Short film set entirely on a teen's computer screen - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcocreate.com/3017108/you-need-to-see-this-17-minute-film-set-entirely-on-a-teens-computer-screen <comment><USER3> Am I the only one that doesn't really like it? I see all these websites talking about how amazing it is, but it's just, eh. Everything pre- chatroulette was alright and realistic but then a third of the movie is wasted time jumping around dick shots until he magically hits upon a girl who has a quick speech talking about how fake Facebook is.

The bond between those two parts doesn't really work for me. And it seems like he just ran out of ideas for concluding the Facebook paranoia/break up scene so he cheated with the speech.

It's like a bunch of people see this movie is completely on a screen and it's this hard hitting revelation that relationships are now on screen and so this movie perfectly encapsulates a young person's relationship.

<comment><USER4> I think this format has a lot of potential, but it's also really hard to do well.

To me, this film felt much more like a stylistic proof-of-concept than something that's been realized. Having Noah change the status in Amy's account served the plot but not the story--it was a quick shortcut that got the film to the length that those who created it wanted, but it struck me as unrealistic.

This had a higher level of production behind it than The Scene, but The Scene --at least what I watched of it--did much more exploration. Granted, they're about different things, but this seemed much more glib. I think it was really more about how to execute the idea than about the content, where I feel The Scene explored the content better. I don't think either of them got it right, but I really appreciate the attempts. I'd love to see more exploration of this sort of thing.

<comment><USER5> Agreed. The status change seemed very unlikely.

It really got me to cringe during the mouse hovers on the buttons though. That was pretty great.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is this how people actually use their computers? I only watched the first couple of minutes, but it seems kind of odd. I did grow up with internet (25 now) but I don't use Facebook, so maybe I'm out of touch... but seriously do people just open tabs or flash games and porn while talking to someone via video chat? What's the point of video chatting then?

I will say though, the way he didn't really pay attention to her in Skype is similar to what I experience in person... with regards to people texting. I make a conscious effort myself to not text while with another person, and if I do text, I make sure to pause if they talk to me.

<comment><USER7> Maybe it was more of a way to demonstrate that she didn't mean nearly as much to him as the electronic status he shared with her.

Or maybe the younger generation does multiplex much more than we've been accustomed to (I'm also 25 and don't use facebook).

<comment><USER8> I think the'generational gap' here is fascinating. I'm 18 years old and I browse the net like this, as do most of my male friends from conversations we've had. The only difference for me is that I don't have porn up while talking to friends.

<comment><USER9> As a 22 years old, my online life is a lot slower paced than in the movie. I also don't play video games(that often), I chat on IRC a lot, and don't use IM speak.

<comment><USER10> You use IRC.

No offense, but that alone puts you into a small minority.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Well I really didn't expect to end up watching this all the way through. Worth every second. Be aware this is NSFW but I'm not sure if the film would have lost anything if the NSFW clips had been left out.

<comment> jack-r-abbit Really unfortunate about the NSFW part! This could have been a great tool to show kids about the darker sides of social media and the skewed perceptions you can have with digital communication... and stuff like that. But I don't really want my kids to see a bunch of dicks. The Chatroulette part could have been just as powerful without actually showing dangling cocks and jerking off.

<comment> jack-r-abbit Too many replies all bashing me for the same opinion to reply to them each so I'll just reply to myself and address them.

I don't think making a PG edit of this video would be any different than the radio edits they make to songs or tv edits they make to movies so the FCC doesn't kill them. Anyone who enjoys the edited version but would still like to check out the original is free to. I would never tell an adult what they can and cannot listen to or watch. Have at it. But I do like to keep a certain level of appropriateness for my kids. If you want to show this to your kids.. have at it. You're free to do as you feel is best for your kids.

There will come a day when the sex talk happens. It will probably come sooner than I would like but I'm not blind to the reality that kids find out about stuff from friends before their parents. But I don't think the sex talk needs to be wrapped into a more general talk about the dangers of the internet and digital communication. There are more things to worry about on the web than cocks. I'd like to address those things with my kids without cocks. There will be plenty of time for us to talk about and look at cocks when it is important to the subject at hand. IMO, it is not that important for this topic.

The creep factor of Chatroulette could still be portrayed without actually showing the cocks. The creator chose to show them. Fine. That was his/her choice to make. That just limits the audience a bit.

I don't think of it so much as "sheltering" but more like waiting for the appropriate time and way to talk about certain subjects.

As mad as everyone got at me for having an opinion (one that I am certain is not unique)... I can only imagine how angry you'd get if I treated your opinions the same way. I feel like some of you want to come to my house and force me to show the video to my kids.

<comment><USER12> The video has nothing to do with the "dangers of the internet", whatever that means. Moreover, I don't think anyone cares whether you shelter your kids and/or teens from sex (err, sorry, I meant "wait for the appropriate time and way to talk about sex").

I think people perceive that as being a facet of modern suburban parenting with a historically lopsided set of priorities. You may disagree with them, and that's fine, but to accuse them of wanting to come to your home and force you to show the video is a truly bizarre overreaction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Seems a bit like "Welcome To The Scene" but less interesting. [http://www.welcometothescene.com/](http://www.welcometothescene.com/)

Notice that there are two seasons, you can access the first one here: [http://www.welcometothescene.com/download.php](http://www.welcometothescene.com/download.php)

<comment><USER14> Yeah, I thought the same thing...

And of course, there's also "Welcome To Teh Scene". [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scene_%28miniseries%29#Paro...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scene_%28miniseries%29#Parody)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> For anyone who enjoyed this and might like to look at similarly themed pieces (impact of social media / internet communication on relationships) - <USER2> following might be of interest:

* Catfish [movie, USA] - [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1584016/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1584016/)

* Black Mirror [series, UK] - [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2085059/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2085059/)

Both a little on the bleak/dark side, forewarning!

<comment><USER16> The first video I remember in this style was "The Website Is Down".

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8_Kfjo3VjU](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8_Kfjo3VjU)

<comment><USER17> Great stuff. Came to post that one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> As a 17-year-old, this hit disturbingly close to home. Absolutely brilliantly executed, and definitely worth the 17 minutes.

<comment><USER19> Did you start checking facebook as well whenever he got a new message?

<comment><USER18> No but I did check my phone when he got a text :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> What surprised me most is not the movie but the realization of how much communication overload has changed over time.

I am old enough to have lived the same situation depicted here on two different communication media: IRC chats and BBS + CB radio before that.

The difference is that i experienced communication overload in a time 1990->2000 when such experience marked you irrevocably as a geek.

Today this is open to the masses.

</comment><comment><USER21> The early part of the video gives some insight into why his girlfriend broke up with him: she's trying to have a conversation with him on Skype, but he's barely paying attention to her while playing with that game. It's almost like he lost interest in what she had to say a long time ago, and she finally got tired of it.

<comment><USER22> She didn't break up with him. His paranoia/out-of-touchness convinced him that she did.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> There's a similar short-film that I thought was more thought-provoking -- [http://vimeo.com/channels/staffpicks/42857970](http://vimeo.com/channels/staffpicks/42857970)

</comment><comment><USER24> reminds me of "The Sceen" [http://www.welcometothescene.com/](http://www.welcometothescene.com/)

<comment><USER3> Be sure to check out Season 1

[https://technutopia.com/](https://technutopia.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Things I liked: Excessive porn may decrease a man's desire to engage women, exposure to sexual situations may be occurring at younger ages, the attention span of younger generations may be decreasing. (I use the term "may" because I don't actually know the extent to which these things could be harmful.)

Things I didn't like: Noah was a scummy person for whom I had no sympathy (not paying attention to his gf, lying, breaking into her account, having no sense of subterfuge at that, using chatroulette), the girl's obnoxious and clichéd speech at the end, and the numerous exaggerated aspects. And I would argue a lot of this video is exaggerated, like the ridiculous music- "cuddle jams" played immediately when Noah starts feeling down.

Overall, I'm not a fan of the video.

</comment><comment><USER26> This is a pretty negative portrayal (obviously) of the dark side of social media. I think that it should be taken that people should be careful about getting too sucked in rather than thinking that social media is "evil". A lot of good and amazing things have come from Facebook (maybe chat-roulette not so much). For example, the Soccer Goalie story is pretty moving ([http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpOvYWd4KW4](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpOvYWd4KW4)). Granted this came directly from Facebook, there are other similar stories out there if you look.

