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Ask HN: Teach me something new

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Re: Ask HN: Teach me something new

#741

Post by mikelevins »

LargoLasskhyfv wrote: post #736
mikelevins wrote: post #734

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, you can talk with me in English, but I can't do much better than a young toddler in German, unless I first spend some serious time and effort to reacquire some fluency. In my defense, I've had some decent fluency a couple of time in the past. I ran into a German couple in Athens once and we had a nice conversation. They said nice things about my German :-). But now in all those languages except Eng…

Hrm. I had that interest when I've been younger, but not anymore. Btw., the English lessons I had in school were rather boring and uninspiring. I didn't really learn it that way, that happened when I had to read Neuromancer by William Gibson, and didn't get it . So I bought a small to middle dictionary from Langenscheid and read it again with the dictionary at hand. Then it somehow clicked for me. That worked for rea…

"I had that interest when I've been younger, but not anymore."

Should be "I had that interest when I was younger, but not anymore."

I thought you might like the correction; forgive me if I'm wrong. In my experience, differences in the idiomatic use of verb tenses is one of the more difficult things about learning languages.

If you hear a native English speaker say, "I've been younger," then what they're saying is, "I'm old."

Re: Ask HN: Teach me something new

#742

Post by alar44 »

mikelevins wrote: post #662
alar44 wrote: post #634

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. In my experience, I end up cleaning my house the next day, because I noticed that the light switch in my room isn't just a light switch, it's a dirty light switch. I'll see stains or smudges that I never noticed. Suddenly there are tons of details that I can see that just got smeared in "normal" waking life.

Well, I noticed a bunch of things during and after tripping, and some of it was even true, but I didn't ever notice that seeing and being aware of seeing were two separate and separable processes, and I didnt ever notice that I could be awake and asleep at the same time, not until the events I recounted here, both of which occurred years after I had, as they say, gotten the psychedelic message and then hung up the ph…

Well I'm glad you got the call.

Re: Ask HN: Teach me something new

#743

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

mikelevins wrote: post #741
LargoLasskhyfv wrote: post #736

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hrm. I had that interest when I've been younger, but not anymore. Btw., the English lessons I had in school were rather boring and uninspiring. I didn't really learn it that way, that happened when I had to read Neuromancer by William Gibson, and didn't get it . So I bought a small to middle dictionary from Langenscheid and read it again with the dictionary at hand. Then it somehow clicked for me. That worked for rea…

"I had that interest when I've been younger, but not anymore." Should be "I had that interest when I was younger, but not anymore." I thought you might like the correction; forgive me if I'm wrong. In my experience, differences in the idiomatic use of verb tenses is one of the more difficult things about learning languages. If you hear a native English speaker say, "I've been younger," then what they're saying is, "I…

Yah. I can do better. But not when being awake for 23hrs, reading, reading, reading. Not doomscrolling. And switching to HN from time to time.

Good night :-)

Re: Ask HN: Teach me something new

#744

Post by mikevin »

kmarc wrote: post #327
hiisukun wrote: post #123

In a lot of terminals, Alt+. (or Option+. on Mac) will paste in the last argument of the previous command. $ mkdir hi $ cd You can hit . several times to cycle through earlier final args.

More precisely, this is not a feature of the terminals but of readline. https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man3/readline.3.html All engineers working with the command line (even after 35 years) really, really should open and read man bash and man readline

man 3 readline

to make sure you don't end up with something like urxvt-readline(1)

Re: Ask HN: Teach me something new

#745

Post by mikevin »

goldenkey wrote: post #416
jonah-archive wrote: post #89

The big bang was extremely hot; the universe now is quite cold (microwave background). It was a continuous process of cooling, implying that there was an interval where the entire universe was comfortable (there are at least a few papers on this, e.g. https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.0613 , but I like it more just as a strange thing to thing about).

Comfortable but not necessarily livable?

I guess comfortable with regards to temperature but definitely not livable in any other regard.

Re: Ask HN: Teach me something new

#746

Post by mikelevins »

LargoLasskhyfv wrote: post #743
mikelevins wrote: post #741

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I had that interest when I've been younger, but not anymore." Should be "I had that interest when I was younger, but not anymore." I thought you might like the correction; forgive me if I'm wrong. In my experience, differences in the idiomatic use of verb tenses is one of the more difficult things about learning languages. If you hear a native English speaker say, "I've been younger," then what they're saying is, "I…

Yah. I can do better. But not when being awake for 23hrs, reading, reading, reading. Not doomscrolling. And switching to HN from time to time. Good night :-)

Sleep well!

Re: Ask HN: Teach me something new

#747

Post by HomeGear »

snyena wrote: post #38

The Boltzmann brain hypothesis suggests that it would be more likely for a single brain to spontaneously and briefly form in a void (complete with a memory of having existed in our universe) rather than for the universe to come about in the manner cosmologists think it actually did. In this physics thought experiment, a Boltzmann brain is a fully formed brain, complete with memories of a full human life in our univer…

You need more than a brain to have a thought. Or am I missing something?

Re: Ask HN: Teach me something new

#748

Post by pabs3 »

rekado wrote: post #715
operator-name wrote: post #681

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Odd that the wiki (but not the projects section on the homepage) mentions Guix, which seems to be doing a lot in this and the reproducible builds space: https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2020/guix-further-reduces-boots...

I wanted bootstrappable.org to focus on the individual projects (such as Mes, bootstrapping the JDK from C, etc) instead of distro integration. The idea was to avoid the impression that this is a distro project (much as reproducible-builds.org used to look like an exclusive Debian effort). I don't maintain the Wiki.

It might be good to reshape the Bootstrappable Builds effort in a similar way to Reproducible Builds, in order to make it appear to be and also really be a more cross-distro multi-community effort.

Re: Ask HN: Teach me something new

#749

Post by seesaw »

helph67 wrote: post #36

Here's mine, the Pareto principle or the 80/20 rule. You will find that it applies in MANY ascpects of life and knowing it may give you an `edge'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle

Related: 80% of the work is done by 20% of the team :)

Re: Ask HN: Teach me something new

#750

Post by schoen »

yobbo wrote: post #717
schoen wrote: post #618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect, without having researched it, that människa and mensch are direct cognates where vowels have been inserted for various reasons. It's not unusual that an affix can have a form with a vowel that gets lost or added, or that cognates can have different morphemes in addition to their shared morphemes. (For the latter case, when writing about Grimm's Law above, I re-learned that although "hundred" is cognate wit…

Mensch, människa, menneske, ..., and (most likely) manusha are cognates. But it's still curious how "manusha" sounds like "människa" while the vowels have been dropped in "mensch".

For some reason German sometimes drops the i in "-isch" (cognate with English "-ish"). But the only reasonably common examples I can think of are Deutsch (etymologically definitely with -isch/-isk) and Kölsch ('pertaining to Cologne'). I don't know if this is somehow an example of a more widespread phonological process in German.
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