Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: I will work for free ...

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 59 posts

Re: Ask HN: I will work for free ...

#41

Post by RiderOfGiraffes »

_b8r0 wrote: post #39
RiderOfGiraffes wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a pet peeve of mine, and my apologies if it feels inappropriate. I also recognise that, given your post, you are likely not be a native English speaker. If that's the case, please accept this as intended to help you improve your already excellent English. However: > ... everyone doesn't want to be an entrepreneur. The opposite of "Everyone wants to be an entrepreneur" is "Not everyone wants to be an entrepren…

I see what you're trying to do, to help the parent with American/British English, but actually the language the parent is writing in is a typical idiom found in Indian English ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_English ). English is the official second language of India (which doesn't mean an awful lot but consider that Hindi in Devanagari is the main language and is only spoken by just over 40% of Indians) and is…

I appreciate your comments, and I agree with some of what you say. Idiomatic language is not always literal language.

In America, for example, people often say "The proof is in the pudding." Logically this does not make sense. Logically the original saying - "The proof of the pudding is in the eating" - makes sense, and can be interpreted literally.

But idioms are atomic. They cannot be understood in any way other than as a complete whole with a meaning unextractable from the components.

But idiomatic language can lead to non-understanding, and sometimes mis-understanding. Recognising it when it occurs can be important, especially when what is said can be interpreted literally and logically in a manner other than intended.

My intent is not to prevent idiomatic usage of language, that would be Sisyphean. My intent to to highlight a case where was was said, when interpreted logically, is not what was intended.

Re: Ask HN: I will work for free ...

#42

Post by jeromec »

_b8r0 wrote: post #39
RiderOfGiraffes wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a pet peeve of mine, and my apologies if it feels inappropriate. I also recognise that, given your post, you are likely not be a native English speaker. If that's the case, please accept this as intended to help you improve your already excellent English. However: > ... everyone doesn't want to be an entrepreneur. The opposite of "Everyone wants to be an entrepreneur" is "Not everyone wants to be an entrepren…

I see what you're trying to do, to help the parent with American/British English, but actually the language the parent is writing in is a typical idiom found in Indian English ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_English ). English is the official second language of India (which doesn't mean an awful lot but consider that Hindi in Devanagari is the main language and is only spoken by just over 40% of Indians) and is…

Indian English is generally as valid as American English

Perhaps when I'm in India. However, if you're in an English class in Britain or America I don't believe any instructor would say "everyone doesn't want to be an entrepreneur" is valid as meaning "not every person wants to be an entrepreneur". If I start my own country on an island and declare English the official language, and say "I'm drinking water" actually means "I'm going fishing" it's only valid English for that meaning on my island.

Re: Ask HN: I will work for free ...

#43

Post by RiderOfGiraffes »

randallsquared wrote: post #40
RiderOfGiraffes wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a pet peeve of mine, and my apologies if it feels inappropriate. I also recognise that, given your post, you are likely not be a native English speaker. If that's the case, please accept this as intended to help you improve your already excellent English. However: > ... everyone doesn't want to be an entrepreneur. The opposite of "Everyone wants to be an entrepreneur" is "Not everyone wants to be an entrepren…

I don't think this is necessarily a mistake. I'm American, and I think "everyone doesn't X" has a clear meaning of "Not everyone does X". It only fails to mean that if you don't take it as a whole, but no one ever says "Everyone doesn't X" to mean "No one does X"; it always means "Not everyone does X". There are lots of phrases in English that do not mean the same thing as the literal meanings of the words would indi…

I agree with you. However, sometimes such phrases can be a barrier to communication across cultures, and this one especially makes it difficult to teach formal logic.

People say "You know what I mean" and that's fine when you're talking to someone from your own culture, or even just to a human. Such an audience will interpret what you say, realise it makes no sense, find an alternative, more sensible interpretation, and go with that.

Computers, and some cultures, are otherwise. Recognising such things is important, even if you don't change the way you speak.

Re: Ask HN: I will work for free ...

#44

Post by alnayyir »

swombat wrote: post #3

I don't think this is a good approach. As an employer, I wouldn't want to invest the time in getting someone up to speed with my systems if they have no "lock-in" that means they'll stay with me until they've paid off for that initial ramp-up period (which would cost me time). I particularly wouldn't want to do so for someone who already has a job at a software company - I'd clearly be a distant second (if not third…

>That long list makes you look unfocused and implies that you probably suck at a lot of technologies rather than being very good at a few.

Virtually everything programming-related that I've learned has contributed to a more rapid grokking things differently/deeper that I work with on a professional or personal basis.

I'm a generalist for two reasons.

1. I believe a renaissance style understanding of programming languages and informatics contributes to my ability to rapidly pick up and in a deep way grasp what's going in anything I have to work with, and

2. It's simply needed by my employers. I don't work in the corporate world anymore, although when I did contract for large companies, I worked as a .NET dev with a specialty in debugging and reversing. Now I'm a django/ajax/admin/db generalist and I enjoy it more.

I'm a generalist because it's simply what my employer needs from me.

They don't need someone who knows MS SQL Server in and out, they need someone who can make rapid decisions about what tool out of hundreds is going to be able to best fit their needs and rapidly learn how to deploy it for them.

