If we weren't the first industrial civilization on Earth, would we ever know? - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610886/if-we-werent-the-first-industrial-civilization-on-earth-would-we-ever-know/ <comment><USER2> The History Channel had a 20 episode series called _Life After People_ that looked at what would happen if every human suddenly disappeared.

The National Geographic had a similar, but only one episode program looking at that questions, called _Aftermath: Population Zero_.

I have a vague recollection of seeing something like this on one of Discovery's channels, too, but I may be mixing that up with an article in their magazine.

My recollection is that they all concluded that in the very long term (tens of millions of years), if some other species evolved intelligence it would probably not be able to tell we were here.

Some of the materials we used might survive, but things like glaciers in ice ages would grind them to a powder. The next intelligent species might notice these odd concentrations of unusual combinations of metal particles and powdered long chain carbon compounds, but there would be nothing to tell them it wasn't made by some unknown natural process.

<comment><USER3> At least they'd be incredibly confused when they eventually went to the Moon :)

<comment><USER4> I've always wondered if future people will believe that we put up the all our artificial satellites, without help from aliens. If we can't even imagine egyptians being able to stack rocks, who's gonna believe that we forged metal ships and launched them into orbit?

<comment><USER5> Satellites would disappear pretty quickly without constant orbit adjustments.

<comment><USER6> I would expect geostationary satellites to last pretty long, after all their orbit should have close to zero atmospheric drag and barely any tidal forces.

<comment><USER7> "pretty long", yes. Tens or hundreds of millions of year? No.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Ceramics should last a very long time if they are buried. Ceramic toilets and stoneware dishes are like stone. If buried in sand or silt that collected over time they would be like other fossils. They might get crushed or broken, but I don't think they'd dissolve or corrode.

<comment><USER9> Yes we have fossils of many of the most delicate creatures that have ever lived, it seems impossible to believe that nothing of all the durable items we have created would remain or be fossilized. It's a cool thought experiment wondering if we aren't the first but it seems completely impossible. I'm afraid our generation will be known as "The Plastic Generation" from our layer in the sediment.

<comment><USER10> "I'm afraid we'll be called the plastic generation", why are you afraid?

Plastics are a hallmark of an era, like clay, bronze, bones, etc... .

Social and regular media is currently making plastic out to be this big boogie man, intentionally ignoring the good sides of plastic, to sell you tweets/articles about the benefits of plastics (and will point out how you should suddenly feel bad for not using them already) in a few years anyway. They're not about a balanced discussion anymore.

<comment><USER11> Cause it's gonna kill us, in spite of the good it's done

<comment><USER6> How would plastic kill us? The only issues I'm aware of are

1) the pollution of oceans, which seems very fixable with much less effort than replacing plastic (filtering water at river outlets and in coastal waters, preventing ships from just dumping their stuff everywhere).

2) microplastics. In marine environments that seems solvable by solving point 1, and while a cause for concern I don't think any negative effects outside marine environments or food chains containing marine animals have been shown?

Of course particulate matter is somewhat related, but wheels on asphalt will cause tiny airborne particulates no matter what material we use to make tires, so we might be better off just filtering our air in any case.

<comment><USER12> You're forgetting the most important issue: 3) Human apathy.

Our ecosystems will collapse well before we change our cancerous existence on this planet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> We are the first nuclear civilization.

We know the expected isotope ratios too well and test them too often. This is how we discovered evidence of a natural nuclear reactor from 1.7 Gya. Any other nuclear civilization would have changed the isotope ratios in detectable ways in some part of the world.

<comment> Engineering-MD Out of interest what was this natural nuclear reactor? And also how do we know it was definitely natural? I don't believe it wasn't natural, but I wonder how one would prove that.

<comment><USER14> Oklo in Gabon, Africa. See [https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/meet-oklo- the-earths-tw...](https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/meet-oklo-the-earths- two-billion-year-old-only-known-natural-nuclear-reactor)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's an interesting way of thinking of the age of the earth and geological changes that there could have been a civilization and we wouldn't know.

Or someone later wouldn't know about us.... outside say an abandoned car floating through space...

That would be an interesting story. We travel into space to find things out there only to find things that seem to have come from... home.

<comment><USER16> > _Or someone later wouldn 't know about us.... outside say an abandoned car > floating through space..._

The cars we left on the moon will still be there. The satellites and trash in orbit would still be there. The satellites orbiting Mars would still be there.

We can see clear evidence that life has altered the climate in the past [1]. Anyone looking like we are would notice our mark on the environment.

1) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event)

<comment><USER17> Are satellite orbits really stable over millennia?

Maybe just the geo-sync ones, but I imagine anything closer will decay in "relatively short order".

<comment><USER18> Depends what you consider "closer". Geosynchronous orbit is 35,786 km above the surface and while at 500 km you get significant decay (order of years to re-entry) while satellites at 1,000 km are estimated to take centuries to re- enter. Extrapolating that anything above the start of medium earth orbit (2,000 km) and out should last a hell of a long time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> If another civilization had reached space-faring technology then one day they might come back and discover that the (perhaps inhospitable) home planet...harbors again life. Probably too far-fetched and better suited as material for a scifi story, but the idea is interesting.

<comment><USER20> > Probably too far-fetched and better suited as material for a scifi story, > but the idea is interesting

M. Night Shyamalan directed a terrible movie from 2013 that is a version of that premise. After Earth, starring Will and Jaden Smith. Solid idea for a sci-fi movie, they botched it unfortunately.

"In the future, an environmental cataclysm forces the human race to abandon Earth in search of a new habitable planet, eventually settling on the planet Nova Prime" ... "A crash landing leaves Kitai Raige and his father Cypher stranded on Earth, a millennium after events forced humanity's escape. With Cypher injured, Kitai must embark on a perilous journey to signal for help."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Earth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Earth)

[https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1815862/](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1815862/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Increased carbon levels are found in ice deposits from the period of the Roman Empire. There's nothing prior to that.

<comment><USER22> There's no ice that goes back a hundred million years.

<comment><USER17> I think 2 million years is about as far as we can go...

[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1692-3](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1692-3)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> How long does it take for tectonic action to "recycle" the plates? Could a civilization have existed as extensive as our own in the extreme past, but we can't see any evidence because it is all hundreds of miles under the surface of the earth being melted down slowly?

<comment><USER24> The oldest rocks are about four billion years old: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldest_dated_rocks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldest_dated_rocks)

<comment><USER25> But the oldest surface material is less than 2 million years old (Israel), and the second oldest surface is about half a million year old (Nevada).

[https://www.livescience.com/3542-oldest-surface-earth- discov...](https://www.livescience.com/3542-oldest-surface-earth- discovered.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Oil was a good push for the development of our civilization, and should have been for any past technological civilization too. If we have oil today (in the amount we are getting it, at least) then the previous civilizations didn't reached our oil dependent civilization stage, or existed before the actual oil reserves formed.

It doesn't imply that there wasn't any civilization before, but or it happened hundreds of millions of years ago, or never became as advanced or global as our actual one. Unless there could had been back then an abundant energy source different from oil but with similar efficiency, and it got globally depleted by that previous civilization.

<comment><USER7> The same argument can be made for rich surface deposits of Iron, Aluminum, Tin, etc... If there were civilizations in the past - even a hundred million years ago - they likely would have mined those.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> If a previous industrial civilization put satellites into geo-stationary orbit, they'd still be up there. If there are unknown objects in geo- stationary orbit, would be be able to find them? If we could find them, and we haven't, doesn't that put an upper limit to the technological sophistication of possible previous industrial civilizations?

<comment><USER28> Not all industrial civilizations launch geo-stationary satellites.

<comment><USER29> Only the ones we know of.

<comment><USER28> Not necessarily. It is true that the industrial civilizations we know of, considered on a consolidated planetary short-recent-history level, have launched satellites in geostationary orbits. But we can not logically infer from this that only the ones we know of have launched satellites in geostationary orbits. There may be ones that have launched geostationary satellites which we do not know of.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Isn't there some level of radiation that is ubiquitously present ever since we started nuclear testing? Seems like we could figure out if there ever was a nuclear-capable society in the past just by looking at radiation decay.

