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.
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.
An algorithm that could find the optimal solution in practice. For instance, in 0.36s, as in the article. A theoretical algorithm that finds the optimal solution is trivial; you don't need to be a programmer to come up with that one.
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.
Andrew Wile began work on proving Fermat's theorem in 1986 at 33. He finished first presented the proof in 1993 at age 40. He was not eligable for a Fields Medal, which I personally think is a travesty (An award reserved for the class of people considered most fit in the field? What's the justification there ).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Wiles
It has been hypothesized that mathematics has grown so large that mathematicians are now more likely to make contributions because of the amount of material which it is necessary to learn.
Gotcha. I'm not a mathematician, but your comment made me feel like I'm running out of time to make a difference, and I'm only 24. It also gave me a bit of confidence that I can. Anyway, better get to it!
Mathematics is good at making young people feel old.
Take Galois, for instance (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galois). Solved one of the major mathematical problems of his time. Founded a major branch of abstract algebra (seriously -- in a three quarter grad level course, you spend about a quarter on it).
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.
> But you do know that blacks commit a lot more crime (~ 10x) everywhere
I don't understand why this rules out cultural reasons. In most of the places where black people live today outside africa their immigration was mainly based on slavery and subjugation, and this comes with a really heavy cultural baggage both for the black people themselves and for the rest of the local society. And racial slavery took a few centuries to fade away, which helped build a lot of other sociological prejudices and rituals around it. At least here in brazil this is pretty obvious. That's very different from jewish immigration worldwide (based on commerce and a looser form of persecution), mexican immigration in the united states (also marginalized, but far less), asian immigration, etc. You can't discount these factors.
I've never been to africa, so I can't say why (and if) this phenomenon happens there, but I think european imperialism and colonialsm might be a good place to start looking for a reason. Before you think I'm a liberal nut, if the structure of a society was built for a long time around foreign domination, most people living in it will adapt to it. Inferiority complexes are hard to overcome, even discounting factors such as ghetto areas, bad infrastructure, and the "social inertia" that makes it easier to raise traumatized kids if you've been traumatized yourself.
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.
What are you talking about? It's not race. That is, genetics means shit here. It's all socioeconomic. The incidence rate of poverty is also a lot higher in blacks than whites.
The blank slate is dead. Science killed it.
If you want to have a nature vs. nurture debate you need to actually post some science. Until then you've simply violated a fundamental law of statistics: correlation is not causation.
African-Americans make up about 12% of the US population and, for all crimes, about 28% of arrests. This is out of proportion to their population (and other subthreads can pick up the argument about why that disparity exists), but if black crime were ten times the rate of white crime, and if the racial proportions of who got arrested reflected this (which is of course another issue), then African-Americans would make up about 58% of arrests.
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.
It's very plausible, and indeed pretty much undeniable, that male behaviour is different to female behaviour (eg higher aggression) for biological reasons. Males and females have been under vastly different selection pressures for millions of years, so it makes sense that the survival/reproduction strategy for males should be different to that for females.
However, it's only been <100,000 years since the various ancestral lineages of modern humans split off from one another, and only in the last few thousand years that life in Europe or China has been significantly different to life in Africa (apart from the climate). Huge differences in behaviour between the different lineages are very unlikely.
At first glance, that may provide some evidence for your theory.
However, an alternate theory that I prefer could be stated something there is an inverse relationship between income and likelyhood of committing violent crime.
2.7 * 3 = 8.1, which is actually less than the 7 times offending rate cited above. (Yeah, I know there are some pretty big assumptions in that big of math. Still, the point remains that there is a real relationship between poverty and crime rates)
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).
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).
So your data are limited to the few places on Earth that there's a significant population of Africans; being the US, the Carribbean, Europe and (of course) Africa.
Now, it's also true that in all of these places, people of African descent are poor, and it's also well-observed that poverty is correlated with crime, so I'm not really convinced that your "black people commit more crimes because of a biological tendency to do so" hypothesis is any better than the more conventional "black people are poor for historical and cultural reasons, and poor people commit more crimes" hypothesis.
I wonder, where are people of African descent least poor? That is, if one made a list of countries sorted by wealth of their African-descent populations, what would be the first few items?
A table of homicide rates per country hardly counts as a "citation" for the statement, "blacks commit a lot more crime (~ 10x) everywhere, not just America", let alone, "The answer has everything to do with race."
No doubt political correctness is a distorting factor in the discourse; so is garden-variety racism. Therefore it's important for honest inquirers to be careful about how they put things. As you said, "it's really hard to be very exact about this sort of thing".
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.
There is more genetic diversity among the different African native groups than there is among the rest of the world. The majority of “black” Americans have the genetic equivalent of at least one white great-grandparent. So what were you trying to prove about genetics, again?
