skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I find the transformation and evolution of languages in general and English in particular fascinating.

Old English was a Germanic language primarily. After 1066, the court language of England became French and remained so for centuries. It was in this period that the Middle English transformation happened.

The fascinating thing about this is that the language became much more regular in that period and, more importantly, it dropped a lot of what I as a native English-speaker at least consider pointless grammatical cruft.

For example: Old English had 3 noun genders (male, female, neuter; this being the norm for European and Semitic languages). Middle English lost that (other than male and female for people). Old English had 5 cases. By comparison, modern German has 4, Latin has 6, some Eastern European languages have more. The concept of case has almost completely disappeared from English (pronouns and the Saxon genitive notwithstanding).

It's fascinating because it seems what keeps languages unchanging is a ruling class. It's a bit like the philosophical view of grammar as being descriptive (my view) vs prescriptive. It's almost a model for conservatism being the resistance to change.

As a native English speaker I've found it difficult to learn other languages not just because of the ubiquity of English but because other languages have concepts that English just doesn't, like in German where adjectives and pronouns have to agree by case, number gender and article of a noun (eg "the" vs der/die/das/den/dem/denen/der/des). That structure just seems like such pointless cognitive load, at least to learn. I'm sure it's zero cost if you grew up with it.

But it does seem like it makes English easier to learn. Obviously there are some complexities in English (eg adjective order and the tenses).

And before anyone mentions Asian languages for simple grammar let me just point out: no clear word separators and the writing system in general (although this varies too).
This is a crazy story. Especially the part where the person just claimed the other person's work as his own, not even pretending they were doing another version of it (more typical plagiarism). A small version of this happened to me many years ago. A dude who was a technical editor on my first book (and actually seemed to get fired by the publisher, because another technical editor replaced him midway through), claimed to be an author of the book on Stack Overflow and his own web page/resume. Truly bizarre because only my name was on the cover.
> Spore comes to mind.

Unfortunately, Spore treats evolution as largely cosmetic.
If that scares you... never look at how sausage is made in FMCG world. One of the major companies in that area essentially uses Excel as standard data format, that is exchanged by applications etc. Capo di tutti capi of the company (i.e. the CEO of the overall controlling entity of the whole multinational) might be woken up if, by the end of the month, a bunch of Excel/CSV files aren't exported from a certain database, feeding a bunch of downstream applications, which in turn will provide Excel files to employees.

The less insane use of Excel there was as human interface, where Excel files were used both to query external services, but also as input files/forms that could be sent as attachment and "cosigned" by appropriate person.
They just have to convince you it's good enough.

Even if they do pick a car largely based on your needs, they're never going to say it's anything but a perfect or near-perfect fit.
> 3. China is not a dictatorship

Technically no, but without term limits and little accountability isn't the paramount leader a dictator in practice?
When compared to GrapheneOS, Duval claims:

"If you want something with hardened security, use Graphene, if you want something that help you keep your data safe from Google, use /e/. It depends on your needs."

GrapheneOS is already de-Googled, so, it's the better option?
I am, at the moment, learning Spanish and also teaching English to native Spanish speakers. The languages present almost opposite sets of challenges. English is chaos: the connection between spelling and pronunciation is so random that one practically has to memorize how to say every word, as if they are ideograms; there are few conjugations to learn, but in place of that many rules for modal and auxiliary verbs; word order is extremely free, but that means that a listener needs to figure out the meaning of a sentence that might have a half dozen different structures; almost any verb can be combined with any preposition to form a phrasal verb with a meaning that needs to be memorized (put up, put down, put out (!), etc.); there are ironclad rules on one hand, but on the other, more exceptions than rules. I am fascinated by the challenge of really learning English grammar for the first time, so that I can try to explain how it works. Spanish, by contrast, is almost a formal mathematical system. There are many rules, but they are actual rules. They are difficult to master, but once you have them, they define the language. The spelling of a word tells you exactly how to pronounce it. The rules demand to be followed. My teachers are on my case for even a minor variation in punctuation, that would be perfectly normal in English. And one must beware of the different vocabularies in neighboring countries, which can get you in trouble. That situation is way worse than the differences between US and UK.

The notes in the article were interesting, but I was puzzled by the one about the present continuous tense, which does exist in Spanish. Also, the usage is the same as in English, although the use of simple present for present continuous is common in casual speech, and impossible in English (just because there are rules doesn’t mean people follow them).
> Hasn’t China’s economy been growing steadily for decades?

Fake GDP #s, especially since 2010. CCP does NOT have a growth goal in the recent five year plan, meaning they can't fake increasing defaults and can't increase construction spendings anymore due to ballooning debt.