<comment><USER31> On the millions of years scale, that signature disappears.

<comment><USER32> What about fossils, surely children in that ancient vibrant civilization dropped their shoes, phone, remote and it got fossilized

<comment><USER31> The article explains that one. If we were gone today, we would probably not leave any fossil.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> >The current area of urbanization is less than 1% of the Earth's surface

But doesn't this assume cities are distributed uniformly and randomly? Cities seem to be build at ports (ex: Port of NY, Oakland) and waypoints with natural resources or barriers (Salt Lake City, Denver on either side of the mountains for example)

<comment><USER34> The locations of rivers, good natural harbors and resources would have been completely different tens of millions of years ago.

<comment><USER35> Different, yes. Unknowable, no.

We know the general distribution of continents dating to 550 million years ago (Gondwanaland), and to some extent prior, though that largely predates the Cambrian explosion of complex life on Earth.

Ancient coastlines, estuaries, and riverbeds leave quite distinctive geological traces and would be detectable. We'd be looking for ancient civilisations on or near such features.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> 2018.

Interesting idea and covered many times before on HN including at the time:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16837120](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16837120)

</comment><comment><USER37> It also assumes industrialization similar to our own. A past civilization would most likely have developed entirely different technologies that we may not know what to look for.

<comment><USER24> Some technologies seem too universal to assume an industrial civilization would miss them. Things like ceramics for example are easy to make, very useful and would likely survive in the geological record.

<comment><USER7> Fossil fuels are the same. It burns. It's obvious it burns. The internal combustion engine was inevitable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> sorry for the total aside, but this article reminded me of one of my deepest typo curiosities: why is the misspelling ratio -> ration so common? there are lots of words that can have a character erroneously appended and still be a correctly spelled (different) word. for example: most verbs in english (ride -> rides, bake -> baked, etc.). but for some reason, I see ratio -> ration all the time. 'n' isn't even that close to 'o' on the keyboard! it really jumps out when you subvocalize; the 'n' changes the pronunciation a lot.

<comment><USER39> I wonder if it has to do with the suffix -tion. Maybe muscle memory is triggered when the letters "tio" are typed at the end of the word and "n" is automatically added to the end of the word.

<comment><USER40> I'm fairly sure this is why I do it. I'm an average typist and above-average speller, but -ion spills out whenever I type it. There are almost no words ending in -io, and there are a lot ending in -ion. For some quick numbers, the OSPD database I have here has 1432 -ion words and only 47 -io words.

<comment><USER41> I always type ratio as ration but never type radio as radion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> We would know it. We probably wouldn't know much about that civilization; almost all of their culture or art would not survive. But we would find bits of glass or pottery fossilized in rocks at the very least. We haven't found anything like that so it seems extremely unlikely.

</comment><comment><USER43> this youtube channel i like "Curious Droid" made not long ago a video on the subject

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xDK2LgSeyk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xDK2LgSeyk)

What Fossils Will We Leave Behind in 65 Million Years?

65 million years ago the dinosaurs died out, we only know of their existence because of the few fossil remains found. So what if a similar fate were to happen to us humans tomorrow, in 65 million years time what would remain of everything we had created and would there be anything be left for any future intelligent species to find.

</comment><comment><USER44> They glaced over nuclear war a little too quickly. While I'm not an expert, I've heard many times that a significant nuclear exchange between countries would likely result in so much debris being thrown into the atmosphere it would cause a nuclear winter. This could lead to a full blown ice age, mass extinctions, etc...

Surely those "side effects" of the bombs would be measurable far longer than the radiation. We know of past super volcanic eruptions and the dinosaurs' extinction because of similar circumstances.

<comment><USER45> It's not just radioactive material that would betray a past nuclear war. Some of the stable decay products are extremely rare in nature, and their presence in the ratios we know atomic weapons produce would be a dead giveaway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Its not industrial, but I recommend At the Mountains of Madness by lovecraft for an example of this sort of question being asked in fiction

</comment><comment><USER47> Just thinking off the cuff and channeling a bit of Isaac Arthur here.

Coming from the angle of a non-native intelligence colonizing Earth in the super distant past, there may not be many or any terrestrial remains over such a long span of time.

It's reasonable to think "aliens" would not burn coal and oil for energy. If they crossed the gulf of space, they likely used fusion or some other power source. A ground side civilization could sift helium3 from the oceans for thousands of years without a noticeable depreciation. If they used power satellites, those would likely have fallen from orbit or been knocked out of the Earth-Moon system within hundreds to thousands of years.

Within human history, many of the same geographical areas of the world have been good places to live for thousands of years. But when you extend that to hundreds of thousands to millions of years, those places generally change drastically and disappear. One could assume, for the sake of argument, that aliens colonizing Earth might have similar biological needs as we do and would live in similar areas of the distant past. We might not easily find those places now given environmental changes over geological ages.

We also are still very early in exploring the solar system. It's plausible there could be remnants of mining and manufacturing in places we haven't looked. It's important to remember that if your civilization is colonizing a new system, you're already a space based society. It's then reasonable to expect little on the ground industrialization since most of your infrastructure will be in space.

There's a new study talking about solar electrostatic effects on the Moon and how it causes lunar dust to rise and drift around despite no atmosphere. Given long enough spans of time this might even conceal evidence of prior space- based industrialization.

One big red flag to me that this hasn't happened in Earth's history is the biological record. We have a fairly good overall map of biology over large areas of the world. Everything alive here seems to come from here. There's nothing alive that doesn't appear to use the same general base chemistry and biology as everything else.

If some aliens showed up a hundred million years ago, we might expect to see some distantly evolved branches of life that are somewhat different in at least DNA or other chemistry. We might find something like this but it's unlikely.

The follow-on to that might be an argument that all current life is descended from some ancient aliens. That could be true but it would be nearly impossible to tell at this point. All life seems to have a common descent with no aberration, so following up on this line of thought is extremely difficult to test for. We would need to find examples of life outside of Earth before we could make comparisons to investigate that hypothesis.

<comment><USER32> I suppose it's possible an ET civilization had an outpost on earth and that outpost is now in the middle of the ocean. I think the discussion is an earth based civilization, then the chances of all their cities, discarded equipment, lost items haven't left a single mark is very unlikely.

What about fossils from that era

<comment><USER47> Right but I think in terms of interstellar colonization there can't really be a concept of an outpost how we think of say bases in Antarctica or the ISS. If you're sending people to another star system, it has to be a minimum viable colony or nothing.

In regards to fossils, excellent point. The problem is that despite all of the fossils we've found, overall it accounts for less than 1% of all species that have ever existed on Earth. The odds of finding even a single fossil from an animal from a non-terrestrial colony are exceptionally low. Not zero, but so low as to be extremely unlikely.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> This sounds like an incredible science fiction series that needs to be written.

Any chance such books already exist?

<comment><USER49> In some ways, Howard's Hyborian Age stories featuring Conan were a response to scientific revelations of his day indicating the plausibility of a vanished age prior to recorded history.

Aschulean hand axes have been dated to 1.76 million years ago, Oldowan tools were made up to 2.6 Mya. Just really smart apes, sure, but who would know if they had a breakaway 5,000 years of brilliance reflected mainly through an extensive oral tradition and crafts with exceptionally disposable materials.

Not known in Howard's day, but Göbekli Tepe is an extensive temple complex in Turkey that predates when we thought sophisticated organized societies emerged, and seems like something his Hyboreans might have built.

If you want to get way out on a limb, our theory about how monkeys got to the new world is pretty suspicious. Currently, we theorize that a breeding population managed to accidentally raft across the Atlantic exactly one time in all of history, but this is so rare it didn't happen for other animals, and never took them to the much closer North America from there.

Might as well guess some ancient extinct navigators brought some monkeys along as pets, then died out and left the monkeys as the only evidence. Crazy and unsupported conjecture, but why not, par for current theories.

<comment><USER50> "Just really smart apes" basically describes us, too!

