HN user

fish45

617 karma
Posts16
Comments113
View on HN

Interestingly Zelensky might be easier to deepfake than other world leaders because there's more footage and a wider variety of facial expressions to train on due to his acting career

The thing is that there's two levels of possible discrimination; systemic discrimination and admissions discrimination. Pure test results are discrimination free at the admissions level, but they don't address systemic inequities. To accommodate for systemic inequities, we use admissions discrimination. Again, that's not necessarily a bad thing; the author thinks it's a worthy tradeoff.

Asians are extremely well represented at top schools, i'm not sure what they are fighting for?

The truth is that Asian Americans have to get higher test scores / GPA / extracurriculars to get into prestigious schools. It's true that this might have a positive affect on reducing systemic discrimination in the long run, but it's hard for Asian American applicants to accept that the burden should be placed on them.

I just want to point out that this is part of the premise of the original article:

Harvard’s admissions policies make me especially queasy, because the burden rests so heavily on Asian Americans. Still, it advances the important goals of exposing students to a somewhat broader range of colleagues and helping to lift more underrepresented minorities into positions in the power elite, which remains heavily white.

Generally, going to prestigious schools benefits under represented minorities more than it benefits Asian Americans to an extent that affirmative action can be effective at addressing systemic inequalities, but it's still discriminatory against Asian americans to do so. It's a matter of opinion whether it's a good tradeoff or not

I think many people haven't realized that different paradigms fit different people's brains in different ways; there are better paradigms for a specific person and task but it's impossible to generalize.

A common example I use is an Abstract Syntax Tree, which is essentially a mutually recursive polymorphic tree. In Elixir you might model this with a tuple labelled by an atom. With Haskell you'd use ADTs and pattern matching, which are easy to pick up because they're first class in the language but they're still something to learn. In Java, your understanding has to be a bit deeper; you'd have to learn about abstract classes. In C, you'd need to understand forward declaration and tagged unions.

Honestly I can't think of an example of anything which is harder to model in Haskell's type system, but I think the Java and C examples demonstrate that you do have to learn different type systems to model more complex examples.

I totally agree that type systems end up reducing cognitive overhead in the long run though.

after you know one language well, you know them all instinctively

This isn't strictly true. Elixir, while functional, isn't completely pure and has a dynamic type system which definitely lowers the learning curve.

Developers who know one language well are likely equipped to pick up a language like Haskell faster than even a mathematician, but I can't imagine that a Java one trick would pick up Haskell (or APL, or Scheme, etc.) "instinctively"

Funny anecdote, I installed Ubuntu on my own laptop to improve my minecraft FPS when I was 9 (~9 years ago).

I googled something like "how to get more fps in minecraft" and the first result was a minecraft forum post to which the only response was "install Ubuntu". At the time, Ubuntu had a .exe installer, so I thought it was just like any other program and installed it to my C: drive along with everything else. I think I did have the concept of other OS since I'd used both Windows and MacOS previously, so I figured it out after the reboot. It did increase my minecraft FPS from ~15 to ~30 on average, so I didn't have any complaints.

I stuck with that laptop until high school, when I got a new laptop and started dual-booting Windows for gaming and Linux for everything else, which is where I'm at now.

Mix.install is super great for me. Personally I vastly prefer Elixir to Python for basic personal scripting stuff so being able to pull in dependencies in a single file is nice. Before I'd been using escript to turn mix projects into a single executable which is pretty inefficient

My favorite is https://calcula.tech which I made to help with my physics and chemistry homework. I have a few other users, mostly friends from school AFAIK, but I'm hoping that it can become more useful for more people. I wrote the main interpreter in Rust mostly from scratch, and the site is built with elixir Phoenix and alpineJS.

I'll agree with other commenters that Zig is no where near mature enough for Linux yet. However, I definitely think that it will be a better fit than Rust in a few years. It's a fantastic C replacement.

I've started learning Elixir over the week and I can't see myself using Python for scripting again. They're very different languages but th experience feels similar, except I vastly prefer Elixir

I find that for most of these use cases I'd rather just make a Vim macro. I already know Vim, so I don't have to learn and remember a new language.

For cases where it needs to be automated, Awk is probably the best tool. I don't know it though, and cases are few enough and far between so I've always just used Python.