My graduation cap runs Rust
ericswpark.com> It probably would’ve been easier if I didn’t use Rust and just used the Arduino libraries, or if I used a different board. But I was really married to this blog post title idea
Worth it, nicely done
> Fun fact #1: you rent your cap and gown in the US. You have to return them. And they’re expensive, too! I paid $94 just for the privilege of renting mine, which is insane because they probably cost way less than that to manufacture.
Ah, yes, of course this is how it works in the US.
It depends entirely on school.
Mine wasn't like that (and still isn't). Multiple friends of mine are graduating from NYU this month, and their situation isn't like like that either.
Every school I've ever encountered gives an option to purchase (with some being way more affordable than others). E.g., NYU JD (law school) cap and gown is roughly $98 to purchase (not to rent) this year.
FWIW I'm in the US and I bought mine. Renting does seem to make more sense here as the gown has no utility outside of this one event.
You generally rent caps and gowns in the UK too. Can you share where you are that you buy them?
Here is one company that provides the gowns for many UK universities: https://www2.edeandravenscroft.com/non-ceremony/. I could be kitted with the appropriate gowns for my UK degrees for a few hundred squid each.
Academics, who attend many graduation events, often end up buying their own gown. I believe you are supposed to use the gown of the university you graduated from, so they must be for sale somewhere.
Once you have your own gown you can customize it. I haven't seen any profs with LEDs additions to their gowns, but adding extra pockets to hide a book or snacks is fair game.
Yeh but most undergraduates (and probably graduates) will rent because it's cheaper for a one-off occasion. As you said it's mainly academics that buy.
Looks like Ede no longer sells my University gown but https://churchillgowns.com/ does. Again rent/buy.
You are allowed to turn up in your own though, no one will check. I even had people turn up in the wrong colour gown at my graduation.
I don’t doubt that some offer and charge for rentals. (I think mine only charged $130 ish for purchase though.)
However, I am shocked to hear that there is not even an option to purchase them at OP’s university. Many people like to keep them, especially the cap at least, as a souvenir, or their parents will keep it. Besides, couldn’t they make more money selling them?
At my college you rented the gowns, or at least that was the default, but I think the cap was bought and yours to keep.
Also, as a souvenir, the tassel, which is decorated with a charm showing the year graduated, is also always (obviously) yours to keep.
It’s very common in America for young people to hang that tassel from their car’s center rear-view mirror.
Yes, you have to pay a decent wage to the people helping you fit, cleaning, and storing the goods. Manufacture is done in a low cost country with cheap labour, so buying clothing seems cheap.
Do you truly believe most of that goes towards wages?
Well, some will go on corporation tax, some on business rates, some on rent of the land the storage is on (which itself has to pay corporation tax, I suppose).
Yes. Competitive forces would push the cost toward the most expensive input which is likely people. That would be somewhat muted if the supplier was sole source but even then outright purchases would put downward pressure on the rental price.
Given that you’re forced to rent the cap and gown, I think it’s safe to say that competitive forces are entirely absent in this scenario.
What competitive forces? It's not like people have a choice in choosing whether they want a particular cap or gown and the people who contract the rental agreement (i.e. the university admin) are not the ones bearing the cost.
I'm surprised at the concept, somehow I thought the whole "graduation cap" thing was just in movies. Seems out of place in a country that's otherwise so individualistic.
Colleges are far less “individualistic” than most places in the country.
We are by all concievable measures living in the best timeline and under the best economic system. Just look at the graphs. Just consider what an American symbol the graduation cap is. We don’t really know why, but I think a likely reason is that making graduation caps under most economic systems is too labor intensive. Some families might not have even been able to send their children to universities since they couldn’t rent or buy graduation caps—and certainly not make them themselvse—and not doing so would be a complete humiliation for their family or clan or what they have in other countries.
Too coherent. You need to work on your simulation.
What in the world is going on here?
That must be new; I walked in 2009 and we got to keep ours
High school lets you (makes you?) buy them. My HS and college had almost the exact same color, so I probably could have gotten away with reusing mine!
It's insane, why doesn't the school just store a bunch of them.
As opposed to what buying the thing and storing it or throwing it away?
It's a $10 gown, renting it for $100 is madness
Welcome to captive audience pricing! There are more a few companies who have this type of business, especially targeting those in institutions of all kinds.
They probably are fully gone now, but when I was in college some (IRL) classes, usually the big auditorium ones, added interactivity in the form of realtime polls and quizzes with a little “clicker” device. This was of course $30 or whatever and just used some custom RF protocol to register your vote across the room. Single-source, you have to buy it to be in the class.
Textbooks themselves, electronic or not, same racket. Professor is sold the book, but it’s the students who pay. (Don’t forget of course the scam of “writing your own math book” and requiring it!!)
