think your comments here are off base.

The SWF standards (and associated standards like RTMP) are available for free on the Adobe website. You are permitted to construct alternative implementations based on this specification. I think it meets the definition of an open standard.

Would HTML not be an open standard if the only browser we had was IE, and it was horribly buggy? No - the quality of the available implementations is irrelevant to a standards "openness".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> HTML5 is not a valid alternative to Flash. Sure, there is some overlap between them, but there are way more differences.

It's (like so much else) like comparing an apple to an orange.

<comment><USER7> The implementations may differ, but the main use-cases are the same. So it's like comparing an apple to an orange when you want to choose a healthy supplement to your diet ;)

<comment><USER8> The anti-Flash crowd with their fantasy about how HTML5 >= Flash are missing one phenomenally tragic detail ...

We're going to have HTML5 for the next _twenty years_ \- and right now it's only a _sometimes_ substitute for Flash. If you think HTML5 is going to meet your requirements for the next 20 or more years.. well, assuming you're pushing 30 like me we're actually going to be close to retirement age by the time HTML5 is fully replaced by it's successor.

Arguing Adobe should kill Flash for HTML5 is the same as arguing the W3 should kill HTML5 for HTML 2.0 - it's 15 years old, how's it stack up against your requirements today?

Technology has never stood still for the W3C and market penetration to catch up, and 'kill flash' is betting that this time it will ... silly.

<comment><USER9> "We're going to have HTML5 for the next twenty years..."

Everybody's going to get up to speed with implementation of HTML5 and then ... stop? The story of HTML5 so far has been a mix of browsers chasing/leading the standards. In other words, the standards and the browsers are evolving together rapidly. I don't see why that would stop anytime soon. Certainly all this innovation won't ground to a halt when HTML5 submits their final release to the W3C (or whatever the next "formal" step is at this point).

Will there be some instance of an installed browser today that will still be running on a machine somewhere in 20 years? Well, probably... but remember that guy a couple of years ago that still had a CP/M system running his business? He wasn't holding anybody back.

And once everybody's on modern, standards-compliant browsers (and thus there's less friction for upgrading, i.e. there's no more "all our corporate apps only run in IE6"), I expect far more people will upgrade far more often. The web is at a really, really exciting time if you ask me.

So: non-Flash web technologies can reliably handle some percentage of Flash use cases today. Certainly more than a couple of years ago, and that appears to be about to go up again a lot more as HTML5 sweeps across the web. The number of use cases that require Flash are going to continue to get smaller and smaller over time. When will Flash be utterly irrelevant to the average user? I don't know. But WAY less than 20 years from now.

<comment><USER8> The current standards are a _decade_ old already, HTML5 has been 6 years in the making and will probably be another 4 or 5 years before it reaches a market penetration that makes it an generally-viable design decision rather than what it is now - a device or browser specific option.

Work probably won't even _start_ on the HTML6 specification for another decade at least while they wrap up all the formalities for HTML5, and identify where it needs improvement, and slowly discuss and agree on those improvements. Years after that browsers will start supporting it feature by feature, and years after that enough users will have access to enough features to call it mainstream.

That process is _very_ likely to leave us having this same discussion about whether HTML6 will kill Flash in 2030. Assuming anyone still makes or cares about any of this stuff that far in the future.

Where we are now with HTML5 the void between HTML5 and plugins (Flash is just the most significant) is smaller than it's ever been before, but the fallacy of that argument is that Flash, Silverlight, JavaFX, Unity, etc are in _active development and release cycles_.

They make significant progress year after year, just like desktop software, operating systems, programming languages etc, and while HTML5 _almost_ catches up _right now_ this is as close as it's going to get at this time.

<comment><USER9> Keep in mind that they don't keep progressing linearly forever because of the nature of the service that's attempting to be provided -- neither are far off from being able to do basically all the things that can be done on a 2D panel attached to a speaker or two: interface device input, 2D/3D animation, sound effects/music, a bit of local persistence, access to the videocamera,... what else is there? I'm not sure of each's multitouch API, if any, but, really, there's not that much more beyond those things that HAS to be implemented for the _vast_ majority of web pages and apps to fully function. Support for accelerometers and other such devices would be nice, but is hardly important to reading the New York Times or the other 99.999% of things people do/want to do with the web. Perhaps in 2030 there'll be argument about whether the web- or proprietary-way has the best support for holographic 3D displays or 360-channel surround sound, etc., but those and many other things that the two technologies don't support today seem likely to continue to overall be niche things. In other words, things whose proper role is a _plug-in_ , not a vital part of many pages' experience. That's fine: there's going to be a role for plug-ins for a long, long time, perhaps forever. But, the fundamentals? We're getting pretty close to having them covered.