There's really only two kinds of understanding when it comes to software. Structural, and memorization.

The first large chunk of learning a programming language or technology comes to grasping the structure of how something is built/designed and utilizing that knowledge to be able to predict how things should be implemented.

The second part, and certainly the more laborious/time-intensive is memorization. That's anything that falls out-side the "least-surprise" vector and that simply requires memorizing the intricacies of how things interact. (C++ and the English language are notorious for this)

Having a broad understanding of virtually any software concept is a form of human-caching. It's caching the common engineering tropes that underlie the things you have to work with on a regular basis, and if you know anything about deploying software stacks or how hardware works, you know that caching is everything.

Simply being a static human .NET/Rails/PHP machine might look attractive to an employer, but it leads to dangerously narrow decision making from a broader sense and could lead to problems later if the company wants to pivot to a better approach/technology.

Anecdote:

Over the past year, my company has moved 2 projects from Jboss/coldfusion to Django. We have 5 more projects to perform the same switch for. This coming week I'll be converting the svn repositories to mercurial. I've already centralized the repository infrastructure, switched them to Linode for the VPSs, will be setting up an extra off-site backup service soon, and we've switched them from Eroi to a local message sending system, saving them $150k per year on mailing costs.

All the while, I'm converting perl scripts that handle billing and commissions for another business within the company to python (for direct integration within django), have written an entire customer management frontend + backend, and I've only been here 6 months.

By all means, tell me a PHP/Rails/Whatever monkey is more valuable.

A good developer can do anything you ask of them in the web world. Exceptions being hardcore Quant type (statistics, huge databases) projects or embedded work (requires strong understanding of the principles of writing software closely mated to the hardware and knowing ANSI C in-and-out, if not the assembler for the target platform).

I mean, I wouldn't exactly expect a Rails dev to be able to tell me what the const and volatile type qualifications mean when combined and where you'd normally see them. For my part? I got 9/10 on an embedded.com C dev test, whereas the global average is 4-6/10. I've never even worked in the embedded industry.

But do I know x86 and arm assembler and could probably slap together a control system for a production line in a pinch? You bet.

I take great pride in being a programming chameleon and in learning as much as I can on my own time, I have no idea why you'd desire a person to be narrow.

You think Paul Graham got ahead because he spent 10,000 hours mastering the blub everyone else was using?

Re: Ask HN: I will work for free ...

#45

Post by losvedir »

RiderOfGiraffes wrote: post #41
_b8r0 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see what you're trying to do, to help the parent with American/British English, but actually the language the parent is writing in is a typical idiom found in Indian English ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_English ). English is the official second language of India (which doesn't mean an awful lot but consider that Hindi in Devanagari is the main language and is only spoken by just over 40% of Indians) and is…

I appreciate your comments, and I agree with some of what you say. Idiomatic language is not always literal language. In America, for example, people often say "The proof is in the pudding." Logically this does not make sense. Logically the original saying - "The proof of the pudding is in the eating" - makes sense, and can be interpreted literally. But idioms are atomic. They cannot be understood in any way other th…

>My intent is to highlight a case where what was said, when interpreted logically, is not what was intended.

I disagree that "interpreted logically" the statement is not what was intended. It just depends how you interpret the word "everyone". Is it a single representative object which takes on the combined characteristics of all the people it represents? Or is it a stand-in for comparing each and every person that it represents?

You're saying it must be the latter. If you're talking about person A, person B, and person C, then "everyone" is short hand for comparing against each one. So, "Is everyone tall?" means "Is A tall?" AND "Is B tall?" AND "Is C tall?"

However, that isn't the only valid way it's used. "Everyone" could be its own object, so you don't need to check against each of the underlying ones. And it only has a certain characteristic when each of the underlying people has that characteristic. So, if Person A is short and has green eyes, person B is of average height and has green eyes, and person C is tall and has green eyes, then "Everyone" takes on the green eyes characteristic, but not the "short" one. Hence, "Everyone" has green eyes, but "everyone" isn't short.

It sounds convoluted when spelled out that way, but I think each usage of everyone is both valid and used by English speakers. When considering "everyone doesn't want to be entrepreneurs", I can mentally switch between the two cases. "Everyone doesn't want to be entrepreneurs" could incorrectly mean Person A doesn't want to be an entrepreneur AND person B doesn't want to AND person C, etc.... It could ALSO mean the word "everyone" did not take on the "wants to be an entrepreneur" characteristic BECAUSE there existed people in the group that did not have it. In that case, the statement "interpreted logically" is just what was intended.

For this reason, when I read the original statement, I didn't notice anything odd about it at all.

Re: Ask HN: I will work for free ...

#46

Post by anamax »

_b8r0 wrote: post #39
RiderOfGiraffes wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a pet peeve of mine, and my apologies if it feels inappropriate. I also recognise that, given your post, you are likely not be a native English speaker. If that's the case, please accept this as intended to help you improve your already excellent English. However: > ... everyone doesn't want to be an entrepreneur. The opposite of "Everyone wants to be an entrepreneur" is "Not everyone wants to be an entrepren…

I see what you're trying to do, to help the parent with American/British English, but actually the language the parent is writing in is a typical idiom found in Indian English ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_English ). English is the official second language of India (which doesn't mean an awful lot but consider that Hindi in Devanagari is the main language and is only spoken by just over 40% of Indians) and is…

> Indian English is generally as valid as American English,

I don't know about valid, but if the point is to communicate with Americans....