Prisons: some private company always has a deal to “supply telephone service” and charges the inmates or their families rates that are higher than international long distance used to cost.
All of these things are sold to administrators who have no fiscal concerns with the service or product because the institution isn’t the one paying, so there’s zero pricing pressure. If there’s even multiple contractors in the niche, they are more incentivized to compete on sending cool freebies to the administrators, or add perks that benefit them, than they are to compete on pricing for the students/inmates/etc. like, say, Jostens might throw in “free school ID cards” which is technically “saving the school money” in order to get the yearbook contract, while making $100 a yearbook in gross profit on $150 yearbooks. Note: all numbers made up.
Throwing it away after single use is madness.
I think they’re saying it should be much cheaper to rent, and we shouldn’t throw them away.
Is it?
My issue with this type of thinking is it assumes "transport cost <<< manufacturing cost" -- a decent assumption for a lot of goods throughout a lot of history, but just... not really true for lots of things in a modern supply chain.
The cost of moving the gown between users -- in the form of the user needing to give back the gown to the service, who must then clean it, inspect it, etc. -- may in fact be far higher than the cost of manufacturing a new gown and only needing your supply lines to be "one way".
trash doesn't disappear, everything has to go somewhere
Sure, but there's a lot of random matter on Earth -- excess trash being an issue is less about space and more about externalities (e.g. toxic chemicals leaching).
Being mindful of how much trash we produce does not necessitate producing less (or more!) -- but merely balancing the pros and cons.
I was wondering why I saw them for cheap on aliexpress…
And if you order XXXXL it might fit. A little tight, but bearable.
Yeah this is not universal. I bought mine
If you go to a bigger school, they have multiple graduation ceremonies. Split the rental amongst anyone who does not share a time slot with you.
That’s what I did and people acted like this was a genius move. No, I am just broke.
I skipped the graduation ceremonies for my BA and my first master’s degree. For my second, apparently the cost of a cap, gown and hood was included in the tuition so I have academic regalia sitting in a box somewhere should I ever find myself in need of such, a scenario I cannot imagine ever coming to pass.
Yeah, I skipped mine too. I was not (and am not) at all proud of my box-checking degrees.
I had a blast in undergrad, not at all because of the classes.
Same here, walking across the stage in a dress is for the school, not for you. Got my paper, bye
It’s also for the families, but mine wasn’t available for the BA and I told them not to bother for the first master’s. The second, I only went to because it was a low-residence program and the ceremony took place during the final residency and being one of less than 20 people in the cohort, my absence would have been conspicuous.
Lol yeah, still pissed at my family for having me walk for high school grad, didn't walk for college because I got a real job instead of wasting my time graduating. What a stupid tradition; mandatory accredited higher education deserves the death waiting for it. Paid for a dumb "class ring", too.
Halloween costume? Or perhaps you could donate it to someone who would otherwise have to pay the fee.
There was no additional fee for it. The program was shut down in 2020 so there are also no later graduates to receive it.
Halloween costume?
I just did online school and didn't bother showing up to any kind of ceremony. I was 30 when I finally finished school, I didn't really feel the need to prove anything.
You can just not participate in the ceremony and then you don’t have to spend any extra money at all.
I am pretty sure I purchased my cap and gown instead of renting. But my college was a bit smaller.
At my school, I purchased my cap but rented the gown. The cap is in a box never to be looked at again. I can't imagine what I would do with the gown.
It’s not just for graduations! You can wear it at any gown-appropriate event!
Marriages, graduations and funerals carry forward some traditions that haven’t made sense for generations. They are the irregular verbs of modern life. Interestingly, marriages and funerals often have a religious element, and religion itself is conservative—but graduation doesn’t have that excuse.
Can you? I mean, you _can_ but you really can't. Showing up at a marriage or funeral in one would be... weird to say the least.
What a brilliant idea! I'll make sure to include in my will arrangements for everyone to easily be able to rent graduation gowns. It should make for a happier event
Wouldn't the purchase option be priced at a multiple to the rental?
OP paid $94 to rent their gown. I'm pretty sure I paid less than that (if not a comparable price) to buy mine. Thank god it wasn't multiple more, I only wore it for 5 minutes for a picture, since I graduated during Covid.
Yeah, there was no option to rent at my school. I purchased those things, not that I'll ever use them again.
Can't you sell it used to the next graduating class?
> Fun fact #1: you rent your cap and gown in the US. You have to return them. And they’re expensive, too! I paid $94 just for the privilege of renting mine
Ah, the final way that US universities transfer wealth from students to corporations... just before they start sending out begging letters for alumni donations to the poor, destitute university*
*: my university shuttered the CS graduate program the year I graduated, on the basis that "there are more jobs in communications", so I never donated a red cent
Side note:
> What if, say, you say you’re fine without a cap and gown? Well, then you can’t walk in the ceremony. So you do need to shell out to rent them.