<comment><USER27> I don't understand how this shows the dark side of social networks. It does show the ugly underbelly of human interaction, but that side is no uglier for the technology used. The guy was lonely, his gf was worried about something else, so he became insecure & impetuous and decided to move on, as young people are wont to do. Only today it's happening through websites and webcams instead of phone, telegraph, snail mail, or message-in-bottle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> made me want to rewatch Antonio Campos's Afterschool, the first feature-length film I came across that tackled the youtube generation. That film is slow- paced to the point of irony given its subject (this video is Crank by comparison), but its basically similar to what you would imagine if this kid was a couple years younger and at boarding school, and if the camera followed him beyond the screen.

<comment><USER29> Yes! I thought of Afterschool too. One of my favorite films.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> What's so crazy about it? I don't get it.

</comment><comment><USER31> That was surprisingly good, 'weak' start but tied it well in the end. If you are reading the comments to check if it's worth the time, it slides well through the time it takes. And it will speak to you, because it does what a good short should do. It makes you think.

</comment><comment><USER32> Brings this to mind:

The More You Multitask, the Worse You Get at It

[http://priceonomics.com/the-more-you-multitask-the-worse- you...](http://priceonomics.com/the-more-you-multitask-the-worse-you-get-at- it/)

</comment><comment><USER33> Genius, loved it.

</comment><comment><USER34> rooofl, you're hell-banned. Looking through your comment history, I don't see why.

<comment><USER35> One of roofl's two visible comments would appear to insult HN. Perhaps that pulled in some downvotes or a direct hellban by the mods?

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Good demonstration of sensory overload looks like

</comment><comment><USER37> I enjoyed it, I think if this film was out when I was a teen several years back it would have been enlightening to parents about typical teenage computer use and how much it differs from their own.

</comment><comment><USER38> welcometothescene.com - web series starting in 2004. So much for "entirely on a computer screen" being unique.

</comment><comment><USER39> Reminds me of [http://www.welcometothescene.com](http://www.welcometothescene.com)

</comment><comment><USER40> Why would you bookmark chatroulette?

<comment><USER41> I've seen people bookmark Facebook and Youtube as well, even though they can get to them through their browser's version of Speed Dial or by simply typing the first letter of the link in the address bar and pressing return.

<comment><USER42> I understand the mouse is being used as a standin protagonist, but why bother bookmarking something and then not using the bookmark if you're using the mouse anyway

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Does Facebook really work so fast in the USA? :D

<comment><USER44> It depends on your ISP, time of day, computer resources, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> interesting to view into a new generation's issues from a gen-Xer POV.

</comment><comment><USER46> What the hell was that line about not wanting an Asian roommate?

</comment><comment><USER47> I love the clicks and keypress sounds.

Oh and I liked the film itself.</comment>


$68B California bullet train project likely to overshoot budget and deadline - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-bullet-train-cost-final-20151025-story.html <comment><USER2> I have a question to all the naysayers and praisers of the future autonomous car: have any of you ever been on a high speed rail link in europe? Assuming everything else equal, they're just a far superior way to travel, where you can walk around, drink coffee, work in a relatively quiet and steady environment and all of that going 300 km/h.

That said, there are obvious questions why the project is far more expensive than a comparable one in Europe, but that is a completely separate question.

<comment><USER3> The original plan called for a LA to San Fran trip time of less than 2 hours or 40 minutes, which would have required peak speeds of over 350 km/h (faster than any other train in the world), and average speeds of 320 km/h. This would be difficult to achieve anywhere, but it's especially hard (read: utterly impossible) to achieve on that route, since for regulatory reasons the train will be limited to 160 km/h for significant portions of the route.

Since then, the plan has changed repeatedly, and not for the better. It currently looks like average trip times will be in the 4-6 hour range. That is hopefully achievable (although they haven't built it yet), but one thing it _isn 't_ is high speed. (They're hoping to work in some "express" trains which will do better, but it's an open question whether they're manage it, and even if they do, they won't be remotely as fast as Europe, China, or Japan.)

You're talking about trains going 300 km/h, but California is looking to build a train that will be doing _literally_ half that. By many common definitions, it's not even "high speed rail".

> I have a question to all the naysayers

I love high speed rail, and I hope maybe one day California will try and build a high speed rail network. :) Naysaying what they're actually building doesn't mean I don't like rail.

<comment> guard-of-terra High speed rail between Moscow and Sankt Peterburg takes 4 hours exactly. This includes leaving Moscow urbanized area from city centre, a few intermediate stops, and traversing Sankt Peterburg to city centre. I don't see why traveling from SF to LA would take more than 3:30 given that the distance is 100 kilometers shorter.

(It also costs around $50 currently but obviously don't expect that)

<comment><USER4> WP says that train only goes 250 km/h and that the railway is congested, with another rail being built for just the high speed. So it is really a low lower bound.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The sixty-billion-dollar bullet train they're proposing in California would be the slowest bullet train in the world at the highest cost per mile," Musk said. "They're going for records in all the wrong ways." California's high- speed rail is meant to allow people to go from Los Angeles to San Francisco in about two and a half hours upon its completion in—wait for it—2029. It takes about an hour to fly between the cities today and five hours to drive, placing the train right in the zone of mediocrity, which particularly gnawed at Musk. He insisted the Hyperloop would cost about $6 billion to $10 billion, go faster than a plane, and let people drive their cars onto a pod and drive out into a new city.

From Ashlee Vance Book on Elon Musk

<comment><USER6> To be fair, experts said that $6-$10 billion estimate was not realistic. First time projects always overshoot their budget. Also, it assumed placing tubes on the highway, instead of buying land (by far the biggest expense of the project).

<comment><USER7> > Also, it assumed placing tubes on the highway, instead of buying land

Which is a good idea and should be done. In fact any scheme that doesn't include this should be by definition classed as a unnecessary money-sink.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Politically, from my own personal experience, most infrastructure projects are sold to the public with a much lower price tag than what they know to be the actual costs, because people are incredibly price sensitive when approving important infrastructure projects.

What we need is a true accounting of the cost of things, and the political willingness to do them. This way we don't have to worry about politicians 'underbidding' their projects just to get enough popular support. It becomes a rigged game when that happens, where the public approves projects that everyone on the project side knows will costs several times that early estimate.

If we want the bridges and the tunnels and the shared transportation, sanitation, etc. We need to understand that these projects cost money, and we need to be able to have t true accounting of them, not one that is politically convenient.

Otherwise, we'll just have this, with 2x and 3x being common run ups, ad infinitum.

Good numbers, on all projects, would help us better allocate our future dollars. Big numbers shouldn't kill meaningful and worthwhile projects. Bad ideas should.

The Swiss seem to be able to do it.

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

On time and on budget.

<comment><USER9> I've noticed during the HS2 high-speed rail arguments in the UK that one effect of giving more accurate costing up front (which the UK govt appears to have got better at recently) is that people will just double your numbers anyway, due to long-standing lack of trust. Despite the government giving a very generous £40bn cap on the project, opposition groups still quote £80bn as the final price.

Of course, no-one will actually know if the costing was accurate until it's finished. Does being accurate really pay off for a politician?

<comment><USER10> And then there are the people who will round that figure up. I've heard some Green campaigners calling it a £100bn project...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The tunnels under the San Gabriel Mountains is an _optional_ alignment that is being _studied_ by the CHSRA at the request of the residents who live in affected areas.

It may indeed not be cost-effective, at which point one would assume the CHSRA will go with a different alignment. (The others of which have been studied for longer. This tunnel alignment is a new option they wanted to study before finalizing the route for this stage.)

</comment><comment><USER12> From the submission yesterday: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10448702](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10448702)

America seems to be unfixable:

"The 11-mile East Side Access tunnel in New York City, for example, is 14 years behind schedule, and the tab has grown from $4.3 billion to $10.8 billion. Boston's 3.5-mile Big Dig was finished in 2007 — nine years behind schedule and at nearly triple the estimated cost."

<comment><USER13> Blue state America, at least. Around here we routinely do projects on time and budget.

Might be as much a scale problem, are there any Red state America projects being done on vaguely similar scales, with, say, a billion dollars as a minimum baseline?

