It is worth a try. I have had really good luck with the US Postal Service. People do not get much mail, so if you send it, someone might actually see it. That will never happen with email or any electronic tools.
I used to buy laptops, and the external quality peaked at different times for different brands (the Asus all aluminum was wonderful, but Sony made some nice stuff twenty years ago as well), but for the actual guts-PCB, power supply, ..., they all seem like the same old sh^t. The monitors get better, but I swear all laptops slow down with age. The only solution is to re-install windows and start over.
I personally prefer desktop workstations. They are better.
If you want to get REALLY angry, go to school in poor neighborhoods and watch teachers "teach" children how to search the web. Computers in schools was a mistake. If there were to be computers, they should all be Unix or Linux or BSD distros run from the command line.
There are key phrases that a school is scam central. Any time they try to say "X percent of students went off to college" that school is a scam. If they speak of creating "computer literate" or "technology literate" students, the school is a scam.
Check out how easy many of the reading and math tests are, then you will know how horrible it is when schools only have 20-30% of students getting to their grade level. It has been a bizarre transformation where schools went from being oriented around student learning to being oriented around teacher wellness and teacher preferences.
We should be hiring teachers from Singapore and Hong Kong to fix our schools. Instead we hire creepy education consultants that get rich peddling idiocy. It iw a crime against children.
For many business-type courses they like you to be able to quickly get an IRR or NPV value. One could solve that by hand, but the exams would be long and require manual grading. According to my older colleagues when I started my career, they used to bring their HP calculators to client meetings before laptops were a thing. They would sit around and do estimated calculations. If you look at old photos, your can see the HP calculators in them and paper with written calculations. When I started my career in 2000, laptops were already ubiquitous. There were still old timers with the RPN calculators from HP. Excel is better for finance. For real analysis and simulation stuff like Mathmatica and Maple are better, with SAS, SPSS and R for statistics, although SAS is used a ton in finance, insurance as well as government.
That's another point, during college some tests were and multiple choice questions. They were manually graded and for each answer you needed to prove how did you get the answer. I don't remember any kind of automated grading system. Everything was done by hand, whether by the teacher or TA's
That rabbit hole will make you angry, then sad, then hopeless. I live in Chicago, on the South Side. The number of foolish fads in education have been forced on poor children for decades. It is shameful. Children should not be experimented on because their parents could not afford Catholic school or a house in the suburbs. Rich white people enjoy warping the minds of black children far too much. They never experiment with their own children, only ours. It is sickening.
I used the TI-85 back when dinosaurs walked the earth. I still have that and the TI-92, the best FAT calculator ever. This thing will tie your shoes and help fight off depression. I strongly recommend the TI-92. It is not allowed on any standardized tests though.
I do know that even my TI-85 was programmable. I made a few different functions with it. If you try anything too sophisticated, there really is not sufficient space for it, but it was the first device I ever wrote any kind of program on. I used that through university, but for work I had the HP 12c with reverse Polish notation. Now that was useless. I could never understand why old men preferred that to Excel. Excel is better in every way, and one can write pretty sophisticated functions and simulations in Excel VBA. I spent years doing so.
Overall, I do not see the point in bringing out new calculators. I do think the existing ones should have more RAM and storage with a bit more computational heft, but only 1-3% of owners are ever going to use that, but it will make them so much better.
As a lover and admirer of all things porcine, I am deeply offended by that comment. Although pigs do enjoy a good wrestle, they are a fine animal with a great spirit and refined wisdom. If you think I am joking, I am wearing a solid gold pig pendent right now, surrounded by pave diamonds. I genuinely adore these creatures. They have been unfairly maligned in our culture.
I always interpreted it as the pig liking getting dirty, not necessarily the fight.. And before reading your comment I never thought there could be another way of interpreting it..
This is what happens when people are anonymous. I assume these are all 12-year-old victims of bullying with a lot of pain and no where to get it out. They spit venom wherever they go. I assume they grow out of it.
Frankly, I would recommend you think on why you are so sensitive to random criticism? That is not healthy. I had the privilege of growing up in a rough place where ridicule was the norm, so I was rather immune to insults by around age 14. I mean, it would hurt if it came from someone I respected, but not a drug dealer or bum on the street. That is what internet commenters are, homeless junkies throwing insults out of powerless rage. They do not matter.
I do not know you, so I will not provide the tough love I would give to a friend or relative, but you should not care what unimportant people say about you. Such insecurities are dangerous and counter-productive. If some crack head on the street pointed out your deepest insecurity, it should not bother you. He is a crackhead. He does not matter. You do. You need to let that shit go. It will eat you up inside. If you have legitimate insecurities, fix them. If you are bothered by silly stuff (appearance, ethnicity,...), you need to shake that off. No one should be able to use that against you. That is giving others too much power over you. It is an insane submission for no benefit. Let it go.
So my advice is to let it go. Choose to stop reacting to these comments. You CHOOSE to react. The comments are irrelevant. The problem is that you are letting yourself react negatively. You need to stop that. There exist evil people who will use that weakness to control you. PLEASE fix it before you meet someone of that nature. Insults are like cockroaches. You do not need to fear them, but you should never let them into your home.
I think a lot of it comes down to what the forum incentivizes. Hacker News is anonymous, but people tend to be quite nice, the worst thing I see here is people being pretentious or know-it-alls, but nothing like the absolute vitriol you see on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc.
