skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
pg: In linguistics a grammar is just a series of rules. "Proper English" is not a linguistic concept, it's a social concept.

If you were raised in a household and exposed to proper English input, your native language is proper English. You have accomplished nothing other than learning the language you were exposed to. Similarly, if you are born into a household that speaks Spanish or AAVE or Dutch (and are fed and otherwise not abused too significantly), you will learn one of those languages and become a fluent speaker without any conscious effort.

AAVE is no more "improper" Standard English than Spanish is improper Standard English.

Of course, if you're taking a course in school on Standard English and you choose to turn in a paper written in AAVE (or Spanish), you are likely not to get an A.
"As a rule, I don't think governments should be out to make money on behalf of the public. They should be out to convert money into public benefits."

Nailing it. This makes the difference between a proper government and a sovereign corporation that, due to a historical accident, you are forced to pay your taxes to.
The Apple ][ fundamentally changed the personal computer.
The Macintosh fundamentally changed operating systems.
Pixar fundamentally changed the film industry.
The iTunes music store fundamentally changed the way music is distributed.
The iPod fundamentally changed the way music is listened to.
The iPhone fundamentally changed the mobile phone industry.

Sure, there were predecessors and prototypes. Sure, he had a ton of help. I count more than 3 decades of contribution so far. How many times does he have to be at the helm of a fundamental change before we stop having this discussion?
I'd pay more attention to those frameworks if you'd say why they're interesting. I consider python/ruby/perl to be sibling languages. You only really need to know one as your primary language and then steal ideas from the other two. Node is interesting because it solves a problem: efficient long polling setup in a language I know.

Why Ruby over Perl then? The ruby peoples have great taste in designing mini languages: e.g. sass is amazing in a why-couldn't-I-think-of-that way so I pay attention to them. The best thing I know of coming out of the Perl community is the people (Michael Bayer is my hacking hero for SQLAlchemy).
Not a particularly good source, but I've heard this several times over the years. The iPod was developed in six months:

http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/news/comments/apple-more-th...
A linguist would argue that it's a mistake only if an adult speaker learned the language after the critical period and didn't manage to grasp all of the rules.

If a child (or someone who grew up in the language environment) made the "mistake" then it's an example of language change in action... unless the child is so young that it's simply a language learning artifact such as "I goed to the store today, daddy" (which, incidentally, is logically consistent with other past-tense forms yet ungrammatical b/c of social norms)...
What about their figures do you disagree with? It's fairly open and fundamental science, I'd be very interested in a half-decent paper knocking holes in it.
Do you really believe I don't understand that human languages are just grammatical conventions their speakers observe?

If you think you disagree with me in some way, could you point out a sentence I wrote that you believe is false, and explain why it is?
True, you'd need permission from the rights holder to use the image.

Do a Google search for desktop wallpaper using the advanced CC options or use a background from KDE or such that is FOSS licensed, eg from http://kde-look.org/index.php?xsortmode=down&page=0&...
I just started watching some Machine Learning lectures on iTunes U. from Stanford. Great stuff so far.

http://deimos3.apple.com/WebObjects/Core.woa/Browse/itunes.s...

http://cs229.stanford.edu
I like the way they've arranged all the vocab, pronounciation, grammar links together for each language in a nice organised fashion.

I'm a little skeptic though of their classification of difficulty. I understand that they're categorising it based on English being a starting point, but after a certain level of proficiancy (what most people would classify as "intermediate" level), language learning just becomes a matter of constant exposure. I'm sure this would hold equally for both French or Japanese (apart from writing).
Perl6 would make you love Perl for being a better tool again ^_^

It has all the features python has over Perl5, except for the syntactical whitespace strictness. And that's totally subjective.
> It's all the small unintuitive things, like "x" doesn't close the application.

That's because many OS X applications are document-based apps. All windows are either documents, or are meant for directly manipulating one single document. The 'X' is supposed to close the document, not the application. Applications in which the document-based approach does not work (Songbird, for example) will automatically quit when you close the last window. This is perfectly intuitive behavior for people who have been using Macs for a long time. Just because Windows does it differently (and Linux copies it blindly) does not mean it's the One True Way. In fact, I'd kill to get document-based apps in Linux and Windows.

> There are no hints for accomplishing basic tasks like renaming a file or moving a file. (Finder doesn't do cut, only copy)

You have a point here. I'd give anything to get 'Cut' in the Finder. But, then again, Finder is the second worst piece of software in OS X (the worst being iTunes).
Four out of five of the most difficult languages are east Asian; not too surprising there. The fifth, however, is Arabic, which I didn't anticipate.