There's that 40k-year-old bracelet that was made with a "relatively high speed" drill, something we didn't think the denisovans could do: [http://siberiantimes.com/science/casestudy/features/f0100-st...](http://siberiantimes.com/science/casestudy/features/f0100-stone- bracelet-is-oldest-ever-found-in-the-world/)

I'm also reminded how in the past 15 years or so, using LIDAR, we are learning that there are way more Mayan or Aztec ruins than previously thought; they were just covered up by the jungle.

There's a lot of mystery still buried in the earth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> What about artifacts on the moon?

</comment><comment><USER52> star trek voyager had an episode about this

<comment><USER53> Isn't it the premise of the Stargate universe as well?

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> This idea has come up a few times on conspiracy subreddits, but it seems like a pretty big stretch. Look at all our landfills full of old obsolete electronics. The fact that we don't find similar things make these "hidden civilization" theories pretty unlikely in my opinion.

<comment><USER15> I think article accounts for that.</comment></comment>


Vue numeric keyboard - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/viclm/vue-numeric-keyboard <comment><AUTHOR> The keyboard which created by javascript can not work with normal text input element, the component provide a custom input + keyboard suit which can be used in a normal form situation.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> A numeric keyboard used in mobile created by Vue 2 component. It contains a pluggable keyboard component and a input + keyboard suit.</comment>


Show HN: Start Providing OAuth, a base Rails App - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/sethherr/grape-doorkeeper

<comment><AUTHOR> I found that I was using this pattern in a number of places, so I thought it would be useful to create a base I could use again.</comment>


Inside China's surveillance state - <AUTHOR> https://www.ft.com/content/2182eebe-8a17-11e8-bf9e-8771d5404543 <comment><USER2> "China starts from a different point of view — that a strong empowered state is necessary, in order to drag the nation forward."

I highly recommend Martin Jacques' Ted talk [0] on this very subject from over 7 years ago. I believe this aspect of Chinese culture -- of treating the state as being a BIG part of your daily life -- is super important to grasp if one wishes to get a sense of Chinese thinking and way-of-life.

It's also a starting point if one wishes to imagine how a future China might turn out to be.

[0] [https://youtu.be/imhUmLtlZpw](https://youtu.be/imhUmLtlZpw)

<comment><USER3> > I believe this aspect of Chinese culture

Well, for me, it's just like to saying "Oh, Chinese people just do that sometimes".

It's a quite ignorant view actually, because when you look at Taiwan and Hongkong, it's very easy to found that Chinese people can adapt to many systems rather than the 'good' old authoritarianism.

Mainland China current running by the Communist Party is actually because of many historical reason, rather than a choice of Chinese people.

Also, one thing some people from the west don't understand that the Chinese government lead by the CCP also generates many many benefits to the Chinese people, and doing a not-bad job protecting their citizens. And those benefits are not easy to be ditched away.

Another thing that I want to mention is, China will never be 'Westernized', it will instead to be 'Modernized'. And you can clearly see modernization everywhere in China during these 7 years.

In fact, for me, the word 'Westernized' is pretty arrogant: It assumes the 'West' should set the rule and standard for the world. And you just can't assume that, just like you can't assume all your neighbors one day will follow the exact schedule like you do. They just don't.

Also, about Han[0]'s superiority: First thing is, you maybe don't know that the Chinese government provide better benefits[1] to those ethnic minority groups than Han people did.

As a Han myself, I personally don't feel like that I'm superior than others. In fact, start from the kindergarten, we been educated to respect other ethnic groups and at least know what not to. For example: Don't eat pork in front of Hui[2] people.

Yes, many people still don't completely understand all those rules or just don't care about it after they grown up, but you can't deny the education is there.

Even there is superiority between Han and other ethnic groups, then that would be very similar as in C++ programmer vs PHP programmer, rather than black vs white.

Then, about Uyghurs[3]. To be honest, I don't fully understand the problem there. But I think the tight control that the government has implemented there is at some part due some terrorist attacks[4][5][6][7][8](are originated from Xinjiang). And you can think of how many pressure the center government has pushed on Xinjiang's administration, so maybe that's why they did something that not so civilized.

I'm not saying it's understandable or forgivable, they are not resolving problem from the root there. What I'm trying to say is: Maybe things happened in Xinjiang was not about ethnic superiority as some west people may think it is.

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

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_minorities_in_China#Gua...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_minorities_in_China#Guarantee_of_rights_and_interests)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hui_people](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hui_people)

[3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghurs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghurs)

[4] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_China](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_China)

[5] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Kashgar_attack](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Kashgar_attack)

[6] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Tiananmen_Square_attack](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Tiananmen_Square_attack)

[7] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Kunming_attack](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Kunming_attack)

[8] [https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015%E5%B9%B4%E6%96%B0%E7%96%8...](https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015%E5%B9%B4%E6%96%B0%E7%96%86%E7%B3%BB%E5%88%97%E8%A2%AD%E5%87%BB%E6%A1%88) (No English version available)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> '...Some 530 camera and video surveillance patents were filed by Chinese groups last year, according to the research firm CB Insights — more than five times the number applied for in the US. Unhindered by worries about privacy or individual rights, China's deepening specialism has attracted global customers and investors. "The surveillance industry is still in the growth phase," proclaimed analysts at Jefferies, the New York-based investment bank. '

In a way I'm relieved the West is lagging behind on this but I found the whole article very worrying indeed. Individual digital rights have never been more urgent or important in the West to delineate 'free' society, life, liberty, pursuit of happiness etc...

</comment><comment><USER4> "Panopticon?"

Sesame Credit:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHcTKWiZ8sI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHcTKWiZ8sI)

</comment><comment><USER5> non-paywall link: [https://outline.com/ejH8Nf](https://outline.com/ejH8Nf)

</comment><comment><USER6> Waaay more interested in the American surveillance state, which is global, penetrating, the best funded, attached to a global propaganda system, and sits in the hands of the world's premiere superpower. I'm also a citizen there.

These Chinese surveillance state stories are all really tame compared to the abuses of the American program.

<comment><USER7> You will never see Western journalists go after their own surveillance state even though it is far more extensive and aggressive than China. What's really strange is they accuse China of doing things like exporting compromised telcom equipment -- things that we now know that the NSA actually does. (See eg NSA interception of outbound Cisco routers.) Given this very particular blindspot you really do have to wonder who they think they're fooling.

<comment><USER8> > You will never see Western journalists go after their own surveillance > state...

False. You see it all the time.

> ... even though it is far more extensive and aggressive than China.

Not sure I buy that, either. The US may be more aggressive in terms of information collected, and in terms of global scope. It's less aggressive than China in terms of being used to control the lives of the entire population of the country, though.

<comment><USER7> Nobody outside of the American fantasy believes this even for a second. In the US you have local law enforcement running around with cell trackers, public and private organizations deploying widespread facial tracking, and let's not even get to the absolute zero data protections Americans enjoy so literally all their data, from location history to purchase history, is available to the highest bidder. But hey, it's not the government doing the tracking so it doesn't matter! Anybody with even half a brain understands that Americans are the most surveiled people on the planet. (Though the Brits are a close second and it's not for lack of trying they're just less competent.)

But really keep focusing on China. Have a feeling this strategy will work great for you.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why did disastrous floods in the Balkans fail to capture US attention? - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2014/06/lost-in-the-flood.html

<comment><USER2> the article should say US attention, it was in the news in europe (Belgium)

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right, it did received more coverage in Europe medias. Changed...</comment></comment>


No effect of monthly supplementation with vitamin D in older people - <AUTHOR> https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30583082 <comment><USER2> I have a difficult time believing this because two years ago I started losing energy and was not feeling as well as I had been. My doctor ran some tests, put me on D3 supplements, and within one week I started feeling more energetic and after a month I was back to feeling well.

My wife was then also tested, with the same result. I believe there is enough evidence that D3 helps brain health, balance, and energy levels to make it worthwhile to take supplemental D3.

</comment><comment><USER3> The abstract says "muscle function." In the keywords is "grip strenght". As I watch my parents age, balance (read: primarily legs) is far more important than grip strenght.

Some can get hurt falling in the shower. No one has been hospitalized for not being to open a jar of jelly.</comment>


Failure to communicate: Inability to write clearly is costly in the digital age - <AUTHOR> http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2010/05/19/failure_to_communicate/ <comment><USER2> A lesson I once learned from a mentor: attention to detail in the little things often demonstrates attention to detail in the big things.

