vacuity

"Generics" is not why Rust compiles slowly. Rust had certain design decisions and implementation details that impact compile times significantly. Do not misrepresent them and pretend that the Rust developers are incompetent or malicious. By doing so, you invite discourse as ideological and uncritical as that of Rust fanatics, however many or few there are.

I am not too familiar with D, but it seems that D's borrowing system is somewhat different than Rust's, given that it is not the focus of how D is implemented and used. This means different design tradeoffs.

There are appropriate ways to contrast D with Rust and illustrate where D is stronger, but it is inaccurate to say "Rust has borrowing; D has borrowing" and conclude that they are comparable in this sense.

Internal use of unsafe requires securing the safe code at the module boundary. However, the design of unsafe still greatly reduces the burden of memory safety, both when it is and isn't used directly. The specific semantics of Rust aside, unsafe is more or less the ideal way for a language to express unsafe escape hatch constructs.

Your point about compile times is very dismissive and wrong, but I agree aside from that. It's worth noting that the Rust team explicitly tracks, monitors and limits regressions in, and actively optimizes for compile times, and Rust community surveys always ask for better compile times. This is clearly a significant issue, and while Rust is never going to compile as fast as C or Pascal, it can and will improve so that it becomes more usable.

If any language would've had this bug, why is Rust being singled out? If the software was written in Go, would the bug get the same attention?

No programming language should get flak for a bug that is not the fault of the programming language. This is Cloudflare's problem.

(I haven't presently read Wolf's essay on account of it being paywalled. However, I think I get the gist of it, and Scanlon's view too, from the abstract and some commentary.)

I see good points from both Wolf and Scanlon, but I don't fully agree with either. To express myself crudely, I might say that I think "feelings" ("emotions") can be either rational or irrational. That is, logic and emotions are orthogonal concepts, and in fact we must perform logic within some domain, which may involve emotions. So I embrace emotions as one domain in the exercise of logic, but that gives rise to "logical beliefs based on emotions" and "illogical beliefs based on emotions".

If someone believes a friend is worthy of blame for something, but does not consider their friend to have caused an injury as Scanlon says, then Wolf says this is indeed blame, part of a valuable notion of blame. But I don't tend to consider emotional-logical beliefs to convey blame or praise, because really they are just reflecting reality. I wouldn't praise a friend for having the sense to pour a thirsty person water anymore than I would praise the water for having the sense to obey gravity when poured. But lack of praise isn't the same as determining whether to feel or express, say, gratitude or pleasure. I believe that all deeds should be judged as they are, and others should express themselves about those deeds accordingly. That the friend has done something blameworthy is just to say that the friend should be blamed (in my opinion, which I recognize is contentious). But blaming the friend does not require a specific response, and the response may be quite amicable. In this sense, I think blame and praise are useful when they logically correspond personal responses with logical judgements, but they reduce to dull logical exercises.

Illogical beliefs rooted in emotion are where blame becomes dangerous. Case in point: this overall thread. I think it's fair to say that some comments are combative. Still, something illogical is merely illogical, and also dull in the end.

I think the real challenge, and point of interest, is dealing with human beliefs in practice, where the presence of logic (or lack thereof) in a comment is highly subjective, ambiguous, not obvious, not formally coherent or perhaps not even informally coherent.... This is a good example of human "messiness" but also human "value". Especially when discussing beliefs rooted in "emotions", with blame being a prominent category, things aren't so easy to judge.

While the US education system is plenty bad, I expect that a substantial number of people who can't/don't cook are not held back due to illiteracy. To be fair, this thread seems to be discussing recipes and dishes, but even "tossing some meat in a crockpot and some rice in a rice cooker" is an improvement from ordering fast food.

Moreover, changing one's habits to cooking requires effort upfront, and its benefits may not be apparent (at least in the start).

I think this is a good example of how lying can affect one's autonomy (though I don't remotely hold that as an absolute principle). In the ideal exercise of love, I agree with your claim. I don't think it's dismantled in practice, but I think it is weaker. The spouse fell in love with "someone", but it turns out it's just a dummy of the other spouse. To some extent, probably everyone only loves or even perceives imperfect images of others, but this takes it a step further. I think this is somewhat different from supporting a disabled/ill spouse, because that condition arose through no fault of anyone (presumably). I think this is also different from a spouse, sometime into the marriage, realizing a different romantic/sexual orientation, because no one could've known at the time of marriage (presumably).

I find it very hard to judge whether I'm fulfilling that part of the guidelines. I only have a few submissions, and I think I'm good there, but I'm more conflicted when it comes to upvoting or engaging in other people's submissions. For example, earlier today I saw a thread on German laws on date rape drugs. I upvoted the thread. Do I think it's important for people to talk about date rape drugs? Certainly. I'm not sure if it falls under satisfying my "intellectual curiosity", though. Is HN "the right place" for this conversation? I'm not sure, though I think the reality on the ground would say "yes". Most likely, all of this is an organic adaptation that HN has experienced.

The notions of "blame", "excuse", and "forgiveness" are strange to me now. I want to say that understanding is key, and everything else follows from understanding. If I understand a person's action, I should act, according to my values, regarding that person. Consistency to one's values is also key. Any emotions, feelings, etc. should either be recognized in my values or shouldn't interfere. If I am to praise or elevate someone, I should praise or elevate that person, and the same if I should rebuke or punish someone. Any extraneous desires that would prevent me from doing what I should do are to be contained. I must understand my values, by which I will understand the world, and how I should act within that world is then determined.

