Ask HN: Teach me something new • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Teach me something new

#511

Post by euroderf » Sat, Apr 30, 2022, 2:19 PM UTC

DavidSJ wrote: post #291

schoen wrote: post #132

In the 1800s, scholars who knew a lot of languages (including, often, several modern and ancient European languages, and increasingly also Sanskrit) started to notice some amazing patterns about similarities in words among all of these languages, including languages from very far apart and that had no visible connection at all from the point of view of their present-day speakers. As these patterns were explored, they…

On this general topic, I recently learned that the words undulate and water have the same origin in Proto-Indo-European: wódr̥ (PIE) → udōr (Proto-Italic) → unda (Latin) → undulātus (Late Latin) → undulate (English) wódr̥ (PIE) → watōr (Proto-Germanic) → *watar (Proto-West Germanic) → wæter (Old English) → water (Middle English) → water (English) In fact, I'm now noticing that the t in the Proto-Germanic line corresp…

In IE languages, the words for water basically follow either "aqua" or "water". Finnish (it's Ugric, not IE) follows the latter, with "vesi" (combining form "vete-").

Re: Ask HN: Teach me something new

#512

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Apr 30, 2022, 2:20 PM UTC

FrenchAmerican wrote: post #477

leephillips wrote: post #99

Most rape victims in the United States are men: https://www.hrw.org/reports/2001/prison/report.html Caution: that’s hard, explicit, distressing reading.

This reflects the abnormally high proportion of people jailed in the USA: - 80K inmates for 68.5M inhabitants in the UK => 0.12% - 1,215K inmates for 331M inhabitants in the US => 0,37% There are therefore around 3 times more people incarcerated in the US than in UK, proportionally. As rapes are very frequent in the US jails (as this terrible report points out) and most of the jail population are men, then indeed, wh…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Teach me something new

#513

Post by O_H_E » Sat, Apr 30, 2022, 2:21 PM UTC

poisonarena wrote: post #330

Quoted post unavailable.

What the hell is this islamophobic crap.

Just fyi for other readers, that has nothing to do with Islam beliefs.

Re: Ask HN: Teach me something new

#514

Post by amarshh » Sat, Apr 30, 2022, 2:22 PM UTC

leephillips wrote: post #99

Most rape victims in the United States are men: https://www.hrw.org/reports/2001/prison/report.html Caution: that’s hard, explicit, distressing reading.

Is this not just because most rapists are men (and sexual assaulters more generally are men), and the only people they can rape in a prison environment are other men?

Which is also why prisons are segregated by sex, to avoid women prisoners being sexually assaulted, raped and impregnated by deviant men. If prisons had no such sex segregation, it would overwhelmingly be the women being raped, not the men.

Re: Ask HN: Teach me something new

#515

Post by senjin » Sat, Apr 30, 2022, 2:23 PM UTC

schoen wrote: post #139

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.

Wow, I did not know that! I would have referred to this using !$, which is one of the Bourne shell history substitutions. Like $ mkdir awesome $ cd !$ (The "!" has the connotation "history" in the shell, while the "$" has the connotation "last", as in regular expressions.) An advantage of the way you mentioned is that you could actually see the history item displayed on the command line before running the command!

I use !$ multiple times every day but you just helped me make the connection to try !^ for the first argument and I think I'm going to start using that as well. Thanks!

Re: Ask HN: Teach me something new

#516

Post by ZoomZoomZoom » Sat, Apr 30, 2022, 2:25 PM UTC

vermarish wrote: post #225

An electric guitarist usually has a pedalboard that they use to make different guitar tones. Let's approach this like an electrical engineer might. Time is a straight arrow: call it t. The guitarist plays, and their guitar pickup records a signal. At any time t, measure the value of this signal's waveform: call it x. That signal can go into a pedal that maps each value to create an output signal. Call it f(x, t). The…

It's worth mentioning that in a typical pedalboard you're probably going to see zero linear effects. The closest ones are probably an EQ and pure digital Reverbs and Delays. Almost all other effects have tons of saturation.