No one really cares if you misspell a word, use the wrong tense, or make some other grammatical error. But sometimes, that's all they've got to go on to assess your attention to detail. I've seen vendors proposing multi-million dollar purchases rejected because of carelessness in their writing. And the explanation was always the same, "If he's that careless with his writing, how careless will he be with my business?"

When the division manager who has made us $90 million misspells a word in an email, no one bats an eyelash; he must have been in a hurry. But when a cover letter has errors, it really makes people wonder.

<comment><USER3> > A lesson I once learned from a mentor: attention to detail in the little > things often demonstrates attention to detail in the big things.

That's why Van Halen's concert contracts say "No brown MMs".

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Halen#Contract_riders>

<comment><USER4> See also [http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio- archives/episode/386/F...](http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio- archives/episode/386/Fine-Print)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is anyone else baffled by how the article title talks about "failure to communicate" and then goes on to talk about basic things such as spelling and grammar?

In my opinion, communicating something is a far deeper skill than just writing correct grammar (and following your local style guide regarding other conventions). It's about structuring your thoughts into a logical arguments that others can follow, and that is specific enough that people can find out on which points they disagree with you if they do.

Most from the Graham/Spolsky/whoever crowd can do this awesomely well, but in all likelihood, not many enough people learn this in high school or college. And it's something that overworked school teachers or TAs cannot ever hope to address if they are to spend 15min. with a 10-page essay. (Why are they making anyone write a 10-page essay if there's no time to provide adequate feedback?)

<comment><USER6> That was my thought too.

At the risk of being snarky, I read this article as: Boring exposition, boring transition, finally some data and then a hedged conclusion with no suggested solution.

This article had impeccable grammar I'm sure, but I hardly cared because it had a weak, watered-down message.

For a tech analogy, it's a bit like web service uptime.

      - No one will care unless something's wrong
      - It doesn't provide a net gain, it only prevents a net loss
      - It only matters if it's worth reading anyway

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've always avoided being the grammar Nazi, but it still bugs me to see lazy writing, especially from people I know. Far too often, family members ignore glaring rules of grammar without a care in the world. I fully realize I'm not a paragon of English grammar myself, but I learn when corrected.

The problem is that for many people, it does't matter as much. If you have bad grammar, or write poorly, it won't matter because so many other people have bad grammar and write poorly as well. You don't see anything wrong with it.

It's usually simple things to: capitalization, punctuation, proper tense, and spelling. I understand typos occur, and sometimes people just don't know better. Fine. The biggest problems are the use of chat words, like "u" for "you" and other problems. People use these in a casual atmosphere, and I feel it becomes normal for them. They see proper writing as work.

Meh, I dunno, mybe i be tinkin 2 much abot tis.

<comment><USER8> > It's usually simple things to:

Some people! :P

<comment><AUTHOR> I was just waiting for the first grammar or usage mistake to be made and pointed out in this thread. :-)

It's ironic that now, when anyone can publish their writing to the world in a blog, so many people don't have the writing skills to communicate effectively.

<comment><USER9> Muphry's Law: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law>

Also, it's always been true that many people don't have the writing skills to communicate effectively. What's different today is that for the first time, those people have the ability to publish their writing.

<comment><USER10> I don't think it stems from really increasing the author pool so much as reducing the amount of effort put into editing the material. A good editor can dramatically improve legibility, but few bloggers are paying for it.

<comment><USER9> You raise an interesting point, but the purpose of an editor is to filter content _before_ publication in a scarce medium so that resources aren't wasted publishing crap no one wants to read. The editor serves the owner of the means of publication and acts as a quality filter so that only content worth buying and reading will make it into print.

Unlike a printing press or a broadcast frequency, the internet is unbounded and access is dirt cheap. There's effectively no cost to publish crap, so there's no reason not to wait until _after_ publication to filter for quality.

<comment><USER10> Editors do both. However, if you look at the standard quality of a small town newspaper from the 1920's the overall quality is not all that high. Realistically, papers like the New York Times are an outgrowth of having a huge audience which can support a lot of staff, but there used to be a lot of small players out there who had a lot less content to choose from.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wonder if, over time, this trend will lead to a shift in what is considered acceptable writing. Once the "texting" teenagers of today take positions of leadership in government and corporations, they may be more accepting of this writing style.

<comment><USER12> Mark Twain complained about this long ago. As a previous commenter said: it's not so much that people are not able to write now, it's that they can publish their bad writing. We have metrics in schools to track how well our kids can write. We can blog about how poorly our co-workers write. It's more visible than it ever has been.

At the end of the day, every communication with your employer is an opportunity. If you can't communicate well, you will be less likely to get what you want out of those interactions. On the other hand, if you're able to write well and communicate clearly, you're going to get what you want far more often.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> As someone who has been a TA for the past three years at a top-tier university, I have had the same experience as the author. It's shocking how many students are admitted that do not know how to write an essay. I find that I spend _at least_ half an hour per 10-page essay and almost always end up drowning them (even the good ones) in red ink.

Perhaps this is due to growing up with a mother who worked as an editor, but I tend to think that I'm not being overly harsh when I have to repeat the same comments over and over again: proofread for typos, needs a strong introduction, put your thesis up front, number your pages, use consistent formatting, punctuation inside quote marks, footnotes outside quote marks, don't use big fonts / extra spacing to pad the paper's length, use a (correctly formatted) bibliography, don't cite Wikipedia (or any encyclopedia), give the reader a roadmap up front, etc.

<comment><USER14> I missed this one, but what's wrong with citing an encyclopedia other than Wikipedia? :: prepared to learn something new today ::

<comment><USER15> It has been a long time since college for me, but I vaguely remember this one.

Just like Wikipedia, encyclopedias are not generally original source research. Citing more specific original or closer-to-original sources gives the evaluator more tools in considering the relevance or validity of an argument.

<comment><USER13> This is pretty close to the reasoning. You can broadly categorize sources into three tiers: primary, secondary, and tertiary.

Primary sources are the actual documents or individual recollections involved in an event—a treaty, a memoir, a transcript, etc. These are the archival documents that historians love. A programming-language-analogy might be writing something in a close-to-the-metal language like Assembly or C.

Secondary sources are usually synthetic works that comment on primary sources and other secondary sources, or strongly advance/test a certain hypothesis. These would be the works produced by historians, political scientists, sociologists, and so on analyzing the historical data and evaluating the theories of other social scientists. Most books fall into this category. The analogy would be higher level languages like Java and Ruby.

Tertiary works are produced for the general reader. Rather than providing new scholarship or advancing a hypothesis, they generally try to summarize the existing consensus in a concise manner. Because encyclopedia articles aim to give the generalist reader an overview, they are usually a good starting point for someone with no background in a particular area. But, the idea behind writing analytical or research papers is to get the student beyond just a general familiarity with a subject, and to get them to engage some part of the debate. Citing encyclopedias, while in and of itself not wrong, it usually evidence that the student hasn't really engaged the topic. Presumably, if they've read 3-6 secondary sources, they would have all the citations they needed and the encyclopedia would be extraneous. The programming analogy here would be using very little code to paste together a bunch of libraries that you don't understand.

Wikipedia has an additional epistemic problem that other encyclopedias usually don't have. Other encyclopedia entries are usually written by experts in their field. There is no such guarantee for Wikipedia articles: they could be written by experts, they could be written by 14-year-old Singaporean communists writing from their mother's basement (I speak from experience as an admin who's had to deal with this scenario). While studies have shown Wikipedia to be comparable in terms of quality to mainstream encyclopedias, there's no way of telling at any given moment which revision you're viewing and who it was last edited by and what their level of expertise is. For that reason, Wikipedia is usually _especially_ discouraged by academia, which as an institution places emphasis on linking the authority of a piece with the person who wrote it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> And yet with all their errors, the majority of his students still pass and presumably go on to be leaders or at least high earners. So even though it's a "crisis" no one will do anything meaningful to fix it.