Also, I think it's well worth taking a good look at HTML5's rate of progress over the years. A huge chunk of the HTML5 effort has been toward just standardizing the response to the tag soup that is out there. That work is essentially done and doesn't have to be repeated. Just in the last year or two have things really taken off as far as adding new functionality to browsers and example pages, and it's only been in the last couple of months that a few actual commercial pages have started to use these things. In large part, that's because the web has been _stuck_ for most of a decade because of IE stagnation. [Also note that the rest of the browser/platform vendors didn't seem to have a good mechanism to rapidly innovate together on until the HTML5 effort came together. I don't expect that that diplomatic work will have to be done again, either.] The web platform after the IE stagnation seems likely to move much faster toward covering the gaps that remain in the web platform.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> So instead of adobe being the monopolistic developer of tools for the successful flash platform , adobe should compete with everybody else on developing tools to html5?

This doesn't seem like a great business move, at least not before they tried everything they can to keep flash important.

<comment><USER11> But isn't ActionScript completely open? And the flash framework is open too. You don't need Flash CS4 to use flash. You can also program it with a third party IDE and then use the free compiler. This would be quite comparable.

<comment><USER10> what parts of flash are not open? When flash opened those parts you mentioned? do their knowledge and control of the closed parts of flash enables them to build better tools? how big a lead did they have for their tools when they opened those parts of flash ? Are they still today the leader in flash tools so maybe it's not worthwhile for a competitor to enter?

I really don't know flash in depth , but my guess is that they today have a big advantage in flash tools and moving to html5 would seriously reduce their advantage.

<comment><USER12> "what parts of flash are not open?"

The source code of the Adobe Flash plugin, if nothing else.

Incidentally, that does bring to mind one possible Hail Mary that could work: Open source the Flash player(s). Whether the open source community could fix performance issues on Linux and OSX depends on a lot of things, but they could certainly fix some things that would make it less aggravating.

(Since it's probably impossible to open source as-is due to licensing agreements it still might not work; depends on how much of the plugin is still left after you've removed those bits.)

<comment><USER13> Source: <http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/site/Home>

Flash's ActionScript engine, for instance, was donated to opensource and subsequently used to make Firefox faster.

(Adobe Flash Player includes licensed codecs from Fraunhoffer, On2 VPx series, H.264, more... Adobe can distribute them, but cannot license them for redistribution by others.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> _It's funny to me how a few years ago we were all slamming Apple for not allowing native iPhone apps and forcing us to build web apps, and now we're slamming them for forcing us to build native apps_ instead* of web apps! Oh how quickly we forget…*

I think those of us who are slamming Apple over the iPhone development model are doing so because Apple is forcing us to do things. I'd be happy if they kept everything exactly the same, but allowed users to install _any_ application from third-party websites.

</comment><comment><USER15> I think some people are forgetting that Flash is used for more than just serving up video and pop-under ads (though admittedly that would be its largest use).

There are a lot of games that may not be possible to run on an HTML 5 canvas.

Also, lost in this discussion is the fact that one of the more popular browsers doesn't support HTML 5 in its current version or possibly even its next.

Does streaming video work under HTML 5 specs? If not, that's another thing that Flash can do, which you can't with html5.

<comment><USER16> _Also, lost in this discussion is the fact that one of the more popular browsers doesn't support HTML 5 in its current version or possibly even its next._

Not natively, but <http://excanvas.sourceforge.net/>

_Does streaming video work under HTML 5 specs?_

Yes.

<comment><USER17> _Does streaming video work under HTML 5 specs?

Yes._

Not within ogg/theora it doesn't because there's no way of signaling the correct amount of data to buffer as used in the buffering mechanisms of modern video codecs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Eh.

The best way for Adobe to save it is to open source the plugin though I suspect the resulting fragmentation would be a hindrance as well. A certification process of some kind might be helpful in that regard though.