No, you don’t need to shell out. You get you diploma regardless of whether you participate in the ceremony or not.
I chose not to participate because I knew it would be long and boring, and I still got my diploma all the same.
> So you do need to shell out to rent them. And they don’t give you the option to buy the cap and gown outright.
You can't buy them from a 3rd party? Maybe a cheap Spirit Halloween costume? Maybe even make your own from cardboard and a black napkin or two?
Then you probably won't match the rest of the class.
Living in the PE side of software, with its EBITDA and other metrics, poorly researched product initiatives, senseless firefighting, and toxic bro cultures, it's nice to be reminded some of the reasons I got into this. Thank you.
Those ATtiny85 boards that plug directly into a USB port are great if you need 1 to 5 GPIOs and/or a HID interface. At 2 dollars apiece or so it's worth having a few around.
Oh to be young and have oodles of free time again
I just graduated this weekend and my school gave us our cap and gown for free. Seems fair with how much we're paying...
Cool project. And it goes to show how this education system is scammed out to the max, even cap and gown.
> I thought about it but decided it looks pretty tacky. It looks like what kids would think of as a gaming PC and what boomers would think of as a seizure.
Missed chance to be a school legend and initiation of a career launching arc.
I think if designed in a way where it’s subtle when off/low and at appropriate times can be activated on-demand, that would be great.
But to be in a crowd of people all dressed the same, all graduating as well, having a gaming PC on your head might be too much main character energy.
I don't recall that there is a situation that you can turn on gaming RGB on your head. Someone suddenly starting to shine is as bad as keep shining. It's just either stealing everyone's concentration near you or give a jump scare to how ever was unlucky to look at your direction when you turned it on.
Say you’re at the reception after and you want to take a few photos with friends and family.
Or the traditional post-commencement board mortaring where you light up and throw it into the air.
Actually that gives me an idea: a grad cap that is also a drone. So when you throw it up with everyone in celebration yours just keeps going.
Goodbye hat. I uploaded my student debt into you. Don’t come back.
Technically it runs AVR-RISC :-)
Fun project though!
You are having so much fun in the video clips. I love this!
If there’s anything I really want written in Rust, it’s a Chrome extension to filter out all the HN posts about Rust.
Or to automatically write command bitching about it.
That would likely entail an LLM today. Which is the single topic that is more highly represented on the HN homepage than Rust.
You forgot the lowkey accusation that a comment is llm-generated. With that we have the trifecta.
That seems unnecessary. JavaScript is memory safe.
> Are you actually going to wear this to your graduation? > Heck no.
What? That would have been so much fun!
A lot of graduation ceremonies have restrictions on how you can decorate your cap. I would be surprised if this was allowed.
> Warning: the following video contains rapid strobing of light. I’ve written this out so people who are reading this with a screen reader know not to watch the video!
Uh...if you need a screen reader are the strobing lights really going to be a problem?
Some people have very blurry vision, so they might be using a screen reader but still watching videos. Some people might translate the page to another language, which wouldn't apply to the warning embedded in the video. Probably there are other edge cases.
1. No it doesn't, it runs machine code.
2. Yet again we have the need to announce Rust to the world, when the usage of it is inconsequential in this context
Do you go on every project that announces itself to be written in C/C++/Zig/Fil-C/Java/etc. and make those same complaints? That must be tiring.
No need!
Which begs the question: what was the need for OP's comment? How did it bring anything deep or insightful to this thread?
No-one (sensible) claims that a CPU "runs" C.
No one sensible reads it as that.
Besides, my biggest gripe is with point 2. Had it been just point 1, it could have been seen as just a tongue-in-cheek comment.
To be very frank, nothing in the blog post is ground-breaking or interesting enough to be on HN. The only thing it has is its (probably knowingly) controversial title, and as such, I have no problem directing technical and nit-picking ire at it.
For starters, I'm talking about @Ferret7446's post, so I don't know why you are talking for them.
Still, if the lack of something of note was the main issue, just say that. Nitpicks like these are only informative to people who doesn't know how computers work. They can serve as fun tongue-in-cheeks, but that was seemingly not the intention here.
As it stands, in my eyes, this just a small fun project. How is the title even controversial? Because it has "Rust?"
I bet you are fun at parties
As much as anyone else talking about Rust or programming at. a. party.
You’d be surprised
I mean #2 is literally done tongue in cheek
If Rust could create the girlfriend I still do not have, I think I would have learned Rust by now.
There is a joke around ownership or borrowing that I'm going to take the high road and not make.