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Why would you need Google Maps to get home from school? I have an absolutely terrible sense of direction, but even I can memorize a single route after walking it a couple of times.

Is this really that US specific? Ages 6-7 seems to be pretty common for first grade¹, which gives you 13-14 for eighth.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_stage


In Scotland, the first year of school is Primary 1

We have P1-P7, then secondary S1 - S4, with S5 and S6 optional.

> Children start primary school aged between 4½ and 5½ depending on when the child's birthday falls.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Scotland


Primary 1 seems to be a pre-primary school type curriculum and you leave secondary school at the same exact age. So you reinforced the parents point, even your exception is pretty much the same except you call it P1 instead of nursery. From what I read, in most schools P1 activities are play based, many times there's no individual desks. It's basically kindergarten.

I think I’m missing your point- is your (overall) point that I should have known what age range 8th grade is in the US without looking it up? And that I should also know what activities happen in a US kindergarten?

My point is 6 years old is a good heuristic to use for "start school" age and even scotland is similar

I’ve had really strange replies to my original reply. I posted some information that I had to look up for the benefit of other people and now for some reason I need to say that school starts around age 6 in my country when my son started Primary 1 when he was closer to 4.5.

Others are trying to say that I should somehow automatically know that most of the world uses the similar(?) age ranges. I don’t even know what age school starts at in other parts of the UK despite sharing borders with them. Maybe I’m ignorant but it’s never been information that I needed to know or retain.

Was posting the age range of US grade 8 so controversial?


Agreed. Australian school years are January-December but you're still 13 or 14 in Year 8.

No, you can just use a pointer to struct S without ever defining the fields of S, no void pointers required.

But whether standard software is able to express this system is up to the software, not the system, no? Why is this way of timekeeping weird, apart from the arbitrary decision not to support it?

I would agree it's weird, but not because software doesn't support it, but because it's different from what the vast majority of the population of the world does. The fact that software doesn't support it is a downstream consequence of that.

I agree with that take. It's also quite different from saying that it's weird because software doesn't support it, which is the claim I took issue with. Maybe I should've phrased my comment differently.

The decision to not support it isn't "arbitrary" per se; it's a function of utility vs cost to implement (which a healthy dose of fudge). "Standard software" for timekeeping is far more useful precisely because it is used by far more people.

Maybe arbitrary was the wrong word. I understand that this is an implementation cost issue and I'm not saying that the decision not to pay this cost wasn't reasonable. My objection is not with tzdb, but with the characterisation of a real-life practice as weird just because software doesn't accommodate it. Shouldn't what people do be the reference for what is normal, rather than the rules encoded in software?

Individuals are full of conflicting incompatible desires and people as they group are exponentially so.

There are people who want to end any other human to ever live homeless in starvation or any kind of poverty and there are people who want to eliminate anyone they judge as threat or a nuisance while reinforcing there feeling that they dominate everything that will ever matter in the world and the rest.

Software can help all kind of purpose.


Software doesn’t accomodate it because it’s weird relative to literally the rest of the world.

Sure. But that's completely different from saying it's strange because software doesn't accommodate it.

Is it?

Yes, it is, because in your phrasing the fact that nobody else keeps time that way is the cause and lack of support in software the effect. The comment that I originally responded to is phrased as though lack of software support is the cause of weirdness.

I object to the latter since software is not the source of truth, the social practices it aims to encode are. It is perfectly reasonable to say that this particular practice is so rare that it is out of scope, but this makes tzdb a not quite correct approximation of reality, rather than reality an approximation of tzdb.


Except it doesn't necessarily go towards (positive) infinity. Use a negative dividend, and you approach negative infinity instead. The same is obviously true if you use a negative divisor instead, and you get positive infinity again if both are negative. So division by zero is impossible because you can't meaningfully define it (in the general case).

Surely the logical pronunciation is the way you'd pronounce it in library, so a long 'ai' rather than any kind of 'i'? Though I personally always use the short 'i'. I was going to justify that by saying it's the same as /usr/bin, but that's also short for binaries, so should also be an 'ai'.


I've been pronouncing it with the short 'i' for 30 years, but mainly, possibly only, in my head.