Re: Ask HN: Teach me something new

#517

Post by euroderf » Sat, Apr 30, 2022, 2:25 PM UTC

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #351

schoen wrote: post #132

In the 1800s, scholars who knew a lot of languages (including, often, several modern and ancient European languages, and increasingly also Sanskrit) started to notice some amazing patterns about similarities in words among all of these languages, including languages from very far apart and that had no visible connection at all from the point of view of their present-day speakers. As these patterns were explored, they…

Have any modern constructed languages made use of this knowledge? A very quick Google suggest Esperanto doesn't: https://indo-european.eu/2008/05/esperanto-other-invented-la...

Loglan and Lojban give entirely too much weight to Chinese and other large languages (in terms of numbers of speakers) that have zero relationship to IE (unless you're heavily into Nostratic). I'd like to see someone combine an exemplary form of Romance languages (like, Latin or early French) with an exemplary form of Germanic languages (like modern Icelandic or reconstructed proto-Germanic) to form a new lingua franca [insert corresponding Germanic term here] for use among language enthusiasts in Europe. Call it Frankenlingua ?

Re: Ask HN: Teach me something new

#518

Post by spython » Sat, Apr 30, 2022, 2:26 PM UTC

stavros wrote: post #314

Water is blue.

What? No. As was known by Homer already, water is wine-coloured: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine-dark_sea_(Homer)

Re: Ask HN: Teach me something new

#519

Post by aprinsen » Sat, Apr 30, 2022, 2:26 PM UTC

mikelevins wrote: post #28

I've described this on HN before; forgive me if you've already seen it. I have chronic migraine. It sounds worse than it is; I rarely suffer attacks anymore, and when I do, they're usually mostly harmless, as in the case I'll describe below. Contrary to popular belief, migraine is not a headache. It's something a little more like an epileptic seizure. Intense headaches are one common symptom, but there are a lot of o…

Read a fantastic book that makes the case for 'composite cognitive processes' called "Self Comes to Mind".

It touches upon the composite nature of sight and other senses and functions.

It's ultimate goal is putting forth a theory of how self naturally arises from the composite.

Re: Ask HN: Teach me something new

#520

Post by FrenchAmerican » Sat, Apr 30, 2022, 2:27 PM UTC

rmbyrro wrote: post #274

amin wrote: post #2

Quantitative easing (sometimes mistaking called "money printing") isn't directly inflationary. Because when central banks buy bonds, they do not pay with normal money. Instead, they pay with a special type of money that can never enter the real economy (as to not create inflation). This special type of money are called "bank reserves". And bank reserves can only be used to 1) settle interbank transfers and 2) buy mor…

Throwing Japan as an example you want to generalize defeats your purpose. As has been famously said, there are only three types of economies: Japan, Argentina, and the rest of the world. So, next time, pick an example from the rest of the world. Is there many where QE did not lead to inflation?

The link between monetary inflation and price inflation has been "demonstrated" by the Chicago Boys, with Milton Friedman as their guru. It led to the "monetarist" school of thought - which has been the reigning paradigm in economics since.

There is no such thing as "inflation" in general.

There are different types of inflation, such as the rise of the valuations of stocks, the rise of real estate price and day-to-day prices such as food. And monetary inflation.

QE has led to various effects in various countries at different times. There is no absolute correlation "always and everywhere".

The funny thing is that a rise in stock market is always interpreted as a positive thing - despite everybody knowing that bubbles happen very regularly.

Otherwise, inflation is seen as bad - which is ridiculous since the extraordinary low interest rates kept by the FED for years ("printing money") has sustained the economic growth and avoided recession.

Economists are historians of the economy. They are able to explain what happened - and if they agree on the general picture, they disagree on many points. Which is normal, that is a research field, so there are debates.

Some say lessons should be learned from History... well, for sure, all other things being equal, stuff tend to repeat, but as time goes by, the other things are not equal at all - or only to a certain point.

I majored in History but historians are not my first sources to predict the future. Despite having repeatedly failed at predicting anything, we can't help but ask economists to be oracles and ask them to set-up policies.