Anyone know why it's apparently dramatically more difficult for a native English speaker to learn Arabic compared to other languages which would seem (to me, at least) equally remote from English in terms of geography, syntax, phonology, and lexicography?
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The good news is you are at the right place :)
You should probably pick up courses on machine learning as will I.
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/classes/AY2009/cs7641_spring/
kind of tells you the topics you may want to look at.
http://www.autonlab.org/tutorials/
is mentioned in the previous threads which has some neat tutorials too
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Why? I've been happily ignoring it for the last 10 years, and I think I can continue to do so ;)
I hate it, and am happy to continue hating it. Cheers!
The iPod is a great example of how Jobs was unique.

Sure, MP3 players existed before. The iPod had a very nice scrolling wheel. But it also had iTunes, meaning all the major labels had agreed to sell music online through that channel. Do you remember those times? Napster was scary for music labels. I'm sure it took serious negotiations to make the iPod/iTunes platform happen.

Geeks tend to make the usual mistake of breaking a platform into small pieces and argue that individually, each piece already existed. The scrollwheel? A program to synchronize your player? Etc...

That's missing the forest for the tree. Someone (Jobs) saw all these disparate pieces and had the vision to build a full, coherent, intuitive platform that solved a real problem and made the device a winner.

Until you understand the difference between a laundry list of features and a solution, you'll keep writing useless code :-)
A running app takes up a certain amount of memory it needs for performing basic startup tasks and loading menus/bundles. After that, each document takes a tiny amount of extra memory. For example, Safari with no windows takes about 25megs of memory. This shoots up to about 100megs on opening one window after which it only takes about 10megs of memory per tab (this depends on the size of pages you're loading, of course).
Well, I think the burden of proof is on you to show why language mistakes matter at all.

If I can understand what someone else said or wrote (or spelled!), then why do we need a central authority to determine what is correct vs incorrect? Isn't there a fairly significant incentive toward conformity for efficiency's sake?

It's as if there were a call for some central authority to critique the names people are given (which, incidentally, change over time just as languages do). It is my opinion that someone named, say, Shanikwa had about as much control over her name as anyone else does over his/her native grammar, and those who judge someone on the basis of their name are just as much playing the social judgment card as those who judge a person's native grammar. Doing so is purely a social status play, and has no useful/pragmatic significance or objective superiority.

The fact is, language changes over time like any other fashion. If you don't like a particular grammar or a particular fashion that is a matter of taste. I can look at someone's outfit and say "ooh, fashion mistake", but is there really any reason why I would find doing so useful?

You can make the argument that using Standard English (and wearing a suit) are useful social conventions to adopt when going to a job interview, but I think the usefulness of either judgment ends there.
DynarchLIB documentation seems to be quite comprehensive: http://www.dynarchlib.com/dl/index.html
Thanks for the clarification.

The author drew a distinction between making a grammatical mistakes, and a vernacular dialect. He didn't claim that there were some vernacular dialects that embodied mistakes and others that didn't. I can't imagine any linguist who would.

Fair enough. When you said "vernacular variants" (as opposed to dialects) it sounded as if you were including all vernacular variants including simple grammatical mistakes, sporadic use of slang, etc.

What I'm saying is that all vernaculars have consistently observed (surely you don't literally mean well-specified) grammatical rules.

I agree that all vernacular dialects have consistent rules. And you're right, I did mean consistently observed, not well-specified.
Another thing just occurred to me. Her article is titled "African American Vernacular English is not Standard English with Mistakes". She seems to spend the whole article making the semantic argument that it is instead a dialect.

Are the two mutually exclusive? Can one dialect not be simply another with mistakes?
Publishing requirement is a bit softer then what I meant. I was talking about a copyright or licensing requirements.
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Python has a killer feature by comparison, actually. It has a living, widely used implementation.
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Still, 24 hours is undoubtedly better than 0. It could mean that the attack is discovered in time to warn customers.
People have the right to believe anything they want. And only fools think that beliefs of any kind can be done away with through laws and force. The theory is about how these beliefs come to be, even religious beliefs and why they will disappear when class oppression does. "Communist" governments have used force and laws to oppress those of certain faiths, but that is not about oppressive control over the masses, like in China.
If you could explain evolution (and get them to believe it), you'd change the course of intellectual history in some interesting ways.

Once you've done that, you could start on the germ theory of disease. Those are both scientific breakthroughs that you probably understand well enough to explain.
Just adding another data point: Steve Yegge's essay [http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/ancient-languages-perl] scared me off trying Perl.
Making things happen in politics typically requires convincing at least some threshold number of largely disparate groups that they each stand to benefit (in some tangible, direct way) from your proposal, or at least won't be harmed by it. This tends to constrain the space of possible solutions in awkward ways, as an initially simple proposal may accrete peculiar exceptions, irrelevant attachments, and other cruft until enough people are happy.