> Hasn’t China formed new trading partnerships with many countries in Europe?

First time in 30 years EU has sanctioned China. The CAI deal (Europe-China trade deal) is now being put on hold since various members of EU being sanctioned. Potentially a dead trade deal going forward.

> China is not a dictatorship.

It is. Please read up on Xi Jing Ping's personality, his success on removing most of his enemies and secure his power, and changing the law for unlimited terms
Most of us can’t reliably tell when a romantic interest is actively signaling their mutual interest. If we can’t get cooperative activities right, most of us don’t have a chance to spot a liar through nonverbal cues. The fact is that random effects are huge when dealing with people. Is that person you’re interrogating not showing emotion because they’re a psychopath, or because they were taught not to display emotion? Is someone not looking a cop in the eye because they are lying, or because staring someone in the eye is perceived as defiance in many cultures and they don’t want to anger the cop? We’ll probably never be perfectly accurate at spotting lies. A bunch of biometric measurements might help, but current polygraph techniques can allegedly be beaten with training. If trained polygraph techs with special equipment can be beat I don’t know what rules of thumb we’re ever going to give to the general public that will work.

If you know someone really well, you might have a decent chance of knowing when they are acting unusual. Such is the case with parents and teenagers, but suspicion often gets the best of the parents and they misinterpret the cues that they spotted.

A good method would seem to be to catch someone on a logical contradiction, but that has issues when someone is under emotional distress. And emotional distress tends to appear often when someone is innocent but is afraid the evidence points towards them. The family cat may have knocked over Mom’s favorite vase, but the child is less interested in the truth and more interested in avoiding a spanking- so they embellish whatever story they had (in a misguided attempt to make it more believable), which introduces contradictions that the mom notices. The kid technically lied with the embellishments but was innocent of breaking a vase, and gets spanked when they didn’t deserve it. Then imagine the kid’s emotional distress being even higher the next time something happens.

I’m sure that there are a lot of learned people out there that study lying, but I agree with the article’s main theme that most of us can’t reliably tell when our why someone is lying, and we’re overconfident in our abilities.
1) Yes, but that's slowing by all external measures

2) Yes, but as with the agreements with my state (Victoria), those are fleeting and mostly gesture - the tide is turning against China since these wheels were set in motion several years ago

3) President for life? How isn't it a dictatorship? How is the leader replaced if the populace does not like him - and how do they make that known, when you can't even use an open communication platform like Clubhouse in China?
I should start using "utilizationize" to see how long it takes before PHBs use it unironically.
One explanation:

It is a big deal for Western companies given their Embedded Growth Obligations. A lot of their stock price and chosen leadership is justified only by the potential for growth that only winning the Chinese market can possibly provide.
The Terror of Deep Time (2017)
Not sure what you’re trying to say? Asbestos is a natural mineral - not sure where you think that fits into this or how it’s relevant, sorry. We aren’t just listing all things that are naturally occurring!
IIRC their 95% failure includes failing to spot explosives and the like in their scanners
Among Us is the most recent version of those games, and it made me realize how good my friends were at gaslighting me.
Just wonder can we just send the nuclear wast to the sun, wouldn't that be a good way to get ride of them?
If you think China’s growth is fake then I don’t know what to tell you. I invite you to talk to people who lived in China in the early 2000s and live there now.

> It is. Please read up on Xi Jing Ping's personality, his success on removing most of his enemies and secure his power, and changing the law for unlimited terms

How much do you know about Chinese politics? Xi Jing Pings power isn’t as absolute as the American media would like you to believe. In fact he’s in a very vulnerable position.
The part about European langauges not having a present progessive tense was painful to read. Many european languages do have a present progressive, just not French and German, which aren't much of a representative sample.
I read the article. It sounds more like practically everyone is stuck in a steady state of believing the same "tells" like fidgeting, averting gaze, and stuttering they have been told forever, and those things don't work. That's not really like a GAN at all.

Additionally what you say about being able to spot the average liar, as an average person, is contrary to the article. I would encourage you to read the article more carefully to distill the main points.
Hell, some people even manage to make gobs of money publicly documenting their irregular intercourse on video.
The first amendment doesn't protect a private company making statements on a private platform

If Elon stood on the street corner shouting lies into a megaphone? Sure, maybe there'd be an argument there
Common lisp does change though. Package local nicknames and named readtables being the two obvious language level changes.
> Another reason I love Rust. It’s very statically analyzable.