Re: Ask HN: I will work for free ...

#47

Post by plinkplonk »

jeromec wrote: post #42
_b8r0 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see what you're trying to do, to help the parent with American/British English, but actually the language the parent is writing in is a typical idiom found in Indian English ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_English ). English is the official second language of India (which doesn't mean an awful lot but consider that Hindi in Devanagari is the main language and is only spoken by just over 40% of Indians) and is…

Indian English is generally as valid as American English Perhaps when I'm in India. However, if you're in an English class in Britain or America I don't believe any instructor would say "everyone doesn't want to be an entrepreneur" is valid as meaning "not every person wants to be an entrepreneur". If I start my own country on an island and declare English the official language, and say "I'm drinking water" actually…

"Indian English is generally as valid as American English

Perhaps when I'm in India."

And who says HN isn't "in India"? A webapp doesn't really "exist" at a particular point in space. (sure teh server sits wherever but it could just as well bin Singapore vs Califronia). Just somethng to think about.

When someone from Japan (say) is posting here, why should he speak "American English"? I'd say just speak English the best way you know how and if someone insists on everyone speaking American English, he can go jump off the nearest cliff. If our hypothetical Japanese poster were to use a phrase which I didn't immediately understand, I would just ask him what me meant, not berate him for not speakng the exact flavor of English most familiar to me.

My 2 cents.

Re: Ask HN: I will work for free ...

#48

Post by jeromec »

plinkplonk wrote: post #47
jeromec wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indian English is generally as valid as American English Perhaps when I'm in India. However, if you're in an English class in Britain or America I don't believe any instructor would say "everyone doesn't want to be an entrepreneur" is valid as meaning "not every person wants to be an entrepreneur". If I start my own country on an island and declare English the official language, and say "I'm drinking water" actually…

"Indian English is generally as valid as American English Perhaps when I'm in India." And who says HN isn't "in India"? A webapp doesn't really "exist" at a particular point in space. (sure teh server sits wherever but it could just as well bin Singapore vs Califronia). Just somethng to think about. When someone from Japan (say) is posting here, why should he speak "American English"? I'd say just speak English the b…

I didn't say anything about which language should be spoken on HN. I think the sticking point is the word "valid", and my opinion on that is that location does have bearing. Take my island example above. Would you argue that the meaning I assigned to "I'm drinking water" as "I'm going fishing" would be valid English anywhere in the world? I think that would be absurd, because if we are to accept that then the construct of languages breaks down entirely, and people will eventually be hurling sounds at each another hoping someone discerns their intended meaning.

Re: Ask HN: I will work for free ...

#49

Post by plinkplonk »

jeromec wrote: post #48
plinkplonk wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Indian English is generally as valid as American English Perhaps when I'm in India." And who says HN isn't "in India"? A webapp doesn't really "exist" at a particular point in space. (sure teh server sits wherever but it could just as well bin Singapore vs Califronia). Just somethng to think about. When someone from Japan (say) is posting here, why should he speak "American English"? I'd say just speak English the b…

I didn't say anything about which language should be spoken on HN. I think the sticking point is the word "valid", and my opinion on that is that location does have bearing. Take my island example above. Would you argue that the meaning I assigned to "I'm drinking water" as "I'm going fishing" would be valid English anywhere in the world? I think that would be absurd, because if we are to accept that then the constru…

"Would you argue that the meaning I assigned to "I'm drinking water" as "I'm going fishing" would be valid English anywhere in the world? "

absurd example. No one anywhere in the world has such absurd correspondences.

"I think that would be absurd, because if we are to accept that then the construct of languages breaks down entirely, and people will eventually be hurling sounds at each another hoping someone discerns their intended meaning."

exaggerated.

Re: Ask HN: I will work for free ...

#50

Post by prodigal_erik »

losvedir wrote: post #45
RiderOfGiraffes wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I appreciate your comments, and I agree with some of what you say. Idiomatic language is not always literal language. In America, for example, people often say "The proof is in the pudding." Logically this does not make sense. Logically the original saying - "The proof of the pudding is in the eating" - makes sense, and can be interpreted literally. But idioms are atomic. They cannot be understood in any way other th…

>My intent is to highlight a case where what was said, when interpreted logically, is not what was intended. I disagree that "interpreted logically" the statement is not what was intended. It just depends how you interpret the word "everyone". Is it a single representative object which takes on the combined characteristics of all the people it represents? Or is it a stand-in for comparing each and every person that i…

Both universal and particular statements are needed, and there are separate words for them. In your example, I would say "everyone has green eyes", "someone is tall", "someone isn't short", and "everyone doesn't have brown eyes". If "everyone doesn't" merely meant "someone doesn't", I would need another word that actually made that negative statement about every member of the group.
Post reply on HN