<comment><USER14> Can't say much for America, but in the UK our own HS2 high speed rail line, which probably won't be too far longer than 200 miles of track in total is projected to cost £40bn, with some suggestions that the true cost will be closer to £80bn.

Conversely we're also building a new west-east railway across/beneath London that seems to be going fairly well for about £15bn.

High speed rail is just a hugely expensive thing to get built in the developed world it seems.

<comment><USER12> The question is why? If China can build 10,000 miles of HSR and the developed world can't build 400 miles, won't there be an infrastructure penalty at some future time?

Spain has built 1500 miles of HSR so it seems that the extreme high cost is avoidable.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High- speed_rail_in_Europe#Sp...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High- speed_rail_in_Europe#Spain)

<comment><USER15> Two major drivers of the cost, as I understand it, are geography and geology of the region and existing land values, especially near the termini (eminent domain, in the US, requiring fair compensation to existing landholders.)

<comment><USER13> There's also non-cost factors involved with the PRC: for a land based empire like their's, internal lines of communication are critical, and since 1866 Prussia has shown the utility of railroads for that. Faster ones are obviously better, modulo how much heavy equipment you might need to move as well (for a lot of the PRC's issues, lightly armed troops are just fine).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The $68 billion figure is actually an overestimate. It's not in 2015 dollars; rather, it's adjusted for hypothetical future inflation. So if a tunnel is planned for 2025, that tunnel is priced in inflated 2025 dollars (using whatever made-up number for future inflation), not 2015 dollars.

</comment><comment><USER17> Not surprised. But not hugely important in the scheme of things. The fact that the project exists and is being worked on seems a win to me given public transit history in the USA.

<comment><USER18> Building more trains and other fixed-location transit systems that will be finished right around the time autonomous road vehicles start to become viable seems like a bad idea.

Public transit planners need to get a clue, seriously. The cars of 2050 are not going to be their father's Oldsmobile. This is more of an issue in urban environments than for cross-country transit, of course, but still... if trains are the answer, then we're asking the wrong question.

<comment> guard-of-terra One train is like 500 autonomous vechicles on one road, and more comfortable. It will still win energy-wise. That you can hop on robotaxi after arriving makes it even more desirable.

<comment><USER19> > It will still win energy-wise.

What are we basing that on? Let's look at some numbers:

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

Let's take the Eurostar trains as an example:

> The Three Capitals sets are 394 m (1,293 ft) long and have 766 seats, > weighing 752 tonnes.

Most of the other trains seem similar. The mass is about one tonne per passenger. So in terms of mass of metal you need to drag around per passenger, a _full_ train is very similar to a small car (say, the latest model Mazda Miata which weighs 1056 kg) occupied by a single passenger.

But of course trains are very rarely entirely full (and cars average more than one passenger). But the whole mass of the train needs to make the journey regardless of whether there's people onboard or not! The train I caught the other day was probably dragging around ten tons of metal for every passenger. This is what makes trains a horrendously energy-inefficient means of transport.

Aerodynamics? Self-driving cars could draft behind each other at high speed. Probably not a drag coefficient quite as low as the aerodynamically designed train, but it also has a colossally lower cross sectional area, because a train is ridiculously high and ridiculously wide (in the interests of not being ridiculously long, and also for historical reasons).

What else? Oh yes, the car doesn't have to stop 'til it reaches the destination, trains tend to have stops along the route.

For speed, I don't see any reason why, once self-driving is solved, you couldn't have cars cruising at 200mph+ in self-organised "trains" on the existing I-5. No present car is really optimised for that kind of thing, so it's difficult to say how hard it would be, you'd need different tyre compounds for a start.

As for comfort I'll take the privacy of my own little bubble over travelling in the close company of four hundred random strangers.

<comment> guard-of-terra It won't be your own little bubble. You're not going to own a 200MPH autonomous car. You will lease it by hour.

And even that is very far away. Meanwhile trains just work. No high-speed connection between LA and SF is an anomaly by world standards given size, proximity and economical importance of two cities.

Also, modern high-speed trains don't have 4-person compartments (or have those at premium), they are rows of seats not unlike plane business class seats. You usually have power, sometimes wi-fi. You can get coffee and a newspaper.

<comment><USER18> _You 're not going to own a 200MPH autonomous car. You will lease it by hour._

I don't _want_ to own it. I don't _have_ to own it. The transit authority can own and operate it.

This will be so much better than fixed-track transit it's not even funny.

<comment> guard-of-terra Why? I can understand that for short trips but not for 3+ hours.

<comment><USER18> Let's try an experiment. Let's meet in the lobby of an office building in the middle of downtown LA, and see how long it takes each of us to get to a bar in downtown SF. Loser buys the drinks.

You fly at 500 MPH, I'll drive at 65-70 or whatever the speed limit on I-5 is these days.

I will win this bet, most likely. You will lose. A train won't help you much, if at all, because it's going to embark and disembark on its own fixed schedule, probably in some crappy/scary part of town miles away from where you need to go. (Here's another reason: eventually some terrorists are going to attack the train. The TSA will muscle its way in, and you'll have to arrive at the station an hour or two early, just like we do now when we fly.)

There's just too much hassle and overhead involved in multi-modal transit... which is why people who can afford to drive still do, even when they have alternatives.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Autonomous cars are about to make this entire project redundant. It should be canceled, or maybe turned into a new kind of highway designed for 100% autonomous cars.

I'd feel much safer in a private car pod going 40 mph than a manually operated car going 80 mph. And I'd feel more comfortable in a private car pod than a busy public train.

<comment><USER15> > Autonomous cars are about to make this entire project redundant.

No, they aren't. One of the major motivations of the project is avoiding both the environmental cost of operating autos on the same route, and as an alternative to the infrastructure costs (including land lost from other uses) of adding the road capacity to handle volume growth on the routes the HSR will support.

Autonomous cars don't address either of those concerns.

<comment><USER18> _One of the major motivations of the project is avoiding both the environmental cost of operating autos on the same route, and as an alternative to the infrastructure costs (including land lost from other uses) of adding the road capacity to handle volume growth on the routes the HSR will support._

This is absurd. The cars are going to get _much_ more efficient, and the roads are already there.

<comment><USER15> The road capacity is not already there, and to meet the increased capacity needed will be quite expensive. The cost avoided in terms of road load was a major justification for HSR.

<comment><USER18> You don't think that a fleet of networked, semi-autonomous vehicles will be at least several hundred percent more efficient at using existing road space than human drivers?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> For $68 billion, you could fly everybody in San Francisco to Los Angeles, and everybody in Los Angeles to San Francisco, and back again, about forty times. And that's _before_ it starts going over budget.

But of course, the line doesn't go from Los Angeles to San Francisco. It goes from Burbank to Merced, on the good-governance principle that if you build something completely freaking useless, then somebody might find another hundred billion dollars to turn it into something useful at some point in the indeterminate future.

<comment><USER16> The $68 billion figure includes the full length of the line from downtown LA to downtown SF. The segment from Burbank to Merced is just the first one to be built. There are already tracks (albeit not high speed ones) from Burbank to LA and from Merced to Oakland, so when that section finishes you'd still have a one seat ride except for the last five miles crossing San Francisco Bay (for which you'd have to transfer to BART).</comment></comment>


VRAM page table entry compression improves DRI drivers in Linux 3.16 - <AUTHOR> http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/2014-May/059963.html

<comment><USER2> According to the patch, it's ati/radeon specific - doesn't affect other drivers. This probably deserves mentioning in the title.