Proc-macro in Rust is very tricky to analyze statically, some are even impossible (due to non-deterministic behavior)
we don’t use the word master anymore.
I honestly think the only way we are going to solve this is with Genetic engineering and manufacturing on a global scale. We need to create self sustaining food sources that provide enough of our needs to allow natural resources especially the ocean time to heal and replenish itself. Things like the AquAdvantage salmon, lab grown meat on a massive scale and a massive marketing campaign to quash the anti-gmo mindset that is making the world hesitate to go all in.

We are not going to heal the planet by everyone consuming less or driving less or any of the million things that they encourage you to do to save it. Science is going to be the only solution as the pandemic has proven that people really are not going to make choices that inconvenience them, we need to provide alternatives that are just as enticing but are also financially attractive. In addition, even if we convinced everyone to cut their consumption of everything by 25%, so what; in a few years there will be more people rendering that 25% savings moot. Science is the only way.
Even that is itself a weird quasi-bad-faith statement though. A potential union would not be unaware of stock options, nor how to value them. They could just as easily request higher cash pay and that stock options remain as they are. That's a valid position, and arguably a likely one.

On what possible basis could Musk be making a fully good-faith statement that he has good reason to believe it is impossible for a union to negotiate on such grounds? Obviously he is free to stick on that point in actual negotiations, but again he can't in any kind of good faith negotiate in public with an entity that doesn't exist yet.

As for UAW, that's kind of getting into the detailed specifics of this instance. Maybe there's more room to argue for looser regulations when there are extant industry unions? But that would also seem to push things more in favor of larger, more encompassing unions rather than smaller more specific ones, which I imagine most people in favor of less regulation wouldn't be fond of either.
> Are there any languages that are good at this?

Go. 10-year-old Go code looks much like Go written today. There really haven't been any significant changes to the language since 1.0 was released, and most of the idioms were discovered within the first couple years.

Generics will certainly create a big rift in this regard, which is one of multiple reasons why they make me sad.
He selectively reports and focuses on things that support a conclusion that Trump is amazing, the rise of fascism is real but it's actually from groups like liberals and the CDC, and anything telling you otherwise is a liar.

For instance, he focuses on where the guy got the zip ties but totally ignores the constructed gallows on the lawn or that a guy in military fatigues literally broke into the capitol.

He focuses on the fire hydrant event but totally ignores all the pipe bombs

He's selectively painting a narrative. It's called apologetics.

People have been doing it for centuries. Here's an article from counterpunch https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/10/30/what-happened-to-gle...

He's super excited about essentially a form of right wing National Socialism, literally what Nazi meant. I'm not kidding https://www.mediaite.com/politics/glenn-greenwald-describes-... ... He thinks it's j-kewl awesome.

He could be reporting anything but it's constantly excuses for right wing terrorists and fanning the flames of conspiracies.

He's free to do it but it's quite literally just propaganda dolled up to pretend it's journalism which is why the only news organization paying him these days is Fox News.

Think about that

Greenwald has always had some right wing views, here he is in 2005 https://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2005/12/yelling-racist-a... but now he's all in.

It's a shame but let's not deny reality here. Some people got pilled, even Glen Greenwald. Fascism is pernicious. Look here for an example https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Wave_(experiment) - it's required study in German schools for a reason
Likely due to an intentional misdirection campaign by the carriers poisoning the mindspace of journalists: https://pxlnv.com/linklog/5g-pixie-dust/
You should read Populist Authoritarianism by Tang. They explain this better than I ever could.

The tldr however is there is a difference. China is not a dictatorship. I’m not sure why such blatant misinformation is being spread.
I should have included more details, but the claimed expert lie-detectors almost always name non-verbal cues as the trick to detecting liars.
See also: https://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/20... and https://blog.digitizedmedievalmanuscripts.org/medieval-kille...

I’m sure there’s one more relatively recent article I read on this, well-written with a few more pictures, but I’m not finding it in Google right this second.
https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3015206/c...

China’s economic census uncovers more fake data as officials promise ‘zero tolerance’ to data manipulation

https://www.heritage.org/international-economies/commentary/...

The Problem of False Chinese Economic Data

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/yes-china-lying-about...

