LaPingvino's comments

maybe you can center on temporary social networks, a kind of throw-away account system for social networking when you need it...

Like, I meet some people somewhere and we want to engage more, so someone creates an identity just for that and mails friends to do the same and link.

Maybe... At least I've got the impression that on HN reactions are way more professional, I see people here actually listening to the arguments of others and that's the least you need to keep things quiet.

Most people here keep extremism out here anyway. Emotional arguments don't succeed to gain traction, you have to be factual and nuanced to gain respect here, and as far as I see blind extremism doesn't get that far.

I signed up. There is a lot of surprise when I go through the process. And I seem not to be able to change the description I first entered...

There is actually mainframe emulation, it can certainly be done. However, IBM is doing everything to keep that unattractive and with a bad image.

I think that's a good reason to all start using and improving the Gnash plugin. I use it for my work and it's enough for what I need it for, and one of the most overseen GNU efforts to make things free.

if you read well, you see he already knows how to get it to work, using the tools he mentioned. the only thing he asks here is why and how those tools work.

A lot of contrib stuff has matured and is now in the core.

true; anything I see from the US is seen as one point or exactly the contrary, never as the way more complex reality it really is...

yes and no

In Dutch (technically not too far from English) we only use past and present tense, and although we can mark the future with a special verb like in English, we often don't do that. It is perfectly possible to mark the time with a time marker then, but often this is not necessary to be understood. Relative time can be enough to be clear for the other. (Like "I am short of bread. So I go to the market and buy some. Then I eat it." is grammatically incorrect English, but easily understood, and a correct formulation in Dutch.)

Esperanto has past, present and future and has the possiblity to note the completeness of an action, but it's not obligatory as in English.

toki pona has no inflection and doesn't indicate time at all. If you want to indicate time, you end up using a complicated grammatical construction of causation. Mostly you just make a general statement or indicate time as something coming before or after something else.

- Dutch from birth

- English from around 10 years, needing about 7 years or more to get to speak it comfortably

- French and German from around 12 years, never liked it really and couldn't speak comfortably yet, only the last 3 years speaking it with more confidence

- Esperanto since about 15 years, got fluent in less than a year and conversational level in a month

- Ido and toki pona in free time online that follows, mostly in mailing list conversations, probably don't really count as they are conlangs

- Spanish and Portuguese since my 20th, both basic conversational level in about a month, my spanish is still conversational but my portuguese is quite reasonable, to the point where non-brazilians accuse me of a brazilian-like accent.

I am Dutch so I learned English, French and German at school, but actually those are my worst languages. I really started to learn languages with Esperanto. The first merit of Esperanto was to show me that I actually am capable of learning languages (because at school, languages were my worst topics, as far as that I could conditionally go to the next class with a task for French...) Then I started to discover that really the only thing that matters with learning languages is to have fun and to speak, and Portuguese, which I learned last, I speak actually better than practically all other languages, I studied least grammar for it and I use it with my fiancee daily. http://fi3m.com describes mostly how you can actively start learning languages quickly, although details can differ with my path.

I am 21 now, I learned Spanish and Portuguese about a year ago, and most languages earlier.

Absolutely. Often I can think of not directly related elements that help to solve something.

Slightly off-topic: I made a shortlink doeslanguageinfluence.tk to make it easier to pass this article on.

For sure. Functional programming helps to separate a problem in small elements and to think of all kinds of creative ways to combine those elements. I basically came from imperative to functional straight away, so I cannot tell a lot about OO programming, but I definitely see the consequences of OO thinking in a lot of code. Clojure was a great way for me to simplify programming in my mind. Although it's a very capable programming language, the concepts are so simple that it puts your mind into creative thinking :).

I speak 9 languages by now, and it's definitely true. I cannot talk well about feelings in other languages than Portuguese, explaining technical stuff and counting I do best in Esperanto (it has a very intuitive regular number system and the agglutinative grammar makes it very convenient to explain the finer details of complicated stuff), when I'm tired I answer casual stuff in my native Dutch, philosophy is a lot easier with toki pona and to be short and clear, English is very useful as it's words generally are very short.

Pro-tip: if you want a quick way to get more control over your language usage, and a way to escape your national language habits, try to learn Esperanto. It definitely helped me.

And as I know this stuff out of experience for quite some time, you can probably imagine why I don't like Chomsky that much (and for similar reasons, Richard Dawkins... Populistic science sucks :(.)

I got the feeling the flash rockstar and flash game engineer descriptions are swapped...

rss support like the twitter-ticker would be nice as a basic need for a system like this...

Take a look at the registration process. You need to place a link to your profile at hackernewsers in your HN-profile to be able to sign up. I like it :).

My way to execute this algorithm is to try to get as distant as possible to the problem in step 2, taking as much experience into account as possible, and then hap-hazardly zooming in. Or something like that. And it seems to work.

I get lost easily in non-lisp-code nowadays =x The unwritten standard for lisp indentation works out quite readably

Ah, but it's not bad to work for someone who has the guts to take action.