If you're lucky, the final result of the process will still fulfill the purpose of the original proposal. If you're unlucky, the crufting process will have completely undermined the original intent and you'll have to either vote against your own proposal (which is embarrassing) or pass it anyway (wasting taxpayer money on all the useless cruft).

That said: smart people are often prone to underestimating the complexity of problems outside of their domain of expertise, and it's easy to propose solutions when you're not the person implementing them. So it's probably a bit of both.
"Well, I think the burden of proof is on you to show why language mistakes matter at all."

Most importantly, because they inhibit efficient communication among parties. The lesser problem is that they might signal low educational status and/or incompetence: I know there is no such thing as "standard English," but you can get pretty close to it through guides like Diana Hacker's _Rules for Writers_. The further you get from this thing that's close to standard English, the more likely you are to sound incompetent or incomprehensible.

If someone comes into a job interview -- or YC interview -- speaking AAVE, or some wildly non-standard form of English, they're probably signaling that they haven't figured out how to speak, if not "proper" English, then a form of English that will allow them to communicate with high-level technical workers. They're not likely to get the job or the funding or the lawsuit won or whatever it is that they're trying to accomplish. _That's_ the problem.

There isn't a central authority because there doesn't need to be: as Foucault might argue, there are merely different loci of power or force that tend to create webs of what is acceptable or not in a given situation.

"The fact is, language changes over time like any other fashion. If you don't like a particular grammar or a particular fashion that is a matter of taste."

Which is all very interesting until you're applying for a job or writing a research paper and you can't write something very close to standard English, at which point you're not going to be able to achieve what you want to.

"You can make the argument that using Standard English (and wearing a suit) are useful social conventions to adopt when going to a job interview, but I think the usefulness of either judgment ends there."

I don't. The fundamental issue is what you signal and how efficiently you communicate. Whether you wear a suit or not has little to do with how you communicate verbally or in writing; whether you can speak something akin to standard English matters enormously.
There's just as much arbitrary difference you have to look up if you're used to a Mac and using Windows. Why the hell does "Display" (which you think would change monitor settings) control your desktop background image (and why is it called a "wallpaper"?) What's the GUI to figure out your IP address? (wait, there is none...)

If you close all the windows of an app, clicking the app icon in the Dock usually opens a new window. It does for Safari at least. Anyway, the main difference is that Windows doesn't consistently differentiate between windows and applications, and Mac does. On the Mac side, a window is just something that's opened up by an application as an interface, whereas on Windows, the window is the application, which is why if you need to open more than one browser window you have multiple instances of Microsoft Internet Explorer running, but it's really okay because secretly they're all running off the same DLL's. Or something like that.
Anyone know why it's apparently dramatically more difficult for a native English speaker to learn Arabic compared to other languages which would seem (to me, at least) equally remote from English in terms of geography, syntax, phonology, and lexicography?

I might hazard some informed response on that, as a native speaker of English and student in classroom instruction at various times of German, Russian, Modern Standard Chinese, Cantonese, Literary Chinese, Biblical Hebrew, Attic Greek, Biblical Greek, Taiwanese, Japanese, and Hakka. But what other languages did you have in mind that seemed to be rated as surprisingly easy by contrast with Arabic?

P.S. Being quite the language hobbyist, I have also self-studied a variety of other languages, including several more that are on the list included in the submitted article. Modern Standard Chinese is by far my strongest acquired language, but I would agree that it does not come easily for a native speaker of English--and arguably not for most native speakers of Sinitic languages.

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-03/07/content_5812838...
Regarding US healthcare:

The American system is broken and corrupt.

Broken because it denies healthcare to millions who need it or financially bankrupts others. Healthcare is a basic human right - what exactly is the problem with having everyone pay a healthcare levy so that universal care can be provided? I live in Australia and my medicare contribution is ~$300 per YEAR. I have NEVER paid for a single doctor, or hospital visit in my life - the concept is utterly foreign to me.

Corrupt because from what I understand big pharma has lawmakers either in their pockets or by the balls - not sure which.

I hate the 'why should I pay for other people's health cover' line - it's something you only ever hear healthy people say.
But was Fadell going to create itunes, and run a brilliant marketing campaign to persuade people to pay 10x as much as an MP3 player from Walmart?