You made a very strong claim: "blacks commit a lot more crime (~ 10x) everywhere, not just America". (In fact, that claim is so over the top that it suggests 'troll', but I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt.) DOJ statistics do nothing to back up the "everywhere" part. And citing a summary table of countries with black populations does next to nothing.
As for the rest, you're projecting (I don't believe the things you're objecting to) and resorting to rudeness. It would be better to shrink the scope of your claims to what you can actually back up, and tone things considerably down. That doesn't mean not saying controversial things. It means saying them in a way that's cognizant of the context, makes respect a high priority, and resists venting.
I didn't suggest it was cultural. I don't think it is cultural. I can't imagine how you inferred that from my post. I didn't even use the word "culture" in it.
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?
Most people on HN belong to another ~10x crime group: Americans, all those bombs and guns blowing up stuff all over the world to 'protect' capitalism...50% of American's taxes makes us individually responsible
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."
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.
> 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?
No. They understand and speak plain, unambiguous English, C, Python and Lisp. They don't speak corporate weasel propaganda. This kind of speak, throws all kinds of exceptions, causes segfaults, or returns a non-0 and sets errno in their heads.
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.
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.
Actually, that's the nice thing with SC2. First, APM apparently has gone down with SC2 because a lot of the drudgery is being taken care of. Most of the APM is spent on macro and micro that makes a real difference. Micro is an important element of the game. Watch some good games on YouTube, and you can see how players will micro certain units in a controlled movement (Move/Shoot/Move/Shoot), or splitting different units up rather than just blindly moving them forward in a single mass.
That being said, the second part is really where the new Battle.Net and SC2 design shines. I'm not a pro-player by any stretch of the imagination. However, SC2 makes playing online fun. The majority of the games I play are intense, even though I'm hitting only about 40 APM. The match making system is excellent, and so each game I'm playing against people who are usually at my skill level.
So rather than change the game, they worked hard at good match making, and they succeeded.
I wouldn't say a game that sold 10 million units and has a thriving professional competitive scene 10 years after release is "misguided" just because you don't like it.
The required APM has dropped pretty significantly in SC2, and you see a wider range within competitive play. There's still a lot of non-strategic crap to deal with, but it's improved and at least your units will usually go in the direction you ask them to.
So bzip2 and 7-zip are way, way slower than gzip, then?
Bandwidth is cheap. Stick to gzip.
It's not as simple as that. Which one is better depends on the use case. If you're sending a one-off file to somebody, sure, gzip is better. But if you want to distribute a file to a large number of people (like Linux distributions do with their packages), the extra CPU time is insignificant compared to the bandwidth saved over the course of thousands of downloads.
Decompression is more often limited by disk I/O, in my experience, particularly when the source and destination are the same disk. I can often get large improvements in decompression and installation speed by putting the source file and / or temporary installation files on a different disk.
It's not always I/O speed. You can notice when installing CPU usage goes to 100% (or fans kicking in) for BWT/LZM* and not for the DEFLATE (unless you use -9 or something like that.) While you install something at least one of your cores is unavailable for anything else.
This affects energy consumption, too.
And think about both mobile and servers. Those systems are usually more sensible to high CPU load.
I have a draft blog post with analysis of different protocols with valgrind and other tools. But it is so much data to present and graph I never get around to finish it :(
If you look at some of the stats people are posting, it's the compression that takes the most time, not the decompression. gzip has fast compression and decompression, which is why it's used for things like compressing network streams (http,ssh,etc). But when you want to package up large files for distribution to a large audience, then it makes more sense throw some extra CPU time at the compression to get a smaller package (so long as the decompression time on the other end is reasonable).
If you have to wait minutes to download the files it doesn't matter, but if you already have the file locally it is very annoying.
Also if this is used extensively on projects with a large server deployment this matters even more related to latency and energy consumption. That's why Google has their own compression algorithms derived from BMDiff and LZW (Zippy.) Think about it. Speed matters.
Are you willing to donate money to your favorite open source software so they can afford the bandwidth? If not, don't complain about having to spend a few more seconds decompressing the latest release (which you're getting for free).
As a programmer, I would rather work on a patent-unencumbered and open source compression algorithm solving exactly this problem. Perhaps investing months of my own unpaid time on it. HINT
mileage may vary; If the time it takes to compress is costs much less than the time it takes to transfer over the network, you might want not want to use gzip. For example, you're transferring a large file (1GB? 1TB?) to a remote person to deal with, is it cheaper to gzip (lower compression rate), take longer for the network transfer (most likely slowest step), and have the other person unzip, or to use a better compressor, and have the file transferred over quicker?
The question in my mind is if 7-zip has a good multicore implementation for compression/decompression. I recall that the multicore implementation by the original gzip author increased the speed on a 4-core machine by something like a x3.75 boost.
Given the increasing CPU/network gap, it's only a matter of time before the bandwidth (and thus time) saved by XZ more than compensates for the slower compression.
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.