tman

16 वर्ष पहलेdiscuss

Other than blaming illegal immigrants (a dubious politically motivated response)

Reference? I'd like to see what percentage of California's population is the result of post-1960's immigration, the total tax input from this segment and their costs in government services.

I only point this out because some people I've come across on HN who think a Canadian-style immigration system is racist seem to think that public display of their own good intentions is much more important that looking up the numbers.

tman

16 वर्ष पहलेdiscuss

I have the feeling you're not a programmer. An algorithm that generates the optimal solution for a given configuration is trivial. Do a breadth-first search of the results of each move until you get to a solved cube. Ta da, you're done!

Now, if you want to do it fast, that's a different story.

tman

16 वर्ष पहलेdiscuss

a1 = 10^10

a2 = a1^a1

...

a_n = a_(n-1)^a_(n-1)

My number is a_(a_(10^10))

tman

16 वर्ष पहलेdiscuss

Did you Google for the DOJ stats I mentioned? Regardless, here's what we know:

1) Blacks commit on the order of 10x the violent crime of non-Hispanic whites and Asians in the US. This is well documented.

2) Africa has tremendous murder rates compared to almost everywhere else in the world. Again, well documented.

3) In this hemisphere, the majority black countries all have very high murder rates (Jamaica, Haiti) and the one major country with similar demographics to America has a similar problem with their black murder rate. Again, very well documented.

If you need Googling help on any of this, you can ask. But, really? Come on.

As far as this "racism" bugaboo you bring up...I know you didn't directly call me a racist, but that's just so tired. The Hap-map alone destroys any contention that we're all the same. We're different in countless ways. To me, that makes for a much more interesting world than one where everybody is a WASP under the skin. In fact, it's the race-deniers, not the realists, that I find to be the ones with the really dangerous and bigoted ideas.

Different peoples have different criminal tendencies? Well yeah. Let's admit it and do what we can to alleviate it rather than pretending it isn't there and building huge "great society" projects (The Projects) that make lives worse for the very people we're trying to help. Hurting black people with your verified non-racist good intentions is a really lousy way of helping black people.

tman

16 वर्ष पहलेdiscuss

Case of exaggeration for comedic effect.

tman

16 वर्ष पहलेdiscuss

Sure, in America there are at least three independent lines of evidence for the 10x figures. DOJ arrest rates, DOJ violent crime victim surveys, and simply by looking at the race of murder victims (50% are black -- most murder in the US seems to be intraracial).

Globally, you can look here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2009/oct/13/homicide...

The numbers in Africa look bad, but South Africa is really the only place in Africa together enough to do statistics on this stuff. Of course, they also have the highest murder rate in the world (one assumes that other parts would have them beat handily if they could count it all). Jamaica also tops the list in our Hemisphere. The rate cited there for Haiti is half as high as I've seen it elsewhere, but Haiti isn't a great place for accurate data collection, of course.

I've got some estimates for crime rates of African populations in places where they are severe minorities (there's a figure on the internet that claim 80% of London gun crime is African/Caribbean), but it's really hard to be very exact about this sort of thing.

It's a mess of numbers, but there just doesn't seem to be much room for the case that America's problems are special (Brazil, for example, has somewhat similar population demographics, and broadly similar problems).

tman

16 वर्ष पहलेdiscuss

The blog post gives the example of how more distractable old people can outperform less distractable young people on a specially contrived mental test. Similarly, if you put a bunch of junk for someone to trip over on the way to the bathroom, it would be the old person who tripped over it all that would remember it on his return.

But in what real-world mental challenges do old people have the advantage over the young? In mathematics, for example, you're an old man at 30. Except for Erdős the meth-addict, of course.

tman

16 वर्ष पहलेdiscuss

Other than linking to culture and cognition...

Maybe I am still misreading, what did you mean by "The answer to that one is pretty straightforward, well known, and easy to understand. And it has little to nothing to do with race. America is simply not an egalitarian society."

To me that looks like you're blaming the crime rate on our non-egalitarian social structure. Is that separate from culture in your book?

tman

16 वर्ष पहलेdiscuss

You've obviously thought very hard about all this. But you do know that blacks commit a lot more crime (~ 10x) everywhere, not just America? The answer has everything to do with race. Most people on HN belong to another ~ 10x crime group. We're males. I personally don't mind my tendencies that much. But to say they're cultural? Stop pretending it's the sixties. The blank slate is dead. Science killed it.

There are still things to be done about crime. Concentrating poverty (the projects) turns out to have been one of those really stupid progressive ideas. Crime rates for blacks in the south tend to be lower than in the north (I'll pass on that one). The post-1950s destruction of the black family (eclipsing slavery's destruction of it) seems to have been a bad thing. There are things you can fix. Just don't expect the effect to be huge.

tman

16 वर्ष पहलेdiscuss

There's a little bit of that on HN. Not more than other places. HN is certainly not "Digg."

On the other hand, if you attack the big SWPL shibboleths (human neurological uniformity, homosexuality as mirror-heterosexuality), you tend to get stomped on. I've known hard-core Marxists who are less fanatic about believing what they're supposed to believe about this sort of thing.