</comment><comment><USER17> I agree with the importance of good writing, but I'm curious about the headline. As I read it, the author gives two examples of how poor writing is costly: in terms of time spent correcting papers, and a reference to an estimate from the "National Commission on Writing" that "remedying deficiencies" costs as much as "$3.1 billion annually". There is no explanation of how this estimate was calculated, nor does the article explain how big the US economy is, for purposes of comparison.

</comment><comment><USER14> Makes me think of "Hire the Better Writer" out of Getting Real. <http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch08_Wordsmiths.php>

Edit: I'm the local grammar Nazi and have always been a fan of engineers/programmers that could write their asses off, e.g. Paul Graham, Joel Spolsky, _why the lucky stiff, etc., etc. Gives us all something to aspire to is all.

</comment><comment><USER18> And this applies especially to code.

<comment><USER19> At my college, the "gatekeeper" CS course was notorious, even among non-CS majors. Your code could compile, pass all the unit tests, have optimal algorithmic efficiency and highly optimized runtime... and you could still get a C- because you used inconsistent capitalization for your variable names, or had misspellings in your comments[1]. May the ghost of Dijkstra have mercy on you if you did anything "clever" at the high level.

The goal, of course, is not that later on you will spend half your coding time thinking about variable capitalization. The goal is that when you're writing your code, you pick good variable names automatically because you've built up the reflex, by having the idea pounded into your head with the wrath of an angry god. Anecdotally, the class was largely successful in its goal of setting up good habits before the bad ones settled in. After taking that class, people wrote code that was significantly more readable and maintainable than they had written before, and the habits tended to stick.

I suspect that at least part of the problems with effective communications is that we develop our early communications largely ad-hoc, and tend to build up a lot of bad habits in the process. Without concentrated effort to correct this habits, they remain and reinforce themselves through repetition. And of course, concentrated effort doesn't scale well.

[1] Granted, part of this was because the class was graded on a negative curve. If everyone got 145/150, then 145 is the average, which means a C.

<comment><USER20> In high school, my senior AP Eng. Comp class was similar. We had to write 2-3 page paper, in class, every day. The papers were all literary analysis (ugh!), but it definitely sharpened the 'writing muscle'.

I can write much faster, with more clarity, than most people I know today - all because of that one year of English.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This author does not understand topic sentences:

 _First, many seem to have received little writing instruction in high school. I initially noticed this as an undergraduate English major at Yale, where I helped peers revise their papers. I saw it again in graduate school at Tufts, where I taught freshman writing classes. And it has also struck me at Babson, where, for the past two years, I have instructed first-year students._

Maybe in informal academic writing, there's a special kind of topic sentence whose purpose is to introduce an opportunity for promiscuous name-dropping. I.e. in an essay on insomnia, one might write: "I usually wake up late. It's because I go to parties at Noam Chomsky's house, or on Richard Dawkins' yacht, or..."

<comment><USER22> It is name-dropping to an extent, but it is somewhat relevant. A lot of people would expect freshman students at prestigious schools to have a decent grasp of the English language.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Communicating well is just as hard as any other worthwhile activity and it doesn't come naturally to most people. It took me forever to figure out that part of the reason that I was always so frustrated with people was because I wasn't communicating well enough with them. Oftentimes I'd think I had expressed one thing and later I would find out that the other person had completely misinterpreted my meaning. After the n-th time I figured I was partly to blame and decided to do something about it and picking up a grammar book was the first step. It's not hard, it just takes practice like anything else and the benefits of being understood better are definitely worth it.</comment>


Ironclad C++: A Library-Augmented Type-Safe Subset of C++ (OOPSLA 2013) - <AUTHOR> http://acg.cis.upenn.edu/papers/ironclad-oopsla.pdf

<comment><AUTHOR> I also found a GitHub repo: [https://github.com/crdelozier/ironclad/](https://github.com/crdelozier/ironclad/)</comment>


What Happens When You Ban Affirmative Action in College Admissions - <AUTHOR> http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/heres-what-happens-when-you-ban-affirmative-action-in-college-admissions/ <comment><USER2> As a non-american, your obsession with race confuses me for one very specific reason: it is all about involvement, and never about achievement. I wonder if this is a consequence of the "every kid gets a trophy" phenomenon, where merely showing up is seen as the key.

Not once in that article were graduation rates from colleges, or post-college outcomes, mentioned. Surely, that is the most important factor in improving racial outcomes, getting people into education that improves their lifetime outcomes.

It is weird to me that the US has made the inbetween goal the only goal, e.g. rather than aiming to close racial gaps in outcomes like income, lifespan, likelihood of being a victim of violence etc and promoting policies that can be shown to achieve that, the US has made the goal to close it in opportunity, assuming (hoping?) that will improve outcomes. Seems to me that more blacks and hispanics at college who don't graduate or, almost worse, choose easier subjects with worse career options, perpetuates the problem rather than solves it. [http://spectator.org/articles/64739/little-understood- engine...](http://spectator.org/articles/64739/little-understood-engine- campus-unrest-racial-admissions-preferences) has a good summation of this argument.

I don't think it is really enough to make every college have the right racial mix, if what comes out the other end is a graduate pool that divides along not racial lines, but course lines. If Asians and Whites dominate the degrees that pay well, and Blacks and Hispanics the lesser degrees, we'll be left with a population that is educated, sure, but likely in more debt without much improvement in earnings potential. That hardly seems like a great outcome to me, and seems the complete opposite of what the goal should be.

<comment><USER3> > As a non-american, your obsession with race confuses me for one very > specific reason: it is all about involvement, and never about achievement.

As an American, your comment confuses me for one very specific reason: it doesn't at all reflect the actual dialogue about race I've experienced in this country (from _all_ sides of the dialogue), in which very much is about achievement.

> It is weird to me that the US has made the inbetween goal the only goal, > e.g. rather than aiming to close racial gaps in outcomes like income, > lifespan, likelihood of being a victim of violence etc and promoting > policies that can be shown to achieve that, the US has made the goal to > close it in opportunity, assuming (hoping?) that will improve outcomes.

Attending formal education at a higher level _is_ , itself, an outcome. Its also an outcome that is _proven_ to improve other outcomes (both for the person experience it, and in future generations, since not only is education attainment measured in highest level attended shown to be a significant influence on income and other outcomes for the person receiving it, its _also_ shown to be a strong factor in educational attainment of that person's children.)

(And, of course, affirmative action and other diversity efforts in colleges _aren 't_ the only mechanism, nor is college attendance the only goal, in improving the condition of historically-disadvantaged groups in the US. So the whole criticism of this being the only goal -- which seems to be based on nothing other than the fact that its the focus of the article -- is entirely misplaced.)

<comment><USER2> > Attending formal education at a higher level is, itself, an outcome.

See, there it is again - SHOWING UP. You didn't say "getting a degree" or "graduating to a high paying job" or even "putting themselves in a position to succeed in life" \- simply "attending". That's the problem - merely attending isn't enough to address any historical disadvantage other than "spent at least a day on a college campus as a student". In a list of historical disadvantages, this is just above "has used a ski lift at least once" in importance.

Step back, there are four important factors that make up the value of college: 1\. Attendance - how many people go to college. 2\. Graduation - where total graduates, not a percentage, dictates success. Because 25% of 4 is worse than 10% of 100,000 in addressing disadvantage. 3\. Degree choice - the choice of degree is almost as important as getting one. 4\. Post-graduation outcomes - like career earnings, opportunities, stability etc.

Attendance does not address true disadvantage unless the other three also improve - and specifically I think what society wants is more absolute numbers of graduates of good degrees, who go on to great post-graduate success. That seems, to me, a pretty uncontroversial summation of the issue.

The goal of uni quotas is to improve 1, so that 2, 3 and 4 improve. It isn't to address historical rates of attendance. But I could be wrong, and if the case is that the goal is simply getting more blacks and Hispanics to go to uni for at least a day/semester, outcomes be damned, then I withdraw my argument.

I think that the idea of addressing disadvantage is a lofty, important and praise worthy goal. And because it is such an important goal, policy choices have to be effective, and rigorously shown to be effective, because failure only fails the most disadvantaged more.

My fear is that a lot of people judge policy by INTENTIONS, not OUTCOMES, and this leads to inbetween goals of attendance trumping deeper issues.