In 1998 I started a new job, and my boss pronounced "URL" as "earl". That threw me for a loop, had to fight my way through our first conversation before I figured out what he was saying.


I pronounce API as "appy", which sometimes draws quizzical looks (people think I'm using next-level cutesy slang for "application"). But I never could do the "earl" thing. Or "sequel".


> Surely the logical pronunciation is the way you'd pronounce it in library, so a long 'ai' rather than any kind of 'i'?

Yep, that's what I meant to say with:

> … never noticed until I heard someone else say it with a long 'i' that that was obviously the logical pronunciation.

But maybe the sentence structure was too tortured for it to be clear what I was saying.

> Though I personally always use the short 'i'. I was going to justify that by saying it's the same as /usr/bin, but that's also short for binaries, so should also be an 'ai'.

Oh, shoot, even after I noticed the logical pronunciation of "lib" (long 'i') it never occurred to me that the same applied to "bin". I guess I just can't say any paths out loud any more.


Perhaps the difference for you is that "bin" is already an English word with an official pronunciation.

Personally, I also use short-i for "lib," because I tend to pronounce shortenings of text as if they were words themselves.


> that's what I meant to say

Ah, that makes sense. I thought you meant long 'i' as in extending the duration of the 'i' sound, like in 'beep' vs 'bip'.


Do you pronounce the vowel in /var as in "bar" or as in "bare"?

Also, for those who try to pronounce everything rather than spell them out, where does it end?

I now have a newly discovered, morbid interest in how such folks say path elements like "selinux", "httpd", and "pgsql"...


> Do you pronounce the vowel in /var as in "bar" or as in "bare"?

Ha, they're everywhere!


You could kind of avoid the return stack, if you only ever do tail calls. Obviously, that's pretty unrealistic, but it's possible.


Assuming your compiler implements TCO properly, also.


I believe GP meant that you can't have protocols containing numbers, using rot13 as the example protocol on port 76. Though, as msk-lywenn said, rot13 isn't a real protocol, which don't really have numbers in their names.


rotthirteen76 would work


rotthirteen would "work", but it's not a protocol.

Actual protocols include tcp, udp, dccp, sctp, etc.


Who said anything about sticking anything into credit card terminals? And I'm not seeing any wires sticking out of the phone. I'd say it doesn't particularly look like a bomb either, but given recent events, that probably doesn't say much.


You'll be asking the same thing by trying to pay through a totally custom phone. As I'm repeating here, the blocker is lack of trust from banks, not technical reasons. THEY have to trust YOU, and then banking apps will work. Otherwise any tricks to get past security check to manipulate your bank accounts will be just short-lived hacks.

If the King of England walked into the Bank of England and wrote a hand-written bond for GBP1k with a bic pen on back of copier paper, they'll take it. Electronic platforms has nothing to do with that. That's why it's stupid to keep asking if banking apps would work.


>If the King of England walked into the Bank of England and wrote a hand-written bond for GBP1k with a bic pen on back of copier paper, they'll take it.

what has gone wrong in your brain that you think that?


You're new to HN, right? We don't behave like this here.

I'm referring to the pugnacious tone, but the certainty in the absence of evidence is also a bit gauche.

So you know, chazza banks with coutts. I reckon he could draw much much more, over the phone or in person, and wouldn't be put on hold or asked security questions. If you also happen to be the head of state of several nations and have your face on the coin of the realm, and your experience is contrary, then please do rebut my assertion.


147 packages don't strike me as that many, that's less than 1% of all Gentoo packages. I expected much more.

EDIT: And several of those packages are binaries. Apart from the *-bin packages, I've identified TeamSpeak, dev-libs/amdgpu-pro-opencl, Skype, and Slack. That leaves 138 packages.


Yeah, but one of those packages is nodejs. That means no firefox, no transmission, almost nothing with a web ui.


(Sane) web UIs in general should be fine, since they can just use the browser's JS engine. I don't think transmission is affected, at least it's not listed as masked.

You're right about firefox though, which is weird. Apparently node is a build dependency, but I can't figure out if that's something specific to the ebuild (that Arch's PKGBUILD does as well) or just generally something the buildsystem requires, but it's not listed as a dependency at https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/setup/linux_build.ht....


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