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Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?

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Re: Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?

#321

Post by TZubiri »

bombcar wrote: post #271
TZubiri wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Declensions seem very extensive and unintuitive to learn, like they had a completely different structure than modern languages (verbs adjective noun articles)

Getting declensions right is a pain when trying to write Latin, but of reading it you can often just ignore them entirely and work it out from context. Of course you have to basically memorize the common things but those are all non-standard anyway.

Are you sure you are actually understanding the subtleties? I can definitely read latin and work out what is meant. But when I read my native languages, I can tell that there's A LOT of meaning hidden in subtleties that I would definitely lose if I were to analyze sentences only through etymological meaning of each independent word, to say nothing of the pain of having to parse ambigueties:

e.g:

Ambigueties: "Defended Warrior" - "Warrior Defends" / "Bellator defendit" - "Bellator defensus"

Subtleties: - "Defense! Defense!" "Defend! Defend!" (Basketball vs war)

- "No good", bad? Or bad/neutral?

- "Do you take me for a fool" / "Do you think I'm dumb?" (Accusation of cheating vs Earnest)

That's not to say you don't have the tools to derive meaning from context and parse ambigueties, but if you are simultaneously parsing syntactic ambigueties, then you have much less energies to parse semantic ambigueties and to try to work out what idiomatic phrases would have meant.

And the effect is multiplicative, if you have 2 declensions you don't remember, you have 4 combinations to parse. Multiply that by 2 possible meanings of the phrase (or more) and you have 8 meanings ( or more).

Sure, you can read somewhat, but I'd be skeptical as to how much you can understand what you are reading, sure it's more than chinese since we share a lot of roots, but there's still a lot of meaning that is missed, and knowing declensions is like level 1, it doesn't guarantee you will understand latin either.

Re: Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?

#323

Post by nosrepa »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #282
spenjovewkwhalo wrote: post #49

The origins of Port and Starboard on ships. Chosen to be independent of a mariners orientation. Starboard - most sailors were right handed and the steering oar was placed on the right. Star = steer. Board = side of boat. Port - as steering oars got bigger, boats tended to dock on the left hand side. This became to be known as “lardboard” which sounded too much like starboard, so it was changed to “Port” (as in the si…

A fun mnemonic I use to remember port is to the left is "lp unix command = line printer = left to port".

I just remember that left and port have the same number of letters.

Re: Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?

#324

Post by archargelod »

omgmajk wrote: post #66

I explored the programming language nim a bit deeper for use in game programming with SDL3 bindings, but I came to find out that compiled nim code on Windows often triggers anti-virus because, from what I hear from people, nim is used a lot in malware development currently. Which is a shame because I really like that language. I haven't tested it myself, it's just things I have heard and read. Someone on r/gamedev to…

It's usually code compiled with Mingw that gets AV false-positives in Nim. But, indeed, you can use clang or zigcc compilers instead.

Nim has good support for Clang, so it works by just switching a single flag: `nim c --cc:clang main.nim`

For zigcc - there is a wrapper package you can install with nimble: `nimble install zigcc`

Then you can use it with: `nim c --cc:clang --clang.exe=zigcc --linker.exe=zigcc main.nim`

Of course, you can save the flags in configuration files. You can look at my setup for inspiration [0].

[0] - https://codeberg.org/janAkali/grabnim/src/branch/master/conf...

Re: Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?

#325

Post by stackghost »

kristianp wrote: post #67
stackghost wrote: post #28

I found out it's easy to write Swift/Appkit apps without the dumpster fire that is Xcode! It turns out it's really easy to do it with good old `make`.

That sounds interesting. What reference did you use to get going?

Just the developer.apple.com docs and talking to my friendly neighborhood LLM

Re: Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?

#326

Post by TZubiri »

andoando wrote: post #280
TZubiri wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Declensions seem very extensive and unintuitive to learn, like they had a completely different structure than modern languages (verbs adjective noun articles)

Not sure what you mean, all the Romance languages are derived from Latin. German, Russian and a lot of languages have cases. The tough part is having to memorize feminine/masculine/neutral genders + the million cases for how they transform. Genders seem completely useless, Im curious as to why they developed so extensively in language at all.

Right, and we descend from amphibians, but we diverged quite a lot.

I took a look into german, it seems that their case system is much more stable than latin, based on suffixes mostly, and most words having the same form for many cases.

Why genders or specific declensions exist? Being a native spanish speaker I can say:

- Error correcting code: If a gender or number doesn't match, you can reparse what you heard, or ask for clarification.

- Proof of consistent thought: Forces to think ahead in sentences, you can't just make things up as you go, if you used an article early in a sentence it's because you already know what you are referring to. If someone can't even match their genders or numbers, you can pretty much discard what they are saying, or surmise they are intoxicated. Consider how basic autopredict would fail and instantly be detected in spanish, while not necessarily so in english.

As for latin declensions: - Classism: I don't think the purpose of language is always to increase communication, I think that a high bar for communicating was placed, no doubt there existed simpler languages that could have reached more penetration, but I believe that the incredible amount of cases serves as a test of memorization, a display of mental virtue which one must pass through in order to be worthy of communicating. It would not doubt be a more extreme form of proof of consistent thought, but I imagine it would be much more notable, it would be easy for a roman citizen to detect a non citizen or a slave by how they talk based on their lack of schooling, maybe they couldn't even form complete sentences to collude, they could just be limited to saying yes/no.

Re: Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?

#327

Post by lanyard-textile »

yMEyUyNE1 wrote: post #60
lanyard-textile wrote: post #9

I found out my crimson-bellied conure is laying an egg today! She's nesting in some towels now, chirping away while she works on laying it. Having an egg is relatively hard on parrots. I've given her lots of food and warmth to prepare. She is comically hungry -- she's usually not such a big eater, but she's happy today to be scarfing down her apple slices, fruit pellets, and safflower seeds. She usually sleeps at the…

> I've wondered if it is some innate need to nourish herself with calcium, or if it's stress relief :) methinks: Calcium is required to make the egg shell. Calcium supplements would help, just in case "Life finds a way".

Funny enough, people often scramble chicken eggs in this case :) I guess enough calcium leeches off into the eggs themselves. Maybe I'll try that tonight.

Re: Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?

#328

Post by lanyard-textile »

aryehof wrote: post #35
lanyard-textile wrote: post #9

I found out my crimson-bellied conure is laying an egg today! She's nesting in some towels now, chirping away while she works on laying it. Having an egg is relatively hard on parrots. I've given her lots of food and warmth to prepare. She is comically hungry -- she's usually not such a big eater, but she's happy today to be scarfing down her apple slices, fruit pellets, and safflower seeds. She usually sleeps at the…

A beautiful pause in my day reading this - many thanks. Would love to see a photo!

:) Thanks for reading.

No egg this morning yet. But here's some pictures of her! My pretty little Christmas colored bird.

https://imgur.com/a/AZDdvgO

Re: Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?

#329

Post by noncoml »

dzink wrote: post #311

Make your own. Your mental health loves you when you come up with stuff. Humanity has generated so much content and none of us have the lifetime to consume it all, but that shouldn't stop you from making your own any chance you get. Make music - you don't need an instrument if you can whistle. Make stories - just say them to a recorder or your kids or write them down. Make food experiments - nothing will please your…

Couldn’t have put it better myself. Some more ideas:

DIY you car service and wash

DIY house improvements and fixes

Cook. Make bread

Fix old electronics/appliances

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