<comment><USER3> Sounds like something that could be rolled into the intel driver at least.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Since most VRAM data is quite large, this seems like a pretty nice optimization. Lots of images are multiple megabytes, or 100s of KB at least.</comment>


Better recommendations from Twitter - <AUTHOR> http://scripting.com/stories/2010/08/05/betterRecommendationsFromT.html <comment><USER2> This looks promising. It would be nice if they showed why certain people are recommended and let us see more recommendations like a certain person too. Somewhat like Amazon recommendations.</comment>


Show HN: Tinder for Baby Names – Babyname App - <AUTHOR> http://babyname-app.com/

<comment><USER2> I'd definitely try it once it's time to pick a name for my future child. But not sure, if there's enough market for it to make it sustainable... Looks cool though! Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks man, glad you like it! The sustainability is a good point! Within the US there are around 11k new borns per day and the average age of first time parents is 25.6 years old. Worldwide there are everyday around 370k new borns and the average age for first time parents is even younger (22.8 years old). That in combination with how much money first time parents spend for their new borns can be an interesting market. We are right now working on the next update. If you have any additional thoughts please let us know. Happy holidays!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> So we would use this once or twice in our lives then never use it again? I don't think I need an app for that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fair point! Based on research the finding a baby name phase is quite stressful experience. There are a lot of books, sites and tools out there. But it's all cluttered. Most of my friends used google docs to keep track of their progress. With Babyname we are working on a solution that simplifies the process + adds more fun to it. At the end you could name anything with it.</comment></comment>


Living your life without excuses - <AUTHOR> http://blog.dinohusejnovic.com/the-man-with-no-excuses/

<comment><USER2> Watching a story like Kyle's helps to remind a person that instead of making excuses for the obstacles in your life that it is far better to focus on overcoming them. It also points out that your obstacles can also be turned in to something positive that can help someone else facing similar challenges.

</comment><comment><USER3> Thanks for posting this!</comment>


The Mirrorball - <AUTHOR> http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/4395

<comment><USER2> Fine, I'll bite. I have no idea what the hell the author's talking about. S/he keeps it deliberately vague because failing to do so would mean "the Thing gets in and it is less about The Thing than what The Thing happens to be finding in the weakness in human beings". Then s/he lists some troubling trends with the things enables (i.e. by "pointing at the thing" rather than naming it explicitly).

I don't really see any point to this writing style though (unless the only point is so the author can feel clever). I'm going to guess though that anyone who understands what the author is getting at already has the same interpretation of "the thing" as the author and thus already agrees, that anyone who would disagree with the author (if the post were less vague) will continue to disagree, and that anyone who could be swayed is left in bamboozlement.

</comment><comment><USER3> This reminds me of Timecube.</comment>


The model minority is losing patience - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21669595-asian-americans-are-united-states-most-successful-minority-they-are-complaining-ever <comment><USER3> One reason that Asians outperform other racial groups in the United States is overlooked in the article: the difficulty of immigration. Most whites and blacks are born within the US, and Hispanics are either born or move into the US by simply crossing a land border. For Asians to come to the US, they have to cross the Pacific Ocean. In order to do that, they have to be either rich (at least middle class), highly educated, or extremely adventurous and self motivating. The Pacific Ocean filters out many would-be Asian Americans that would have lowered the average of the "modelness" of the group.

<comment><USER4> It's also entirely possible that, on average, Asian people are more intelligent than other groups. We won't really know for a long time, as discussing such things is taboo.

<comment><USER5> I'm Asian and I don't think it's possible. Jews on the other hand are confirmed with the most Nobel prizes per capita. :)

<comment><USER6> I'm Asian too. I don't think it's because of raw intelligence. Asians work hard, but in a very confined way, and visible way. For example in high school, you work hard in school to get into a great college, your hard work is visible.

Scientific discovery and technological innovation takes more than hard work, it takes the willingness to be obsessed with specific and sometimes obscure fields and forfeit social prestige and stability. Neither of those things are praised by the Asian culture.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> See also a longer text on the same problem: "The Myth of American Meritocracy" (2012) [http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-myth- of-...](http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-myth-of-american- meritocracy/) (or, as I would summarize it, "why Asians are the new Jews").

</comment><comment><USER7> I'll be very happy when everyone can just stop worrying about what race everyone else is. I understand the issue, but at what point does it sound ridiculous to even use the term minority when there are 1B+ Chinese and not much less Indian descendants around the world? In the tech world it is certainly ridiculous. Trying to micro-categorize who is a minority in what context has to qualify as some sort of vanity.

<comment><USER8> The title may refer asians as a minority. However, while asians definitely aren't a minority in the context of the world, they still are a minority in the context of the united states and Europe. All of that, however, is completely irrelevant of the issue. What is the issue? Vanity? No. The issue is racism.

When a race delivers quantitative metrics that beats other races out of the water, what does it mean? When black people dominate in basketball and athletics does it mean their race is genetically and physically superior to others? When asians dominate academically does it mean asians are genetically more intelligent?

I don't know the answer to these questions. It may be that asians just work harder... but I do know one thing: All races are NOT equal. Political correctness states that although races look different, all races are otherwise equal. Although this idea permeates the cultural reality of the United States, there is no logical universe where this makes sense. If races look different, then the possibility of other metrics being different is a logical induction.

What does this mean? The implications are scary. Historical mistreatment of black people have made this concept a very touchy issue in the united states.

While it is of my personal opinion that asians are academically successful mainly due to hard work, I do believe that the heart of the issue that articles like this discuss is this: We live in a culture where we are taught that all races are equal, this is not the logical reality and subconsciously we all know it. It's what causes the discrimination in the first place and it's what causes defensive comments like this to be posted.

<comment><USER9> I think that's a bit literal.

No one thinks all races are equal in a genetic sense, it is obvious they are different.

They should be 'treated' equally is the thing we are taught. We all have our unique genetic advantages and disadvantages, but there shouldn't be social disadvantage based on genetics. It is good we are taught this, because it requires social change.

Also to answer your points directly, they do not at all suggest races are not equal. "Asian" isn't a race, and "Working harder" is a cultural/social quality not a genetic quality. Same with black people dominating basketball, could just as easily be explained with social qualities rather than genetic. Really you have presented weak hypothesises in the form of rhetorical questions.

Otherwise, by your same reasoning: White men people are genetically superior at leading, running companies, space travel, research, etc... Where as the truth, I suspect, lies in the context of their social situation, not their race.

<comment><USER10> > No one thinks all races are equal in a genetic sense, it is obvious they are > different.

I don't find that at all obvious.

<comment><USER11> No? Why? It isn't racist to say Africans have darker skin or different shaped faces to Caucasians, you know. It's a fact.

<comment><USER10> Ah, I guess it depends on what you mean by 'equal'.

But I also think that's probably less of a fact than you think, depending on what you mean by it. There are certainly some people identified as being 'Caucasian' who have darker skin than some people identified as 'African', for instance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I was talking to someone just out of college the other day and she was adamant that reverse racism doesn't exist. To her it isn't racism unless it happens to a group lower in a power ordering. The exact position of groups in that ordering wasn't clear but it was clear that Asians were higher than other groups.

Identity politics is a very dehumanizing philosophy. It tells us that we must be seen through a label we can't change: our race, gender, or orientation.

<comment><USER13> Yeah. The ultimate goal of such redefinitions is to imply that some groups' problems are inherently more important, more worth addressing. But that's not true. All suffering is suffering.

<comment><USER14> I don't know. Is going to jail based on your race suffering more or less than not getting into Harvard because of your race? I tend to agree with OP's comment, but one important aspect is left out when talking about things like this: Class.

<comment><USER15> I'd like to call out your casual mentioning of someone's race being responsible for them going to jail. That's not really what happens - <USER2> that someone breaks the law and goes to jail.

I'm not aware of law-abiding members of any race going to jail (while the article demonstrates that Asians who do everything same as whites or blacks have no chance of getting into Harvard).

<comment><USER16> _Everyone_ breaks the law. Some people get disproportionate punishment. So while your statement is true, it entirely misses the point.

<comment><USER15> This is a factually unsupported assertion.

[http://www.manhattan- institute.org/html/miarticle.htm?id=458...](http://www.manhattan- institute.org/html/miarticle.htm?id=4582#.VhC1fWSrS2w)

<comment><USER16> From your article:

> In 2006, the black arrest rate for most crimes was two to nearly three times > blacks' representation in the population. Blacks constituted 39.3% of all > violent-crime arrests, including 56.3% of all robbery and 34.5% of all > aggravated-assault arrests, and 29.4% of all property-crime arrests.

This paragraph is presupposing that the arrest process is fair to assert that blacks deserve their higher prison sentences.

<comment><USER15> I'm not sure if you missed these two points:

"From 1976 to 2005, blacks committed more than 52% of all murders in America."

and

"The advocates acknowledge such crime data only indirectly: by charging bias on the part of the system's decision makers. As Obama suggested in the Martin Luther King debate, police, prosecutors and judges treat blacks and whites differently "for the same crime."