I'm sure there are patent and licensing issues getting in the way of such a move.

<comment><USER19> I'm sure Adobe will open source the parts of Flash they own.

They will just do it too late for it to make a difference.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> If Adobe ever did stop developing / supporting the Flash plugin, it would be a complete disaster from the point of view of people like myself who think once something has a URL it should ideally stay accessible until the heat death of the universe.

<comment><USER16> The Flash resource would still be available. If you encode your resource in a proprietary format then that's your choice :)</comment></comment>


.DS_Store files always hidden from Finder in macOS Sierra Beta - <AUTHOR> https://imgur.com/a/NF6sY <comment><USER2> If this means it won't appear on my desktop now, perfect!

Now, if only there's a way of displaying folders first in Finder..

<comment><USER3> "Keep folder on top when sorting by name" is finally an option in Finder on macOS 10.12 Sierra: [http://d.pr/i/10yom](http://d.pr/i/10yom)

<comment><AUTHOR> My prayers have been answered. Seriously though, this has been requested for ages and is so clearly a feature benefits a lot of users (even when being opt- in) while probably being easy to implement. I'm so glad they finally did.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is not a good thing, since it seems the file are still there. I still need to add them to my `.gitignore`. If they are there and I ask to see all files, I want to see them.

<comment><USER5> A global gitignore solves that.

The file is available in the Terminal. I don't see the point of seeing a `.DS_Store` file on finder.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Surely with Apple's new file system, the need for these files will go away, right? I'm sure they can bake whatever metadata these directories need right into the fs.

<comment><USER7> I recently tested APFS on a USB stick, "ls -A" hasn't shown any .DS_Store files.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> That's great. .DS_Store was the reason why I stick with the default setting of not showing hidden files.

</comment><comment><USER8> How do you changed your terminal in that nice looking one?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a custom build of iTerm. You can download it here [https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ogqyltkbx47kd9b/AAA2uuxIlVFVzQwCH...](https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ogqyltkbx47kd9b/AAA2uuxIlVFVzQwCHuGHeO- Ma)

…or get a similar one [https://github.com/jaredculp/iterm2-borderless- padding](https://github.com/jaredculp/iterm2-borderless-padding)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Ah, that's nice.</comment>


Experts Warn of Possible Sustained Global Spread of New Coronavirus - <AUTHOR> https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/experts-warn-of-possible-sustained-global-spread-of-new-coronavirus/ <comment><USER2> So reading or watching the news makes all this sound very worrying, but if you look up the amount of deaths from influenza every year, "Up to 650,000 respiratory deaths per year"[0] then this will just become a run-of-the-mill thing, or am I missing something here?

0\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza)

<comment><USER3> Two points against this general "but the flu" argument:

An October 2019 novel Coronavirus simulation by Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, World Economic Forum, and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation [1][2], projected 65 million dead and widespread knock-on economic and societal problems during 18 months of pandemic. Not that this is a likely outcome for nCoV-2019 (which is likely less lethal than the imaginary virus), but it's worth understanding SARS-like viruses can be significantly more serious than the flu.

Secondly, the flu is "baked in the cake" in our general medical and societal infrastructure. A novel virus will be additive to flu infections and even at similar rates of infection/death could cause a noticeable impact. As an analogy, 1.25 million people die in road crashes each year, but if some catastrophic, widespread automotive software bug/malware caused _an additional 1.25 million road deaths_ in 2020, it would rightfully be a massive story, could potentially overwhelm emergency and medical services, and would be something to be concerned about mitigating as much as possible.

[1] [http://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/event201/scenario.htm...](http://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/event201/scenario.html) [2] [https://youtu.be/AoLw-Q8X174](https://youtu.be/AoLw-Q8X174)

<comment><USER4> This is one scary graph

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Log- linear_plot_of_corono...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Log- linear_plot_of_coronovirus_cases_with_linear_regressions.png)

<comment><USER5> A logistic curve looks exponential until it doesn't. There is no telling just from looking at this when it will plateau.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> US State Department advisories:

Travel Alert Level 4 Do Not Travel to Hubei - Tue, 28 Jan 2020

Travel Alert Level 3 Reconsider Travel to China - Tue, 28 Jan 2020

Health Alert Update – Novel Coronavirus in China - Sun, 26 Jan 2020

China Travel Advisory Update: Level 4 – Do Not Travel to Hubei Province - Fri, 24 Jan 2020

</comment><comment><USER7> Statement and statistical model of the epidemic from HKU researchers. They're quite pessimistic.