As an analogy, the push to change people from "I donated so I feel good" to "my donations DID good" is a huge mental shift that effective altruists are championing. If quoatas help improve life outcomes, they need to stay. If they don't, if they put black and Hispanic students in positions to fail or almost worse, to choose lesser paths, then they should be replaced by something better.

Rather than quotas, what is needed is policy that puts black and hispanic students into colleges where they get the largest number of the best degrees for to improve their lives. Going to an Ivy league school to flunk out is worse than going to a tier 2 school and graduating with honors.

I could be wrong about the inbetween goals being a focus, and there may be a whole raft of research that shows these inbetween goals achieve positive outcomes making them the metric to focus on. I'd honestly like to be proven wrong, and know that these policies are on the right track, but it seems to me that the circle of policy to outcomes is rarely fully closed, and with even 15 years of data, the outcomes achieved should be dictating policy, not something more immediately measurable, but ultimately less important, like attendance rates.

TL;DR good outcomes dictate the quality of a policy, not intentions.

<comment><USER3> > See, there it is again - SHOWING UP.

Whatever you call it, it is in fact an outcome, and one with a demonstrated influence on other outcomes of interest, so its one that it make sense to target as a means of targeting those other outcomes.

> You didn't say "getting a degree" or "graduating to a high paying job" or > even "putting themselves in a position to succeed in life"

Incorrect. I didn't mention the first. I did mention future income as something that increased attendance of formal education is _demonstrated_ to affect, even short of getting a degree.

I didn't mention the third because it is a fuzzy concept, of which the second (which, again, I did mention) is a concrete operationalization.

> That's the problem - merely attending isn't enough to address any historical > disadvantage other than "spent at least a day on a college campus as a > student".

You assert this, but there is considerable evidence that further educational attainment, even at the level between "graduated high school" and "some college", has positive influence on other outcomes, including future income and one's childrens' future outcomes, including their own level of educational attainment.

> In a list of historical disadvantages, this is just above "has used a ski > lift at least once" in importance.

I am aware of no evidence supporting that the difference between "some ski lift use" and "no ski lift use", controlling for other known contributing factors, has any significant positive contribution to one's future income or other important outcome measures, either one's own or one's children. So, no, I don't think this is correct, at all.

> Attendance does not address true disadvantage unless the other three also > improve

While I'd want graduation and other factors that assume graduation to improve as well, the actual evidence is inconsistent with the claim that attendance without graduation has no effect on reducing disadvantage.

<comment><USER4> > Whatever you call it, it is in fact an outcome, and one with a demonstrated > influence on other outcomes of interest

Maybe, but if you optimize only this metric (enrollment) while disregarding all others (graduation), then you'll soon get ineffective results and the "demonstrated" influence will no longer hold true - simply enroll minorities, regardless of their knowledge or intelligence, and make sure most fail the next year. Will you be satisfied? Will it still correlate with the desired outcome?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The article presents an interesting fact. The article claims minority (presumably non-Asian) enrollment drops 23% when AA is banned. The converse of this is that 23% of non-Asian minorities are only there due to affirmative action, and would not be there under a meritocratic system.

I was previously told it's racist to believe things like this.

The article also begs another question: _"The Court expects that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today." But that decision was only 12 years ago, and the data suggests that we're still a long way from having proportional minority representation on large public college campuses._

Supposedly AA and similar programs were supposed to solve this problem, and colleges have been engaging in them for many years. At what point can we conclude that perhaps goals like getting a critical mass of minority students will simply not be effective, and conclude that the real problem lies elsewhere (and out of the control of college)?

<comment><USER6> > The converse of this is that 23% of non-Asian minorities are only there due > to affirmative action, and would not be there under a meritocratic system.

Your _curiously unstated_ but obviously logically necessary premise that non- AA systems are already magically meritocratic is what's racist.

Hope that clears it up for you.

<comment><USER5> Non-AA systems primarily look at grades, SAT, extracurriculars and the like. They tend to also include small alumni preferences and the occasional "this guy's dad donated $20M" preferences. Why do you believe they are not predominantly meritocratic?

<comment><USER3> > Why do you believe they are not predominantly meritocratic?

What is the concrete merit being assessed, and where is the evidence that the measures used provide a race, ethnicity, and gender-blind predictor or measure of the that concrete merit?

<comment><USER5> To check that such measures are race, ethnicity and gender blind, just run the following unit test on your admission procedure:

        allow_admission( x.copy(race=a) ) == allow_admission(x.copy(race=b))

<comment><USER3> That proves that your admission procedure does not consider race separately from the measures (and could be extended to do the same for gender and ethnicity, _mutatis mutandis_ ), it does not prove that the measures themselves are race, ethnicity, and gender-blind measures of the concrete merit which they are designed to assess.

If you want to make the case that they are meritocratic, it would be more convincing with a concrete definition of the merit they are intended to measure, evidence that they do measure that merit, and evidence that the manner in which they do is not sensitive to race, ethnicity, and gender.

Assuming that there is an objective, measurable merit being addressed, these are all empirically testable, and the claim can be assessed based on the evidence for it; if there is no such merit being addressed, the claim that they are meritocratic is empty.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "A society which has for hundreds of years done something special against the Negro must now do something special for the Negro." \--Martin Luther King, Jr.

<comment><USER8> Whomever you are, you have had ancestors that enslaved and ancestors that were enslaved.

<comment><USER9> While true, this is irrelevant.

Things like affirmative action do not exist as revenge or compensation for some past act, they are there to undo some of the still present damage from those acts.

<comment><USER8> >they are there to undo some of the still present damage from those acts.

In which case income/wealth/SES are the better metrics, as they ensure those who are damaged get help instead of relying on some other measure as a proxy for damage.

<comment><USER10> Income is easy to measure, but it does not capture wealth very well. Even if we measure all total assets, there is still an enormous amount of unmeasured wealth: can you go to a family member or friend for financial help in an emergency? Even when we compare people with the same income and total assets, that latter question tends to be different for white people versus black people.

In America, black people suffered organized, systemic oppression for generations which prevented them from accumulating wealth. That fact is not well capture by just looking at someone's income, or even all of their assets. That's also a question of all accumulated assets of all of their family and close friends.

A recent Pro Publica piece covers this very well: "The Color of Debt: How Collection Suits Squeeze Black Neighborhoods", [https://www.propublica.org/article/debt-collection- lawsuits-...](https://www.propublica.org/article/debt-collection-lawsuits- squeeze-black-neighborhoods). I originally heard it on This American Life: [http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio- archives/episode/573/s...](http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio- archives/episode/573/status-update)

I also think Ta-Nehisi Coates' famous piece covers the history of systemic financial oppression well, "The Case for Reparations", [http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the- case...](http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for- reparations/361631/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Why is 538 selecting public _research_ universities? Is that the full, technical name for typical US colleges, or is there a specific distinction here that would imply they are excluding whatever "non-research" universities are?

<comment><USER12> I imagine the distinction that they are trying to make is between research universities and liberal arts colleges (most of which are private, though there are some public). The term "research university" has connotations of a place with four-year undergraduate programs, with few or no two-year degree options, and likely the presence of graduate or PhD programs on campus, as well. In many ways, "research university" is the typical US college experience, though there are still many people who only attend "community colleges" or local public institutions where no research is performed and there may only be two-year degree programs.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher_education_in_the_United...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher_education_in_the_United_States#Liberal_arts_colleges)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> IMO, the real problem with differences in educational opportunity is the knock-on effects in hiring decisions. If there were many more jobs that could not discriminate on college degree, then Affirmative Action doesn't matter (since the net present value of a college degree goes down). As a nice side- effect, a college education is often a positional good in hiring decisions, so we're often better off as a whole if we stop consuming it. (That is, instead of looking at 5 college graduates for a firefighting job, we look at 5 non- graduates, and we get to save 20 person-years of education costs)

</comment><comment><USER14> In other words, not using racial preferences in admissions decisions lets the black college enrollment trends continue; though, as the article doesn't point out, 'not using mandated racial preferences (banning aff. action)' is not the _cause_ of disproportionate representation.