Apple's (and Steve's) genius was to sell them to people who didn't know or care what MP3, gB or bitrates meant.
Looks like somebody is recovering from an ice age, good for you little blue planet!
It seems based on your reply that we will never know, then, whether initial assessments of complexity were correct. If the description of a problem never matches the solution, it becomes very difficult to have a conversation about whether a solution actually addressed a problem, no? The problem mutates from it's original nature and becomes assembling and coordinating disparate groups.

I note that there are many examples of solutions to problems in legislative circles done in a direct fashion -- I'm not certain this is as much a requirement of legislative solution-creation as much as a certain style of decision-making.

I don't have any conclusions, just the observation that if the goal is to gain support of various groups, then it's not really about solving the initial problem any more, because with just a small number of groups it's very easy to over-constrain a solution.

Very interesting. Is it a bug? Or feature?
Am I getting down voted by Americans who don't like having their system criticised or because people disagree with me?
The author of the submitted article certainly appears to be in agreement with the authors of purported disclosed emails as to public policy, and he is pained by their troubles. But he notes, "When it comes to his handling of Freedom of Information requests, Professor Jones might struggle even to use a technical defence. If you take the wording literally, in one case he appears to be suggesting that emails subject to a request be deleted, which means that he seems to be advocating potentially criminal activity. Even if no other message had been hacked, this would be sufficient to ensure his resignation as head of the unit."

That's really where responsibility has to be here: if someone has a legal obligation to be transparent in handling organizational documents, he has no fitness to run the organization if he refuses that responsibility. Any follow-up inquiry may as well focus on that point to decide the issue of who should be running the organization.
Intel wants a chip implant in your brain
According to patio11, they are actually cheaper in Japan because of cheap-o machines.
英文系统，中文输入及显示最终解决办法[原创:pengogo兄] - LinuxSir.Org
Her article is titled "African American Vernacular English is not Standard English with Mistakes". She seems to spend the whole article making the semantic argument that it is instead a dialect.

I don't think this is a meaningless distinction. If you believe the author, speakers of AAVE are speaking a dialect of English that has lower prestige than Standard American English. If you don't, you think that on a daily basis they simply screw up the task of speaking Standard American English. This is a subtle but non-trivial difference: one point of view is about culture while the other is fundamentally about intelligence.

Because many people hold the latter view, I was taught by my parents to avoid speaking AAVE. For similar reasons, I was taught to avoid Pittsburghese[1] even though I grew up with it in school.

Are the two mutually exclusive? Can one dialect not be simply another with mistakes?

I think it comes down to my earlier question: What is any dialect or derived language but a set of consistent mistakes with respect to the ancestor language? More to the point, either all dialects have mistakes or none do. The only difference I can see is the prestige involved.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pittsburgh_English
Yeah, we're definitely spoilt by yesterday's standards. I'm lucky in that while I'm young (24) I got into programming/computers early enough that I remember what it was like back in the Atari/Apple II/Mac Classic/286/386 days...

I still remember the day my Dad bought a Macintosh Centris 650. The best computer on the market at the time for use in sound mixing. 25Mhz of pure grunt. And it only cost a cool $10k!
Beats me, but if you want criticism I'll give it a shot.

Healthcare is a basic human right

I'm unaware of any right that involves making other people take care of me by producing medicines, providing services, food, housing me, and tending to my disabilities.

You can certainly argue that a lack of healthcare is a moral problem that good people solve so that all folks have as much healthcare as is feasible, but to say it is a right is to start trashing what real rights are, and healthcare, for all it's importance, is nowhere near being as important as, say, free political speech. This is a critically important thing to understand.

So I agree that morally something must be done, but I felt you went way over the top with the language.
He was comparing with Perl6, I think.
Interestingly, in the 1970s, the big fear was not global warming but global cooling. For example:

http://ruby.fgcu.edu/courses/twimberley/EnviroPhilo/Why.pdf
I think he means that Perl 6 doesn't have a living, widely used implementation. The point is that since Perl 6 is relatively less mature, it would be more valid to compare Python 2.* to Perl 5, and Python 3k to Perl 6.
Heh. Some other fun "anti-Perl" stuff: [the Python xkcd comic](http://xkcd.com/353/) and the [ESR rant](http://www.python.org/about/success/esr/).

That said, another satisfied Perl user here. :)
I tried out rel.0.5.4.1 and it seems to work fine.
http://github.com/yhara/biwascheme/downloads
Picolisp was a major inspiration for me to start writing my own lisp --- I love the idea of removing lambda in favor of quote. I was constantly frustrated by the dynamic binding, though, and the lack of idiomatic macros --- I guess you can't have everything you want unless you do it yourself.
The Computer That Gave Birth To The Internet (Video)
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