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kaesar14on Liz Truss resigns as UK prime minister

https://www.collegeraptor.com/find-colleges/articles/college...

30% of our House went to a top 100 university which isn't necessarily saying much - that list includes many state universities and I'd say that's a perfectly appropriate number.

20% of the British Parliament went to Oxbridge alone.

kaesar14on RacketCon 2022

Could just be different strokes for different folks. I thought OOD in java taught by Lerner was way better (Card game project opener was wonderful) and just made more intuitive sense. I didn't honestly get functional programming until circling back to Racket in PL.

I would also say Matthias is a legend and my instructors were nowhere near that level.

kaesar14on RacketCon 2022

I just think functional based program is a bit harder to reason about for newbies. Programming did not click for me until the third class in the track where we learned object oriented design. Pretty common experience in the program as well, scared away a lot of people who took fundies 1 to explore the major or to minor in CS.

kaesar14on RacketCon 2022

Funny to see anything Racket related rocket up to the front page of HN. My alma mater (Northeastern) is heavily involved in its development and the infamous intro CS class (Fundamentals of Computer Science 1 / Fundies 1) is taught in it. I only appreciated its beauty after I learned how to code deeper into the program. Horrible experience for anyone coming into it with no CS background.

kaesar14on Did an NYU professor get fired because students hate organic chem?

Yeah, I think is more of an organic chemistry thing which I only got to at the end of my class so hopefully some other commenter can provide more color there. I will say the experience I had there made Orgo seem more like a language than a science - there's no way to talk about Orgo without memorizing the language as you would with French or Spanish. But again, I don't have the right context to push that analogy further

kaesar14on Did an NYU professor get fired because students hate organic chem?

My education only went as far as AP Chemistry in high school but we did no such memorization of periodic table. The table is organized in a way that's extremely informative with regards to ionic charge and element classification. It pretty much is exactly what you say re: learning what the periodic table means. Any high level chemistry class that's focused on such trivial memorization is doing a huge disservice to its students.

The memorization bits come with remembering nomenclature and equilibriums, which you just kinda have to memorize or you're not really learning any chemistry at all. They're the building blocks of all higher level chemistry that come after, organic or inorganic.

kaesar14on Musk Proposes to Proceed with Twitter Deal at $54.20 a Share

Do you have a source tweet for the 10% discovery?

kaesar14on Post-pandemic, the battle between Uber and Lyft is looking more one-sided

It seems like a fundamental issue is that there's no really no product differentiation - a Lyft's end result is the same as Uber (getting to your destination) so the only path to winning is having the money to outspend your opponent. Now that Uber's cut out the bullshit with self-driving and endless expansion, and started to focus on winning in the US, I see a tough road ahead for Lyft.

kaesar14on Turkey’s inflation hits 83% as Erdogan vows to keep cutting interest rates

I mean either way it's a transliteration that's still not accurate to either pronunciation in its original form by sound. I don't have a problem with these sorts of political changes, just the way the wind blows, but it is funny to me when someone who doesn't speak either language attempts to correct other English speakers pronunciation when it's still not how a native Ukrainian would say it. Languages bastardize place names universally, there's no right way to say most places in most languages, they're all equally wrong.

kaesar14on Turkey’s inflation hits 83% as Erdogan vows to keep cutting interest rates

The sound like bit.

kaesar14on Turkey’s inflation hits 83% as Erdogan vows to keep cutting interest rates

Reminiscent of changing the collective English world's spelling of Kiev to Kyiv when both are just approximations of the real pronunciation, lol.

kaesar14on Turkey’s inflation hits 83% as Erdogan vows to keep cutting interest rates

I don't think the average literate English reader really knows how to parse an umlaut - I sure don't.

And while the spelling system isn't necessarily consistent I don't see why we should change words that people do know how to pronounce to ones that we don't?

kaesar14on Number of States with High Rates of Adult Obesity More Than Doubles

And still vast amounts more of poor minorities are obese than live in food deserts.

kaesar14on Number of States with High Rates of Adult Obesity More Than Doubles

The statistics here are saying anywhere from 30-50% of each American state's population is obese so yeah I'm gonna venture to say food deserts are not the culprit here

Edit: Looks like the AECF link might've been edited as the Google preview said 8% - indeed is 12% on the same link. USDA says 10%: https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2011/05/03/interactive-web-t...

kaesar14on Number of States with High Rates of Adult Obesity More Than Doubles

I mean there's still enough time to pick and choose the food that is making people fat...

kaesar14on Number of States with High Rates of Adult Obesity More Than Doubles

Only 8% of the American population live in what could be qualified as a food desert.

kaesar14on Number of States with High Rates of Adult Obesity More Than Doubles

Or that the cultures in each racial group have different diets of wildly different nutritional value. No one is making anyone overeat.

kaesar14on Two hundred years ago, Jean-François Champollion deciphers the Rosetta Stone

ah ce n’est pas disponible dans mon pays :(

kaesar14on Two hundred years ago, Jean-François Champollion deciphers the Rosetta Stone

I don't know German, how do I navigate to the French version?

kaesar14on Two hundred years ago, Jean-François Champollion deciphers the Rosetta Stone

Sorry, can't recommend it enough, typed that on my phone.

kaesar14on Two hundred years ago, Jean-François Champollion deciphers the Rosetta Stone

https://youtu.be/NIxn9auks24 I can’t recommend this Royal Institute lecture about how Champollion (and others) finally cracked the code of Hieroglyphics

kaesar14on Diving deeper into custom PDF and ePub generation

+1 for weasyprint, only library I’ve found that respects all modern CSS and importing fonts

kaesar14on Uber investigating breach of its computer systems

If the theory posted elsewhere in this thread is true there was definitely gross negligence elsewhere in the security chain so it’s not the fault of that one person for sure.

kaesar14on The Koh-i-Noor diamond, and why the British won’t give it back (2017)

I wasn’t aware those places were in India, the subject of this exchange.

Entirely possible and supported by mainstream historians that the colonial regime did lead to a number of deaths around the same magnitude of both of those events though, fwiw.

kaesar14on Uber investigating breach of its computer systems

Forgive me for being frank, but how do people seriously fall for phishing scams? How do you work at a company like Uber and do something like click on a link in an email to claim a gift card? It’s insane to me.

kaesar14on The Koh-i-Noor diamond, and why the British won’t give it back (2017)

I’m also Indian. The British regime is likely responsible for tens, if not hundreds of millions of deaths through the forcible extraction of food and wealth, and the impoverishment of generations of Indians since. The atrocities of the Mughals are not to be ignored but the simple fact remains that India’s population grew greatly during the period of colonization, as did the brutality and extremity of the methods of extraction.

One source: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/india-35-milli...

kaesar14on The Koh-i-Noor diamond, and why the British won’t give it back (2017)

Not on the scale as afterwards, no.

kaesar14on Jackson’s water crisis: latest updates

I think in large part it’s due to how economically divided American society is in terms of where people live. Places like New York have excellent water - the wealthy and poor live side by side. But a huge part of this country live in suburbs and rural areas that are strongly divided on economic lines, any thus those with means are not exposed to and do not care about the quality of infrastructure in poorer areas.

kaesar14on Health insurers just published close to a trillion hospital prices

It’s crazy how every other western country also has those things and yet… no 50 dollar saline bags. Keep defending graft though

kaesar14on Health insurers just published close to a trillion hospital prices

Which part of this equation is contributing to hospitals charging 50 dollars for a bag of IV fluid? I'd cut that part out. Whatever it is.