I think the argument against affirmative action is more, morally speaking, addressing the question, "should we use racial preference to fight racial preference?".

<comment><USER15> There's no moral question here. We have a disadvantaged group of people who are being actively discriminated against by a majority group. The easiest way as a society to make sure that we treat the group fairly is by creating a system that ensures that they are being represented in the university population. It's good for them, it's good for their classmates, it's good for the university, and it serves long-term goals by putting more educated people in their demographic.

<comment><USER5> Why does the majority discriminate against themselves and in favor of other minorities (Asians, Jews)?

<comment><USER15> Because innovation happens faster when there are more perspectives in the mix, and communities improve faster when there are more successful people in them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'd be interested in seeing the underlying data because there's a lot of noise you introduce by just equally weighing all colleges as data pts and then teasing out a weak trend. You could boil down the entire ban and non-ban populations to a single number for each group which would probably tell you more than these graphs do. Better yet do it over time.

</comment><comment><USER17> I looked at the graphs earlier and couldn't understand them. Can a stats wizard please help me understand how significant the difference between ban and no-ban are?

</comment><comment><USER18> I'd like to see research on whether banning affirmative action benefits Asian students, who are typically discriminated against.

<comment> finance-geek Not sure what sort of research you want to see, but the Michigan case opened up the books on who gets the raw deal. Summary here: [http://www.forbes.com/sites/danielfisher/2014/04/23/hidden-b...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/danielfisher/2014/04/23/hidden- bystanders-in-michigans-affirmative-action-case-asian-americans/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> One issue with affirmative action which rarely gets addressed: What is the definition of a certain race anyway?

If someone is from two black parents, fine, they're black. But what if one parent was black and one was white, are they black? Are their children black? What about their children's children? Are we going to spin out genetic testing, color cards, or start looking at people's family tree to decide eligibility?

Honestly I think the US has the right idea, but has the wrong implementation.

People who are from disadvantaged households SHOULD be given a leg up. They don't get the expensive tutors, and their parents might have to work longer hours, they cannot afford that trip to Europe the rich kid wrote their essay about, and their home life could be a lot more disruptive.

And the nice "perk" of discriminating based on household income and or poverty is: A lot of minorities will benefit because they're already in that group.

It also solves another issue we're seeing: Second generation kids of minorities whose parents are college educated and or professionals. The affirmative action program is designed to give kids with a disadvantage a more fair shake, but it is being used by minority kids who are by all definitions from middle class or from affluent households even more of an advantage, which is stealing spots from poor minority kids that actually need it!

So I would like to see affirmative action based on race scrapped. Base it on income. It will still largely benefit minority applicants, but we won't have to answer awkward questions like "how white is too white to be a minority?"

<comment><USER20> As an outsider looking in, it seems that the one thing the US hates more than affirmative action is exactly the kind of "socialist" interventions you describe.

I'm also wondering what would stop a structurally racist society from simply choosing poor people from their preferred race? You're begging the question if you assume that people will be chosen fairly with no regard to race under this system.

<comment><USER19> > I'm also wondering what would stop a structurally racist society from simply > choosing poor people from their preferred race?

It is illegal in the US. Also colleges could simply stop asking about race on applications.

<comment><USER20> Is it illegal for Asian Americans to be discriminated against when applying to top colleges, because it seems to be widely accepted that it happens all the time? And even if the form didn't explicitly say "Chinese-American" on it, I'm guessing the people who scrutinize every detail of their academic and personal development for admissions purposes can find some clues, like their name, to give them a chance to continue with their discrimination.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Seems like a pretty ludicrous analysis. Can be summed up as 'If you ban quotas, the people who get in because of quotas will not be as represented'. Uhh - duh? Will they have another post 'What happens when heavy objects are thrown up in the air - do they fall to the ground or float away?'

There is actually a much more interesting analysis of effects of AA on its recipients I read recently here: [http://spectator.org/articles/64739/little- understood-engine...](http://spectator.org/articles/64739/little-understood- engine-campus-unrest-racial-admissions-preferences)

<comment><USER8> I think the argument was 'if you ban quotas based on race in favor of other measure which should still help increase diversity, you don't get as good an effect as just quotas'.

That it is lower shouldn't be surprising, but how much lower or higher than the expected lower might be surprising.

<comment><USER22> >which should still help increase diversity

I think quotas by income would be a much more interesting experience for college students than quotas by race.

<comment><USER23> You would still have people complaining that it's not entirely merit based.

The point is that socioeconomic status (correlated with race and family income) has already impacted someone by the time they reach college application age. The idea behind quotas in public institutions is that it gives opportunity to those who did not have them previously.

A better analysis would be based on graduate performance, rather than admission rates, for demonstrating success.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Announcing the CovidActNow.org API - <AUTHOR> https://blog.covidactnow.org/covid-act-now-api-intervention-model/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN - I'm one of the team working on Covid Act Now. We're hoping this API is a useful input into COVID efforts (response planning, reopening initiatives, data visualization, etc).

Our model is only scoped to the USA (I wish we could include more countries, as this is a global pandemic. We haven't had the time to expand yet).

I'm sure the API could be improved in the next version. For example, we had some lively discussion around whether OBSERVED_INTERVENTION was intuitive enough variable name. (It uses an inferred R0 based on actual observed deaths, cases, and hospitalizations to generate forward projections).

If you have any feedback, let us know and we'll try and make it better in V2.

</comment><comment><USER2> Great stuff: how often is the underlying data refreshed?

<comment><AUTHOR> Case and death data is pulled in daily. We are working on getting real-time feeds for ADT (Admission / Discharge / Transfer) for ICU and Hospital Beds.

The model is run (and so forward projections are updated) once every 3 days at the moment.</comment></comment>


Learning Smalltalk from "Pharo by Example" - <AUTHOR> http://www.adamtornhill.com/reviews/pharobyexample.htm <comment><USER2> As a diehard functional programmer (who used to shun OOP as a fad) who's been dabbling with Pharo over the last few weeks, I must say I'm impressed. And, like the article pointed out, I'm having the same "seeing the light" experience that I first had with Lisp and Erlang.

After experiencing what OOP is really all about, an interactive environment with live objects sending messages to each other, readily available to be inspected and manipulated [0], I find it a drag to go back to Python and Clojure (less so) on my day job.

I now feel like every other OOP implementation (without the live environment) is just a horrific bastardized version of Smalltalk.

[0] [http://simberon.blogspot.nl/2013/01/swimming-with- fish.html](http://simberon.blogspot.nl/2013/01/swimming-with-fish.html)

<comment><USER3> I would say Smalltalk is really two concepts that people don't often encounter rolled in to one term. OOP in the Smalltalk sense is message passing and is a fantastic way to structure larger programs if possible. If you think about the internet as one large system, you can see that software complexity can scale with message passing methodologies separating components, especially if you don't care about latency and ultimate performance between them.

The live environment is another extremely powerful and useful aspect, but I wouldn't say that it is OOP. Smalltalk may have pioneered it but it is something that is just good in it's own right from a tools standpoint.

I actually think the more pure a programming language is in one concept the more academic it becomes. I see functional programming as being useful at a different complexity layer than Smalltalk style OOP (and of course Smalltalk does have many functional programming features).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Last year I added a touch of programming to my 9 year old son's home school activities. We tried several learning tools, starting with Scratch. I don't have anything negative to say about the various options we tried. However, the most positive exercise was him going through the "Prof Stef" tutorial built into Pharo. He really got into exploring and interacting with objects using tradition Smalltalk inspectors and workspaces (Do it, Show it, Inspect it). He loved that he could close the environment and open it the next day with all his play right where it was.

As a father, I loved that I didn't feel like a fraud as I could easily help him dig around and answer just about any question on what's really going on.

<comment><USER5> "He loved that he could close the environment and open it the next day with all his play right where it was." \- I can't understand how such a basic functionality is missing from all the popular IDEs and text-editors-turned- IDEs.

It blows my mind that people don't see what an IDE should look like and what it should do.

<comment><USER6> It's all tradeoffs.

There are clear benefits to your IDE remaining unaffected regardless of how badly your program messes up.

