dbrock

It’s hard to run a business, but the hard part is not honoring your own stupid promotional gimmicks instead of using them to insult your customers and make them feel like complete idiots.

Please fix the bug where trying to connect my account to a Google account just leads me to a completely blank page http://news.ycombinator.com/openid_merge with the word "Unknown." (Sorry, didn't understand where to report bugs.)

How about

  try await foo = bar(baz)

  await error, foo = bar(baz)
  if (error) throw error

URL detection is tricky because people omit the “http://” part of URLs. It used to be that you could look for stuff beginning with “www.”, but nobody uses “www.” anymore, so now you basically have to have a list of TLDs and look for anything ending in “.<tld>”. Now that everybody will be able to register their own TLD, will URL detection even be feasible for humans any more? I’ve been thinking about how we’re going to solve this problem for a while, because we need some kind of notation to replace “.<tld>”. I mean I don’t think people will go back to writing <http://coca-cola>;, so when I saw the title of this post I immediately knew what the idea was: let’s write //coca-cola to denote “the URL coca-cola”. (Unfortunately, both Google Chrome and Safari interpret “//coca-cola” as “file:///coca-cola”.)

I don’t know why everybody is talking about the technical meaning of //coca-cola, as that’s kind of irrelevant. Us web developers will of course still be typing the full http://coca-cola, as we always have.

Short answer: the latter is more true. The reason why {mi} is unmarked for number is simply that it’s defined that way.

In Lojban, everything is unmarked for number by default. It’s actually quite rare to see things explicitly marked for number, as it’s usually either irrelevant or obvious from context.

The pronoun {mi} is technically unmarked for number, but is restricted to refer to people that the speaker represents, just as you guessed. For example, it would usually be weird or incorrect to use {mi} to mean “we” in the sense of “me and you”, since representing the very people you are talking to is a rare situation — although theoretically you could come up with examples where it would make sense.

So in practice {mi} is usually singular. On the other hand, {do} (which means “you”) is as often plural as it is singular.

There are other pronouns that mean “me and you”, “me and others”, “you and others”, and “me, you, and others” — respectively, {mi’o}, {mi’a}, {do’o} and {ma’a} — which is another reason why the need for plural {mi} seldom arises.

There are many people who can converse fairly well in real-time written Lojban (although vocabulary is limited, and some parts of the language are generally not used).

Due to audio-visual isomorphism, being able to converse in written Lojban almost implies being able (theoretically) to converse in spoken Lojban. However, people are generally much less used to speaking and hearing Lojban, so spoken conversations are usually somewhat difficult (definitely far from fluent).

Go to #lojban on irc.freenode.net if you want to see Lojban conversation in action.