burnthrow (u/burnthrow)

burnthrow commented on Boston public schools suspend advanced learning classes wgbh.org/news/education/2... · Posted by u/undefined1

dfadsadsf · 5 years ago

The biggest fallacy is that gifted students would attend regular public school classes if gifted program is unavailable. In reality students with wealthy parents will transfer to private school, middle class will move to suburbs and few students with poor parents (disproportionally people of color) will stay in shitty regular school. Only last group prospects and education will be damaged long term and overall numbers involved is not really enough to have material positive influence on overall level of students in Boston public school.

“My kids are dumb. I do not want other parents kids to get ahead only because they are smart”

burnthrow · 5 years ago

> few students with poor parents (disproportionally people of color) will stay in shitty regular school.

I'm white and this was me. If it weren't for these programs, I'd either be in jail or working retail/fast food. Congratulations on provoking me, I'm going to take a long hiatus from HN now and go build something. I've changed my password to a randomly generated (ephemeral) string on this and my main account; I won't be back to contribute.

burnthrow commented on Rust, Zig, and the Futility of “Replacing” C gavinhoward.com/2021/02/r... · Posted by u/gavinhoward

pjmlp · 5 years ago

Back when I started coding, C was only portable across the very expensive UNIX workstations and unavailable anywhere else.

At most you got to use dialects like Small-C and BDS C on other platforms.

burnthrow · 5 years ago

Yes but we're talking about today. And C's smallness/simplicity means that bootstrapping on new architectures is straightforward. Meanwhile Rust needs 64bit, etc. just to build. Rust's early embrace of compile-time complexity (ZCA) means this will always be a fundamental problem for the language. In fact it's getting worse over time.

burnthrow commented on Rust, Zig, and the Futility of “Replacing” C gavinhoward.com/2021/02/r... · Posted by u/gavinhoward

brabel · 5 years ago

I mentioned that there are other places in the Book where this information is mentioned, but it's funny how the `?` is described in at least 3 places (your link plus my two other links), but the section you would expect most information about it, called "The ? operator for easier error handling" which is fully dedicated to explaining the operator, does not mention that fact.

My point, above all, is not tied to this specific example, by the way, hope you understand how an informal tutorial about the language does not replace a strict specification - and pointing out that such information is available somewhere if I look hard enough does not disprove anything.

burnthrow · 5 years ago

> pointing out that such information is available somewhere if I look hard enough does not disprove anything.

I didn't look very hard, I went to the language reference and searched for "?" in the Tokens section.

burnthrow commented on Rust, Zig, and the Futility of “Replacing” C gavinhoward.com/2021/02/r... · Posted by u/gavinhoward

brabel · 5 years ago

The author correctly, IMO, points out that this is not possible currently because there's no Rust Specification, so the exact behaviour of such a compiler cannot even be described.

I was surprised by how informal the Rust language semantics are when I was trying to find out how the `?` operator works, exactly. There's no official description anywhere except for an RFC which was created before the feature was introduced, but from which the feature has diverged significantly since it was added to the language!

The Rust Book, normally assumed to be the "true" description of the language, is quite incomplete in places as it's not a formal specification. For example, the section about `?` does not mention that different error types will be auto-converted if there's a `From` implementation between them. This is quite important information missing from the documentation. Just from reading that page, you would be writing really verbose type conversions yourself, everywhere.

But the Rust Book does mention this elsewhere[2] (if you're careful enough reading the first link, you can see that it says `?` is "more or less" equivalent to `try!`, and reading the docs for `try!` you could actually find out what it does, and hope they didn't change anything when implementing `?` - but that's a quite a lot of assumptions). You just need to read the whole book, or at least be lucky enough to look at all the right places, to make sure you understand how a language feature works, precisely.

[1] https://doc.rust-lang.org/edition-guide/rust-2018/error-hand...

[2] https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch09-02-recoverable-errors-wi...

burnthrow · 5 years ago

Were you looking for this?

https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/reference/expressions/opera...

burnthrow commented on Rust, Zig, and the Futility of “Replacing” C gavinhoward.com/2021/02/r... · Posted by u/gavinhoward

burnthrow · 5 years ago

I'm amazed by the hostility of these comments, including personal attacks, and by this post being flagged. The author isn't some nobody who just finished a boot camp, but a very skilled C hacker. He makes a good argument for the importance of portability, a topic that seldom comes up in the C/Rust discussions I've read.

burnthrow commented on McDonald's and other chains are giving their drive-thrus the Jetsons treatment cnn.com/2021/02/26/tech/m... · Posted by u/apsec112

mc32 · 5 years ago

If you’ve been in an In and Out burger drive thru multiply that by twenty cars ahead of you. That is indeed golden.

burnthrow · 5 years ago

Ordering isn't the bottleneck at In n Out, it's the food made fresh, sometimes for custom orders. The menu itself couldn't be much simpler. The kids taking down the orders work quickly and are always at the end of the line. That they're friendly humans and not a confused AI is an added benefit.

On the other hand this should work for McDonalds, where nobody's expecting friendliness or much of anything; it's basically a feed trough.

burnthrow commented on Slouching Toward Post-Journalism city-journal.org/journali... · Posted by u/nkurz

burnthrow · 5 years ago

That's the great thing about math: It doesn't care how sincerely you believe that 6 and 9 are the same number. In other words, the kind of game you're talking about can only go on for so long before cold reality makes itself known.

burnthrow commented on Slouching Toward Post-Journalism city-journal.org/journali... · Posted by u/nkurz

mrzimmerman · 5 years ago

This article only seems accurate if you’ve never met any average journalists. Your run of the mill reporter is looking to tell an accurate story, nothing more dramatic or interesting then that.

The idea that these news organizations are monolithic structures where hive minded journalists are endlessly seeking to push their master’s message is on its face ludicrous, as are all conspiracy theories.

burnthrow · 5 years ago

I've worked in newsrooms and disagree with this saintly image of truth-seekers. Yes, the rank and file reporters are not looking to grind an axe; even if they were, they'd be too busy to do it. The well-known writers have huge egos and strong opinions. The editors are even worse.

Also, please don't cast aspersions like "only seems accurate" and "conspiracy theories." There is no conjecture in this editorial: It's somebody's opinion about recent, real developments in major newspapers.

burnthrow commented on The Mac price crash of 2021 zdnet.com/article/the-mac... · Posted by u/blinding-streak

jonplackett · 5 years ago

No they’re actually selling. Just saw one go for £850 a few weeks back. And one with only 256gb SSD for £650. It’s crazy!

burnthrow · 5 years ago

I stand corrected, that is crazy!