Not to mention being able to get your code out of the IDE easily (for versioning, backup, deployment and whatever else). Or having code that is readable/understandable and deployable without an IDE.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> iso-8859-1 It is worth noting that there is also a book on Seaside, a continuation-based web framework that runs in Pharo: [http://book.seaside.st/book](http://book.seaside.st/book)

</comment><comment><USER7> Going through Pharo By Example, and especially the similar book "Dynamic Web Development with Seaside"[0] (a smalltalk web framework), really helped me to understand many concepts in OOP. Seaside is worth checking out simply for how differently it does things (the author describes it as a "heterodox" framework). As others have said, once you experience the joy of the flow of programming in Smalltalk with a great environment, it's difficult to not miss it when using other languages.

[0] [http://book.seaside.st/book](http://book.seaside.st/book)

Edit: Actually, I guess some of the things done in Seaside are now more common, such as building up a webapp from reusable components that have code and some local state coupled with a view.

</comment><comment><USER8> I didn't really get oop until I learned Smalltalk, working through this book, and subsequently through the Seaside one, was a revelation.

It ruined things for me, most everyday tools and languages look messy and inelegant next to Smalltalk.

</comment><comment><USER9> Good article. I was at first taken aback though by the negative comment in the second to last paragraph about the book being out of date. But, the book is a little out of date.

I am mostly programming my current passion project in Clojure and Clojurescript, but, I shadow my project with a version in Pharo. I love the environment for experimenting and the visibility to what is going on in a computation is a refreshing change from trying to figure out when something goes wrong in my Clojurescript code.

<comment><USER10> There seems to be an updated version of the book, now I just need to find the time to read it :)

[https://github.com/SquareBracketAssociates/UpdatedPharoByExa...](https://github.com/SquareBracketAssociates/UpdatedPharoByExample)

<comment><USER9> I wish I could have given you +10 thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Can Pharo/Squeak programs utilize multiple cores? Last I checked, they used green threads and there weren't any plans to add true multi-threading.

<comment><USER12> > Last I checked, they used green threads and there weren't any plans to add > true multi-threading.

That is correct. My understanding is that supporting multiple hardware threads would require major work in the VM and the development of a memory model. There's some quite critical code in there relies on certain things not being a point for a possible context switch.

<comment><USER11> Isn't that a big setback for adoption though? The world is moving to multiple- cores, albeit slowly.

<comment><USER12> It's hard to tell. If you compare yourself with traditional scripting languages like CRuby, CPython, JavaScript, Perl, PHP, Lua, … — they all use green threads as well. If you compare yourself to C++, C#, Java then things look differently.

It's probably a bigger issue for the commercial Smalltalk vendors. I would assume for a free, open source project this can be "forgiven" more easily.

<comment><USER13> > It's hard to tell. If you compare yourself with traditional scripting > languages like CRuby, CPython, JavaScript, Perl, PHP, Lua, … — they all use > green threads as well.

"CRuby" (MRI) since 1.9 and "CPython" (forever, as far as I know) use native threads with a global runtime lock so only one thread running Ruby/Python code (but possibly more running native code in the same process) runs at any given time.

AFAIK, most JS environments don't provide threads (green or otherwise).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Hired Acquires Y Combinator Grad Py and Launches Assessments - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/07/hired-buys-y-combinator-grad-py-launches-assessment-tool/ <comment><AUTHOR> Anybody used Py, either for interview practice or as job applicant?</comment>


EmuTOS, a free operating system for Atari computers - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/emutos/emutos <comment><USER3> For those unfamiliar, this is a full open source (GPL) re-implementation of the original Atari ST (16/32 68000 system) operating system. Here's the long form:

The Atari ST's operating system ("TOS") was forked from Digital Research's 'GEMDOS' (a kind of CP/M 68k / MS-DOS alike disk operating system) along with 'GEM' (Graphic Environment Manager) which consisted of a device-independent graphics subsystem ('VDI') and a windowing system / application toolkit ('AES' application environment services). Atari was given a license from DR back in 1984, and effectively did their own port and forked from the mainline. The story of how that all went down is chronicled in an excellent series of blog posts by an original participant here: [http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/?p=995](http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/?p=995) and [http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/?p=1000](http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/?p=1000)

Note that this is 'Atari Corp', which was a company owned by Jack Tramiel after he quit Commodore. Not Atari Inc, which was the company responsible for Pong, the Atari 2600, and the original Atari 8-bit computers.

GEM was the brainchild of Lee Jay Lorenzen, who had worked on the Xerox Star project and who had advocated at Xerox for getting some of those concepts onto lower end PC-class machines. He joined DR in the early 80s and headed up the GEM project to work on that. He later left DR to start Ventura Publisher, an excellent DTP package which was built on GEM.

Digital Research went on to develop GEM on the x86 on a separate branch from the Atari version. They were forced by an Apple lawsuit to make modifications to it to make it less Mac-like. Atari's branch was exempted from this.

Atari Corp eventually packed it in, with their assets spread around like ashes, and the IP around their fork of GEM/GEMDOS has been lost to the world (well the source has been leaked but not legally). However after a series of acquisitions, DR's original IP -- including GEM, GEMDOS, CP/M 68k, etc. was open sourced under the GPL.

EmuTOS was created (many moons ago) from the original DR sources in order to have open source ROMs for ST emulators, effectively doing again what the team at Atari did back in the 80s: porting to the 68k Atari ST platform. But since then it's grown to be a full alternative to Atari's ROMs that works on more than just emulators.

In addition to being basically full feature (and quirk) parity with Atari's TOS, it also includes a full hard disk driver which is something Atari's never included without an add-on. This includes support for IDE drives for modern devices like compact flash cards, etc.

It also has been ported to and runs well on other 68k and Coldfire platforms, and runs well on the Amiga, on the Firebee (a modern Coldfire based Atari-like machine), and headless on Coldfire evaluation boards. It's also been recently ported to the 'Kiwi' 68008 DIY microcomputer.

<comment><USER4> > ... it also includes a full hard disk driver which is something Atari's > never included without an add-on.

I don't remember having to do anything to use a hard disk with any of the official versions of TOS.

I have an SH204 "shoebox" HD from the initial developer offer.

<comment> amiga-workbench Those ACSI cables are a massive pain in the ass to lay your hands on nowadays, the D-Sub connectors haven't been manufactured in the necessary size for ages.

<comment><USER5> Soembody did a production run a couple of years ago: [https://www.bigmessowires.com/2016/06/04/db-19-resurrecting-...](https://www.bigmessowires.com/2016/06/04/db-19-resurrecting- an-obsolete-connector/)

<comment> amiga-workbench Yeah, I managed to grab the last pair off eBay.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So frustrating with Atari.. they were only a little behind the Apple Macintosh (but with color!). They almost made the IBM PC:

[https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/7135/the-...](https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/7135/the- almost-was-atari-ibm-pc)

<comment><USER3> Different Atari tho. Atari Inc (that made the A8 machines you link to here) and Atari Corp were two different companies. The latter headed by Jack Tramiel with a few assets purchased from the former.

<comment><AUTHOR> Those assets included the A400/800, which was designed by Jay Miner, same guy that went on designing the Amiga that Commodore bought

<comment><USER3> Yeah and those assets also potentially included rights to the Amiga Loraine IP itself, depending on who you talk to. Hence the lawsuit that ensued.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I knew this existed but had no idea it was still under pretty active development. How cool!

<comment><USER3> Very active. Getting close to 1.0, and pretty much at parity and beyond the original TOS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Tramiel Operation System (TOS) named. after the legendary computer icon, Jack Tramiel.

<comment><AUTHOR> A trio of Jack Tramiel profiles by Kim Justice:

JACK ATTACK: The Story of Jack Tramiel at Commodore, Part 1 - Kim Justice [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nd9kmBn0M9k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nd9kmBn0M9k)

Jack Tramiel Part 2: The Commodore 64 vs The TI-99/4A and the American Computer Crash - Kim Justice [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDJqocxoOBA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDJqocxoOBA)

The Last Stand of Jack Tramiel: The Atari ST vs The Commodore Amiga - <USER2> Justice [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bMJt65Jm5E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bMJt65Jm5E)</comment></comment>