• Likely ~75k infections in China already

• Chongqing likely the next big city to experience full uncontained outbreak

• Drastic measures required to prevent full pandemic, including a drastic reduction in mobility (no large group gathering, no travel, etc)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwXMPsbxFfo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwXMPsbxFfo)

<comment><USER8> A positive effect of a higher number of infection is, that it would reduce the fatality rate of the virus.

<comment><USER7> Indeed, but there's also very credible rumors saying that the number of dead patients in Wuhan is severely underreported.

For example, this video shows someone walking around a hospital in Wuhan, where you see dead bodies in the hallways just sitting around.

That doesn't happen when you only have 100 deaths in the province. That happens when you're so overwhelmed with dead patients that you just can't deal with it fast enough.

If this is true, which I'm inclined to believe, then we're very likely looking at thousands of deaths already.

[https://twitter.com/ezracheungtoto/status/122064100006384844...](https://twitter.com/ezracheungtoto/status/1220641000063848448)

<comment><USER9> Isn't it more likely that they are asleep than dead?

<comment><USER10> That's the thing: we don't know. We don't even have data to make a guesstimate. That's the scary part: we can't tell _if_ that is more likely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Why isn't quarantining all flights to and from china not an option?

Lose a couple months of GDP vs. dying is not worth it?

<comment><USER12> Remember that people travel to and from China. I'm pretty sure it's illegal for a country to prevent its own citizens from returning to their homeland.

<comment><USER11> This is what I don't understand. A global pandemic of epic proportions is about to occur and you're concerned about legality?

Ship them back on a one way trip.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> [https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736\(20\)30260-9/fulltext)

</comment><comment><USER14> It would be interesting to see what the process is for testing for this, costs involved and what the bottlenecks are.

For example, you might not even get treated in the Philippines if you don't bring money with you or don't have insurance.

Once a panic sets in, can a hospital in a developing country even continue testing? Or do they start turning people away?

Do hospitals in developing countries have the resources to mass test people? How much total cost is involved?

Given the challenges, I imagine these confirmed cases are going to be seriously constrained vs actual cases which might even go to the hospital to get checked.

</comment><comment><USER15> Isn't it already to late? It has two weeks incubation time roughly, it's already been observed in Europe and America? It's not contained in a small area in China anymore.

I would bet that enough people are infected with it as we speak that it can sustain itself and no amount of quarantining will save us from it. The only option would be an instant complete travel, logistics and congregation ban around the world. Which is I without a global government.

<comment><USER16> If I got it right there is not a single case of transmission outside of China reported. Yet.

<comment><USER15> Germany has a patient near munich that didn't travel to China.

<comment><USER17> This one is the worst one. The guy contracted it from a lady who was at training in the company. She contracted it when her parents from Wu-chan visited back in China. The guy has been in contact with 40 people apparently. No idea about the woman. This alone yields huge figures if the spread while in incubation period is confirmed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've been following this closely since Jan 2nd. This is looking like it will be far worse than SARS and MERS, and far harder to contain. I imagine it'll look a lot closer to the Spanish flu.

I wonder what absolutely drastic measures China could implement to get this under control. Short of a total curfew of the country for a few weeks, I don't know what they can do to prevent a full blown pandemic at this stage.

<comment><USER14> I believe we're only a couple days out from the total confirmed cases of Coronavirus to match the total confirmed cases of SARS. At that point, SARS will still have far more deaths.

There's a lot of graphs on projections vs actual numbers since this thing started being heavily tracked. I don't know what sources are most authoritative. Each seem to work on different timelines but all show fast growth.

<comment><USER18> Well at the time the SARS cases were confirmed, those individuals weren't dead yet either. That happens some time later.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm afraid it won't be contained - and similar to other tough viruses it will kill millions in coming years.

