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English has been my pain for 15 years (2013)

antirez.com

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Re: English has been my pain for 15 years (2013)

#3

Post by tailgate »

As a native English speaker who is hard of hearing, I can echo his pain with phonetics. I learned most of English from reading and writing, and I say a lot of words incorrectly. People I am talking to that do not know me well often treat me as if I am retarded.

I can imagine it is far worse for people like antirez.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years (2013)

#4

Post by gamesbrainiac »

> In my opinion one fact that made me so slow learning English is the fact that I started reading English without never ever listening to it. My brain is full of associations between written words and funny sounds that really don't exist in the actual language.

Really good points on learning to speak before writing. Trying to learn japanese now, and I'm glad that someone told me to learn to speak it fluently before learning to write it.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years (2013)

#5

Post by jacquesm »

angryp wrote: post #2

I'd say security is his biggest pain. Redis is insecure by default[1]. 1. http://antirez.com/news/96

And you made an account just for that?

That's a pretty low blow. Redis is insecure because it is designed that way, it is a powertool with a very specific role to fill and it comes with a very nice warning to that effect. If you use it in a way that's insecure the problem is yours, not redis'.

Compare with cooks knives, powertools (drills, reciprocal saws and circular saws as well as fun things such as plasma cutters, welding gear, chainsaws, hedge trimmers, lathes and mills) and other professional tools sold without any kind of license or requirements of proficiency by stores all over the world.

Each and every one of those can kill you, in a pretty straightforward manner. And yet, they continue to be shipped, insecure by default. Because their users will not be able to do their jobs if each and every one of those would come with the kind of safety requirements that we'd normally apply to say a toy for a toddler.

If you don't know how to use a tool like redis in a secure way then you probably have other problems besides.

You'd probably be shocked to hear that many cluster environments have a single gateway machine that is (usually somewhat) secure but behind that gateway the whole cluster is wide open.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years (2013)

#6

Post by uniclaude »

angryp wrote: post #2

I'd say security is his biggest pain. Redis is insecure by default[1]. 1. http://antirez.com/news/96

I know that HN has a "don't feed the trolls" rule, but I don't mind losing karma here, I'm going for it.

Not only your comment is off topic, it's also comment is short-sighted at best. Redis is a fantastic tool that helps professionals like me get work done. It's well designed, well maintained, well written (just read the source code), and is one of the few small open source projects you can introduce to big co without fearing upper management complaints.

So yeah, maybe it's not as secure as you wish by default, but I'm glad antirez has the priority sense he has, because it led to working software that you can easily secure in your architecture.

So no, I don't think security is his biggest pain.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years (2013)

#7

Post by riffraff »

gamesbrainiac wrote: post #4

> In my opinion one fact that made me so slow learning English is the fact that I started reading English without never ever listening to it. My brain is full of associations between written words and funny sounds that really don't exist in the actual language. Really good points on learning to speak before writing. Trying to learn japanese now, and I'm glad that someone told me to learn to speak it fluently before l…

People who learned english mostly via text rather than speech 20 years ago do have a bit of an excuse though: it was _a lot_ easier to find english content to read than to listen.

These days you can just get "south park" with subtitles off some torrent site, but non-dubbed content was quite harder to come by in Italy when I was a kid.

Sadly, this is not necessarily the same when trying to learn something other than english.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years (2013)

#8

Post by WalterBright »

I enjoy watching foreign movies with subtitles, and then trying to learn a few words in the language that way. I watched a French movie a few days ago that way, and was surprised at how many French words I already knew.

I've been told that's how the Dutch learn English. The country isn't big enough to make it worth dubbing the shows, so they are shown in English with Dutch subtitles.

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