HN user

nebaneba

28 karma
Posts2
Comments14
View on HN

Been interested in doing this too, but reconsidered since I don't know about property laws for EULAs/TOSs. But a public-facing TOS that tries to bind users and says "this document can change any time for any reason, and we will notify you by email, and it is your responsibility to keep up to date with it" should have some public domainness to it, even if it legally isn't: users should be able to "congregate publicly" to discuss their archived copies of TOSs.

(The counterargument of "don't use the service if you don't even agree with how the TOS is deployed" is technically agreeable but utterly impractical since "I am whimsical" clause in TOSs these days protects the vendor and not the user, and places 100% burden of trust on the user that the whimsical TOS will not arbitrarily screw you over later. Every vendor relies on the fact that there are so many other vendors out there, that some percent can eventually get a free ride on trust)

Suppose we provide the venue for congregation. How to ensure legal survivability?

If you watch the introduction, notice that when Rich Hickey motions the lisp syntax with his hands, he explains prefix notation in the viewer's perspective!

As mental exercise, it's certainly helpful, but the marginal benefit is probably lower than going from monolingual to bilingual.

The second language is crucial because it provides basis for comparison. If all you've ever used is Internet Explorer, that's the entirety of your internet experience. But if you've tried just another browser, you learn to appreciate the difference.

> (Maybe it's a perfectly acceptable trade-off, if it happens fast enough. Or maybe I'm just not there yet.)

You are not there yet. Here's why. In pre-fluency stages of language acquisition, the taxing part of language parsing is memory retrieval, iow, mapping meaning from language A to language B. If you are well-versed at this, it can happen sufficiently quickly. For example, "a machine with four wheels that brings people places" --> car. After enough practice, you "bypass" the "machine" and retrieve "car" without consciously looking up the word. Imagining that happening for every single word, and every single sentence construction. That's when you're "there".

As for coding, there is an easy example: iterative looping vs. map/reduce operations. These can express the logic but are conceptually different: one is to repeatedly track states across some number of times, the other is to apply a transformation function to a set of items. To reuse the car analogy, a looped factory would be like taking parts and assemble 100 cars, and a map factory would be like taking parts and assembling all the wheels, then all the engines, then all the doors and so on.

Fascinating. Sarcasm is inherent in the grammar? Can you give some examples?

update: searched a bit, cannot find any supporting evidence for bioh42_2's statement.

How does the fact that the average age of first child in western societies hitting the 30 year old mark support the argument that there is a dramatic mental difference between those in their mid-20s and those in their mid-30s?