</comment><comment><USER20> Wuhan Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) Global Cases (by Johns Hopkins CSSE) [1]

1\. [https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.h...](https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6)

<comment><USER21> Google's put the document on lockdown so if you want to save a copy of the data yourself this will get you an ODS file (for now):

[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1yZv9w9zRKwrGTaR- YzmA...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1yZv9w9zRKwrGTaR- YzmAqMefw4wMlaXocejdxZaTs6w/export?format=ods)</comment></comment>


YC's Terms of Use: "When you click on a link, our server will send you the corresponding page." - <AUTHOR> http://ycombinator.com/legal.html I always love it when people pass up opportunities to engage in legal bullshitting.<p>Although it is interesting to note that they claim that "make something people want" is their trademark. <comment><USER2> "Privacy Policy: Unless you log in, we can't tell any more about you than your browser version, IP address, and referring url."

What can you tell if we do log in?

<comment><AUTHOR> that you touch yourself at night.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hm, looks like the "bios" link goes to about.html instead of people.html

<comment><USER4> It's interesting what the Morris bio says:

 _In 1988 his discovery of buffer overflow first brought the Internet to the attention of the general public._

Hmmm... well, that's _one_ way of putting it...

BTW, it's interesting that while Graham is the front man for YC, the idea of launching thousands of like-minded enterprises and seeing which prevail (while knowing many will get caught, killed off, or die) is very similar to how worms spread across networks.

YC as the capitalist/web applications worm?</comment></comment>


Making $435,79 in July with My Side Project - <AUTHOR> https://www.failory.com/open/july-2018 <comment> grey-area Did you mean $435.79?

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh yes! In Argentina, where I live, we use the comma.</comment></comment>


Private Bitcoin Foundation Discussions On Blacklisting, more - <AUTHOR> https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=334520.0

<comment><USER2> This has always been Bitcoin's ultimate end. Anonymity (a mandatory requirement of _money_ ) is a much harder security property than simply not implementing a name field.</comment>


Apollo 1, Challenger, and Columbia: Remembering NASA's Lost Astronauts - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/01/apollo-1-challenger-and-columbia-remembering-nasas-lost-astronauts/ <comment><USER2>
      Six subsequent Apollo missions landed safely on the Moon and returned to earth.

_Plus_ the other Apollo missions (through Apollo 10, Apollo 13, and Apollo- Soyuz) benefited from the Command Module safety improvements.</comment>


Show HN: Encrypted One Time Secret Sharing - <AUTHOR> https://share.labs.tozny.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> We made this using sodium for end to end encryption - let me know what you think!

If you're interested in reading more about it check out this blog post [https://tozny.com/blog/encrypted-one-time-secret-sharing- app...](https://tozny.com/blog/encrypted-one-time-secret-sharing-app/)

</comment><comment><USER2> Just used this to send a set of D&D DM notes to a friend. No pesky players will be seeing those secrets!

</comment><comment><USER3> Simple, secure, shared. Made with craft and care.

<comment><USER4> I just tried it. Simple and easy!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> i like how easy it is to use.

it did not work for me in microsoft edgeHTML 17.17134, in chrome worked well.</comment>


My Hacker Heresy: Hacking is what happens between diaper changes. - <AUTHOR>

One of the prevailing views of hacking is an intrinsic need to have significant blocks of time to facilitate the need of wrapping one's mind around the complex systems that are formed and modified by any hacker pounding out his passion.
I'm a dad. A new one. Also a relative noob to programming. My 'big project' is three years in the making and I'm just now stepping out of the back end formation and relational database design into tackling a front end. But I'm married with a kid, no money and a full time job.
For the past first year of married life the programming needless to say has been ground to a halt, until, that is I discovered this hack.
Insane documentation. I'm not talking about documentation in the code, rather a separate ongoing accounting of what I'm doing. Very detailed, very time consuming.
Why does it work? Because it enables me to grasp where I left off and where I'm going at a relatively very fast clip.
15 min windows actually yield progress. It's small but every step closer to launching is something I celebrate. <comment><USER2> First time dad to, with a teething 7 month old. Definitely feel your pain. I've been just documenting the crap out of eeevvveeerrrything, but your method sounds like a good idea for the progress of a project as a whole.

The one thing I try to stick to, is make progress on at least one thing every day.

<comment><AUTHOR> I would imagine, as with anything, some balance would be needed.