Yes China Is Lying About the Size of Their Economy
You programmers from bigtechs are a shame to the country, giving backdoors to NSA/FBI so they can rule the country on they distorced notion of reality and conduct. But, what I can say, Internet has became the FBI, theres no unlogged machinne, no unlogged connection, no unlogged download, no unlogged transfer, all scripts... With all the OS metadata that you take, you spy, steal and take royalties on users inventions and patents, you buried America to a mass surveilence Big brother, planted home terrorism. And bring the entire world they corruption circles, dumping all countries liders phones, computers, lines, signal and wires, manipulating the midia, crashing planes, causing death, rage and lies, a perfect psicopath FBI world. The intelligence hacking forks agents, under russian/china flags, mocking in to their oun citizens, instiganting violence and supporting racism. The FBI brilliant Bitcoin invention to profit on hackers arrests. The linux intrusions with back doors into theur basis, direct in the foudantions. And all this, all, is in your house, my friend, with Aws, Face, Micros, Yout, goog, inst, tesl... you do nothing plugged, without an alarm setted, and if they want, they get you. You collaborate with the end of criativity and fund the shitcorruptnet. Tks
McDonalds started to make money selling burgers but then along the way they found a more profitable way to invest their money for long term profits.
How to 'borrow' your neighbors xfinity internet
See Rob Pike's talk from 2001, "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: the Unix Legacy"

http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/good_bad_ugly/slides.pdf

"What makes the system good at what it’s good at is also what makes it bad at what it’s bad at. Its strengths are also its weaknesses.

A simple example: flat text files.

Amazing expressive power, huge convenience, but serious problems in pushing past a prototype level of performance or packaging."

The slides have many more examples.
someone slap un lup dacic on that S1 imediat!
You don't understand what many of us are saying--even with *zero* time pressure this will happen. If you're paid piecework it's simply common sense.
I find it interesting that the TSA uses these behaviors but their own army’s interrogation school[1] tells their students not to use them.

1. FM 2-22.3 (section 9-6)
Yeah but that mostly hasn't really happened either. I've been using Rust since just before 1.0. In the first year, there was churn constantly - it used to be that, for a good experience with json, you needed nightly. It was insane.

A few key features landed and things more or less stabilized in the language - I don't recall anything super meaningful where I was like "ah nice, time to update my code". We got some helpers like `impl Trait`, but there was 0 reason to go back into most codebases to use it.

More recently the major change was with async/await. At this point, sure, you may want to go back to old code using old futures and update? So that's one major change in my entire time using Rust where I'd say "yeah, go back, bring stuff up to speed if you can".

I guess there's the new anonymous lifetime stuff, which I don't really think was that important to add tbh.

Most churn is in libraries, unsurprisingly. Tokio only just hit 1.0, but that does mean that from here on out we can expect much less churn there.

idk otherwise, nothing sticks out to me as a major idiom change. I don't think Rust code 2-3 years ago will be particularly foreign at all, again with the exception for when people used to use 'raw' Futures.
Probably only on places where you dont have restaurants. Never seen Ikea using food to bring people in the countries I have been to.
The biggest problem that non-native speakers face with English is the pronunciation. There are no consistent rules which can be applied to letter combinations; and that alone makes it hard to master.

English is not my native language, but I've been using it for decades. Still have to look up pronunciation. OTOH, my native language Malayalam (and other Indian languages) doesn't really have the pronunciation problem. They're just read as they are written.
As the imposter this is a really dangerous gambit, though. If it succeeds, and that person stops doing academic work, who does the imposter plagiarize from?
> Hasn’t China’s economy been growing steadily for decades?

Not steadily - but geometrically (if not near-exponentially). Rapid expansion is not sustainable. I compare China's growth from the 1970s through to the early-2000s to the US's postwar boom years: eventually things settle-down. I suspect the people at the top (whether in the CCP, private business interests, whereever) are
uncomfortably having to acclimatize to this slower world of theirs they now find themselves in.

> Hasn’t China formed new trading partnerships with many countries in Europe?

News to me. Link?

> China is not a dictatorship

You're technically correct - but consider that China is simply too big to be run as a dictatorship, and the CCP do not act in the interests of their citizens' human rights and individual freedoms.

I don't understand what China's leadership is afraid of such that they have their internet filter and suppress independent journalism. And I don't believe you can have economic freedom without also having individual freedom.
"Angloexceptionalism" really gets on my nerves to no end, and the worst part of it is that it seems it's mainly anglophone monolinguals that are making these outrageous claims, like English being intrinsically superior to other languages or being exceptionally easy to learn. Sure, English is really damn useful, but the grand scheme of things it's no more fit to be the global lingua franca than say Mandarin or Hungarian.
I very intentionally did not specify a number - I said very generally that the Chinese economy has been growing steadily. This is pretty much indisputable. Your links do not dispute that China has grown in this century, more the extent to which the growth has occurred.

China is likely exaggerating their growth but regardless it has been growing.
Certainly not sold at loss based on how much they charge.
A dozen anti-vaccine accounts are responsible for 65% of disinfo shared online