But in fact, cops don't over-arrest blacks and ignore white criminals. The race of criminals reported by crime victims matches arrest data. No one has ever come up with a plausible argument as to why crime victims would be biased in their reports."

The simple truth of the matter (which our entire discussion boils down to) is that blacks commit crime at a rate vastly exceeding other groups. For more stats please see: [http://www.infowars.com/black-crime-facts-that-the-white- lib...](http://www.infowars.com/black-crime-facts-that-the-white-liberal- media-darent-talk-about/)

<comment><USER17> Lol, I believe that cops DEFINITELY over-arrest blacks. After Ferguson and a huge WAVE of black people dying unfairly at the hands of police officers, you can read a lot of articles online where highly educated black men (ivy league) write about how they get pulled over by a cop once every 1-2 weeks for NOTHING (except for being black).

Think about that, once every 1-2 weeks. I've been pulled over 3 times in my life. Twice for speeding, once for a broken tail light.

<comment><USER15> 1\. I'm not sure why you bring up Ferguson when the guy was clearly in the wrong. Ie he got killed because he fought the cop for his gun (which went off inside the car) and then charged at him.

Ie someone who jumps out a 10th story window can't blame the oppressive "gravity" for causing their death.

2\. That said, I take your point that educated black men may be unfairly targeted for being _pulled over_. Yet I don't see how someone being pulled over results in their arrest, let alone conviction of a crime which they did not commit.

That's the issue - not that someone gets pulled over every couple of weeks (unpleasant but hardly life-altering) but that huge number of men are in prison for actually committing crime.

<comment><USER17> 1\. As all the controversy shows, he wasn't "clearly in the wrong". Neither was Eric Gardner, that guy who got choked out, nor all the other cases, the names of whom I started to forget because the reporting became so common place, i.e. it was happening all the time.

2\. So let's say a white person and a black person in a car have the same rate of performing a crime (let's say smoking marijuana, a harmless pastime enjoyed by all races). Let's say that if a cop pulls you over while you are smoking marijuana, then you will be arrested. Well if a cop is twice as likely to pull you over if you are black, then there will be twice as many black arrests. This is a simplistic model and doesn't even factor situations where a black person gets pulled over, and definitely gets forced out of his car, handcuffed, and searched, whereas a white person might be able to cordially get away with a smile and a "Yessir".

<comment><USER15> 1\. The only thing that controversy showed is that Mainstream Media is bending over backward to accommodate black race baiters.

If you read the report that explains in great detail what happened (as opposed to just saying 'well, there's no smoke without fire') - you will see what I mean: [http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/08/13/us/ferguson- mi...](http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/08/13/us/ferguson-missouri- town-under-siege-after-police-shooting.html?pagewanted=all)

Eric Gardner was indeed a completely different case. His death was an unfortunate accident. The cop did not intend to kill him - he was looking for a way to subdue a very large man. I do agree that under normal circumstances it should be treated as manslaughter (ie unintended killing).

2\. Your scenario is missing a very important point. I'm not saying that black arrest rates are much higher, hence this proves criminality.

Rather the rates for being convicted for serious crimes (like murder) is off the charts. Likewise victim reports of the race of crime perpetrators matches the conviction stats.

So basically the innocent black guys who just smoked weed in a car and happened to be pulled over because they're black are not going to jail for it (maybe a fine at most).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm not sure what to think about this topic, but articles like this don't help me decide, when they do things like:

* Dumping data from an advocacy group into a sidebar chart without doing any critical analysis of the data. The ratios of professionals to managers and executives are meaningless without factoring age cohort ratios into the data.

* Comparing Asian student admission rates between Ivy League universities to two California public universities, making an implicit assumption that they have comparable candidate pools and an explicit assumption that the only real difference in their admissions policies is that California forbids using race in making admissions decisions. Neither of those assumptions is close to being true.

* Implicitly accepting the idea that SAT or ACT scores are the only metric on which students ought to be judged for making admissions decisions. (Okay they mentioned "extracurriculars" and I was amused by the Northwestern person who said recruiters were looking for people who played lacrosse and rowed crew. But all the data mentioned were based on test scores alone.)

About the only sentence in the article I feel I can put any trust in is: "Asian-Americans are a large, diverse group exposed to a range of influences." But that very true statement feels almost out of place in an article that sure frames things as if all Asian-American high schoolers are academic powerhouses who want into the Ivy League at all costs.

<comment><USER8> >* Implicitly accepting the idea that SAT or ACT scores are the only metric on which students ought to be judged for making admissions decisions. (Okay they mentioned "extracurriculars" and I was amused by the Northwestern person who said recruiters were looking for people who played lacrosse and rowed crew. But all the data mentioned were based on test scores alone.)

What other metrics are you referring to besides academic performance? The color of the skin? Obviously not. But this sentence implies something else. It admits that asians deliver superior performance in terms of test scores but that there must be some other metric that causes Ivy leagues to dismiss them.

I would like to know what that metric is. What is the supposed metric that asians are inferior to other races at that causes their superior test scores to be completely dismissed? Do you know the answer? Can anyone else answer it?

<comment><USER19> From the horse's mouth:

      "We could fill our class twice over with valedictorians," Harvard President
      Drew Gilpin Faust told an audience at the Aspen Ideas Festival, sponsored
      by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic, on Monday. That means admissions
      officers rely on intangibles like interesting essays or particularly unusual
      recommendations to decide who comprises the 5.9 percent of applicants who
      get in.

      Faust's top tip for raising a Harvard man or woman: "Make your children
      interesting!"

      For parents and students alike, that's both good news and bad news. The bad
      news is that of course it's much easier to say that than to actually make it
      happen, though Faust recommended encouraging children to follow their
      passions as a way to develop an interesting personality. It's much easier to
      complete a checklist, however daunting, than to actually be interesting.[1]

[1] How to Get Into Harvard

[http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/06/how- to-...](http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/06/how-to-get-into- harvard/373726/)

<comment><USER20> in other words, use unclear and vague criteria to judge admissions that just happen to massively disadvantage asian americans. it's strange that Faust is not condemned for her absurd and racist suggestion that asian american applicants are on average much less "interesting" people.

<comment><USER21> "All these Asian applicants look the same..."

Seems to be her meta-message.

<comment><USER19> Not to put too fine a point on it, but 20% of those admitted were Asian American, for the class of 2019, in a country where less than 5%, self- identify as Asian-American.[1][2]

[https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/admissions- statistics](https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/admissions-statistics)

[1]

[http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/06/how- to-...](http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/06/how-to-get-into- harvard/373726/#comment-1462718053)

[2]

[http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/06/how- to-...](http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/06/how-to-get-into- harvard/373726/#comment-1462720720)

<comment><USER22> Harvard accepts students from all over the world. Over 50% of the world is Asian.

<comment><USER23> Only 12% of admitted students are from outside the US. Harvard clearly favors US applicants.

[https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/admissions- statistics](https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/admissions-statistics)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> What's interesting to me too, is that they are also neglected in the discussion about diversity in tech. They are the most over represented minority in tech, and instead of looking into why, and how it happens, can we find a leverage for other minorities, what open them doors but not blacks and hispanics, they are just overlooked.

Complaining people just overlook them as: "it's a bunch of white males", but Asians (and Indians I think) might be a key for change this situation.

<comment><USER25> A bit off-topic but on US tv shows is ridiculous how actors (esp. main characters) are usually white or black, little or no Asians and Hispanics. "Friday Night Lights" is about teenagers in Texas (1/3 pop. Hispanic) and they are all white or black (they even had an episode or more about the divide), not a single Hispanic or Asian ever (only one secondary character for a bit).

EDIT: Also we laugh now at stereotypes like the token cool/funny black guy in shows form the 90's or so, but now it's about the super aggressive female black lead ("Suits", "Scandal", "How to get away with murder" etc).

<comment><USER26> A Native American actor classmate of mine did a lot of tv during the era where Vietnam-based programs (e.g. China Beach) were running as casting directors would hire him for those parts (his hair was short then). I guess that's why you see self-financed stuff. Defiance has a Native American in a lead part, but I am hard pressed to think of anything else. Figure 2% of the population would give you something statistically.