I think one of the things that's helping me with this type of documentation is that it's just for me. I mean that I don't worry too much about other's being able to understand what I'm referencing, I don't plan on anyone reading it, so I'm free to write whatever my mind needs to quickly take me back to the place I left off and to make sure that I remember what loose ends I still have to work on tying.

I agree with you completely on the making some progress every day.

The documenting also helps to recognize when the direction I'm going in is not netting results fast enough or adequate enough for the desired end.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> My Hacker Heresy: Hacking is what happens after the kids are asleep and when I'm not spending quality time with the wife.

Then again, I have 3 kids.

</comment><comment><USER4> More details and an example?

<comment><AUTHOR> Well since I have to be a jack of all trades AND have a few details that I need to have for my particular project that are not generally as vital in most development projects I have both a bit more complicated data structure as well as having the need to become sufficiently competent in a number of areas.

One example is a need I have to do all or virtually all interactions between my heavily normalized back end with stored procedures as well as needing to have data protection built on both the front end and the back end. This redundancy is also something I need to deploy in a somewhat consistent manner if I am to keep a handle on what I'm doing. When there's replication in protecting the data on both sides, at least it's been my experience, that the going back and forth makes more moments for things to be forgotten, so I find that being very systematic in my approach is needed, but being systematic while working in a piecemeal manner, at least for me, is tough.

Documenting my code helps some, but having my own linear, self directed narrative about what I've done, what I'm doing, where I'm going, written in a way that I understand and not encumbered by the preoccupation that should accompany, I believe, well documented code, helps a ton. If I can write and not worry about dotting all the I's or crossing all the proverbial T's then a few minutes reading/revising my narrative and I'm ready to jump back in to coding, even if I just got done feeding the baby, changing the diaper, paying the cell phone bill, putting the baby to sleep and then doing a 'honey-do' for my wife. I can sit down and quickly get oriented in the direction I need to go.

I hope that was what you wanted when you asked for details and an example. If not I'll need you to elaborate more on exactly what you want to hear.</comment></comment>


How to Protect Your Business From Hackers Without Really Trying - <AUTHOR> http://citizentekk.com/2013/07/31/kasperksy-labs-explains-how-to-protect-your-business-from-attacks-without-really-trying/#sthash.ClW4FCMR.dpbs

<comment><USER2> At first I thought it was an advertisement, but I enjoyed it. Especially the Social engineering attacks part

<comment><AUTHOR> I really liked this part: "You trust your employees, right? Maybe you shouldn't" LOL

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I can't believe Kaspersky Labs is writing these articles in citizentekk</comment>


10 Free Python Programming Books - <AUTHOR> http://www.coderholic.com/free-python-programming-books/

<comment><USER2> <http://openbookproject.net//thinkCSpy/ch11.xhtml>

"Both factorial and fibonacci are examples of tail recursion.

Tail recursion is considered a bad practice in languages like Python, however, since it uses more system resources than the equivalent iterative solution."

Uh no, those implementations were plain recursion. Tailrecursion is basically the same as iteration but Python doesn't optimize tail-calls so the stack will blow anyway. He defines tail-recursion something along the lines as "if the last statement ina function is a recursive call". NO! From wikipedia: "In computer science, tail recursion (or tail-end recursion) is a special case of recursion in which the last operation of the function is a recursive call"

And while the solution he presents in the next chapter: previous = {0: 0, 1: 1} def fibonacci(n): if previous.has_key(n): return previous[n] else: new_value = fibonacci(n-1) + fibonacci(n-2) previous[n] = new_value return new_value

works the simple idiomatic way is simply: def fib(n): a, b = 1, 0 while n: a, b, n = b, a+b, n-1 return b

<comment><USER3> Nope. Its worse. The solutions given in the book for the Fibonacci sequence and the factorial won't be optimized into tail recursion even in scheme unless some additional transformations were carried out on them first. In the factorial sequence, the last call is to the multiply method, not the factorial sequence and in the Fibonacci sequence, the last call is to the addition function.

Sad that most people don't catch that.

<comment><USER2> What is worse do you mean? Was I wrong about something?