I generally assume it's because the worldview of the average HNer is not even a little bit informed by biology. Just look at the uncomprehending awe that your average hacker holds the for the term "neural network" or "genetic algorithm."

tman

16 वर्ष पहलेdiscuss

FUD FUD FUD. What an awful summary.

There is an efuse and they refer to it in the statement: "the technology is not loaded with the purpose of preventing a consumer device from functioning, but rather ensuring for the user that the device only runs on updated and tested versions of software". The technology is there in the device, says Motorola. It's just loaded with good intentions.

Now, what's it for? "If a device attempts to boot with unapproved software, it will go into recovery mode, and can re-boot once approved software is re-installed."

What does it mean that Motorola's "recovery mode" is eFuse based? It means exactly what was reported earlier. The phone is bricked until you go to the Motorola store to get your software reloaded and the eFuse reset. Find somewhere where Motorola says that you can get out of their friendly "recovery mode" without their assistance. If it walks like a brick, if it quacks like a brick...

What's a bigger issue to me is why so many hackers fall for easy market-speak like this. Are they English-challenged? Verbal-intelligence-challenged? Well, explains why certain politicians get so popular on the internets, I guess.

tman

16 वर्ष पहलेdiscuss

That sounds like a recipe for population replacement. Historically a wonderfully bad idea.

Why are Canadians (like whites everywhere) not having children? It strikes me that we should answer that question before replacing them by populations a bit further left on the civilizational bell curve.

tman

16 वर्ष पहलेdiscuss

The importance of APM always struck me as evidence of misguided design in Starcraft/Starcraft II. It takes emphasis off the parts I find fun (the strategy), and puts it on the parts of the game that aren't interesting at all: micromanagement of units is just drudgery.

To increase the strategy and reduce the drudgery, you could either implement APM restrictions directly on the player (drop clicks, etc. -- very annoying) or you could design units to be maximally effective by default, without micromanagement.

tman

16 वर्ष पहलेdiscuss

Xz appears to use the same algorithm as 7zip.

Here are some comparisons between the big 3 compression algorithms (taken from http://blogs.reucon.com/srt/tags/compression/ -- he used a 163 MB Mysql dump file for the tests):

  Compressor 	Size 	Ratio 	Compression 	Decompression
  gzip 	        89 MB 	54 % 	0m 13s 	        0m 05s
  bzip2 	81 MB 	49 % 	1m 30s 	        0m 20s
  7-zip 	61 MB 	37 % 	1m 48s 	        0m 11s

tman

16 वर्ष पहलेdiscuss

Oh really? I don't think you know what you mean.

In point of fact, I just sent myself a very important password in clear text. Hack me.

tman

16 वर्ष पहलेdiscuss

The perfect is the enemy of the good.

There is a trade-off here between security and usability. 99% security is good enough for a lot of purposes and has its place.

tman

16 वर्ष पहलेdiscuss

Posterous really does fail here. I can see why they would want to tolerate a little of this to preserve ease of use for their users (just like Amazon with their Kindle email address). However, there are a number of steps that Posterous can take to combat forged headers in ways that should not impact users at all. Enabling SPF, for example, would be a good start.

Technically, it's the same problem as email spam, and most of the same tools can be used to combat it. Posterous should flag posts that they aren't sure of and make users confirm them before putting them up, etc.

EDIT:

The other fix would be to use an email address that can't be guessed from the blog address. In other words, the email address is the password.

tman

16 वर्ष पहलेdiscuss

http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.5/cxx0x_status.html : "Status of Experimental C++0x Support in GCC 4.5"

Last month's release of 4.5.0 is stable, but the C++0x support is experimental.

tman

16 वर्ष पहलेdiscuss

Where functional programming in C++ falls apart is this step:

  bind(std::plus<int>(), _1, bind(&Die::faceValue, _2))

When I first learned the STL, I worked pretty hard to figure out bind, etc., and get rid of all my for loops. The problem is that it doesn't actually buy you that much. The for loop is uglier, but simpler to maintain, read, and debug.

Luckily the lambda syntax from the new standard already appears to be available in experimental gcc. This is going to be a game-changer.

tman

16 वर्ष पहलेdiscuss

Absolutely right. That's actually what I was thinking. It should be built into the OS. Same for adblock in IE (too late for that, maybe).

And there needs to be serious backup software built into every version of Windows (not just the premium versions). The recovery discs should be as ubiquitous as AOL CDs, recovery partitions on every hard drive, etc. Backups should be on by default and as simple to use as Time Machine.

In fact, if they were really going to do it right, they'd go to a repository system for software (like Linux uses), give free online backups for user data to everyone, and basically make the process of duplicating your home computer somewhere and somewhen else a point and click exercise.

Instead, what we get is a company that manages to steal Apple's bad ideas, ignores its own innovative ideas, and delivers products that are only 90% there. It's painful to see so much wasted potential.

Ah well, if Microsoft shareholders ever get tired of Ballmer and want to give me a call, I'm on the internet.

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