felxh

As many have mentioned, microwaves are the ones I get the least. What is the urgency for opening the damn thing when it is done!?

For dishwashers, we now have one that just opens by itself when it is done (to dry) - no beeping or anything. Maybe a bit hyperbolic, but it was quite a life changer!

In my experience, water pipes (not sure about heating) routed outside the walls are pretty common in houses in Amsterdam build pre ~2000 (and not renovated since)

I think the advise in the article and various comments here won't work, for the simple reason that Safari does not allow ajax requests from non localhost origins to localhost. I suspect this is the real reason they used an image request.

You can link any of your bank cards to any of your accounts using the mobile app (change is instant AFAIK) You can even configure different pin codes per card, where each pin code corresponds to a different account

That would mean that anything that responds to click events is a button. From your experience of using UIs, you can probably think of many more UI elements that respond to clicks and are not buttons

It is a bit paradoxical of course, since, as you pointed out, the British empire is the reason that the US speaks english. However, I would still argue that the US is really the reason English became widely spoken in Europe.

The British Empire dominated large parts of the world, but it never dominated continental Europe. English was not widely spoken or taught in Europe until the end of WW2, when American culture became highly influential (although the UK did have its part through pop music).

The final push for English came with the internet and thus again from the US, I think. In many European countries there is a big divide in terms of English proficiency between people who grew up in pre or post internet era.

I am curious, what made it a maintenance nightmare?

Aside from the point others have made that carbon based chemistry is a likely candidate for life, there is another factor I think:

We already know that carbon based can exist and we know what it looks like. Since our means for searching for life in the rest of the universe are still very limited, it is best to focus on what we know, instead of searching for a different form of life of which we

* don't know what it looks like

* don't know whether it can exist in the first place

Anecdotally, my master thesis on natural language processing was supposed to consist of first reproducing the results of an influential paper (back then) and then hopefully improving upon it by extending the model used.

The paper made it seem like they had been using a standard PCFG parser (which circulated in the research community at the time) to achieve their results. It turned out they hadn't and instead had written a custom one and in fact their results were not reproducible using the standard parser.

What was meant to be a timesaver in terms of engineering (using a standard parser instead of writing your own) turned out to be a massive time sink. It also turned out that by using a custom parser they had unintentionally diverted from a vanilla PCFG (probabilistic context free grammar), or in other words, some implementation details had led to a departure from the assumed underlying theoretical model.

Here you go https://gist.github.com/felixhageloh/37c4d091f4e40c4d19fa83c...

And you are right - this started pre Sierra already (can't remember which version)

They must have changed their CMYC to RGB conversion algorithm as well. CMYC colors now look different in Preview compared to when rendered in Acrobat Reader or using Ghostscript

I think it is because of the latter. The Anglo-Saxons, while coming from an area that coincides with modern day Denmark, did not speak (an ancient form of) Danish.

Interesting, thanks! Probably not as cool, but you could also just get the output of the regular top, parse it and generate HTML from it (a bit like http://tracesof.net/uebersicht/)

looks nice! I noticed some issues on retina screen using safari. Initial render is fine, but it breaks when you update some numbers

I find it works really well for listening to music in album format and getting more albums from the iTunes store. The store integration is well done and I love the (newish) UI that reacts to the colors of the album artwork. For listening to music that is not in album format and/or which you didn't purchase via iTunes and for any other tasks they have bolted on, such as device management, I find it not so great.

Your comment seems irrelevant - the article never claimed that english has the most (or even a lot of) irregular verbs. If you have some linguistic insights regarding irregular verbs in Polish I would be curious to hear them (I really mean it)

I think you are correct that english grammar simplified because of the intermix with different languages. For example during the viking conquest, many viking words were very similar to english except or their grammatical endings, so people dropped them.

On the other hand, I think the irregular spelling has more to do with English never undergoing a mayor spelling reform: many times, the spelling reflects an old pronunciation. From what I know, England always had a relatively lax and pluralistic approach compared to other European countries when it came to managing its language. For example in France you have the Académie française, which essentially has authority over the French language. There is no comparable thing for English, which is probably why such reforms never took place.

Also, correct me if I am wrong, but you seem to incorrectly assume that English (or at least English grammar) stems from Latin.

Zug does mean train but it comes from ziehen (to pull) as others mentioned. So I am not sure whether zügig comes from the original meaning or from 'train'. The english cognate for Zug/ziehen is tug btw (follows the common t -> z shift in german)

It is true, you can probably stop supporting IE8 depending on your audience.

[UPDATE: also I was reading SVG/DOM as an or]

I can't speak for others, but if you write browser apps/websites for a generic audience you basically have no choice. The reason consist of two letters: IE

Isn't that exactly the point I made? You mentioned that people who rant about people being late annoy you. You don't have the power to change them, but you can adjust your own action and be on time. I am not saying you should btw, I am just saying your argument could be interpreted in this way as well.

You could invert your argument to: If you know that people are going to rant when you are late, why don't you try to be on time.

Thanks, I learned something new! But yeah, as other people have pointed out, browser support starts with IE 11 and almost no mobile browser supports it - so it might as well not exist.

Or at least 'Huegelkultur', especially since the author spends some time talking about the correct spelling.

Good point indeed, thanks. The problem is of course that widgets are not clickable by design - you don't want to take over the desktop. Shipping some default widgets might be a good solution though.

hmm yeah, was too preoccupied with getting the layout right, so some typos crept in :)

The fact that the Angles and Saxons were from an area that is currently Denmark means nothing. Territories, country borders and the languages and cultures occupying them have changed significantly in the north of Europe after the collapse of the roman empire to the present day.

The angles and saxons spoke a western germanic language, whereas modern danish is a northern germanic language.

EDIT: as a side node: Frisian is the language commonly regarded as being closest to English

Your observations of dutch being closer to English in some way than German, is correct. However, saying that Dutch is mix between German, English and French is quite wrong (disclaimer: I am not Dutch).

English, Dutch and German are all classified as western germanic languages, meaning they probably derived from a single ancestor language some time ago. Note that 'germanic' has nothing to do with German or Germany, a common misconception because the two words are similar in English.

Dutch is often more similar to English because German underwent the so called high german consonant shift (essentially changing t -> s or z, p -> pf and some others I think), in which Dutch and English didn't participate. There are some words that highlight this quite nicely:

  english   dutch    german

  appel     appel     apfel
  plough    ploeg     pflug
  better    beter     besser
  toth      tand      zahn

The irony doesn't escape me, but for what it's worth, here is a previous HN discussion about their framework you mentioned:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6653024

A complaint I remember was that "there isn't much to see here except jQuery"

Not having much experience with developing native mobile apps, I can only say what a pain it is to develop non trivial HTML5 apps that need to support a wide array of browsers. Your initial euphoria of 'oh wow I could make this thing for [insert browser of you choice] in less than [x amount of time]' is quickly mitigated when you try it on other browsers. Different browsers _will_ vary greatly in performance for different approaches and at least one browser _will_ have a bug. Fixing these performance issues (and not killing performance on other browsers again) and finding workarounds for bugs will then take 80% of the entire development time.

Having said that, things have improved the last years, especially when you don't need to support older android versions (> 4). However, performance will always be suboptimal and I found that people who claim the opposite simply have a lower bar for what good UI performance means - as harsh as it sounds. There is also a great number of tips and knowhow on how to make 'blazing fast' HTML5 apps, which people are quick to point out. Many of these help, but they don't always work for all browsers and they potentially limit you in what you can achieve (my favourite: don't use images. But what if the whole point of my app is to work with large images!?)