<comment><USER3> No. You were right that with large inputs the program stack will blow up. However, the definition of tail recursive is if a function returns the value of a recursive call or does not make a recursive call and the factorial and Fibonacci functions weren't even tail recursion in that sense. Ie. it didn't matter where they were implemented, they would still blow up the stack anyway. The "worse" is because they will always blow the stack without some drastic optimization.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> He also links in the article to a list of free computer science books <http://www.coderholic.com/free-computer-science-books/>

</comment><comment><USER5> Nice find. Thank you.</comment>


Top 8 Awesome Reasons to Join a Rock Climbing Gym - <AUTHOR> https://methodclimb.com/join-indoor-rock-climbing-gym/ <comment><USER2> I want to clarify the "full body workout" point. For one, it's not really a full body workout, and you disproportionately work out your back. This, along with an under developed chest can cause your shoulders to roll forward resulting in bad posture. Another problem if you find you have a dominant hand while climbing, which leads to half your body getting exercised more than the other side. This is usually your right half because setters are usually right handed and will set routes that lead to you working your right half more. If you get a massage, it's normally pretty easy for them to immediately notice this asymmetry. Like all exercise, try to find a balance. No one activity is going to be a catch all for your whole body.

The other points are pretty spot on. I just wish climbing gyms weren't so expensive haha.

<comment><USER3> > This, along with an under developed chest can cause your shoulders to roll > forward resulting in bad posture.

I would have thought they would have rolled back - a tight chest and unworked back muscles will cause the shoulders to roll forward due to the pecs being in a constant state of tension and the back being unable to balance it all out. I wonder why the opposite would have the same effect.

<comment><USER4> climbers tend to overdevelop back muscles. pecks are largely not involved - it's all flexors not extensors.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, so if the back is tight why would the shoulders roll forward?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I climbed when I was young and picked it up again as an adult hobby two years ago. It's still a blast and I would recommend it to anyone who is bored of lifting weights.

Bouldering in particular is easy to do routinely because you don't need a partner with you in the gym holding a rope for you.

It also appeals to my gamer side, because routes are graded in terms of difficulty. For bouldering that's V0 through V10, sometimes higher, with zero being easy and 10 being... competitive. Progressing through levels is a great mechanic. Routes also get reset by the gym owners every couple weeks so there is always a new set of challenges.

The competitive scene is getting more and more connected with streams online, too, so you have a sport you can enjoy watching between sessions. e.g. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWXWoziXtyM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWXWoziXtyM)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm not sure if any of those arguments actually are unique to rock climbing. I mean, it looks like it could be fun, but none of that is a strong argument specifically for rock climbing.

<comment><USER6> Number 7 (Practice Mindfulness) is the killer app for me. I've done biking, power-lifting, and swimming before and these do focus you, but not the way rock climbing does. Planning out and executing a route has a higher level of novelty than most exercises. This helps me turn off the part of my brain that's always worrying about work because I need to focus not just on things like form and breathing but the more analytical task of real-time planning as I scale the wall.

<comment><USER3> I've found mindfulness in powerlifting, as well as rowing and bicycling. Powerlifting is an acute condition - I have ~30 seconds of absolute concentration and focus, being totally focused on executing and knowing nothing else, ignoring the agony of screaming muscles and intense pressure. Rowing and bicycle are both much longer steady state, but at the right pace it really focuses you in to the here and now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Rock climbing is a really unique mesh of physical activity, community, and puzzle solving. If you find the thought of gyms boring but want to start getting some exercise, I'd definitely suggest trying it out.

</comment><comment><USER8> Rock climbing is the new CrossFit.

<comment><USER3> That's not fair, there will probably be less ruptured Achilles with this.</comment></comment>


Computers = Trucks - <AUTHOR> http://lilly.tumblr.com/post/23719699951/computers-trucks

<comment><USER2> What do HNers think of the possibility that younger people coming up may not have ready access to the 'big yellow machines' of coding/software?

At present, you can get an old workstation and monitor for cheap, put Linux on it and have essentially the same tools that the folks at Facebook/Google?local startup have.

Once the divide pointed out by the author becomes entrenched, it may not be that easy to get access to the same environments that professional (paid) coders have.

</comment><comment><USER3> This quote rings very true to me: "The next big thing is always beneath contempt."

I was one of the people that wrote off Twitter as a useless fad that would never catch on. For a while I also told everyone who considered buying an iPad to just get a laptop instead of a toy.

Hindsight has proven me wrong before, and these days I give more thought to what a new "fad" could be, instead of letting out a derisive snort.</comment>