<comment><USER27> Longmire has many Native American characters and addresses Native American and reservation issues throughout the series.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> _" Since the Ivies will not stop giving places to the privileged, because their finances depend on the generosity of the rich, the argument homes in on affirmative action"_

I was surprised by the paragraph before this, when it claimed affirmative action was holding back Asians, when immediately after it listed a whole bunch of less deserving groups that were taking up spaces. At least this line acknowledges it, though I'm not sure fatalistic acceptance of the status quo is much better than ignorance, both seem driven by cognitive dissonance more than logic.

<comment><USER29> There were Asian-American based advocacy groups that disagreed with California Prop 209. Their stance was Affirmative Action would intact a societal change beyond academia in the long term.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> This is hurting the country. I want my (white) kid to get in and everything, but it's not right. Education is an investment, and we're not putting it where it will do the most good.

We know there are de facto quotas at a lot of otherwise great schools. (Probably not MIT -- yay!) Hopefully the word 'quota' reminds people of the time when Feynman couldn't get into Columbia because he was Jewish.

</comment><comment><USER31> A really good point noted in this article, and ignored in the comments, is that of the 'bamboo ceiling.' Yes, there are lots of Asians in tech. But they are generally programmers and rarely in managerial positions.

<comment><USER32> As a white in tech, I sometimes sense that I'm being discriminated against by Asian / Asian-American hiring managers. For instance, I've never been offered a position by an Asian, whereas I'm rarely not offered a position by a non- Asian.

What kind of concerns me is that so many of the big tech companies have disproportionately more Asians, and many Asians cultures are known to be as racist or more racist. Unlike Americans, who are trained from youth to be tolerant and accepting, many immigrants are not.

Unfortunately, even with training, most people will still be biased toward hiring people like themselves.

<comment><USER33> _> I've never been offered a position by an Asian_

so... this feels like discrimination, which is understandable.

 _> whereas I'm rarely not offered a position by a non-Asian._

... but does this feel like preferential treatment? because that's the logic you are presenting here.

"when i don't get hired, it's because of discrimination. when i do get hired, it's because i'm a good hire, not because someone _else_ was discriminated against to hire me."

this is why these discussions are meaningless. there's no way of knowing why you did or didn't get hired. yet another reason to run your own company.

<comment><USER32> Certainly a valid point, but I decided against pointing it out, since because of market demands, pretty much anyone with a brain can get a job in tech, currently.

That a particularly skilled and experienced candidate was being rejected so frequently either pointed to an innate bias, more selective criteria, or inflexibility in pay. Maybe all three.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> "There's something in the upbringing that makes Asians shy,"

At my first internship, people were commenting on how timid I seemed. I was used to obeying my parents and teachers without question; all I did was try to keep my head down and work harder. This sort of upbringing makes for great workers but bad leaders. I hope to come out of my shell more during the rest of college and my formative years.

<comment><USER8> As an asian, I think shyness is also genetic. My parents were pretty lax in terms of discipline. So lax, that I ended up going to a community college after high school and transferring to ucla after i got my act together. This didn't stop me from being shy. Shyness is just a heightened fear response that's triggered during social situations. I think for asians the threshold for this trigger just lower when compared to other races.

<comment><USER33> i'm asian and i think this theory is 100% full of shit.

you're making excuses for your under-developed social skills.

how embarrassing.

<comment><USER35> How would you like it if someone said that to you? Do you act this way in real life? Sometimes I think the internet acts as a sort of alternate reality where people can just act like assholes without consequences. On the internet people cowardly hide behind nicknames, but in the real world you're exposing your physical identity to everyone. Things can get really dangerous.

-Ryan Iwamoto

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> "Children who rebel may be threatened with being sent to stay with family in China, and they know from relations there that teenagers in America, even Asian ones, get off relatively lightly compared with those in China."

This seems quite naive. We all have been children and something like this seems unlikely to work (at least my personal opinion).

<comment><USER37> Actually, plausible threats that are carried through are usually quite effective. What kind of similar experience are you suggesting everyone else has to compare to this?

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I think the Australian system is fairer, where university entrance is determined almost solely by the results of our SAT equivalent and our final year of high school in a largely automated matter. Universities don't even know the race of applicants (although they do know if the applicant is a member of the underrepresented Aboriginal minority).

<comment><USER39> That would only be fairer if everyone has the same level of access to education up to that point.

I don't know anything about the Australian school systems, but I know for sure that is not the case in the U.S.

<comment><USER40> Isn't it wrong-headed to attempt to derive fairness out of non-fairness? If the level of access to primary and secondary education is highly unequal then why not fix that first?

<comment><USER41> > Isn't it wrong-headed to attempt to derive fairness out of non-fairness?

While the wording of that sounds very logical, (Isn't is stupid to try to get gold out of not-gold?), it's a pseudologic that has historically been used by the likes of Ayn Rand and other right-wing types to justify inaction. Fairness is always "derived from" unfairness. The pie wasn't divided equally? Then the fair thing to do is to unfairly take pie from the people who were rightly given their larger share. It's theirs, right? They were given it. They played by the rules, and now we want to take pie from some and give it to others? Fairness is only possible when one transcends exactly that line of reasoning.

> If the level of access to primary and secondary education is highly unequal > then why not fix that first?

The _most_ naive thing about that remark is that it's precluded by your first remark. The _second most_ naive thing about it is that the way in which this inequality of access works, and the ways in which it can be remedied, should embarrass any speaker who asks "...why not fix that...?" Civil liberties? Just fix it. Traumatic and total devastation of an extant cultural support system by colonization? Just fix it. Centuries of ensuing racism, ethnocentrism, and bigotry reinforcing an association--in both the dominant cultural and economic systems _and_ in the minds of the members of an outgroup--between a race or ethnicity and social unfitness and undesirability? Just fix it first.

No problem. I'll have it on your desk Tuesday.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> So uh, why aren't admissions implemented as an algorithm that reviews academic performance? Minor human intervention could be used to prevent mistakes by the algorithm... Or not, humans make mistakes too. But machines don't intentionally discriminate.

<comment><USER43> Well, two major issues:

The first is technical: how does one guarantee that the algorithm is actually fair? And that of course hinges on how one defines 'fair'. Many of the measures that appear objective aren't. There is a growing amount of evidence that the method in which a test is administered can have a statistically significant impact on how different races and sexes perform [1][2]. On top of that, there is evidence that similar biases creep into how teachers grade essays and even math problems [3].

The second is more social science-y: switching to an algorithm doesn't fix the problem that affirmative action attempts to solve, which is that even after correcting for any test bias certain minorities or subgroups will still perform statistically worse than others, not due to inherent differences in intelligence, but due to the cumulative effects of the inequalities of opportunities in society, eg lesser performing schools, less time/energy for parents to help with homework, less money for extracurricular activities, &c. &c. [4]. Yes, socioeconomic status accounts for a large amount of this, but it does not 100% account for it. There are still statistically significant amounts that are due to things like race, sex, or religion.

[1]: [http://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/picture-yourself-as- a-s...](http://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/picture-yourself-as-a- stereotypical-male) [2]: [https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/06/21/sat](https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/06/21/sat) [3]: [http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2015/02/10/teacher_bias...](http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2015/02/10/teacher_bias_in_math_new_study_finds_teachers_grade_boys_more_generously.html) [4]: [http://thewireless.co.nz/articles/the-pencilsword-on-a- plate](http://thewireless.co.nz/articles/the-pencilsword-on-a-plate)

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Fix the title please. It should probably read "discriminated against," otherwise it appears as though the Asians did the discriminating.

</comment><comment> nv-vn I find it very ironic that the people who created affirmative action are now realizing how dumb it actually is in practice.

</comment><comment><USER45> >Thanks to such pressures and hard work, many Asian-Americans do end up in top universities—but not as many as their high-school performance would seem to merit. Some Asians allege that the Ivy Leagues have put an implicit limit on the number of Asians they will admit. They point to Asians' soaring academic achievements and to the work of Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Walton Radford of Princeton, who looked at the data on admissions and concluded that Asian-Americans need 140 SAT points out of 1,600 more than whites to get a place at a private university, and that blacks need 310 fewer points. Yet in California, where public universities are allowed to use economic but not racial criteria in admissions, 41% of Berkeley's enrolments in 2014 were Asian-Americans and at the California Institute of Technology 44% were (see chart).