The "never had to work a day in his life" claim is wrong, though I agree his experience seems insufficient for the position of mayor.

When I brought up grade inflation, I meant it as a factor of a different kind than { COVID, phones, generative AI, ... }. Grade inflation is the reason why the decline is deceptive.

> > What aside from grade inflation explains why those students in the UCSD report had high grades but had to take remedial math class?

> > Also, what even is the ideological angle here? I'm the only one talking about grade inflation here (well, one other person mentioned it, but surely not to be "anti-woke").

Decline in math skills in an international test before COVID: https://www.edutopia.org/article/pisa-math-scores-fall-globa....

> U.S. students remained relatively steady in science and reading in 2015 compared with 2012, when the exam was last administered, but dropped below the global average in math.

> Of the 35 OECD member countries, the U.S. was among the lowest-performing in math—finishing 31st—continuing a downward trend that started in 2009.

> Outspending all but two countries on education, the U.S. joins countries like Norway and Switzerland that provide significant funding to their school systems yet aren’t seeing the same high performance from their students as other countries that spend less.

It is even more an indictment of the education system if, this long after COVID, so many students are doing so poorly.

I can't honestly call myself "anti-woke", nor can I honestly call myself "woke". What a pain. Harping on about either one makes for a dull comment. If anything, I'd probably be considered "woke" by ideological proximity.

> Is it though, or is that just what your ideological sense tells you?

What aside from grade inflation explains why those students in the UCSD report had high grades but had to take remedial math class? The schools I went to had some grade inflation, though perhaps it's not that bad. Heck, Harvard loves grade inflation.

Also, what even is the ideological angle here? I'm the only one talking about grade inflation here (well, one other person mentioned it, but surely not to be "anti-woke").

> but haven't ever been moving particularly fast either

Would it be false that education quality is declining even if it is doing so slowly?

> Teachers have always had funny ideas, and haven't broken kids yet

That "yet" is doing a lot of work, and ignoring the present article. A slow-moving train wreck is still a train wreck.

In fairness, I think reading abstracts is a good way to 1) quickly gain information and 2) figure out if the paper is worth the time to read. Especially for paywalled papers, and when I'm trying to get a broad sense of different ideas, consuming a few tens of abstracts is a nice way to get a feel for the research.

On a somewhat different note, I also tend to only read the comments of HN threads and Youtube videos...

Grade inflation seems to be the main long-term culprit. Lowered standards mean that any student that isn't incentivized for some other reason to learn math simply won't learn. I'm less enamored with the other explanations, such as technology distractions or relying on AI, but they probably play a small part too. You and GP seem very sure that, if the pandemic didn't happen, the decline in math skills wouldn't be happening to a significant degree, but the pandemic was a fast-forward.

When the education policy is less about "how do we teach math" and moreso grade inflation, I don't think it's strange.

Standardized testing isn't remotely perfect, but I think I have grounds to say that it is far better than many alternatives. In this case, standardized testing would've caught the problem before admissions.

As someone else mentioned somewhere in this thread, what about public schooling prevents students from learning by themselves? In my experience, the best students I know generally didn't become so due to public or private schooling, but simply personal interest and drive (and perhaps talent, but that is also school-independent).

Do you have reason to believe he benefitted from gifted programs around the level of kindergarten or maybe first or second grade?

The sad thing is that I saw that standardized tests were being blamed based on a certain ideology, when the proponents of the ideology should've realized that their own goals are better served by using standardized tests.

It shouldn't be controversial, and in some sense it isn't (in another sense it is, because people confuse themselves), that everyone should be given the opportunity to develop and perform at their full potential. I could name multiple different ideologies that oppose this in some way, though.

Based on what GP said, it isn't clear that the implementation of "allowing advanced students to learn advanced topics" is successful either. It seems like the current gifted/non-gifted system isn't working.

Alternatively, maybe some of the rejected students could be admitted. I don't know that any college has an excellent admissions process that reliably identifies talent (or the lack thereof).

It's not just about pride. Companies, artistic productions, projects of any kind...they require vision and focus. When the people in charge change, maintaining these becomes a challenge.

I did fall for it just now, but I think it's typically easier to read when handwritten.

Percentages and arithmetic in daily life, programming, financial bookkeeping...to be fair, the math I use often is pretty basic, but even so, the report from UCSD seems to be saying that a significant fraction of the remedial math students can't even perform at that level.

Other math I use rarely, but I'm still glad I learned, say, geometry or calculus when a situation pops up.

And in a classic stroke of Gell-Mann amnesia, if you're questioning what you just heard, how much should you trust what you were hearing five minutes ago?

I agree that learning is what is important, but I wouldn't assume that GP did not make an effort to learn. Learning an entire field is difficult, and small hints may be all that's needed to draw upon one's learning.

To me, a big factor that I subconsciously evaluate on is the "fakeness" of the appearance itself. Instances where plastic surgery results in the uncanny valley of "should be good but looks too perfect or messes up a critical aspect" disturb me. Plastic surgery isn't as powerful as Photoshop. Maybe that's more on the surgeon, and subjective criterion of attraction (such as mine), but it simply isn't the case that plastic surgery makes someone look good.