HN user
The people at the top of Google are rich and have the freedom and resources to work on things that interest them.
Also, this is an old issue, Google in China.
I'm sure they won't start caring what a few outspoken individuals think by this point.
I was actually just toying with a similar thing myself. I'm experimenting with a system that generates abilities for a game within certain design parameters, then tests the games' balance by running lots of example games. I figured compiling a DSL via macro compiled down would be worth the upfront cost given how much testing I planned on giving each generated variant. Thanks for laying some groundwork in this part!
I guess I stand corrected. But the practicality, as others note, still seems limited.
That would only be useful if everyone were outside, and you wanted a split second of many different people's conversations. Satellites move rather quickly relative to the Earth's surface.
It's also daaaamn slow. And when you paste formatted content into it (at least from vim on a mac), lol, have fun cleaning up your newly-unformatted content.
Privacy, other people putting things in your can, previous tenants and perhaps other flaws exist. That's why I think it best it be automated and take more than one offense.
I'm wondering how possible it would be to have garbage trucks identify valuable materials in trash as they enter the truck, so the city can fine someone who doesn't separate.
I rinse foil and reuse it, or rinse it before recycling if it's torn. But what I wonder is how dirty is too dirty to recycle in the case of aluminum? I'm not leaving large chunks of food on it, but I'm also not operating a chemistry lab here. I'm just curious what kind of process goes into repurification.
Some of the worst offenders are logging webservices. We've replaced a simple text file with a bloated site that requires mousing around, does not support grepping, etc.
What do you think of Wiktionary? That's been my go-to for a long time.
Ah, thanks.
It's not just orthography. English has been influenced by Romance languages and gained a tendency to write "of"s instead of compounds. This reverses the word order (order of words) and adds extra words in between.
There is some bit of composability that German has over English though. It's just easier to pick apart words that have been concatenated. Maybe it's because often the first word is in genitive (roughly means possessive) form?
In your example, "Weinachtsbaum", we have "Weinnacht" (itself a compound wine-night) meaning Christmas, and we have "Baum", tree. But the word gets and extra "s" in the middle which is serving roughly the same purpose as "'s" in English.
Winenight'stree. Tree of night of wine. I prefer the Germanic construction.
The language isn't using lossy compression, but rather it's robust to loss. Sort of the opposite of compression.
I believe it's just that the etymologies in English are more obscure. They're still fascinating, but they come from foreign roots a lot of the time, so they're not as immediately obvious.
Although, tangentially, even constructions that are just compounds of 2 English words or so slip past my notice. I can't think of any examples on the spot, but I've definitely gone decades without really parsing apart common English idioms or compound nouns until one day, when I finally notice "oh that's why we say that".
But you can't say "Food want me". Whereas in Old English, the grammar had so many markings that poets could weave distinct phrases together and still convey their meaning. In practice, that would still be awkward for typical speech, but it's cool all the same.
The original statement was playing off of "lossy compression" as in computer science. The concrete meaning here is that Chinese and English both have enough redundancy to convey meaning even if some information is lost. So, in a noisy room you could still understand someone, for example.
I don't agree or disagree with that statement, because I speak 1.5 languages and the other is closely related to English. It's an interesting thought though.
It seems there's a general trend in the development of English to remove tenses and moods in favor of instead more-strictly prescribing word order.
They were saying each is tolerant of loss.
"Zwischenspeicher" is a magnificent word! Betweensaver. I love the Germanic way of nouncompounding.
As an American who learned German in high school and have since only admired German from afar, that word sounds great and I love the way the meaning is derived.
The more I think of it, while it's disappointing from a pure-science point of view, doesn't the lack of our ability to determine whether it's QM or GR that is flawed imply that each is already sufficiently powerful to probe any practical realm we'd care about?
We saw birds flying around when we were cavemen. It's always been clear that heavier-than-air flight is possible. We don't currently know of any space-birds flying around black holes.
It's also reasonable to assume that more and more extreme physics is going to be harder and harder (if not practically impossible for any future humans) to come up with new gee-whiz uses.
I can think of more than one religion that's pro-life _and_ advocates for refugees, the poor, strong marriages. Individual people always have their own flaws.
My problem with voters is that they're not willing to take enough risks. The "Throwing away your vote" meme was election tampering just as much as the Russian Facebook ads.
Oh, that's another great point. There are different kinds of racism.
There's a great video from the 80s called "The Color of Fear" which has a bunch of randomly-chosen people of various ethnicities put into a room, who slowly start to talk about more and more uncomfortable subjects.
There's fear. There's lack of empathy for problems which don't affect you personally. There's even outright hate. These are different problems with different solutions.
There's an Italian proverb that "one can never have a friend if one must have one without faults". Obviously, the degree of the faults matters, but your implication that friendship is a tacit endorsement of all the complexities of a person is extreme.
Edit: I feel this also applies to politicians. Sometimes I just dislike all the candidates for a given election, but for different reasons. And I have to choose which of my principles I value the most. It's awful! But it's reality.
3Blue1Brown has been recommended on HN before (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYO_jab_esuFRV4b17AJtAw)
But it's so great I think it bears bringing up in case anyone reading this comment has missed it. This channel animates math proofs, shows you the intuition behind fields of math, and constructs subjects in such a way as to make you feel like you could have invented them yourself. You'll still need a good textbook or something to go with the videos, but they cement the understanding in your mind very well and even open the door to more formal proofs.
My favorite video is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NaL_Cb42WyY . You'll have to take an additional step to get a complete proof (hint: read and work through the One Sentence Proof), but this is a beautiful piece of mathematics, shown in an understandable manner.
Certainly. 2016 is evidence of what happens when you don't listen to people you disagree with. Lower class whites are disproportionally-likely to have "deplorable" views. Yet even as we as a society move to bring education to more and more people, still this demographic has become the last remaining group of people that it's "OK" to hate. So they've reacted.
Disclaimers: Obviously, not everyone who's a lower-income white person is racist. Nor do I support racist views -- just saying that ignoring people will not help effect change. MLK was a genius and great person.
Yeah, I'd say there's a huge overlap in attributes of testable code and reasonable code.
Which is why I think they should open the platform. Don't start from scratch, but relicense the OS to be compatible with FOSS and, say, make iTerm the default terminal.
Do something crazy. Completely embrace FOSS.
Do something conservative. Invest heavily in battery research.
Make hardware the focus, make it incredible. Support software with money and project governance, but let the ties to the hardware go. Win purely on incredible hardware.