The picture painted by this article of the difficulties (or lack thereof) faced by whites in securing admission to elite private universities like Harvard, Yale, or Columbia is in stark contrast to the one painted by Ron Unz three years ago in his thorough analysis of university admissions policies.

While Unz did indeed find ample evidence of quotas restricting the admission of Asians, he also found evidence of what appears to be affirmative action favoring Jews:

>Most of the other Ivy League schools appear to follow a fairly similar trajectory. Between 1980 and 2011, the official figures indicate that non- Jewish white enrollment dropped by 63 percent at Yale, 44 percent at Princeton, 52 percent at Dartmouth, 69 percent at Columbia, 62 percent at Cornell, 66 percent at Penn, and 64 percent at Brown. If we confine our attention to the last decade or so, the relative proportion of college-age non-Jewish whites enrolled at Yale has dropped 23 percent since 2000, with drops of 28 percent at Princeton, 18 percent at Dartmouth, 19 percent at Columbia and Penn, 24 percent at Cornell, and 23 percent at Brown. For most of these universities, non-white groups have followed a mixed pattern, mostly increasing but with some substantial drops. I have only located yearly Jewish enrollment percentages back to 2006, but during the six years since then, there is a uniform pattern of often substantial rises: increases of roughly 25 percent at Yale, 45 percent at Columbia, 10 percent at Cornell, 15 percent at Brown, and no declines anywhere.

Read the rest here: [http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-myth- of-...](http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-myth-of-american- meritocracy/)

Despite Unz's piece being nearly three years old, the issue of Jewish over- representation at these elite private universities has gone completely undiscussed in the wider media, even in the context of Asian quotas, and outlets like the Economist continue to point the finger at whites and whites alone.

Similar dishonesty is manifest in the discussions of technology's supposed lack of diversity, where it turns out that whites are actually generally underrepresented at major tech companies relative to their proportion of the general population and minorities (non-whites) are therefore by definition collectively overrepresented, despite the continuous rhetoric to the contrary.

For example, at LinkedIn, whites make up only 53% of employees, meaning that minorities are in fact overrepresented, largely due to Asians making up a full 38% of its employees despite being only 4% of the general population: [http://blog.linkedin.com/2014/06/12/linkedins-workforce- dive...](http://blog.linkedin.com/2014/06/12/linkedins-workforce-diversity/)

Yahoo! is borderline majority-minority, yet it too supposedly lacks diversity: [http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/06/17/yahoo-lack- of-...](http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/06/17/yahoo-lack-of- diversity/10718789/)

Asians apparently only count as diverse and minorities sometimes, when acknowledging them as such won't refute a particular anti-white narrative the media is intent on spreading.

</comment><comment><USER46> A similar thing happened--and still happens--to Jews (which is why there are so many Jewish Nobel Prize Winners from schools like "City University of New York"). The Economist blames other factors, though.

"Racial prejudice of the sort that Jews faced may or may not be part of the problem, but affirmative action certainly is. Top universities tend to admit blacks and Hispanics with lower scores because of their history of disadvantage; and once the legacies, the sports stars, the politically well- connected and the rich people likely to donate new buildings (few of whom tend to be Asian) have been allotted their places, the number for people who are just high achievers is limited. Since the Ivies will not stop giving places to the privileged, because their finances depend on the generosity of the rich, the argument homes in on affirmative action."

The Truth, which is hard to swallow for some people, is well summarized in the book "The Bell Curve." Fact is, in a pure meritocracy, some groups of people ("races") would be represented more than others. And its impossible to face this fact in America without getting shouted down.

<comment><USER45> >and still happens

No it doesn't. If anything, Jews now seem to benefit from a bizarre form of affirmative action, particularly at the institutions that once most discriminated against them: [http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-myth- of-...](http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-myth-of-american- meritocracy/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Americans view everything in life through the race and skin color lens. It's becoming really exhausting and frustrating to deal with.

The other day I was watching a video on YT for the Daily Show after Trevor Noah took the helm. While all what I was just concerned about was the possibility that Trevor not to be up to the job and not to be able to fill Jon's shoes, in other words, he might not be funny, esp. since Jon was exceptional in this regard and superbly funny, unfortunately a great deal of comments on the video were about his skin color and ethnicity and whether he was black, bi-racial, mixed-race, coloured ...etc.

It's really nauseating and disheartening.

Americans need to be de-sensetized about this immediately because their heightened sense of awareness regarding this issue is getting to an extremely ridiculous level.

Back to the subject, America could be considered a relatively meritocratic economy compared to others but in general can't be viewed as such in absolute terms. There's a pecking order in businesses and while they love to blabber about diversity and inclusiveness esp in tech companies, this only applies to the lower ranks and if anyone wants to make his way up, they get to deal with the ugly reality and real strata that make up their organizations or the society as a whole.

<comment><USER26> > Americans view everything in life through the race and skin color lens. It's > becoming really exhausting and frustrating to deal with.

As a popular TV program put it, it's America's original sin. Also, it factors into targeted politics that is in vogue. Separate everyone into groups and target them with specific (and sometimes conflicting) messages. It works, so I wouldn't expect a change.

<comment><USER48> Isn't it everyone's original sin? Which nation did not conquer the land it occupies today from some other nation? Which nation did not have the institution of slavery?

<comment><USER49> Forcibly occupying land that is occupied by others is not necessarily driven by racism. Often it is hunger, or something else. Slavery in many locations was not something done to other races, but to other closely-related tribes, long enough ago that no one remembers the difference between those tribes.

USA is somewhat unique in that we enslaved people who were easily distinguishable from the rest of us, and also in that after slavery was ended we maintained a system of laws and cultural norms that kept the former slaves and their descendants separate from and disadvantaged to other citizens. That is our sin. It functions so that racist institutions and the habit of racism reinforce each other, and even pull other races such as Native Americans into the Other category. That didn't happen in Mexico or Brazil or many other places in which multiple races had had a problematic history but then learned to coexist, if not on an equal footing then also not on a so aggressively unequal one.

<comment><USER10> I don't think the US (or it's colonial forebears) forcibly occupying the land occupied by others, or importing others as enslaved laborers -- was _driven_ by racism either, especially at it's origin. It was driven by economic profit, same as usual. Europeans didn't conquer the Americas because they hated Native Americans, they did it because they wanted the land and it's resources. They didn't import slaves, originally, because they hated Africans, they did it because they wanted free labor.

But the pertinent thing about America is how the society was structured based on racism to _manage_ the economic exploitation. It was convenient to those on top to color-code the socio-economic structure. And this was done at an early stage in European settler colonial society in North America (By the 1600s it was fairly solidified).

This is what makes racism the 'original sin' of the U.S.

And it is definitely not at all a constant in historical examples of nations or kingdoms conquering land. There are plenty of examples, especially pre- modern, of the conquered people being fully or mostly integrated into the conquering society on the same basis as the already existing population of the conquererors. Now, especially in pre-modern times, 'the same basis' could mean as impoverished and disenfranchised peasants -- but the same as the impoverished and disenfranchised peasants of the conquering kingdom, state, or nation. Or in other cases, incorporated into an existing society that is somewhat more complex and with opportunities for advancement

(How the Ottoman Empire treated it's conquered populations is super interesting, and certainly not always great, but _very different_ from how we assume this thing works in modern times. The Ottoman Empire was sort of a pre- modern socio-political structure that hung on into the beginnings of modernism).

There has always been conquering in human history, and it's often been brutal. Even in the pre-Columbian Americas. (Although at the same time it's not been _universal_, there are more and less brutal, and more and less expansionist, societies in human history. )

But the very idea of 'race' is a modern phenomenon, as is structuring a stratified society based on race. (And the idea of race developed in the main during a process of structuring societies based on racial stratification, in a way that hadn't genererally existed before).

<comment><USER49> Yes I agree with all of this.

Your reference to the integration of the conquered reminds me of James C. Scott's studies of the states of Southeast Asia. As he explains it, the limiting factor on the wealth of kings was the number of subjects they had working the land. So when they went to war, it was primarily to capture more people they could enserf. There was actually a regular intergenerational cycle. Grandparents could have been (the equivalent of) serfs, some of their grandchildren might have had some sort of sub-chief of a sub-village position, others might have been conscripted to fight a war to round up more farm labor, while others yet might have run off to the hills to stay out of reach of the state.

<comment><USER10> I love James C. Scott's writings too. :)

I am currently going through _Seeing Like a State_, going through it pretty slowly because nearly every page is so thought-provoking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Wait? Are you saying that affirmative actions are discriminating high performers in favor of lower achievers? Holy shit, I didn't see that one coming.

"The higher socioeconomic status of Asian parents provided part of the explanation, but only a small part. Their data suggested that Asian outperformance is thanks in large part to hard work."

So Asians' higher socioeconomic status only play a small part in their success, but Whites' socioeconomic status is the only explanation for Whites outperforming other races in academia (thus justifying Whites being the target of discrimination via affirmative actions). Boy, don't I love it when liberals try to make up some double-think to reconcile their crooked ideology.

</comment><comment><USER51> The points I see missing from that very accomplished young man's application to these top schools are the essay(s), any interviews he may have done and any sort of philanthropic or leadership roles he may have been involved in. These are all important, now more so than ever.

It is entirely possible that he did not demonstrate, through these other avenues, the desired qualities of a student from the schools he was rejected by. Getting into such schools isn't simply a matter of racking up points by following some formula and quite a few kids do not seem to realize this.

When a school has a flood of equally polished test scores and fantastic accomplishments it can result in other criteria playing the deciding role. Perhaps he didn't meet these other criteria? They are not discussed in the article so no way to know. I personally suspect this, much more than mere ethnicity, as I know they matter greatly in the application process at such schools.

<comment><USER20> perhaps michael wang fell short in terms of extracurricular achievements (though this is unlikely given information provided in the article). but this is unlikely to be true of all asian candidates as a group. serious questions need to be asked about the use of subjective and hard to quantify non academic criteria that discriminate against a particular group.

the usa is after all quite unique in using non academic achievements for admissions to elite universities...</comment></comment>


Net Neutrality Under Attack, Again - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/12/15/house-conservatives-want-trump-to-undo-regulations-on-fda-climate-uber/ <comment><USER2> It's interesting that most non-technical people I know simultaneously support net neutrality because of intense campaigns for it, and support things that are against net neutrality like 0 rating because they benefit from it.

Many of them didn't realize the most common mode of breaking net neutrality could individually benefit them (even if it collectively hurts us all in the long term)</comment>


Haskell – An Experience Summary - <AUTHOR> https://holmusk.dev/blog/2019-03-29-experience-summary.html <comment><USER2> This is a great summary. I'd be interested to know which packages broke their APIs. Most that I'm familiar with are meticulous about their deprecation cycles and easing the user experience of upgrading.</comment>


Understanding Postgres Performance - <AUTHOR> http://craigkerstiens.com/2012/10/01/understanding-postgres-performance/

<comment><USER2> I would be more cautious about indexes than this article is.

The trade-off with indexes is that they make reads faster and writes slower. But if you're running a high performance application, it is not that hard to have read-only slaves to offload read queries to. (I won't say that it is trivial, because there are issues, but it is doable. I've done it.) However fixing poor write performance is much more complicated.

Therefore create all of the indexes that you need. But no more. And any indexes that are not carrying their weight should be dropped. Furthermore if you have intensive queries that you have to do (eg for reports), consider offloading those to another database.

Of course if you don't have significant data/volume/etc, then don't worry about this. Any semi-sane approach will work for you. (That applies to most of you.)

<comment><USER3> am i wrong in thinking that a missing index can change an O(logn) query to an O(n), while an additional index is going to add a constant cost to writes?

because if that's correct then it makes sense to err on the side of too many indices.

of course, it is better to be perfect. but if you have an error, which side would you prefer to be on?

and you don't need "significant" volumes to hurt with a full table scan (ie it _will_ hurt most of you).

[what surprised me was the 99% cache. that is very dependent on your application, but i guess is common for web apps?]

<comment><USER4> I do not think an extra index adds a constant cost to writes. If it is an index that allows for range queries (I haven't seen 'equality-only' indices, but that probably is because I haven't looked hard enough), writing an index entry is (or should be) like an insert into a sorted dictionary. That will be O(logn).

<comment><USER2> You are right that indexes are usually (though not always!) implemented as a tree. But in practice the number of levels of that tree is usually fixed, so in practice it is constant. (And the number of writes to disk per write to the index averages under 1 - the top levels generally get overwritten multiple times before they have to hit disk on a checkpoint, and sometimes the leaf gets overwritten again.)

<comment><USER4> But that would mean you would have to make it wider and wider. That cannot be done at O(1) time, can it? Or are they just starting a second, third, etc. tree whenever one fills up? If so, what is the benefit over adding another level? More localized disk I/O during writing? Do you have a reference?

<comment><USER2> [http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs276a/projects/docs/berkeleyd...](http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs276a/projects/docs/berkeleydb/ref/am_conf/cachesize.html) describes the performance of BTree data structures in real world databases. (It is discussing a standalone key/value store, but the internals of a database index work the same way.)

As noted, 3 levels suffices for a moderate sized table, and it would be rare to need more than 5 levels. The "levels" in question are pages of memory that have to be looked at. The reason that this is less than you expect is that inside of each page you essentially have a tree that has several levels to traverse. However the time to traverse that tree is less than the time to fetch the next page, so the operations of concern are fetches of pages.

The most important number noted in that link is that under normal operation once caches are warmed up, it should a maximum of one disk seek to traverse the index. That single disk seek, if it happens, takes longer than all other operations.

The long and short of it is, "in theory log(n), in practice a reasonably small constant."

<comment><USER4> Thanks. But a disk seek is not a small constant. I would almost describe that as "in theory log(n), in practice a disk seek, so half the speed" (assuming that the record can be written with one disk seek)

<comment><USER5> A hash index will also require one disk seek which makes b-tree indexes and hash indexes have more similar performance than the theoretical O(log n) vs O(1) would indicate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Slightly OT: I've been using MySQL for quite some time now and whenever I start a new project thinking that I'll use Postgres this time I find myself lazily opting for something that I know and going back to MySQL. Is there a Postgres guide that is concise, easy to follow and illustrates its advantages over other relational databases. The Postgres guide[1] is too sparse currently and the beginner Apress book[2] mentioned is 644 pages long.

1- <http://www.postgresguide.com/>

2 - <http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1590594789>

<comment><USER7> What content would you like to see within Postgresguide?

<comment><USER8> Probably a good idea to add a bit about serial, and sequences. This tends to confuse mysql people like myself.

I for instance don't know what happens when I copy or dump and restore a postgres table that relies on a sequence. Mysql auto-magically takes care of it by saving the next auto increment id in table dump or copy.

<comment><USER9> If you use pg_dump to dump/restore the table, it will reset the sequence to the correct value. Look at the dump file, there will be a setval of the sequence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I really liked the NewRelic graph and I wanted to know if I can get it running on my setup: Scala, sbt, liftweb, Jetty.

It worked! Just downloaded the ZIP, unpacked and started: sbt ~container:start -J"-javaagent:/path/myapp/newrelic/newrelic.jar"

Now I have a nice graph which matches up with the numbers I see in my logs. As I suspected there's some work that needs to be done on the DB access side.

</comment><comment><USER11> A better query to see how indexes are used to avoid division by zero errors.

      SELECT
        relname,
        CASE
          WHEN seq_scan = 0 THEN 0
          ELSE 100 * idx_scan / (seq_scan + idx_scan)
        END AS percent_of_times_index_used,
        n_live_tup rows_in_table
      FROM
        pg_stat_user_tables
      ORDER BY
        n_live_tup DESC;

</comment><comment><USER12> I think the ratio expressions are slightly off. Using the queries from the article can result in negative ratios, which shouldn't be possible if we're measuring the percent of accesses that hit the buffer. Each access is either a cache hit or a read, not both. So instead of subtracting in the numerator, they should be added in the denominator:

      SELECT
        sum(heap_blks_read) as heap_read,
        sum(heap_blks_hit)  as heap_hit,
        sum(heap_blks_hit) / (sum(heap_blks_hit) + sum(heap_blks_read)) as ratio
      FROM
        pg_statio_user_tables;

</comment><comment><USER13> Off topic: grok is now my new favorite word.

<comment><USER4> New? It's over 50 years old: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grok>

<comment><USER14> "new favorite word" not "favorite new word". Also, see <http://xkcd.com/1053/></comment></comment></comment>